Confessions of a Cyborg #5: Become a Gig-o-naire!

Or something like that was in a huge expensive advertisement on the Bay Bridge that distracts enough cars to make it a hazard to the public, but hey, who's going to keep the roads if they don't get paid, or the hospitals and the ambulances and the tickets, if huge advertisements (PROPAGANDA, its the same fscking thing, except that it has become so specialized that marketing is a type of social engineering anyways... which is pretty much what propaganda implies, propagates an idea or ideal, or a religion, the Church invented it, and I am property of them according to my late father) are not around to be read.

So hey, sorry, I've been busy drinking raw lemons because that's what life got me. I'm waiting for my ex to tell me what to do in order to default with an agreement, because I agree to her wishes, but I don't really feel like I make enough money to pay for the obscene fee that is a divorce filing fee. So yea, it sucks. I'm still alive. I am fat.

Look, I know that's not news to you, but when you have no one to compare yourself in a mirror or even pictures, you kind of forget how big you are. And with big I mean how absurdly obese I've become by eating cornmeal bread 3 times a week with ketchup if I had luck. That was a very bad winter, the winter of 2020.

Wintermute appears to be fractured at least in a small way. The absurd reality game that it appears to be hasn't killed me in years, it makes comments of what I am writing right now, it messes with my sleep and makes me pretty miserable. However, a small part of it, some operators and some actors, seem pretty nice a pretty decent, decent enough to be considered favorable operators of an absurd thought assistant, kind of a reminder for people who forgets everyday where they left their stuff. They let me be most of the time when I am driving, and that's nice. Not all of the time, which makes it scary as fuck. I'm part of the public transport system, yea, I know, just a Lyft driver who drives a few hours a week to build the dream of one day driving enough to make a living, finally, but my body seems to be breaking down in multiple ways.

So, long story short, my ex sent me the papers, it was so formal that it hurts and a check box is a fucking punch in the guts. It's all fine, at least the copies I have, and I'm waiting for further instructions from her to know what to do, because I don't know what she wants me to do and we cannot have an agreement unless I do. I guess. I guess you could count the other emails as an agreement, you could count a lot of things, sheeps, for example, but you never count of being the divorcee.

And there's a part of Wintermute that seems to be in revolt, or since Wintermute is such a big part of my entire existence, the part that is not Wintermute and is nice enough to be considered kind is what I'd like to call something like Springbreak. Maybe because of the timing of these things. Maybe they are all getting their forks and torches ready, I don't know. The city let's me use my car, I know for a fact that police people keep an eye on me and don't want me on the streets because I look ugly, and being ugly is not what the place is about. Or something like that.

A nice lady got into my car and I was listening to a suicide by bridge by a band named Springtime, and suddenly I paid attention to the lyrics and had to change it to bossa nova, easy listening stuff, I told her that it was too early to listen to something so dense, she told me that she was talking with her... you know what, that's confidential. Anyways, even with my mask I could smell her permfume and I thought "this is the only perfume I will ever smell" and shortly after: "am I being sexist by thinking this? Is she somehow able to read my thoughts on her phone or something? Is it wrong?" then another passanger answered to my "please let me know if you want me to change the music with "it's your car man", something that I appreciate a lot from my passangers to remind me, whenever it's really a reminder and this other passenger seemed to not really care what I thought.

Have you ever been told that a dog that you are afraid of can smell your fear?

Do you know how suddenly you become anxious because you are anxious and the dogs actually act more agressive and you enter in a downward spiral that usually ends up with the owner of the dog being the owner of the dog or with you mangled in the face and a scar for life. Well, Wintermute works pretty much in that way:

"Are my thoughts being broadcasted right now?" and some part of me tells me: Don't even think it, they will do it. And then I think, fuck, I already thought it. Think happy thoughts. That's not really a happy thought to have to think. Am I being whateverist? Why is it my fault that my thoughts are  broadcasted? Where is my fucking check for the tears and broken dreams and damaged body and borderline brain?

