Dr. Bacteria or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the End

"Science holds plenty of exotic worlds that are not exactly parallel to our own. Rather they overlap outs to a degree but are generally outside direct human experience. Beyond frequencies of sound that we can hear and of light that we can see, very different realities can present themselves."

This is a quote taken directly from the December 2007 issue of Scientific American, page 12 - the 'From The Editor' column. It is a warm-up for the readers to an article by Peter Byrne on page 98 of that issue, an article about Physicist Hugh Everett who in the mid-twentieth century met with disdain and unfavorable responses from much of the scientific community when he proposed a 'Many worlds' multiverse theory. Go here for a slightly annoying but nevertheless fun explanation of Everett's theory utilizing, what else, SuperMario.

Anyway, I woke up later again today and once more found myself swimming up from the deepest reaches of dream-state. This is interesting because that means the subject of all of my recent blogs here have merged, what with dreams and now multiple realities and the idea of 'thing beyond human experience shaping our world.' Because today I double back and talk about what I really think is going to be the 'Big Bad' to our modern life plotline, and that my friends, is bacteria.

Bacteria.

Please allow to quote just a little more from that SCI/AM to further set the stage of my ramblings: "The Universe of the gamma ray spectrum, for example, is utterly invisible to us. But it is painted in the colors of the most energetic events in the cosmos: massive stellar explosions, g]black hold collisions and similar catastrophes."

Okay, I could go on because after I woke up, got my pot of Dunkin Donuts coffee brewing and stopped in the latrine before beginning my customary first-thing-up blogging (to get the juices, and fingers, flowing for the day's real writing) I picked up the Scientific American and found it to be exactly pertinent to thoughts I'd lain down over the last several days or so.

It seems such a marvelous triumph to me that science has, in the last half of the twentieth century and now beyond into what we in our life times would once have thought of as "The Future", come around to a place where it not just recognizes there are entire corridors of the known Universe that are outside of the human experience/perception but CAN PROVE IT. This is especially titillating to those of us who secretly long for some big, undefinable and awesome experience to touch our lives and make the world around us seem that much more beautiful and grandiose: religion does it for some but not for me, although I suppose one has to be careful that in their alternative searches they don't just end up becoming devout "INSERT BELIEF SYSTEM HERE" something I found myself doing a little more than five years ago in regards to studying the occult, most specifically Chaos Magick*

So yeah, there are thing that our race of egotists and species-snobs just cannot comprehend with our limited senses, no matter how great and all-knowing we think we are. And on that note I'd like to take you back to the other day's blog where I prattled on about my dreams a decade ago that warned me of a coming extinction event and how my own personal investigations had convinced me that despite the aura of the dream clinging to the idea of the word 'Nuclear' preceding the event, I know believe (and have believed for some time) that what we really have to worry about is Bacteria.

Think of it like this:

In the last twenty years Antibiotics have become a widespread relief for everything from the common cold to any of the other inconvenient little eco-systems that pop up in our blood streams and high jack our bodies for days, sometimes weeks at a time. This is because those antibiotics work. And in the blossoming 'neat and sterile' island of Western Culture we continually refine and replenish the idea that you would have to wait until you came down with such an illness became unthinkable, thus the dawn of the widespread Antibacterial products: hand soap, dish soap, every kind of soap. There's even that antibacterial goo that comes in the small bottle for us to rub on our hands whenever we think we may have come into contact with something that could be 'dirty' enough to lead us into a cold or worse. So everybody's all neat and clean and protected in the modern age, right?

Hold on a minute.

Think about this: for every one day we live bacteria, a microorganism that exists in a dimension that we humans cannot see without the aid of a microscope, cycles through generations. Thus, extending the 'treat-it-before-it-happens' life plan on to a much longer time line, what we are going to find using science or even just the most basic reductive reasoning is that Bacteria, which is like us and other life forms in that the more contact with something that negatively affects its immune system the more it will be able to marshal its forces and eventually, generations later, overcome that something, will eventually evolve past the point where our treatments will work on it. This will take some time, however it is a race being run in two different dimensions, ours and the microcosm of the bacteria, and that means our clock doesn't apply, because again, in relation to us humans, Bacteria evolves faster.

