wildcat

I've been thinking about the future all afternoon and evening.

I was asked today to contribute a short story to a still-fetal online magazine, which sounded like a fun project to take on because, you know. It has specific weight, depth, and purpose. The theme was simple: "The future is now."

So I've been thinking about the future since around two this afternoon.

There was a set of short films presented at Plan B tonight as part of the Victoria Film Festival. One of them--a friend of a friend's, actually, made it--went into the "secret tunnels" under Victoria, extrapolating and articulating the class divides in the city, the historical significance, the creepy passages... on the walk home I mostly found myself looking at the number of alleyways and shop alcoves locked up behind barred gates to keep the homeless from squatting over night. And, you know, thinking about the future.

Earthbound science fiction, when poised in the direction of the future, seems to most often (big generalization!) be focused on urban spaces and our interactions with them in the wake of technological leap, species transformation, or xenocultural infestation.

But what about rural spaces and small towns? What do they look like in the future? Or a future, or any future?

Looking at the future from the present is like being in a small town, looking at the big city you want to move to, or you're afraid of, or seems to encroach upon you (think of all those little towns eaten, squelched, sucked and devoured by Toronto in its desperate guttural evolution toward Mega-City One). How does that work, that tension between Futuropolis and Todayville?

What will rural spaces and small towns look like?

And, that's all very North American, but you could say that future fiction is also tension between first/second/third worlds. But that fucks with my head, because third world urban design is practically an inversion of the first world design, and that's based on theories I haven't brushed up on in years, and I feel a bit like cracking open the urban morphology shit again.

Note that there is no inherent value judgment about particular time periods, nations, or urban/rural spaces -- each has a positive or negative attribute that balances out the others. Not every city is a utopia, and not every small town is an idyllic, simpler time.

Anyway, will be noteblogging for the next few days while I try to start something up.

Also: tomorrow I'm hoping to see the ophthalmologist and get a prescription for some new glasses. Expect eyedrop drama.

Apparently Masaru Emoto said a bad word this morning, because when I stepped out my door the heavens had opened up and there was ocean everywhere. Soaked right through by the time I made it to the Bay Center to see the optometrist.

The whole process was rather protracted, as I was led first to a dark room with three of those weird optic test machines with the head rests and chin rests. You stick your face into each one and then it examines your eyes; the first machine calculates an approximate prescription, the second one fires gusts of air at your eyes to test for glaucoma and the last one photographs your retinas.

Then I waited a little while longer in reception until the doctor asked me to come into another room, where he made me look at eye charts through various lenses. Apparently the machine from earlier gives them an idea of a prescription, but is terribly inexact and so a non-objective exam has to go down.

I tend, oddly, to have a lot of guilt associated with doctor's offices -- as though I'll be shunned at the regatta based on what the doctor finds. Dentists are really bad for this, but there's this weird fixation with wanting to read as much as I can on the eye chart but feeling weird that I can't because my eyes aren't strong enough and my old glasses aren't working as well anymore. Which is funny, because when he put lenses in front of my eyes that would correct the problems, I was surprised that I could ever see that well. You start to misremember your own abilities from youth.

After that, he administered some drops to open up my pupils, sent me out to reception again, where I waited in the bright light until he called me back in to do the rest of the exam.

There are no signs of glaucoma or macular degeneration, in spite of me being predisposed toward both because of my nearsightedness and genetic background. He showed me images of my own retina -- a big red universe with a blister-white optic nerve sun. A little elongated, apparently, due to the nearsightedness -- but otherwise clean and healthy.

Afterward, when I walked out with the new prescription, I was in a world of bright lights and soft focus. Everybody was a Sixties TV love interest!

I do not know which is more disturbing: An Icelandic girl grunting, hiccuping, and choking out a song of pure breath or the swelter of harmonica that's slapped on top, like a bad peanut butter job, uneven, maybe ground down into the bread a little too much in places.

I looked at the insides of my eyes today. There's this strange world veiled by the vitreous and aqueous humors. Actually, there's two of them, separated by meat and bone; each one gated behind fluid and existing parallel to each other.

Still thinking about the future today. I worked on the swamp story, squeezed out a few hundred words, felt a little ill for my efforts, saved and closed.

Mostly the future feels big and dumb in my head. The future is slow and pointless when it comes to what we imagine to be the important things, dribbling into non-existent past-due space operas when really it's all about communications technology. Your TV will have call display, but I'm not getting a cottage on the moon. There will be no Grey Alien migrant workers, getting high off packets of space gas. At least I can write about them.

