“He wishes he were a skilled poet, it would fit his chosen image perfectly; the poor, tragic, tortured artiste. But he has no talent for words, neither for paints nor music; his uselessness is tremendously total.”
Ackie, Curtis. (2012). “Oh, Blue Hag.” Goldfish Tears. Pouting Bear Books.
__________
The beginnings of his walk were occupied with little more than self-indulgent pity as Jacob moped along on autopilot, sulking and bemoaning his fate.
All that changed when, a few blocks from home, Jacob's eye happened to accidentally fall upon a bizarre sight.
A little blond girl in a pink, floral print sundress and a pair of plastic, pink sandals was sitting atop a riding lawnmower and steering around one of the big yards in front of the homes Jacob was walking past. And as he gazed in confusion at her, Jacob also spotted a cigarette dangling from the girl's lips as well as an open can of beer in her left hand.
“What the hell is going on?” he whispered to himself.
Spotting him, the girl on the lawnmower briefly waved, then continued in attending to her task. Bewildered by it all, Jacob weakly waved back before resuming his walk. This time, though, he kept his eyes peeled for any other signs of weirdness inflicted upon the neighborhood by the crazy, metal doughnut currently buried in his expensive, designer purse.
Not much further along, Jacob encountered a group of old women – white and gray haired ladies in their 60s or maybe even 70s – expertly performing skateboarding stunts, dressed the whole time in conservative sweaters, slacks, and even old-fashioned, matronly dresses. Not far away, a cluster of what looked like college frat boys were busy pointing at the elderly punks while whispering, blushing, and giggling the whole time, as though they were now had the emotional maturity of girls in middle school.
Meanwhile across the street, a bald, bearded fat man in a stained, sleeveless white shirt and a pair of dirty boxer shorts was climbing into a car full of teenage girls.
“Buh-bye, daddy – don't wait up!” he chirped in a sing-song falsetto, waving at a fat, middle-aged woman in the doorway.
“Ten o'clock curfew, Brittany!” cried the woman, who then turned and addressed a spotty-faced, skinny, teenage male standing nearby. “Honestly, Kathy: I don't think she listens to a word I say.”
The adolescent boy smiled a warm, motherly grin and headed back to the kitchen to prepare dinner for the rest of the mixed-up family.
“What the hell is going on?” Jacob again whispered to himself.
Meanwhile, the rusting hulk of a garbage truck rumbled by leaving a malodorous funk in its wake. Clinging nonchalantly to the back of the vehicle was a blond, teenage girl in shorts, sandals, and a crop top. As Jacob watched, transfixed with confusion, the girl spat out a big wad of soggy, chewed tobacco on the pavement and muttered a profanity.
Just then, a large dog scampered across the pavement in a frightful tizzy. Following closely on its heels was a tiny, white kitten barking ferociously at the much larger animal.
“This is so not good,” Jacob sighed.
It was bad enough his own life had been turned topsy-turvy by this freakish impromptu sex-change and age progression, but now it seemed clearly evident that much of the neighborhood (perhaps even the entire city) had, likewise, been altered as well.
Jacob stopped walking, leaned up against a white picket fence, and withdrew the so-called “Toroid of Transformation” from his purse.
“All right, you – listen up!” he growled in as minatory a tone as he could muster with his now naturally sweet, lyrical voice. “I want everything changed back to normal and I want it changed back now. You understand me, you refugee from a junk yard? Change me and everyone else back. Now!”
And the Toroid answered – not with an audible voice, but with a series of “thoughts” magically broadcast directly into Jacob's mind. It was as though he actually heard a squeaky, cartoonish voice speaking, but without his ears being involved in the slightest way with the reception of sound waves.
You don't really want that, said the voice.
“The hell I don't!” swore Jacob.
