I’ve felt it. You’ve felt it. Things feel off. Things don’t work the way we’ve come to accept as normal and expected. Whether that’s our institutions, our devices, or—dare I say—our bodies (TBH, the latter may be colored by my own experiences over the past year). The simplest tasks are glitching. Trying to get anything accomplished through customer service anywhere is a lesson in frustration. Nothing is working the way it should.

I have a theory.

Judging from the prevalence of YouTube videos on the subject, as is the case with many older people I find myself waking up almost every night like clockwork around 3 am. Sometimes I can fall right back asleep; other times—like this morning—not so much. My mind starts wandering.

I know I’m not the only one—again, because I spend too much time on YouTube—that everything just feels off. In fact, I will go so far as reality itself has felt off since I watched those planes slam into the Twin Towers on the morning news that fateful day in 2001 as I was getting ready for work—although nowhere near as much as it has over the past five or six years.

“High strangeness” is the only way I can describe it. Yes, life eventually returned to normal—and for a few brief months our country was united in a way I now doubt we’ll ever see again. But then Republicans got a war hard-on and Bush invaded Iraq (even though it had nothing to do with the attacks) and things started unraveling.

This morning, while laying awake listening to Ben breathe beside me, I envisioned reality as a meticulously maintained Jenga tower; a tower representing our shared reality.

Bear with me here. This is kind of in the weeds and I’m not sure I can adequately convey it in words.

This tower of our shared reality is composed of blocks made of 8+ billion smaller towers representing our individual lives. When we die the small gaps left in the structure from our individual towers disappearing are replaced by new towers of those who follow after us. The big, life-altering events we each experience individually can be represented by blocks being knocked out of our personal towers. It’s never enough to bring down the entire fabric of reality, but these events definitely affect our personal realities, forcing us to change. (see: cancer, etc.)

But something happened in 2001. Something came along and knocked out several rows wholesale making everything unbalanced. The tower started listing.

When it descended that golden escalator in 2015, more critical rows were knocked out. The tower started leaning dangerously and it’s only gotten worse over the past decade. That’s this feeling of everything being off. Because it is.

COVID, 2020. Another block pushed—although not immeidately out of the tower. Somehow this managed to give our collective reality an opportunity to reset. But then, BAM! It was knocked out as well and it was back to business as usual. The tower was beginning to look like a certain monument in Pisa, Italy.

I fear all it’s going to take is one more event, one more loss of a row of blocks and…

I don’t know about y’all, but I keep feeling like this is just around the corner.

(Originally appeared on Voenix Rising 26 May 2016)

Ben and I were heading home the other day and as we were driving down Lincoln and crossed 22nd Street, I was reminded of a time—a lifetime ago, it seems—when my family almost bought a house in that neighborhood.

It was during eighth grade—or perhaps shortly after I’d graduated. Dad was rightfully proud of the work he’d recently done for Hallcraft on their new Biltmore Highlands subdivision, so one sunny Saturday we headed over to what seemed at the time to me like the far east side of the valley to check it out. I don’t know how the talk started, but before I knew it we went from looking at the model homes to being shown one house in particular a few streets over that my parents were actually considering buying. It was a large, beautiful three bedroom, two bath place with a courtyard entrance, a spacious kitchen and a large family room with a fireplace. The bedroom that was to be mine was significantly larger than my current room, eliciting no small amount of excitement on my part. The room also had two windows instead of one.

My enthusiasm was tempered somewhat by the fact that it would now actually cost to phone my best friend (apparently calling from certain Phoenix exchanges to certain Glendale exchanges back in the day incurred wasn’t free).

This move also meant that my sister and I would be transferring to a new school district, something I think caused my parents’ eventual decision to bail on that house and that particular subdivision.

We did end up moving into a new home a few months later, actually only about a half mile south of where we had been living, so the seed had definitely been planted. I’m sure economics were also a factor; we got a much larger house for less money in Hallcraft’s Bethany Heights than we would’ve gotten if we’d moved to Biltmore Highlands.

