One More Spin
Notes from the casino of false hopes.
As I write, I watch the wisteria climbing resolutely toward the wooden pergola.
For a month now it has been showing off its new, vivid green leaves. I planted it there last year, beside the column of the wooden pergola, hoping that one day it might cover the beams where the cat now walks.
The first thing I did three years ago, right after buying this house to renovate, was imagine the garden. There, where there was only gravel, wreckage, dirt, and uncultivated soil, I saw a grassy lawn full of life. A few details are still missing, but the bulk of it is done.
Somewhere I read that the garden is the soul of a house. For me it is also a small engine of hope: that winter will be mild, but not too mild; that hail will not come too large and at the wrong moment; that the wind will not knock down the trees; that spring will be rainy enough; summer calm but not scorching; autumn dry to just the right degree. In short, the hope that the world will remain just below the threshold of excess.
Outside, nature offers no false promises. It does not console, does not seduce, does not sell a better future. In its movements, however, it gives form, regularity, measure.
Inside, instead, screens large, medium, and small call us toward a dimension where every promise is reversed into its opposite and everything loses form.
Capitalist eschatology is pure performance: a casino full of Windows and devoid of windows; without a Sun to dictate order and time. An environment designed to keep us devoted to a future always deferred, always promised, always out of reach.
The rotation of the Earth is replaced by the Network Time Protocol, by remote servers and correction algorithms that tell the local oscillator when to slow down or accelerate the digital clock.
The slot machines of disposable current affairs, passed off as information, mix with cooking shows for people who will never cook, fitness lessons for motionless bodies, social networks that produce loneliness, dating apps for those who hate human beings, porn that falsifies intimacy, and ass-kissing artificial intelligences for those who want to be adored by their own reflection.
Hope is just around the corner. Look at that influencer who made it!
Keep playing. In the meantime, work fifty hours a week. Eat shitty food. Drink energy drinks to stay awake. Swipe: read the profile, study the photos, build the brilliant opener with ChatGPT.
Masturbate in front of a screen. Talk to the therapist inside the screen. Count your steps, calories, hours of sleep, notifications, heartbeats. Read the latest news about the Third World War, about aliens, about the new pandemic. Watch the last episode of the last season of the last series. Bet on the date of the Second Coming of Christ.
Pay taxes to the pedophilic aristocracy of terminal technocrats — and when the time comes, go ahead and die in that absolutely necessary war. But do not forget the action cam.
One more spin. The future is almost here: 777.
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That was great. Just read this after drinking coffee under our wisteria in the morning light.
Less windows, more windows!
You've penned some very thought provoking material throughout your SS, all very good, but this post is now my absolute favorite.
Lines such as: "The slot machines of disposable current affairs, passed off as information.."
This is a topic that I think about often.
So much of "current events", when reviewed a day later, and especially a year later seems so trivial as to make one wonder why was any energy whatsoever was spent producing, let alone consuming it. Literal drivel.
or
"a casino full of Windows and devoid of windows"
The post is replete with gems.