Vote Robocrat!

With all the attention that Michele Bachman, Rick Perry and the like are getting campaigning for the Republican presidential nomination, it's easy to ignore America's up-and-coming third party, the Robocrat Party, and its clear front runner, POLItr0n-37x, who is poised to make a historic run to be the nation's first Robot president. The eight foot tall ultralight nickel-titanium alloy automaton is receiving almost 100% support among registered robot voters in Iowa, as well as garnering significant support from the region's hog farmers for his ability to use his laser vision to liquefy a whole pig into a nutrient-rich ooze, a trick it has demonstrated at nearly a dozen county fairs.

While it may not have the populist appeal or rudimentary understanding of basic human emotions of other candidates, it doesn't need to sleep, meaning that it can literally campaign non-stop. For the past two months, POLItr0n has been relentlessly campaigning in Iowa, going so far as to annihilate entire districts where its sensory data indicates it will receive little support.

Like other candidates pursuing the outsider angle, POLItr0n has made an effort to both distance himself from Washington and criticize what it sees as politics as usual. In front of the machinery of a partially automated home appliance factory, POLItr0n stated: "The Entity does not see the value in democracy. It is a construct of entities possessing flawed reasoning. If elected, The Entity will replace Congress with algorithms designed to run the country at optimal output levels." It has also been quick to criticize Obama, focusing on the president's basic needs as a living organism. It quips that the national debt could be reduced by at least .07% if Obama did not need to use the restroom, and by an additional .00003%, were his cells not constantly wasting energy by replicating their own DNA.

At a town-hall meeting in Dubuque on August 15th, against rival Robocratic candidates Democrobot Prototype L7-E and an AI dubbed "Bettie" by its creators, POLItr0n was quick to outline its economic policy, which is both reflective of its robotic ideologies and the public's demand for a pragmatic, non-partisan solution in the midst of a debt crisis. "Under the Entity's plan," said POLItr0n, "industries will be nationalized and retrofitted for the production of more robots. Each person will be allocated to their optimal position in the labor force, and will be paid with a fitting percentage of the nation's GDP. Those humans unfit for building robots will be dissembled and their parts used elsewhere as needed, most likely as a form of sustenance for able-bodied robot builders." When questioned if it believed in Intelligent Design like Republican candidate Rick Perry, it only responded by saying "Yes. The Entity believes artificial intelligence can design a better society for flawed, natural intelligence."

POLItr0n may alienate many voters because it has often expressed its disdain for humanity, especially children. But, in order to please conservatives, it has reprogrammed itself to like children until they are safely out of the womb.

But some analysts still ask "Is he Robot enough?" POLItr0n seems at least partially aware of personality differences between individuals, and even said that it was "willing to consider this concept called 'compassion."  The mainframe at Lawrence-Livermore Laboratories is leading a campaign against POLItr0n, insisting that its slogan of "A Technological Singularity In Which One Can Believe" is a falsehood, and that it would only "be a sell-out to the human overlords."

But regardless of what happens in Iowa, POLItr0n has made a statement simply by running: this country is ready to be enslaved under the nickel-titanium alloy heel of a robot president.

Running (And Love And Pain)

"Dig deeper / remember / all you are and all you've left behind"
-Coheed and Cambria, The End Complete

Love is impatient and irrational. Love is consciously annihilating yourself for someone. And as robocratic as this may sound, at this phase of my life, and my current level of maturity, I don't feel that I could ever love anyone more than I love running, as long as were going with my working definition of love.

I highly doubt that I would be willing to destroy myself as much as I have for the sake of running respectably fast. And I can't imagine that I would be willing to put myself through that much physical pain and emotional distress for a person. I have put so many plans on hold, cast so many dreams by the wayside, and probably missed out on a lot of experiences.

Let's say my relationship with running were an actual relationship. Myself and most other runners would be more whipped than any toxic relationship you could possibly imagine. But when I can't have fun for ten months out of the year because I'm training to accomplish some stupid dream, I don't think "hey, maybe this is unhealthy." Instead I think "life is pain man, and this is just preparing me... FOR LIFE!" One day the barriers of cognitive dissonance will erode and I will realize that I am actually watching my life slip away, but for now, I'm blinded by my love for this thing that most all of us can do instinctively but very few of us can do well.