Ironically, even though my best buddy and I now actually lived closer to each other than we had previously with this move, after high school started we drifted apart and each went our separate ways. (I found out many, many years later that Neal—whom I’d known since 4th grade—transitioned to Angela sometime in our twenties. He’d always told me he’d felt like a girl trapped in a boy’s body, so this did not come as a huge surprise.)

What does all this have to do with the title of this post? Well, I got to thinking how different (or perhaps not) my life would’ve been had we actually moved to Biltmore Highlands and my sister and I had been forced into a new school district.

Obviously, I would never have met the people or made the friends I did if I’d gone to a different school than the one I did, but I wonder if life post-high school would’ve actually been that different. I’d still have undoubtedly gone to the University of Arizona in Tucson and had similar experiences. Or would I?

A currently popular idea in cosmology is that there are an infinite number of universes, each one calving off and growing on its own, depending upon what choices are made. And not just your choices, but multiply that by the billions of other souls on this rock and it boggles the mind. Multiply that by the number of possible planets and potentially sentient beings in the universe, and it truly becomes an unimaginable number.

So it’s always an interesting “what if” game to play. What if I’d actually gone to ASU instead of UofA, stayed in school and gotten my degree? What if I’d kept on going the night I walked out of The Joshua Tree and never met Dennis? What if Bernie and I never visited San Francisco—much less moved there?

I suppose there’s a certain satisfaction in knowing that if this multiverse idea is in fact reality that somewhere, maybe as close as the orbit of an electron—there are universes where Hitler was never born; where JFK was never assassinated; where you are just as likely to be President of the United States as you are to be living in a cardboard box under an overpass; a world where the Dark Ages never occurred and Christianity never gained a foothold; a world where you actually bought that Apple stock in the 90s; a world where mankind has already colonized the solar system and is moving out to the stars…

None of which we’ll ever see…unless we incarnate on one of those planets. And then, will they even seem strange to us?

I’m not sure how to proceed with this post—much less gather my thoughts into any kind of coherent narrative. Suffice to say that if you’re reading this I did manage to pull something together that isn’t utter crap. And if not…well, you’ll never know will you?

So…am I the only one? Am I the only one who,  for the past few months has  been feeling a sense of—for lack of a better word, dread? It feels like a storm is gathering on the horizon that promises to lay waste to everything we’ve come to hold near and dear; to alter what is perceived as reality itself.

Perhaps it stems from the constant onslaught of Trump-related news, too many late-night journeys down the dark corridors of YouTube and the general sense of malaise that started engulfing the nation with the arrival of COVID. It seems people are sick of being screwed over by corporations and a seemingly intractable Congress hell-bent on sending the country careening back to the 1950s and fulfilling the dark fantasies of the worst members of our society instead of actually representing the will of the people who put them in power and, you know, actually moving the country forward.

Then there are the obviously corrupt members of the Supreme Court, the are-they or are-they-not real revelations from the US military about UAPs/UFOs and just the constant firehose of bullshit we’re being force fed on a daily basis from the media.

It short, it seems like the rug is being pulled out from under us and a huge change is heading our way. So what is it? The unfettered rise of a Fourth Reich? DIsclosure that aliens walk among us and have been abducting humans and performing expeiments on them for at least the last 80 years with the government’s blessing in exchange for technology? The infamous “Fourth Turning”? The rise of Artificial Intelligence and humanity’s corresponding retreat into virtual reality?

Or is it just that I’m getting old and can’t keep up with the pace of change going on around us any more like I was able to 40 years ago.

What say you?

From Second Nexus:

Humans have looked to the heavens for millennia and wondered if we’re alone.

For some the answer is a resounding “no.” If they haven’t seen it with their own eyes, it doesn’t exist.

…the skeptics aren’t buying it.

Now NASA scientists are dashing our hopes of having an up close encounter with an extraterrestrial because of something dubbed the “Great Filter” theory.

So, what’s it all about and what bleak future does it predict for humanity?

The scientific paper—which is not yet peer reviewed—posits all intelligent life capable of space travel has likely destroyed itself before reaching the technological advancements necessary for interplanetary flights.

And they predict the same will probably happen to humans…

…unless action is taken.

