Overflow

Here’s one I wrote when I was feeling a bit daft. Last poem for a while, I almost promise:

Life of the Sacraments
———————-

creation
conception
gestation
incarnation
lactation
circumcision
name selection
identification
innoculation
family relation
parambulation
increased sensation
vocalization
ideation
education
socialization
conscience formation
transsubstantiation
mastication
unification
carefree recreation
birthday invitation
childhood cessation
hormone invasion
pubic creation
menstruation
teen rebellion
sexualization
masturbation
nocturnal emission
urge repression
transgression
sin abation
soul confession
reconciliation
maturation
confirmation
high school graduation
college orientation
inebriation
stomach evacuation
dehydration
final examination
metriculation
job application
selection
employee orientation
daily production
weekly remuneration
yearly vacation
workforce reduction
reeducation
pheremone secretion
mutual attraction
infatuation
romantic profession
sexual action
marriage vocation
wedding celebration
honeymoon vacation
newlywed elation
reproduction
sleep deprivation
parenting aggravation
marital frustration
verbal aggression
counseling session
reunification
midlife trepidation
retirement recreation
bodily disintegration
assisted ambulation
extreme unction
loss of function
breathing cessation
soul elevation
divine reunification

reincarnation?

Yes, another Futures poem. This one I wrote last summer after I saw a sign announcing that a colleague was speaking at the local UU church the upcoming sunday on “The Future of God.” Considering that she was agnostic, I figure it was an interesting talk. Anyway, I had to pull over to this coffee shop and write this:

The Future of God
————————-

At the dawn of our bold scientific age
we gave God his pink slip;
a gold watch, a handshake,
and sent him packing
off to an early retirement.
We didn’t need God anymore to explain
where the rain comes from or
how the mountains were formed.
We didn’t even need him to cure sickness
(tho he still does the occasional consulting job.)

Then Derrida and the Postmoderninsts
cancelled Absolute Truth, so
there went his night gig.

Now God, bored in his retirement,
is back in school,
retraining,
learning to multitask.

In the Future, God will be the new Pokemon
with custom powers to fit our needs,
kept in Pokeballs to be brought out
only to fight other PokeGods
or to forgive the occasional indiscretion.

In the Future, God will be a D&D character
that we can conjure by rolling twenty-sided dice –
16 charisma, 12 strength, with spells and charms
to slay our dragons and quest for treasure.

In the Future, God will be a fully-poseable action figure.
We’ll dress him any way we want,
with outfits and accessories we can buy
from the self-help section of Barnes and Noble.

In the Future, God will be a slob like one of us
(as he was two millennia hence.)
He will experience alongside us the humility
of exchanging pride for a paycheck.

But, in his off hours,
he’ll be no man’s PokeGod.
He will hang in the hearts of old married lovers
and in the eyes of children.
He will visit jazz bars and coffee houses
and the occasional mosque (to piss off the Christians)
and the public schools (to piss off the atheists.)
But most of all he will be found
rising in the silent smoke
of an humbly-offered candle.

And, humbly,
in silence,
I will be waiting for him.

What the heck, it’s a full-on poetry dump! I wrote this as kind of a Futures poem:

Surfing
——–

This is not a time to be nonchalant about your lives!

Things are happening that are both horrible
and wonderful beyond our imagining.

Animals are being cloned for your consumption.
Computers are being woven into your socks.
They’re inventing new flowers.
And new ways to live and die.

(Are you paying attention?)

Hate is spanning continents.
Borders are dissolving.
War is a media event —
The next genocide will be televised.

(Will you be watching?)

Clever diseases are adapting
to sidestep new cures.
New microbes are being patented;
Old ones are learning new tricks

(What are you learning?)

Pigs will grow new hearts for us
While our old hearts will grow fond of
faces over wireless rivers of bandwidth;
Hearts to be broken by virtual lovers.

(Where is your heart?)

Soon we’ll glide on hydrogen chariots
and Stirling scooters and maglev trains
Superconductors will take the reins
And move us faster, ever faster.

(But, do you know where you’re going?)

Turbulent data is flooding the culture.
Information is boiling, steaming our vision
While wisdom becomes a commercial commodity
And knowledge is power and power is an oddity
To most of us regular folks.

(Do you know who you can trust?)

Yet billions of people rely on each other.
They trust their elders, their elected offcials.
Billions of people do not use computers;
they do not see them as anything special.

(Do we pity Them? Or do they pity Us?)

You must be alert because time is accelerating
At different speeds in different places.
Is what you hold onto moving you forward?
Or holding you back while “progress” erases
Your every anchor, your every point of reference.

(You must pay attention now. To eveything. All the time.)

You will learn to surf or you will drown.
So watch for clues that swirl around
In the currents of our times.

And paddle like hell
when you feel the swell.

Boy, I hope
you can afford
a board.

While we’re on poetry, here’s my attempt at beat-style:

cracking black sack of jaded dream
makes monstrous bowls of clotted cream
and sugar for souring the golden rule
and feeding facts into fiction. The fool
knows no notion of momentary nomenclature
and erupts in erudition and effects erasure
of indention intended to incendiary stature.
So pretentiousness gives no man his due
and concupiscience makes his manhood blue
while he prays for merciful metriculation
from cadres of colorless calculation
and escape from epiphanies of emasculation.
In perfidious peace pines the seamless soul
tethered to nothing, no texts to extoll,
left living on stately and elegant parole
from instruments of finance and peril.
And a crimson lace of meterless verse
makes thoughts meander and tongues rehearse
in praises of priapic philosophical folly
in phrases of the epic metaphorical jolly
of mind in madness inclined too steep
as the roses of the day grow soft and deep.

