Flying times. Didgeridoo player at Whole Foods, in the aromatherapy aisle. Reminds me of the pseudo-bluegrass band playing at the Pharmacy in the Newton, New Jersey ShopRite. Something about Nero and Rome burning. Here in Boulder, however, it’s different. Food samples being offered everywhere, so people come to the store to get a meal. Word gets around. Even Boulder can’t insulate itself by the diffident cloak of liberal ‘caring’. Society out of touch. Schisms, chasms opening wide. John Brunner’s book The Sheep Look Up crosses my path again in Bordesholm, after 25 years. And it is more accurate, with the exception of missing the cyber-developments (those the Neuromancer caught), in its prognostications of a world ruled and consequently destroyed by technocrats and technological implementations in the service of consumers and consuming. So it goes. A traveler’s notes might well continue here in this immobile condition. As the social matrix around is foreign, and re-mark-able. And in the complex sliding process of multi-phased decay and degeneration. I had forgotten that much of the action in Brunner’s book takes place in Colorado, for whatever reasons. Ending with Denver under martial law, and the dominoes toppling.
Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace trade ed. Ace Science Fiction. New York, NY: Ace Books, 2000.