Son Rudy's dog Slug shaking. I love the motion implicit in dog-shakes, like an Italian Futurism painting. Made it to the beach two days in a row, thanks to Isabel being here for a visit. Yaar.

Later a beach cop stopped to scold Rudy for not having Slug on a leash. Rudy tied his belt to Slug's collar, but the artifice was seen through.

Ocean Beach notes, made 11/5/2004,for use in my Mathematicians in Love novel. Walking there with daughter Isabel. Photos by Isabel.

Container ships chugging past toward the Golden Gate.

Little birds running like their legs are wheels, their bodies don’t move, how nice it would be to cup one in your hand and feel its heartbeat. The little white ones are plovers, the big ones with up-curved beaks are godwits. Here's some godwits digging in the sand.

The horizon line isn’t straight, its wavy, scalloped, undulating. Giant waves out there, far outsiders.

The waves closer in were smooth and clean, like slow gray hills, with perfect lips and spray blowing back off them towards the sea.

It was a marbled cloudy sky, with shafts of afternoon light coming down through rents in the cloud cover, pillars of light like fingers of God.

Crossed the dunes and the beach grass. Tropical plants in the highway divider, cacti.

The coffee shop is called Java Beach, at the corner of Judah Street and La Playa. They have a checkered floor. Black leather couches. A character sitting there, older man in a flat hat and wearing a red carnation. People doing homework on laptops

One more interview question from Arianna Dagnino in Italy. (On November 19, 2004, I'm on a panel about “Digital Eternity” Futurshow 3003 in Milano, and Ari is the moderator.)

Q 160. We humans used to think of ourselves as the key players on stage. And we want to stay at the centre of it: we’ve been using children and/or works of art and science to grasp a sense of immortality, of life that still goes on after our death. But maybe one day the human race will simply disappear to be replaced by more intelligent beings (robots?). Is there any hope for us in the long run — at least as a race, if not as individuals? What is a human being going to look like a hundred or a thousand years down the line?

A 160. As you say, even if an individual achieves personal immortality, there’s social sorts of immortality. Your genes may survive in your descendants, and your ideas may survive in the minds of others. A society has a kind of hive mind which we all participate in, and the hive mind is potentially immortal.

I think it’s very unlikely that we would be replaced by purely mechanical robots. Biology is vastly superior to mechanics — for instance, unlike machines, biological organisms have homeostasis, that is, an ability to repair themselves. But what could happen is that, on the one hand, we begin to tinker with the genome, altering our biological make up and, on the other hand, we create mechanical devices to augment our bodies. Certainly in a thousand years we can expect to be cyborgs, that is, genomically tailored biological beings with mechanical add-ons.

Amputees are already using very high-tech artificial limbs. And I don’t think a brain prosthesis is out of the question. I often write of a device that I call an “uvvy” for “universal viewer.” It’s a soft wireless computing device that rests on the nape of your neck and gives you instant cell phone abilities, internet browsing, and access to your lifebox database. At some point a person without an uvvy might not be considered a whole person at all.

But even though our bodies will be upgraded in various ways, I don’t think human nature won’t change very much. When I wrote my novel about the age of Peter Bruegel , it was borne in upon me how similar the people I see on the street are to the people in Bruegel’s paintings. My prediction is that people won’t change very much, and the overarching hive-mind of human society will also remain much the same.

We are close to having the uvvy, what with our increasingly powerful wireless devices. Cell phones have already greatly changed the details, if not the essence, of social dynamics.

What’s still missing is a seamless user interface. Actually inserting wires into one’s brain is something that people will, quite correctly, never be willing to do. But perhaps we might be able to create tightly focused magnetic fields capable of interacting with the neurons in the brain stem. More realistically, we might wear what I call “stunglasses,” which combine a heads-up display with the user’s surroundings. Lightweight sensor-equipped fingerless gloves might allow someone to “type” simply by twitching their fingers. Everyone will have an uvvy within a hundred years. Cyberspace will ooze out of the machines to permeate every aspect of daily life.

But, even so, we’ll still be the same kinds of people: lustful and greedy, noble and inspired.

Forget not the eternal verities of human nature as depicted in the supremely wise Carl Barks tales of D. Duck.

This morning daughter Georgia Rucker emailed me:

man, am i bummed!

i vow not to hear or see that chimp of a leader's voice/face for the remaining 4 years. i am SO SICK of him!

i can't help feeling mad at the red states too…. from a “center of the world” new yorker point of view, it feels like we (and calif) produce all these books, television shows, movies, fashions, which the midwest and south LAP UP, and then in return, they re-elect a freaky evangelist who is gonna do a christian clamp down!! not fair. sure, they give us some crops and vistas…but i'm scared things are gonna get really conservative. for starters, see how gay couples are being treated. 11 states banning the right for them to have partner rights??? that's nuts.

the preppy dumb people win again. (instead of preppy smart?) at least there's an END to the bush reign – 2008.

=========

My answer.

Thou sayest it, sister.

You're right. That's the thanks we get for entertaining those overweight flyover-state couch potatoes, four more years of the fuming chimp?

How to survive? Since the world won't change, I can only change myself. Not obsess over him. Start loving him? Or at least don't think about him much. I keep saying I'm gonna read the paper less. Definitely I'm going to stop reading those trembling-with-righteous-indignation editorials in the New Yorker.

There's a certain neurosis common in men over 55, of obsessing over the flaws of the government. Men seem to get it more than women. I think it's a carryover from the tribal days when if you were old you either got to be a revered elder or were dragged away from the fire and had your head bashed in. “Shuddup already, you lost, crunk.” But it's not like that anymore. Live and let live. As Richard Nixon once said, “I respect that most sacred of American rights, the freedom to do one's own thing.”

People my age did already, after all, survive Nixon, Reagan, and Bush the Elder.

The upside is that this will be great for the solidarity of the reburgeoning counterculture.

And thus I calmly, maturely, blog the great collage picture below, by Rick (anyone know a link?), showing Bush the Younger in poses matched with chimps.

And I hope to God that's the last freaking thing I'm saying about The Chimp in this blog. There's so many things that are more interesting to think about. Forget about pounding your head on the wall. Tunnel!