Welcome home, Julian Assange.
California Book One continues.
9.2
Curiosity appeared to be a burden in her kind. Our heroine was back home with her parents in Nebraska, having left California without telling her boyfriend. The thing about frontiers is their unrecognized temptation. Naked and smooth, she slid away from our hero eastwards. Those before were better times for him. For her, only if she thought of it and only when honest with herself. She was more likely to laugh it off or claim a holey memory, things like how they couldn’t keep their hands off of each other at a party in a backyard pool, above ground and lit where everyone could see, so that when the food arrived he’d had to wait in the water for a while first. And received generous ribbing, made up for by generous rubbing later. That had only been two weeks ago.
Was her dissonance expressed by being totally in love when the person’s present and hormonally amnesiac when not? He could not believe it. Probably he never would. She was not the one to say. She was only ever living with the windows looking out. She did not have authorities ready at her inner voice’s side the way he did. The way he had been raised had constructed in his mind a hostile, religious general whose function was to condemn replete with scorn. She did not have one of these; too bad because she missed out on some tasty arguments indeed, a lifetime’s worth of entertainment. To connect with people she certainly was able, lacking that fanatic admiral. Her fun was deeper. It could be spontaneous and it lasted longer. Asked for her stance, she would not know what to say. Hers could be a carefree lollygag. There was neither point A nor point B. She didn’t have the fear of missing out. She envied no one, but felt a tinge when someone in her clique did well. She was the loudest with congratulations. The louder she was, her friends knew, the more the thing had bothered her. At the same time she was empathic and a good listener. Her friends would admit this too. She’d sit with them whenever. Nothing fazed her, not a cancer scare nor the bruising of domestic violence. Whatever her friends were facing, she was there. Acquaintances and women on the periphery made fun of her for this. They called her Heroine. They sang a little Mighty Mouse when they were signaling their virtue. Nonetheless she dispensed her own being.
The turn was always something. Our heroine heard time crossing her path. Her plans were acute. They were definitive, and they would occur by such and such a date. The offended seemed to be the ones cussing all the time. Considering her mind could hold infinity, it was a bit ridiculous she could not help how much it decided to devote to mud-slinging. She wanted neither that nor the spirit of the staircase. She’d rather it were demolished and its wood repurposed into instruments. It would take a library of possum-lickin work songs to express the injustice of trip-laying, the ease of which would add all up to change the very way she went through life.
In a lot of places she still did not have control over her own body, still in this modern day and age. But she didn’t have control over her mind either, when any conscious hormone could harpoon her with its barely suppressed rage. She’d never wanted to toughen up the way her father had. But our heroine knew that just by the fact the latest public altercation had not sent tears skipping down her face that she had already toughened. The proof was there regardless how she tried to hold out against it.
9.3
There are countless, continual gauntlets to be run to be a functioning adult. Starstuff is needy af. “I need a loud engine and no muffler. I need atrocious music. I need to pollute. I need guns. I need them. I need you to meet all my needs whenever I demand them. And my expectations too.” Old man river is a river of psychosis. “Starstuff eh? Can you believe what it gets up to with its gift? A buncha malarkey at varied gradients of destruction.” “At least a few of them are inclined to preservation, and a few of them make art.” “Let’s not go around handing out blue ribbons just yet. They were happy when there was less traffic on the roads with the quarantine. But once they were allowed out they went right back to polluting in the name of personal freedom.” “They’re adapting quickly and some of the new habits will stick. It gives hope for the intensifying climate crisis.” “Only with that, they won’t be staying home. They’ll be moving north en masse. Las Vegas without water? No one’s going to stay. The new hot property will be Minnesota and its ten thousand lakes. Resettlement’s always a big problem. And on the scale we’re looking at in eighty years? There will be gun battles. Groups will patrol their lakes and they will shoot on sight. It will escalate to raids, then platoons of defenders, then militias will insert themselves, demanding certain profits, growing larger until they abut, and now it’s war, over lots of territory, with frontline tactics, advisor jockeying, backroom diplomacy, only calming once one guy is in charge. Once the totalitarian is reached, people stop playing the game so hard. There’s no more spirited competition and so they lose interest, except for the real maniacs. Those ‘uns want the only chair when the music stops. If anything they want it more than the maniac who has it. They have that advantage, and also the desire to please themselves. Predictable whims are ordered. By now you see the pattern. They get women one way or another. The baffling reward is sexual congress wherein the eyes match the living. They want a thing available to all, functionally identical, lacking merely a few finer details. That is worth killing millions for, just to get basically what they could get anyway.”
And thinking later: It’s no surprise pond ripples look like galaxies when there are only a few forms that anything can take.
