Quantum Errors

 

For all my complaints about genre, I have only published sparingly in it. With the exception of poetry, and articles and columns which, in brevity, I earned enough in commissions to merely supplement disability insurance, not compete with nearly any of my previous salaries in relation to  it, I managed to nibble the etch-a-sketch around subsistence, after my minimal white collar dalliances. Some of those dalliances failed due to my significant disappointment at not joining the ranks of collegiate instructors, an indolence of ego. I spent all that time in college learning how to think to join a press clipping service, which involved manually clipping clients company logos out of newsprint. I wasn’t there very long, still don’t really understand the utility of the organization as a contractor, and then lasted in accounting firm proofreading a little longer. I did not live at Riverside at the time, and ironically, if I had, commute stresses would have been easier. By my early forties there was a glut of PhDs on the market. This in no way indicated that it was incumbent upon me to close the door on teaching. If I couldn’t handle special needs students who could, after all?  But I was never entirely comfortable around the myriad guises of human deformity, my skeletal ligament contortions included, and there we have it. A new generation of the disabled community is coming forward, and I do not even know what my mission entails anymore, rather like Philip K Dick’s Isidore crafting a very vivid image of kibble for the mentally slow androids on a post nuclear Earth. Dick’s work, beneath the surface, is less about science in speculative fantasy, and more about biological depreciation. It doesn’t translate particularly well on screen, though the Amazon Prime hires from Hollywood diversifying the long dead, or decades dead, studio monopolies, make an effort to validate Dick’s humanoid organisms ultimately overwhelmed by defeat. Indeed, The Man in The High Castle is grand theater as an Original, but it is not Dick’s original story. Couldn’t be and still be a series, although Amazon does better with Electric Dreams.

When we compare these to contemporary parables like Domain or the overly ambitious series Counterpart as conceived by Justin Marks, what we see is an alternate reality, transposed from individual, tortured psyches, into the macro reality of the digital age. As a throw away forget our troubles DVD knockoff, Domain was better than it had to be, manipulating its audience, deflating the gravity of the surely soon to be dystopian end of ourselves into a finger wagging cautionary tale about outsourcing the most malevolent American criminals we’ve delineated into types, within our ever evolving psychoanalytic maturity. The two women in their pods, the usual space milkshake providing nutritional supplements, were the family annihilators, and the men? Spree killers, slashers, doxed into yet another sociological experiment, conceptually worse than the brutality which inspires it, ever advancing on A Clockwork Orange , which was actually written as an absurdist morality tale, engaging readers with its vibrant anger at Western mores and not knowing what to do with the tribalism to which we’re beholden still in our evolution. I loved Counterpart, and praised Marks accordingly from the other side, despite Baldwin’s décor lesbianism, and the softball black botanist included as one of the origin managers for an unforeseen quantum error. Are we all in an alternate time space continuum, happy or less happy elsewhere? Do I try sucking tits and thereby, with Google’s approval, earn a secure living? I barely have the requisite training to comprehend the elegant computations and sign language of physics, but Greene’s affability notwithstanding, it all seems a little too convenient, a more rational juxtaposition of heaven and hell, so that we have a more palliative olive branch to restrain ourselves from vengeance, like turning on the cruelty of the oppressed. For nearly 12 years, Trudy Richardson tormented me, carte blanche, for how I dealt with my bodily needs, and the only thing she achieved by dragging my now widowed father into my tactics and methods, was virtually ensuring I will have to be disposed of like toxic waste. I consider the death of this woman to be a matter of political self defense, and I am hardly a seventeen year old who may be the penultimate libertarian of our age.