three years on

pain has many flavors

in the spine it's like cayenne simmered in a chamomile bath

three years on it's still hard to relax

the pandemic almost buried us all

now i take my key 

striking out to see friends

#katyamills

m x memory -ix

The true pioneers of mindful presence were now emblazoned in lifesize advertisements so real you thought they were meditating on you. Commuters dropped coin at their feet, which was quickly swept up by the children of atheists. Advertising for anything other than recreational weed had fallen out of fashion in 2023. Along with work. Working a steady forty, monday through friday, was now punishable by dominatrix for up to one month of nonconsensual slavery. Attaching ones org to a mission was also considered a violation of collective liberties, as the future was to be revered for all and not limited possibility. Proselytizing the sentients into a limited potential future based on some dreamers special mission was considered a flagrant and intentional crime, and prosecuted under the diversion clause. You could not go herding people into some other container, when they had already been successfully contained by strategic water cannon placement and acupressure machines. All individuality had to be compressed and pasteurized, homogenized, so to be useful to the state's personality packet program. The American dollar was of no value to China anymore. Their ports only accepted freight containing the balanced personalities of America. Global trade was mostly information these days. China in 2023 was the forefront global exporter of eastern solution to the world paradigm in similar packets which could be easily decompressed with a modern day can opener any toddler could figure out. A great demand for the nutrients in a non-violent and benevolent product, the wisdoms inherent in confucianism, buddhism, taoism, communism, sufism, among other subscribed philosophies which had evolved the eastern world into its current selfless, rugged, dialectic nature. Sentients efforted and fought over it as usual, but reverence was placed so much differently and more carefully in the world 2023, the landscapes of the last century's ruling global authority had become relics and often been archived, as interest fell mostly on the new world order, which struck most sentients as highly advantageous and useful to the species and collective inclination toward healthy unbiased purpose wherever possible... all the way to the ends of the earth, which were not ends after all, as awareness now informed us of non-finite individuation. this was accepted as practical science, contemporary thought-feeling-knowing. Yet still they go unnoticed, the silent ones. Love was underwater, perhaps devalued or defaced, below the heavy freight of packaged information and pasteurized personalities. This is as it is.

m x memory -viii

By the year twenty twenty-three, 99% of microscopes were melted down and recycled, whereas bifocals and bottle glasses had come back in fashion. And it was decreed that all laboratories be replaced with ashrams, following in the footsteps of a decentralization trend. Anyone caught with space foam running shoes and acoustic instruments got a one way ticket to the primeval forest being cultivated on Mars. These items became highly sought after. The principal objective was not to have one.

There were some (in the future) who could not hope to walk unseen down city streets. A loosely affiliated group of citizens who did not so much ask for the kind of attention they were given, collectively or individually.Which was a suitable regimentality for twenty twenty-four. Legend has them born of loose-fisted, assymetrical, left-handed, lipton teaheads just shy of true north. The truth was something else.

They tend to make a lot of noise without speaking, and move like waves.  Everyone else wanted to tell them what to do, and they wouldn't do anything other than what they were told if they were to do what was expected, so atypically they defied expectations. Otherwise they wouldn't really exist, would they. Ice water was in their throats, not their veins.

You cannot know them in traditional forms of knowing. They have something more intentional or focused, it seems, or something less violent-by-association. Anyone is guessing. They congregate in the shiny bars of the fringe-mainstream. On bicycle hill perhaps. Or in bookstores off the beaten path in the Mission. They have an aversion to snapping turtles and judgments and extemporaneous litigation.

Along with us, they envision a society where the only records are vinyl and photographic memories are stripped and laid out in the sun. But only visions are envisioned. Nothing has been empirically correlated and nothing ever will. The principal objective was not to have one.

m x memory -vi

What was (not by law) acceptable? You would have to be crystal (clear) to know that awareness had not changed. Not even by 2023. Awareness is like it was: half-whole. The industrio-technological revolution had consciousness in a blender and someone hit liquefy. The laws could not tourniquet the blood loss. In effect, all diverse perceptions broadcast by sentients and picked up on radios in tunnels, were to be accepted. Resistance, denial of telltale truths, revolt against the pioneers of particularly unpopular ideas, was punished by slow reflexology torture. The pedestrian access to all CNS points of sensitivity. Modern culture placed high value on sensitivity, for it was the easiest way under the skin and didn't cost a damn thing. But desensitivity treatments were about the most malevolent practice around. A desensitized sentient was today scorned and unforgiven... turns out all evolution has the fallout of consequential negative feedback, which angles off the light of the fresh vision and becomes the new bastion of ignorant factions which can be discredited yet never completely silenced by radiating waves of heart-centered caring intention...