At night, when we’re going to bed, Kiki lies next to me and talks. She’ll talk about anything; like Tetris, a new thought drops, and she’ll share it. I nod off, exhausted, going in and out of consciousness, but I try hard to listen. When she pauses, I say, “I love you, now let’s go to sleep.”
Her glistening eyes stay fixed on the ceiling as she tries to make all these thoughts fit together, and she says, “Just ten more minutes Mom.”
I wake up early drink coffee and write in my journal in the living room. I hear Geoffrey wake up because he wraps a blanket around him and it drags down the hallway, like a king’s cape. He sits next to me on the couch and starts to chat. Similar to his sister the night before, I can see in his eyes the thoughts coming in. I’ve had a couple of cups of coffee, so I’m more conversational.
Geoffrey is a visionary, a man of tomorrow. These morning discussions I make promises like, ‘If you don’t move to Mars when you grow up, I’ll take care of your children, so you and your partner can work full-time.”
He’ll argue a case for why I should buy a cyber-truck, and ask me if I plan on buying a house in the same gated community as his dad, so he can ride a bike between our homes. I look at him, my thick morning hair ratted like a cave woman, and sip from my “rise and fucking shine” coffee mug, and reassure him, “I’m working on it.”
He asked me if I believed we were living in a simulation, and I judgmentally told him, “I don’t like you watching YouTube.”
He asked, “What if I'm controlling everything around me with my mind?”
I wanted to say, “If that is true then could you take care of a few people for me… just have them go peacefully in the night?” Instead, I said, “We need to go see Great Grandma Jackie because maybe you’ve lost sight of the ancestral chain that goes back… forever.”
He groaned when I added, “We should go to church more.”
I didn’t shut down his delusions of grandeur because I like how he’s demonstrating an interest in philosophy. It shows that despite my fear that my kids’ brains are prey to the all-consuming predator that is “Online Media Retention,” they do in fact, sit in thought.
I read Brave New World last week after Geoffrey said, “I can’t wait till we all have computer chips in our heads.”
I asked him, “If we all have the same intelligence, who will be the innovators, and who will be the people who vacuum the poop out of the Port-o-Potties?”
He was stumped. So I thought I’d test him, and I said, “Maybe it would be better to give the intelligence only to some people,” and thank goodness, he thought that was a bad idea.
I’m glad I read the book before reading it to the kids because I forgot all about “Chase the Zipper” and how Huxley theorized everyone would turn into detached sluts from the desensitization of sex. Quite the contrary has happened, and young people can’t even be bothered.
Huxley was right about the pharmacological revolution, and by conditioning people to feel shame when they’re unhappy Soma became another essential food group.
I can’t have a computer chip in my head because of my depraved thoughts, thoughts that I have no control over. I would be thrown in jail the moment the chip was implanted, and when I explain to the thought police (different book, same genre) that I don’t believe these thoughts, they just show up to make me feel like a bad person, they’d throw away the key. It’s a shame, I could be limitless with that computer chip.
Every parent hopes their kids have the intellectual aptitude to get into a great university and make a positive difference in the world. We're too far off from brain-computer chips to change the current college landscape, but after this week when the IVY league school presidents went on an antisemite rampage, they relieved a lot of pressure that these schools are a pinnacle in academic ambition.
The reality is that for a student to get into an elite university, they would have had to spend their teenage years creating a contrived resume. They enter institutions of higher learning with burnout and a robotic mindset. They don’t need a computer-chip brain, they already gave themselves one. Now all they need is a lifetime supply of Soma.
I teach at a state university. It is not a prestigious school, but I value and enjoy my students. It’s finals week, so part of my morning was fielding emails from people who dropped the ball ten weeks ago, and want another chance. The situations can rip out my heartstrings, but I have to be robotic in my assessment of these situations, and honest, they can always do better next time.
After that, I Googled “Was Steve Jobs a devil worshipper?” It was a legitimate question after I saw an advertisement including the pricing for his first Apple computer. An hour investigating and I didn’t get an answer, but I stumbled upon a lot of weird people’s theories of the world.
It was an enjoyable time. I need a night and a morning to make sense of it all.
