“A story told is a life lived.”
– Unknown

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

CATOCTIN MOUNTAINS, Md. – If the story of the 21st century is just going to end up being one hellscape disaster after another, until most of the countries of the world live under tyrannical dictators who ignore all science and allow global warming to run rampant until the planet becomes uninhabitable, this is not a story I want to stick around to continue telling.

Warning about this outcome has been the story of my life. Not to say it’s inevitable. But to warn people so they could work together to maybe do something about it. That is the entire mission of this website. To find ways to protect democracy and to preserve the Earth, or at least to keep it a habitable, enjoyable place where humans could savor life.

But in this day and time, I guess more people are interested in listening to the fantasies of a guy like Ray Kurzweil, who the New York Times calls “a godfather of A.I., our foremost technological prophet and a ‘principal researcher and A.I. visionary’ at Google.”

NYT: A.I. Will Fix the World. The Catch? Robots in Your Veins.

Kurzweil, the author in 2005 of The Singularity Is Near, has now pumped out another fantasy book, The Singularity Is Nearer (how fucking ridiculous), in which he promises that, by 2029, A.I. will be “better than all humans” in “every skill possessed by any human.” He claims that during the 2030s, solar power, enhanced by A.I.-driven advances in 3-D printing, will come to dominate the global energy supply, most consumer goods will be free, and the “dramatic reduction of physical scarcity” will “finally allow us to easily provide for the needs of everyone.”

But like these other so-called geniuses at Google, Meta, Amazon and the rest of the tech giants who now have a strangle hold over all our lives, this guy has never covered politics, never seen the inside of the White House or the Capitol or talked to guys like Mike Johnson, now our dimwitted speaker of the House, or the likes of Ten Commandments Judge Roy Moore in Alabama, who are bound and determined to destroy democracy and the planet to make way for the end of this world, so their fantasy Jesus will have no choice but to come back from whatever exoplanet he escaped to in the Easter resurrection to save us, or at least the chosen worthy according to the made up myth they live by.

There will be no way to save people when all the jobs are being done by computer robots unless some politicians come up with a plan to pay us all a living wage to not work, which of course will require taxes that no one wants to pay.

What artificial rock has Kurzweil been living under?

How could he miss the stories projecting that this massive Machine Learning experiment is already overloading the existing power grid, and may bring the entire thing crashing down in the next year, if not the next two? And if not stopped by Congress, it will end up destroying the very environment these techno fantasy writers say their technology will save.

What to do about the electric power demands of artificial intelligence data centers?

No, if this is the way things are going to go, I will find a beautiful mountaintop to camp on and either find some way to survive for a little while longer, or if I run out of money to keep telling these stories, I will either die peacefully in my sleep, the preferred way to go, or take my own life. So like all art, my work and published words will one day disappear, like all ephemeral art.

The Right to Live – And Die – On Your Own Terms

Like all humans, at least up until 2024, I have lived my life according to a narrative. I’ve read the important newspapers, magazines and books, and watched the movies and now all the Netflix series that seemed interesting and worthy of my time.

Here today, I want to recommend one to you, dear readers. I’ve now watched the series “Outlander” twice, even though at first I was skeptical of the scenes where a British woman visits a place like Stonehenge and travels backward and forward in time from the 20th century after World War II to the 1700s in Scotland. I came to see the time travel element of the story not just as science fiction, but as a literary device. It’s highly instructive to see one woman’s story play out in both times.

There are relevant scenes in Season 3, Episode 9: The Doldrums. An artist and poet from China ends up saving the life of a member of a ship’s crew one day who was about to be tossed overboard. The ship is stuck at sea for days when they lose the wind in the Atlantic Ocean, on the way from France to Jamaica.

The superstitious crew thinks it’s the fault of bad luck, because someone failed to touch a horseshoe mounted on the ship’s mast before they departed port. But the Chinaman knows the wind is about to pickup. He notices a seagull flying low over the water. When the air is light, the birds fly high. When it is heavy, and rain is on the way, the birds fly low. He let’s fly the paper he’s been writing his life story on just as the wind picks up. The suspected man’s life is saved as the artist and poet captures the crew’s attention with his story just long enough for the wind to arrive.

Earlier in the episode, he had explained that he drew symbols on the deck of the ship, Chinese characters called logographs, as a form of art and poetry. But the rain washes the symbols away, ephemeral art. He explains that he is telling his own life story so it will not totally disappear. This is the way in China.

“A story told is a life lived,” he explained.

So too it is the way here. It matters not so much how many people hear or read the story. Or if it makes a lot of money. This story will be told. And there will be those who remember.

Much of my story is here on this website, and here in this memoir: Jump On The Bus: Make Democracy Work Again.

There is a sizable literature about how to live and die on one’s own terms. They say the only “right way” to live and die is on our own terms. No one knows what those terms are except us.

So according to one writer named Melanie Young, it is important that we “articulate the terms of our death now, while we are alive and healthy, so that we do not face our inevitable deaths in a manner contrary to our wishes.”

If you have not done so already, get your affairs in order. This is what I told my good friend and partner David Underhill back in 2019 when he found out he had advanced prostate cancer. I was there with him when the doctor told him it had metastasized into his bones.

Mobile Writer and Activist David Underhill Dies at 78

Some friends have a copy of my will. My obituary is written, saved as a draft on this website ready to publish after I breath my last. I hope it is as peaceful as the last breaths of my loyal dog Jefferson on Christmas Day, 2019, in the Connecuh National Forest near the Alabama-Florida line.

I do not say this to scare anyone. I do not plan for this to happen tonight, or on the Fourth of July, 2024. But if it does, know that I tried everything I could think of not just to save myself. But to save us all. If it does not work, so be it. I’m OK with that. Like art, life is ephemeral.

I’ve done it my way, and made it further in life than anyone could imagine, considering where I come from. So far I’ve made it 20 years publishing on the web. Many people, including close friends, said it couldn’t be done.

I proved them wrong. If it’s my time to go, and I’m not saying it is, at least I got this book chapter written this year.

It’s Only Rock ‘n’ Roll But I Like It: Wayne Perkins and Lynyrd Skynyrd, 1973 to 1977

Oh, and one more thing. America’s first successful “acknowledged” free-lance writer, Washington Irving, laid down in his bed on the Hudson River and died in his sleep not long after he finished the final volume in his five volume biography of George Washington.

Washington Irving: The First Acknowledged American Writer

That’s how I would like to go. Right after I write the last story I will ever write. I sincerely hope this is not it.

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