It's been a while since I've blogged on Zaadz. Most of the action is now occurring at Foreignerd.com, my "speculative travel writing" blog. Right now I'm in Berlin, so all of the posts have taken on a decidedly Prussian overtone, much like that lion chugging a beer posing in front of the Fernsehturm (TV tower) you see above. Also note, I've set up a new Flickr set to capture my Berliner fotografs. All of which is to say, for the latest P'SAL news, better to check the aforementioned sites, rather than this one. And as always, the Twittering continues.

Sensory Extensions The electric lights exist to reveal what our naked eyes cannot. The stereo systems echo and repeat sounds which our ears were not present to hear. A soufflé of international gourmandry awaits my tongue in the kitchen, while my video game system gives me the thrill of wars I'll never participate in. And the car: The car is my two feet multiplied by the tens of thousands. To hear the whir-increase of an accelerator in the distance is to hear an actual human foot, wrapped in its augmentation, running across the earth's hard surface. And yet, we dance. We dance because our bodies, often it seems, enjoy to be "naked" without their accoutrements, extensions, and amplifications. We dance in the dark to the slight sound of our heart-beats to celebrate the dim small places from whence we came, the slight whimpering bang which lodged us all -- we creatures, we beasts -- into the air and space we now occupy. But it is not everything, it is not all of us. We ourselves are but a thin, airless mirror, hovering behind a massive apparatus of muscle and bone and skin and fur. Looking farther still, we see the way in which this mass has attached itself to still other masses: trusses and trellises and chassises of all sorts. These in turn must be wired -- hard or airlessly -- across vast distances of communicable space, so that they may dance in sequence. This unrelenting progression outwards from us: from meat to machine to information space and back again, is everything we could qualify as "us". I am not a lone thing: I am a direction... outward.

George Eastman, founder of Kodak, was a genius (via Wiki):

The letter "K" had been a favorite of Eastman's, he is quoted as saying, "it seems a strong, incisive sort of letter". He and his mother devised the name Kodak with an anagram set. He said that there were three principal concepts he used in creating the name : it must be short, you can not mispronounce it, and it could not resemble anything or be associated with anything but Kodak.

Amen!

Call it sacrilege against my own kind, but when I think about Germany, I don't immediately get hipster-indie chills when picturing the "new Williasmburg" of Berlin. No, my interests are more captured by Frankfurt, birthplace of banking. Why? Because it so verboten to an artist like me. If I can make the obscure abstractions of the accrual and dispensation of finances somehow aesthetically compelling, then perhaps the "starving artist" ethos can be something forever buried. Berlin may be all retro-Kommie cool, but Frankfurt is the new Omaha, as in Mutual of Omaha.

A friend has recently introduced me to Sark, a large-livin' artist lady with lots to offer we creatives. Her work reminds me of a cross between a tidier Ralph Steadman and writing coach/painter Natalie Goldberg, but it's her concepts of "micromovements" which caught my eye. Basically, take any super-amazing creative goal you want to accomplish for yourself, and dice it up into tasks which each take no more than 5 minutes to do. Set a loose deadline for each, and feel a sense of accomplishment as you tick each off the list. It works for food, and it works for us. [Go here for more.]

