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11.4
Our heroine’s good deeds with other women were wrapped up with her boredom. Without this primal cause, util could not take place. Moral expressions would manifest elsewhere, to exist in a non-space, where they are useless/lack util. What does not promote consumption, or divide-and-conquer, lacks util.
They are mythological beings, these people — they engage with myths so strongly that they have adapted ideals (necessarily unreal) to their behavior, whose course is then permanently charted. All adaptabilities are in hand for use according to the judgments and lessons of their preferred tales. It offers them a well that need never be replenished, or really even drawn from — it gushes from the bottom of their mouth, giving no occasion for to think.
But not for our heroine. For her, it was better to swim around for answers. Anything, anything that would entice thinking in the other party was of benefit to her. It pulled their minds from reproduction, as well as all sorts of resentful memories informing present action. It lessened her chances of being hit on, sure, but, more essentially, of being demeaned. Engaging with cat-callers lacked util. Letting them change her did not.
A life with less suffering is worth changing for. On one hand it’s down to base survival. This is a species that will drop dead in two rotations without water. It’s going to be cautious.
Even here she was an official. She had the experience and the nature that people were predisposed to follow, even as the only qualification for leadership in an online world is whether folks are liked on sight. And she was one of these.
She had a boyfriend, so our hero thought, lurking on her street, perhaps aware of her potential, with the mistaken belief that this kind of love would scorn the other drives inside her. But it would require a reckoning with the path of exclusivity that had been shown to her. The horizons each could see would have to overlap.
An action can only be as messy as its motivation. What had annoyed her about him before was beginning to recede beside her possibilities in art, in meeting amiable sorts willing to open doors for access to new pleasure.
Suddenly the mountain path was winding downward. Vegetation changed as elevation lowered. The air grew warmer at sea level and the only birds were city kind. Trails met roads, which got wider and more crowded as they joined to other roads. Man was on the loose.
11.5
There appeared a familiar ear to record memories. Everyone felt better when it showed up to listen. They were willing to share more. Otherwise it was the paid stubborninity of arguing against a made-up mind.
With the mountains now behind her, she could see a new horizon. Somehow the blue-green melt had included no brown. When everything she did had been applauded, it was easier to make a big decide. Later, when she was older, she’d understand the importance of where the applause was coming from. For now it seemed a great occasion. Great occasions vibrate — that’s how she recognized them. Their leftover materials are piled up outside, the weeds get tall around them. They have discolored in the sun and flaked off in the rain. Soon parts will weaken and snap off. They’ll hit the ground eroding. Unless someone comes along with something to conceal, the parts will remain where they fell, in sight if not obscured by vegetation, until they are buried in the continental drift.
There are much too many new materials to bother restoring the old. One day a migrant will step on top of what was loved and feel nothing but the ground. It will cohere in the earth long after the archaeologist’s dream comes true — a device that can reveal the outline of everything man-made covered by the ground. It will have the value of the billion others needed everywhere. It will be capsule-less and easily repeated.
Already for her the quotidian was grindingly humdrum. It took more to raise her interest. While she found free love acceptable, a jolt from boredom, a fun moment, she’d be a lot more picky with who could be a boyfriend going forward. She’d find a new one among her connections in the art world who had everything. With this status bf didn’t really need her, so she kept him around. He was upfront about his freedom and she did not restrict him. The novelty was most of it — he was asked to be on podcasts, did not need to have one himself, and this was rare and magical. It seemed out of her grasp and so she wanted it — perhaps not in Nebraska, but she was in no hurry at 18.
One arriving from afar sees not the same welcome in the age of interstates. Free love was rare for most, but free energy would not be known outside the human mind. The campers on arrival in the dark were stretching into sleep. Tired so, they slept through aching bladders and woke up to where they could not stand up straight. There was a swirl of dreaming in the final moment but nothing registered in memory. So they left their trash right where it lay and drove down roads sans traffic signals.
There’s trash in orbit too. There’s so much that it could put a lid on exploration. It’s 50/50 in the future any rocket would be struck and damaged by the overwhelming debris, effectively closing a dungeon door around the troposphere. That wouldn’t stop new music but it would by proxy drive so many batty that teens would have responsible discussions amid the heat of hooking up. There’d be real wrenching emotion at the opportunity to make a new life — under their locked-in, polluted sky.