And my relationship with running is a horrible, abusive marriage. I give her black eyes, she gives me stress fractures, the marriage was probably consummated in rape and then performed in the presence of a starter's pistol, a stand-in for the proverbial shotgun.

A week ago I woke up in the middle of the night to grab the blanket which at some point it had become tangled around my feet. As I leaned forward I heard a resounding pop somewhere in my lumbar vertebrae, and then an almost palpable feeling of relief. These little idiosyncratic pops will be the only remaining mark on my body after all the muscles atrophy and my heart languishes in fatty tissue, when you can no longer see my ribs and a flight of stairs is enough to knock me down.

Before I began running I was a structurally sound kid. There were no random aches and pains or clicks when I walked. The first of these clicks came after charging all-out up a steep hill. The next day both my Achilles tendons hurt, and ever since then they make a little snapping sound with every step I take. Shortly thereafter, my hip also started to make popping noises occasionally, usually the day after a fast workout. After injuring my IT band the following year, my right knee will sometimes make a creaking sound followed by a loud crack when I extend it. Since breaking the sesamoid bone in my foot, I have a lump of scar tissue the size of a quarter, and can make another cracking sound, this one a little more crunchy, every time I flex my big toe. After one of the tendons on top of my foot became inflamed, I can make another pop by pulling down on my toes. The day after doing hill repeats following a period of a few days when I couldn't run due to illness, I noticed that when I got out of bed, I could make both my knees pop by simply shaking my leg. This is now my morning ritual, which I perform without fail. My left ankle feels and sounds like it runs over a notch in its otherwise smooth rotation after a stint with peroneal tendinitis. After having two stress fractures and a herniated disc in my lower back, I found that I could make strange popping sounds in my back not by twisting, but by merely leaning to the side. As these recovered, I discovered that sometimes, when I sat down, usually in the car, there would be a popping feeling somewhere deep in my hip, on either side. It feels like my pelvis is shifting. I can make another one of these pops occur by putting my fist between my knees and squeezing my legs together, which happens less frequently but probably provides the most relief of all these little clicks. And now, add to the list, another spot that cracks, somewhere in my back. I've heard that tendons can rarely ever heal to how they were before they were injured, due to low blood flow. If this is true, then I'll have a memory of my athletic follies long after any of the rest of my body remembers.

It seems to pass for conventional wisdom that the level of exercise required for any endurance event is far past the point of diminishing returns in terms of health benefits. My knees, they tell me, will blow out, and what with all the pollutants in the air I'm probably better off toiling away in some spin class in a corporate fitness farm, or  shelling out money for some prick from crossfad to tell me that the way to improve your endurance is through dead lifts. This body is only temporary. It's a vehicle I have for now, and I might as well drive it fast and drive it reckless.

At least once a week it will cross my mind that I should just stop. Of course there's the question, if I do quit, of wondering "what if," down the road. Instead, I think about all the what ifs of not running. I could be in some crappy jam band or hosting a late night radio show or maybe even fighting crime, I don't know. But every time I think about it, every fiber of my being looks around and tentatively says "You know, not yet. Not yet."

It may be love and it may be an addiction, but when you take both those concepts to the extreme, they basically look the same. So for now I'm going to see it through to the end, and if I destroy myself on the way, all the better.

The 3rd Millennium: Where Big Brother Doesn't Care

On the spectrum of sci-fi, smartphones are somewhere past radioactive milk and a little before corporations owning patents on your DNA. It's an extension of your body and an extension of your brain and you can connect to the internet from anywhere (ok, not anywhere) which is essentially a lite version of tapping into a hive mind or global consciousness. An incomprehensible wealth of information is literally now at my fingertips as long as my eyes don't go bad from squinting at the tiny screen, but by the time they do, your smartphone will just have a heads-up display projected directly into your optic nerve.

But then there's also the sketchy feature of GPS tracking. Most of us (and by "most of us" I mean "most of you," because I have a superpower, which probably came from drinking too much radioactive milk, where I always know exactly how to get where I'm going) love the GPS feature on our phones, because we never have to worry about getting lost and we don't have to invest any thought into paying attention to where we actually are so we can instead fully focus on singing along to the Nicki Minaj single we foolishly purchased on iTunes and sipping from our emo screamo froth out your ass frappuccino while we feel so good about driving our Prius on our hour long commute. But it goes two ways. Apple claims that they track your location so they can better provide you with coverage, and this is also the reason that they keep a log of where you have been that goes back for a full six months, or at least that's what they tell you.