Decades from now the Steve Jobs Memorial Memeplex, speaking through a hundred thousand speakers capable of receiving wi-fi, will announce the launch of the Mac iCell. Besides being a cellphone, mobile web-browser, camera, capable of containing all known music ever, able to download and display text, images, video and all that shit for you -- it will also be small enough to be injected directly into your bloodstream. It will work its way to your nervous system and there you go! You won't have to worry about drunk-dialing so much as drunk sub-vocalizing. The iCell's nucleus will come in a variety of colours, but you'll need an MRI or electron microscope to see. Load the syringe and shoot up, Johnny! Then call your mother.

Or, hey, Bob, you know Old Bob. He's an oracle, used to live down the street. Precognitive. He drinks to forget what's going to happen. Oh, sure, he shouldn't -- family history of alcoholism, he's not eating enough anymore and he always smells like shit. You know what science fiction taught us, what Buffy the Vampire Slayer taught us. You see the future, you see the bad shit, the apocalypses, you see all the death and violation. Like Isaac Mendez on Heroes, painting images of his own corpse, head sawed off and brain eaten. Precogs don't get flashes of finding their car keys ten minutes from now and not being late for work. So Bob, he drinks. It's all a bit pathetic, sure, but the neighbourhood has an agreement: Leave him alone. Let him drink. Don't ask him any questions about what's coming, because he'll either shout and throw bottles at you, or he'll tell you. We can't blame him for the drinking, because he's stuck thinking about the future all the time.

In the future, little kids will grow up dreaming about leaving the Vancouver Island Outer Wal-Mart Projects to move down to the Downtown Core, make it big. Mostly they'll end up working at a crap drugstore for couple months before some drunk bladerunner mistakes them for a replicant and BANG.

I've been keeping up a conversation with a friend of mine while she's been travelling. She got a great gig teaching Conversational English to people in the future, where it's a mostly dead language and attempts have been made to preserve it by recruiting people from the past. I come home after a day of carting books, magazines, and newspapers around, handing them to people over a counter, taking them back, arguing over late fines for DVDs -- and there'll be a message from her on my TimeBook account. We tried to play Cross-Time Scrabulous for a while but she kept making words up and claiming they haven't been invented yet.

She asks about pretty basic things, like the current cost of fossil fuels, how much sushi I've had in the last week -- she won't explain why she asks about the sushi. At first I thought it was because she just couldn't get it in the future, but then she said something about unagi the other week...

She doesn't visit that often. Maybe because of family stuff, but she seems to like the future a lot, and she always seem perplexed by finances whenever she's in the Now, carrying around all this cash like it's going out of style and looking bemused at me when I pay for a bottle of Bombay Sapphire with my debit card. She says she doesn't really understand the economy of the future, but it doesn't work the same way it does now.

Occasionally, she asks about Poland.

She's very careful to avoid mentioning how far into the future she is, but I sometimes think she's just being coy. "Oh, they had an alien invasion on Monday," she said the other day. I think it was a Sunday. Just like that. They had an alien invasion. She still feels very much like an outsider. Apparently they're weird about time-travellers, even ones that teach English. Possibly because she owns natural fibres that haven't been genetically modified. Possibly because she actually remembers -- knows -- what Britney Spears's voice sounds like, rather than just singing along with text and a beat in a karaoke booth. "No, but seriously, they've never heard the original version of Oops I Did It Again?"

"Dude, they only really know Marilyn Manson as a talk show host. Off MeTube."

"YouTube."

"No, MeTube. Knock-off from after Google buys YouTube."

"Google already owns YouTube."

"No, no. The second time, after they have to buy it back from the Mormons to save mankind."

"You're making this shit up."

She sends me stuff in the mail, which can be a bit of a hassle, but people are doing it more and more, trading stuff back and forth between now and then, so the post office is a lot better about it. The packages are usually grey and sort of cardboard-like, plastic trying to look like cardboard. She sends me books that I can't read because the pictures jump around, there's not a lot of text, and she wants me to send her copies of People Magazine in return. All anybody in the future reads is Elpoep. Something about "ghost particles." She occasionally uploads photos backwards into time. People blog backwards now, little travel diaries detailing their attempts to woo people from the future -- she's had a few of those herself -- and a lot of my friends have started to decorate their apartments in Nouveau Futur style, purchasing bargain basement reproductions in silver and black from catalogues. I hear a couple of actual businesses from the future are taking orders from now.

I see field trips -- kids from tomorrow shoveling weird snacks into their mouths while gawking in the streets. "Oh, they're obsessed with the past," my friend says in her messages. "They ask me a lot of questions. I taught this whole class on the Tarot, actually. I had to explain that my mother thinks it's a sin, but they don't get what Sin is. They also think the cards are pretty silly, they thinks it must be really weird for us to not know what's going to happen before it does. They don't get trying to predict something."

