skonen_blades

The struggle is eternal.
If it’s not mental, it’s emotional.
If it’s not emotional, it’s spiritual.
If it’s not spiritual, it’s physical.
If it’s not physical, it’s financial.
If it’s not financial, it’s moral.
Round and round.
Over and over.
It feels like the rules are simple.
But it’s the obeying that’s complex.
I feel like we’re getting far too used
To far too much far too quickly
And I think sometimes
That there's a darkness
Inside all of us
That's too easily awakened
Too easily manipulated
A selfishness
That makes us the main character
Wilts our compassion
Enables us to blunt awareness
And fluff up our denial
Makes our eyes willfully blind
To book burnings
Sometimes it's the horror of life
The cruel indifference of the world
That coffins our empathy
But usually it's a whisper
From some dark lord
Some walking advertisement
Some human drug
Cocooning us in self assurance
And shallow certainty
You need to keep your eyes open
But it’s getting late
And people go to sleep in the dark
Maybe I’m just old
Maybe I’m yelling at clouds
Maybe it only feels fast because I’m slowing down
But I’m worried about us



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What to do when your child asks when Earth’s temperature will get back to normal:


1. Croon an old song from the fifties in the hopes that you’ll start a distracting singalong. If you want to go more contemporary that’s up to you.

2. Beg for forgiveness. Curl up. Weep. Maybe she’ll be confused and move on to a different subject.

3. Show her every post-apocalyptic film ever made. Instill a love of the genre in their hearts. Encourage them to take archery and swordplay and firearm training when they’re old enough. Get them to start a sustenance garden on their windowsill. Buy a book on which fungi are edible in your area.

4. Say “Everything will be fine in a few years. Don’t worry.” and then bit your knuckle to keep from screaming.

5. Offer them ice cream. It’s amazing. They’ll forget what they were even talking about.

6. Tell them to invest in sunscreen companies. When they ask what ‘invest’ means. Tell them it’s about making a bet on a financially stable market future. Then have a deep think on that and refer to #2 or #5 or.....

7. Offer yourself ice cream. It’s amazing. I’m telling you, the salt of your tears barely alters the taste.

8. Remind them that living in the downtown core of a desirable city with high property values and strategic importance means that when the missiles fly, you won’t even notice when you’re evaporated in the atomic blast. It’s freeing.

9. Denial. Pretend you didn’t hear. Then actually believe you didn’t hear.

10. Point to the recycling bin, the compost and the second-hand clothing in an effort show your child that you’re doing what you can. Explain that you don’t eat meat as often as you used to. Let them know that that next car is going to be electric, for sure this time. Explain why you bicycle more. Do all this to show them you tried to be less culpable. That it’s not your fault. Don’t tell them that such actions are nothing in the face of the large scale deforestation, the toxic production waste products, and the rising carbon emissions. Let hope be the last thing to die.



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Today as I was walking down Commercial Drive
I walked past a thin, older, confident man wearing what looked like:

a leopard-print onesie
a faux-fur, tiger-striped vest
a shiny pair of short shorts
six dark, thick, prominent, tentacle-shaped face tattoos
so many rings, necklaces, and bracelets
and a zebra-striped fedora

He said to his friend sitting beside him
“Back in the forties, everyone used to wear hats. Like this.”
He pointed to his own hat as an example, and finished,
“Nowadays, nobody wears hats.”
with an air of regret
slightly smug
like he was keeping a tradition alive

And I thought it was the best metaphor
for how nostalgia is a liar

If that man could time-travel back to the forties dressed like that
No one would say “Hey, nice hat”
He’d be killed

The good old days are not what people thought they were
It just feels that way

The basis of so much political propaganda is getting back to the ‘good old days’ when men were men and women were women and the economy was good and kids were safe to walk the streets, etc, etc.

And it’s a lie

Times were only simpler because you were simpler.
Life gets harder and faster until you die
The complexities of human relationships, economics, and politics
from personal to national
are revealed to be so much more byzantine, deep, nuanced, and detailed than you could possibly imagine.
So who can help but be nostalgic?

People who say they’d do better in medieval times
or on a starship in the future
When in this reality
they’re a menial wage drone
an assistant manager at a tiny Wal Mart

The knights would chew them up
And so would starfleet

But I thought the dude looked great
Flying his flag on the drive
And hey

Nice hat



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It’s these forgotten circuses that threaten to overwhelm reality. The crack are showing. The balloon grows almost to the bursting point, exposing tectonic plates that were more fragile than we thought. Time dilates and wheezes, breathing accordion across our experience.

