March 25, 2022
Thank you to everyone so far who’s subscribed to this experiment, and extra thanks for actually reading. I was especially chuffed to see Bill at Last Gasp’s shoutout on Twitter this week because he’s so cool, and I am definitely an awkward new kid on this block:
Bill also gave me a new acronym…
Punk Rock, Making-It-Small. OK. Cool. That’s a PRMIS I can keep.
I had a dream on Xmess Eve 2021. Like, the following vision of sugarplums danced in my head while I slept. From my notes:
I had just returned from a FL vacation and had stopped by McDonald’s on my way to work to have some oatmeal and a medium Classic Coke with “plenty of ice” - very on brand for me 30+ years ago. Said McDonald’s was situated by (in?) a very busy rural-ish depot that was also a huge grocery store. No one wearing masks, no anxiety about it; it seems my subconscious was mining the Before Times.
The people working behind the counter cheerfully told everyone in line (did I mention it was very busy?) that there was a labor shortage and there’d be a wait while a truck was unloaded. Everyone was cool about it and just talked to each other. No phones or screens anywhere.
While seated and waiting, an unusual suspect (one of Jim’s uncles) discreetly dropped edibles on my table - the whole exchange definitely had a “oh, hey, welcome home, nice to see you” vibe.
Oatmeal and perfectly iced Classic Coke arrived and the people next to me started talking about the James Webb Space Telescope. I woke up right after this - 6:33 AM local time - and checked Twitter. The launch had gone well.
This dream had it all, if you’re me: That post-beach vacation vibe, friends, trains, properly-iced soft drinks, no pandemic, people being kind, tech in the background rather than (literally) in everyone’s face at all times, edibles, giant telescopes…
O, how I loved that dream. It really stayed with me. The mood was soft and quiet at 909. We read books and listened to music… and I tweeted about ten times that morning. Small steps.
Most of my sleeps don’t yield memorable dreams. The one I describe above stays with me, I think, because it reminded me of when I was almost 13 and my hopes and dreams of what I thought the future might be like were shaped in no small part by a book I discovered at a tiny public library 41 (!!) years ago.
My obsession with the Book of Predictions, published in 1981, began that same year, after my family left the northern gulf coast of Florida for barely-suburban Minneapolis. One of the first orders of business upon arrival in Chaska, MN was to acquire library cards (thanks, Mom), and once I discovered it, I spent the summer reading this book over and over and over again. I must have checked it out 20 times. I wore out “The Experts”, the book’s main section. I had little time for “The Seers” or “Looking Backward–and Forward” Nope. I just wanted experts. [Cosmos had already blown my mind, so this kind of made sense.] Sadly, once school started I was pretty busy dropping my southern accent and learning how to ice skate and generally being an 8th grader; The Book of Predictions was forgotten in favor of Wildfire romances and VC Andrews’ Dollanganger series and this amazing book.
Anyway, at some point deep in the pre-vaxxed throes of the central Illinois part of the pandemic (I have no idea when… maybe fall 2020?), Jim and I were hanging out with our friends T and J and I was going on about this book all of a sudden, lamenting the fact I’d I never actually owned it. J looked at me and was like, why don’t you just buy a used copy online? We were sitting in their front yard at dusk, eating Thai takeout, and I stopped eating. I said, Oh. I’d somehow forgotten that a person with the means to do so can buy old books on the internet. Maybe I’d just thought that particular book was located solely in the past and therefore could not be bought using internet technology. No idea. But reader, I bought it right then and there in T and J’s front yard, because unlike my dream, internet technology is NEVER in the background.
I’ll write more about some of the discoveries made during my re-reading in a future newsletter (and how just about everything deserves a re-reading after the events of the last 5 years and especially the last 2), but for now I’ll leave you with this prediction for the “1980s-2030 and beyond” from a woman named Hazel Henderson, who, at the time of the book’s publication, was “the only female appointee to the advisory council of the US Congressional Office of Technology Assessment”:
Even though the competitive, patriarchal, nation-state system with all its institutional forms of hierarchy, dominance/submission, and “machismo” technologies and aggression-based values can no longer be maintained, leaders will continue to try and shore up these social systems. As these leaders try to maintain control, they will continually propose dangerous policies of confrontation and violence, risking nuclear proliferation and war, rather than admitting that the value systems by which they rose to power were viable only in the expansionary phase of human evolution, but cannot be perpetuated as boundary conditions are reached in a finite planetary ecosystem. In a new phase of global human interdependence, only a switch from competitive to cooperative value systems* can assure the continuation of human development and avoid extinction.
*emphasis mine
I took yesterday off and continued my slow clearing of the garden. Things are looking good back there. They’re also looking pretty decent on the seed shelves* in the basement.
*Not pictured: A tray of herbs and brassicas starts and a tray of flower starts. It’s time to start digging up what remains of the lawn.
LOTSA (Lisa’s Open Tabs, Saved Aggressively):
▶️ The Tech Won’t Save Us podcast’s two more recent episodes, War in the Content Economy and How Peter Thiel Wields His Power in Silicon Valley (the first half of the latter episode mentions the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign several times)
▶️ Current COVID info for where I live
▶️ Solarpunk on Tumblr
▶️ Went down a Heath Ledger rabbit hole, probably because of the new Batman film
▶️ Hoya carnosa, for those into indoor plants (currently trying to keep mine alive)
▶️ I have a surplus of walnut pieces thanks to a neighbor & am trying to decide what to do
▶️ I like Under Aurora’s perfume oils a lot
▶️ Sad that we broke my Effin Birds “weekend” coffee mug this week - which one should I replace it with?
▶️ Doing some cast iron cookware research
▶️ If I could clone myself, I’d go to grad school for my MLA
▶️ The word “storyteller” + journalism = hmmmm
▶️ Anthony Hopkins and Diana Rigg
A shout out *and* a reference to the importance of perfect ice in a fountain drink? Definitely my kind of newsletter!
ME TOO re: the MLA!