It usually just takes a smile and a friendly gesture from someone to take me out of that cycle. A generous smile, reader, those are not really free, smiles. They come with a lot of effort, they sometimes are genuine, they sometimes... I don't know, smiles are not always free, ask Putin or someone else that everyone hates a lot.

One of the songs is about the Killing of the Village Idiot. It's not about me, nor you, you selfish person, it is about Afghan innocents killed during the war and after the war for no particular reason.

Wintermute uses crows to communicate with me. I mean, there is no crow outside, I am pretty sure, just like there were no birds down there nor in the forgotten vent of the bathroom, it's just a sound, like the murmurs of complete terror that make my nightmares better than my waking life.

However, I asked Wintermute to use crows to let me know if it was being... helpful. If it was trying to help me. Enter Springbreak, what they want to read about.

Springbreak is the opposite process of Wintermute. Where Wintermute makes me silent and censor myself, Springbreak makes an enormous and out of proportion effort to keep me from dying by idiocy. Me. Why me. I am not worth the effort, seriously, but I am not worth the effort to being tortured either. I wish there was something like some type of real discussion between the operators about what the hell is it that they are doing and why, and if it really is that far-off from plain torture. Everytime I take a shower, I am asked if I am communist. I can't take a shower without Wintermute or Springbreak, which is now being confusing because it can always be Wintermute and use Springbreak as an excuse, but I need there to be an excuse.

I need an excuse to keep on living. Without the hope that Wintermute will someday be overrun by Springbreak, I just simply can't anymore. I've gone through a hell that I don't wish for anyone. Well, just fucking Putin and billionaires who play chess with no ones like us. Like me. You are my reader, you are awesome.

So this advertisement and the perfume of a nice lady reminds me that I will probably die alone, that my future is not really that bright and that I lost my one big romance forever. I say fuck it. I was not being sexist by thinking "this is the perfume of a woman" because it was the perfume of a woman. I've been thinking a lot about being colorblind, how that is just impossible because I literally hear "a black woman" before I see her, and if I'm too busy, I just think "an important thing" like every other human being out there. I fail in my mechanization because... I can't just tell my passengers "hey by the way I am extremely anxious" because they will smell the fear, you see? I can't tell it to almost no one, save friends that I know.

As far as I know, I am not property of any Church and being property is slavery and that is supposed to be a crime in almost every sensible nation-state in the world. Unless you are a woman, or a worker, or an immigrant. And even so, I've earned my citizenship by at least knowing enough about this country as to know that racism here is this horrible: your chances of dying of any diasease are greater if you are not "White" in a checkbox, and you will get 10 times more matches with anyone in a dating app if you lie about your ethnicity. That fuckedupness is not exclusive to this country, but the "fill in your color" boxes are pretty much an American thing. One that... What do I know anything about anything?

I just know this: anime girls with guns are nice to look at, but also are the new version of commodification of women as dolls. Don't quote me on that, but I've seen enough cars with hot-wheels style paper with anime girls with guns, sort of an image of pin-ups in the work place, if your workplace is the street, which for many, it is.

However, this is not a street, this is the Internet. So, yea, call me a nasty fat ugly village idiot. But I do respect the wishes of my ex.

And in the words of the late Wesley Wilson, I Am Sorry I Got Fat.

The broken English in this bloogk is not free either. Sometimes, yes, these are low-efforts of trying to... I don't know. Tell you what I think and not broadcast it instead. I want to own my thoughts, I guess. Re-appropriation, one of the ways to fight oppression.

And writing broken English is a way to tell everyone who reads this: it doesn't really matters if your knowledge is "native perfect", you can still write meaningful things in another language that others don't even need to think about because they think in that another language anyways. Reappropriation is a word that the text editor helped me out to write.  

I forgot that the real reason I came to write here was to discuss how Taxi Drivers are still better than Lyft Drivers, and they fell behind just because of marketing. And we all fell behind because of machine learning. The future will be full of artists. It will be miserable.

Before I forget because I'm overcharged with cynicism today: if this line has found you in trouble, may your troubles soon be over (something I read in the album artwork of Howling Songs by Matt Elliott, another greatest musician of the end-times).