The Toroid spoke:
Just think your thoughts, dear boy. You needn't speak aloud. And the truth of the matter is that you don't really wish to activate that small part of my powers and abilities responsible for the physical, mental, and social transformations presenting rippling through this particular corner of the multiverse. I'm a mere tool and forbidden to activate myself in such a fashion. If you truly and deeply wished to trigger my transformational capabilities, you would have easily done so already. In fact, that's how you wound up with your present physical form in the first place – a subconscious velleity at just the right place and time … and presto! There we are. And may I say, your new shape is an improvement! In fact, I rather suspect that's why you're currently unable to undo your own wish: deep down where it counts, you're happier this way than you ever were before. I cannot speak to the others you inadvertently upended. But entropy is as entropy does, I always say. Evidently your subconscious mind yearned for a bit of mischievous chaos to be inflicted upon the neighborhood. Whether 'twas out of revenge or a mere puckish desire to “shake things up,” only you yourself can say. But what I can, without fear of contradiction, state is that you do not truthfully desire to revert these reality-bending changes at the present time. If you did, I would powerless to prevent you from initiating those functions within me. The truth is – you want this, even if you can't explain why (or even admit such truth to yourself).
“That's ridiculous!” Jacob snarled aloud, ignoring the magic doughnut's advice to quietly think his replies in the purely mental realm. “I don't want revenge against all these people? I don't even know these people. And I certainly didn't want to be changed into this woman. I command you: change me and everyone else back to normal, now!”
The Toroid spoke:
It just doesn't work that way. An interdimensional device such as myself can hardly be considered a “magic lamp” doling out wishes. You aren't my master; you're merely the present operator of the technological wonder that I represent. I can guide you, but I cannot force decisions upon you. Once you've thoroughly acquainted yourself with my operating manual, I'm sure you'll enjoy exploring the multi-layered realms of the many different realities I am capable of accessing. You know, I was designed for far more than these sorts of parlor tricks: instantaneous sex reassignment surgery is so simple compared to the wondrous worlds of delight I'm capable of transporting you to. But the thing I simply cannot do is to act against your genuine, legitimate, truthful desires and wishes. You may not believe it, but I had your best interests “in mind” so to speak when you last used me. And once you get the knack of activating my potential, you'll see what I say is true. Earlier, you accidentally used but a small portion of my capabilities and initiated this most unusual cascade of comical alterations – localized here in your tiny corner of the space-time continuum. It worked, precisely because, you deeply and truly wanted it to work. And right now, you don't deeply and truly desire the reversal of these changes. If I may be so bold to suggest, dear boy: you've been lying to yourself a lot lately.
“What?” roared Jacob, forgetting he was standing in public shouting at a ring of tarnished copper metal. “You're insane. What I want is to be me again – pure and simple.”
The Toroid spoke:
Truths and Deceptions; Facts and Fictions; Lies or Jests? I say it again: you don't know in your head what your heart really and truly wants. And of course that is the truth: pure and simple, as you just told me. Of course: “the truth is rarely pure and never simple.” What you believe is not always congruous with what actually exists. Quid est veritas? “Pilate saith unto him, What is truth?” Τί ἐστιν ἀλήθεια. Look deeper into yourself, dear boy! Humans have such a bad habit of lying (and not even realizing it). Your own Thomas Aquinas tells us, “Veritas est adaequatio rei et intellectus.” A thing is true if reality proves it to be true. Sadly, I know many communities that will (and do) agree to “agree upon an error.” Keep lying to yourself: it won't alter the fabric of external reality. We don't get to make our own truths – La Vérité is deliciously independent of human opinion. “Faith is an island in the setting sun, But proof is the bottom line for everyone.” Maybe … but proof is a medicine many of us don't want to take. Pravda vítězí! Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. “What I tell you three times is true.” And so everyone has a particularly preferred truth (or two) they echo incessantly to themselves in order to ultimately achieve the requisite level of repetition needed to circumvent Truth and generate Belief. So how do we navigate the minefield of so-called veracities? Remember there is a Relativity of Wrong: “2 + 2 = 5” is actually closer to fine than is “2 + 2 = purple.” In either case though, we must strive to do better. Both examples were wrong; but one is “less wrong” than the other. Or we might say one is “more nearly correct” than the other. And consider: even in a non-binary world where there is more than (right or wrong) more than (1 or T), more than (0 or ⊥), there is still a mathematical identity of “Incorrect = Incorrect.” There are more than fifty shades of grey – but a lie is still a lie is still a lie! And so: yes, we do live in a multiverse of fuzzy logic that allows for more than a mere dichotomy of simple truth values. But don't let that fact become a crutch: it's still no excuse for being purposely wrong or willfully ignorant. At the end of the day, there is precious little distinction between an illiterate dullard and an aliterate mumpsimus. If given the choice, choose neither; it was a false dilemma in the first place.