I lived in the old empire, in the days when the Great Crumbling had begun. There was a bridge, somewhere up on the northern waters of the Mississippi, which collapsed during rush hour and sent dozens of cars into the drink, trapping and destroying many more. There was the New Orleans flood a few years before that, where the great levees gave way. And of course, the massive towers which collapsed at the behest of a few errant 747s. The very infrastructure was rotting like quicksand beneath our feet, and we had only ourselves to blame. For years we'd thought of our infrastructure as something erotic, and permanent, like the beauty of youth and the long legs of models who posed in crisp gowns. It was a solid, man-made ground, but it was ground nonetheless. But money, and croneyism, and war bonds: these all filtered money out in the wrong ways. The projects were quietly underfunded, the departments of public works slowly eroded by tax drip here, embezzlement there, and entitlements all around. The great civic geniuses were given to building new big boxes and multi-tiered (and -themed) shopping destinations, while the road beds and train trestles which bore these quiet burdens grumbled underneath. And then, at last, it happened: slowly at first, and then with ever-increasing efficiency and speed, like a giant, random game of dominoes set all across the country. An overpass here, a public pier there, and suddenly, the transit officials and police departments and dutiful, good-mannered engineers were overwhelmed. Foreigners and Europeans came in to help, but it was much too late: the cocky, loud empire was resting on powderizing bones, and we were all rattling at the rib cages hoping to break out. That's when I came here, to the fair, new, more boring land, where the religions and political parties form singular entities, where alcohol is outlawed and gambling a thing of dirty child's story books. I came here, where thick opaque fences block the public eye from surveying the ever-numerating landfills, and it's simply ok (and normal) to have to wear a gas mask to work and surgical mask to the play. And infrastructure? It's all soft, safe, and non-secular: God himself must hold these bridges and car queues up in the air, float as they do. Airplanes no longer hurl themselves into the atmosphere with a linebacker's fury: they simply flutter into orbit, blowing with the gentle breezes as they make their boring way into the lanyard-covered cloudforts of the sky. The cloudforts: this is where my daddy made his living, contemplating and redrawing the clouds from above. They made queer shadows on the ground from up there, and my childhood bedroom was covered with them. See here, how the giant, curly-haired monster angles his paws around the throat of Chicago! See there, the way the three-legged angel fish squats down and farts on the shores of Galveston! Oh, looky now, at how the man-eating pickle bats descend on the sanded plains of eastern California, looking for trailers and other thin-skinned prey! These white, impermanent creatures were in a never-ending quest to pick the planet clean of people, according to my dad's wild imagination. He could only wonder what those still left to suffer below must think of the clouds themselves.

Robbie didn't think the Last Days would be so anticlimactic, but they were. He was a lowly tank, an M-1 Abrams, piloted by another thinkcan like himself. Herman was a newer thinkcan, but crude in his functioning: they'd designed him to drive an M-1 Abrams in a straight line, running over Crisstings and Lionmen alike, swiveling his turret in lazy arcs across the sky as the spiderplanes flew overhead.

The spiderplanes were the ones who did the actual fighting: up there past the stormclouds, in the rare air where the ozone had all been destroyed long ago. The other humans, the non-Crisstings and non-Lionmen, had seen their skin boil away in a matter of years when the last of the ozone dissippated. A harsh new light rained down around the globe, like God Himself had replaced the sun with a garish ultraviolet bulb, and everything felt, well, tangy.

It was under this light that the spiderplanes engaged in fierce combat. Both sides -- the pious, white-wearing Crisstings, and the hideous, blood-jawed and pelt-wearing Lionmen -- had purchased their spiderplanes from the same company, HalliburgerKing Wristcomputers, a NLC (No Liability Company) based in the post-nuke wild of Michigan.

The Canadian steppes had been flattened, but not HalliburgerKing's headquarters, a massive, sprawling steaming skull which covered Lakes Michigan and Superior with its massive, grey bulk, sucking up every last bit of freshwater for use in its fowl Beasts of Labor, especially the spiderplanes.

Well, here they were: the Last Days.

Someone had tipped off the Crisstings to a Lionman presence in what was once eastern China, and the Crisstingers went apeshit, bombing away whole mountain ranges and vacuuming out the breathable air for miles around. The Chrisstingers were the most vicious of all Crissting troops: they had the bodies of grown warriors, but the minds and hearts of wee children -- Apocalypse was a very large preschool game to them.

Robbie watched all of this on a newscast while he was parked in a thinkcan motorpool which covered the entire Arabian penisula. The motorpool was a vast, almost endless parking lot containing every functioning gas-powered motorized vehicle known to man, gathered here to take advantage of the peninsula's last remaining drops of oil.

Robbie had a diesel engine, which meant he hung out with the other diesels, swapping stories and trading jokes about what all of the other horrible engine types had done to deserve being less than great: the little 2-stroke lawnmowers were too dirty, the hemis were too small, the rotaries too weird, the hybrids weak, the V6s and V8s brainless and simple.

"We diesels are the only ones who can run both on road AND track," as one of the smarter thinkcan diesels -- a flat-fronted semi-hauler named Jimmy -- had put it.

On the first of the Last Days, Robbie was watching the newscast with the other diesels, when the order came out: drive.

As none of the vehicles could be trusted to drive alone, they were awarded with smaller, humanoid-shaped thinkcan drivers, who came down from helicopters and dispersed across the peninsula in great waves of gleaming limbs.

"The idea is simple," said Robbie's superior, a garbage truck named Bobby. "We're to function as a low-rate 'sweeper' force, cutting down all remaining land-based humans at the knees. Only the spiderplane pilots will remain. This is what HalliburgerKing is looking for. This will be the future."

No more humans. Just thinkcans, everywhere.

