Entering Deep Simulation

E-cigarettes
Social media
Body-building
Microwaves
Porn
Travelling
Video games
Make-up
Sport
Are all simulations of the intended act, made antiseptic and cyber. We are entering an apocalyptic society in which technology begins to invade not just our minds but our bodies. The world vibrates at a certain frequency as it tries to attain balance. The search for authenticity leads to a simulated version which becomes the subject rather than itself. A thing is reduced by being recorded, quantified, replicated. A video of a storm is not a storm, yet the person recording it was experiencing it behind a camera. What is in front of the camera becomes cinematic, there is a theatricality in the image. People nowadays walk around with a computer in front of them, ordering burgers to their pet dog whilst quitting work to go on a Call of Duty binge. I can shout to my phone and it sprouts small wheels and drives itself to me. In the film The Matrix it was thought denizens would be imprisoned in virtual reality pods with their butts hanging out. In the future reality will become more virtual, there will be no real world to escape to as technology will have replicated everything.

There is no imagination, just reference. Many critics throw this bone out once in a while, although they don’t understand that an Egyptian Pharaoh wouldn’t have been able to imagine being a heroin addict living in New York city. Therefore the original will always exist in the future. If time travel existed we could go into the future, copy some CD’s and bring them back. Can you guess what the number one song in the year 3589 is? Probably some grindcore.

In the video game the sims you play out the lives of actual human beings in abstract potentials. But whose to say all of this isn’t controlled by a mad robot? This questions the nature of reality and in doing so we realise it really is a moot point only the worst pragmatist would lazily bring up. The nature of reality itself is unimportant. Whether we are a brain in a jar, the dream of an elephant, the game of a god or any combination of the three. What scientists do know is that the skein of reality is malleable, similar to lava or perhaps magma. Through inventions like the internet or hypderdrives we can explore the alternate dimensions that exist on another planet. How about a world in which everything is legal? What about a world without poverty? Can you ever imagine that happening in this dimension bub?

To bring this essay to a close I’d like to share some thoughts with you.

Sand is like time, without nature involved we don’t know what to make of it.
Yonic symbolism is strongly lacking in our culture.
Think of life like a bubble floating in the air. When it pops aren’t we just one of the cosmos?
Quantum Physics has proved that we are watched by particles. Why?
There is an unbroken chain of parent and child that links you to a fish.
Magic is real…if you believe in yourself.
Sometimes there’s no such thing as coincidence. This is the uncertainty equation.
It’s fear that gives men wings.
If you sharpen a pencil until there is nothing left, is the shavings a pencil?

Fun Day Out At La Brea Tar Pits

The La Brea tar pits have been excavated for the last one hundred years, the black bones of animals are dredged from the deep using a series of chains attached to a crane. Tar divers doggy paddle in the molten blackness, helping ease out the skulls of giant wolves onto the shore for visitors to see. The pits reside in Hancock Park, halfway down the Miracle Mile, next door to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). The odour of the tar pits hangs in the air like an ancient death, the ever grave churns beneath the boiling sun. I finish my coke and hurl the can onto the heavy oil before walking towards the Page Museum. It's quite busy, families run backwards and forwards between the exhibits, the children point excitedly at the hundreds of bones scattered around. Teenagers chill out radically around an enormous woolly mammoth, repeating internet catchphrases to each other or swapping e-mail addresses. Retired people are ushered around and they look thoughtfully at the great condor, magnificent in it's quiet existence. Museum attendants are constantly smiling, eyelids as far back as they will go, hundreds of teeth shown, well moisturised hands ready to touch people on the shoulder as they are pointed in the right direction. I see my contact, Vernon Chavéz, gazing at the ribcage of a camel.
“Vernon?” I say. He turns around, face sweating and chemically thin. We shake hands and begin walking through the museum, passing an animatronic sabre tooth cat that jerkily nudges a sort of bear.

We enter the restroom. Vernon checks beneath the stalls and once sure nobody else is there he puts his briefcase on the side of the sink.
“You got the money?” he asks. I put my own briefcase on the side. “Let me check.” I pop open the lid and show him sixty thousand dollars in unmarked bills.
“Now you show me.” I say. He checks the door before opening the clasps on his case. Inside the aubergine coloured interior are three jars of wasps.
“Impressive. Most impressive.” I say. He takes my briefcase and I stand in the bathroom, watching the wasps waiting in each jar. I take out a pair of ear defenders from my pocket and put them on.

I pass an enormous puppet built by the Jim Henson's creature workshop, Smilodon Fatalis, It is accompanied by a smaller puppet, Nibbles. An old man plays a harmonica. A girl lets go of a balloon. A young couple kiss each other. Faces flash by. I crouch down onto the cold floor and open up the suitcase, taking out each jar carefully. Some movement catches my eye, I look up to see a security guard wearing a khaki shirt running towards me, although I am unable to hear his shouts. People are beginning to move away. I take one of the large jars and open the lid, pouring the wasps out. They begin to fly away before hitting the floor. I do the same with the other two jars and then begin to make my way through the crowd of people around me. The wasps meanwhile begin to search for food genetically installed into insect brains. For those wasps each ear is like a flower for a bee, a fruitful canal for them was a valuable source of protein. They flew from ear to ear, their thumb-sized bodies clinging onto the earlobe as they carefully fed on the people around them. Panic gripped the entire museum, people clutching at their heads as they ran full pelt through the corridors, others were caught in the swarm of wasps and crouched close to the ground, faces contorted into strange grimaces. In the confusion I made my way towards the Research and Collections area.

There are thousands of boxes, each containing a fossil pulled from the tar pit. I make my way quickly past the bones of rodents, dogs, giant birds and lizards, the preserved shells of the invertebrates and into the flora section. It takes me a few minutes but I have quickly filled my pockets with the preserved seeds of almost fifty species of prehistoric plants. I would need to send them to Korea to be processed properly. I make my way back into the museum, it's corridors empty now save for the constant flight of wasps.

Classical Music In Public

Women wearing yellow sit beneath the trees, they call out.
"Let me see your heart, show me your heart."
I take off my jacket and unbutton my shirt.
"Let us see it. We need to taste it. We see it."
"It is burning."
I pull at my sternum with my fingers, pulling apart the skin and bubbles of yellow fat.
"Show me your heart."
I unclick the ribs and part the lungs.
"I can see it. Your heart. Your heart."
"It is burning."
I reveal my heart, like the blooded head of an unborn, it moves inside of me, pumping the blood into my brain that is telling it to beat.
"Oh, your heart. Magnified in a lens made from the air, refracted in my mind. It is your heart and I can see it, burning. A burning heart pumping molten blood."
I reach inside my chest and pull out my heart slowly, being careful not to tear it from my body. I am holding it in my hands and I part the ventricles like the petals of a flower.
"This is my heart."
"Show me your heart."
A woman walks over to me and begins to caress is gently with her hands. It flutters like a bird. She bends down and begins to kiss it, licking at the thing which beats. She whispers something to it before handing it me back. I begin to sing in operatic fashion:
"I am but a man, holding out his heart. A clock that ticks. This is my heart.
See my heart.
It is burning."
A host of flies begin to swarm around the greying thing and I bow one knee, offering it up. She accepts and takes a bite.