Inventories

(This post is brought to you by the keen and prolific William Schuller, a dear friend and stage beast.)

(This was unedited. Do not judge a man too harshly.)

This story is about a town--no, not a town, a city. In this city there were only cyborgs. Cyborgs are normal human beings who also have a powerful computer brain attached to their regular one, so that they are both good at thinking the ways humans are (can tell the difference between a bird and a pumpkin, can synthesize information according to natural language, can tell jokes) and the ways computers are (can rank any number of objects, no matter their differences, according to arbitrary values in an instant, can add very quickly, can do trigonometry). The cyborgs found after not very long at all that one additional advantage of being a cyborg is instantaneous communication between everybody all at once, which both removed the need for shouting and made certain key phrases and witticisms, given a context that was easily understood by all, instant hits within the cyborg community. Soon in this city, whose name was Elibom, certain phrases became instantaneously recognizeable and in fact learned by heart by everyone because they were both very clever and dumb enough for most people to understand. The individual words of these phrases themselves became like the stars of a hit movie--so well known, and eventually so inextricably linked with their original phrases, that all shades of meaning they had in other contexts but that were not used in that phrase became obsolete and forgotten. They were the rugged individualists of words, who soon didn't even need any other words at all to signify the one, mean, particular thing that they finally meant. And everybody knew them. The capacities of cyborg brains are such that the celebrity status of certain words never faded, and as you have already guessed every word in the language, from the most innocuous particle to the most obscure medical terminology became recognized in this way, and without the subtle variegated flavor that each word once possessed, language among the cyborgs in Elibom was useless unless some cyborg wanted to reference a forgotten bon mot from the beginning of the city's foundation. Computers can work very fast, and these human-computer brains were no exception: this shocking degredation of verbal communication, which by the way took with it poetry, literature, funny jokes, and mysterious proverbs, occurred in less than one second. So, with words each being totally independent from every other word, with them being like cowboys or colonial explorers or those birds who only see another of their kind twice: their mother, and their child, in their lifetimes, it became necessary to invent a new language altogether, one which could not be easily passed around the myriad interlinked robot brains of Elibom, and one which could not be processed rapidly like computers. This language did not have words that could go out on their own--none of those Teddy Roosevelt words, which must be kept away from other Teddy Roosevelts because if they see each other each TR will instantly fight the other, believing him to be a ferocious bear. (Actually, this is why the secret service was invented over a hundred years ago: to keep the President Teddy Roosevelt from seeing, and thus fighting to the death, any of the other thousands of Teddy Roosevelts which were wandering America at the time. It would have been bad publicity, and therefore bad for America). The new language of the cyborgs broke words down into three parts: an invitation, a stream of meaning, and a goodbye, so that for any cyborg to communicate using words, they would have to first catch the attention of another, indicate soundlessly that a word was to be said from the speaker to the listener, evoke the particular meaning that the speaker wished to create, and then signal unequivocally that the word was over, but hopefully in not such a final fashion that the listener would turn away, thinking that just that one word was the entirety of what the speaker wanted to say. As you might imagine, speeches, advertisements, rants, commands, and frankly a lot of other much less offensive types of communication were casualties of the new language, and it was a bit lonely at first, but somehow the cyborgs got on.

Haiku of the Day:

Oh, I loved to feel

My old bicycle rattle

On the cobblestones.

Today's Drawing (inspired by the word "argot". I drew Jason on the Argo speaking an argot with a fish and a bird.)

Today's "365" Project (Make something with glass. I chose to inventory all the unwashed glasses in my apartment and record their contents.)

Clockwise, from top left: (1) a juice glass from a set once bought for my father, now with dried rye whisky on the bottom (bottle included for reference). (2) Glasses that were sitting on my desk for a long time. One seems clean, and the other (a preternaturally fragile cup with a metal handle and cradle from a set once belonging to my dead grandmother) has crumbs and toenail clippings in it. (3) Pint glasses containing stale tap water and approximately .001% backwash. (4) A mason jar with a brown ring in the bottom. It's my jar but the unwashed brown stain is my roommate's.