Robbie felt a shudder run through his pleather seat cushions. Like the rest of the vehicles in the motorpool, he'd been designed to be a protective shell AROUND humans: his whole existence was made to protect them from harm. True, he had a gun, but this was only used on occasion to free other humans trapped inside of buildings or dirt mounds. This is what he told himself at least.

It all made sense now: the thinkcan drivers were here to make sure the older thinkcan vehicles didn't suddenly become sentimental and drive in such a way as to spare human lives. HalliburgerKing wanted free reign across the planet for its thinkcans -- especially the spiderplanes -- and the loud, stinky, highly-talented humans would simply get in the way. Robbie thought -- and smiled -- about the windtraps a nest of wily humans had set to bring down a spiderplane in the High Urals. They were wiped in minutes, but the effort was notable.

Now here they were, driving at full speed across what was once Iran, beelining it for what was once China, flattening tens of billions of humans beneath their feet.

Over the course of the century they'd reduced their material needs by 99%, figuring out a way to hack their DNA to allow them to find simple nourishment by simply standing in the sun. They'd grown like weeds -- literally -- from this point forward, often spending their whole lives standing in the same place. The need for architecture had vanished, and with it the need for roads, electricity, airports and malls. A half a trillion silent, standing people, looking dumbly up at the sun, thinking bleached-out thoughts. It was no matter: it felt horrible to crush them underneath his chassis.

"Faster! Faster!" screamed the little thinkcan driver perched in Robbie's turret.

Robbie had quickly begun to resent him, or it.

Older thinkcans like Robbie, the pre-HalliburgerKing models, had grown up and around humans, built to serve and be serviced by them. They grew to love each other, as evidenced by the obsession the older humans had with washing and waxing their cars, hosting airshows, and finding motorcycles sexually appealling. It might not have been real "love", but it was affection.

HalliburgerKing had changed all that. The organization was founded by one RebelDawnNine, a thinkcan/human hybrid who'd spent his entire childhood in outerspace, coasting around the stripminemalls of the asteroid belt, and felt little affection for the home planet. He wanted it smooth, gleaming, and chrome-plated, the better to hurl through the cosmos with it.

This was not hyperbole: RebelDawnNine was constructing an elaborate "slingshot" apparatus somewhere out past Saturn, which would use some secretive principle of advanced physics to hurl the planets of the solar system in every which way across the galaxy, like massive billiard balls with molten cores and atmospheres. The motivation behind this absurd act, as usual, was unknown, but Robbie and his fellow thinkcans knew what it meant for them: certain death once they'd swept away the humans.

He slowed down.

"Damn it Robbie! More speed! More speed!"

The driver spoke the words "damn it" with the over-articulated sterility common amongst the newer thinkcans. The driver was free of any of the rust, mold, or other biospheric debris which covered the likes of Robbie and his fellow vehicles. This, in microcosm, was what RebelDawnNine intended for the entire planet: sweep away the human-weeds, level the mountains, fill the oceans with their dust, and make the whole thing as hard and bullet-like as possible.

Robbie and his fellow vehicles would do their part, but RebelDawnNine needed the spiderplanes to finish it.

Over the years, while the majority of humanity had willingly turned itself into little more than a glorified cornfield, the Crisstings and Lionmen had secreted themselves away to caves and swamps underground to perfect their own DNA manipulations.

The Crisstings traced their lineage to an obscure, Old World sect of desert worshippers, who'd left behind home and hearth to be illuminated by the desert's purity. They hated the earth with a passion, but they were not spacesailors by any stretch: their escape and migration would be inward, into their minds, into the seat of consciousness from which all things arose. They tinkered with their DNA to the point of being able to subsist in caves for centuries on end doing little else than counting the number of breaths they took and waiting for revelation. One such Crissting, a bald, impossibly thin man named Cyprisseria, had counted his breaths up to the daunting number of 567,889,003 at which point he'd stood, raised a finger, said "aha!", and decided he had to tell everyone about it.

He was met with resistance soon enough when he ran across a patch of Lionmen dueling it out on the Pampas, who were none-to-pleased to have a cataract-riddled wisp of a man telling them what to believe.

