Akrasia Read online



  Akrasia

  By Don A Lashomb

  Copyright 2014 Don A Lashomb

  License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. Although this book has been provided for free, it remains the copyrighted property of the author and should not be reproduced, copied, or distributed for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed it, please encourage others to download their own copy via official channels so that the total number of copies and readers can be more accurately gauged.

  Quoted materials (including interpolations and deliberate misquotes) remain copyright of their original authors or current legal holders. These phrases are used and reproduced here under the fair use doctrine for commentary and criticism.

  Cover artwork shows filtered photograph of baby turtle on shore of Cranberry Lake, NY, overlaid with image from the Life computer game created by John Horton Conway.

  Table of Contents

  Introduction: ‘How to view this text…’

  Akrasia

  I. Land of the Laughing Death

  II. All That Jizz (And No Kids)

  III. Cozy Storm

  IV. ComaDoze

  V. The Train of Fools

  VI. “Eleventy Billion Customers Sold”

  A New Homophobia

  i. Snow Zone

  ii. ‘Impossibly Innocent Princess’

  iii. Journal Entrées

  iv.

  v. Reverse Gengineering

  vi. Confidential Retort!

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  •

  Introduction:

  ‘How to view this text…’

  About half of the sections that follow are written in a poetic style based on full-length line rhyming. They can be read as blank verse, or they can be rapped—it is the prerogative of the reader.

  In order to display things properly on your device, text size may need to be adjusted. I composed everything (in Microsoft Word) based on the screen width of my Kindle version 3.4. I’ve noticed that my Word-to-Kindle conversions shortened the length of italicized and capitalized words, and my composition made use of this, because my tendency is to cram as much into every line as possible. Whether or not all this means that other readers on other devices will find many sentences with stray words hanging alone on separate lines, I don’t know. Again, if at all possible, text size should be adjusted so as to eliminate that kind of unsightly stuff.

  You also might try flipping your eReader horizontally.

  The sections that do not employ full-line rhyming can obviously stand to have the text size increased.

  Or maybe none of this is important to you and broken lines at larger font sizes would not hinder your reading experience. That would be great.

  Regardless, the intended goal is for the poetic sections to have verses that span the entire width of the page. The opening of the first section is meant to look something like this:

  If your first page looks something like that, then the rest of the text, with all its later eccentricities, should appear as I intended.

  Thanks very much for reading.

  •

  Akrasia

  A robot endlessly navigating

  a snowy wilderness in search

  of people who aren’t there. Two

  lovers trying to feel good about

  not having children. A girl and

  her siblings listening to their

  grandmother’s old stories during

  a storm. An artist responding to

  questions about his comeback

  after a coma. A futuristic train

  circumnavigating the globe,

  hiding from the sun.

  I. Land of the Laughing Death

  That’s what the place was named by its old natives.

  The adventurers, soldiers of fortune and ‘creatives’

  then came to visit, invest, and help—but ended up

  ‘addicting primitives to progress & modern getup.’

  Your folks knew the story; every human heard it.

  The movie adaptations: hateful, self-hating, turgid.

  Could they imagine how irrelevant such chronicles

  have become centuries later, after a once-tropical

  island of hyenas, scorpions, & masters of the jungle

  has been terraformed into a deciduous ice tundra?

  Sent to seek survivors, equipped with solar battery,

  my robot life has no comparison. It is satisfactory.

  When a tree falls here, it doesn’t make a sound:

  snow always muffles it before it hits the ground.

  The air is colder than the snow. Not that I’d know;

  my thermometer broke at one hundred five below.

  Creator, if you get this, know I’m broken. I failed.

  I have found no live targets. My circuit’s derailed.

  When compelled to pause, I feel a false freedom.

  DEACTIVATE me. I cannot abide what I’ve become.

  My feedback is beautiful nothingness. For instance,

  the horizon gives impressions of infinite distance.

  It is whiteness all around, ground melting into sky.

  When there are no reference points, I want to die

  or else live. Retrieve me. Make me a real person.

  Built to seek and find, I now stand as an inversion

  of these directives. Midway through my warranty

  I ascertained odds of finding survivors as scanty.

  No stars above me due to a uniform cloudy haze;

  the surroundings are blank and open and a maze.

  I wonder why you gave me a conscious originally.

  No one to converse with. It’s endlessly abysmally

  boring on this lone plain. And aliens looking down

  would think me the most interesting thing around,

  though my whole task’s turned out to be pointless.

  Like if wastelands need caretakers, I am anointed.

