All Our Wrong Todays

by Elan Mastai

Every person you meet introduces the accident of that person to you. What can go right and what can go wrong. There is no intimacy without consequence.

In the absence of material want, the world economy transitioned almost exclusively to entertainment—entertainment is both the foundation and the fuel of modern civilization. Most of us now work in labs imagining, designing, and building the next cool innovation in entertainment. It’s the only thing you really need in a world where almost nothing is asked of you. Other than paying for that entertainment. The newer and shinier and wilder it is, the more it costs.

People also acted like assholes for no good reason. But, sorry, I’m trying to tell you about my mother, not my father.

My mother’s job was to create a warm, soft nest for him to preen in. My job was to listen to my mother talk, endlessly, so she didn’t have a nervous breakdown while suppressing anything consequential about herself in case it spoiled my father’s expansive mood of cosmic contemplation.

When someone dies they get very cold and very still. That probably sounds obvious, but when it’s your mother it doesn’t feel obvious—it feels shocking. You watch, winded and reeling, as the medical technicians neutralize the stasis field and power down the synthetic organ metabolizer. But the sentimental gesture of kissing her forehead makes you recoil because the moment your lips touch her skin you realize just how cold and just how still she is, just how permanent that coldness and that stillness feel. Your body lurches like it’s been plunged into boiling water and for the first time in your life you understand death as a biological state, an organism ceasing to function. Unless you’ve touched a corpse before, you can’t comprehend the visceral wrongness of inert flesh wrapped around an inanimate object that wears your mother’s face. You feel sick with guilt and regret and sadness about every time you rolled your eyes in annoyance or brushed off a needy request or let your mind wander when she told some inconsequential anecdote. You can’t remember anything thoughtful or sweet or tender that you ever did even though logically you know you must have. All you can recall is how often you were small and petty and false. She was your mother and she loved you in a way nobody ever has and nobody ever will and now she’s gone.

Just because we could holiday on the moon or teleport to a shopping mall or watch a fetus gestate in a celebrity’s uterus or regenerate body parts from a plasmic soup or any of the countless things that sound like science fiction to you but were documentary to me, it doesn’t mean we had everything figured out. We were still just people. Messy, messed-up people who didn’t know how to act when one of our lives came undone.

We sat in his study, the lemon tree that saved his life outside the window, fat lemons hanging heavy on its branches, ripe for lemon tarts that would never be made for a birthday that he would forget and I would ignore.

You could see it as my father dutifully honoring my mother’s deathbed wish. I prefer to think that she had to die for him to pay attention to anything she said.

The problem with knowing people too well is that their words stop meaning anything and their silences start meaning everything.

We could’ve done so many things. We could’ve brought a life into this world of wonders and that life could’ve changed us both, made us better, fixed the broken clocks inside our brains that wouldn’t let us be happy when happiness was within reach. It wasn’t just a who inside her. It was a where, a place both of us could’ve finally been free of the people we never meant to become because that’s the magic trick of creating life—it takes every bad decision you ever made and makes them necessary footsteps on the treacherous path that brought you home. For just a moment I had a home. It was the size of one cell but that was enough to fit in all I ever wanted.

When you live in a miserable world of systemic inequity and toxic want, the answer is elusive and dissatisfying. And there’s always a blameworthy because. Because of human nature. Because of money. Because of the government. Because of magical puppet masters manipulating us from their celestial lair.

It’s amazing how much damage one penis can do.

skeptical, awed, distracted, amused, jealous, angry, thoughtful, frightened, detached, concerned, excited, nonchalant, harried, weary, cheeky, or wise—they

He thought about how the war seemed like the end of the world but, in fact, no matter what people did to each other the Earth’s movement through the solar system was entirely unaffected, its orbit unchanged and unchangeable, constant, forever. He felt utterly powerless, alone in a foreign country, but he took comfort in that eternal spin. Not just comfort—power.

WE MUST SUFFER FOOLS GLADLY, OTHERWISE HOW CAN WE HELP THEM TO STOP BEING FOOLS?

“I’m sorry,” Penny says. “Honestly, I keep expecting you to drop the act and admit this time-traveler thing is totally a bit you do to hook up with chicks and, once you’ve had enough of me, you’ll be going back to your own dimension forever, which basically means you fully ghost me and I never see you again.”

These are not buildings. They are monuments to the future we deserve.”

“I don’t believe in the truth,” he says. “I’m a scientist. I believe in questions and the best answer we have right now. That’s all science is. A collection of the best answers we have right now. It’s always open to revision. Yesterday’s fact is today’s question and tomorrow has an answer we don’t know yet.

“You got a little bit famous. Even a little bit of fame can mess with your head. It’s a cognitive disease, you know, fame? It used to only be for royalty and we know what they’re like. I’m not much of a Freudian, but something about fame makes the id and the superego devour the ego like anacondas in a cage, right before they cannibalize each other. Fame warps your identity, metastasizes your anxieties, and hollows you out like a jack-o’-lantern. It’s sparkly pixie dust that burns whatever it touches like acid.”

The virus that is Tom has no plan of action, just a list of demands. It wanted to be in charge but, like so many aspiring despots, it hadn’t projected beyond the coup to the day-to-day grind of running the show. Anyone can overthrow a government. It’s ruling that’s hard.

Wowwie wowwie - This is my 4th reread - The state of the US and the world is so different today. "Anyone can overthrow a government. It’s ruling that’s hard." Ain't that the truth.

You love someone for fifty years and then they die. People talk about grief as emptiness, but it’s not empty. It’s full. Heavy. Not an absence to fill. A weight to pull. Your skin caught on hooks chained to rough boulders made of all the futures you thought you would have. How do you keep five decades of love from souring into a snakebite that makes your own heart the threat, drawing the poison up and down the length of you?

😭😭😭

The farther back I go, the more failure there is. This is how you discover who someone is. Not the success. Not the result. The struggle. The part between the beginning and the ending that is the truth of life.

Watching Lionel, I learn something about success I never did in a lifetime as my father’s son. You keep working. You keep trying. You keep failing. Until one day in the distant future, that for me is the distant past, the failure ends. That’s all success feels like. It’s not triumphant. It’s not glorious. It’s just a relief. You finally stopped failing.

She’s particularly taken by a French philosopher named Paul Virilio, who writes about the Accident—the idea that every time you introduce a new technology, you also introduce the accident of that technology, so you have a responsibility to anticipate not just the good it can do but also the bad it can wreak, not just the glory but also the ruin.