I like to listen

I like to sit and lis­ten to Pink Floyd’s The Wall.  It makes me feel like some ancient being, perched up on the walls of crum­bling civ­i­liza­tion with the moon at my back and the black­ened plains of what was the world splin­ter­ing out before me; who lis­tens to albums any more?

That’s not to say I’m not pulling the bricks out with the rest of ya; I spent all of Sun­day vibe-cod­ing two projects, mar­veling all the while that what I’m doing now was so far out of reach I didn’t even dream about it a few years ago.  Now more than ever, the veloci­rap­to­ri­an veloc­i­ty of the world is stunning.

The arrival of full and com­plete agency in the form of vibe-cod­ing is not just a few hood­lums crack­ing away at the gate; it is full hair-on-fire gaso­line-fueled Mad Max style bar­bar­ian change blast­ing in on a world that is still, incred­i­bly to me, unsuspecting.

It’s sim­i­lar to liv­ing at the foot of Vesu­vius; you fuck­ing KNOW that thing will blow, and yet here we sit, cook­ing our eggs in the cin­ders and tak­ing the heat for granted.

In this last decade or less of full human auton­o­my, remem­ber what it is to be alive.  Remem­ber what it is to throw your toes over the edge, to look down and quake and thrill.  Remem­ber the cold water of the Pacif­ic, the dark shapes in the push and swell of a night dive.

Remem­ber what it was to wheel and spin on ris­ing air in the com­pa­ny of eagles, equal parts of won­der and under­stand­ing as we cap­tained plas­tic bags and bits of string through the invis­i­ble ocean of sky.

Feel the sun on your face in the morn­ing, the first sip of cof­fee, the remem­brance of what it was to hitch­hike as a kid.  They will be gone.

The world we came from was so safe and unthreat­en­ing and we had no idea that it would end.  We are all, and I’m right there with you, hell-rid­ing on the back of this mon­strous steel dinosaur just begin­ning to wake up, and we tit­ter and thrill at the shiv­ers rum­bling through its armored skin as we slide down it’s shiny scales.

That ruby-eyed mon­ster will crush us all and yawn before it wan­ders off to break­fast on Mercury.

Until then we live, my friends.  Until that day comes the best of us will con­tin­ue to get after it, from the squat rack to the sec­ond pint of ice cream. 

We fol­low the scent of strug­gle and sati­a­tion a bit fur­ther in our quest for inter­nal excel­lence, we rev­el in the joy of earned indul­gence, and in all things human we rev­el in con­trast.  This, that feel­ing of the bot­tom and the top, the heat and the cold, the sor­row and ecsta­sy of life; those ends of the arc of expe­ri­ence are the only true joy we may be able to hang on to once the machines rise.

Until then, we live. 

To life!