I've been saying this for years but now we've begun to see it. H1N1? Originally called Swine Flu. How many people did you know that had it, because I knew two. And wasn't it like some demented Gilliam/Orwellian science fiction setting to see those pink billboards at the height of that outbreak that colloquialized and even attempted to make 'hip' and 'cool' the immunization shot?

Bacteria can travel too. If you read Howard Bloom's book The Global Brain you'll hear all about how millions of years before we or any other proto-sentient life came along Planet Earth's highest lifeform was Bacteria and it managed to do a lot of the things we think we are so special for doing today with just their DNA and its continued refinement.

They traveled across the globe.

They set up vast and far-reaching communcation networks.

They evolved. Maybe too much, because they eventually led to us, however, that process could always be wiped clean and begun again. In the event of a global human population scything Bacteria may also be damaged, but being that they are more resilient and existing on a micro scale, they'll be back long before we are.

Now why do I seem so hellbent on an extinction event? I'm not, but look around. Better yet, go here and stare at the numbers in the center of the screen. Then, when you've committed at least the last two or three places to memory, hit refresh a couple of times.

world population clock

Now do you get it?

Yeah, so throw away your antibacterial stuff and the next time you get sick, stick it out. We're supposed to go through that stuff from time to time - that's what the bacteria does when we bomb the hell out of it with our fancy shmancy pharmaceuticals and its getting stronger.

The race is on.



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* Which is especially ridiculous for any out there who are familar with that particular paradigm. But the important thing was I caught myself! What can I say, raised in a Christian house (not an overbearing one however) I recognize there is certain 'programming' that's been hard-wired into my head. The trick is to locate it when it activates and then hit the DELETE button until it is gone.

Remember Where You are now so You can Get Back Here Later.

So I am currently shopping my second completed novel. Technically I've completed three, but that third one (or actually it's the first one, Thee Subtle War) I've 'completed' about three times. It was the first novel I attempted to write and as such it is the one I've had the most trouble reconciling with my 'voice' since I have honed it. Although there are many parts of Thee Subtle War I like from those earlier versions as a whole I could never quite stand the book. Perhaps this has a lot to do with the lack of follow-through on the plot, which was originally a fanboy's attempt at imitating Grant Morrison's The Invisibles. Over time my fixation on all things Morrison has waned enough for me to find my own voice (although that will hopefully evolve with time) – I still love The Invisibles and everything else the man writes, but I've gotten over my starstruck period of intense influence at the hands of his art. With this evolution Thee Subtle War has evolved as well, but through it all one main idea has remained consistent. The theme of the book shoots off of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, combining it with science in a way I do not believe anyone else has ever attempted. So these more recent versions now too are 'influenced' by another author's work, but with each new winnowing of Thee Subtle War I feel I pull Lovecraft's ideas more and more into my own world, instead of vice versa.

I have no problem with this, realizing now that ultimately Thee Subtle War will be something that I will publish down the road, after I have a name and fan base (which I Will have).

The book I'm currently shopping is 100% me and a direct result of many of the experiences I've had in my own life. I tend to write a lot about fucked up people, drugs, alcohol and a certain longing that I keep with me for lonely, intoxicated nights when I can almost smell the south suburban Chicago rain in the air and realize that the past is not a when but a where, and something I can easily invoke with the right combination of music, substances and lighting.

The Ghost of Violence Past is my attempt at an imaginary confrontation with a very real demon from my own past, a boy I once called friend who went on to murder several people I knew for no reason other than, I suppose, he felt he could.

What do you say to someone who has done those things? I don't know, and never will, as although my avatar in the story is both willing and able to confront the killer from his childhood, I most certainly never will.

I would never want that person to know that I even still remember him.

