stevengharms.com

William Gibson said one of my favorite dicta about the future: “The future is already here, it’s just not very evenly distributed.”

I feel like a wave of the future washed over my shore recently. I received a postcard from my health benefits program encouraging me to take advantage of “an exciting new service…a personalized, confidential genetic analysis.”

A what?

It continued:

“With a simple DNA test,…you can work with your doctor or a Navigenics genetic counselor”

Say what? Is that a job you can apply for, “genetic counselor?” Can you imagine the résumé for the person that applies for that job.

• Completed course in grief pre-mediation for X42 haplogroup with disposition to ALS

And what would the bullet points look like for tomorrow?

• Delivered haplogroup cross-referencing database for training AI voice agents for disclosure of low-IQ offspring prediction

Was this job even imaginable when I, pitiful creature of the 20^th century I am, was born? I must be getting old, present technology is starting to feel bizarre. Read a portion of the flyer yourself:

I’m signing up for it, of course, but it’s amazing to think that the nucleotide pair in my cells can now be used to design a health regimen for my 30’s to improve my 60’s.

Guy on the right.

A siren.

Have a daughter who has a daughter.

Bless the power of of fame and money ( ça veut dire “resources” ) to improve the gene pool.

And this, my friends, is natural selection.

You may want to see Kris Carr’s crazysexycancer.

It’s the documentary of a young woman who gets word on February 14th that she has inoperable cancer. The question is, what did she do with her life after that.

What do we do with ours?

Debut’d at SXSW and previously mentioned here.

I dreamt that I was attending a wedding, and in the white dress was my friend who was murdered years ago. She was breathtaking, radiant, and tan. She was the way I remembered her, but with that elusive red tint she tried to get in her hair working exactly the way I knew she always wanted it to be.

I dreamt that the cathedral was large and wooden, clearly Catholic but minus a lot of the kneeling it seemed. Along the exposed ship’s ribs of the supports of the vault there were pennants, standards, and flags.

There was a large organ in the far right corner, with long pipes that bellowed the inevitable Mendelsshon’s ‘Wedding March’.

I awoke and, still under the influence of The Brief History of the Dead, I fancied that I had been called, in dreams, to the City of the recently departed, yet still living in the memories of the living, to witness this event.

As I shuffled out of the bedroom, under the weight of this vivid dream, and into my couch, I wondered if it could be. Could the African folklorists have gotten it right, that there is a tripartite division of being. Could it be that those in the City can channel and invite the wandering psyches of the sleepers in, perhaps only as observers?

And, if there is such a City, and it holds cathedrals, then I must certainly wonder if the answers are given at the end, or if the yearning simply gives way to more mystery.

Harry Lime: Don’t be so gloomy. After all it’s not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. So long Holly.

This weekend I caught the famous noir thriller “The Third Man”. What a great movie! I really enjoyed the plot. It had all the usual, post-war amorality, a stunning European dame, Yankee idealism, European cynicism, and the question of what can we say for ourselves, as a race, when The Judgment comes.

I was on a bit of an Orson Welles kick. His geist seems to be in the air wtith War of the Xenu, er Ritalin, er Worlds running and with his mention in the recently-viewed-by-me “Ed Wood.” Welles is just one of those stunning talents that I don’t think that any actor of today could even hope to rival in scope (and no, I’m not talking about his weight problem).

I got the Criterion collection version so it had some great extra bits provided by Peter Bogdanovich. If you see the film, I think this is definitely the DVD version to make sure you get.