What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

i watched the doc last night dude

Todd left me another sticky overnight. It seems that while he “lives” in my laptop, he has the ability to travel pretty much anywhere he wants. Of course he does. He’s a frickin’ ghost. He can roam the net, hack any computer, channel surf the cable and satellite systems, call into any radio station on the dial. He can even listen to my CDs. Apparently even while they’re sitting on the shelf. (insert iTodd joke here)

I sat down and replied. “What did you think?”

it scared me

“Yeah. I can understand that. The collapse of industrial civilization and the mass extinction of life on this planet are scary things.”

Todd disappeared for a bit. Off to ponder, no doubt. I opened my mail and started to scan the new stuff. There was an article about the decimation of Colorado pine forests and another about forests replacing tundra in the Canadian arctic. Both situations seem to result from global heating. And there was a link to part three of John Michael Greer’s very clear and insightful review of David Korten’s The Great Turning.

Todd returned. i don’t think all of the doom and gloom helps

I sighed. Great. There’s a cheermonger in my computer.

I’ve learned, these past couple of days, that there is a correlation between the color of sticky Todd uses and his emotional state. This one was pink. Anger, I think, or at least frustration and upset. I typed back: “What doom and gloom, Todd?”

your whole damned movie dude the whole thing peak oil and mass extinction and nuclear war and climate change and how everything doesnt work like the economy and politics and how screwed up we are and the culture and shit its all going to fall apart and how there are way too many of us and all of that its depressing dude and people are not going to buy it youre selling doom and gloom and people do not want to hear it

This is an edited version, actually. Todd went on for about three dozen stickies, covering my desktop like the bulletin board at the General Store Cafe. By the time he was done I could only see Barry Godber’s left eye peering out.

“Is that all you saw, Todd?” I asked. “Doom and gloom and nothing else?”

The stickies disappeared en masse. Then a single sticky popped back, this one blue. Sadness? Regret? Slowly, one letter at a time, this message typed itself out: it made me feel things i dont want to feel

I smiled. There was hope for Todd yet. He got right to the heart of it, and he told the truth. Not bad for an undead bank teller from Spackle Grove.

“Watch it again, Todd,” I replied. “It’s long and dense and it takes some time to sink in. Watch it again and then we’ll talk more.”

I sat and waited, staring at the screen. It was a full minute before one last sticky appeared.

so this is what the pig was talking about

That was this morning. Todd’s been absent since. I’ve been hauling boxes, getting ready to move, and pondering whether or not to enter more film festivals. It’s not like Todd doesn’t have a point. While I don’t agree that we’re selling doom and gloom, I do agree that our call for sanity, deep feeling, and the end of denial do seem to fly in the face of the entire dominant culture. In the matter of reaching our audience, whoever that is, we have our work cut out for us. And we’re not sure how to proceed.

And I don’t know what Todd’s last sticky meant. First it’s a chicken. Now it’s a pig. I’m not sure where Todd went after that pizza roll refused to budge, but it sounds like that old phrase “bought the farm” may be more accurate than I had supposed.

I’ll ask him when he returns.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 12:25 pm and is filed under Tim's Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.