The paper—titled Avoiding the ‘Great Filter’: Extraterrestrial Life and Humanity’s Future in the Universe—theorizes other civilizations capable of space flight existed during the life of the universe, but they all destroyed themselves before visiting outer Milky Way galaxy neighborhoods where the Earth is located.

While some on Earth may think they’re the center of the Universe, Earth sits on an outer spiral arm in one of the estimated several hundred billion galaxies in the observable universe.

In other words, Earth is not exactly situated to become a prominent interplanetary tourist stop.

The researchers based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in southern California referred to the phenomenon as “filtering out” various forms of life in the same manner some human civilizations on Earth filtered out species of flora and fauna and other human civilizations through destructive lifestyle practices, colonization, warfare and genocide.

When a lifeform reaches the final stage, their destructive tendencies—”deeply ingrained dysfunctions”—filter themselves out of existence or “snowball quickly into the Great Filter.”

It is this fate the scientists warned against if Earthlings ever want to reach other planets or encounter extraterrestrials.

There is hope for humanity with some changes in attitude allowing Earthlings to take steps to avoid our own extinction.

Astrophysicist Jonathan Jiang and his coauthors wrote:

“The key to humanity successfully traversing such a universal filter is… identifying [destructive] attributes in ourselves and neutralizing them in advance.”

The researchers proposed the tendencies likely to wipe out human existence would have destroyed intelligent life on other planets if the most destructive societies also gained power during their planetary evolution.

They specifically cited nuclear war, pandemic, climate change and uncontrolled artificial intelligence.

 

The hardest task facing Earth—according to the scentists—will be working together to survive long enough for long distance space travel.

But the Great Filter theory isn’t exactly new.

The idea was first proposed in an online essay The Great Filter – Are We Almost Past It? written by economist Robin Hanson—an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. The first version of his Great Filter article was shared in August 1996 and last updated on September 15, 1998.

So the theory has been bouncing around academia and online message boards like Reddit for years. Redditors have asked about the theory in subReddits like Ask Reddit, Religion, Space and Aliens.

The Great Filter has even had its own subReddit since 2017

The subReddit states:

“The Great Filter is the most urgent question Mankind has ever faced.”

“It’s the solution to the Fermi Paradox—Robin Hanson’s hypothesis there are no other technological civilizations (not even on Earth) because they die before they colonize a galaxy.”

“The mission of r/GreatFilter is to raise awareness of the value and fragility of life, and thus the importance of peaceful colonization of space beyond Earth, one rock at a time.”

“Is our destiny literally in our stars?”

As for those JPL scientists at NASA, they wrote:

“History has shown that intraspecies [human versus human] competition and, more importantly, collaboration, has led us towards the highest peaks of invention.”

“And yet, we prolong notions that seem to be the antithesis of long-term sustainable growth: racism, genocide, inequity, sabotage.”

What a 17-year-old me would think if he was shown this photo and was told it would be his study in the year 2022. So many things we easily take for granted would be total sci-fi magic to that guy.

That quote above is so true. Every now and then I start feeling a little nostalgic and Google someone from my past to find out whatever happened to them since we last crossed paths… or just to see what they look like today.

(Or more embarrassingly, to put a face to the name I had been gushing over in some journal entry from the 90s whom I now have absolutely no recollection of.)

I’m amazed how consistently I have come up completely empty-handed, and that’s probably a good thing. About twenty years ago I tracked down several members of my old high school crew whom I lost touch with when we went off to different colleges and discovered to my horror that nearly all of them had become raging conservative christianists. I just remember shaking my head in disbelief. Needless to say I did not pursue reestablishing those friendships.

I’m curious, but not that curious to go digging into the past; and certainly not curious enough to spend any money on those paid stalker people-finder background-check websites.

At this point I just assume that the folks I’m trying to locate have no online presence, have done a damn good job of hiding it, or—since I am getting up there in years and we’re still dealing with an ongoing pandemic—have simply died.

I mean, in the last two years people who I have stayed in contact with for the last 30-40 years have passed away, and COVID wasn’t even the cause.

