Somewhere during last night's dream we had figured out the time travel excursion had to have changed something, but we couldn't put a finger on it. We flipped through all the different expressions of history we could find, like you do, but it wasn't until we started noticing the ads that we realized exactly what it was- the beaches were all empty. That didn't feel right at all. There should be miles of nearly naked people wasting time being useless. At least, we got the strong impression that there should be, even though it seemed ridiculous. Somehow, the absence of thronging in thongs seemed blaring.
What could we have done to change that? How did we rewrite the entire societal pastime of vacation? With further investigation we boiled it down to one simple political conundrum- assuming the people knew they were powerless to control their own futures. It must have happened during that lunch we popped in on where Jason argued with the president's nephew about how Machiavelli would idolize Neitzsche if he'd been born after him instead of before (postulating historical rearrangements upon unsuspecting victims is Jason's favorite debate while the rest of us quietly roll our eyes), but how to fix it? We couldn't go back and just undo a conversation. We'd tried that before, and the running into ourselves part gets unlaughably ridiculous.
I had an idea. What was it we'd seen that we'd forgotten must have existed? Wasn't there something everyone was holding in their hand all the time? Something that kept them all connected somehow. Something that made it easy for them to forget their sufferings and keep moving freely around their tightly scheduled days as if everything were fine.
We couldn't remember much of it, but I did recall that tiny little guys were the central focus, as though the user could transfer their soul into another world and interact in an entirely different dimension from the one they lived in. It was genius, and had very much mesmerized me because it was nothing more than what they were doing already, but dressed up in fantasy and spread across a tiny world stage. It wasn't much different from going to theater, but instead of simply watching others, each person played out their own parts almost continuously, essentially living double lives as they 'played' the play.
That's what we must do, recreate the atmosphere of self involvement, redirect the mind to an alternate path, distract the people from the mundane trenches of necessity with a parallel existence of imagined daring do and virtue. Jason said I got it wrong, that it was about the psychological thrill of being able to do what one was not allowed in society, and we argued a bit about how that could affect history all over again, but in the end, we were approved by administration to proceed with the novel idea of consumerism, an ideology that held satisfaction as the gold standard for goods and services.
We still weren't quite sure how to get the ball rolling on such a gaping hole in what seemed an otherwise already too busy economy. Entertainment itself was a psychological study in mind control, and we were about to break that field wide open with an all new counterintuitive approach that might conceivably boost production simply by creating the illusion of wasting time. Too many were rejecting their scheduled entertainment, an act of political dissension in an otherwise perfect society. Perhaps the answer was to introduce a dash of imagined chaos at the individual level, make a game of problem solving, allow them the freedom to think of something else while they did their work.
Ads are contrived to funnel thoughts toward specifics, but this was different. It was too new to slide into the scheduled entertainment and watch the trickle in effect, especially if the people weren't cooperating enough to see it. No, this had to be a brazen contriving, a 'hard sell'. People had to want it, clamor for it. What could we possibly put into an ad that would turn every brain on the planet toward this new form of entertainment? But it worked. Fabulously.
We here at the fat condonement facility have the perfect avatar to reflect the utter waste of existence that is your life while it inflates your sense of self importance in the horror vacui of entertainment.
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Yep, I really dreamed that.
Yesterday-
I imagine this is what a jackolantern must feel like after its insides are scraped out and the inside starts drying up. How am I even awake on this much zyrtec and benadryl? Oh, yeah, the prednisone. But feeling the Sahara sliding into my being is so relieving after the feeling of thrashing through a sticky swamp in a heavy downpour.
Experimenting with minecraft while I experiment with new word arrangements in my head. Setting a little moat up around a little hut for terrace farming backfired drastically when a creeper floated in and blew up underneath my house. This is a different singleplayer, have somehow landed on chicken world and everywhere I run, I randomly pick up eggs just floating around. Sounds horrible, but it occurred to me I could hatch eggs inside my little hut, feed the chicks seeds and then leave for the 20 minutes of daylight, then come back to them all grown up and kill and eat them and make arrows with the feathers. I'm so third world today. I'm glad I experimented with a different world before I destroyed my desert village with this moat idea, because I really did think it would be awesome. I could write a book now on all the ways creepers love spelunking into water and the sneaky ways they get there despite all your defenses. One of my experiments later on further away from my hut will be seeing if I can set one off with a flint and steel. I've never used one before, keep running across how dangerous they've been for runaway fires and stuff.
Kai got me a Pegasus and we took our mounts out for a spin in the tundra where we wouldn't wind up on anyone else's township. It was marvelous.
Shout out to the east coast. I've been watching it snow up at my tundra house. It's amazing how soothing stuff like this is on a big screen with the music in creative mode in singleplayer.
Part of the wonderful problem solving distraction that is gaming. Kai is showing me how to find and harvest obsidian.
Getting my feet back under me both metaphorically and physically. Long talks about how I balance who I am, where I'm going, the paths in and out of finding ourselves and embracing the truths inside us. Coming out the deep ravine of loss and over the last of the big rocky jags of sadness, getting my bearings again, gearing up for the walk across a plain to the next steep thrust up into the sky. Minecraft mirrors my soul journey while my words start crowding in again pushing for release. I live for the glory moments. I missed getting a selfie yesterday after I pummeled a couple of skeletons to death in the dark with my bare hands. I must've had 30 arrows in me and big knots of them stuck in everything all around me. How can a person not feel better about their day surviving something like that?
I put a rose bush outside my tree farm shack, and the way it looks through the glass block reminds me of the rose under her glass dome in The Little Prince.
It looks a little haunting to me when the sun sets.
Me irl getting back on track with my workout jam. Lost 2 pounds on prednisone. Now I've gotta keep them off while my body adjusts back to no prednisone.