The particles in our lungs are cancerous in the same way that the nose of a rhino is rhinoceros. It’s what we breathe out. We paint this world caustic with every exhalation. A condensation of disease on the windows. It’s a stretching. A testing of the tensile strength of celebrated reality. We’re crossing the dimension on the river Leithe, drinking the water to forget the future. The hubris of our choices that set this in motion. We need to pat ourselves on the back while trying to row.

We’re dinosaurs flying kites. The crushed blood of the last race to die here powers our cars. The wind that whistles through the holes in our bodies carries the light chuckle of the earth. The earth is not in distress. The earth is a ball of iron. Plants and insects and animals iterate faster than plodding meat people. Evolution will fast forward like it always does.

Earth’s life will thin, will wane. We will thin, will wane. We are about to become a new moon of a race. Quiet and still here. But there will be no sanding down of the scars for a long, long time.

The skyscrapers will scrape less and less sky as one by one they collapse to the gums, going back to the soft loam of the earth. How many glaciers will need to scour this earth to reduce our troubled stacked caves back to sand? We cannot sift what we’ve done back down to nothing. There is no reset. Only forward.

That precious guest the future, shaking its head with its “I told you so”s and its “Why didn’t you listen”s, ruining dinner, ruining our present-day good time. We were all having fun until he showed up.

Time isn’t a flat circle any more than it’s a straight line. It’s a dot. There’s nothing to it except strong legs fading up into the clouds. We don’t know.

We know. But we don’t know.

It’s dark even in the daytime.


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I was a time traveler. I say ‘was’ because it’s apparent to me now that this was a one-way trip.

I realized I was a god as soon as the pain stopped.

I could hear all the other gods, shouting in my head. Billions of them ordered into groups and catalogues. Every thought that ran through my mind accordioned new sub-menus out, giving me access to the proper people. Polite queries were flooding through me like water through a dam.

I wanted to respond but it was hard to do because of all the screaming I was doing.

It was a social network in my mind. Nodes of location and profession grew and pinpointed depending on my attention. Closing my eyes did nothing.

Most countries I recognized. Some I didn’t. I shied away from the nodes labeled with the names of planets. I only recognized half of the professions. Even though I could hear everyone, I was somehow not going insane. My brain must have been augmented, too.

I looked down at my arms. Light blue with a faint tracery of new lines on the skin. I wanted to get a closer look and immediately I could see the manufactured hairs on my arm in electron microscope detail.

I started screaming again. This was not my body.

I remembered stepping out of my time machine into an alley in what was supposed to be the year 2120. Immediately, I had trouble breathing and my eyes started watering regardless of the air filter and goggles.

Then fire lit up my veins like vegas and I went down.

As soon I came in contact with the future, I was registered as a pure biological and 'updates' began pouring into me from the picotech floating in the air. According to the tech, I hadn't been updated in a long time.

It was like plugging a gaming console into the ancient internet after two years of not playing it. Immediately, downloads for the OS and all of the games would pour in with a need for a restart. It took a long time.

Well, I've never been hooked into this network and according to its data, I was in need of a full reinstall.

I was in a coma for two weeks. Upgrade after upgrade slammed into my twitching body. I lay shuddering in the hospital while concerned medpeople monitored it all. The future ran through me like a train.

I am now connected to worldmind, overnet and airmesh. My eyes are sniper scopes and my skin is an air filter. I am blue.

I cannot go back. This future lacks the technology to regress me to my former self and the body I now possess would create thousands of patents that haven’t been invented yet if I went back.

The future is sorry. It says so. Here. In my mind. Everyone one earth apologizes and is happy to meet me. The other planets are knocking on my mental firewalls with well wishes. They all feel bad, like they sprung a trap on me. But they’ve never met a time traveler before and they want to talk.

I have five options of travel if I want to see other planets, seven if I want to leave this body here.

The blue skin around the corners of my mouth hooks up into a smile.

I think I’ll go to Mars.


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We’re not part of the circle of life.
We’ve turned the process into a straight line.
Our mouths are the tunnel at the end of a railroad track and everything is going in.
We are a mutation that isn’t succeeding.
We are an aberration.
We are not doing what we’re supposed to do.
At first we were benign. Now we are malignant.
We think we’re succeeding but we are aggressively failing.
I wonder if cancer would feel the same way if it could think.
Would it try to say “Look what I can do! Look how successful I am!”
Economic growth has metastasized.
We do not march with nature.
We actively march against it.
We’ve drawn our line in the sand. And in the forests. And in the ocean.
This is a war where even if we win, we lose.
We are going to run out of food.
We are going to run out of water.
We are going to run out of air.
And when we die, Earth will compost our civilization into a new chapter.
Strange new plants will break it down. Strange new animals will adapt to the new settings.
The worst part of it all is that we had the capability to be in tune with our surroundings but have chosen not to.