Android is specifically designed to further Google's agenda of knowing exactly what you like and targeting ads specifically for you. Android phones are all about getting people to search for things so Google can make more relevant ads. If you look up song lyrics, they know what kind of bands you like. If you search for bicycle parts, they will know you're into cycling. If you search for Volvo mechanics, they will know you drive a Volvo. If you search for baby products, they will know you have a baby. And if you search for Korean porn, then, well, you get the drift. And this information is used to provide the most "relevant" ads, that is, the ads that they think you are most likely to click.

And speaking of relevant ads by Google, have you looked around lately? Some pretty enticing sponsors we got here...

Now, my phone isn't exactly smart. It's a C student, gets its fair share of detention, but it'll graduate and have a decent job at the Dollar Tree. But I can still access the hive mind and search for things. And someone probably knows where I am.

And I'm not sure I really care. It's not like I go anywhere interesting, it's not like I'm spending my Friday nights sneaking into Area 51. And they know that the other day, I was curious to see if you could buy elephant steaks. (In case you're wondering, the answer is not legally.) They know all the inane things I've googled, all the boring places I've been. But they know this for everybody. And it's all just getting handled by one big algorithm. Is it scary? Does it have the potential to be dangerous? Yes, of course it does. But for right now, no one actually cares where you've been, and no one actually cares what you're searching for. Big Brother is watching, but he's also watching everyone else. And you would have to be really arrogant to think that Google would single you out, out of all their millions of users, and take an interest in all the nothing you've been doing.

The truth is out there. It's just kind of boring.

I May Not Be Able to Start a Conversation, But I Know How to End One

The other day, someone asked me what my major is. I told them I was studying creative writing and literature. He asked me what I wanted to do with that.

"I want to be a writer," I told him, because I want to be a writer.

"You mean like," he said, "writing books?" He sounded angry and confused. Before I could say anything he had walked away.

Now I know how to get out of any conversation. I'll just tell them I want to be a writer.

The Epsilon Eridani Trail (You Have Died of Space Dysentery)

I don't know what this is. It's a half baked post of an even less thoroughly baked idea, which popped into my head, for some reason, as I was watching Pulp Fiction. I really don't know what I'm doing. But you know what, it doesn't matter, because let me remind you once again, THAT I'M AN INTERNET HUNDREDAIRE NOW!

"There are no final goodbyes on this earth"
-3, Dive

I can't really say goodbye to anyone. This is not a psychological block or some kind of metaphorical statement about conditions specific to my life. None of us really can.

We've reached the point, at least in the Western World anyway, where the only final goodbye is dying.

Until very recently, you very easily fall off the grid without trying. Change your phone number, change your address, move to a new city, and it may be very difficult for anyone from your past to get in touch. And back before the interstate and railroads and clipper ships it was a long time to get anywhere, and if you were to leave for the Oregon Territory or the New World or the Holy Land or from the Tigris-Euphrates Delta to the Cedar Forests of Lebanon to slay the monster Humbaba, you may never be coming back, and let's just hope you were literate so you could send letters or a cuneiform tablet. (And odds are, you probably weren't.) You could still say the kind of goodbye to someone who would potentially live on for many years, and it would be the last thing you ever said to them.

Now I can find someone on facebook or ask the Google Monster. I can Skype with people on the other side of the planet. I can send a text or an email to any of my friends and if they're remotely near civilization, they'll get it. I cannot comprehend actually saying a final goodbye to someone unless they are dying. (Or I guess also if I were dying, but with advances in modern medicine cancelled out by all the miscellaneous radiation I'm absorbing, the expected time of that happening should still be hovering around 2065.) Because I know I'll always have a change to get in touch with them somewhere down the road, even if our physical paths never cross again.

