When I was young I studied the literary and flakey European philosophers known as Continental philosophers rather than the more stodgy and fundamentally British ones they called Analytical. I was a poet more than I was a logician. Wittgenstein was an Analytical, one of their demigods in fact, protege as he was to Bertrand Russell, but I always harboured a kind of special fondness for him on account of having deduced early on that he was both autistic and a closeted homosexual. Philosophically, for me personally, you can sum up Wittgy’s Sturm und Drang and reduce it to something pure and simple and maybe (increasingly) useful: there is no meaning for people—nor will they ever find any—outside of the operative communications apparatus, whatever the particularities of that apparatus may happen to be in any given place and time. Unfortunately, as everybody and their loud, opinionated uncle knows, the communications apparatus right now, summer of 2025, isn’t even a vague whisper of a ghost of itself, and a lot of this has to do with the internet (of things), a planetary network/web made from real material parts and running 24/7, which is no longer like the maypole around which we gather and dance a jig, but much more like a Tower of Babel that will divest us in short order of our ability to communicate or collaborate meaningfully with one another at all. When I was young there were only a certain amount of channels on the television and everybody was basically drinking their news and entertainment right out of the same trough. The absurd level of harebrained consensus was maddening and troubling, from my always slightly-outcast vantage point, but it was eerily consistent and from the perspective of now probably almost idyllic. Sex and gender have quite little to do with it: if I meet a new person at any time in this 21st century reality in which I find myself bumbling through an embodied experience, I will not have any idea where they get their news and entertainment until they start laying it out for me.
I went on a date last night that was awkward, rife with unhealthy communication tactics flowing in both directions, and ultimately totally demoralizing, mostly because she and I obviously don’t like one another very much…and have already done this twice before. What I’m saying is, this is the third time we’ve had sex after a sad and lacklustre date. She has no consciousness of who I am or what my tastes will tend toward. Last night I had to watch two episodes of Mom, a new or newish piece-of-shit Chuck Lorre sitcom I’d never even heard of, just because I said I liked Anna Faris. She seemed slightly ashamed when I told her I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like making her feel that way. So then we had sex, and the density of the nightmare thickens. I haven’t even mentioned her once to my sponsor. I got home from the date shortly before midnight, ate a bag of candy, and lay in bed sleeplessly staring at the bedside lamp I knew I’d use to defend myself should some nocturnal interloper seek to enter my house with ill-intention. I’m the kind of guy who can think about an intruder long enough to hope one actually shows up.
Having slept almost not at all and being in a funk because of the date, my finances, and a hundred other bullshit things, I arrived at Ernie’s for my coffee as I normally do on my way to my morning A.A. meeting a little later than usual. Then I realized also that there were four people in front of me in line, such that I had to make a choice as to whether I wanted to go to my meeting at all, or if I wanted to sit down and drink a coffee and eat a cream cheese bagel. I did the latter, sitting for a while scanning newspaper headlines from around the world on my phone. Hatred for my fellow man was at a manageable simmer. After a short while, as the place was sort of clearing out, an extremely well-dressed, tall, and attractive couple sat at a table nearby and as I began to listen in on their private conversation I was reminded immediately of the marvellous Javier Marías novel The Infatuations, which is narrated by a woman who spies on an attractive and compelling couple in a café day after day…with horrendous results. I did not intend to ever repeat this exact experiment, should that even be remotely possible, but I was immediately fascinated by what the tall young man was talking about, which related to an episode of Black Mirror, the popular streaming series sort of in the spirit of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, and an episode which apparently features the actor Jon Hamm and has quite disturbing implications in the sense that it suggests that some kind of criminal justice infrastructure conjoined to A.I. and quantum computing could in the near future develop ways of torturing persons, in whatever state of embodiment, infinitely. The smart and composed girlfriend said this was exactly the way ratings-obsessed streaming platform executives would imagine a fully-syndicated eternity, but as I was finishing the dregs of my coffee and bunching up my napkin, it seemed to me that the premise of that Black Mirror episode I’d never even seen was the most terrifying thing I had heard in my life, at least since learning about the ubiquity of death itself.
There is something to what the young lady said, too. It were as though television was always there to hook you then serially hurt you, much like a large 19th century novel might kill off your favourite character somewhere in the vicinity of page 400. When I was living with Louise she really loved Sons of Anarchy and Breaking Bad, neither of which did anything for me. My complaint with Breaking Bad was that Walter White was the only dynamic, fully human character in the whole show and that the writers kept throwing out plot points like they were smoking crystal themselves. It was almost like the days of the old-timey ‘cliff hangers.’ That being said, I did make it through a few seasons of Better Call Saul on my own, precisely because l liked the characters and the non-codependent relationship between Jimmy and Kim. I stopped watching Better Call Saul the season where the final episode has the brother, played brilliantly by Michael McKean, dying in a house fire. I simply did not wish to see how much more awful things were going to get.
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