By now everyone has heard the theory that everything we perceive as real is one very large, very complex computer simulation. This is of course, sci-fi nerd speculation, best left to stoners gathered around a star trek bong in a basement apartment. There are times however when I can't resist the feeling of what this world might really be: a very ripe, surreal graphic novel, penned by some vast intelligence resembling Kurt Vonnegut. Consider the absurdly garish circus act of Donald Trump- the comic book billionaire villain, who's very name seems like a sneering sarcastic bit of overly smug fiction: Donald Trump- as in" Donald Duck", wholesome comic misanthrope and "Trump" a name calculated in self imposed superiority with the frat-boy aire of one upsmanship- it can't be real....His celebrity and nonsensical appeal to BOTH the holier-than-thou evangelical and the Howard Stern disciple knuckle dragger alike. He can't be anything but a figment of a grand auteur.My own life seems to follow the same writer. My beautiful mom is slowing disappearing into the darkness. She and her gracious, funny and loving computer simulation program will not last to the next upgrade. She can still hold a normal conversation but can't do much for herself. As my personal proof of the heavy hand symbolism of the author in my own story, yesterday, while stuck in traffic in the U-District, (owing to a head on wreck on the impressive Gothic bridge over the Montlake cut, a bridge whose mechanical guts were designed by my mother's engineer father Clifford McCallum), I was talking about my mother's decline with my sister on my phone. Barely moving, I was overtaken on my left by a long black Cadillac hearse. I can't say when I last saw a working hearse. It was a profoundly obvious metaphor from a novice writer, not unlike something I might have written.
This all could be a product of watching Westworld too.