11.6
Caverns buried by the sea return to light, but all the paint upon their walls was power-washed away. How far, as the conceptual limit of human endurance, can never be determined. Always does it vary. The warning sounds ring red. Anti-social personality disorders (asps) are on the prowl. They have the drive to freeze someone in place. Just like the lizard whose heart explodes as a bird claw draws near, sparing it its eating, our minds shut down at the poisonous speech and energy of our inhumane cousins. As far as one’s influence on the other goes, this one works quite well.
But our heroine could be the catalyst for anything, including basic income. Her opportunities did not end at some gallery, some country club. Hers was the chance for meaningful plus-change. The warnings peeled in crimson, and from where she stood the breeze blew arctic, dry, and soupy. Gradients she saw were paths she could latch onto. But her stitching was uncommon. She was the exception to the patterns of our governance. When the colors all went grey, that’s when she knew she had to step back. For like all lust, hers was a craven sort. She couldn’t trust in anything to fill her up for long. She lacked the mentality of the collector. It was not to be raged against. It seemed that everything was turning brown — the prelude to a winter. It was time to swap her bracelet for her charm.
Some kind of slime had gathered in the corners. Knowledge was a bust — she saw it now. Her feelings were her only guide. Another spin was at its end. She’d mention it to her girlfriends, and one of them would wipe it up, and another would take a rag to those filthy corners.
The ground is where the beasts do all their biting. She pulled away and he was clawing at her back. A woman realizes, can sense the first time her man is not excited to have sex with her, that is, his lust is ever-evident but feels no longer crazed. It is a sign to her. A man may sense this too, but he will overlook it.
Arguments come out when triggered by a partner. Then the partners get to hear the entire rehearsed spiel, all the spirits speaking from the staircase, the bon mots and witty repartée, the asserted air-tight logic that they’ve shored up for their side. The partners will be confused. It won’t make a lot of sense to them, nor have exactly much to do with what their fight’s about. With age they’ll realize the other party’s arguing but it’s not with them — they’re arguing with someone who’s not there. The partners head off to their happy place and wait. The storm assertions pass. Then they’ll dip via text on account’a dude/chick’s cray-cray, and potential children go unborn, to not be alive when this biosphere is too hot to support them.
The answer comes between the curtains of the mind. Blown open briefly, they settle in slowing waves back to their normal state. Then the world is pointing right again. She thought more about her future wedding than her future husband. It had to be a gala with press photographers, ending with an ode to a Grecian cruise line urn. The man she’d be with had somewhat less importance. But she figured to get all that would require betrothal to a real macho s.o.b. with dinars and connections. That meant being favored for a bit, until the new car smell wore off. Then that sort would put her on a pedestal and find himself a mistress. He would not hide this from our heroine. He’d see it as respect, she as humiliation. A lot of these would even have them meet, his wife and younger mistress, putting her through that. They are about half likely to get the mistress pregnant, keep the baby out of fervor, and then pay a bunch of money on the side to it (it will be an it). The lusty and entitled, enjoying life without a superego, would do that to more than just one mistress, so they’d have families visible but not close. He’d revere his matrimony kids and express his love through checks to the mistress-born. Occasionally when sloshed he’d forget and mention their accomplishments to siblings they didn’t know of, angering everyone, real suss. Our heroine would have to wear a stoic face each week at the church he made her go to. Other wives in the same pew as her would compliment her resil-silience. Other men would show her deference even as they tried to bag her. There’d be one unspoken rule with her husband — do not sleep with anyone she knows. Like deities he would demand her faithfulness but would recognize the mold that he was setting. He saw her difficult position but the women in his family had gotten on with just the same. As long as it were a stranger someplace nowhere near, and she used protection (unlike him), and he never had to know about it, he’d do no interrogating and would assume the best. This would put her higher than those wives who dealt with jealousy on top of all the rest. These were likely to get knocked around a bit. This could be an advantage for the clear reason it gave them to get out. The wives would start bonding with a male friend of church means who’d be ready to elope on horseback, to a place not easily pronounced, and take the children too. The emotional beatings they had to stand to get there would be bearable for most.
