Tag: future

Future Me

I read a recent article about how we see ourselves. The article’s essence was that a study showed that people could readily see how they’d changed, but didn’t think they would change in the future.

That’s an odd conclusion. Looking back on how and why I change, I can appreciate how the world changed, forcing me to change. Mentors, friends, and family members have died. Their influence remains, but it’s faded.

Sometimes, I think of it like dominoes. I’m in a long row that’s been set up to fall over when tapped, part of a pretty design. Matters that tap me over include my changing body. My hearing is damaged and my vision has lost its acuity. My metabolism has slowed, as has my physical energy, and my muscles are weaker. My joints are stiffer, and my athleticism and coordination have diminished. My sleeping patterns have changed. I endured illnesses and injuries which changed my trajectory. I’ve gained weight and developed gluten and dairy reactions.  I mostly bloat. Before I bloated, I didn’t understand what people meant when they said, “I feel bloated today.” Now I understand.

Our food chain has changed. What impact that has on me, I probably won’t ever know. I was introduced to new foods, and dishes from other cultures, and I was introduced to better quality food, increasing my awareness of what quality means, and how it influences me.

Technology has advanced, enabling me to hear more music, inviting me in as a witness to more amazing events and moments. I usually have a laptop or tablet nearby to keep me connected to others. I’ve never met many of the people who are in my circle of friendship. Science has advanced, giving me more to think about. Researchers, psychologists and sociologists have gained insights into how our bodies, societies, and civilizations function. Engaging TED Talks and blogs help socialize new information. Big data analytics keep expanding on what we know, or what might be going on.

Our society and government have changed. Events like 9/11 changed us. I make more effort to understand the world than I used to make. After traveling and living outside of the United States, I became more watchful about politics, equality, justice, and our environment. As our politics have changed, and groups like white supremacists and Nazis have grown, I’ve been forced to question what I know. Likewise, revelations of sexual assault, news of murders, and lies by politicians and others sharpen my desire to know the truth and understand.

I’ve read many more books since I was young. I’ve written books. Both activities encouraged thinking, and from the thinking has come change in my views, approaches, appreciation, and understanding.

My brain has changed, apparently from triggers built in at some genetic level. I’ve become more impatient. Lessons learned through betrayal, resentment, success, and failure have fostered changes to my behavior. I work on improving myself more than I used to, when improving myself meant working out or taking classes.

I’ve lost hair on my head. My hairline recedes and my baldness expands. My hair thins and grays. Meanwhile, the rest of me becomes hairier. With my aging and changes, I became more invisible to a larger segment of population.

Or maybe that’s just me and my perceptions. They can change.

I can extrapolate some ways that I’ll probably change. I think I’ll be more withdrawn, speaking less, and enjoying small talk less. I hope to be writing and publishing more, but that’s a hope that I’ve been nurturing for over twenty years. My future diet will probably be more limited, I’ll be less active, and pop culture will seem more alien. I’ve always disliked talking on the telephone, and avoid it when I can. I suspect it’ll be hard to get future me on the phone.

I’ve been fortunate that I’ve escaped being caught in disasters. That luck can change. It feels, sometimes, like the hazardous air from the wildfires of the last few years have changed me. Certainly, that smoke, combined with the blazing heat, increased my depression, depleted my energy, and sapped my will. It certainly changed my summer and expectations.

Then, there are the other people in my life. Their changes, illnesses, success and failure will change me, too. That’s one constant that’s not likely to change.

All these variables will cause changes in me. I don’t know what I’ll be like in the future, but I don’t think that who I am now is who I will be.

2

The Revelations Dream

Once again, dreams thundered in like tornadoes, leaving much to contemplate in their wake. The most prominent dream was about unknown talents and changes, in my mind.

  1. I could see things that others couldn’t see, including the future.
  2. While I was demonstrating this to a friend, I used a wrinkled, old Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog to show her.

