John Wise

I come here without much spleen and a skull that feels relatively empty, but I do need to get on with some writing.

Opening the editor with nothing to say and hoping that this cat skull that now sits in a hydrogen peroxide bath will spark something witty to fall from my imagination feels as futile as thinking this cat might say hello. As a reminder, this skull came to us when Caroline scooped it out of its roadside fur sarcophagus back on June 1st. It wasn’t good enough to just pick it up to get a closer look; she brought it home. After nearly two months of it sitting out on our balcony baking away more of the still decaying flesh clinging to its bones, the wife brought it into the kitchen to finish the task of cleaning things up. Now it sits in that mason jar, looking creepy.

I’m not going to be satisfied in writing about how ghoulish Caroline can be because she’s not really that, she’s just seriously curious. Yeah, I know there are other things to be interested in, but when an opportunity presents itself, she takes the bait. So I sit here waiting for the floodgates of inspiration to strike and instead find the spleen I’ve vented so often about this, that, and the other to be talking to my brain saying, “That shit’s gotten boring, write about something else, ANYTHING else.”

I know: “How about you watch some YouTube?” I can’t be the only person for whom streaming and social media are becoming boring. No, I must turn to this page with 450 words on it already and tie something together so I can be at peace with myself that my fingers are still able to talk for my brain. Speaking of brains, staring at the skull in the jar is radically different than looking at this photo. What I mean to say is that my brain knows the object in the photo, but when looking at the skull itself, there’s a kind of perception where the animal that was embodied can be understood as a living, moving entity and not just the subject frozen in pixels. I can look at the teeth and sense their use during the lifespan of however long this cat lived. The feline that relied upon its mouth to nourish itself could have never had the recognition that nine months after it died, someone would be gazing upon the place its mouth once was and consider how it would have chewed its food or extended its tongue beyond those fangs to help groom itself. While the animated pulse of life is gone, the ghost of its existence survives based on images of other cats I’ve known, as I had no contact with this animal prior to its demise.

Just like me, that cat rose up from the soil after having been birthed, following the encounter of its parents that produced a litter. Its bones, brain, fur, organs, nerves, and curiosity propelled it through a world where it sought out shelter, food, and social interactions with people and other animals. Now it’s silent. Was it a friendly house cat or a feral hissing thing? Did it purr a thousand times in its life or ten thousand times? Could it remember its mother? Are its offspring living in my neighborhood? How does this contrast to my fellow humans?

We are over 7 billion, and I know nearly none of them. They, too are going about lives unaware that someday someone else might be staring at their skulls and wondering what kind of life they had. But bones don’t tell very good stories beyond the obvious biological ones we’ve been able to figure out. We won’t know how they enjoyed music, food, night skies, the affection of others, or the color of their first car. It’s only from these words we attempt to leave for posterity that someone else might come to some greater insight into who inhabited the bones they are contemplating.

So I guess it doesn’t matter if I once again spill my guts of dissatisfaction regarding politics or the state of education, as who would begrudge me for eating pizza 100 times over a lifetime? Every time we return to something, we experience it a little differently, although the nuance of the encounter is typically lost in the repetition of what we accept as a kind of routine. Still, the pizza cannot be the same from maker to maker and what stage we are at in our lives. So, can thoughts and ideas be shared in an identical manner from year to year when we are no longer the person we were a year before?

Today, a train is burning on a bridge in Tempe, Arizona, after it derailed. We as a species and as individuals will not be known by this mechanical anomaly that is being featured with big drama on the news media, and yet that is what we are focused on right now. The U.S. Representative and civil-rights leader John Lewis died recently and while on one hand a common man, he was an extraordinary man that surpassed what many will be able to accomplish in a lifetime. He’ll be remembered as his story has been captured over and again during the nearly 60 years he was politically active. Mass murderers such as Stephen Paddock will find their place in the history of humanity even though he was responsible for the death of 59 people in Las Vegas one night. This is because, at our current stage of development we are still struck by the sideshow, celebrities, and tragedies far more than we are with someone who just goes about their life.