After finishing The Ghost of Violence Past I recently began a new story, tentatively titled '2 A.M. Corridors'. Corridors is built around my experiences as a drug-taking, alcohol-swilling bartender in the South Suburbs of Chicago. It is an exercise in merging the time travel I experience with drugs and music with the world where I lived and worked, fucked drank and snorted for five years until I met the love of my life and turned the page (and what a heavy page it was to turn, moving 3000 miles away). One of the main influences on the aforementioned period of my life (as with all periods of my life) was music,and it is to help set and maintain the mood that I have utilized very particular playlists for this particular project. Below is a widget containing the main throng of songs that compliment the atmosphere and motivation of 2 A.M. Corridor's characters and story. As the story evolves I will most likely assemble and post more of these, perhaps even with excerpts from the book. My hopes in sharing these is that so that when people eventually read the story they can let me know whether or not the story and music contain/convey one another.

Life is a series of stories, culled together in a pantomime of chapters arranged in, apparently, no particular order. As a writer I attempt to impose my Will, my 'Order' on it so that when I am gone, my life will remain.

In the trenches...

... It's been a pretty strange year, eh?

Actually, no scratch that. It is not that it's been a strange year - that is a cop out, a product of human language to say something that is pseudo-important not in the interest of being observant but in the inability we have of keeping ourselves in check when it comes to opening our mouths just to open our mouths.

So let me start again.

It has been strange, evolving through this bizarre matrix of intervals that we long ago fashioned restraints for using out language, to find myself utterly convinced that we live in what I would have recognized as science fiction when I was in fourth grade or below.

There.

Perhaps it is a product of being a child of what we refer to, here in western civilization, as the middle class. The middle class is not a shield, but it is a fence of sorts - a partition. We may not have had a lot of money growing up but we were, because of the institutions and social mores of this country, not in need of much. I had a roof, three square meals and a continuous loop of education for the pre-advised intervals, so maybe it was a fence, or blinder rather, to what the world really is.

Science fiction.

Seriously, I have detailed in my Bartender Chronicles blog the moment that I realized that there was no such thing as an 'Adult' - a mythical being of maturity and responsibility that children are taught they will turn into if they do good in school, get a good job and marry for the sake of propagating the species. But this goes beyond that.

Life is surreal not because clocks drip from trees or Jesus appears as a conquistador, but because we are taught through words and through repetitious reinforcement that certain key guidelines are always in place, governing us and the world we live in. Good triumphs over evil, Love can beat all, good people are rewarded, bad people are punished, etc. And sure, we can probably all name examples where these statements are true and more where they are not, but the very fact that we are raised to believe that these ideals are plentiful, or some kind of Universal Absolute is the basis for the real illusion - an illusion that some people never get to see behind. And when you do see behind it, when you're standing in a grocery store at 10 PM on a Thursday and realize just how alien a concept it is for droves of people to walk up and down brightly lit isles choosing from literally millions of products that have been researched to glisten and call to us with expensive, environment-defeating packaging while not too far away someone is taking part in a conference call that is going to cost thousands of people their jobs, or someone else is paying for a donut with a piece of currency that has passed through the hands of hundreds of people who died for it's possession, all while invisible, human-appointed 1's and 0's make and break the building of new cities, traveling devices and entertainments that suck us dry of our zest for actual, physical experience, well, that's when you have to either recognize that the world we live in is stranger than the science fiction we used to think was so strange and 'fictional' or maybe check yourself into an ECT treatment center.

Mostly I think those people who do not see things for what they are choose to adhere to the guidelines they've been ingrained with, because if in this day and age, the beginning of man-made interval 2009, you cannot see the absolute pure, swirling chaos all around us EVERY MINUTE OF EVERY DAY then you probably are in need of something stronger than I can give you here.

so what the hell good does all my jibber-jawin' here do, anyway?

Sadly, not much. But as my high school guidance counselor once told me, just being insightful enough to be aware of what is really going on is at least a step in the right direction. Only I don't believe that as much anymore, but I too am so ingrained in my own personal minutia-intensive Universe to get up and go out and DO SOMETHING. Also, I am largely non-violent and maybe it's a cop-out but it seems more and more to me like the only change that is ever going to really come is going to have to be on the back of drastic, world altering conflict.

Who knows.