Many people were present in my dream. Most were strangers, but friends and family were present. We seemed to be in a large room in the upper floors of a tall building. Windows were on the two outer walls. This vantage let us look out across a cityscape. Crisscrossing white cement roads connect business parks surrounded by manicured green spaces reminiscent of places that I worked at in San Mateo, Palo Alto, and Foster City, California.

Inside, we were looking at long gray counters located under the windows. Strolling along, we were looking at these. To me, they looked blank. I don’t know what others saw, but looking at the gray counters absorbed them. Seeing an orange button on the table, I pushed it. Silver metal boxes arose at regular intervals on the counters. They had controls on top. Feeling bold, I examined the controls of one. They seemed simple. Although I didn’t know what they did, I pushed one.

The light changed, revealing other objects around us. Turning to another box, I pressed another button and exposed another aspect of our hidden reality. My thought was, these machines help us see the world. I was excited and wanted to talk to others, but when I did, I discovered that they didn’t see the boxes or their influence.

Taking my mother by her shoulder, I pointed to where the boxes were. When I did that, the boxes became visible to her. Likewise, when I guided her to the two boxes that I’d used and pointed out their influence, she could now see them. Understanding that I seemed to be a connection, I went to others and showed them. Excited conversation spread as more and more people were engaged. I pressed more buttons. The lights shifted into something dark that revealed bright strips of existence and threads running from the people to the sky. I couldn’t see where the threads ended, but I thought that the strings went to stars.

My friend came in. A college professor who teaches network security and cyber-forensics, I told her what had happened. She was astonished. As I told her about this, I realized that since I’d been exposed to the machines’ influence, I could now see these things without the machines.

To prove that to her, I found an old Montgomery Ward Christmas catalog. Using it, I told her, I can see the future. Then I knew, it’s not the machines or the catalog, but using them encouraged me to see.

I was astounded. Even as understanding seeped into me and epiphanies bloomed, I grasped that if I touched some of the exposed objects, I could peel away more limitations. Touching the closest thread, which was connected to my friend, I saw her future flash into existence like a giant movie screen. Gazing up into it with amazement, she and I said, “Wow.”

The dream ended.

0

The Shoeless Dream

I call it the Shoeless Dream, but it was an involved and multi-layered excursion featuring music, family, red ants, and strangers, besides the shoes.

I know exactly the shoes involved, too. They’re still in my closet, and I wear them once in a while. They’re a pair of coffee brown suede Oxfords.

Thinking about how long I’ve had them, I realize that it’s now twenty years. That amazes me. I can put them where I had them because I remember wearing them at work when I lived in Mountain View, California, and worked in Palo Alto, California. That employment ended in 2000, and I moved from Mountain View to Half Moon Bay in 1998.

I lose the shoes during the dream. The dream is taking place at a sort of muddy, outdoor fair and picnic that reeks of a dystopian movie set. The shoes are important to me because I don’t have much. Despite that, I take them off as I walk around. Then, I set them down to to something, forget about them, and walk off. A little later, after going through the fair – about ten ramshackle booths made of plywood, painted with white primer (sometimes) and sometimes decorated with a few Christmas lights, I realize that I’ve forgotten the shoes. I make my way back to them without problem. Finding and picking them up, I go on.

During this dream sequence, there’s a lot happening in my dream. I’m walking around a property that I own, doing a survey. I’m passing by many others who greet me. I’m busy and don’t have time to talk. I recognize aunts in the crowd. As I walk around, I have one shoe on, and carry the other one.

Once again, I put the shoe down and walk off without it. This time, a long period passes. I visit with my sisters, and talk with them about music, ending up singing Collective Soul’s song, “The World I Know” with my youngest sister, and then with my oldest sister.

