(NaPoWriMo Challenge: April 9, 2015)

The tendency to forget information that can be found readily online by using Internet search engines.


This information is the result of my searches on Google this morning:

• “Never memorize something that you can look up.” Online this quote is widely attributed to Albert Einstein.

• “[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.” This was Einstein in response to not knowing the speed of sound as included in the Edison Test. (Wikiquote)

• Many people wear the same clothes every day. In Einstein’s case this was a grey suit--the reason being that our thinking time is wasted making irrelevant wardrobe decisions. I also re-read the Henry David Thoreau quote about life being frittered away by detail. But when considering what is being frittered, you could add the mind, the spirit, time itself. This idea was part of Thoreau’s “simplicity, simplicity” quote which I once bought as a magnet from the museum at Walden Pond in the fall of 2001. I didn’t remember that date. I just googled a story about the trip, (www.apeculture.com/travel/boston.htm). In any case, I felt the magnet was being ironic. Like Einstein, President Barack Obama wears the same variation of two suits every day in order to “pare down decisions.” Apple genius Steve Jobs wore the same thing every day as does Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg. (Elite Daily: elitedaily.com/money/science-simplicity-successful-people-wear-thing-every-day/849141/)

• Google is creating personalities for androids, personalities that will live in the cloud and can be swapped into robots. I plan to forget this information because it’s creepy and like Ripley in the movie Alien, I’m suspicious of androids unless they are like Lance Henriksen in the movie Aliens in which case I would probably buy that personality for my robot if I had one.

• I also found out today that Google's images section, (which I use religiously when blogging), was created due to Jennifer Lopez’s green floral Versace dress, the one that opened like a surgical split to her navel, the one that caused such a kerfuffle when she wore it to the 2000 Grammy Awards and everyone searched Google fruitlessly for it afterwards. I’ve forgotten about that dress because I hated it. It looked like a Miami house-robe for one thing and I don’t like any couture that structurally hangs off *****.

• Google also announced a new patent today for a warning system that protects you from pop culture spoilers on Internet pages. If you think about it, this warning system will protect you from Google itself. Sometimes a little information ruins everything.

• I found all of this Google news on Google News.

• You can find more Einstein quotes here:  brightdrops.com/albert-einstein-quotes, one particular quote informs me that creativity is knowing how to hide your sources.

• D’oh!

• Which is a word I have always remembered because the great poet Homer said it.

Feel empty in your post apocalyptic City of Angels,
Where not even your pets are real!
An electric android, a sheep or a frog,
The whir-flutter of micro-electrical wings of a butterfly.

Good, and so you ought.

Now grab the handles of your empathy box,
And in a shared virtual hallucination –
Feel: empathy, depression, pain, delusion and despair,
The outré myriad gifts of consciousness.

Billions of discombobulated and disconnected wrecks:
Adam's sons; Eve's daughters,
And among them simulations too,
Fakes! androids!
A phony circuit of implanted semi-conscious memories,
A hive of neural malaise!
Welcome to our world;
know how dead inside I am.

You, yes, you:

Need a pet to make you more complete?
Maybe you can afford
A Fake Fakir Flake like me who looks like Jude Law,
Sounds like Richard Burton,
And silently romances you like Rudolph Valentino.
Come and stick what’s left of your mind,
In here,
In hair,
Hear her:
har, har, har…

A box of lies...

A voice, Mercer's,
With texture from an age you neither lived in nor dared in:
Al Jerry's, a TV actor,
Droning on in pre-selected tones.

The real thing, the men, the women, the children - their animals -
Made in the wild, wild desert,
In the green pulsing savannah,
On the open crusted sea;
Now too, washed, choked, and drained,
Too many spliced and diced mutations,
Iterating your image:
The thing that was my heart,
My Child, now its imitation.

Destiny for humanoids---
Shall we run by androids?
Or shall we be the androids?
Let's prognosticate,
Predict our fates----
Shall mankind claim the Universe?
Or is Anarchy to be the serve?
Teeming billions in a rat race,
What is destiny for our Earth place?
In our lifetime, we'll never know,
Unless Armageddon explodes,
Let's hope the young are star hopping,
Instead of retail therapy shopping,
Too young for the stars,
Too old for the seas afar,
Nothing left to explore,
Disaffection, please no more,
Shall we be the androids?
Destiny for the humanoids?????????

