Gone. Forgotten. Discarded as in Library withdrawn.
Attention span shrinking. Wallet size shrinking. Memories full. No bandwidth left.
Everything, all at once. Multi-media, multi-screens (everyone now looks like a Wall Street broker: vertical spreadsheets on multi-screens, multi-tasks\.
Somewhere in time, we have morphed: from telescopic living to miniaturizing of everything thanks to Big Tech mini-tasking for the mass, us, prosumers. Everything now involves ghost work, and shadow work (ground swelling). Proxy war, nuclear war, contracting war plus helping machines to learn ( before they can replace us all).
Except for dreams. Unrealized ones. Dreams early in life: career, material and marital success, and of course, occasional mesmerizing babes (Basic Instinct’s interrogating scene).
These days I am surrounded by dead people (as of yesterday, John Jakes whose Love and War I have yet read; Bobby Caldwell’s What you won’t Do for Love). Existential sadness and loneliness filled up the achievement gap.
In the absence of viable alternatives, we settled for day-by-day self-perpetuating e.g. breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Then Airbnb, and Amazon scaled up and share economy.
Since when do our lives get played by these big entities, from banking to tech to oil? We are then rated and artificially measured by the number of thumbs up, like Narcissus, with his concentric rings of reflection on the water. That’s our force-fed dream. Our virtual 24/7 presence.
Always been a sucker for the intangible e.g. fame and fortune. For love and war. For notoriety and significance. Occasionally it dawns on us: this is it. That’s all the time given to us. To complete the task. Figure it out and finish it. If lion, then roars. If skunks then stinks. Don’t hesitate to be yourself in full force.
We are so far yet so near to our lost dreams. It’s almost as if we could reach out and grab them. There might be a financial collapse or there might be not (war and want). But it’s always been there. The trouble that is. To view life this way is quite pathetic. As in being cogs in the wheel. Data point in some spreadsheet. Automatons of ghost work for Meta, Linkedin, for WordPress (like Mechanical Turk).
Speaking of which, I am going to the store, where at the end of my purchase, I will play cashier (under the watchful eyes of that cashier-turned-supervisor). Fun the first time. But it has become a chore. All in the name of tampering down prices, in itself, is a myth ( groceries price never comes down, even eggs).
Lost dreams. Childhood dreams intersect with adult reality. Don’t dream it’s over….except in that interrogating room, seeing it flashed up close (get played), speechless with beads of sweat streaming down (like a close-up of our SF Assistant DA). “What? You are going to charge me for smoking?”.
Thang Nguyen 555 