Our heroine in such an octopod would throw herself into philanthropy. The attention she did not receive from military men would be collected tenfold from the poor souls she would soothe with buttered alms. One way or another, she would have her import. If ever she felt low, she could be reminded of her grandiloquence by looking at the past posts of her art, and podcast clippings, by looking at her reflection in the polished silver frames of her wedding photos, and in the visage of the portrait of her that he’d had commissioned.
11.7
Stretching things out longer meant that some will have enough. They start to reach the point where they’ll have to make decisions and that scares ’em. Tribal dogma’s handy cause it takes away this confrontation. There’s a state of blitheness that not only do people mistake for happiness, they prefer it to being happy. It’s comfortable, the consequence-free existence of a child. Grown-ups regress to it. It’s a superfood, delicious as ice cream. It feels like a hammock on a beach. There’s no more invitations though. The land party is all full. They were born aboard and will not be allowed to disembark. They can claim a corner of the deck but should not put much hope in its enforcement. People will find it, like it, and set up there as well. The ground-down network’s comprehensive. Our heroine and hero may wander wide of each other’s path forever, though they’re stuck on the same ship. They’ll take a rip from time to time but the other will be coincidentally far away at each potential junction. They’ll dream about the other, strong enough to pierce the bounds of waking.
Whether they buy stock in such dreams will depend on their keeping bitterness toward what they made at bay. This has no guarantee. It puts adults in Eastern bloc bureaucracies for life. Every day their instrument is blunted. Reams of curses fly from out their stamps.
Discoveries have the tinge of memory, especially those pursued a long time. They seem to have been wished into being. It’s not unusualll to shut down at a problem. He did not seem to want to face a thing head on. He could be programmed to, as in basic training, but this necessity implies the basis is avoidance. If this were not an advantage, those who landed there wouldn’t have reproduced.
Our hero thought regardless of the era, that they would find each other, while she was still ready for whatever would come — it was sure to be okay. Salve was running down her skinny fingers. She kind of thought he would have proposed before she left California — especially because she had come right out and said it first, that they should get married. Our hero had said no, that they were too young. This was obvious to him. What wasn’t was the change in her perception of him after this. It was indicative of his head-up-the-assedness that he didn’t think of this moment when she had left. He actually thought he had convinced her! Like all truths to him this would come much later. Regretfully he’d still think he was right.
One can scarcely become harsh in ambiguity. Compared to the opportunities her college friends would have, the ones their new husbands could give them, it seemed clear our hero was plebeian in slope. Already the least important of her clique — sisterhood is real, but there’s the slightly less significant jeans-wearer, usually in terms of who’s known whom the longest, and how the roles of leadership, peacemaker, dramatic type, and so on shake out — had made the richest match. To make our heroine despair in fury, it came about by happenstance. Her friend and this fellow were riding bikes in the same park at the same time. Neither had ever seen the other riding there before. It was in the early evening, after work, when May dips into the summer. The bike path was miles long, following a healthy creek through eastern deciduous dimpled in evergreen. The odds of traffic and the lack of stress at work combining to put them on the same right angle at the same time were small enough to be remarked on. The fellow started after her, on seeing her, was bolted to her from the searing moment when her inverted image landed on his retinae. His faster pace caught up to her as they intersected from the L and R directions. Rarest of all they both were in the mood to meet someone (they must have been reared right). Neither was dominated by residual pain in that moment. Neither lived in a fan/collector world, where their vision was obscured by fantasy. Neither had tattoos showing, so they were, generally, flexible sorts. Indeed they might have been a pre-war ad — both light blond, below average height, 22, with all the confidence of having had their expectations met. He said hello when they both stopped for traffic; that was all it took. It was clear to both that they must meet again. Later, with her hair and makeup done, in a gorgeous long white dress, she had the beauty of an object who loves back. It was uplifting to them both. Her status came from placid nature. Her type is found today, still, in southern churches. Jealous onlookers had predicted for her a string of athletes before marriage to an EDM DJ, attracting followers, finding the ceiling of her fame before kids, excess weight, and startling plastic surgery. Instead her girlfriends could tell that, however unexciting he seemed, this cycling fellow put her first, had a good heart, that she had made the correct match, in capitals. This drove them to croodle with anybody near. Each in her way had gone for the big score, someone close to fame or business power. Doing right was a luxury to be discarded in favor of doing right for them. When they would completely cry about some triviality in their McMansions, it was their girlfriend’s fortune they were thinking of.