POST-HUMAN (a hot night rumination)

Here in Los Angeles, the temperature was pushing 100F this afternoon with no exaggeration. Parts of the city suffered power blackouts, and the cat decided it was sufficient reason to demand two breakfasts just in case some PM apocalypse might occur and upset what the airlines call meal service. And, of course, it’s the Labor Day holiday weekend in a city, country, and culture with so little pride in the power of labor or the dignity of unions that a party or parade would – like socialism – be just tooo 20th century. (But what do I know about work? I’m a bloody writer.)

And as a writer a found a couple of brand new hyphenated words to play around with that came with both a thrill and a chill…

“Post-human” he muttered to himself, over and over, ruminating and less than happy.

If you heard it here first, you heard it heard it here first, but I doubt it will be the last time (maybe the last time, I don’t know.) Supposedly the post-human condition will be whatever emerges in the wake of The Singularity when, in thirty or some years, as predicted by Ray Kurzweil and others, the computers will be smarter than we are and they’ll be calling the shots, and our brains will supposedly be integrated with advanced microprocessors and nanobots will be rebuilding our cellular structure, granting us virtual immortality. Or possibly our personalities will be uploaded onto a super-future hard drive and then decanted into some incredible piece of animatronic biotech. Although when I say we, I actually don’t include myself in all this because even though I quit cigarettes, I in no way expect to live another thirty years with US healthcare, and even if I did, I would be so fucking old when all this came to pass, I'd hope to be too full of synthetic opium to care. And I would also be more than a trifle ashamed to evolve into something more complex and some kind of wonderful while a planetary crisis of extinct polar bears and level 7 hurricanes still almost certainly will remain unsolved. Or is being solved by the super smart computers who might – like Skynet, the Matrix, the Daleks, and HAL 9000 before them – decide that the first and most rational and eminently sensible move towards restabilizing Earth would be to exterminate humanity with all possible speed.

But it’s a hot night and I’m really only playing with the words
“Post-human?”
“Post-human?”
“Post-human?”
“Post-human?”
“Post-human?”
“Post-human?”

The secret word is Hell

And for no other reason than impulse and the mood of the night here's the orginal b&w video of David Bowie singing "Wild Is The Wind" (And, of course, the song does contain the secret word.)