Waiting

He waited for his life to begin. One day, two days, one month, two months, one year until 50 years had passed and he was still waiting. A marriage. Kids. What was he waiting for? Just going with the flow. Asking questions to keep his mind active but not taking steps to make the questions mean something. Pages, sitting in boxes. In journals. On laptops. In draft sections of 35 year old emails. Emails created before dot com crashes and CRMs, crypto and AI. He lived in the hub of digital activity. Watched his City creep towards the inevitable fall, created by a digital gold rush, affordability, disappearing as the City crept towards the final years of the millennium. He had 10 years to live in the City before the gold rush took hold. So many starts and stops. ‘What is the point?’ he said to himself over and over. Dreams, nascent then decrepit, sitting in pools of disappointment. A marriage. Done. Sitting in San Francisco, Pacifica, Half Moon Bay, Wyoming, Hollister and back to Pacifica. Just sitting, wondering, fretting, feeling it slip away with the changes of his body like the changes of the seasons, one after the other after the other. Just sitting, maybe with pen and paper or laptop and latest free range word processor, the one that wasn’t connected to the cloud so the bots could scrape the words and add them to the homogeneity of everything the world was hurtling towards. Offload cognition, why waste that 10 percent of your brain you’re using on thinking when you can use it to buy things the latest algorithm suggested? Doom scroll until doom was the only thing left. Give your last dollar to the guy who has all the other dollars. March like Orwell and Huxley and the others taught us we would. Inevitability? Did we learn and forget and participate until there was no other option but to let ‘it’ do ‘what’ we needed? Until finally everything existed on 3 servers owned by 3 guys who collected everything? Black and white. On and off. Good and evil. Easy enough considering we have infinite choice, but only 10 percent of our brains to process those choices. That one guy or the other guy or the third guy but its only supposed to be two guys because three does not fit the formula for the optimal life. We want to hum with the universe so how do we reconcile the reality of the three in a universe of one predicated upon the rule of two?