Positive Path

You can’t believe how much potential each and everyone has. You see that it was given to them before they were born, in fact they’ve had it all their lives, the lives they have lived, and the lives they are yet to live, although it feels like they don’t have it all sometimes. The greatest tragedy, and it plays itself out each and everyday, for all of them, is that the potential just sits there, like some beautiful flower that is only a bud, all of that beauty hidden away from your eyes, its there but no one sees it, and therefore it might as well not exist. What is something until someone sees it, feels it, smells it? Its nothing at all.
As an alien here on earth you breeze past hundreds, some days thousands of souls that are just that – beautiful creatures that are unseen, unheard, unfelt. This observe and report gig has turned out to be a goddamn tragedy and you will be damned if you put pen to paper and submit it to the powers that be.

You realize they have had a tough go at it, to be sure. You remember the early religions made a splash a couple of thousand years ago, but the true message was lost in translation. That funny carpenter dude wandering around the Jordan river was just too much for everyone to handle, and so his message was subverted and the whole damn thing was hijacked in order to leverage power and suppression. They swapped out love for fear, and the rest is history. Pretty much the exact opposite of what dude intended, a crying shame. The only one who wrote anything of use turned out to be Didymos Judas Thomas, and he got lost in the desert and it was all buried deep in the Egyptian sand, the ever changing sands of time.
By the time some nomads dug it up in 1945 in Nag Hammadi everyone was out for themselves and the world was weary of all the killing. Besides the nomads being illiterate, the scripture was also written in Greek. They simply didn’t have a clue what they had found. Firewood is scarce in the Sahara, so all that survived from the 13 volumes was a few parchments. Yup, you think, that was a crazy bad start.

Except of course until that last great bright spot in the ’60s. Some hippies with flowers in their hair in Berkeley decided that the path laid out in front of them was not the way to go, and so they flipped a giant Fuck You at the crazy old white men in charge, who were still slapping themselves on the back for all the killing they did in Europe in the 40s. You remember there were moments of courage, like Woodstock, and moments of death like the four in Ohio.

You’ve seen a lot planets in your time, a lot of lifeforms, all of them different and some, like your own ancestors knock it right out of the park. And you’ve also seen a lot of trainwrecks too. With these mind control devices replacing the old religious ways you realize things have taken a sudden, technological turn for the worse. You figure that you just never know how its going to turn out.
You notice that Day 30 of your mission is up. You know you have to write this damn report.

You start.. you begin by writing that …

.. they’ve got global warming cranking up the thermostat in this house, and meanwhile there are literally billions upon billions of lost souls wandering around completely bamboozled by these mind control devices, there really is no other term for it. These creatures, these earthlings, and their greatest assets – creativity, curiosity, community, warmth from connecting with one another, are all slowly dulled down by the capitalist surveillance warlords, who would like nothing more than to turn everyone into billions of programmable consumers, buying the things that they have been nudged towards.

You glance at the bottom of the report. You have filled a lot of these out before. You don’t have to read it. You know it says:

Check one.
a. Make contact
b. Re-assess later
c. Ignore
d. Vapourize

Something stirs inside of you. You think of all that lost potential in these earthlings. So much potential lying dormant in each and every one of them. The earthling host you chose 30 days ago in Edmonton has been brushing past a lot of people lately, travelling to Toronto on business, he likes to get lost in the masses of people. Uses the subway, and walks the streets at night. He’s different from most of the humans you encounter. They won’t go anywhere without summoning Uber. You notice he has no fear, no agenda. Then you remember. He’s using a flip phone. A flip phone!

Your thoughts return to your mission. There are strict rules from deviating. The mothership will soon contact you. Once your report is submitted the tracking beam will teleport you up, and you will be blasting back home. Another planet, another day.

“What if…what if I just destroy the tracking device. What if I stayed inside this host. What if I broke the prime directive, which is to never, never, make unauthorized contact, or to influence the native lifeforms in any way whatsoever..” You are suddenly struck with an idea, you think that this is a defining moment. What you decide to do next cannot be undone. Your heart races. Your breath quickens. Slowly but surely you reach over to the tracking device. Such a small silver disc like object, that has a soft red glow in the centre, yet so powerful. If you just change channels on the earthling host you are in for a few seconds, you can make your way to the LRT tracks that are nearby. You could place the device carefully on the track. The heavy trains that roll by every now and then would easily take care of the job.

You look down intently on that smooth silver disk, now sitting in the palm of your hand. You think of the humanity you have been studying.. and all of the wonderful possibilities they posses. And then you think of yourself.

“What possibilities lie… in me?”

30 days ago I agreed to enter the Flip Phone Challenge. The mission was easy to state. Turn over your personal smart phone and have it locked with a pin unknown to you. Then replace it with a Flip Phone. Manage your affairs accordingly.

Those 30 days are over. What did I discover? That time is my biggest asset. And what did I realize? That I was able to win back part of my life. A big part.

[Editor’s note: Day 23 proceeding  Day 1, and  Day 9]

Its hard being an alien stuck inside this human body on earth. You see all kinds of nature here, trees, leaves, green grass. Beautiful glassy blue crystal clear mountain streams, with the water softly falling down, so cold and clear. Giant groves of majestic poplar trees, the leaves flicking against each other in the light summer breeze. Tall grassy fields that sweep on endlessly until they give way to a grove of bulrushes, and a dark deep blue pond. You hear some ducks quacking in the distance, a mother herding her ducklings in the sunshine, forming a row, ever mindful of her brood.

The forests are teeming with life, large stands of birch, tamarack, and spruce trees. Thousands of species of birds everywhere. Very early in the morning by a huge sweeping lakeside shoreline you hear them. Bluebirds, goldfinches, orioles, sparrows, robins, all of them singing together in a mind blowing symphony, early in the morning as the sun rises to greet the day.

The humans are mostly divorced from this. They climb into their vehicles early in the morning and whiz off to their day jobs. As you take your notes for this ‘observe and report’ mission you enter that

“..their actions although unique to their individual circumstance have a common element. They have to have that black rectangular device with them before they leave the house. They check it while sipping coffee. They check it after brushing their teeth. They glance at it quickly before leaving for the office. And lo and behold they check it when they get to the office.”

On these black devices there is messaging. Dozens of messages for most, for some hundreds every day. Some humans are flipping back and forth between 5 or 6 conversations at a time. The younger ones are texting so fast, and flipping between conversations that they often cross wire their messages by mistake. As well as mainstream messaging humans are winging WhatsApp, Messenger, and WeChat missives.

Then there are the mindsucking apps. These insidious things claw onto the human consciousness with a remarkably tenacious grip. And they don’t let go. FaceBook the app, Instagram the app, Twitter the app, SnapChat the app, Pinterest the app, linkedin the app..

Meanwhile any free time that might have evaded the mindsucking apps is quickly consumed by a bevy of time idling apps, Things like the youtube, netflix and reddit, with their notifications showing up here and there, gently reminding that there is something new to be looked at.

The human mindspace has become a kind of a battlefield, the big four deploying new apps designed to grab attention and hold on to it at all costs. The design put into them is about claiming the largest share of attention. Tapping into the human psyche, they exploit the intricate workings of the human brain.

You are reminded this observe and report mission has thirty days on planet Earth, you’ve seven more to go. But you see a trajectory here, you see a pattern. Human intimacy, face to face conversations, humans experiencing connecting with one another is vanishing, replaced by a thin veil of existence. Digital existence.

Seven days, seven days. It’s going to be a long seven days.