Further walking around, I head for where I’d earlier noticed vomit. Passing it by before, I’ve decided that I need to go back and clean it up. I remember it was by the patio and go there, but when I get there, the vomit is gone. Instead, there’s a huge line of fire ants. Others are leaving the picnic/fair, so I warn them around the ants. Then I discover ant hills, and other lines of ants. The ground beneath is hard, dry and cracked. I remember that it had been muddy, so I’m puzzled.

Thinking about the mud of before reminds me that I’d lost my other shoe. Retreating my steps, I return to a muddy place, where the picnic/fair still goes on, but now under strings of bare yellow lights. I walk around. People talk to me. I know some of them but some are strangers. I don’t remember anything that’s discussed, except that I tell people that I’m missing my shoe, show them the one on my foot, and ask if they’ve seen the other one. Eventually, I find my shoe.

One thing that struck me as I remembered and posted this (very annotated) version of the dream. I was carrying the shoe and worrying about them because that’s all I had, yet, I was on my property, and inspected it. I thought the shoes were important, but I missed things going on while obsessing about them, and the world changed around me as I went back and forth with the shoes.

In a way, I think the shoes represent my connection to the past. I’m carrying them into the future, but it’s changing around me, and I think I’m warning myself, don’t get stuck in the mud of the past because the world I know has changed.

* All typing errors in this post belong to my cat, Quinn, who insisted that he help me type by getting on my lap and head-butting my hands, arms, and chin while purring, and sometimes trying to nibble on my ear. It can be very distracting.

1

Seen at Graduation

A young woman held up this sign, written in black marker on torn cardboard, at her college graduation ceremony this weekend.

0

Bot-tender

I followed my robot vacuum around today. Using it for spot-cleaning, I’d move it, turn it on, and then stand over it like a football coach on OTAs. “Move left,” I’d tell it. “Get that fur. Come on, pick it up, pick it up. That’s it. Good job.”

Doing this presented me with a feeling that I was cleaning, but I also felt empowered. I controlled the bot.

Maybe, too, I was seeing the future. Robots and automation are taking over more jobs each day, with plans for greater shifts on the near-horizon. But bots and automation might require intervention and guidance, as my Roomba does. We may have a new job category opening, bot-tender.

It could be the hot new thing, but I don’t think it’ll pay much.

1

After the Revelations

This is not how I thought writing would go.

I had a romanticized, glamorized vision about the writing process and a novelist’s life. I thought I would be dictating the story, making it up and writing it down. Instead, here we go again. Philea finishes her wide-ranging tale and brings it back to the moment where it split away,  and joins two other paths. One path was forged by Pram when he told his part of this story, and the other path was forged by the six primary characters on the Wrinkle.

I’ve been waiting for this re-connecting. I’d seen and heard, experienced, if you will, what they were going to say and do once they came back together. Honestly, Philea’s side-trip astonished me. She went into a life that I didn’t know existed. It’s also surprising that it startled her as much as it startled me.

But, at last her side-trip is done. It’s time for those long-awaited next scenes. But before I go into writing those scenes, I need to soak in what Philea and the other characters experienced. She and Pram shared more examples of parallel life-experience-reality-existences — a LERE, their shorthand for other Now events that that lived (or are living) and share with the rest trapped in this cycle.

They’re trying to understand what will happen to them. They’re attempting to take a piece of information and fit it in with other pieces of information to create a substantive, believable cause and effect tale for what they’re enduring. That’s human nature, to fill in the gaps, color them with some form of logic or explanation, and make it all whole.

I feel for them, pitying them, because I know that’s not their nature. That’s not what they’re living. Even as they draw closer to the truth, sometimes even stating it in incredulous terms as a possibility, the six don’t always agree on the verbiage or logic. The logic argues against their standard expectations about reality, existence, and the arrows of time. Besides, not all of their experiences will support the truth, in their minds, because they don’t remember everything that they experience. Remembering more answers less by introducing more complexity and gaps. At this point, I think all readers will understand that.

So listening  to — hah, typing — my characters’ struggle to resolve these new fragments of information, I really feel for them. The passages of their thoughts and dialogue that I’ve typed leave me oddly reflective.