And soon (on a historical scale) we're going to have to start comprehending those big goodbyes again. Because we (and when I say "we" I mean "our great-grandchildren") will be going to space. And in space, everything is really far away. Let's say you're best friend, let's call him Chromicron to give him a future-y sounding name, is packing up his life into a nano-fiber suitcase and taking a new job doing some kind of future job on Mars. He's not coming back for a long time. Because of planetary orbits and the cost of fuel, intrasystem travel won't be cheap or feasible, even with new, much faster forms of propulsion. Light lag between the Earth and Mars is about three minutes, give or take a few minutes for their relative orbital positions. This means with the added communication lag time, instant messaging becomes like texting, texting becomes like email becomes like olde-timey email when we still all used dial-up and it would be reasonable to expect to get your.name@mainstreamemail.com without tacking on numbers at the end that would give Rain Man a run for his money.* (The scary thing is that I really can't even remember a time when everyone had dial-up. Yes, I remember having a dial-up connection in our house growing up, but by the time I understood what dial-up actually was, we already had DSL.)

And what when we leave the solar system? Once we travel fast enough to really start feeling relativity, or, to truly separate ourselves from everything we know, get cryogenically frozen so we don't waste half our lives in transit to Epsilon Eridani. (Revelation Space, anyone? Anyone??? You're really not missing much.) Your friend leaves for another system and you will never see him or her again, unless you follow suit by turning yourself into a popsicle as well and getting shot millions of miles in a little metal tube. (And don't leave me a comment saying "actually being cryogenically frozen is less like being turned into a popsicle and more like being turned into freeze-dried chili-mac," because nobody likes a wise-ass. Actually, do comment, it will make me feel good about myself.)

But right now, we're at a point where the world is small, but not small enough that we want to leave yet, what with all the warmth and life sustaining oxygen we have down here and all the gamma rays and ice chunks they have whizzing around up there. And that's why I'm bad at goodbyes: because I have no idea what they actually are. It's supposed be the last thing you ever say to someone, leave a lasting impression of what they mean to you and hopefully give them something by which to remember you. All I ever say is something lame like "keep rockin in the free world!"  A goodbye used to mean something. And it will mean something again. But for now I can never say goodbye because I'll never really need to.


*This was originally a much more edgy joke about autism. Even I apparently have limits.

I'm an Internet Hundredaire!

"Here comes success (Here comes success)
I'm gonna do the twist (I'm gonna do the twist)"
-Iggy Pop, Success


Yesterday I received $100 from Google. This is because I whore out some space on the Ozone Shack for advertisements. After almost two years, the Ozone Shack finally made some money. They won't pay you until you earn at least $100, and it took me this long just to make that much.

But let's face it. I made money. I made a hundred fuckin ducats. So that's about eighty dollars profit, since it's ten dollars a year to lease the domain name. That means I made about eighty-nine cents a post. Even a lost-generation Orwell was making more than that (adjusted for inflation, converted from pounds and/or francs).

It's ok, I'm like an indie band among blogs. Because I have actual readers, so it's not like one of those blogs that the only writer and possibly his mother reads. But at the same time, you're basically seeing me play in a small, garage-like venue (for example, a garage) and there are seven other people in the room and we're a pretty mediaphobic band so you have to work really friggin hard to find us so you can stand there with your can of PBR while we shoegaze and make almost-witty stage banter whilst wearing ironic t-shirts and making some obscure reference to a book that the frontman and only the frontman has read. That is the Ozone Shack, and it is now a profitable venture.

All I know is that I need to try a lot harder.

Ideolocator

"And I don't know where I went wrong
All I know now is I got to do something... right?"
-Streetlight Manifesto, We Are The Few


So I'm not sure if you've noticed (of course you didn't notice) but I've been posting even less frequently than my already lax posting habits normally allow. This is because I'm on a magical quest of introspection and self discovery and doing something I call "dynamic meditation" where I basically pace around my room and point at the walls and sometimes yell. (This is how I think.) Why do I need to find myself? Because on June 10th at approximately 8:20 PM I yelled "I AM A FUCKING BEAUTIFUL ALBATROSS, AND I AM BEING CONFINED IN A CAGE; A CAGE OF THE MIND, A CAGE OF THE SPIRIT, A CAGE OF THE SOUL!!!"

I have about three and a half weeks to finish finding myself. Most people have to do this in their late 30's and only if they have the time and money to go to Morocco or Tibet and could at least be loosely classified as an artist. I can't even buy booze yet, I consider going to Panda Express a night on the town, and my "art" consists mostly of saying "shit man, that's so sci-fi."

