Notes from Bushwick

A certain Eric Nelson requests a little bit of your time and a bit of your self-indulgence, if you can spare either (I’m fresh out of the latter). The New Jersey-born writer is among the dying tribe of zine writers, currently presiding over the bedroom-based Cup and Saucer Press, itself the bedroom-based force behind the Cup and Saucer Chronicles, now coming upon its third issue. One ought to respect people of this sort; a fellow who puts energy into such a medium at a time in which one might otherwise reach more readers via the infrastructure of the communications age is truly a lover of print and press and ink and brick-and-mortar distribution and perhaps even phone phreaking. A person such as this is every bit as worthy of respect, praise and support as would be an Orthodox monk or any sort of monk. To the fellow’s additional credit, Comrade Nelson has a book on the way, itself a collection of texts having to do with his hometown of Paterson and entitled The Silk City Series (Knickerbocker Circus Press 2010).

What Nelson asks of us all in conceptual compensation is our answers to the following queries:

Please state your first name, age, occupation and city(ies) you were raised in.

1.      Where do you currently live? What neighborhood?
2.      What brought you to your current city? Apartment?
3.      Would you move to another city if the opportunity came? Why or why not?
4.      What’s been your favorite place to travel to and why?
5.      Please share an interesting experience of either traveling or moving.

Your answers will be put to use in a future issue of Nelson’s zine. That this is almost certainly a ruse, and that "Nelson" is obviously a socio-thematic investigational operative with the National Security Agency, is beside the point. The fellow is keeping alight the flame of the underground press, even if it is all in service to some COINTELPRO-esque operation that exists beyond the oversight of even ranking members of pertinent House committees. Send your data, then, to ericnelson83@gmail.com.

Most everyone has some or another major objection to man’s priorities or pastimes or paradigms or taste in music. Some of these are reasonable, some are even more reasonable than the reasonable ones, and some don’t make any sense at all and ought to be disregarded. Then, there are those that I make; these must, of course, be regarded with such great degrees of seriousness that etcetera and whatnot.

In 1978, science fiction grandmaster Robert Heinlein testified before Congress on the subject of mankind’s future in space, holding forth specifically on those technologies that had been developed in the context of space exploration and which had subsequently found widespread application on our planet as well. Even at this relatively early point in our race’s forays off of our home planet — which is to say, in reference to a small subset of what space exploration has given us altogether — Heinlein could point to several examples of how such spin-off technologies had already helped to enrich his own life and the lives of others by way of consequent medical advances and the like. This he did in recognition of a sad fact of American life: that many Americans of the sort who don’t blush at such things as farm subsidies and national park maintenance nonetheless have no interest in allocating any public monies whatsoever to a pursuit that has already paid us back in ways that defy calculation.

Set aside the benefits of a space-faring civilization over one bound to a single planet; consider, rather, the existential dangers associated with a fast-changing sentient culture that finds itself increasingly unpredictable unless one is predicting that it will grow more capable of doing something bizarre. A hundred years ago, no political entity could put a dent in the planet even if it were so inclined; today, several nations could, by virtue of their nifty modern weaponry, set in motion planet-wide chaos of a sort that would be comparable to the climactic events of 13,000 B.C. or thereabouts. Meanwhile, as our nation’s hawks are happy to remind us, small organizations of like-minded fellows now have the chance to obtain weapons of the sort that would have been unimaginable to our great-grandfathers (though not our great-grandmothers, all of whom were witches). We need not extrapolate all that much to come to the conclusion that each year we come closer to the point at which some association of nihilists, fundamentalists, or greens will find themselves capable of putting an end to all human life on this planet.

As the nation wraps up the latest debate on health care and underpinning issues involving the role of the state and the priorities of the purse, it would not be amiss if we were to spend a fraction of this time discussing a more fundamental sort of health insurance than the sort that was invented just a century ago and that our ancestors largely did without anyway — insurance that will cover the human race in case of one of any number of the increasingly accessible means by which either a small or large number of our fellow men may wipe out the planet either by accident or design, by way of bioengineering or nanotech or some comparable new development. It would be a fine thing if our race could spend some very small percentage of its resources in such a way that we might actually accomplish something long-term, such as long-term survival.