Abstraction is everything

Abstraction is everything.

I wake up at 6:09 AM, the 369th of 1440 moments into which we’ve broken the periodicity of darkness and light. I reach blindly in the darkness to silence my alarm, which knows exactly how far into the day I am simply by counting the times a piece of quartz vibrates. I swipe my finger across the screen, and the capacitance of my body alerts my phone to this. It lets itself know in 0s and 1s. 

Of course, I have no reason to know all of this - someone figured it out once and packaged it up with a tidy bow that I never even need to untie. The beeping will stop either way.

I swing my legs over the edge of the foam slab that holds my body 30 inches above the floor of the box I call my apartment that protects me from the cold or hot, wind, rain or  snow that happen from time to time. Having laid perfectly still while hallucinating for my prescribed 7 hours a night, I am refreshed but not yet alert. I prepare hot water, warmed by burning the fumes of “long-dead” organisms, and pour it over beans that were grown thousands of miles away before being roasted and smashed into small pieces. A brown liquid drips from the bottom of the cone, which I then drink. A molecule called caffeine travels quietly to my brain, antagonizing adenosine receptors, and starting a chain reaction of cause and effect that wipes away the fog of my inactivity.

I put on a shirt made from a fuzzy plant that was pulled, spun and wrapped and tied around itself until it went from thread to  a plane. That plane was cut and stitched back together into a shape that fits over my body, with the right degree of topology to wrap around my shape exactly. I pull on pants that were made more or less in the same way - these pants by the way, have but two holes. A straw is a stretched hole and a pair of pants is a bent straw with another hole in the top, for a total of two.

I put my things into a cloth pouch, thus extending my body’s abilities via personal storage augmentation.I grab a small piece of intricately shaped metal, the only shape in the world that fits into the shape that makes sure the entrance to my element-protecting box stays closed while I am gone. I walk downstairs, a discretized slope that allows human beings to move up and down through the “air”, without needing to defy gravity. I walk again down the street, turning this way and that until I reach another set of stairs. This set of stairs goes down into the earth, connecting to a hollow tube through which electrified sleds move at a great velocity in order to take a person from one place to another at a velocity larger in magnitude than they would themselves be able to travel. Having gone from point a to point b, these people will move up another set of stairs and through another straw with one hole, exiting the belly of the earth into which they had previously descended. And this flux of life, from a to b and then back again, will happen each and every cycle of darkness and light regardless of whether those caught in its pull are cognizant of it or not.

Abstraction is everything.

snippets from a new 3D printer I’ve been building!