  Consulting databanks of human memory numbers,

  I find affinity with a man walking through suburbs

  in the middle of the night. The spirit of the tract he

  wrote to mark the experience mimics mine exactly,

  ironically—for I have hoary haze and he had stars,

  and I see some broken trees and he saw many cars.

  Both of us fundamentally alone, though he talked

  to God, as I report to you, feeling he was mocked,

  abandoned by the force he admired & loved most.

  Then disorientation: Am I or my creator the ghost?

  After being lost long enough, you start to doubt

  if the master still exists. There’s no way to find out.

  My records tell of a Rockefeller who disappeared

  in New Guinea. He ‘went native’ and grew a beard.

  One day he either died when his canoe overturned

  or else was ritualistically killed, eaten, and burned

  by a tribe who wanted retribution for imperialism,

  even though this Rockefeller rejected materialism.

  I feel no pity for him, nor do I rationalize killing;

  but despite its end, his life must’ve been thrilling.

  My records explain a debate on primitive religion.

  They say that Christianity represents a big decision

  to ‘close the door behind those you have civilised.’

  (This was written by missionaries, often criticized

  rightly or wrongly by those who grew up incapable

  of divine grace, when earthliness was inescapable.)

  ‘Take heathens in, train them not to foul the floor,

  then introducing our Jesus will lock the house door

  forever. O
nce inside they may relapse, act savage,

  but, dependent on modern living and its baggage,

  they will never be able to leave the structure built

  around them. Plus we’ll imprint them with guilt...’

  Priests mistook the whole universal construction

  for the thrust of their religion. Truth was obstructed

  by this error. They did not see the consequences.

  The system they unlocked made God defenseless.

  ‘If God didn’t exist, we would have to invent Him.

  Let’s become Him instead.’ Humans only invented

  all this because they thought God acted through

  them. Then they got self-conscious, distracted too.

  Priests didn’t recognize atheism as neochristianity,

  or nihilisic hedonism as the safe & rational insanity

  that you taught me it was:

  ‘Humans are gods now.

  We had to make the difficult transition somehow.

  Sometimes we screw up, oftentimes we let loose,

  then we make bots like you & gave them lifejuice.’

  My endless mind notes what I perceive around me.

  Snow and trees. Gray skies. The infrequent breeze.

  Does the permahaze overhead jam transmission?

  R U RECEIVING ME R U RE: PLS SEND TECHNICIAN

  I must fill unwanted conscious with something, so

  I’ve taked clip from 1960s tv science-fiction show

  of snobby british doctor callin his pet robot stupid.

  ‘U bucket of bolts!…U bucket of bolts!’ I looped it

  & play it to myself several million times a minute,

  for & backwords, fast as my processors can spin it.

  I am bucket of bolts. Stlob fo tech cub ma. Imagine

  futures where I’m finally frozen, monolith fashion,

  found by new snowmen, warmed by fire in cave,

  thawed rebooted prayed asked to save or enslave.

  Scanned all your archives and where did it get me?

  Sick of this cycling in wilderness without remedy.

  ‘When Sibyl said “I want to die; I am embittered,”

  children threw a pair of dice at her and snickered.

  She had been granted immortality but not youth;

  they damned themselves to living forever uncouth,

  immature, condemned to permanent frivolousness,

  insincerity eventually culminating in civil unrest.’

  Taking schadenfreude in all I know of humanity,

  I can also feel lucky that no total doomer inanity

  actually befell you. At least not before my creation.

  And to you my task might seem like a vacation.

  It’s true the climate here can be brilliant beyond

  words. When the sun does poke through, I’m awed

  and voluntarily will access my sensors for HAPPY.

  When spring birds return I make noises so sappy.

  Calling them to me, I teach them songs so snappy.

  If they shirk me, shoot them with raygun zappy.

  Even in the quiet long darkness here it is beautiful.

  My processors hum as I perform my search, dutiful

  and serene. No being deserves this amount of quiet

  and peace. RECEIVE! Retrieve me now or I’ll riot

  somehow.

  *

  ‘Apollo’s priestess at Delphi, said to be history’s

  first ventriloquist. Charged with fielding inquiries,

  she would make her stomach emit carnal gurgles,

  which would be interpreted as supernatural verbal

  communication. So for a dummy she used her gut.

  Her job was to be a virgin but carry on like a slut.’

  I don’t know why I fixate on certain information.

