Senior?
When a year or so ago, unbidden, the young woman at the movie theater gave Beth and me the fogey-discount on our tickets I knew I had crossed a threshold. It’s been more than a few years since that unwelcome AARP material first started showing up in the mailbox, but that was easy to dismiss as mere chronosynclastic infidibula, or whatever.
And now I discover that famous techie and world changer Taran Rampersad’s mother is younger than me. And she’s a fine writer. Here’s her blog. These blogs are leveling things. Nobody staring out of the monitor making conscious choices to dis- me with a senior discount. I think I’ll stay indoors.
***
Looking for links on Vonnegut’s chronosynclastic infidibulum, I discover that almost everything googlable was originated by Rageboy. No surprise, I guess, but you’d think that there would be something more directly referencing the author himself.
Three years ago, moving backwards in some 11 dimensional heart-string theoretical helical path, three years ago when madness was before him and I was Smoky’s age, Locke’s EGR letter titled Complex Adaptive Hebephrenia provided this capsule review of Kubrick’s 2024:
A bunch of monkeys kill a bunch of other monkeys after a singing slab of black basalt appears in their watering hole. Next thing you know, we’ve got space stations at LaGrange points, cosmic telephones and liquid carrots in a box. You eat them with a straw. People apparently like doing this, or perhaps they have simply become so dull through inbreeding that they no longer care. Kubrick doesn’t tell us. Also, there’s another, larger, black basalt thing on the moon now. Holy shit, it’s LOUD when it goes off! Let’s take a ride, someone says, so it’s off to Jupiter. However, before arriving, the highly intelligent but deeply boring supercomputer who has been designed by IBM to maintain the temperature at a comfortable 68 degrees Fahrenheit, goes berserk after a fit of lip reading and kills everyone aboard except for Dave Bowman, an engineer. The computer then sings Daisy, Daisy, and dies. At this point, the original script called for a detailed explanation of what a compiler actually does, but focus-group screenings convinced Kubrick that no one would get it. Instead, he has Bowman shot through a chronosynclastic infidibulum [emphasis added -fp-]into an ornate Victorian bedroom, where he ages quickly and dies. Then a giant fetus appears in the sky. Far out! The credits roll to Karen Carpenter singing We’ve Only Just Begun.
