(Manalive by G.K. Chesterton)
Never mind the beer. (Never mind the beer?!? *looks plaintive*) No, never mind the beer. But the skittles. The skittles warrent our consideration.
I had a conversation with my mother this afternoon. About social networking. My argument was that I would welcome my transhumanist future if it would be that I could wander out into the outside world, social-networking-interface portably tucked under an aesthetically-pleasingly-designed metallic door of some sort implanted in my arm (I know: the alternative is called a laptop. Anyone like to buy me one? *note poet-in-garret-jaded-bitterness-here*), rather than kneeling, acolyte-like, before my makeshift "desk" (read chest of drawers). Her argument was that, in offices across the country, workers would be twitching, bleeping, button-pressing mad marionettes, not getting any work done, and that, on roads across the country, drivers would, focusing on their integrated screens, smash innto each other with wanton imperviousness(one might almost say glee). (I was going to retort with the prospect of the driverless car, but I forgot.) This vision of the apocolypse amused me, but struck me as faintly (or more than faintly) ridiculous. Firstly, people are not lemmings (generally). They tend not to continue doing things which cause (draatic and obvious) chaos and loss of life indefinately. They tend to take note, and make any neccesary changes, and Keep Calm and Carry On (after any initial Human All Too Human fuss). Secondly, if these (somewhat communist-Russia-reminiscent) "workers" want to bleep and twitch and button-press, why shouldn't they? Their work is evidently not being sufficiently interestinng. It should pull its socks up, or be superceded by social networking. (My mother said that I could only say that becuase I was myself "unproductive". I said that unthinking productivity was a Modernist onwardmarch towards the Motropolisesque gaping jaws of Baal. Politics, politics, politics. Stalks my conversations like a predatory elephant.)
Later, I found myself singing this to myself (mockplaintively). (It is my default selfpitying song - and I have a cold, amongst other things, hence it.)
"This game is not a good game." Having a cold is not a good game. One loses horribly and continually for a few days (however surely one's eventual victory, conquest, skittle, is assured...) *restrains self from tangenting about a -further - conversation on The Sensibleness of Phobias Concerning Inevitable Evils, neccesary weevils, copyright A&S-you-know-who-you-are..*
Then I thought, actually, games are really rather useful. They are training for the inevitable banal attacks of the-antagonistic-things-of-this-world on oneself. (Paranoia? No. I am currently being attacked by hundreds? millions? billions? of minor lifeforms who have paraded delightedly into my nose without so much as a by-your-leave and set up camp there, sleepless and mindlessly mauling me. I have been invaded.) One also finds oneself occasionally beset by the higher lifeforms (inevitably, however nice one is to them). Dogs bark, bees sting, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen. Rape murder and pillage may be exceptions rather than rules, but the minor annoyances of wordbullets, ill-clad-shoulder-jostle-ing and objectionableoddness persist undefeated. So. One takes stock of one's inventory, one nervously peruses the subconscious meter labelled "lives" and one dodges the fired pixels, jumps over the absurd hurdles (such as those placed in the way of the bemused pedestrian in the carpark of the train station in Penzance and one hurrahs joyously at the sucessful completion of every level (Happy Birthday! Congratulations! Nothing Killed You!).
Then there were The Sims. These dollshousedwellers (Ibsenishly?) have given one the oppurtunity to live more lives than one (and "he who lives more lives than one more lives than one must [may?] die"). For our lives, as Shakespeare may have said (he ought to have done) are prisons from which there is no escape except the escape that can't be escaped *see nonexistant tangent*). We can squander lives that are not our own. (Of course, we may squander our own, if we want to... It's our party and we'll cry if we want to... But we may not want. We may want to do other things with them.)
"I want to waste it playing. Spend all our days in a dream."
(Goldfrapp)
Row row row your boat... *collapses into the absurdity of it all*
