Chronic Mindcrimes

Pink Twilight Theory^Ω

            Mirror mirror on the screen
            Drag me into the obscene
            Mirror mirror, sex and death
            Stare until there's nothing left

I haven't even started, but I wouldn't be surprised if you already thought there was something wrong with me. I'm just floating here--Lucy in a sky of cubic zirconium. I love Lucy. I love the word "zirconium". I think there's something honest about it, as a message informing you how the world works. I won't confirm or deny whether or not there's something wrong with me, but I will tell you that I'm honest in a similar way. Like a con man dressed in a suspicious trench coat, or a president denying guilt at his most recent scandal. I might seem mysterious now, some new nihilist enigma gnawing nagging at your conscience, but you'll know exactly who I am as soon as things go left (and it ALWAYS goes left). Today I want to nag about a theory called "pink twilight," which is just a pretty way of describing the way things have to get ugly.

'Minitel: Miracle or Monster?' These bold words headlining last Tuesday's Los Angeles Times made for quite the interesting cup of coffee for me (black hole black, no cream, half a pack of sugar (a message to myself that I'm not as much of a masochist as X says I am)). In this article, Rone Tempest tells me about the newest way France has found to stick its head up its ass. The French Government, itching to get ahead on the frontier of information technologies, thought it would be a good idea to distribute Video Text machines called Minitels to some 40 million of its citizens for free. Minitels have quite the charm to them, I would say. Their pixelated screens and clinky keyboards are magicians bringing you worlds in miniature [from the tip of a hat]. Their visual terminal interface makes it exponentially easier to order train tickets, manage your bank account, and talk with your friends, all from home. Penpals and weather updates, phone books and horoscopes, a trillion trinkets of curiosity with no cats killed. This and more are the promise of the largest computer network in le monde. France of course stands to profit tremendously, both economically by charging for time spent on its services, and politically as the bold entity leading the world into its next chapter.

But the ennui of ingenuity is that Faustus always follows, and turning a new chapter in our book doesn't change the fact it's an erotica. We'd like to think the bad thoughts in our heads are only exceptions in a dataset whose mean remains utopian. But Minitel tells all, and the picture painted isn't pretty. Out of the 800,000 services offered by Minitel, over half of its profitability is generated on what are called "Pink Minitel" networks, offering sexual graphics, chatrooms, and even connections to prostitution rings. In fact, Minitel has been a key tool facilitating a steady stream of "difficult-to-detect, mostly sexually linked crimes" (sacre bleu!). In response to pressures to take responsibility for this proliferation of f[leshy fauna], France Telecom argues that it's just the medium, and should not be positioned as a censor of content, despite said content being the consequence of an explicitly government-initiated project. It's obvious that France just wants to keep its hand in the Minitel pot, even if that pot is a little sticky.

It's quite the conundrum, for sure, but I am not the least bit surprised, because France's new dilemma had already been predicted by my favorite Philosopher, Simone Rollkragen. Rollkragen's "Theory of Pink Twilight" is almost prophetic in the way it outlines the dangerous game governments must play whenever it tries to make progress on technological terrain. This is the case because, according to Rollkragen, "technology is a free and therefore fundamentally ungovernable entity. It forms the basis for sites of activity along the entirety of our moral spectrum. It is a hotbed for heaven and for hell, and in turn reflects the core ambivalence of man, despite its being mechanized by lifeless inanimate objects." Rollkragen calls her theory "Pink Twilight" to embody her belief that technology brings with its advancement the end of classical governance as the enforcement of rules and regulations, and most notably through sexual means. "In the beginning, and the end, is a wild West of sorts, and I relish in hope for the day that West comes knocking on Big Brother's door, in the form of computers and machines." It seems to me that Minitel is Rollkragen's vision manifested.