That’s a first, raw, impression. On greater thought, it’s not leaving me oddly reflective. Instead, I’m taking what I learned through my characters’ learning, and applying it to my existence, here in the real world.

We’re all pieces. We see ourselves as pieces that comprise a whole. Yet, few of us ever fit fully, completely, and comfortably. And when one of us goes, we struggle to see the new whole, because we remember the whole that we knew, and lament its changes. We search for answers and rarely find closure and resolution. We remain wondering.

With these notes softly echoing in my mind, I sip the final dregs of cold coffee and end my day of writing like crazy.

4

Three Strange Dreams

Three strange dreams afflicted me last night, one after enough in a line of dreams.

  • I dreamed I’d removed my penis from my body and was making pencil sketches of it that I shared with others. There was no blood loss or discomfort. I was showing the drawings to friends and families, and was holding my penis in my hand. They never noticed that I was holding my penis, but were surprised and appalled by my sketches (which were very realistic, in that style of drawing that I used to do).
  • The second dream placed me in an uncomfortable backwoods setting. I was with people that reminded me of the folks I knew in West Virginia. These folks are hard, shallow, and bitter people, with little empathy. Their circumstances might make them that way (although I also think, if it’s so fucking terrible, why don’t you leave and find something better?). I was looking for change to make a call. They weren’t concerned with that, but instead obsessed with how ignorant I was. This was because I’d found change in a stream (a quarter and a penny), but a dead body was in the stream. They thought I was going to get sick by getting in water with a dead body. I insisted on doing it because I needed the change. I thought there was more there, so after looking elsewhere, I returned to the stream and searched. As I did, I looked at the dead body, which turned out to be a large, black dog. I wondered how he died and arrived in the water, and hoped that he hadn’t suffered.
  • In the third dream, I was in an all-white place, like a ship, wearing an all-white flight suit. Others were there, dressed in the same way. There was no one familiar to me but I knew them in the dream. We were concerned mostly with the toilets, and which toilet to use, and why the toilets was dirty, and whether the toilets worked. I was less concerned about this, and kept trying to direct the conversation and activity to something other than fucking toilets, but it was a challenge; these people were obsessed with the damn toilets. We finally got around to other things, like, hey, we’re supposed to be flying. An involved conversation about who was supposed to be doing what, like flying, developed. I was dismayed and perplexed by how the others all wanted to assign people narrow tasks. Moving off by myself, I went ahead and flew. That impressed others, who weren’t aware that I could fly, and peppered me with questions about how I’d learned and what else I could do. Their questions amazed me. I told them, it wasn’t hard, I’d always known how, people only made it hard for themselves by thinking they had to be special to do things.

Yeah, weird dreams. Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.

 

1

Such Weird Dreams

I haven’t been posting about my dreams in the last few weeks. There’s a plethora every night, but these two from last night seem so strange, I felt driven to share them.

In the first dream, I was at a competition. Dressed in dark swimming trunks, my team mates and I were standing in water up to our chest. I was in my mid-teens and white; the others were likewise young, but were people of color, and all male. No females were in this dream.

For our competition, we had to launch some small toy projectiles on the sandy sea floor. I’d been experimenting with it and developed some insights into how to set up the little plastic launcher for the best results. The launchers shot out small items like pebbles, marbles, bottle lids, and crayfish. They didn’t go far, and nothing was harmed.

What was odd to me as we practiced was that we were standing up in water to our chest, but bent down to the ocean floor to set up and launch things. We did that without putting our heads under water. I realized that in the dream, and keep thinking about it: how were we bending down in four feet of water without getting our heads wet?

The second dream found me experimenting with missile launchers. These were supposed to provide trains proactive protection. I was at a very large conference/school working on this. Working alone, I pursued ideas that were outside of my realm about taking one product and using it in an unplanned way.