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The majority of earth voted against winter this year.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t happen that often. There are still countries on Earth for whom snow is a novelty and there are those who like the seasons to change.

But this year, no winter. The vote pinged us, time zone by time zone, around the planet. We mentally filled out the ballot box in the corner of our vision and sent it back to the main computer.

It’s hard to remember a time where computers were external and even the implants had to be installed physically. Now with the biosoft rewriting the DNA, we’re ‘born soft’, as they used to say. Worldwide, we’re all linked together in our minds.

The weather satellites were a necessary revolution after the planet nearly cooked from our fuel consumption. We crowdsource everything now. There’s still an economy but local power centers and governments don’t differ from each other that wildly anymore. Earth is a country now, not a kaleidoscope of fractured cultures.

Our translators make it possible for us all to speak to each other which we do often. We debate but we rarely war. The collective IQ of the planet has risen to a nice, high average and we’ve realized the profit in peace.

We’re more like a collection of around five thousand cities connected like Christmas lights sprinkled around the globe.

We stabilized the population and we’re all born with a baseline gradient of information that trickles in. We have the wisdom of generations at our fingertips and it cannot be removed or taken away.

That was the failsafe of the architects who instilled the change in us. It was a turbulent time of near-extinction as we understand it. Wholesale slaughter had not yet begun but we were dying by the thousands. Mostly preventable disasters were occurring more and more frequently because of greed, divisiveness, and secretive governments.

A unity was needed. And those Helsinki seven delivered.

Now we are all knowledge-rich and connected through maturity. It’s truly a new age.

It’s called the Anthropocene.



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The taste of the future is a lot like a bathtub full of lemon juice. A punch that you can sit in. A swerve ball of solar plexus centrifuge that calls you home like targets call the answering machines of arrows on rainy nights just to hear their voices. If calculators had souls, they’d be rectangular. Parallelograms of solace and want, needing fingers to help themselves to answers, to help them figure out the world. I’m glad calculators don’t have souls. If headphones were able to talk, they’d beg speakers to shut up and listen for a second. Backspace keys would scream not to be used. Erasers would run away from hands.

Here on the chart of wrongdoing is a line, a circle, and six dots on a graph describing the arc of your covenant life. Your geometry. Your parabola of existence is a plotted average among spikes. You memory sands off the corners. You remember skating on ice-garden professionals with regretful eyes tracking you every step of the way.

All you remember thinking, all you remember knowing, is “after this there is no back to normal. After this there is no back to normal. After this there is no back to normal.” It wasn’t just a line that was crossed, it was an entire border into a new country you were extradited, no, expunged into where you didn’t speak the language but with no embassy of your home town to run to. Any passport in a storm, you said, and you slipped on other people like suits at a sale until one of them fit.

Anyone who tells you smiles are free has never had a problem with depression. Smiles cost a lot to some people.

If you are what you eat then I am my feelings. If you are what you eat then I am my own sense of ambition. If you are what you eat then I am my ability to deal. If you are what you eat then I am my own imagination. If you are what you eat then I am my faith in my own self worth. If you are what you eat then I am the tiger I was supposed to be.

I keep expecting a bike messenger from a better future to come at me with answers. I stare for hours at the doorbell but nothing happens. I wait for either missiles or messages but all that happens is that time goes by.

I feel a darkness coming that will eclipse the others with its magnitude but I’m not sure about that. I sense the edge of it and fight it off.

I guess you could say I’m open to suggestion.





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They stood on level sixteen of the meat building, waiting for their order of sharkbeef.

This vat boutique specialized in hybrid delicacies and Kay was hosting a birthday dinner party tonight. The invites and accepts scrolled across her vision as she looked down at her son. The store prided itself on having curious antique items for the customers to handle while they waited. He was engrossed in something.

“What are these?” posted Adam. He was six years old today. “They look ancient. What were they used for? They look heavy enough to be weapons.” He turned it over in his hands while his pupils irised wide, scanning through several spectra and mags to see if there was something deceptively complex under the surface.

There wasn’t. He was looking at a book. He’d never seen one before. He had yottabytes of information in his cranial cavity just like everyone else but like his parents always said “It’s about asking, not having.” He had perfectly decent search engines installed but like most children, he just wasn’t that curious about the past.

“It’s a book.” Kay said. “It’s how humans used to record information when we stored it externally. Sort of like a baby internet. You remember that from your history downloads?”

