Revision as of 16:04, 9 May 2008

This morning I looked out my window and I saw a surreal painting, weird and unsettling, sprawling out to the sunrise.

Jedi and zombies, vampires and ninjas, cat suits and kings, robots and chameleons, prophets and the profane, and everybody's together, eyes match forward, getting on the train.

We call it the Strange Times.

This is the state of modern living.

This is a strange new world. Weirder than any realm any explorer could ever hope to discover. This is a world where your nervous system, tangled with vines creeping like fractals, extends its tendrils into the modern jungle.

Rule 34: if it exists, there is pornography involving it. There are lollypops with bugs in them. People get surgery to look exactly like Barbie Dolls. There are humans that have become lizards and tigers. The guys in suits have all become cyborgs. Children don't just play Cowboys and Indians anymore, now they play Self Aware Artificial Intelligence versus the Benevolent Plutocracy.

It's the strange times and every human being, even the boring ones, are unspeakably weird.

Everybody used to be into the same stuff, you know? Everybody was at cocktail hour, everybody was into the Beatles, everybody was bathing together in the mainstream. But something happened as the stream got quicker, it forked out into a million little tributaries. The mainstream isn't a river anymore, it's an acqueduct and a sewer all at the same time. It's underneath us, always moving, carrying along all these images and symbols and the familliar sound of the ocean. Ideas bump into each other, and sometimes they STICK, and that's how we get things like a music gadget you can masturbate with, or Japanese game shows dubbed with slapstick comedy banter. It's not because these ideas are good

ideas in of themselves, it's because the mainstream keeps juxtaposing these bits of shrapnel in new ways. It's all being churned up, and the whirlpool keeps getting faster.

Nothing has prepared us for the Strange Times.

If you think you can study history and make some educated guess at what's going to happen next, you're dead wrong. Yeah humans are still humans - those poor shit flinging monkeys, trapped inside their nervous systems. When you zoom out, they're not individual drops of water, they're the swell and pulse of a wild ocean. But these times are different. They teach classes about things you can learn for free on the internet. There is an encyclopedia which contains almost everything that anybody has ever thought, including their biases and errors. Kingdoms make war upon each other not by sacking cities, but by cutting deep sea internet cables. Super-memes collide and bounce off each other like sumo wrestlers, every single cell in their bloated bodies contains a lonely and confused human being.

We spent thousands of years living in caves, working the fire and the rock. Then we caught the City bug, and the city spirit used us to build it hundreds of temples. We spent hundreds of years in the sun, tilling the fields for the Nobles. Then we fled into darkness of the factories, the air choked with the din of industry. It seems to happen in a predictable way. Build, destroy. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Sunrise, sunset. Now we're in a world that doesn't sleep. If it's light here, it's dark somewhere else, like a snake biting its tail.

Odd juxtapositions are the sign of the Strange Times. Comedians are doing impressions of the King. The Catholic Pope looks just like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars. We sit in the dark, around a flickering campfire, and listen to the news man tell us a story about the Dangers of Modern Living. The news man knows that when you juxtapose an image with the story, it creates a new meaning which is somewhere in between the ear and the eye. And if we zoom out a tiny bit, the story is juxtaposed with the house that the TV is in. And if we zoom out, that house is inside your head, next to all these other symbols and squiggles and values.

And at some point, someone thinks its sexy to dress up like a cartoon cat.

Nobody's prepared us for the Strange Times, and there are literally billions of humans that can't cope with it. They could deal with being serfs, they could deal with being soldiers, those are simple lives. Now its come time to make a new story for themselves by assembling all these weird symbols into a lifestyle, a personality, a set of values. And they just don't know how to do it. They look to culture to get clues for how to swim and be happy and break even in this weird world, and all they see are porn models and ninja turtles and humane terrorism and the extreme left and the extreme right and nothing is centered.

If it was as easy as just dealing with the sun and the crops, however hard it might be, people would pull through and maintain. But there are million choices and complexities and nuances and shrapnel flying at you like throwing knives and pillow fights and bananna cream pies.

We think it's best to laugh.