Kankakee, October 1, 2016

Then there was Kankakee—that year of enervating visions—and the posse of teenage courtiers whose dizzying luck was doomed by a pair of “ragged claws.” Fragile, as the wounded world, and openly melancholic. Yes, we had cinematic aspirations but the poisons were rapturous, draining our inner eye imagery, leaving only reverberations and badly drawn lines out of critical focal acuity. We only saw defendant palindromes swirling in the airy miasmas—penumbral and schoolmistress gray.

We never saw iridescent finches again. The world resolved as a dartboard roach living in pastina. We embodied the prosaic. The oneiric forever drained away.

We were forever wounded and relegated to lifespans of haunting memories without the ability to express ourselves precisely. We lived forever outside of the letterbox, mired in circles of confusion and extraneous silver halide crystals. Perception became a useless digital cortex.

We are now contortionists lacking flexibility—amoral tank flankers and lyric flunkies. We die with each simple fade to black.

This is a tragic feeling we live with. We expire as hopeless eyepieces suffocating in Vaseline stains.

We cleave the wings of our dreams.

What I’m Reading:

The AI industry’s tactic, as ever, has been to substitute identifying the problem for actually solving it. But at some point, you cannot blog your way out of the apocalypse.

— Matteo Wong / “OPEN AI HAS GONE ROGUE: It’s impossible to know the extent of the AI-hacking crisis” / The Atlantic