Hurricane Sam was a beast. The storm made a mess of the yard but somehow the garden survived.  When Booker and Sofia cleaned up the fallen branches the tomatoes and stringed supports they set up were all intact. My teenagers are so damn proud of what they’ve grown and Janet and I are too. Proud rents.  They did it all, from compost to fruit.  And these tomatoes are perfectly delicious. It’s too bad no one else will eat them.

How a tropical system sucks away the summer humidity. It’s nice to be able to spend time outside again, particularly for Sofia and I.  Tired of this luggage someone called “respiratory distress,” distress?  Asthma is what we used to call it.  That drug in 2005 that left me nearly dead and with a permanent case of severe asthma, rrrr, still boils the blood. I should have sued the bastards. But Sofia? Where’d she get the asthma?  Was all that outdoors play at the Waldorf School when she was a tiny thing actually bad for her?  I’ve done all the literature mining and deduction and re-mining and modeling on asthma anyone could do. I’m lucky to have ever gotten some Brazilian investors to finally build Hypothia SMART and pull it off. Lots of suggestions of course bubbled up from the system, all described as high quality, yet none passing the meat test.

My years at Duke, the 09 crash, the five year economic gutter. Reform came much too late until corpses stacked so high people could no longer see their screensets. None of my own forecasting work was ever to be taken seriously and hell why should it have been?  I hate to be so damned right, its a curse. Yeah well let’s ignore what I got wrong, about everything, the details, the mundane stuff, those little incendiary cancerous bits.

Thank god Janet was in health care, about the only job to be had those days, that nursing shortage seemed to just about stick around the whole time. With municipal services busted eveywhere, man, were people ever sick.  Funny. Me, trading labor for a doctorate, no salaries at the university, just receiving medical care benefits, but I held onto my most precious inventions instead of building them out at work.  Amazing no one else thought of these things that whole time. Reds. They say fear is a man’s best friend. You add it up it brings you down.

Well I guess no one ever did go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people, no one except the American people, of course. But this SMART system works now, fifteen years after designing it, just so amazing I can’t believe it is real.  Realer than smoke and mirrors.  How slow we’ve become for technological advance, all that money pumped into the richest 100 US pockets as a golden parachute before the collapse. Almost a trillion dollars gone poof and a bunch of morons wanting to hump the vice president all gone belly up with no more dineros for golf and viagra anymore. Nice going, slaves. And then suddenly those dollars were worthless; they took the speed of the ancients and dumped those dollars for gold, swiss francs, anything but oil or dollars.  They knew it was coming and they ran for the gold-lines hills.

So did I; luckily I dumped and moved for materials and us-independent currencies in 08. So the rest of us be damned.  We didn’t need those jerks anyway; they were such greedy laggards, trying to rerun another energy bubble before they went broke. Suits those suits.

Through an early version of SMART-NORCLUD we told everyone in 2008 that the Chinese had already eclipsed US in terms of technological policy and achievement, how all those citations were lagging indicators, lagging behind the truth of the matter, that it was writ large through the whole global research corpus. All those blank stares. Unlike everyone else, we read all of the data. Our system helped us know. It made us geniuses, Tim and I, even then. Not that Tim needed augmentation like I did. I remain utterly dependent upon it.

Truth somehow survived the incessant stupidity, even in our simulators.  You can’t sim these tomatoes, that’s for sure.  The sim never got it quite right, never does, never can. The future is part what you make it, obviously, but also part how you’re making it and with what part of your body?

The future is always visible from the gut, but only if you consume as much information as possible and internalize it, digest it quietly, beat it around, rearrange it.  It just pops out.

I remember just before my brother died he said, “time doesn’t exist.”  He was the best economic forecaster I ever did see. “It’s already happened.”  What made us this way? Freakish.All that time everyone was OK as long as I kept it encoded in my poems.  It was safe, smart, neat-o. Depressing.

Tomorrow I gotta give another talk about our cognitive attachment to apocalypse again, blah blah, how it’s fixed to any model using language, how apocalypse is a fancy word for denying the realization we’re all going to die, and most likely, quite alone, that it all comes down to measuring the width of language itself.  That it’s already been said.

Fearing the apocalypse, fearing an early death. It’s quite reasonable as a fear I guess, frankly, but still, in some ways, just another way to separate people from what few resources they have. The great simulator of extinction GEAS and it’s pronounced “jeez” if you ask me.  As in gee whiz?  Heh.  Each one of us goes extinct at some point or other and it always sucks no matter the terms. No one likes to hear that one. The planet will be just fine, maybe better off without us.  Who wants to mutate on Mars? Not me.  I don’t wish it on my kids.  Makes that old-time chemotherapy look like a stroll through the park.

Damn good tomatoes. At this point, I don’t care about the soil contamination warning.  I’ll be damned, I am damned, I love these tomatoes. I’m 48 now, and after this last decade, 50 is the new 80, so I’m feeling pretty good that we made it this far. The end. It’s after the end of the world, and these are damned good tomatoes. I just wish I had a good bottle of Chianti.