It worked! Excited, I attended a large morning briefing where the top guy was being briefed on projects. After the formal briefings finished and the meeting was breaking up, I made my way to the top exec, sat down and told him my plan, how I tested it, and how it worked.

He was impressed. “Really,” he said. “You did this? I’m surprised I didn’t hear about this.”

Eagerly I explained how I’d procured and modified the parts, and then tested them…

…in my dream….

The admission and realization stunned me.

He was staring at me. “You did it in your dream?”

“Yes.” I was mortified. “I tested it in my dream.” I almost mumbled the words.

“But you haven’t really tested it.”

“No.” I stood.

“I thought I would have heard about it,” he said, and then turned to go on with other things.

Humiliated, I left. I found a place to sit and think alone, but people kept looking in or passing by me. I knew from their glances and snippets of comments that they’d heard about what had happened. They were stony-faced and silent when they looked at me, and avoided meeting my eyes.

I vowed to leave there. Day was beginning. The main body of workers were arriving. The place was noisy with busy, energetic people.

Dejected and angry, I didn’t want to be there. Packing up a box of personal items, I went and found one of my team members. I called her to me. She was just beginning to start her work day. “I’m going home,” I told her. “If anyone asks, that’s where I’m at.”

I hid my face when I spoke to her so that no one could read my lips, and spoke softly so others couldn’t overhear me. Those circumstances forced me to repeat what I said before she understood.

She was concerned and sympathetic, asking if everything was okay. I didn’t want to explain, and left without saying anything more. As I did, I kept thinking, it was only a dream. I’d confused it with reality, and had acted upon a dream like it was real. That worried me about my mental state, but also worried me about how others perceived me, and what was in store for me for my future.

 

0

Winter Solstice’s Bumper Sticker

This one cracked me up, with echoes of “Red Dwarf” to it. I can imagine Kryten saying, “The future is now. No, wait, now that’s the past. Now it’s the future. Darn, missed it again. You’ve got to be quicker, sir.”

red dwarf

 

0

Personal Windows

Friends, prompted by curious, started grilling me about some of my past life the other night. Those were my super-secret military days.

Since their questioning, I’ve drifted along currents of wonder about living amidst change and how small our windows of knowledge truly seem. Change is fast and constant. The military commands I worked in thirty years ago no longer exist; the weapons systems introduced during my career are being retired. Bases have been shuttered. They’re trying to retire the nukes I once controlled (a good thing, in my mind). God knows what’s going on in space.

I ended up in a medical start-up after my military career, first in sales operations, running customer service and spewing out reports about sales trends. We were part of a nascent business, per-cutaneous transvascular coronary angioplasty, moving into stent delivering systems for coronary applications and radiation therapy to cope with re-stenosis. After that, I moved on to another company in search of ways to cope with chronic total occlusions.

Life found me in Internet and computer security in my next phase, and then onto analytics. Whatever. I drifted through choices, jumping through windows when the opportunities arose, and was fortunate to have someone on the other side of those windows to pull me in and show me around.

The windows in our lives are always so small. They open and close so quickly. Technology accelerates the speed with which the windows open and close. For examples, consider how we now conduct war versus how it was conducted in decades and centuries past. Consider how we make, experience and enjoy music, and how we entertain ourselves. Yet, each window and moment is treated as though this is a permanent solution. Consider the plight of the coal industry, for example. They think it can be legislated back but technology and market forces have moved past them.

We, as humans, can only see and understand so far, and we argue and debate about what we see, what it means and what we need to do about it. Yet, each person’s life is defined by their personal windows. These are shaped by their culture, heritage, education, genetics and personal experiences, yes, but they’re also shaped by much larger forces. We often barely glimpse the shadow of such forces.

Sometimes – no, hell, often – I think we’re going around understanding the world backward; we believe reality shapes us, and we investigate how we shape it.

Maybe we shape reality. Maybe there is no past or future, there is only the window into Now.

Jump through it and keep on going.

 

0

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