“Yes.” Adam lied. He never paid attention to his school feeds. There were so many other cool things happening with his friend’s challenges in the socials. Pretty Renee from crosstag was finally paying attention to his scores.

“I know you haven’t.” she said with a sigh. She remembered being so curious at his age and wondered why he wasn’t. She took the book and opened it. The title had rubbed off but she recorded the first few lines into her eyes. The results fluttered through. No exact matches. Must have been a small publishing run with little to no success. Looked like a collection of poetry. She scanned it in to the general knowledge Linksys, tagging ownership and viewing rights to see if there were any challenges. There weren’t. It must have been quite obscure.

“It was a painfully laborious process and in real-world costs, entire forests were given over to these methods. Businesses made money off of them. Government sponsored storage facilities kept entire buildings full of them.” She searched. “Ah. Libraries, they were called. Like our file system names.”

Adam was already bored. He hated shopping with his mother.

She went on. “It’s a form of meditation in some of the enclaves to read them. Taking in information that slowly is like eating a great meal over the course of days. Flashing a book in seconds still gives you the same comprehension but it’s not the same. Actually reading, using your meat mind, well, some of them say they feel connected to our ancestors by reading this way.”

She had to admit to herself that it sounded incredibly boring. But she’d never tried it. She turned it over in her hands like a curious animal inspecting a possible trap.

The shopkeeper came over with the sharkbeef. “Here you go, Miss. Creds received. Ah, I see you’ve found something interesting.” He said, friendly eyebrows waggling at the book.

“Thank you Jake. How much for the book?” she asked.

“Take it.” Jake replied. “Bring it back if you don’t like it.”

Adam sighed theatrically. Kay tucked the book into her bag.

“Okay, let’s go, kiddo. Your birthday dinner awaits. Thanks, Jake!” she said.

Tonight she would read in the bath like her grandmothers did. She was looking forward to it.




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James was sick of his grandfather’s racism. He didn’t care if he was a war hero.

“They’re not people, Jimmy. They have no feelings.” His grandfather shouted from the other room. James loaded up the dishwasher, closed it, and took a deep breath, preparing for going back into the living room. Once a week, James came by to cook his grandfather dinner and keep him company. It was getting to be more and more of a test of patience.

“I mean, I have a brain, right? I know I’m smart. I was raised differently than them. Not in a lab. I had a mother and a father. I know how to be kind to other people. People, Jimmy. People. That dishwasher in there has more compassion than them. I’ve seen what they do to people like you and I on the ‘vision.”

His grandfather was referring to the war footage from the nightly news. Recently the Chinamerican automated soldiers had invaded parts of Eastern Europe to keep the peace. It was their first solo campaign and it was successful. Video of their angular heads and antennae bobbing through the ruined villages was run constantly with updates of our victorious battles.

“I don’t care about these intelligence tests and emotional accelerators they keep talking about. It’s all smoke and mirrors. They’re not flesh and blood. They’re just equations. They don’t eat, they don’t have trust issues, they don’t cry, they just follow orders. They’re just guns that can walk around.”

In recent years, the A.I. on the automated soldiers had gotten to a point that they’d been given basic rights. Some had been promoted. None of them had been granted civilian status yet but many of them had been given passes and allowed supervised visits outside of their compounds with other soldiers.

Soldiers like James. James was fourth generation Army.

“I have to go, Grandpa. I have friends to see. It was a nice dinner.”

“Well you just be careful. I worry about you. The army isn’t what it used to be. Don’t trust those tin cans.” His grandfather said with an angry jut of his chin.

Outside, James clambered into his patrol vehicle to return to base. A body with an angular head and antennae sat asleep at the driver’s wheel. When James closed the door, lights blinked on and the construct at the wheel woke up.

“Hey. Sorry. I was recharging. How’d it go? Do I get to meet him tonight? I mean, that’s General Daimus in there. Some of his strategy helped us win War IV. I’ve reviewed the records but I always get more from someone who was actually there, y’know?” said an articulate voice from the front faceplate of the construct.

“Not tonight, Darren.” Said James. “Maybe next week. But don’t hold your breath.”

“I have no breath to hold,” joked Darren898. James didn’t laugh. Darren898 felt bad immediately. Humour was a hard thing to understand and he knew he’d gotten it wrong this time. Again. Even though both of them had been through three battles together now and saved each other’s lives a few times, Darren898 still couldn’t make James laugh after a visit with his grandpa.

They drove back to the base in silence, both lost in thought and trying to shake the shame they felt for different reasons.




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