As recently as a few months ago I was speaking with a friend from high school whom I have maintained steady contact with over the years and we were discussing a mutual friend from back in the day who was big into hifi like we were with whom I’d lost contact after I moved to San Francisco.  Surprisingly Ken (my friend) still spoke to Gary, and offered me his contact info.

I emailed him, and after we exchanged a few pleasant emails and current photos, the conversation just died. Like twenty years ago, I suspect Jesus got in the way.

There’s a reason the past is best left in the past. Live with and treasure your memories; don’t let them be destroyed by the reality of what people have become.

I find it far more likely that ours is just the latest in a long list of technologically-advanced human civilizations to arise on the planet…and like with all those that came before, all it will take is a few well-placed meteor strikes and a few thousand years to remove almost all traces of it.

“All this has happened before and will happen again.”

I’ve been following this guy for years. Great food for thought in almost all his videos.

I would very much like to believe this is true.

Try to Ignore the stilted narration and give this video a viewing.

I apparently am following in my late father’s footsteps because he was obsessed with this stuff, albeit he came at it more from an Erich Von Daniken/Ancient Astronauts viewpoint—something I find increasingly unlikely. I do, however, find it very likely that our current civilization is not the first to harness high-technology and spread to every corner of the globe…and it doesn’t require aliens at all.

People will say, “Okay, then…if there was a high-tech civilization that came before us, where are the remains of ancient cars, computers, helicopters,  continental highways? What happened to them?” I have an answer for both those questions.

First, watch the series Life After People, which lays out exactly how short a period of time would need to pass before all traces of our civilization disappeared.

The oldest currently discovered human habitation, Gobekli Tepi in Turkey, dates to approximately 12,000 BC. If humans were to disappear from the planet through some natural or unnatural catastrophe today, 12,000 years from now the only things that would remain identifiable are the stone and massive concrete constructs (i.e.the Hoover Dam and Mt. Rushmore, and yes, even the pyramids, are examples). Archaeologists would find no cars, no computers, no helicopters. Our continental highway system would have crumbled to sand long before that amount of time passed. Even ships lost under the seas would have long since decomposed.

Grand, planet-wide civilizations could have conceivably risen and fallen several times over the last hundred thousand years that modern humans are believed to have existed.

But what happened to at least the one which immediately preceded our own? As I’ve written here before, research the Younger-Dryas event, a cataclys

And I’m not even saying that all those civilizations would use the same tools that we currently do. It would be very much like comparing apples to oranges. They might very well have used technologies we have no knowledge of yet (automatically implying alien intervention to some people), and no doubt used something other than petrol chemicals to power their world. (Because if they had, we would not have the supply we currently do if they had depleted them as rapidly as we have.) Likewise if we’re wiped out, there will be precious little of those petroleum and its byproducts left to power the next civilization, forcing them to seek out other sources.

I’m not trying to convince anyone that this is what actually happened on our world, but give the video 30 minutes of your time and see what you think. Lord knows I can hear Ben’s eyes rolling back up into his head when I’m watching this stuff, but it explains it for me, and a lot of the questions I’ve been asking since I was a child now have answers that make sense.

I have a theory about why everything just seems to be going to shit these days.

And yes, I know this sounds crazy.

Last year Gaia, The Universe, The Divine Spirit…fate…whatever you want to call it…presented humanity a unique chance to change direction through the first wave of COVID. It was nasty, but it felt like we were growing as a society. We locked down. We started treating each other with a little more compassion. We generally stayed/worked from home, and allowed the air above the cities to clear and nature to heal a bit. Social injustices were brought to the forefront of our consciousness in a way we couldn’t ignore.  But in our hubris, the powers that be (i.e. capitalism) decreed that our society had to return to the malfunctioning state it was in previously—sooner rather than later—and look at the mess we’re in now. And those voices, rather than admitting their mistakes, are digging their heels in even further. (I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis, Greg Abbott, and other wanna-be Trump inheritors who would seemingly prefer to kill of their constituents rather than admit they were wrong.)

