Notes from the Black Hole at the Center of the Galaxy

(instead of the notes i was supposed to be taking)

1.

Going back to in-person meetings, bercause they fired everyone who knew how to make the tech work.

Why do I feel like the people responsible for this lovely but ageing Modernist structure, were a past civilization, wiser than ours, & unfit for present savagery?

Faculty get-togethers, & their eternal kid-refreshments.

Everyone knows they need to get out of education, but one more year will go by, & then another.

Software designed to collect data, & only grudgingly allows human purposes.

The invincible smugness of the higher-ups, who cannot perceive at all the harm they do, through the dense fog of their bloated paygrade.

The location moved, no advance notice, a sign just now being made. “It’s not like we’re in the communication business,” I quipped.

The metrics will continue to rise, until the last one of us is gone.

Since the obvious remedies are utterly unavailable, philosophy wrings its hands in vain to find a new way of framing the impasse. One that doesn’t involve time travel. All solutions involve time travel.

Word of the decade: “mitigation”.

The uncivil ones, on whom pretending hangs askew.

The children receive empty promises. I help giftwrap them. My specialty is the shrug. Noncommittal, but deeply felt.

Fireplace screensaver. At least it’s not Praeger U. (like last time). Sieg fucking heil.

2.

Dictionaries fixed the language at one point. Grammar software has done the same at another--. But do we really want the ability to write a sentence made a specialty skill, like extracting roots the hard way?

The real story of the failure of leadership at every level will not be told. But it can be guessed, by the shuffling back & forth of the game pieces.

I’ll just lasso me an iceberg.

When surveillance was made a god, meaning turned out to be a handicap. Among those meanings was the meaning of surveillance.

Reinventing the wheel, square this time. All together now: Let’s roll!