My Reality is Beta?

when kurt vonnegut jr. fell to his death, i was riding the train with timequake in my hands. it's a brilliant novel as any of his are, and a great piece of literature to be reading when someone dies-- especially if that someone is kurt vonnegut jr.-- because he writes of being alive as "embarrassing or much worse"

"The funniest American of his time, Mark Twain, found life for himself and everybody else so stressful when he was in his seventies, like me, that he wrote as follows: "I have never wanted any released friend of mine restored to life since I reached manhood.""

- kurt vonnegut jr., timequake

i've always been a fan of both bitter old writers-- though vonnegut's got a stronger touch on my life, perhaps because he would scribble self-portraits here and there and threatened to sue pall mall cigarettes under the pretense that every pack promised to cause cancer and never did. false advertisement. and because of the lack of cancer, he was forced to live longer and see more of this ridiculous world.

and while i've always agreed with most of his philosophies (i am a humanist in that i try to do good to other people with no expectation of reward), his idea of trying to stop living as soon as reasonably possible didn't make nearly as much sense until i read a recent article in national geographic.

You could call it reality 1.0—the unvarnished world presented to us by our five senses. It's not always the most user-friendly of places. We get lost in unfamiliar cities; we meet people whose language we don't understand. Fortunately there's an upgrade in the works that might eliminate some of the bugs: augmented reality, or AR. This emerging technology superimposes computer-generated images on the real world, courtesy of a cell phone camera or special video glasses.

[read more]

i don't want to be alive for this. at all. are we shooting for a day when "knowledge" will be reduced to a series of computer-based references even when we're outside?

oh, i will never survive to be very old if this is where we've collectively decided to head. i used to laugh at the way my mom would answer her cell phone as if every call were an emergency. she was new to the idea of portable phones and it made sense for her to assume calls that didn't go to the land line must be urgent. but that was cell phones.

do we really want to live in a world where our sunglasses can tell us about every constellation, yelp reviews, landmarks, and where our car is parked? because i really don't. to me, that would be an unbearable place to live.

the world is not supposed to always be "the most user-friendly of places," that's half the fun. there are supposed to be so-called "bugs" in real life. that's the part of living that is enjoyable. if you meet an amazing french girl and worry that you can't speak french, you go and learn french. or you do as the beatles would do.

"I say in speeches that a plausible mission of artists is to make people appreciate being alive at least a little bit. I am then asked if I know of any artists who pulled that off. I reply, "The Beatles did."

- kurt vonnegut jr., timequake

well the best beatles are dead and so is kurt vonnegut jr. and now all we have are scientists making sunglasses that treat the world like a horrible vh1 pop-up video.

time to smoke a cigarette.