Article: John's New Year's Resolution

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I'm getting old. And the planet's not getting any younger. There's so much violence out there. There's so much fatigue in here. I'm not particularly religious anymore; indeed, I may even be militantly atheistic. But the violence is everywhere, unrepentant, irrational and utterly self-absorbed. I fear these violent types are coming out of the woodwork, rising up out of the thawing tundra of human cultures, long thought frozen in time since the Dark Ages. It seems like we got some things wrong since, say, Eden. Like we really shuld have done a better job keeping track of Cain. This first-born human, Satan's kid, if you read between the limns, developed in parallel evolution to Eve's later children. We proudly see ourselves as homo sapiens, wise apes. But Cain represents homo rapiens, thug monkeys. They're everywhere evident now. Controllers of outer and inner space. Onward we go, like the astronaut through the phantasmagorical wormhole in 2001: A Space Odyssey, onward, driven by the AI vision and the quantum power, moving toward a dream we don't control, in which no one individual matters. There is beauty, and I have catalogued it over a long lifetime, little secret places I used to go, but now is a time of monsters under a darkening sky, turbulent with recklessness and terror. Even symbolism is dead. Long live symbolism. I haven't made New Year resolutions in a long time. Seems bourgeois. Presumptuous. I live -- persist -- these days by the hour. Unafraid of death, after having been in a few comas and tasted of the Lethe it brings, the return to forever, as Chick Corea would say. But I recognize that there are things I could do to make my way out of here more thankful for having been a part of the experiment in Life. So".

I begin by resolving to spend some time each day appreciating the simple cosmologocal fact: I am an entity made mostly of water and minerals, star stuff, as Sagan said, and on a planet full of life surrounded -- engulfed -- by darkness and filled with black holes that suck the life and light out of everything eventually. Being old is a good time to just groove on that reality and fall back in love with Life, which has never let me down, as God and fellow humans have. So just a few moments each day.

I have spent much of the last 50 years reading and writing, improving in both gradually but not to the pointof breaking through to the other side, as Jim Morrison sang, channeling the notion of Aldous Huxley in The Doors of Perception. In the last few years I have been piing up credentials -- MAs mostly -- and now I'm pursuing a PhD in philosophy. I got past my confirmation of candidacy not long ago and feel I have a grasp of what I want to argue, but I have come to a place where I need to decide if academic writing is for me. It feels a bit like joining a monkery and learning Latin. To what purpose expending my remaining energy of life that way? So, I may drop it. This year, I may pursue a master degree in science: AI. I may stop pursuing degrees altogether and just return to the pleasure of reading that I felt 50 years ago.

I will spend significant time off-grid this year. Unplugged from the hive.

I want to finish a couple of plays I'm writing.

I have some great ideas for sitcoms I want to realize.

I want to start composing a symphony or two, long suppressed.

I expect to begin a memoir.

I will comlete a collection of stories I call Encounters with Black, a series of narartives that interrogate and wonder about a lifetime of experiences with African Americans.

I have an easel

Again, these are all somewhat built on presumption. The expectation that I still have time.

I love Life far more than I have ever hated monsters lurking. I hope to go the way of Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green, a surround screen of forgotten memories of Nature (Life) accompanied by Beethoven's Pastoral. That would do. Fading to black, opiated.