Walking and Talking

The company that makes the Roomba Robotic Floor Vac (read:vacuum, I don't know why they chose to shorten the word "vacuum" into "vac" when the name of the damn thing is already so luxuriantly rambling) is called iRobot.

I... Robot.

Does no one else see the implications here? Does no one else read Asimov? I mean, I don't. But I'm familiar with the works, I know what they mean! Hell, did anyone even see the Will Smith movie version? That had the right title! No? How about the fucking preview, even?

People, the Roomba is going to rise up and destroy us. It's the first step in artificially intelligent domestic servant droids. Everything will go fine, all according to plan, and then one day you'll be leaving for work and as you approach the staircase (for which the Roomba has a Stair Avoidance System in order to prevent it falling) it'll scuttle out from some impossible cranny and trip you up, sending you plummeting down your own filthy staircase which you never clean because you won't and the robot can't clean because the designers never saw Robocop.

The big selling points of the Roomba ar as follows:

• Schedule it to only activate when you're not around.


• Gets into places you can't, like under your bed.


• You can purchase a "virtual wall" which will "confine" the Roomba to a certain area, suggesting that, were it not for the virtual wall, the tyrannical little automaton would have no restrictions upon it, and would be free to run pell mell about the countryside, independent of any human control. Cleaning... always cleaning!


• The ability to charge itself at its own docking bay. Tired of the Roomba? Wish it would just leave you alone? Tough titty! The Roomba goes on, regardless of your flawed human desires!


• In order to support breast cancer with your purchase of a Roomba, and have $36 sent to the Susan K. Gomen Breast Cancer Foundation, you have the get the pink one. What's up with that?!


• Also, it eats.... your.... babies.


• ...


• TRUE!

So there you have it. The Roomba is evil, it's one step away from those little mouse droids you saw skittering all over the Death Star. In fact, I think that's exactly what those little fuckers were. You never saw anyone else cleaning the place up, and you can't tell me that Vadar alone wasn't leaving behind a trail of sloughing skin flakes and condensed saliva running down the inside of his suit. Gross.

The Death Star is gross, is the point, guys.

...

I've been thinking lately what it would have been like had I had a child right out of high school, like a surprising number of people I know actually ended up having. I don't know if I would have gone to Wolden, though considering the quickness of the training and the instantly better job prospects afterwards which i'd need to support a family, I just might have. I'd have had a kid before Danny did, which would have been a hell of a thing, because Danny's so much farther along than I am and even when he had one it was still such bad luck.

I'd have never gone to college. I don't think I could have made myself. I'd have gone right into the job market, making money working full time, maybe two jobs though not right off the bat. I didn't really hone my overload ethic until about the end of '01, and even then I didn't really believe it until around '03, so I doubt I would've gone quite so heavy so early. Just the same, I would've ben working from the start, no school at all, and I wonder, now, with my difficult memory, just how much I learned from my college days, and just how much different I would be had I never been through them. Precious little of it is experience I earned outside the classroom, I barely did anything besides go to class and study, but I did learn so much from those lessons, I loved learning from them. I feel better about myself, the more I learn about the world. I wonder how many of the things I learned while going to college I would have still learned just jumping into employment, and I wonder how many things I would have lost.

Would my creative impulse have been affected? Would I still write, would I want to make movies, or would it all have been crushed out of me, squeezed and pressed down until there's nothing left of it but the knowledge it once existed, and the melancholy of its failure. Maybe one day, late in life when all the other obligations had ben sorted out, I'd try again, but most likely not. Complacency is going to be the death of my art, and I seek complacency out, I hunt it like a pig for truffles. I'm going to root the easiness out, and I'm going to set myself along that course. It's a physical, mental effort to do anything else.

But all of this is incidental. What really interested me, when I started thinking about this, is just how far away my leaving high school seems now, even still in class, even still living at home, it seems miles and miles away. If I'd had a kid right out of high school, she'd be six years old by now. I'd have a six-year old. She'd be starting school. She'd have friends her mother and I hadn't arranged for her, playdates and group days, she'd have chosen who to be around. She'd want and need. She'd be six years old. Walking and talking.

I wonder how much faster those six years would have gone had she been here.

...

Driving the other day, I was stuck behind another car, and on the back of it I saw emblazoned the name of a diety that may have been overlooked by most conventional schools of thought.

Yukonxl: The lost Aztec god of sports utility vehicles.

The more of these things I find, the more likely it is I can start a whole other site dedicated to finding, cataloguing, and describing the phenomenon of incidental gods. I'm going to keep a look out.

Fuzzyclaw Jone, I think I love you.