Those with access to the subvarieties are larping so hard they don’t even realize they’re doing it. Indeed they transcend that into plain ol’ rare live action.
What the thinker thinks, the prover proves, said Leary. He didn’t do much accounting for pattern recognition though. Throughout the past we acted in the current ways. There was bigotry and acceptance, and inconsistent gradients between. Some will prove their thoughts so hard they’ll walk their family off a cliff in support of just one gradient.
To get a dependable lifetime out of every human bean, try indoctrination! Even when they rebel later, even when they come to terms with what was done, even when they move on and let go in some maturity, everything they do, for it or against, will be with their indoctrination in mind. They will see its pattern. However they deliberately react to its aspects, or ignore them, it persists, even if only as a resonance. It’s precepts remain at the forefront of thought if only because there are only a few over-arching forms that thought can take.
It’s wonderful to play with light we cannot see. It has grown our palette. Universal objects scoop out our fullest sense of awe. They even give us realms of which we’d never dreamed. The puzzle we’ve been working on has been revealed to be much larger than we thought. And corner pieces were never a part of the border — they were somewhere in the lower third.
Where people lack a leader, they will settle for the illusion of one. They need leaders to confirm their position in the puzzle and allow them to be a focused image, not a background smear. Their parents saw the upper limit of their difficulties and advised them to be glad for what they had. That only provoked them to rebel in exasperation. There weren’t many directed wills sharper than those in the process of forming their identity. They had in common a deep and terrifying drive to make gains at any cost. This was why it was so easy for them to slip into destruction. When every path they tried was closed, just to have any kind of effect on something, they shot up where they stood.
9.4
As a result of her denouement with our hero, she became convinced in her art that what we needed was a simple cultural shift to power to the people. It should be ingrained from an early age using all the old Jesuit brainwashing: the military and the police are of the people and work for the people, as is the case in Latin countries. The lust for power should be tempered too in kids in this ingraining. It may be that the most ethical route is to wait and hope evolution will bicamerate the reptile brain from the frontal lobe. But with global warming time is running out. Evolution should tamp down the limitless greed we currently allow. But every year is hotter than the last. She painted a series called Bicameral Lobotomy, a painless medical procedure done on every infant boy that created separation between the stem and the temporo-parietal areas of the brain. It would be done at birth, the cultural equivalent of circumcision, necessary to preserve a habitable biosphere.
She figured the unintended consequence would not eclipse all the good that would be created through the reining in of the worst of male instincts. And if music for example is never quite so Beethoven again, at least there would be the petabytes written and recorded up til then. She was all for her boring favorites if the glass ceiling was shattered, since society would surely be more peaceful, and man-made environmental crises would be mitigated, now that men were stuck with brains that would not let them do harm on planetary scales.
When every marginalized group had more of what they’ve always wanted, they’ll never launch a war again. Days will be spent in the new virtue, basking in satiety. She’d be able to walk past anyone without tensing up inside. Sure, theaters would be stocked with productions that hope to reach the lofty heights of middling comedy specials. But she’d be able to leave her cocktail unguarded on the bar when she went to the powder room. Pro sports would take a hit, since physical competition will feel rather childish, but e- and mind-sports would flourish. Certainly there will be more men around, since there won’t be manufactured corporate conflicts for them to go die in. She saw a nation of cornhole tossers playing in refurbished gravel lots.
She put those memories of her lovers on a chaise lounge in her mind, and the chaise was in a room she rarely went inside, but if the mood ever struck, she’d go there and lie down. It was of an indeterminate color, stately in appearance, smooth and cool-upholstered, a bit firm but enveloping. Its throw pillows were cushioning. But she had other furniture that was newer, in rooms she liked to be in more. She like the feel of them, the vibe. Their newness had a lot to do with it. She hadn’t worn them out. They weren’t the same as others she’d spent a lot of time in — plain walls, basic faux brass fixtures, squared off baseboards, efficient, featureless windows. The burden of decoration was on her. Everything was laid out according to her available options, her favorite ones at the fore and ready.
Our hero was the type to explain into people, leandering away. There was a forcefulness to his speech. He was not interested in persuasion. There was no catching flies at all, with honey or otherwise. He expected others to act from the best available evidence. He understood neither why they wouldn’t nor when they didn’t.
Our heroine did not adhere to the same precepts. Clocktowers would go tumbling ahead of her inaction. Their hands turned all but according to her whim. Whenever she needed more time, the towers gave it to her. When faced with making a decision, first she’d wait for it to work itself out. If it didn’t, she’d imagine what the bad advice would be that someone would give her and then she’d do the opposite.
