HOMESICK DOPPLER-SHIFTED EXTRATERRESTRIAL BLUES

So, it’s Friday morning. And I’m scurrying along Santa Monica Boulevard. Heading towards the ocean. Avoiding the sun. Hopping between the long shadows, shading my eyes. And a little later, I am sat opposite you, in a dimly-lit UK themed pub. Crouched around a sticky table, under a laser-jet printed Union Jack. Raising an American lager, in some sort of ironic gesture. And then thinking about home.

And in the future, I guess home will have a broader definition. It will probably mean something symbolic and vague. As I think, in the future, it will be unpopular to say anything with any clarity or definiteness, and a sort of muddy relativism will prevail. And people will speak in lazy sentences, using their own definitions of words, and everything will be open for interpretation. And similarly, all truth will be ambiguous and relative and personally defined. Except, of course, for the sort of truth found in engineering, technology, medicine and mathematics, which will be, in any case, widely condemned, and entirely handled by machines.

And all along Santa Monica Boulevard, there are makeshift homes. Soiled sports tents and golf umbrellas, pitched amongst the cafes and upholstery stores. And I am walking through a block of cardboard houses, looking into cardboard letter-boxes and through cut-out cardboard windows, and knocking on cardboard front doors. And moments earlier, I was tiptoeing under a freeway bridge, through a sleeping neighbourhood. Creeping amongst the snoring bodies, wrapped up in woven blankets, and huddled on stained mattresses, and stirring on the curb.

Because homelessness, here, in Los Angeles, is everywhere. Sun-stroked and sad and ragged and rife. And in the future, inevitably, homelessness will be a planetary problem. Eventually, when the Earth is noxious and superheated, and all the plants and animals are gone. And at that point, if we are lucky, we will have our machines scramble around the solar system, searching out a new home, on our behalf. Hopefully finding somewhere with less plastic, and more dry land.

And I, just recently, was rehomed. Leaving Peckham for Beverly Hills, via the strange space-and-time travel of a non-stop, 5,443 mile long flight. Passing over the empty Atlantic Ocean, and the frozen stretches of Greenland, then across the continental United States. And we flew together, you and I, though we were seated separately, and I kept watching you walk along the aisles, stretching your legs, floating 40,000 feet above the ground.

And I can imagine a future where rehoming the entire human population isn’t a problem. As each of us is no longer in our bodies, having induced ourselves into ultra-high frequency radiation, and shone ourselves out into the depths of interstellar space. And in that case, rehoming will be easy. And the whole human race will be in a continual state of homelessness, and existing in some endless, doppler shifted paradise.

And after walking along Santa Monica Boulevard, I duck into an Irish pub, on Wilshire and 26th. Hiding in a dark corner, under a wide, LCD television screen. Nursing a colourless beer. Drinking quietly. Camouflaged beneath a strobing American Football game. And long ago, I used to drink in an Irish pub in Peckham, that was owned by a Irish gangster with one eye. And in another Irish pub, on the walk to Deptford, that had a slippery ladder in its back room, that you could climb, at your own peril, through a hatch in the ceiling, to smoke on its sagging roof, and look out over the raining city.

And I am at home in any pub, in any town, in all the world. As I have it in my instincts, and in my programming. Because I have inherited the pub gene. And I feel at home now, obviously, and also profoundly calm. Finishing another pint of Californian ale. And staggering towards the bathrooms. Clutching my sides. Hallucinating tall, unbalanced, radiatory people.

And I know that feeling at home, in the future, will be a crime. Because, in the future, feeling anything personal will be under prohibition. As all experience will be an enforced communal experience, mediated and managed and shared over a network connection, in an internet of thoughts and feelings and perception. And all humans on the planet will think in unison. In one drumming, deafening, cloudy thought at a time.

And I guess, lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about home. You know. Having recently moved from London to Los Angeles. And you could call it homesickness, if you like. Though in the future homesickness will be the name of a real disease, caused by microgravity, that astronauts catch on interplanetary flights, in which their bones waste away, and their blood thickens, and their muscles unwind like tired string. 

And I’d imagine, everything in the future, will be tinged with sickness. Because, eventually, all technology will be alive, written in a computer language of DNA, built from cells and organs, and warm, pulsing, breathing bodies. And, at that point, we will have to exercise our technology, breed our technology, and send our technology out to graze. And, in the future, when our machines fail us, it will be due to our machines catching machine colds, suffering machine sickness, coming down with machine related illnesses. And, indeed, after some time, human diseases will spread from people to their technology. And, likewise, malware and viruses will spread from technology to infect human beings.

And, last week, I was lost in Culver City. Looking for directions, beside dirty, dried out canal beds, and plastic-cladded, artificial looking taverns, getting sunburnt and toe-blistered, wandering along dusty six-lane highways, past oversized satellite dishes, and fenced-off movie studios, and closed-down music halls, and serve-by-window taco restaurants, offering handmade, home cooked food.

And I’d guess, that everything in the future, will be handmade, and all food will be home cooked. As everyone will own the technology, to manufacture anything themselves. And home cooking will be printing artificial steak and algorithmic eggs, with perfect nutritional value, straight from a household machine. And the greatest chefs will be the most inventive computer programmers, and the most famous restaurants will guard proprietary code, rather than secret recipes. And eating will become something abstract and jaded and recreational. And starvation will be a kind of fantasy, that people elect into voluntarily, for religious reasons, sexual gratification, and art.

But, anyway, this evening, I am at the end of Santa Monica Pier. Looking out at the water. Under a beer-branded parasol, in a festooned, tourist’s bar. And you are there too. Eating curled chips, and acid guacamole. Drinking watered-down Mexican beer. And later, we are on the beach, walking along the shore, towards Venice. The cold ocean breaking on our ankles. And you are describing to me your dream, and you look peaceful. But also bored. And as you spoke, you were adjusting your jacket, then shaking the sand out of your hair.

And, I guess, in the future, our technology will be interwoven into our homes. Baked into the bricks, strung into the carpets, and pasted onto the walls. And, I think, eventually, technology will miniaturise so much that entire computers will look like grains of sand. And we will live in our homes, with technology literally heaped around us, in sand dunes of microscopic machines, digging through heaps of technology to get through our front doors, constantly shaking technology out of our shoes, and brushing it off of our clothes and feet.

And tonight, in the taxi home, you said: Los Angeles is a place where distance means something else. And I said: I agree. Nodding my head. And making a serious expression. Because there is always a sort of seriousness to being in a taxi. Something formal and estranged. Then, on the corner of Wilshire and Crescent, you asked me about the future. And I thought for a long time. And I found it hard to answer. Because I have never felt as if I have a future.

And so, I told you, in the taxi, that I am still working on imagining my future. And I thanked you for being patient. And I explained, that it’s a work in progress. That I am trying a little more, each day, to imagine myself, in the world, in the future. And that it’s difficult, though it’s getting easier, a little, at a time. But that for the rest of the world, and its future, I could already see it quite clearly. And I said to you, I was imagining the future, there and then, in the back of the taxi. And you replied, that you were too.

And so together, we imagined the future. And we imagined a future where we are rock. And a future where we are fine, electric dust. And a future where we are gigantic animals, moving drunkenly, over a crystalline ground. And another future, where we are strange light. And a future where we are mysterious, marbled cosmic rays. And we imagined a future where we are not anything tangible. But, instead a property that emerges from some vast, deeper structure, and we will span the cold galaxy in our scaffolding, our humanness arising, slowly, on the scale of the lives of stars, visible only from billions of light-years away.