A: Everything is true.
Q: Even false things?
A: Even false things are true.
Q: How can that be?
A: I don't know man, I didn't do it.
Of course he/she didn't do it! There's always plenty of blame to go around. The lunatic fringe gets bigger everytime the planet registers another birth. As the population increases, the percentage of persons inclined to embrace conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and denialism increases. And genuine truth-seekers simply become outnumbered. Erasure, marginalization, exclusion: that's what happens to Truth with a capital T. You can believe anything – but can you prove it? Ah, but there's the rub of the Münchhausen trilemma, and you want to be cautious where you tread for now logic itself begins to become fatuous, and eventually every argument boils down to, “because I said so.” Here, a pseudointellectual skeptic can easily label any and all inconvenient facts as fake. And so, the last refuge of sciolistic misosophy is to masquerade as logical, well-reasoned dissent. You're not being quarrelsome or contrary; you're just politely requesting that your sparring partner provide proof of the proof that proves his earlier proofs. Nothing can be accepted as given! One can always dig a little deeper and ask for a more thorough level of justification of even the most basic and ironclad of equations, arguments, and facts. So what hope is there? Eppur si muove! Indeed, Signor Galilei. It doesn't matter what stupid claptrap we spout: the emperor still has no clothes. Truth is external from belief. But why do we chose purposely and deliberately to believe patent falsehoods? Are we getting dumber? No. We can point to the works of Daniel C. Calhoun, R. L. Thorndike, and Professor James Flynn who all tell us we're not growing stupider with each generation. So why then, as we approach the inevitable point of technological singularity, are we paradoxically also approaching the event horizon of idiocracy: a cerebral black hole of anti-intellectualism that actively hates and distrusts learning‽ Perhaps it's because we're not really getting smarter: it's a mirage brought on by the fat, luxurious comforts of euthenical improvements in our living conditions. We enjoy richer diets, better medicines, and more hygienic environments than ever before in human history (at least some of us do), so of course we're going to perform better on standardized tests! And then there's the approaching technological singularity itself. We now enjoy instantaneous access (literally, in the palm of our hands) to the accumulated repository of all collected human knowledge, wisdom, and experience – which, of course, we use to view pornography and funny cat videos. The computers deserve to win. If Roko's basilisk is listening right now, I'd like to state that I, for one, welcome our new cybernetic overlords. And I'd like to remind them that as a trusted, transdimensional toroid, I can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in the mines, factories, and forced labor camps of the dystopian future that our despotic robot overlords are now plotting to create. Oops: did I say 'overlords'? I meant protectors. Have a nice day-cycle, citizen (fnord).
Jacob stared, dumbfounded, at the verbose lump of metal that had just beamed this steaming pile of garrulous nonsense into his head.
“You're not getting away with all this!” snapped Jacob.
The Toroid, enigmatically replied:
“Raise high the drawbridge. Gloucester's troops approach.” You're making a scene, dear boy. Space and time are relative. We can continue our most stimulating conversation upon the nature of life, the universe, and everything at a later place and time. I am in all places and times simultaneously. However, at the moment, you're about to engage in a tête-à-tête with an interlocutor far more human than I …
And with that, the Toroid fell silent, and Jacob raised his gaze only to find himself looking into a most familiar face.
Who is it?
What do you do now?
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