The Unceasing Anxiety Alarm
It's like you have two signals
that interfere with each other
by carrying conflicting information.
It's as if you have two fuel gauges
on your car.
They're studying
the same amount of fuel
but one says your tank is full,
the other registers empty.
They can't both be right.
And you as the driver have only
an indirect relationship to the fuel tank
via the gauges.
-A Scanner Darkly (Film 2016)
So its 2023 and everything vaguely sucks. I myself suck, but as a kid I thought we might have a future of fun. Flying cars, jetpacks, and space frontiers. I got older and just want convenient technology. Instead I got a smart tv update that bricked my TV turning it into a very expensive nightlight. Toasters that have to connect to wifi, and digital purchases that can be revoked or changed based on the politics de jour.
Even now, just now (2023), I tried to book a train through (or via) Via rail. After I had entered the routine credit card info they needed one last step. They sent a text with a one time use code to my number. Lest some vagrant, a menacing doppelganger with my credit card and ID try to get a free train ride to where I want to go.
[Post trip note: They say you need to have valid ID, but no one asked for ID. I argue this makes it even more unnecessary to have 2 factor authentication, you know, if your not authenticating who I am at point of travel.]
It’s a 6 digit number, which I entered. Then got a display message that “An error has occurred”. It doesn’t seem like I have a train ticket. So I guess I have to start the process over. But I have to wait a little bit lest I buy another non-refundable ticket. Everything is fine.
But it’s not just companies that seem to be increasingly dysfunctional, it’s everything. Of course it is. We have everything at our fingertips. An yet were still not happy. Alas.
It seems fair to say the cultural and political landscape is in upheaval. If you can’t define what a woman is, how do you afford them rights. Eh I guess you don’t have to. Or maybe legislate that everywhere must now construct a single bathroom that anyone can use, so there’s some tiny cell of a bathroom created. Or just call anyone who disagrees racist/sexist/transphobic/nazi.
[2024 Note: I have since used a single occupant washroom. It was so small that you had to straddle the toilet to open and close the door. There was one stall with a sign that implied it was reserved for female employees. I'll note a urinal is specifically designed for urination and thus preferable to a toilet for this purpose. Have you considered the implications for the mostly non white cleaning staff in your aggressive compassion?]
Except for when you accidentally give a standing ovation to someone who was in the SS and fought the Russians in WW2, you know like the real nazis. Apparently we also gave another Waffen SS nazi a medal. But that’s good I guess. Everything is fine. At least their not doing really bad things like honking their horns ( remember Honk Honk = Hail Hitler) and disrupting commerce.
It’s not just incredibly important to daily spend time to revere trans people, even through I only met one open in real life. It’s also incredibly important now to view someone’s race above all else. Fuck you Martin Luthor King Jr. “Now it the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.” No! Now is the time that Black people deserve their own racially segregated arts night. Their own affinity groups. Perhaps even their own busses, schools and businesses. Lest they have to deal with the Hwhite man.
[2024 Update]
Can we please stop pretending that everything is the end of the world and that normal people are crippled by asking where they’re from. Yes I get that some people are so fragile that this does legitimately destabilize them or whatever. The answer in these cases is to give them coping strategies, or assist in avoidance. Not to rearrange the rest of society.
Yes yes yes I see where it’s inartful, or more likely annoying when someone’s trying to sus out your ethnic background. But who’s doing this to narrow their hate?
I like this pretend scenario of someone who hates Hattians but is cool with those from the Dominican Republic. I like the Japanese but those Chinamen are intolerable. African, all life spawned from Africa, I love Africa, but your not one of those dirty Boers are you?
No, almost everyone is asking to spark a conversation because it’s an incredibly easy factual conversation. I’m from X, here’s what it was like in X. It’s infinitely more interesting than pointing out the current weather.
You can always lie if you want. I generally suck at it but at the time my Uber name was Cornelius Fudge. This is not my real name and in fact a fictional character from Harry Potter. This eventually became an issue when I ordered alcohol so I had to change it, but prior to that I had a conversation about how I was not Greek and my father was an English professor (I’m not Greek nor is my father a English professor, also I think the name is Latin), but then we jumped to books and politics and the Uber ride was one I was almost sad to end our conversation.
Nor was it racial. We live in a big fucking country, as does the US, with lots of differences.
The anger here is mostly with white elite liberals as they are mostly responsible for this. I'm told it's extremely offensive to refer to a spirit animal. White people can't have spirit animals. There can be no mixing of cultures, for inclusiveness. Every meeting now starts with a land acknowledgement which at this point is obviously a taunt. Yes we are on unceeded land. No we do not intend on giving it back. But we are acknowledging your defeat at the start of every meeting.
Look there’s a lot of issues. A lot of serious issues. If the alarm never ends, then people put in ear plugs.
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