In a universe where no less than 7 billion minds might be able to contemplate their place in the cosmos, we can’t know if, in 50,000 years, anyone will wonder anything more about John Lewis or John Wise as by then, maybe we are just the lost bone fragments and ash from a side branch of evolution that came and went as the previous eight hominid species that walked the Earth in the past 300,000 years did before us.

Then, when I think about what the average Egyptian or Greek might have thought about particular circumstances during classical antiquity, could it possibly have any bearing on how we see anything today? I think the obvious answer is no, but then again, what if the lessons of early people had been codified and our minds had evolved to take from the best lessons and use those to guide ourselves? Some may say that is religion, but I’d disagree as I can’t see most Western religions being about the fundamentals of good living. Instead, they are guides to subservience to the powerful. That, though, is a whole other subject that risks taking this entry off the tiny rail it’s barely skating on. The bigger point was, do we care how somebody saw their world in 300 B.C. or even in 1930? Well, I do, and if I could peer over the shoulder of someone preparing dinner 2,000 years ago in Italy or read the diary of a person in western Africa after being raided by slave traders, I’d be up to be that fly on the wall.

Go back further, and I certainly would love to watch the people who were painting horses and other animals in Chauvet Cave 35,000 years ago, and if all that was available was a transcript, I’d take it. Share with me a real day in the life 130,000 years ago of one of the earliest Neanderthals and how they saw their world. I’d sign up for a front-row ticket. In this capacity, I write as someone who may as well be from the Homo erectus branch of archaic humans. Like them, I know how to use fire, tools, and desire to care for others, most notably Caroline. Unlike them, I have some limited mastery of abstract symbolic tools that only require gestures for me to extract knowledge from an electronic library and to communicate with others. But ask me if I believe that after 2 million years of hominin evolution, I believe we are on the cusp of enlightenment, and I’d have to say we are likely still hundreds of thousands of years away. Collectively, we are too primitive and enraged to qualify as truly smart and aware.

Ten thousand years from now, I think my quaint musings on whatever topic will appear primitive and nearly stone-age, and that’s if they are even retrievable. From a pair of eyes out of the future, might someone look upon my metaphoric skull wondering about what this creature was chewing on that they felt compelled to leave some hints about just one more anonymous life amongst the trillions that preceded it? How long will they stare at the word shell of John, trying to decipher what kind of Homo sapiens I was? I wonder what kind of voice the cat, I will never listen to, had. I can only wonder.

130 days and 80 blog entries ago, I wrote my first self-isolation post to chronicle our time staying at home. This was going to be a daily post about what promised to be an extraordinary moment in our lives. We made the decision to self-isolate before San Francisco committed to a lockdown and a full two weeks before our state of Arizona decided it was in our best interest to issue a stay-at-home order. After less than two weeks, the writing task grew burdensome, becoming a reflection of anxiety triggered by watching a country doing everything wrong to suppress the outbreak. Documenting the lunacy was going to make me crazy, so I diverted my attention. More than that, though, I never thought back then that things would be getting worse by the middle of summer, no matter how incompetently state and federal officials were acting.

But here we are, and I feel like some kind of update is in order. I’m in need of new shoes as I’ve put 581 miles on my current pair in less than 90 days. I’ve walked 903 total Covid-miles since we locked our door and threw away the key. At some point, our bodies seemed to be craving junk food,  but the In N Out we opted for wasn’t the greatest, which had me feeling I was losing the taste for fast food after all this home cooking. On another day, I picked up a pizza that did, in fact, hit the spot. So did the brisket from HEK Yeah Barbecue. And two stops out in Globe, Arizona, for Mexican food were both terrific, so I’m not fully against going out for dinner again. That’s pretty much our extent of eating out in 130 days, besides the obligatory visits to grocery stores. My trusty digital travel companion Marlene (my Surface Book) grows dusty as it sits on my right, aging without purpose. I think Caroline has been in our car maybe half a dozen times since mid-March. Our lives remain different and stuck in the loop of a virus.

