Midjourney genart from text prompt
I started this blog about ten years ago with designs on banana peel sketches and found images of churches that look like spaceships, inspired by the cover art of an early 1990s noise rock band Mount Shasta’s album, Watch Out that features a Gothic church image posted onto an outer space background. Piloting the spaceship church are what looked to me like a crude cartoon drawing of a dog in a viewing bubble, and further aft a horse in another viewing bubble, attached to the facade like a command bridge. Like Lukeskywalker and R2D2 dog n pony adventure. The church looked like a spaceship. On its way to a giant ringed chicken leg-shaped planet. One of the songs is aptly titled ‘(He’s on) Planet Dumb Ass’, not only one of my favorite albums of the 90s, but one of my favorite live shows.
A decade later I am on about the Sama-Bajau and strange physics, still drifting on digital oceans. I wonder if my reality is a simulation. Advanced AI would be indistinguishable from willpower. Our simple universe fits neatly in higher dimensions generated and sustained by cybernetic forces in order to store time like a spring, seemingly arbitrary and stochastic, Brownian, chaotic to us. Squishiness. How much of your own life would just be noise to a crab? Everything except ratings for consumption, reproduction or threat determination.
All I know is I had a colonoscopy and when they hit me the gas, my head filled with Beyoncé’s ‘Irreplaceable’. I lost consciousness. I regained consciousness hearing the same song in my head a half hour later in a recovery room. “You must not know ‘bout me/ I could have another you here in a minute” was like a lyrical portal. My ass felt fine, too. Bonus.
Except maybe it wasn’t me that came back. Maybe what came back was only a song of me.
Fifty State Banana 