"What do you mean you've never seen Blade Runner? My GOD! I didn't think there was a single person on the planet that hasn't seen that. They showed it to us in elementary school as an example of a prophetic, foretelling, social commentary."
"Well, I never was a fan of fiction or science, even though somehow I've still managed to live my fair share of both."
" Do androids dream of electric sheep? What are your dreams?"
"Electric...sheep?"
"Yeah, that's the title of the book the movie is based on, but like, I'm honestly curious about the second part. It's a better ice-breaker than your deprived childhood".
"You wanna' know what I dream? I dream of a world soaked in gasoline, and a lone, shadowy, figure masked by deceit and decay, filling the air with a rotten sulfuric smell as he festers in his own filth. I can't see this guy clearly, but I know him. I know him in my head and my heart and he just stands there, idle, in a place where he can see the silhouetted skyline of the entire wretched city. Trapped between his forefinger and thumb is  a match donning a dancing flame for a hat, performing a flamenco routine for two wild eyes.  Eyes that indicate a sureness of what to do, but make no use of intentions. They seem to sort of flip between question and answer with each dimming and brightening of the match's beacon.  The question appears to already have been answered, but has yet to be acted upon. He's tinkering with the notion.  Is this due to hesitation in the man's mind, or is he simply toying with the already squirming city? The final act is inevitable, yet the ulterior option, to extinguish the trigger, still stands...". He pauses.
His new partner's face has lost most of its color and his mouth is propped open with a jack made of sheer horror and curiosity.
"Well JESUS man! Aren't you gonna tell me the rest of it?"
"The rest of it is: I wake up".
He languidly looks around, takes a pull from the bottle, and proceeds to pull his mask over his face. His partner isn't sure, but he thought he'd caught a smile crack before his mouth was covered,
  "...and not like a haha I'm yankin' your chain kinda grin. This ****** meant it", his partner would recall later to some buddies in a bar.
"I wake up and wonder whether I'm the man, or the match".
He slams the magazine into his weapon and rips the slide back to load up the first round of ammunition. He exits the vehicle, and heads towards the disheveled building that has more or less sunk into its foundation. His new partner shakes his head, wipes his face with his paws of hands, pulls on his mask, and flicks the *** end of his cigarette whose embers have already begun to eat away at the cotton filter out towards the woods. He catches the light from the buckshot of the cherry out of the corner of his eye and imagines that match spinning towards the city.
"What the **** have I gotten into..."

No matter what I do
theres always something
I want more
Like a camera
or a trip
or even just something
just a little bit better
than what I have, even if its older, because
sometimes things
of old are
so much better
than the new,
like how I look at
These cameras I dream of
in stores, in
flea markets,
I hold their predecessors,
their grandfathers
and feel the cold calm
of the metal body
in my hands, and know that
things just aren’t built this way any
more, and people
aren’t what they used to be, or
so it seems,
from the history classes
and all the books
I read, about life
before it was my time
and how people seemed
to give a ****,
and didn’t just sit
and whine
and waste so much time,
but how did they live
before Facebook
how could they
fall in love without
Tinder,
or read the news without
Twitter
or pass their classes without
google on their Androids in their laps to pass the answers on the test before them?

So I guess they were just tougher
than us, like these old cameras
I want, and they
didn’t want, like we
want to pretend we need
so we don’t have to accept
what’s right in front of us.

Our excuse that
We need to wait for film
To develop.

Set fire to the Antique Shop,
We’re one step ahead of the cops.
Mannequins of Elvis begin to melt.
Free from past matters; free from guilt.
Promoting the prosperity
As we hoard hostility
Androids ambushing Arkansas,
They seek to find ménage trois.
Achieving self-awareness
They want fill the void’s emptiness
Chugging R & R by the fifths.
By our thumbnails we dangle off cliffs.
Thread by thread, the veil unfolds.
Standing all alone, I’m left in the cold.
Show me how much you care.
Push me in my wheelchair.
Listening to what drives you crazy
Eventually helps you stop being lazy.
Lilly is spinning me dizzy
She belongs to the world of yesterday
The haze is now fading away.
If only I could stay
for just one day
But Behold
I feel you should be told
I have come from the end
When the Earth is condemned.
As I tell the tall tale,
How we came to live in hell,
once we found the holy grail.
“We overcame our fear
The classified was made clear.
We launched all the nukes,
By order of the Skywalker named Luke.
The framers were lousy architects;
They left the balance completely hectic.
The CEO’s got away with fraud.
Thinking their work was the will of God.”
I met you in the gloomiest bar.
We speed across the town in my car.
Questioning why we remained silent.
The flickering florescent light compliment
The tone of shallow yellow paint,
I can finally hibernate.
After I left the oblivious,
Do I finally notice,
It’s hesitation that leads
me astray from redemption.
TJW 2013

i want to scream till i puke and cry myself empty
because my mind is a dark place and the thoughts
that haunt me are half formed and sadistic
they wrap my mind so tight in these chains
that i feel like the breath is crushed right out of me
and my ribcage is cracking my shoulders are breaking
and my eyes have been replaced with
cold black stone.. i thought i was made of flesh and blood
but apparently i'm just carved out of metal and bone

Meticulous and loveless, she does her duty
with flawless execution in a calculated fashion.
Every task she has accomplished
is done with a robotic passion

The wires of her brain
are smoldered in place.
Insulated with old errors
she computes a quiet disgrace.

Malicious programs in a trojan horse
sent from a suspicious source with a familiar name.
She brought down her firewall to let him in
which is why she feels such shame.

I watch her as she marches;
no style, no finesse, no grace.
I want to give her a soft touch or an honest whisper.
But I'm prevented by the anti-virus in within my interface.