#29: Futureblindness

Actual updates

Hey, remember how last time I had no news to report and not much on the links front, either? Well, that changed fast. Just a couple days after I sent the last issue out, I was washing dishes one night when I realized I could hear water running that wasn’t the water in front of me in the sink. It was coming from the basement.

I went down and found that I clearly hadn’t caught on right away - a pipe was leaking profusely and a big section of the floor was already covered in water. After some investigation, it became clear that this was part of the pipe coming down from the sink drain, but farther along, after it had already merged with other pipes. I was too nervous to run the dishwasher, so I resolved to call the plumbers in the morning and we’d just make do with what all I had hand-washed already.

So, I did call them - I called our plumbers of choice, which are a women-run outfit, still a surprising rarity in the world of trades - but I had to leave a message. Fine, I thought, they’re a small shop and if they’re out fixing something, there’s probably no one in the office to answer the phone. But as time ticked on into the next day, and I was turning the sink on in little dribs and drabs only when I absolutely had to, things started to get serious.

We managed to run the dishwasher once without incident, and immediately got cocky, filled it back up, and ran it again, which was a mistake. It was getting into the second day now with no response, so I called another plumber, and they were able to send someone to look at it, but not to solve it: that would require someone from another, affiliated shop. It took until the next day to get it actuallly fixed. Apparently, it was a clog in the pipe that the sink and dishwasher and washing machine drain to. I’m just glad they didn’t show me the clog.

So, that was crisis number one. Then, later in the month, Hap had his school’s spring break, and I took the week off work to watch him and have public transit adventures together (his favorite). We had to put them off, though, because my home laptop abruptly decided that it did not have a hard drive anymore. I can assure you that this was a scurrilous lie. One night, it was acting slow - but normal! It was already on and everything! - and I thought, well, it’s been awhile since I restarted, better do that to sort it out. And then it couldn’t restart because there was “no” hard drive. So I had to make an appointment with the Apple Store to take it in the next day, and ultimately pay a bunch of money to sort it out (but still less than a whole new computer! what a savings!). Crisis two!

And then, the other weekend, I gave myself one of the dumbest injuries in my own personal history, which is saying something. I was in the grocery store and I needed a basket, but it was stuck in the one beneath it. You know how they get. So I was trying to yank them apart, and I had my fingers - in retrospect, stupidly - through the holes in the side of the basket. I guess I thought I just had a hold of the exterior basket that way, but my fingers evidently extended through the holes of both baskets. This is key, because as I tugged on the handle, they suddenly and abruptly came apart with quite a bit of force, and the inside basket jolted upwards and basically took my fingertips with it, stopped only by… the edge of the holes on the outside basket1.

It fucking killed. I actually yelled, or I guess let out a big shuddering grunt, which is the same thing in terms of sounds you don’t want to make in public, and had to bite back a sudden rush of tears. My legs felt weird as I walked around the store - I had to make a conscious effort not to be weaving and wobbling, and that was tough because I was dizzy and felt like I might faint or puke. I was stunned that my fingertips weren’t all bleeding, but it still felt like it was an outsized pain reaction for just scraping my fingers really badly. I wrote it off as fingers being more sensitive due to being specific tools for touching and feeling. It was only later, looking at the bruising and swelling on my pinky finger and noting that while the other fingers felt a bit better, that one wasn’t, and I couldn’t bend the last knuckle or really touch it without pain, that perhaps something more had happened here. By that time, it was too late in the day to go to urgent care about it, though - Hap needed dinner and then it would be his bedtime - so I figured if it wasn’t any better the next morning I’d go then.

It was a bit better - a bit - the next morning. I had regained the ability to bend it, and it hurt less, so I decided not to wade into the waters of “this wouldn’t have been such a big deal if you had your driver’s license” or make Hap sit in a waiting room or make Matt solo-parent on his day off, and I just figured I’d given it a bad whack and my aging and decrepit bones would just take a little while to heal. And that may still be true! But it still hurts when I move it wrong; it’s usually sore at the end of the day, and today it’s been bothering me all morning (it’s supposed to rain today, so I might have finally achieved the Weather-Detecting Bone2 of old-person lore).

So I think, based on similar sensations with toes, that I might have broken it just a little bit, just the fingertip - nothing so serious that I’m in agony or can’t use it at all, but enough to still hurt, a week and a half later. Should I have seen a doctor about it, probably; would they have done anything about it, who knows. I’m sure they would have found a way to tell me it wouldn’t be broken if only I would just lose some weight.

I’m trying to tie this back to that time I thought about pain and what it means to me, but I don’t think this is an “I deserve it” thing or a “not worth a painkiller” thing. This is a “don’t inconvenience other people over your probably-trivial pain” thing, and trust me that there is no level of pain that I can’t define out of existence. After all, how do I know if I’m not just a wimp and a normal person would barely notice it? Definitely not worth messing up bedtime for. Probably not worth messing up anyone’s pleasant Sunday for. It’s also a “please don’t hassle me about driving” thing, but what isn’t?

There was another thing I wanted to talk about that’s unrelated to my various crises and my rapidly-deteriorating human form, and because it’s my damn newsletter, I’m by-god going to!

