Business as usual

Semper ad asterisk.

via Wikipedia. (supposedly not a picture of a real E.T., but I guess we can’t say for sure anymore.)

Not sleeping much tonight: Thing 1 woke up to go to the bathroom at 3am, and rather than falling back asleep, my brain clicked into the possible ramifications of the David Grusch revelations/hoax. While the import of it is still TBD as of this writing, I’m sure that story will be soaking up most of our attention for the next several weeks/months/years/decades, depending on how things shake out.

My first thought, naturally, was: “Does this mean I’m out of a job?”

In one sense, no matter what the actual story turns out to be, anything I’m doing on here pales in comparison.

Even at this early stage in a developing story, one of three possible scenarios—or some combination—seems unavoidably true:

1. The disclosure is legitimate, and the governments of the world have been hiding physical evidence of “intact and partially intact craft of non-human origin.”

2. It’s an official misdirection, and the United States government has taken their efforts to fuck with us to stratospheric new heights.

3. David Grusch is committing suicide by practical joke, revealing that a confluence of shoddy journalism and hyperventilating social media has driven us to lose our collective mind along with him.

“If any of those three things is true,” I ask myself, while staring at the darkened ceiling and fighting the urge to bundle the whole family off to a bunker,¹ “what the hell am I supposed to write about?”

Maybe this is just the false bravado of sleeplessness talking. But for the moment, it seems like—regardless of what happens within the Disclosure/Hoax/Insanity triad—there’s still work to be done out here.

If it turns out that First Contact has already happened, then it just puts a giant asterisk next to the whole human project. These things are still true:

• There are still some big chunks of material reality that are some combination of unknown or unknowable to humans*.

• We’ve forgotten some pretty significant parts of human history, and might have done a poor job of assembling the puzzle pieces we do have*.

• However we came to have our particular physiology (and whatever help we might have gotten along the way) we still don’t fully understand how consciousness works, and how it might interact with reality in ways that we don’t entirely grasp*.

• We’ve created a system of governance that, at the highest levels, depends entirely on secrets and deception; those systems will continue to misrepresent or hide important information from us, because that’s the foundation of their existence*.

• Our increasingly globalized systems of cultural interpretation and meaning-making are woefully inadequate for anything besides the continued orderly function of international capitalism*².

• Regardless of whether we’re about to be inducted into the Intergalactic Space Federation or wiped out in a planetary genocide, most of us will continue to live and die on Earth* for the foreseeable future.

*And also there might be some aliens.

Some of the stuff I write on here might seem like esotericism for its own sake. However, my primary interest has always been in what makes us human, and how we can preserve that humanity in spite of whatever the future throws at us. The asterisks next to some of those considerations might change as new information comes to light. It certainly looks like we might be heading into a new frontier of the what-the-fuckery. But that doesn’t diminish the need for us to hold onto our humanity; in fact, questions about what really makes us human become even more salient. That’s what I intend to keep focusing on.

And also there might be aliens.

Stay safe out there, everybody.

1. For those of you who don’t have kids, let me tell you: the past five years (and counting) has been an ongoing exercise in resisting the ratcheting tension of cascading instability. Regardless of whether we pick the worst-case scenario from the Forrest Gump box of poisoned chocolates that the future is currently offering us—the constant need to re-evaluate the future we’re preparing our kids for is a fucking killer. And I don’t need any cheery optimism about “it’ll probably turn out okay.” I need a warm blanket and a cup of tea and a good cry, which I can’t have, because the blanket and the tea are getting packed into the bug-out bag in case we need to evacuate. GODDAMMIT.

2. Deep in the very core of my being, there is an inky black fistula of oily dread, welling up from the certain knowledge that—if we’ve actually made contact with extraterrestrial intelligence—it’s only a matter of time before the Seussian machinery of our incredibly stupid culture gloms out a commercial for, I dunno, the new iPhone, with some pithy quip about real aliens. “It turns out we’re not alone in the universe! And now with the 6D front-facing camera on the iPhone 30, you never have to be alone either, thanks to crystal-clear picture quality! ✌️😄” When this happens, I will not immediately commit ritual suicide—as penance for the tremendous shame of our species—because I have a family.