Psychedelia Gothique

Swallows Playing Chicken is a vivid metaphor. Swallows are beautiful, graceful, free and fragile – a state humans can only ever really approximate when we are children. The game of chicken – for anyone who doesn’t know, is where two fast moving, human piloted objects approach one another at top speed – on a collision course, until one, both, or neither lose their nerve and veer off course at the last moment Even a near miss can send one or both players careening out of control in random directions with results almost as catastrophic as a head on collision. Swallows are probably the fastest and most agile of songbirds. Their ability to evade one another is mindboggling. But the results of a mid-air collision would be like two bullets meeting, probably resulting in a tangled wreckage of bones and blood and feathers. And if the bird they are challenging is their own reflection in a window, their death is blunt and assured. The impact is always devastating. I, for one, am glad that Dav...

The BioGrid is  a vast biological computer housed in the root network of a forest. Following the disaster that wiped out most of humankind, the BioGrid was almost destroyed. In the process of recovery, it forms into factions. One faction calls itself The Free-Thinkers and considers itself humanity's heirs. All of the knowledge and referents including their sense of society and community comes from the civilization that the humans built. They want nothing more than to be human. In the course of their recovery, they discovered and resurrected Raine Naidu, a human (and son of the director of the BioGrid project) whose personality matrix was uploaded before the disaster to help make the BioGrid more relatable to humans. Raine is, in effect, their human template. The largest faction of the BioGrid calls itself The Core. It believes itself to be nothing more than a computer – a tool that humans built for their own use and benefit. While waiting to reconnect with humanity and re...

  I’ve made a couple of observations this fall that may point to something real or may be as magical as the subjects of the observations. Observation one: The ranks of conspiracy theorists are burgeoning, growing larger and seemingly more gullible with each day. The website “Livescience.com” claims that 29 per cent of Americans believe in a “Deep State.” More than 50 per cent of Americans believe in at least one conspiracy. This did not come out of nowhere. In fact, it’s human nature. In the early twentieth century, when technology was on the rise and everyone pretended that superstition was a thing of the past, spiritualism was actually making a huge resurgence. The Order of the Golden Dawn was a secret society of British gentlemen, Aleister Crowley was beginning his campaign as the most evil man in the world; belief in ghosts and spirits was so pervasive that it ran rampant through all strata of society. William Lyon McKenzie King, the Prime Minister whose likeness graces the C...