Last night was a good night. I spent the evening in the company of my sister and a few companions, treating her to a birthday dinner. Afterwards, our group strolled around, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes (well I wasn’t), and later convened in my apartment to talk about our dreams—both eerie and violent, to amusing and fantastical, representing animus & anima, beginnings & endings—over mugs of mugwort tea.
More and more I'm taking it as my guiding assumption, my guiding historical thesis, that Mayans were right about 2012: it was the end of a world, a kind of benumbing, technological end, when tech truly took over people's brains, and life got worse, a *certain version* of the world ended. Basically, we can only refer to pre-2012 as the before times: the times when you could get on public transportation and not see fifty heads glued to some little screen of nothingness, before people unlearned how to make friends, have conversations, court a lover, and other things before all sorts of reverse cultural transformations.
I actually feel good about this admission, however; it's clarifying. It's better than saying, “oh, hey, our world now is just a weird and troubling extension of the world I used to know.” It’s not an extension; there’s been a break. It’s clearer to say that “my childhood and adolescence was the world of yesterday, and this is something else.”