a cynical kind of day

If I'd known what kind of day I'd have when I woke up this morning, I might've skipped it altogether. Though I suppose it was an important one, full of new information and enlightening tidbits. I was supposed to run a workshop this afternoon an hour outside of town and it didn't happen because of seized bearings, someone else's busted arm and a rather large photojournalistic editing project. But these are merely the interesting details in what is otherwise a long and boring story.

I did not give any workshops today. I spent the day in doctor's offices and cars and other people's lives, and here I am in the relatively reclusive anonymity of my relatively unread blog, doing that potentially shameful thing akin to scribing a self-referential whiny diatribe on a bathroom wall. Everybody's doing it.

Psychic prediction: in the years to come when the neoliberal capitalist agenda becomes increasingly user-friendly and transparent, the concept of rights will be seamlessly fused with the concept of commodity. Today, if you have enough money, you can travel to Amsterdam from the U.S. and engage in activities there that are otherwise illegal as a U.S. citizen. In the future, perhaps a greener future where the fuel to fly you to and from this place are spared, you will merely purchase the right to enter an amsterdam zone on the end of your block, much like a door charge for a bar with a liquor license. Your id will be checked on the way in, and then you will be permitted to engage in activities which are not legal outside the building. The cost will be costlier, but theoretically the right to buy it will be available to everyone.

Citizenship will be phased out slowly as passe, the recognition that nation-states have been messy and outdated will be commonplace. Zones of appropriate rights will be established but will no longer be dilineated by borders. Fences will do. All people will be theoretically free to circulate, provided they have accumulated the capital to trade for the right. For some rights, the cost will be so exorbitantly high that only the concentrated capital of several lifetimes of labor will purchase it. You may not even know what these rights are, because you have no amassed the capital to imagine them.

Psychic prediction: tomorrow morning I will wake up and eat some toast and coffee. I will google the news. It will be raining. I will go back to bed and revel in holding very, very still for a long time. Sometimes, I will blink.