But it's not the fate of Minitel that concerns me here, or even the French government's thinly veiled complicity. Rather it's the persistent dishonesty of its initial vision. There is a kernel of puerility in all purity, and France Telecom's naivete disappoints me in it's utter lack of foresight. To advertise a communications network like Minitel as something that could only make the world a better place, rather than a medium also bound to amplify humanity's greatest malintents, is to avoid any responsibility for its complicated consequences. Such reckless impunity in front of truth, like mooning a powerful god threatening your demise. Or... maybe Minitel's rabbithole goes even deeper than I've originally thought. Maybe the French government has actually read their fair share of Rollkragen, and is intimately familiar with her theory of pink twilight-- so familiar, in fact, that they've found a way to use it to their own advantage. I wouldn't be surprised if the emergence of Pink Minitel networks occurred as much by design as by the mere vicissitudes of human nature. Maybe France Telecom has known all along that baiting the public with wild fantasies and sexual allures, offering a new realm for esoteric freaks and the criminally inclined, is the easiest way to guarantee a loyal user base and ensure the success of their product. Indeed, Pink Minitel hasn't simply been a minor territory in Minitel's broader domain, but rather has been the financial core of the network from its inception. Perhaps it is the case that the lie of the French government's promotions of Minitel is merely a tool serving its fundamental truth, that they are merely in the business of selling a good cheaper than they could ever honestly advertise, peddling well-polished cubic zirconium.

And the truth is here and who I am. And the truth is, you've been looking for me. Looking for some man, some thing, some X, who can actually admit there's probably something wrong with him. Maybe, despite the brutality they tend to entail, we like pink twilights because they're more honest than anything else we come across these days.

So as the sun sets further down into epic nighttime ephemeral oblivion, and the moonlight triggers a cool and calming melatonin, don't forget that you've been looking for me. And when we say goodnight, a single tear creeping past our closed eyelids, penetrating all pretense that we're not preparing to go to war with the next day, see if in your dreams you can find me. Lord knows I can't find myself...

**"That mist is a mountain--and that mountain must be conquered. Up a trackless slope climbs the master artist, and at the top, on a windy ridge, whom do you think he meets? The panting and happy reader, and there they spontaneously embrace and are linked forever if the book lasts forever"

Today's honesty regards a theory called "pink twilight," which is just a pretty way of describing the way things have to get ugly. According to philosopher Simone Rollkragen, any and all digital domains are doomed from the moment they cease to be commercially viable.

Telecommunication technology when it falls into disuse it becomes primarily used for naught purposes

-"skeevy dudes"

Think the quick collapse of Minitel Pink[Ma Bell --> analog digital machine gun control], or [example]'s dense decline into degradation. In the beginning, and the end, is a Wild West of sorts. Nobody's safe when things turn left.

And it ALWAYS turns left.

[reminds me of...]

Unless you pull the kill switch, as many companies often do. In a scramble to preserve profit or evade lawsuits, they take the coward's way out, aborting the internet's natural program, substituting [pre-established] protocols of precarity for problematic pretense. In other words, Pink twilight is just the course of history uninterrupted, the thing that happens when you don't kill an ineluctably pinkening thing.
-Minitel Pink Messaging + Nightridder
-Usenet
-Video Text

-Populate with more Wiki stuff

greenwich village vibes => the village of the green witch

Pink twilights don't only apply to once safe places on the internet...[talk about relationships]

[conclusion]
And the truth is here and who I am. And the truth is, you've been looking for me. Looking for [some person/an entity] who can actually admit there's probably something wrong with him. Maybe, despite the violence they tend to entail, we like pink twilights because they're more honest than anything else we come across these days.

So as the sun sets further down into epic nighttime ephemeral oblivion, and the moonlight triggers a cool and calming melatonin, don't forget that you've been looking for me. And when we say goodnight, a single tear creeping past our closed eyelids, penetrating any [pretenses] that we're not preparing to go to war with the next day, see if in your dreams you can find me. Lord knows I can't find myself...

A String Theory of Being

What if I told you that black holes aren't just at the center of galaxies but at the center of the very things that make up who we are? What if I told you that at the center of everything...

is nothing?