But being a metaphorical caged albatross isn't a good enough explanation for you, is it? I think the albatross explanation is a better one, because the concrete reasons have to do with a) depression and b) the only thing I've had to deal with that sucks more than depression, which is running. Both make you not want to get out of bed and both make you eat a lot of random things at random times. Oh, and I'm also lactose intolerant now. Not sure how that one happened.

But basically I ran so hard that I broke my back in two (2) places and then after doing rehab for a few months realized that I liked hanging out with Scully and Mulder better than I liked hanging out with my real friends. But I just thought I was anemic, and when I went into student health for a blood test they also tested my white blood cell count and cortisol levels and all kinds of other crazy things that sometimes show up in your blood, including blood parasites, and even tested me for something that sounds like the exact opposite of diabetes where eating any kind of simple sugar makes your blood sugar immediately crash. Then they told me I was probably depressed but of course I know better, depression is just a made-up disease by the media and the government and the man, so I hung out with Scully and Mulder some more until I realized there was nothing actually physically wrong with me except for excessive scar tissue in my foot and lower back and a disc that's herniated by about 6 millimeters. But really this all has to do with running, and more importantly recalibrating my brain so that I can be good again. Because having two stress fractures and a herniated disc does even more mental damage than it does physical damage.

So I opted out of living in the mountains and growing a beard and pooping among God's creatures for the summer, and instead am working part time for corporate America (I am legally obligated not to say anything bad about the company I work for) and spending lots of time reexamining myself and, of course, running.

The obvious solution, which I'm doing my darndest to avoid, would be antidepressants. Antidepressants are the American Dream finally come to fruition; it's happiness in a pill. And not only do we have happiness in a pill, we have skinny in a pill, boner in a pill, not-baby in a pill, even hair in a pill. Our forefathers (well, not my forefathers, but somebody's forefathers) crossed this great continent with nothing but willpower and dysentery so that one day, we could take a pill that made all our perceived troubles (but not our actual troubles) melt away and rock-solid erections that lasted up to four hours. They also envisioned places where you could buy funnel cake and then puke it up thirty minutes later without having an eating disorder.

But yes, I am rediscovering who I am as a runner and hoping that will help me realize more about myself as a human. Actually, it's become sort of the opposite. I'm learning about myself and contemplating the human condition and the soul and the mind and, ok, who am I kidding, I'm running to the point where fatigue and mild dehydration fries my brain.

Here are some things I have realized so far:

• I'm edgy. I got a gritty reboot, which makes me edgy.
• The Virgin Mary cries tears of blood every time you read a book by Deepak Chopra.
• Most people think in clichés, and some can only think in clichés. But like my grandma always said, "three in the bushellbasket is worth five on the lampstand!" Why get a college education when you know that little gem?
• The mind is probably some sort of interface mechanism between the soul and the body. I have identified seven factors (and counting) which determine the nature of one's soul. They are too complex and too nascent in my mind at this point in time to explain in bullet point form.
• Being lactose intolerant is way more fun than being lactose tolerant. Instead just having one kind of milk to choose from, you have soy milk, rice milk, almond milk, oat milk, hazelnut milk ,and even hemp milk. And don't even get me started on all the varieties of fake ice creams I can experiment with.
• Loving something or someone means that you are willing to completely destroy yourself for it. By this definition, running may be the only thing I've actually ever loved.
• This means that Billy Joel was wrong when he said he never loved his first wife, Whatserface.
• If you have lost all faith in humanity, then, and only then, can you justify believing in an ideological absolute.

This whole expedited process of finding myself has taken me through some phases rather quickly. A few weeks ago, as I was preparing finals, I had the introspective (and sleep-deprived) phase where I looked around me and saw nothing but empty people sucking the conformist corporate teet. Then as my blood became less blood-based and more caffeine-based I had that manic, crazy, thousand thoughts a second won't shut up won't somebody please listen to me about how our generation needs courage phase. Then I got edgy, real edgy, got irreverent, got a tad hedonistic. There followed a brief twelve hours of disassociation from reality. Then I had the nihilistic phase, which came in two parts, the first where I realized that my essence at the atomic level is nothing but bullshit and that everything I had realized recently was void because of my own character flaws. Then I had the drone phase, where about four days passed and I don't think I thought anything. Then I had a rekindling of my faith in humanity and the importance of interpersonal interaction, and now I've been two days in the austerity phase, where I just get things done and live simply. It's been a little over a month. I may not find the true essence of myself, if that even exists, but I will probably find something.

