Predictions

In the future:

1. A person will digitally sign 5,000 pages of contract every morning at breakfast.

2. Breaths will be taxed and insured.

3. Sex will be a competitive sport.

4. Sexual activity and hours spent television watching will be tied to your credit rating.

5. Corporations will build private cities.

6. Children will be taxable assets.

7. Every inch of the planet will be watchable via camera satellites.

8. Video cameras will nestle in and try to sleep in your bed.

9. People will be assigned a group of 'diverse' friends: one gay, one bi, one black, one from somewhere in the middle east, one superstitious, one aethiest, one christian, one racist, one skinny, one ugly, one bored, one fat. There will be obligatory monthly meetings at the government re-education center or the local high school gymnasium.

10. People will have barcodes on their tongues. You will have to stick out your tongue to buy groceries, a muffin, a stapler, whatever.

11. Automatic weapons will be legal only in inner cities and impoverished areas, on the argument that it is dangerous to live there, and violence is more likely.

12. Sterilization of females born in major cities where heavy ground level ozone concentrations - sulfur oxides, etc. - make fertitility a 'risk'.

13. Eunuchism will re-emerge as a popular new mystic religion.

14. People will have pet rats on leashes.

15. India and Pakistan will join with Iran and N. Korea to form what they will call the 'Axis of Evil', and bend their collective wills towards destroying all living things. Or nuclear war will break out over the Kashmir.

16. The United States will legalize torture in cases where the probable criminal probably knows something about something atrocious that happened or may happen in the future - under these circumstances, and these only, is such extremity justified out of concern for the rest of humanity. They will push for the ratification of the same legislation at the U.N.

17. Marriage will be illegal if you have cancer or any life-threatening disease.

18. Abortion will become a matter of state legislation - it will be outlawed in all states except for New York, Massachusetts, and (a new state in the future) Southern California.

19. Public health officials will come arrive at your door one day to evaluate your house and leave a little card taped onto the front window reading 'B'. You will notice that the house across the street has a small 'A'.

20. I will move to Switzerland and live in total seclusion, except for the wife and kids, where we will eventually die of exposure to nuclear winds.

ADHD and Mass Hysteria

My great great third cousin thrice removed's brother in law is recovering from ADHD. What trauma the family went through those preceding 45 years! Now he's become addicted to philosophy. In a tiny woodshed behind his house he's created a library of suprising scale, in which he sits and pores over his texts. Every weekend, while he's away from running his contracting firm (house building- he's made a lot of money this way), he goes into his little space and dissappears. During the first weeks of this extreme change, they tried knocking on the door, say, for dinner, but soon learned better. They would either be ignored or violently reprimanded from within. Nowadays, he stays inside all weekend. He doesn't even take meals inside the shack, much less come out, except during the very late hours, to go to the bathroom. He goes in the woods. On Monday morning he exits the shack as though nothing's happened at all and very somberly strides up to the house, puts on his working clothes, and, without a word to his wife or five children, drives off in his truck. None of that is out of the ordinary. But we've noticed another curious phenomenon. Little George, aged seven, has taken to sneaking into his father's study after school. George might have his reasons: he doesn't get selected for team sports, for example, or get on much with his peers. Breaking apart battle toys holds very little interest for him. But lately he's come out of the shack before dinner with a dazed look on his face, and he doesn't speak at dinner as he used to, which was almost incessantly, except to ask strange questions that upset his mother and make his father chuckle (which is nice since he usually doesn't speak either). For example, he blurted out last night, apparently, something about 'reified subconsciousness'. The rest of the children accuse him of stupidity, but he doesn't seem to notice. That dazed look seems to convey a deeper paralysis of some kind. Anyway, it's giving the rest of us pause, wondering what this bizarre turn of events could mean. We're all writing extensive emails back in forth, forming desperate and complex theories and comparing notes, trying to find out what it all might amount to, and what it might mean. My great uncle in London thinks it's a case of childhood trauma recontextualized by the 'urban climate', but nobody seems to understand what that means. Then there's my sister's husband, who conjectures that it's a case of mass hysteria manifesting first in these two individuals. This email was rebuffed by my grandmother, who says this would redefine the phrase 'mass hysteria', and that furthermore the phenomenon doesn't really exist since consciousness isn't transferable between people. My grandfather had a few complaints about this, suggesting that we don't really know what consciousness is in the first place, and so we can't know the functionalities of an unknown, or at least non-physical property. As you can probably guess, we've been at our wit's end. So recently, we've sent a petition to the governor of the state asking for an investigation into the crisis. We've not heard back yet, but are hoping for the best, that this mystery will be solved, and that things will fall back into their comfortable normal positions and we can get on with life.

OUT THERE

This post has my heart right in the middle of it. I've disguised it as an ordinary word which I expect to be read over without anyone's noticing. The purposes for enacting this little scheme were in vague terms described by myself to a fellow passenger on the bus yesterday. I had said to him, "So as to get 'out there' a little more and make more human connections, and also so as to severe the old and passe bonds between it and my body, I've devised this experiment. I intend as a result a final state of complete disillusionment, where I sense things as from afar, like in a remote control system. My emotion will belong to the chance encounter of this word with the various eyes that skim over it." The gentleman on the bus had paid no attention to my explantion, though if I remember correctly, it was he who had opened the conversation, he who had gained interest, as with mounting curiosity he had asked, indeed, why I was conducting this unusual experiment at all? Perceiving that he could perhaps be one of those odd sorts who likes to pretend he isn't listening when he really is, just so he can feel insulted when you ask him why he was reading the paper when you are talking to him - I continued in my explanation. "In the system, the heart is put in a game of chance equivalent to its usual placement in the human chest cavity. I experience what it experiences though we are displaced objects: the slow flit of an occasional eye skims past the word that is a disguise, and expects no more of it than any other ordinary word. It might be an article or a conjunction, a noun or a gerund, a verb or a preposition. What a profound moment of euphoria when that one little word is crossed over! Perhaps not only days or weeks or months, but whole years go by until at last the body quakes at that distant event, happening again. Imagine the productivity one could reach, putting this situation into effect! It isn't as though you're cutting yourself off - on the contrary, you can assuredly plough through your days with the comfortable knowledge that your heart is really out there making the most of the dice factor, but without your having to go through the endless fluctuations that come along with its being carried around inside you."