So we’ve been rewatching Caprica, the spinoff show from the Battlestar Galactica reboot, and its deal is that it’s a prequel, set about 60 years before the events of the other show, and deals with some of the roots of the catastrophic event that precipitates BSG. The specifics aren’t important to what I want to go into, but the fact that it’s set in a society somewhat more advanced than our own is. There are 12 planets with folks moving about from one to the other, technology is doing things we can’t dream of, high school kids have programming chops that put everyone I know to shame (also true currently, but in a different way, okay?). Also, and this part isn’t related to the point I’m trying to make, but it was shot in Vancouver and does not even make the least effort to look like it’s somewhere else. They even used the Skytrain font for their monorail station signage! Landmarks and mundane streets alike, every time they’re outside and some of the interiors too. It’s bittersweet and it’s almost hard for me to watch. Anyway! This was a digression.

But the show was made in 2009 and 2010, and it highlights - even at such a recent remove - the limitations of our ability to imagine the future. We always want to think of the same stuff we have now, just better, smaller, faster, cooler, and looking at something that was even just 12 years ago, we had no idea what would develop or change entirely even within a short snippet of our own lifespan. They’ve got cars that appear to run on gas, they’ve got little cell phones, they’ve got separate piece-of-paper computers (ok those were actually extremely cool) rather than having the object that does your computering being the same as the object that does your communicating (and your photography, for that matter, but I suppose that would have been harder to forsee). They’ve got big bulky old early-2000s laptops, which might have surprised me most of all - wouldn’t you assume your technology would get smaller and more portable, by that point in history?

So of course I’m thinking about what we can’t visualize today. We’ve realized that having one device to do it all is probably going to continue to be the thing, and that (if there’s going to be a future to set our speculative fiction in) we have to be imagining cars that don’t run on gas, but what assumptions are we building in? It’s fun to think about and nearly impossibly easy to be wrong. My own tendencies always want to err on the side of moving everyone towards the middle, in love and in identity, and I think recent stats tend to bear that out - as you become less likely to be ostracized or killed for coming out, more people come out; as new options are made available, more people will take them. As more people have time to think about themselves (thanks queerantine!), more people will come to some Realizations, and as more people are gentler with and more accepting of themselves, they’ll allow themselves to admit that it’s ok to self-define in a different way than they did last year or last week. Any sci-fi that’s mostly straight people seems desperately unrealistic to me. But I’m sure there’s more to get wrong than just matters of the heart and the body! I’m not cutting-edge enough to know, though. And I want to be more creative than just “robots that do stuff for us.” More remote everything, I guess; fewer offices. Interesting things, maybe, happening with all the old and now unused office space - be that new uses or new disuses. All my proto-interesting ideas for being futuristic always fall off the technological path almost immediately, because my brain knows that it has no business there. But if you want to talk about a city of skyscrapers with bird colonies nesting in some floors and people taking over other floors for makeshift housing, I’m ready to write that story!3

Speaking of the future, I’m going to turn 40 in 3 weeks. I have made a resolution to no longer use mediocre pens. It’s good pens only from here on out. That and not giving a shit about what anyone thinks of me anymore (we’ll see how that turns out!!!). But obviously I’m still going to be the same idiot at any age, just greyer and wrinklier.

What am I reading

I’m reading Authority, the second book in the Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff VanderMeer. I started it over the weekend, and have you ever gone straight from a book that is good in the sense of being well-plotted4 into a book that is really and truly well-written? The way VanderMeer works in language is so evocative and atmospheric that I don’t even feel pretentious saying he “works in” it. The entire world of the book is ominous, overbearing, too-quiet, too-empty.

It’s the sequel to the also-incredible Annihilation, which I read last year (and which was made into a movie that I allegedly saw but remember nothing about, which is… kind of horribly fitting, if you’ve read it). The trilogy deals with a region of coastline that abruptly became inaccessible other than by one entry point, for reasons unbeknownst, and extremely weird shit proceeded to go down inside the region. Expeditions were sent in and they all ended badly in various different ways. Annihilation deals with one expedition; Authority deals with the agency responsible for sending in these expeditions, and while it’s creepy in a different way - a “what yawning horror do these bureaucrats know about and try to manage” way rather than an immediate, danger-alert way - it’s still absolutely wall-to-wall dread in here. Although who knows - I’m not very far along yet, so maybe things will shift. I can’t wait to find out.

Also, and this is less about the book than the edition, but the author’s name is stamped so deeply into the cover that I can’t stop running my fingers across it. Tactile!