The Lionmen had once been Australians, Argentinians, Russians, and Irishmen: stern, bold stock who prized unarmed conflict ("sports", as Robbie heard they were called), honor, bloodshed, and having their way with womanfolk. They word robes made of sheep turned inside-out, hung themselves from makeshift crosses for fun, brewed their own spirits, and tattooed themselves with the names of famous mountain peaks. As the years wore on, as the bulk of humanity went to seed and the Crisstings lost themselves in the endless caverns of their own minds, the Lionmen fixed their DNA to allow them to withstand the rigors of such hard-partying. They installed second livers, increased the size of their fists, and made hair grow from every single spot of blank skin on their bodies. They grew to be the size of giants, drinking 180-proof whiskey from massive oak flagons, headbutting each other during grueling ten-day contests called ManFights.

When Cyprisseria emerged from his cave in order to prosletize for his obscure method for escaping the prison of the body, the Lionmen laughed, put him in a massive cistern, filled it with animal meat, and had him for dinner on day five of that year's ManFight. When Cyprisseria's brethren discovered the fate of their leader, they poured from their caves all across the planet, and declared Holy War upon the Lionmen.

Unfortunately, neither sect had planned for the coming of RebelDawnNine.

To RebelDawnNine and the HalliburgerKing consortium, the warring religious sects would be very useful idiots in the long-term project of wiping the earth clean, packing it like a snowball, and whipping it into space.

And so again, here we are in the Last Days, with Robbie the Tank being piloted by a human-hating thinkcan driver to wipe the plains free of human weeds, with the last remaining Lionmen and Crisstings duking it out overhead in the very spiderplanes which would soon finish Robbie and the rest of the vehicles off for good.

Robbie had only seen a spiderplane up close once, and it was a gruesome site.

The Lionmen had shot one down over the Arabian sea, and a flotilla of maintenance craft had swarmed it, but not before Robbie and the other diesels had commandeered a large pier outside of Dubai to watch it sink into the Gulf's brown waves.

Unlike the rest of the thinkcans produced by HalliburgerKing -- and there were many of them -- the spiderplanes were the only ones which did not gleam with the spitshine polish of RebelDawnNine's preferred aesthetic. Instead, they were black, and furry, almost shivering when they moved. They got their names from the fearsome, impossibly long legs they used to propel themselves from mountaintops and into battle, and the thick webs of burning, solvent goo they poured from their nosecones as they flew overhead. One always knew a spiderplane clash had occurred by observing the local terrain, for they left trails of death and destruction wherever they want.

And now Robbie was headed right towards them.

I've got a sadness that only CGI can cure.

I thought Philly's was bad. I thought DC's bad. I thought wrong. Buffalo, New York, my unofficial second home, has the worst airport I've encountered on my slow-paced Foreignerd world tour thus far. It's not that the runway is mismanaged (Philly takes that prize). It's not that the concourse sprawls on boring and forever (umm... DC). It's just that, if you're on foot, if you don't have the foresight to rent a cab, hire a shuttle bus, or lease out a rental car, you're fucked. I tried to cross the street, tried to go to McDonald's. Closed to pedestrians. I headed over to the Hilton (where I now type this, thanks free wifi!) for a couple good beers. Nothing but Coors. The entire concourse is devoid of an open restaurant. Wifi in the airport is a non-starter. The city bus stopped running at 5pm. Hey, at least it's not raining.

Michael Goldhaber has posted a thought-provoking response to my previous piece on the attention economy. Some of his solutions to the unfairness of having the world's eyeballs affixed to Paris Hilton-style media spectacles include: 1) Paying more attention to our own circles of friends and relations rather than more distant kinds of stars. 2) Offering more and better modes of attention getting to allow each person to find the best mode for getting attention for what is most truly and importantly to his and her concerns. 3) Realizing and supporting situations in which attention flows equally to all -- partying, communal ecstatic dance, social networking, etc. I resonate deeply with all three of these. Re: #1, I know of plenty of folks who waste hours a day charting the obscure maneuvers of far-off celebrities, whilst their personal lives are in high disarray. Were they actually to put some energy into their local communities, paying attention to local causes rather than watching Access Hollywood and collecting memoribilia, we'd all be better off. For #2, as I mentioned in my previous post, there is a class of attention-getting professionals who blend marketing, design, copy-writing, and leveraged technology to tip the scales in favor of new ideas. These folks could definitely lend a hand to more important causes. And for #3, I agree, but I have a concern. While I've been to plenty of parties where attention was distributed more equally, I also worry that "equal distribution" isn't enough: it's not just that ALL people need to have a more equal share of the attention wealth, but IMPORTANT people and ideas (read: necessary for the healthy and happy functioning of global society) do even more so. How we do THAT, of course, is the real question....