We were given a new path last year, and it seems that as a whole humanity has done a 180 and whoever is running this thing called life looked us right in the eye and said…

Not a magic word, but the grace to accept and embrace change. I mean, we started to, and for a while things were looking good. But then came the crazy, the greed, the foolishness of humanity that once again took hold and threw us back to where we were before all this started. As a species, and particularly as a civilization, we’ve fucked up.

And that is why it seems that every. damn. day. something is either going wrong, breaking down, or generally not doing what’s expected. We had a chance to change direction, and when it was rejected, Mr. Nedry popped up and said, “Ah, ah, ah…”

…while escaping the madness that is the approaching collapse of western civilization with Philip Glass’ Akhnaten blasting in my ears. It seems everything is falling apart and while some among us are trying to hold it all together we are increasingly surrounded by the willfully ignorant who would be just as happy to see the world burn.

Lately the idea that we aren’t the first technologically advanced civilization to inhabit this planet—and was blasted back to the stone age by a natural or unnatural event has fired my imagination.

As I’ve written before, more and more evidence is pointing to a cataclysm that shook the world to its core approximately 12,000 years ago. (See: Younger-Dryas) In short, it is postulated that a planet-wide civilization that came to an abrupt end when a comet or small asteroid smashed into and melted the a huge portion of the northern ice cap, causing worldwide flooding and an environmental catastrophe that wiped out most of the megafauna of North and South America, and raised sea level 400 feet.

Does the legend of a vast flood that wiped out everything come to mind?  Noah is but one of many such stories in the historical record.

Even a casual perusal of sites in Egypt and—in fact, sites across the planet— point out incongruities that cannot be explained in the context of the traditional accepted archeological timeline. I call them “inconvenient truths.” Whether it’s the forever enigmatic pyramids of the Giza Plateau, the Sphinx, Machu Picchu, Göbekli Tepe, or dozens of other, less-well-known sites in Egypt and across the world, something just doesn’t add up. Each of these locations contain overwhelming evidence of advanced technology having been used in their construction. Human technology. Advanced, yes, but still nonetheless human.

In my opinion this is far more likely than the ancient astronauts theories of Erich von Daniken.

While I’m not saying that aliens didn’t play a part in this at all, I just find it implausible. I think that limits discovering the truth as much as academia turning a blind eye to on the ground evidence and dismissing anything that doesn’t fit into the established timeline of how and when civilization arose, clinging to the firmly-entrenched idea that our current civilization is the apex of cultural evolution.

And this is supposed to be the apex? If that’s the case, humanity is well and truly fucked.

I am saying it’s far more likely that human civilization is cyclic, like everything else in the universe. It ebbs and flows, whether by natural calamity, or—as it would appear in our case—by our own hand.

Here is a good overview of the concepts I’m talking about:

Genuinely…just make up your own explanation for the universe. I make up gods on the daily to explain the little things, and when I’m hurt or need help, I toss a prayer out into the universe. I know they’re not real—I know that—but they’re a good scapegoat for my problems.”

As I was putting a record on the turntable just now (the soundtrack to John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness in case anyone’s interested) and just enjoying the simple act of listening to music via these spinning discs composed of dead dinosaurs, I was simultaneously thinking about the video I shared a few posts down of the earth exploding and thought, “You really do need to just relax and enjoy life as much as you can in the moment, because at any point it may just end.”

I know I haven’t been in that headspace at all for the last eight months. I’ve either been mourning the past or worrying about the future—and only rarely simply living in the present.

I shall strive to do better.

That’s where it started for me. That’s where this 24/7, always on, connected lifestyle Hell started.

Picture it: San Francisco 1989

It was over a year between the time I got my first computer—giving up weekends at the beach—and the purchase of my first modem. A few of my cutting edge friends had already had them and seemed to enjoy the ready access to porn and chatting with complete strangers on the other end of the line that the early BBS system provided. Cost was an issue, but I threw caution to the wind (as I am wont to do) and picked up some no-name generic internal 2400 baud modem at one of the many weekend computer fairs that used to occur in the Bay Area at the time. And of course, once I discovered the easy acquisition of photos of naked men and steamy conversations with complete strangers, I started getting complaints from my friends that whenever they called me the line was busy, so that inevitably led to the installation of a second phone line so people could actually reach me. People used to call?