In the 1950's, investigators of mesons, subatomic particles made of pairs of quarks and antiquarks, found that the mathematics describing their interactions suggested they were connected by strings. While this theory originally fell short (it predicted the existence of a particle with characteristics only demonstrated by gravitons, which behave very differently than the investigators' math predicted), physicists in recent decades have run with its general hypothesis, claiming strings don't connect mere mesons, but rather all the bosons and fermions that make up our Standard Model of the universe. They've also claimed these strings, the subatomic spaghetti to which we owe our existence, are much smaller than originally presented, scaling from the size of a proton down to a planck length. This is equivalent to saying something we thought was the size of a galaxy is actually smaller than your car. Everything's always smaller than we like to say it is, isn't it?

Anyway, these strings are quite the characters -- they're at the very least charming enough to call our deities. They're thought to be 1-dimensional, but vibrate through 10 dimensions (the 4 unusual suspects comprising our understanding of space and time, plus 6 "pacman dimensions" in which objects travelling through it reach the end only to come back out the other side. Who knew the beloved Namco game was also a lesson in theoretical physics?). In the same way the different strings on a guitar correspond to different notes, the different vibrational modes of these 1D strings correspond to the mass and spin of the particles posited by the Standard Model. But while we can meditate on the idea that our universe is just a fancy game of Pacman, or is made up of what is essentially music, or that right now avalanches of proposals are being submitted by physicists to describe how these strings get tied together, or that nobody actually knows what these strings are made of in the first place, there's something else that has become a ghost which haunts me, just like all the others (Binky, Pinky, Inky, Clyde).

The protagonists of String Theory can apparently form either rope-like lines or circular loops. But why do they form these loops? What are they looping around? Wouldn't you say there's gotta be something holding them together, like how Lucy and Rosa Parks held together the nonsense of the '50's? You might think this is a frivolous, trivial question, something that would win you a measly hundred bucks on a primetime game show. But it really matters to me, because it's at the core of the things that literally make up everything. I think there's something there, though I know X would call me crazy, say I'm "in one of my little loops" again (I know you're reading this. Why won't you call me back?). X is probably right. Maybe I'm just lonely because X is my ex, maybe these thoughts are what I get when I let Lucifer loosely loop around my head and love me like Lucy; these thoughts that won't leave, like Rosa, these thoughts that insist on being a ghost that haunts rather than a ghost that ghosts. I'm acting schwarz-childish, I know, but can you really blame me?

At the heart of physics is a fundamental uncertainty-absurdity, masked by an illusion telling us there's some kind of kettle calling black a pot of gold if you can just make it, make it to the end of the horizon. If God exists they are a master manipulator, which is to say magician, making something out of nothing, a cell, a flower, a me, a you, and a we all out of nonsense. Donning a sly invisible coat and an overtuned grin, skin oily for aesthetic shimmer and functionally slippery in case of the need for a great and fashionable escape (hocus pocus, open sesame), they, in all their opaque omnipotence, exhort us, "I know I work in mysterious ways, Mr. Frost, Mr. Pacman, but all you have to do is walk a little further down the road you chose, and I promise you'll get to the point of it all."

Maybe black holes are what we should be praying to these days, worshipping on weekends and hailing as creator. Maybe black holes are simply waiting for our worship to reveal themselves. Maybe the hole is the whole point of holiness. Maybe black holes are portraits of a future we can't see. Maybe they're just lonely maybe God's in every one of them.

Dear God, dear reader, dear ex, dear oblivion, if you're in there I would like to politely ask you to please stop hiding. If I spoke into the void that I miss you and want to see you again, would you appear out of thin air and say "there there" and make my heart ache less? Would you do anything to fill this void that is somehow both destroying and defining me, help me find the needle in a universe-sized haystack so we can string it all back together together? I beg of you. I beg of you! Don't just sit there and let me unravel! Don't tell me there's just a void in there. Don't avoid me. Don't void me. Don't say there's nothing left, or that there's nothing left to say. I won't believe you because I believe in you, just like how you've always wanted.