She still asks about how things are here, but I mean. They're just not as big as the future is, right? The cars have wheels, sure, but everybody's trying to be like future people and that's all they want to talk about at dinner parties. She asked me the other day what Starbucks smelled like, like she couldn't remember. Like they don't have them in the future. I got a little excited about that, almost thought about trying to get a job teaching English. Imagine! A world where I don't have to suppress the gag reflex when I smell that burnt coffee bean haze. Only, what comes after Starbucks? What's going to eat Starbucks?

Someone at work asked me yesterday why Britney Spears was on the cover of People Magazine all the time, what she did before she was "professionally crazy."

The smell, texture, taste of an army slamming into your -- well, Johnny Damocles's -- face! The sound, well, the sound was swallowed up by the other sound, the chandelier cracking and shattering under the peer pressure of gunfire up against it, glass dust snowing down, the opera house in outright chaos, chaos I'm telling you -- just another night on the town for Damocles and his sweet-sweet partner, Miss Teiresias Jones. The crumple of nose, the blood, Damocles clutching at his face while the blood gushes, simply gushes. "Do you realize," he shrieks, losing his cool for all of a second before the clean sound editing kicks in -- that is, the drugs -- and his voice is all clean lines. Broken-faced, he comes after the big gorilla of a henchman with the fists that match the wound, grabs him by the scruff, and kicks him clean between the legs. "Do you realize," he repeats, while the big dumb monster stumbled backwards, hands down there but not sexy-like, cursing like no proper lady should. "Do you realize how difficult it is to get laid if you have to wear a mask? Because I'm going to have to wear a mask for at least six hours, darling, before I can see someone about this."

"The trouble with assassins these days," says Miss Jones as she cantaloupes a second flunky square in the forehead with her titanium umbrella handle. She is, of course, going up, and quite prim in her Vera Wang industrial velvet pantsuit, frills at the shoulders and a deep, deep V at the neck to show her vamp-able bosom. "Let's dispatch quickly, Damocles. Madame Butterfly has rather lost her wings, I think, for the night." The stage was a wreck, blasted and exploded in wide slices of soot. People screamed and clutched each other, scrabbling for the door.

"I demand cocktails!" Damocles made sure his opponent was completely out with a sharp jab to the throat with the butt of his palm.

"Don't we all."

Well, shit.

The Greater Victoria Public Library will be closed as of February 17th -- Sunday -- as union employees are being locked out by the Library Board & Greater Victoria Labour Relations Board.*

This will not be a short-term lock-out, but will remain in effect until a collective agreement is reached. Which may be never, considering the GVLRA refuses to negotiate with the union.**

On the one hand, finally, this job action is rupturing like some horrible skin problem. On the other hand is messy business like food and rent.

<sub>* Labour Relations: "Hey, you, labour! I'm going to just hit you over the head with this shovel for the next hour, and there won't be any bargaining."

** Aren't I just an optimistic little monkey?</sub>

Well, as of five o'clock this afternoon, we've been locked out of work.

Since the 72-hour notice was given on Wednesday, most of us have been walking around in a daze while panic grows. Flying while in denial, panicking the rest of the time.

I'm out of work. I haven't actually been out of work since 2001, when I moved back down to Victoria after that last summer spent up in Prince George -- I came back down with no plans, lost, taking unexpected time off of school. I got a job pretty quickly, though, even if I hated it with a passion.

So, I'll be picketing from now on, and looking for a new job as well -- either something temporary to keep me going until the lockout ends, or maybe something more permanent. My landlord's been really great about the whole thing, and even has me house & cat sitting for him next month for a bit of money. I might get some money proofreading for some of Christian's students. Might put together some content for a website.

At least I have some torment to write about, and time to write again -- with a bit more motivation, I have to say.

Badly designed author websites make religious icons weep blood. True story. Especially when all content -- text and images alike -- runs in a centered strip down the middle.

Rather than fuel weird freefall feelings, I'm firing information at my brain and seeing what sticks. In between writing projects is another kind of freefall; with the "Future" piece done and submitted, I'm running, running, running toward the next idea.

Octopus suckers implanted in human arm. Probably not safe for those for whom The Body is a Sacred Temple. [Via]

Vintage Automaton on eBay, circa 1915. First thought upon seeing this? Jesus was a scary puppet-man. [Via]

Wikipedia entry for Fletcher Hanks, recently popularized Golden Age comic book creator:

"Little is known of Hanks's life outside comics; the main source is an interview with Fletcher Hanks Junior, conducted by Paul Karasik for I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets. According to his son, Hanks was an abusive father and spouse, as well as being an alcoholic. Hanks earned some income by drawing murals in the homes of the rich. Hanks abandoned his family around 1930. He died sometime around 1970 and his frozen body was found by police on a park bench in New York City."

Trixie Bedlam gives us options.

And, you know, from all of that, the first dribble of a story just showed up in my head.

