![]() ![]() “His hand will be against everyone and everyone’s hand against him, and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers.” So the esoteric meaning of 86 is “to produce an heir by unnatural means and have it go badly for everyone, because you rejected Eliezer”. “He will be a wild donkey of a man,” said the angel. Then an angel descended, and prophesied this was not the destined child, not how things were supposed to go. Abraham and Hagar had a son, and they called his name Ishmael. Abraham’s wife Sarah was 75 and doubted she could have biological children, so she told Abraham to sleep with her servant Hagar. Abraham was childless, and tried to name his servant Eliezer his heir. The number eighty-six appears only once in the Torah it was Abraham’s age when his son Ishmael was born. ![]() Mirrored in the water, “SF” looks like “86”. The light from the lurid sea - okay, the lurid creek channel - is the reflection of a billboard. It’s a miracle we only get one or two madmen per city block. Here we have all gathered, abandoning our green and pleasant homes in Pakistan or Nigeria or Michigan to see the doomed summoning-city at the end of time. We nod at him and let him pass he seems to know the score. All clothing sends a message theirs is “everything that ever happened anywhere in the world however far away has converged here for this moment it was all for this.” A crazy person walks by, mumbling to himself. Where the good and the bad and the worst and the bestĪ Muslim woman walks by in traditional dress, followed by a dark black man in African garb. It feels eerie and unreal in the darkness, like everything is underwater, and I remember Poe: Too much Ethiopian methylxanthine, that’s my diagnosis. The doomed summoning-city at the end of time seethes with palpable impatience. San Francisco doesn’t feel like the sort of place willing to wait another six years. Twenty years ago, he conjectured that all human history - no, all evolutionary and geologic history - was a series of accelerating movements, which would crescendo at the end of time in approximately 2029. Somewhere to the south, Ray Kurzweil walks into his office at Google. A particle accelerator, a summoning circle, a stargate, choose your favorite megastructure that calls up things of dubious put-downability. The city is a machine made of submachines, each with its own fuel. The few visible human commuters pump thick black Arabian hydrocarbons into their vehicles, or thick black Ethiopian methylxanthines into their bodies. The Muni slithers past a line of self-driving cars wearing lidars like silly hats. The sky is still dark, but the streets begin to stir. We have to continue in wicked deeds or we would have to deny ourselves.” “We have walked this path for too long, and everything else has faded away. Everyone here is complicit in their chosen ending - plane flights, porn, $20/month GPT-4 subscriptions. ![]() Climate change for the Democrats, social decay for the GOP, AI if you’re a techbro. Imagine living on Earth in 65,000,000 BC, and being anywhere except Chicxulub.Įveryone here thinks the world will end soon. Imagine living when the first lungfish crawled out of the primordial ooze, and missing it because the tidepool down the way had cheaper housing. It will be the best investment we ever make. We pay rents that would bankrupt a medieval principality to get front-row seats for the hinge of history. There were forests and lakes and homes with little gardens. What marvels techno-capital creates as it instantiates itself, too bad I’m a hairless ape and can take no credit for such things. They look no more human than a termite nest. I’m an heir to Art Deco and the cult of progress I should idolize skyscrapers as symbols of human accomplishment. ![]() But a morning appointment and miscalculated transit time find me alone on the SF streets half an hour before dawn. When I go, I surround myself with people otherwise I have morbid thoughts. ![]()
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