The Terminator fever dream coming to fruition? The need for fantasy? Magic? Faith? Hope/lessness and the foreverness of things.
There are photos of me as a gangly nine year old wearing a reduce reuse recycle shirt, with illustrations of a 1990s multi-culti lineup of cool girl friends, and me with a big gap-tooth smile on my face holding up peace signs in both hands.
Now that my unemployment compensation is about to exhaust itself (a crime given how much money goes to wars, we know we know), I’m gathering myself from this long, necessary, blessed period of recuperation and work work working on a fully Mar-tian, Uranus re-entering Gemini-tinged foray into working for myself. Which is to say, I am back on my vending bullshit and making new things (as if I ever stopped tbh). There will be promo at the bottom of this missive.
Last Saturday I vended at the Clark Park Bizarre, an recurring market entity that sprang up after L&I began threatening operations of a post-pandemic, organically formed DIY vendor market that had been happening alongside the Saturday farmer’s markets. This past week I worked nonstop, tweaking my setup, designing, laying out, and assembling new gear, experimenting with new-to-me spiral binding formats and cold lamination equipment that I’ve cluttered my office with… And I produced…a zine version of
SERVICE APPRECIATION
Here is the intro:
A couple years before the pandemic, I started an Instagram page called @serviceappreciation, an old fashioned internet shrine for service expressed through disposable items, mostly bags. I’d developed an attachment to single-use bags, keen on their designs and manufacture, with that Hagakure quote in the back of my head…
“In the Kamigata area they have a sort of tiered lunch box they use for a single day when flower viewing.
Upon returning, they throw them away, trampling them underfoot. As might be expected, this is one of my recollections of the capital (Kyoto).
The end is important in all things.”
After WWII, there was all this emphasis on plastics and better living through chemistry. Single-use plastic grocery bags were promoted in the 1980s as a tree-saving alternative to paper bags. Now the whole world seems to be choking on the stuff.
Plastic, we can concieve of it as man-made, and yet I often think how petroleum too is of the earth. How the civilizations of today plunder the riches below.
I want to express my appreciation to the bags.
((
Sidebar: I was thrilled when Telfar came out with its Plastic Bag, whose marketing I fucking love as a weirdo whose made their livelihood in the industry of persuasion.
“This bag literally costs more to make than the Telfar shopping bag, but is designed to look like the cheapest bag on earth. On purpose. Fucking genius? Or fucking stupid? You decide.”
“I still have that inner child. There’s parts of me that will never go away. Much…like… plastics”
– source“When we read ‘Thank You for Shopping.’ Whom is thanking whom?
Is it the store owner thanking us for the patronage?
No, I don’t believe so.
It is the _bag_ thanking us…
…for giving _it_ purpose.
The bag seems to scream out: Re-use me… Abuse me.
Squeeze me.
Leave me and run back.
Put your hand around my body and make me crinkle.
Just like that.
Stuff me.
Stretch me.
I’m yours forever.
Plastic is forever.
– source
))
Plastic. Yeah, it’s on my mind with the inagural edition of service appreciation zine, and clearly the Telfar marketing has me by the brain too. But it’s also on my mind when I’m unpacking and debagging groceries, cutting open plastic seals and tossing them in the bin, thinking to myself we’re going to hell for this … And honestly I would reckon at times that we are in hell for this. We being us humans treading an earth where technobaron warlords vie for control of resources. It’s real.
Plastic was on my mind back in my heavy research days for ALL THAT’S LEFT, going down rabbit holes of superfund site databases and industrial waste longterm exposure research papers and sex hormone disorders and the effects of xenoestrogen disruption (commonly found in plasticcccs like BPA, phthalates, parabens, etc) on prepubescent development.
It’s on my mind when I wear my black plastic slides around the house and the bottoms of my feet get sweaty in them. What do our bodies absorb.
There’s that scene from maybe the third book of Butler’s Xenogenesis triology where the young Oankali child finds a piece of plastic and puts it in their mouth, quickly poisoned and horrified to know such a material ever existed on planet earth.
Follow this thread with me.
A couple weekends ago I went to a climate resistance workshop held by Deep Space Mind 215 and got to talk with neighbors and people connected to city offices about my climate concerns (one consensus: stop letting developers cut down the fucking mature trees). Afterwards, I stood lingering on the steps with another attendee who grew food with students, who asked me how long do I think we have? I asked, for what? System collapse. I told them, I think it’s upon us already. The water is already hot (see: boiling frogs metaphor).
IMAGINED TIMELINES
I’ve written before how a sci-fi wordsmith of my ilk does not especially enjoy seeing the horrors of imagined worlds take material form. In my old ALL THAT’S LEFT stories (circa 2012), background characters suffer from nerve disorders, pain ticks, mobility issues, killer mold, et cetera, while the main characters gain mobility by reluctantly entering an exploitative program where they receive prosthetic bodies in exchange for doing land surveys in what are essentially post- climate disaster/infrastructure collapse superfund sites.
Over the years, springtime in Philly has become more like mold season for me, where my aging 150+ year old, post-industrial era house comes alive to try and knock me and my immune system down 2-3 notches. The summers become bad air season, and the meds I’m on to function have changed my once lizard-like heat tolerance to someone who just cannot take the heat like that anymore. I become one the background characters in my own stories (for now).
Meanwhile, I experience the current state of artificial intelligence as a surreal media environment. In 2017, I wrote Romance of the Colony for Mask Magazine (RIP), talking at one point about water asset managers and rhetorical-asking how one gets a job like that. In the same essay I mention an episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex where protestors are shouting ‘give water to war orphans’ outside a building where two corporations toast champagne glasses of drinking water–needed for cybernetics manufacturing, in an era where cyborg soldiers have become status quo. There has been so so much written about AI (and I even contributed an essay for CLOG magazine’s AI issue about assuming they will adhere to human conceptions of being), yet I remain beside myself for the fact that bastards erect this 21st century machine revolution using the energy standards of the 19th.