Wikipedia entries for various two-bit, no-good super-heroes from the Golden & Silver Ages. Significant emphasis is mine, bits and bobs for the story.

Way back when, there were a lot of lawyers fighting crime in capes and suits, like the Mouthpiece or old #711:

"Like many early comic book heroes, #711 did not wear a traditional costume but rather was modeled after the traditional pulp magazine heroes. He wore a green cape, a brown business suit, and a wide-brimmed fedora which cast his eyes in shadow. #711's trademark was a calling card made of a mirror with bars painted over it; when an unlucky criminal would look at the card, they would see themselves behind bars."

"Faustus is a black cat from Earth "somewhere in the far future." He journeys to the 20th century alongside a nameless federal agent from the future masquerading as a supervillain known as 13 in order to prevent an experimental missile falling into the hands of The Ghost, an enemy of the superhero Captain Atom. After their mission is completed, Faustus and 13 return to the future."

"Wrestler Brett Carson obtained super strength and used it to fight crime. He was assisted by sidekicks Kid Muscles and Miss Muscles, who appeared in backup stories. With a superhero costume consisting of red-and-black wrestling tights with a yellow "M" insignia, the blond-haired hero is one of few who did not wear a mask and whose identity is publicly known."

"Yellowjacket's secret identity is crime writer, Vince Harley. After a group of jewel robbers attempted to kill him by pouring a box of yellowjackets on him, he found that he had gained the ability to control yellowjackets, and used that ability to fight crime."

I keep listening to the Shiny Toy Guns' song "Le Disko" over and over.

Everything I've written today has failed, utterly, to amount to anything at all. Which isn't to say I didn't enjoy doing it. I'm trying things out, it's the early part of working on a given story, it's all false starts and trying to nail down exactly what I'm writing about. Or trying to write about. All I really produced tonight was two pages of over-worked comic book artists in the Fifties arguing over an apartment intercom when one shows up to deliver supplies to the other, who just left his wife and is a terrible, terrible drunk.

On top of that, I ended up reading an old almost-story I wrote one night about a year ago, churning out seventeen pages in a few hours. It's a dinner party, that old chestnut (let's face it, Joy did a better one), there are a lot of problems with it -- for one, there's six "in-camera" characters and one unseen one in those seventeen pages -- but I was rather impressed with the characters, the voice, the smoothness of some of the prose. It's quite self-indulgent in a lot of places, everyone operates in this state of hyper-drollness, they're so terribly good-looking, it feels as though someone's spliced yuppies together with bohemian artists and created some kind of super-boppies -- but it still reads in an oddly captivating way. But that's because it's mine, I suppose, and it's that narcissistic impulse to stare into photographs of you or looking in the mirror for hours on end.

Still, the story includes (what I think is) a passably amusing scene in a barber shop that I might expand into something on its own.

Or not.

I can't really get over that conceit of crooks trying to kill a crime writer using a box of wasps, and the horror of it being undercut by the writer happening to develop a weird ability to control the insects as they swarm over him, threatening to pucker his skin with their stings.

Susannah Breslin's interview with Ellen Forney. I very nearly bought Forney's book of cartoon-illustrated personal ads, Lust, but I was looking at it when I got the call that we were being locked out, so I put it back on the shelf and walked right out of the store. It's also worth reading Breslin's short-short story, H is for Hardcore, from the online magazine elimae. It's short and sharp, very well written.

I'm listening to David Bowie's Major Tom songs (Space Oddity / Ashes to Ashes / Hallo Spaceboy), trying to figure up some more weird future thinking. since finishing the Future Earth submission, "Timebook," I've been scrambling to start a new project but nothing's really suggesting itself yet. The super-heroes thing is -- interesting -- but I can't quite find the right tack with it.

My second day of full-scale picket duty was fairly boring. Walked back and forth, read Thomas Pynchon on a wooden bench, played sudoku, failed utterly at sudoku, worked on a crossword, failed utterly at a crossword, drank a smoothie, thought about macaroni and cheese, listened to the Writers & Company interview with Carlos Fuentes, and left early to run the sign-in sheets over to the union's offices.

Michael mentioned something about this last night: "South Korea is drafting an ethical charter to govern how robots will function alongside humans, officials said Wednesday." I wish I could be more excited by the idea, but years upon years of pop culture exposure means I'm more waiting for the inevitable Computer Tyrants.

Listening to the DNTO podcast for yesterday and Isabella Rossellini has just been talking about Ancient Roman penis sculptures.

Because I can read commentary, Mighty God King Live-Blogs the Oscars:

"I know when I think editing, I think Renee Zellweger."

"Wii ad disguised as comedy sketch. Good thing we had that time handy instead of wasting it on some acceptance speeches or something."