Anyone remember Procomm Plus? (Used as recently as 2012 at my first job in Denver, but sadly now completely gone.)

Anyhow…

It was so easy to rack up charges on that second line, let me tell you. Several of the “good” porn BBSes were out of state, and—unlike the dial-anywhere-for-the-same-price world we live in today—there was this little thing called “long distance” that you paid a premium for.

As for the chatting BBS world, in their heyday San Francisco was chock full of choices. I only remember the names of two, although I’m sure had accounts on nearly all of them at one point. Those two were Jox and The Station House. (I suppose I could go through my journals from the 90s and suss the names out, but nobody got time for that.)*

Many deep and abiding friendships sprung from those BBSes, several of which remain to this day. And were these BBS relationships incestuous? Oh, most certainly. It was a running joke that everyone on Station House would eventually sleep with everyone else.

Then along came AOHell and the chat rooms.

Again, a lot of nights wasted downloading questionable files and chatting with equally questionable strangers, but also spawning a few more enduring friendships and more than one cross-country flight to meet some man who had piqued my curiosity on the other end of the data connection. (You know who you are.)

One of those special friendships sprung from my initial forays into the online world. As recounted in my journal from 1995:

I had quite a shock last week when I opened THE SENTINEL:

I hadn’t spoken with Michael Nelson since shortly before my ill-fated relocation.  At that time, sometime during August, he seemed distant and uncommunicative.  I remember him being almost angry with me for calling.  I haven’t called him back because I sensed that something was terribly wrong.  The funny thing is, all the years that I knew Michael, not once did he ever admit to having AIDS.  Sure, he had his bouts with bizarre infections and whatnot, and on some level I knew that’s what the problem was, but I never broached the subject with him, feeling that he really didn’t want to discuss it.

I met Michael on-line in 1989.  It was on a tacky little BBS called JOX.  I don’t remember what my handle was at the time, but he was FIRESTARTER.  JOX was a pretty boring place until Michael showed up and we connected.  I don’t remember exactly how it all started, but I think someone made an innocuous little remark about “wanting to get off this rock”, and from there it snowballed.  Michael and I leapt in, spinning tales of lascivious interstellar activities at Abraxan Laundromats, accosting three-penised cruiser stewards and, of course, the ever-popular story of the “strapless blue-sequined evening gown” borrowed by one of us from the other which had been returned quite soiled and unwearable.  As time drew on, JOX eventually folded, and Michael and I lost touch with each other.  He reappeared on THE STATION HOUSE as FIRESTAR a year or so later, and our friendship was rekindled.  In addition, after many long years, we finally met face to face.  There was no lust between us; only a genuine friendship and fondness for the bizarre.  Our on-line conversations inevitably returned to the fact that we’d been “stranded” on Earth due to one or both of us screwing up some piece of navigational equipment.  Michael had been in charge of stashing the ship somewhere that it wouldn’t be discovered, and I had to come up with a plausible explanation for what we’d been doing here in the first place, if—and this was quite unlikely—the rescue ship ever arrived.  We knew in our hearts, however, that we were stuck here, with only our wits and intelligence to get us home.  It looks like Michael finally succeeded, without, I might add, telling me where he’d hidden the damn spaceship!

Though we saw each other only infrequently, I shall sorely miss him. When is this madness going to stop?

I doubt that the Mark who existed in 1988—or even years later when he wrote those words—could have anticipated the insidious way this once newfound and initially rather innocent online connectedness would infiltrate and consume our lives. Sitting here in 2021, cursing out the fact that our “smart” appliances still can’t figure out when we’re home or away and reminding myself that we are still in the infancy of this revolution, I fully expect future historians to view the arrival of the Internet as we do the Industrial Revolution; something that seemingly sprang out of nowhere and fundamentally changed society.

*Curiosity got the better of me and I plummeted down the black hole that are my journals. A few names that popped up were Eye Contact, Folsom Street BBS, Fog City BBS, Boys Town and The Bear Cave, but I still could find no reference to Station House‘s main competitor. Too many instances of “so-and-so who I met from the BBS.” Ugh.