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About the author:
Descended from old English money, Vidicon was raised by spiny echidnas in the mountainous rainforests of the North American Southeast. Lured back to society by time-traveling gray/reptiloid alien hybrids posing as renegade Jesuits, he has managed to maintain his outsider's perspective and an appetite for crunchy insects. Today, Vidicon is a world-class synchronicity surfer and an unlicensed quantum mechanic. He has a fourth-degree black belt in weird.
About his bi-weekly column:
Tales from the Third Lobe are the unfocused meanderings of the World's Smartest Moron. Topics range widely over the sciences, religion, philosophy, technology, modern culture, mysticism, Vidicon's personal history and viewpoints, and whatever pissed him off in the media last week.
View all articles by Laszlo Q. V. St-J. "Vidicon" Xalieri, 2HC Columnist...
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Doom with a ViewI awoke this morning with a gasp because I dreamed I was in a car that was about to rear-end a dark minivan or SUV on an on-ramp to a highway. Then I adjusted the walls of my lean-to a bit (repositioning some pieces of not-particularly-structural foamcore), admired the giant fly that appears to be attacking Mt. St. Helens, and sat down to work on the day's writing while a housecat licked my elbow. I took frequent breaks to try to figure out what's going on in the world and to handle my end of the business of publishing. Meanwhile, all around me, the world is ending.
When I last wrote, Hurricane Katrina had just chewed up the north edge of the Gulf Coast and sunk New Orleans. As I write now, but probably history by the time you read this, Hurricane Rita is headed for the northwestern edge of the Gulf Coast, triggering the re-evacuation of refugees that Katrina left homeless. We're already around a hundred and fifty billion dollars in the hole over the loss of New Orleans and the associated economic damage to the seaports and oil industry. Rita is shutting down even more rigs and refineries, closing backup ports and displacing another huge chunk of the labor force.
Not as many people are watching this round because their eyes are still tired after watching Katrina. But Rita looks bigger. Galveston and Houston aren't likely to be left under twenty feet of standing water, however, but let me assure you Texas is beloved by the Ruling Party and will get a bulky relief package of funds that probably should be more evenly spread among the poor folks in Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana who haven't seen any relief yet. To a party that runs on money, the health and happiness of corporations are worth more than the safety and comfort of mere humans. Efforts will be made to save the economy at the expense of the actual people who put money in and take money out. Because the ultimate goals are the survival of the nation and the survival of the ruling party and the survival of the one approved national culture, right?
Does it make me sick? Indeed it does. I'd spew more venom, but I'm husbanding my precious mental resources for a future project.
That spiraling shape we keep seeing on the weather radar? There's a reason it looks like what happens in a commode when you flush. And here we are, propped up on the seat like a fascinated kitten, watching the water go down....
I did a brief survey to see if people were rooting for Hurricane Ophelia to scrub Washington DC off the map. My survey showed roughly twenty percent of my readers gave that a vigorous thumbs up, but we were all a tad too guilt-ridden to be able to psychically turn our urges into weather-affecting reality. Maybe next hurricane season, after we've had another year of motherfuckin' expensive stagnation in Iraq and certain individuals have inexplicably dodged a lynching from a certain grand jury investigation.
The Mt. St. Helens fly is back. Here. See for yourself.
The world outside the window has always been a kind of grim spectator sport. We take some kind of twisted satisfaction from watching things get worse, preferably at a distance, but surprisingly enough, right in our laps seems to be a decent second prize. What's the appeal? Does it hold our attention because that's how we learn to survive tragedy—by watching people live or die? Do we get a thrill out of surviving our own tragedies?
Or are we just fascinated by watching the water go down the hole?
See, it's not merely that I wanna keep watching Mt. St. Helens to see if it's erupted yet, it's that the US Department of Agriculture's Forest Service has recognized that there is a large enough demand to have put up, with public funds, a camera pointed at the smoking caldera that updates once every five minutes.
And a fly keeps landing on the damned case the camera is in, occasionally obscuring the picture. The USDA Forest Service apparently doesn't feel it's worth frequent applications of fly repellent.
Flies don't frequently make it the 22,000 miles into geostationary orbit, so if you prefer your doom with a view to be unobscured by insects, click here. Or here.
Sometimes I wonder what has to be wrong with my head that I can't make myself look away from the hypnotic spiral. Is it because I don't feel that I'll have anything to say if I don't have shit to gripe about?
I know that's not true. I never throw away anything I write. Clinton didn't give me much to snipe about, but when I was done gnawing on his haunches, I wrote some cheery, funny stuff. I wrote poetry. I wrote cheerful and happy poetry. The company I worked for was doing good business, I was paying my mortgage on time, and I was still writing. So that's not it. I don't particularly require misery.
But I do need to know what's going on in the world—unobscured by buzzing annoyances, if possible. I need to know if there is a threat, and if there is, I need to understand its nature so I can figure out how to survive. I need to see who lives and who dies so I can take notes. It's nice to be a member of a species that knows how to learn from the mistakes of others. It would also be cool if I were not to be the only one to survive, so I guess I might as well put some effort into sounding warnings when I see danger and giving survival tips, should I know any that could be relevant.
Can you tear your eyes away?
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Vidicon needs a new drug. |
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