Dear God Reader, if you sent me a message through your phone I would call it a holey text and maybe even revere it as such. Reader God, if you feel like nothing or like a void right now I understand and I love you anyways. Even if you are nothing, I'll keep on walking down the road because you told me there's a point and you clearly want me to find it, and also cuz I think the point is you. And Reader I will keep on walking, just like how you asked. And Reader if you feel like nothing, I will make something out of you.

Moonless Earth

Imagine an acme hole where the moon used to be. No natural light to guide you through to the morning. Just a permanent eclipse in your memory, lovingly haunting every time you look up to receive a slightly clearer picture of the sky. Does that future scare you? Does it besiege you with grief or loneliness? Would you find it just plain unbearable not to have something to stare at out your window while you sulk in the bathtub or cry yourself to sleep at night? If so, you and Alexander Abian could never be friends.

And that's something you might not care about, but I think we should at least hear him out. Plots might thicken into a savvy kind of gravy if we center it around a protagonist you can't help but feel skeptical of. Abian, a marvelous yet ultimately miscellaneous mathematician, is our hero here because he has a dream to save the world. In that dream, there are no natural disasters, no catastrophes subsequent to a wobbling Earth, no heatwaves or snowstorms or hurricanes. It's a good dream, I think, maybe even a beautiful one insofar as it facilitates smoother travel, more effective humanitarian aid and less volatile economic exchange. Climates are more stable, forcing strangers to figure out something other than the weather to discuss. Perhaps most charming of all, the Earth itself rebrands its angle, shifting from 23 to 45 degrees off its axis.

We love our hero, albeit reluctantly, so we will say this is a good dream, a beautiful dream. Now open your eyes. It's 3am in winter Buffalo, -17 Fahrenheit. A blizzard has snowed you in and you're running out of groceries. You're hungry and you grimace at the necessity of rationing your goods, which become less and less good with every repeated consumption. Less and less and less. Again and again and again. You're sick of the rerun you live in. You're angry that it's what you're stuck with because the next season got canceled. It's a bitter pitter patter of a boldly banal existence. And, somehow, the worst part is that you have to see it, that, every day, you have to look up at the ceiling instead of dreaming in the dark. You turn your head to the left, and, just for a splitting hair of a silver second, you could swear you see the moon laughing at you. And it keeps on laughing. And the more it laughs the more it hurts.

And it hurts us too, because we love you, dear Abian, and we know you've worked so hard so much so grittily. It takes a herculean push to migrate from Iran to the states, to become an expert and authoritative voice in a field like mathematics. You've worked so hard, just to be stuck in a freezing house in Buffalo, or a state university in Iowa. Your passions have only led you to an absurd and absolutely boring time loop. Abian, this life you know is your Sysyphean soliloquy. We know you tried, we know you're tired. We struggle with you along your long ladder leading nowhere, that inveigling invariance. We know the agony of the fact that the ladder is just barely less painful than falling off.

But you don't see us -- heroes never notice their audience watching them on screen. All you see is your prison and the moon on your left, your belligerently bright warden. You long for something warmer, something safer, or at the very damn least something new. And so I will make one last stand to break out of this prison, by neutralizing its cold and calculating commander. If I have no more food to eat, I will become a lunatic lapping up the loveliness of loss. If I live in a rerun, I will get rid of all the seasons. If my colleagues are right when they say destroying the moon will create a hail of falling debris, then it will be a better way to go. If the moon is the only one here to keep me company, I would rather be alone. Who needs the light at night, anyways?

This is the moonless Earth Theory and I must say it resonates with me on the level of a pang. I think the sun might feel relief without the burden of a moon to love, or bicker with at dawn and dusk. Perhaps all tragedy is selenetropic. Perhaps all loving and losing is a lesson best unlearned.

**Abian said that "Those critics who say 'Dismiss Abian's ideas' are very close to those who dismissed Galileo."[6]