Monday, March 26, 2012

Late Night Gibson

For the first time last night, I dreamed of old age. On the heels of one last brief essay from William Gibson's Distrust that Particular Flavor and after an evening of an execrable MST3K film mashed together from Japanese TV by Sandy Frank, I dreamed of a deep blue room and a job that didn't necessitate leaving bed that somehow involved gently passing information disks (surreal and not entirel physical Frisbees visible as vapor against the blue) to a coworker in the information vent in the upper portion of the wall.

We were talking about shifting roles and how she had found out that China (in the entirety of its digital representation) had been a former information courier and that I should consider this as the next stage in my own growth. It seemed odd that programs with their linear functions could ever change purpose or move up in a hierarchy and I was forced to get up out of the bed to think about what had just been offered to me.

It was in getting up, in pressing the cobalt sheets away from my body and finding myself barely able to straighten up or uncoil myself from the hunch of working in bed that I discovered that I grown much older than I suspected. Not in appearance (blue is the main visible memory I have of the dream), but in my interior structure, right down to my bones.

I woke up and got out of bed. Went to the kitchen, extracted cold water from the fridge, and walked around the couch once or twice to settle myself. Horror was precipitating from the dream, from my own feeling that I'd missed the "writer" boat years ago, and from the aches left from a day in the backyard.

The pendulum of the future swings sharper now than yesterday.