In two recent diaries I have been experimenting with photo placement in order to learn by doing. This is a third installment in this experiment.
Out of fairness and kindness, I wish to inform you that this diary may annoy you. Possibly as badly as “experimental theatre” may annoy you.
So please be warned. This diary is an act of creative expression, meant to convey anxiety, not advocate for it. It is not meant as an argument.
I wrote the following in my journal, just to wipe the anxious froth off my mind, and I decided to play around with it and see if I could use images from the library to punctuate the piece.
Turn it into something “expressive.” Obviously something that pretentious may annoy you.
Like a Christopher Cross song that exists between the moon and New York City, this piece exists between a rant and terrible, terrible poetry.
Still, and my point is, it will annoy you equally as much as any Christopher Cross song. Please, therefore, guard yourself appropriately.
Remember: Some Christopher Cross songs cannot be unheard.
This post, reflecting my journal entry, is merely meant to express anxieties and fear in raw form, fears related to survival, adaptation to the ongoing churn of technological and societal change, and it is an irrational expression, an in medias res glimpse of the abyss I often feel.
It’s like “The Scream,” a pure expression of fear, not meant to advocate for anything, not to push for despair, or advocate optimism. You may or may not relate. You may or may not wish to scream yourself.
But there’s a poll! A poll in which you can express your annoyance!
So, please:
Feel free to skip directly to the poll at any time and express your annoyance with this lousy, “experimental” piece of photo-diary testing claptrap and trash that some of you, like moths to flame, are apparently still quite possibly about to find yourself reading….
A Cog Becomes Aware
Cogs and gears can’t critique the whole grind, can’t even perceive the whole grind, wouldn’t know what to look for, nor would they comprehend the find.
Cogs and gears may never know the reason for their own stopped motion, unless they hold the horrific privilege of seeing their replacement machinery built just next to them on the factory floor, in grand view!
Look how beautiful the world will be for the new machines!
Then, the cog may weep a rusty red tear, the gear may droop into a demoralized slump, and the wheels may squeal their rotational blues into the night.
Sleep, Perchance To See
All the broken machines, moving like ghosts in the wind, form a Greek chorus now, “Cassandras” all, complete with their warnings of doom, whose laments go unheard, mistaken for crickets, or the building settling, or the faintly ticking clocks of one’s own memory in motion.
Morning after morning I hang onto my sleep, remain entrenched in my dreams, as long as I can. I clutch onto it like a knife I’m holding to fend off the approaching beast of Monday morning wakefulness. Or Tuesday, Wednesday, Weekday….
Each day a dull beast which will devour you.
It’s only when you’re coming out the other end of a day beast’s body, drifting through the intestines of your own sleep, that you feel safe:
You’ve already been eaten.
You can relax!
Mornings, though, I awaken and that’s when I can see it all. I can see the beast about to devour me. So I clutch sleep like the pearls of protection it is.
I have vague (in recall, but highly particular in experience) dreams that involve transferring and protecting data files and they TERRIFY me.
I awaken sometimes just absolutely CERTAIN that I have to remember some important piece of information from my dream, about some file, or file pathway, or some such nonsense-ery as that, CONVINCED that I have to REMEMBER IT until I get to work….
About 5 or 6 hours from now.
And I retain this anxiety from my dreams in my sleep-wake-sleep-wake state until such time as Frank decides he’s had it…
...And convinces me to get my ass up out of bed, do my duty, and feed him.
This anxiety precedes my consciousness each morning, and then pervades my day.
I recognize this, but haven’t quite figured out the Lucid Dreaming Therapy Approach yet that’s right for me!
My Loop
I am a repetitive dance move now, choreographed for cubicle, sound-tracked by bot-chatter, enjoying a black hole’s view from the pre-Industrial to the post-Singularity ages, yet trapped here in this moment, clacking keys with the rest of them, clucking tongues with the best of them, just trying to be digested by the beast each day the absolutely best way I can.
If you’re going to be eaten, bring flavor to the meal.
Post-Singularity Script
I am an echo of an ancient mournful howl.
And sometimes, in those moments when I awaken, I can hear myself….
I can hear myself again.