WHERE IS THE IMAGINATION?
slash
Too bad monopolizers-of-the-past set us so far back free-energy-wise, huh.
Robotech/Macross had fighter jets powered by stable, mini nuclear reactor cores gleaned from alien technology. Space cowboy anime depict intergalactic travel with bus-sized craft that can top up their fuel reserves at the nearest station. Other sci-fis and fantasies of the past 50-100 years show humans harnessing energy from crystals (hello Sailor Moon?!), from stars, from plants, from waste, et cetera. But warmonger bastards with no imagination are dropping bombs for oil-dependent combustion engines. In the twenty-first motherfucking century. To “have AI” in this moment of time is a fucking joke.
The way AI, tech, and war company CEOs are in these paranoia bro circle jerks, dropping billions in investment dollars for shit that there is literally not enough resources on EARTH to build, is…rich, let’s put it that way. My Irish ancestors remind me of the famine slaughter the British enacted so they could have land to graze cows and their gentry could eat more beef. We all see how plainly willing these warmongers are to rip any and everything away from us. They lack imagination to do better. To be clever. Only conniving. Misleading. Deceptive. It’s a bad magic.
Somewhere there are wicked new weapons waiting to be deployed on human populations. Laser vaporizers and brain-disabling microwave pistols. Robo war dogs. Remote drone pilots now completely de-rigeur (have you ever seen that 1992 Robin Williams movie, TOYS?). And god knows what else. Back when Biden was running for the 2020 presidential election, I joked that if Biden won we would get a Demolition Man timeline, where everything is neoliberal-polite, sanitized, and ordained under the guise of well-meaning benevolent (corrupt) leadership… and if Trump won we would get The Running Man timeline, where jailed dissenters are used for entertainment on survival gauntlet kill shows with a live studio audience. But I realized, what we’re in is a Terminator timeline. Where autonomous machines have been given the ability to kill people. Where Sarah Connor (like many 70s babies, it seems) has nightmares of nuclear holocaust.
For astrology heads, I continue to take heed that we’re some months into a 2.5 year cycle of Saturn in Aries. Rushing to build systems that fundamentally lack good foundation just because it can be done. Rush. Haste. Misguided passions. Belief that what can be built this fast can last. People in positions of power jumping to ill-begot conclusions. People confidently taking on more than they can handle, ignoring the reality of what’s going on around them and within them. Take heed, take heed. Slow it down. Slow down. The warmongers make haste for their shit dreams of winner-takes-all enclosure, but we do not have to operate on their terms, though they suffocate us at every turn.
And though I’m sensing this human timeline on par with Terminator futures, I’m not convinced of its successful fruition. Where the fuck are tech warmongers securing the materials and energy to power these death machines-to-be when yet more global supply chain disruptions and newer paranoia/divestment over US- (and China) controlled software suites, online platforms, device manufacturers, etc, going on? (And it’s not even hurricane season yet!) There’s a lot to critique about 1980s/1990s cyberpunk depictions, and a lot to glean from Ghost in the Shell cyberwarfare depictions, but I hold on to the hacker as fool disruptor trope in the top-down war machine. Those of us underfoot of giants do not need all the right resources to make our will manifest in this world. Take heed.
There is a zine I offer when I vend in person, a transcription of Murray Bookchin’s speech called Utopia, Not Futurism, which he gave in 1978 at something called the Toward Tomorrow Fair in Amherst, Massachusetts. Earth Day had kicked off in 1970, and organizing around it saw the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, responsible for cleaning superfunds and regulating further industrial pollution. The 1970s were notable for a number of energy crises, shortages and wild price hikes on gas, conlficts over Iranian oil and war with Israel.
Over sixty years have passed and the hungry ghosts of wars past continue to possess those in power. They do not carry their own dreams, they do not know themselves unattached to their power. Drastic, dramatic changes heave up in hidden waves and sudden bursts. For those of us sick, under resourced, over worked, driven mad, incapacitated, scattered to the wind what can we do? Have we been put on this earth only to react to the awful injustices of this reckless terminator timeline? No, I don’t believe so.
As a child, I collected litter, wore my layaway recycle shirts, and celebrated Earth Day, driven by an innocent love for protecting our planet. Today, I go out on my crutches with my extendo-claw and spare plastic bag and pick up the trash left behind by litterers and our city’s outdated trash trucks. There is more litter the next day. I pick it up.
In astrology, the outer planets which cannot be seen with the naked eye, are considered planets of generations. Meaning their influences do not so much speak to ones everyday interpersonal happenings as more the backdrops of generational eras within which we belong. Their revolutions around the sun take many decades, some take longer than a human life to return more than twice or even once. Before the invention of the telescope, Saturn was considered the final planet, a boundary between the known and unknown, the one that enclosed all the others with its orbit, its revolution taking 29.5 earth years. And some of Saturn’s significations, which frankly I cherish, are that things will move at the pace they will move… not all is within one’s control… and setbacks are to be expected, even incorporated into one’s conceptions of production/progress… in fact, progress-oriented linear time itself is not the best framework to cling to in this life.
When I write my newsletters I feel often I repeat myself from last time, and yet I have discovered that often, understanding difficult things demands repetition. We have to be told the same thing over and over and over, because often our media-hijacked, production-formed minds are shouting at our hearts to react to the moment, to act immediately, to not wait because there is no time… when what would benefit ourselves and those around us, would be to Respond. On our own time. And where does one’s own time dwell?
Our resistence to terminators is the work of generations.
Happy Earth Day.
@};—}—;————
Monk
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