Some links

I love Bolu Babalola and I love yearning5 and I love this piece. A Meditation on Yearning

I have lived in this town for seventeen point five years and somehow never managed to hear about this. And yeah I’m not really a Baseball Guy but it’s nearly impossible to dodge baseball stuff in Boston, so I’m honestly stunned. Anyway, this is a story about some townies having a fight. The Legend of the Fenway Pizza Chucker

You had to know I would love this. Science!! Diverse Life Forms May Have Evolved Sooner than Previously Thought

The tired old idea that gay, bi, and queer people, trans people, nonbinary people, anyone who deviates from the straightest of the straight is a city invention and doesn’t exist in a rural context can go straight in the garbage. “I Would Love to Fly a Trans Flag, But it Would Put My Animals in Danger”

Do people who didn’t grow up in Canada know about the DEW Line? If not, it was a cold-war-era series of military installations of various kinds in the high Arctic, to warn the Americans that Russia was invading over the pole6. I think the idea was pretty much that Canada would be a wash at that point but the Americans might have time to get to safety; that warning wasn’t so distant or so early for us. Here are some really fascinating and evocative photos. Distant Early Warning

Apparently there was an octagonal-house craze! That had faux-scientific underpinnings! Because of course it did! Also, some of these are really cool-looking. How America Became Enamoured with Octagonal Houses

Let me preface this one with a content warning, it talks about murders a lot, and sometimes in some detail. It’s also about a creepy scammer who made everyone believe he was a serial killer expert, when he may have been more of a fan. The Unraveling of an Expert on Serial Killers

I thought this was going to be crazier, but it’s still pretty neat: this museum is also some people’s home, and they just started collecting time-and-measurement-related items and never really stopped. I don’t know if the aliens are going to go visit them, though. If Aliens Arrive, They’ll Go Straight to the Museum of Measurement and Time

So, we watched Moon Knight7, and I thought it was good, and Oscar Isaac is of course very hot, but his whole English deal was silly: you can’t just say “bloody” every second word and come off sounding convincing, you sound like an American putting on an accent, which is what it was. Like yes actors put on accents other than their own all the time, but this was distracting. This Fake Accent Matrix places that particular fake accent in some context - plus, it’s good for arguing about. The 21st Century Fake Accent Matrix

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

No shade to Judas Priest but this is one of the covers I would rate as better than the original. Some songs want to be sped up, sure, see every punk cover of a country song, but some songs want to be slowed down. It really lets the menace shine through; this isn’t hijinks, it’s real danger. Also, my apologies, the very very end gets cut off.

I tried to teach Hap to do the backups on this song. It didn’t take. Also, when I was looking for a video of this, I could only find live versions or the full album (same with another song of hers from another album, actually) but Neko Case appears to be one of those performers who can go out and do an exact replica of the same rendition every time. I kind of respect her “just stand there and sing” deal too - I always feel like I have to be doing stage moves or else I’m boring, but that’s probably because she has a much better voice than me and doesn’t need antics to distract and/or elevate.

Is My Aim Is True a perfect album? It might be!!

This month’s top 5: top memories by decade

So, with the whole “going to be 40” thing happening, I’m thinking about my life so far; I’ve been alive during 5 decades, so I thought I’d try to pin down the top memory of each one. This doesn’t necessarily mean “best”! Just the most prominent, for any reason.

• 1980s: my first memory, grabbing the cactus. That sounds like it should be a memoir title. Grabbing the Cactus. Anyway, I was 2 and we were visiting family friends in Arizona and they had a cactus out in their front yard, and my stupid toddler ass decided I should shake hands with it. This has been widely regarded as a mistake.

• 1990s: a hard choice here but I think I’m going to go with the time in grade 10 or 11, on our annual school ski trip to Manning Park, that I walked into the lodge hangout area after a day on the mountain and a boy in my class told me I was the best skier in our grade. Momentous due to how very very NOT a jock I was in school and how doing any kind of sports in front of people made me want to walk into traffic.

• 2000s: I know I should say “my own wedding” here but I’m sorry it’s going to be getting tear-gassed half a dozen times in Quebec City at the FTAA protests. What can I tell you, it was memorable in a way that few other things are!

• 2010s: [redacted]

• 2020s: early days yet but so far I might say the last couple “normal” nights before everything shut down. It was on another ski trip - ski trips are the true home of the memorable, I guess - and while nothing too special really happened, my mind has been replaying it a lot. Oh to perch on a bench with a friend and gossip cozily while waiting your turn for karaoke again!

So, the Supreme Court draft about repealing Roe v Wade leaked while I was in the middle of writing this, and by this point we’ve all read all the infographics and the well-phrased tweets so I don’t have any useful info to add here other than my trusty link to mutual aid abortion funds in each state; I’m vacillating between fatalistic despair and a frenzy of wanting to take action, and I know plenty of you are too. Donating money can be action! Calling your reps can be action! Volunteering is for sure action, and so is helping people in states with trigger laws get to a clinic in a bordering state, in case you’re in such an area geographically. Get in touch with your local orgs (that list can tell you who some are) to find out what they need most.

We all know that reproductive rights are only one prong of an evil fork here; another prong is LGBTQ+ rights, which are already under attack in several states and likely to be repealed federally down the road. So the whole “gay rights are next” line of reasoning isn’t quite accurate - this isn’t the first attack and they aren’t the next; they’re occurring concurrently at different stages, as are other attacks on other rights (voting rights, particularly). I’m fortunate to live, with my couple of silly little marginalized identities, in a part of the country where I’m likely to continue to have rights (and of course I’m trying to move to a country where none of these rights are in question), but we are the only ones who can help us, so we all have to stand by each other, safe and unsafe, marginalized and not.