John Wise

It’s 5:30 in the morning, and the trail is still dark, but it’s beautiful out here, away from sidewalks and cars. It’s dawn in the desert, and with any luck, it’ll soon be dawn for humanity. Like the coming and going of night and day, the cycle of repetition is one we are all accustomed to, but in my messaging, I feel that I’m supposed to be aware of being redundant. Funny how in music, art motifs, television and movie storylines, advertisements, sports, politics, architecture, medicine, driving a car, shopping, and so many other things, we rely on patterns being repeated again and again, but the author is supposed to find originality and limit the frequency of how much they repeat themselves. Well, here I am, beating my well-worn drum that risks raising a chorus of, “Yeah, John, we’ve heard this before,” but it bears repeating that it’s time to emerge from our dark age and face a new dawn.

If anyone should wonder if I really do think so frequently about the state of affairs regarding the bulk of humanity, I do. Every time I witness the poor intellectual and social behavior of someone in public, I equate it to poor hygiene where the person in their belligerence, refuses to clean away feces after taking a dump, nor do they much care about showering. So, we who encounter them must smell their god-awful stench until we find a route to move in avoidance of their putrefying presence. And if you suspect that I’m being overdramatic to prove a point about my disdain, you’d be fooling yourself, as it is our generalized antipathy towards intellectualism that may as well allow shit to fall from our mouths and actions. Ah, you must be one of those idealists or believers in a utopian fantasy, you ask. That would be your folly to think so; is it utopian to desire fresh foods in grocery stores, water made available for drinking and cooking, roads for commerce and recreation, or a commonly spoken language?

There are levels of civility that are achievable without demanding uniformity, conformity, or obeisance to hegemonistic monoliths, but accepting the perpetuation of inferior reasoning bordering on something akin to where our ancestors were some 200,000 years ago is, in this age, a crime against humanity. Don’t go assuming that I cannot accept my fellow hominin who is not well versed in physics, mathematics, philosophy, medicine, or chemistry, as I have an indelible amount of respect for many in labor positions. None of us have all the answers, not the smartest, not the richest, not the angriest, not the most powerful. Group intelligence arises when social cohesion allows us to function for the betterment of abstraction, such as making a better society, working to achieve something like going to space, curing disease, building monuments to our beliefs, or elevating the processes around education so we can search for a better future.

When bogged down under the gloom of uncertainty, we act petty and frightened like weasels hiding in the underbrush. Humanity, even under the threat of global illness, still has more to look forward to than we are exhibiting. We have a functional science and medicine industry on a global scale that is trying to remedy the ailments that threaten us. We could, regardless of the veracity of specifics, tackle repairing our environment if, for no other reason than when nature is at its most beautiful, we are in the highest state of delight. Our ability to communicate and share across cultural and linguistic divides no longer has any impediments; if a Mongolian teenager is a skateboarder and musician who rocks the morin khuur to make a soundtrack to their 3D animation opening credits using free software from the Netherlands and then records video of themselves on a Chinese phone before sharing the production on YouTube, I can watch the clip minutes later in Phoenix, Arizona, while Google translates the spoken words into subtitles.

Instead, I’m bombarded with stories about storms and how many people were displaced or killed, the entire globe hears about a shooter in Las Vegas that murders 60 people, or a pack of men who rape a woman in India is on an endless loop demonstrating the barbarity of it all. How does this milieu of shit inspire anyone? The sensationalized atrocities of the sickest among us are the fodder of a pack of predators who need a population cowed into fear who will lock themselves away, arm themselves, wear their leather-tough persona like a badge of aggression so everyone knows they are serious about not putting up with the sick and depraved. On the other hand, how does society demonstrate how we desire to embrace positive change regardless of the cost? How do we welcome the brainiest without bullying them into neurosis? When do we put down the rabid dog that would infect us all with its venom of vitriol and morbid malevolence? We apparently do not, and instead, we remain in darkness under the cover of ignorance.

Life in the watery domain, life in the gaseous realm, life within other matter, and then there is our life in the universe of thought. Although imbued with cognitive ability, the majority of our time spent is similar to the wren while looking for morsels to sustain themselves or that of the sardine locked in a giant school.

When and how are we supposed to look within the catalog of what we’ve fed our mind and imagination? Can we excavate a meaningful wealth of articulation that might sustain our most human characteristics? Why do we still relegate this task to such a small cadre to whom we’ve given the titles artist or creator?