While this new stage in life has become routine, it still feels temporary and that, somehow, things are going to change. I have some thoughts about that change.

Predictions:

I’ve never been in the driver’s seat when it comes to predictions, so this exercise in making them is nothing more than folly. For some background on my lack of ability to ordain the future, let me share the following: In 1977, I heard punk rock for the first time and thought it was the next big thing, but by 1979, I’d moved on to the next bigger thing, industrial music and, a year after that, power electronics or noise. Punk took off in 1991 with Nirvana, while industrial and noise still haven’t had their moments in the sun. In 1988, I installed Turbo Silver on my Amiga computer, and two years later, I clamored to get the very first copy of Imagine, another 3D software application, while I was in Germany. I just knew that everyone would be learning how to model and animate wrong. My internet cafe in 1995 didn’t have private terminals to view porn, so the draw didn’t quite work out. Then, in 1998, I was certain there’d be a revolution in clustered computing, giving kids the power of supercomputers – yeah, that never happened. Jump to 2014, and virtual reality was going to be explosive – nope, again. My career as a trendsetter has an abysmal record, and I can now see that those things I enjoy might actually suffer from finding popularity due to my interest. Jeez, I wonder how many authors I’ve hurt and how many musicians I’ve kept in poverty? Anyway, this entry is not a mea culpa of my personal cultural failures; it is about my predictions for our dystopian future so that my being wrong once again saves humanity from my skewed sense-certainty of what comes next.

There will not be a return to normal as we once knew it. Over the past few days, the news is trickling in that antibodies against COVID-19 only last about 90 days, and with that, it is likely that immunity from a vaccine will also only be good for about 90 days. So, if this trickle is destined to be a flood on confirmation that the best we can hope for is about 90 days of protection, that means this virus will continue to devastate humanity. As far as the vaccine is concerned, my money would be that people who are willing to travel by air will be one part of those on the priority list of who receive it. Law enforcement, health care workers, educators, food handlers, farmworkers, and the military will be the others at the top of the list.

I believe that sporting events, restaurants, concerts, and theaters are all going to be greatly altered and, in many cases, will just close up shop. For the anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, and flat-earthers, I’ll posit they will be marginalized from performing their economic consumption online and eating at home as they’ll be barred from entering establishments that will be barely hanging on. Travel as we knew it is over as how will communities know if those visiting aren’t carrying the virus with them? As tax and tourism revenue disappear, so will health services, which will drive a deeper wedge between locals and visitors.

The movies, theater, concerts, and other shared public gathering experiences will be too potentially harmful to return. One has to wonder how movies will be created unless they, too, become part of the critical workforce that will have access to a vaccine. Regarding that vaccine, if the average time for antibodies to be active is 90 days, then what about those people where antibodies are only active for a few weeks and the risk they will still pose in infecting others?

Without a demand of the American people to adapt and contribute to themselves, their communities, and an evolving workplace, we’ll wither in stagnation, which will fuel national despair that we may never dig out of. Malaise will be where the United States heads under our current lack of leadership. There are moments that are starting to feel like we could reach a tipping point that will flash over our country like a raging storm, and once that panic sets in, we’ll be hard-pressed to return to anything remotely normal.

If you are old or poor, America is done with you. If your children attend public school, your life is expendable. If you work in healthcare, you may die treating the old and poor, but if you work in an upscale facility that caters to the wealthy, you’ll have the supplies you need while you’ll be able to afford private online tutoring for your children.

Instead of declaring a national emergency and creating a new Manhattan Project where the objective is to educate our citizens, broaden our tolerance for the spectrum of cultures that live upon our lands,  and share the wealth and opportunity across the country, we will continue testing the limits of cruelty.

As the virus mutates and continues to take its toll, many people will question bringing children into the world, and subsequently, not feeling a serious purpose or hope for a positive future, we’ll see a surge in suicide. Despair will then give America exactly what it wants, a dystopian reality where the shit hit the fan, validating our fear of the future.