We were discussing how we can convey intimacy through the mundane in poetry on this poetry list I’m on. Then I wrote this down:

Pick Up Lines

I pick up your earrings –
points of weight on my palm –
that you took off last night
while bathing the kids
and take them back to your dresser.

As I go, with my toe
I snag that bra —
the orange one that makes you grin
just to know you have it on –
and fling it at that chair by our bed
with other things not-dirty-not-clean.
Nice shot, if I do say so myself

Then I snap up your nightshirt —
that tee-shirt of mine you stole –
and flap it straight for folding.
The one long hair on the sleeve
makes me smile.

It’s yours.

A UHCL Futures list friend pointed me to this — From Shell Corporation, an extraordinarily lucid explanation of scenario planning and an updated set of global energy scenarios through 2050 (in .pdf format)

It’s good to see a megacorp using foresight in such a public manner. It’s better to see an energy megacorp seemingly in favor of clean renewable energy sources.

More coverage of Ian Pearson’s top 25 “predictions” that has set skeptics’ tongues clucking across the web. Too bad, like the BBC story, the Telegraph waits until the last few paragraphs to qualify the uncertainty of the rather fantastic statements about the possible future Pearson makes.

Check out the graphic though. it’s cool.

Procedure for Futurist Bashing

1) Journalist interviews futurist or covers his/her work.
2) Journalist writes story focusing on the most interesting (read: sensational) elements.
3) Journalist, not understanding that futurists think up many alternatives, calls the elements “predictions.”
4) Journalist waits.
5) When the “prediction” doesn’t come true, Jourmalist gets bonus story by poking fun at said futurist whose “prediction” didn’t come true, forgetting that it’s in the nature of Futures Studies for *most* forecasts to not come true.

This bashing is not necessarily malicious, but instead a phenomenon arising out of ignorance of what futurists actually do.

This time it’s the folks at the Weblog Metafilter doing the bashing based on BBC coverage of my boy Ian Pearson. I couldn’t add a comment to defend him because Metafilter isn’t accepting new memebrs and non-members cannot post comments, so I’ll say it here.

Ian is a futurist whose talents lie in topping off solid technological analysis with heaping dollops of imagination and wit. His aim is to get you to think imaginatively about the future. Sometimes he makes “predictions” he hopes do not come true — one of the valid roles of a futurist. His job is to assess emerging technologies, give a time window forecast of when they will be useable, and then think up all sorts of ways that those technologies can be combined and deployed. How we react emotionally and intellectually to those alternative forecasts is the most useful product of a good scenario — it makes us think.

He’s just doing his job. Unfortunately journalists don’t cover his job well.

Oh yeah. And I like his low-tech "bizarre 1996 Mosaic-like" web site. It may be low tech but it has good content and loads fast. None of that damn Flash stuff.

Someone at the UHCL Studies of the Future masters program needs to send this guy a brochure.

From futurefeedforward: Nanoscale boy bands. What’ll they think of next?

Really. I think that the writers at futurefeedforward must think up the preposterous future scenario idea first and then backcast their way to it using current trends and emerging technologies. Not the best way to do scenarios, but it does make for amusing reading most of the time.

Still, I love it when they kill off celebrities in futuristic ways.

CBC News: English amnesiac may be porn star. (via Obscure Store)

Man, that makes for a bad day. First, it’s not bad enough that you’ve got amnesia, but then you have to wake up to the fact that you’ve been this gay porn star. It’d throw me. I’m just sayin’.

Hey, do gay people with amnesia forget they are gay or do they stay gay? No joking, that’s a serious question. Research on that would answer some questions about the nature of sexual orientation. Hmmm…..

Hooray! Phil Gyford is back to updating. And he wants to go to Mars.

Existential Risks: Analyzing Human Extinction Scenarios and Related Hazards by Nick Bostrom. I bet this guy is a lot of fun at parties.

He seems to be what I call an Accidental Futurist — someone who uses futures tools and does futures thinking without calling himself a futurist or doing any formal Futures Studies work. He makes my list of interesting people.

Here’s a great article from Scientific American about the long term global future:

“The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems from this conflict between short-term and long-term values. To select values for the near future of one’s own tribe or country is relatively easy. To select values for the distant future of the whole planet also is relatively easy–in theory, at least. To combine the two visions to create a universal environmental ethic is, on the other hand, very difficult. But combine them we must, because a universal environmental ethic is the only guide by which humanity and the rest of life can be safely conducted through the bottleneck into which our species has foolishly blundered.”

Amen, brother. But yer preachin’ to the choir. Rewrite this to a tenth grade level and publish it in Reader’s Digest or Time magazine. That’s the audience that needs to hear it.

via rebecca’s pocket.

This is a well-reasoned and cogent conservative anaylsis of social change in relation to the American family. Such a thing is rare, in my experience. I am basically conservative myself, but reject most of the rhetoric of the right as mere “family values” sloganeering. This guy did his homework.