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.