As I sit here in the warm breeze of the Sonoran desert, miles away from the city but still close enough to the road to hear cars passing by, I try to ask myself, what is it that drives me to seek out these places of solitude? What do I believe or hope to understand as a lizard scurries by or the faint song of birds in the sparse landscape is heard? What might someone who’s never been here think of if they were to take my place? Would their experience be close enough to my own as to be indistinguishable?

Maybe this line of thinking is a silly exercise similar to wondering what the flavor of strawberry means to the next 100 people I encounter. Somehow, this relegates me to feeling like I’m in a school of fish and I’m asking the other sardines to meaningfully describe how they are perceiving the ocean water surrounding them. But they are fish living instinctually and have not left a sculpture or painting behind that reflects the time they lived in any particular period of their evolution.

The plants are mostly still, and if they do move, it’s imperceptible until a wind kicks up and agitates their solemn meditation of being witness to all that moves around and over them. We people, on the other hand, abhor this vacuum of perceived nothingness. More often than not, we bring along our frenetic chaos of noise, which has come to represent purpose while warding off isolation so that we might tolerate a place in which we would otherwise be alone.

We drag this construct, learned by an ever-present television or smartphone, into every inch of our lives. In our cars, we must have music, a podcast, or a talk show that figuratively allows us to remain with others. While on the trail, river, ocean, or almost any other pathway where precious quiet might be appreciated, we plug in our earbuds and bring the tools that absolve our minds from having a conversation with ourselves.

It’s not uncommon in my encounters with the baking flora of this environment to enter into a nearly symbiotic relationship with the grass, the cactus, or a small bush, in which I experience about the same amount of movement and an equal bit of communication. I’m an immovable fixture in the landscape, a witness to a world where reality is slow to change. But then, in an instant, I’ll be thrust back into the maelstrom of my artificial reality, where I’ll reluctantly surrender solitude for the existence I’m most familiar with being a sardine.

And like the sardine lost in a vast school stretching 7 kilometers before me and nearly a kilometer on either side of me, I swim in the shit left by the sardines ahead of me, blind to my many neighbors soiling the environment. As people, we move along, never questioning how our fogged minds resemble the feces-laden water through which sardines follow each other. Such is the school that values social cohesion more than individuality.

My Facebook page is typically populated with some of the following subjects:

• Synthesizers
• German news and culture
• Philosophy
• Gilles Deleuze
• Computer graphics
• Electronic music
• Audio engineering
• Photogrammetry matters
• Blender 3D
• Computational design
• Various Artists
• Artificial intelligence
• Generative arts
• Gourmet food sources
• A few museums
• Whitewater adventure travel

And yet the Facebook engine makes suggestions for me such as Todd Rundgren instead of Blixa Bargeld, viral videos instead of music tutorials, worn-out memes trying to target my age group, tributes to old actors from the 80s as though I were into that kind of thing, medications for ailments that don’t affect me (yet), even going so far as to present me with assisted living options. WTF?

I’m not into Star Wars, comic books, fast food restaurant openings, John Lennon’s birthday, retiree activities, or looking in on animals tortured by living in zoos. What is interesting is how Facebook is trying to pigeonhole me into a demographic that some indicators are telling them I should be fitting into.

I also notice that when I’m looking at other people’s posts on my page, the comments in a language other than English are filtered out, and I have to ask to see “All Comments.” What kind of intolerance for things that are different are these Borgs fostering?

It’s obvious there is a peering agreement with Google for what I search for, or maybe it’s just Facebook reading cookies from my computer, but they should be able to see that I don’t just watch Russian crash videos and people doing stupid stuff or search for what ails me. Why don’t they suggest cooking videos from Indonesia, music from Poland, or rafting adventures from South America? Nope, none of that, just the shit that appeals to my lizard brain for quick dopamine release. But that’s NOT what I want, and because of that, I’m in a constant battle to click on the Hide All Recommendations from this content provider as I did with this Pro Football Hall of Fame crap.

Maybe Facebook is an advanced artificial intelligence nostalgia machine looking to abuse my sense of desiring the familiar. I’m 57 and somehow, the algorithm thinks I’d benefit from having a skateboard channel popped into my awareness. Now, either it is calculating through my purchases and previous viewing habits that I’m still into skateboarding, or it’s looking to have me connect with a version of myself from 43 years ago. How do I tell the snippet of code dedicated to John that I abhor nostalgia and that in its attempt to exploit my weakness, it is in fact breeding resentment?