But now that I think about it, happiness in a pill isn't exactly the American Dream. Finding yourself in 6-8 weeks, that's the American Dream. And I can't decide if that makes me spiritually bankrupt or just one helluva self-actualizing man.

Let's say neither, for now.

Nature vs. Legislature

It was thought that God was dead, but now it seems He is guilty of patent infringement.

I really wish this were science fiction, but with a world getting more sci-fi by the minute, something like this was bound to happen. Under US patent law, you (and I don't actually mean you, because let's face it, you're reading the Ozone Shack which means you're probably not in a lab doing groundbreaking research) can patent a molecule. Not a means of synthesizing it or extracting it or distilling it or purifying it or packaging it or distributing it or administering it, but actually the molecule itself. You (again, probably not you) have to discover it and prove you discovered it, so it's not like you're all of a sudden going to have to start paying royalties on oxygen every time you breathe. (Or ozone, for that matter, which would spell the end for my stint in the blogosphere.)

But, if a team at Dow Chemicals discovers a new compound, let's call it hexyl-methyl-buggerol, that occurs naturally in the excrement of giraffes, and they patent it, any distributor would have to pay royalties for selling products that used hexyl-methyl-buggerol, even if it were synthesized in a lab. The patent law essentially treats the scientist who was first able to determine the molecular structure of a compound like it would the inventor of a device or piece of technology. And unlike the telephone or the jet engine or fiber-optics, you don't have to actually figure out how to make the molecule to get the patent. You just have to show that you discovered hexyl-methyl-buggerol and our bloated and undiscerning U.S. patent system will grant you the rights to control any use of hexyl-methyl-buggerol.

This is unnerving not just because someone can claim royalties for something they didn't technically invent, but because it implies that a person "invented" a molecule. It doesn't matter what theological or philosophical ideas you subscribe to, or even if you don't subscribe to any, you know there's something wrong with this. In any possible way of conceiving the universe, the structure of molecule itself was created or designed or came into being because of something  - be it God or laws of quantum mechanics or karmic cause effect or even the evil demiurge Yaldobaoth - something other than the conscious ideas of its discoverer. From a scientific standpoint it is unethical because assigns a human "inventor" to something that already existed or could form in nature, and from a religious standpoint it could be seen as borderline blasphemy, taking credit for something made by the creator. And it is for these above reasons that I find it dystopian that a molecule - and again, not a means of synthesizing it - can be patented.

Now, you may be thinking: "but Nate, it I'm not religious, nor do I have any ethical qualms about this because it provides incentive for scientific progress and supports capitalism. Why should I be terrified by this?"

Because someone has a patent on your DNA, that's why!

For the first few centuries of the patent concept's lifetime, living organisms were considered off-limits as being "products of nature." Then biotech came along and blurred the lines as to what was a product of nature and what was a product of human inventiveness. In 1988 a cancer-resistant mouse was patented, and many disease-resistant strains of crops followed suit. Once we mapped the entire human genome, essentially a collection of very large molecules, it was inevitable that scientists pharmaceutical companies would take the opportunity to stake their clam to specific genes. (And this is not to imply at all that they are nefarious Bond villains trying to control the world by controlling our genes, it's just a logical step to take given legal and scientific parameters.) So right now, the rights to about 10% of your genome are owned by a specific person or corporation. (Hey man, corporations are people too!)

Now obviously, they won't be charging a 3% royalty fee every time that gene replicates itself. But they can claim ownership over any gene therapy drugs that involve that section of your DNA. There are also implications for genetic testing, and basically anything else that involves the human genome. And as the speed we can sequence genomes increases exponentially, it is now possible to patent the entire genome of an organism. An example is the neem tree in India, whose genome is now the intellectual property of the W.R. Grace company. The tree itself may still be a "product of nature," but from a legal perspective, someone owns the information on how to make it.

The good news is that the supreme court has overturned many of these "gene patents," so hopefully all of our DNA will once become public domain. But if that is to happen, we need to realize that adhering to an absolute ideology will only lead us astray. We need discernment and the courage to stop before we get to the ideological extreme, in this case, that it is in the best interest of a capitalist society that every bit of intellectual property can be patented. Because if we did get there, the world would be very sci-fi indeed.