9.5
There were the malformed, egotists, and most insidiously, those unaware of their own bad intentions, because they existed subconsciously. This occurred in the profoundly hurt who tried to live up to supernatural ideals. Their mortality was more than just their bedrock, it was their self-worth and their gavel. She might at times say yes to a guy without saying it’s over to another, but she’d never to humiliate either, or destroy their social lives, or inflict every wound she was capable of giving, as the big man on campus had done to her before our hero came along.
Everyone born with emotion thought they were basically good at heart, which kept society on something of an even keel. But the newspaper of nature was being published at a loss. The people rioted, were fearful, were indignant to be living in that state. There wasn’t much anymore that could entice them to put themselves in danger. They moved from one house that was collapsing to another weakened building. Their clubs were everything to them.
She used restriction to create a disadvantage that she then was forced to overcome, with an attending reward for when she did. It was about to be a sunshine party for all time.
Everyone who was there was on her side. They had to be. She herself was the removal from their show. Then it went on without her.
Stories can account for anything. They’re more adept at giving hope than any dream.
The desire to leap out of her skin was jiggling its lock — it was nearly free. That had most of it to do with why she took off from California. She saw she could make connections in this old familiar breadbasket setting. Perhaps relationships had to be that too, old and familiar.
The motive was surrendered. She first had to speak into the vapor. Everything went only after declaration.
Down the hall someone was screaming. Her audiophile father had a gangster movie in. Its clarity through his tube amp and estate sale speakers made her think that he replaced himself in there. She realized it was his demeanor that had made her so laid-back, but her hobbies would not be as harmless as his. The art world had made sure of that. She doubted he’d run through a string of women before settling on her mother. More likely he had lashed himself to the first one who would have him. Still, she chose to feel indignant about being startled.
There was help out there, she was sure of it. The lugging of burdens was everywhere, but the instructions were unwritten. There were relations and relatables. The much else besides was undiscovered archaeology. And mayhap it never would be. Everybody could join hands and hope though. Everybody could turn down everybody else until there are two last people on Earth and neither one enjoys the other. Then one dies, and the other’s achievement, of being the last living human bean, goes uncelebrated, unacknowledged, and unknown.
She attained but scant confessions from the men when she was with them, about the other people in their lives, and how they might feel about her being there. She learned not to bring it up. No one else thought it was important. There was information to let in and dwell upon. All the saucers were shining in reflected jewelry. Unlike her mother, she would try to grow up without becoming her own dressing doll.
9.6
There was great weight in every minute change. Every common repetition had choice significance. She wanted to be permitted a delicate evolution. Otherwise she’d be linked to necessity for good. Any line drawn can absorb an achievement. They were both arbitrary and deleting. Any victory could be erased with an assertion. She’d been primed for lashing out. And she had had good parents! Without that she’d already be a mother with side hustles in the service industry. If there hadn’t been enough to go around, she’d be in a cult up in Alaska. Plenty of disadvantaged women found outdoorsmen groups and went through the echoes of their childhood with only tattoo scarring. With a good dad and no mom she’d work in a male interest, like poker or big lift trucks. She’d marry a guy just like dear ol’ dad, and he’d approve of his new son. There’d be reasons not to have a kid, but she wouldn’t know them til it already happened. Without a model for mothering, she’d mess it up and end up leaving with the first guy who could get her across, or out of, the mess that she was in. Once things turned around and she got healthy, she’d get addicted to adrenaline, never realizing she was jumping out of planes as self-punishment, increasing her chance of early death.
Meaninglessness would be almost more than she could bear each day. Bungee jumps would lead to base jumps. She’d sleep with younger guys who did the same. They’d never see the real her but merely her common interest with them. Emotional overload reset to zero in freefall. She’d be offered a job as an instructor and she’d take it, so she could jump out every day. She’d learn everything about the gear. With her employee discount and drinking with the sales reps, she’d end up owning some pretty nice stuff. She’d hold opinions that have been discredited in studies. It would be more important to her to back her peers than to be right. Middle age would be passing fine. She’d have been in a relationship with a married man for almost ten years when she’d meet an older man, just divorced or widowed. He and his attention and demeanor would be the impetus to stop lying to herself that her status as mistress would ever change, that her man would ever leave his wife for her. The transition to the older fellow would go fabric-smooth. There’d be one public scene, a tantrum by the married ex at cocktails with their common friends. It would be the first time she’d debut the new guy, who’d suffer his insults with serious mirth, resisting all the bait, winning her by suggesting the two go off to talk amongst themselves, playing a party game upstairs til she returned without him. What was immolating rapidly was glossed over by the group. Like the planet that they lived on.