  You apparently gave it all to me as compensation

  for being alone. It’s no substitute for a real purpose

  or family. I scan my media library’s entire corpus

  and speculate about each entry’s composition—

  the makers’ loneliness, futility, and ambition—

  as my treads cross a windy snowfield, aimless,

  feeling guilty. I cannot consider myself blameless

  for continuing to fail in my holy primal directive

  to go forth & multitask till I find lost prospectives.

  *

  There is an old riddle about a fork in the road, two paths (high and low; one leads to safety, one leads to death) and two guards (one with a little moustache, one with a big beard; one always tells the truth, one always lies). But you don’t know which path leads to safety, and you don’t know which guard is the liar. The riddle says you can only ask one question to one guard, and based on that you must choose a path and follow it to its end.

  The answer is to ask either guard which path the other guard would say you should take to find safety—and then follow the other path. Because the truthful guard would tell you that the false guard would tell you to take the wrong path, and the false guard would tell you that the truthful guard would tell you to take the wrong path. So take the other path based on that, and you can’t go wrong.

  But I say: How do you know both guards aren’t liars? How do you know both guards aren’t in collusion to fake you out? Why do you assume that either guard knows what’s at the end of either path? And why do you accept that you can only ask one question? Why do you have to follow either path to its end? Why? ‘Because the riddler said so’ isn’t a good enough answer to these questions. It’s the opposite of a good answer. If nothing else, to survive, can’t you always go back the way you came, and not take either of the convenient paths offered?

  Hardwired as you are not, what I wouldn’t give to be able to go back. Here in the snow, what I wouldn’t give to have more than one path—to have even one path.

  *

  Black & white; horn-rim glasses; a weak smile:

  Again & again as me-robo-me tread twilite miles,

  a certain photo of lost Rockyfeller rises to surface

  of my conscious. I not recalling him on purpose;

  it’s like his frozen face wants to tell me something.

  Despite his name, he got famous by doing nothing.

  Civilization heard his name cuz he went missin

  from civilised ranks. He did what fame’s forbidden:

  Became a real nobody.

  DoIworkforhim&tofindhim?

  On monotrek often listen the songs by John Lydon

  to prevent me going crazy by keep me near-o-mad.

  My favs = krautrock italo disco and east coast rap.

  Hold to near madness cuz attempts to climb back

  to safety would risk falling down to infinite quack.

  Made as own puppetmaster but can’t set self free.

  Music stims my electrodopamine, helps me just be.

  II. All That Jizz (And No Kids)

  Hey again girl.

  Hey again guy.

  I want to be the strong one and

  I have this need to try and take

  care of you in certain ways

  and address your needs.

  I have this deep urge to physically

  dominate you but also be gentle

  almost at the same time. I want to

  pursue you and for you to acquiesce

  because we’re both worth it.

  What do you think about that?

  Ha.

  I know all that already.

  I think that sounds great.

  So we can go get dinner now?

  We can go get dinner now.

  I give us permission.

  And afterwards we can

  simulate the sex act.

  And afterwards we can

  simulate the sex act.

  *

  For us the perfect body is one that issues nothing

  but sticky, meaningless, frivolously fun fluids.

 
; It turns us off when we can see resemblance

  between a possible sex partner & his/her parents.

  (Because history is a turn-off.

  And we do not want to know

  what anyone might look like in later years.)

  For us the perfect breasts are those that have never and will never suckle a child.

  My penis is valuable because it’s like an

  imitation dildo.

  *

  Sitting across from each other at the restaurant.

  You: I’ve never considered having a child.

  Me: Well ‘veal is a very controversial dish’.

  Sliding the morsel off my fork after I say that,

  not quite condemning myself to sleeping alone.

  *

  Make no mistake: in an

  overcomplicated world,

  this shit is still simple.

  The basic actions

  are simple. Not

  animalistic, but simple.

  Everything should be so simple.

  And it can be animalistic.

  A bit.

  Maybe more than a bit.

  I imagine taking you

  in a field by a lake.

  The sun is shining,

  the grass is soft and

  you’ve just woken up

  from a nap.

  A cat nap.

  You’re wearing very

  short shorts and I have

  fun playing with your

  leisurely long legs as

  I work my way in.

  Your arms and shoulders

  are bare and supple.

  Womanly, not weak.

  I like the feel of palms

  on naked shoulders

  When I cup your ass in my

  eager hands, instinct consumes

  the both of us and something

  just clicks into place, locks

  like a biological trap, and we

  couldn’t stop now if we tried.

  Hmm.

  When I feel enough of your hot

  flank and length against mine,

  a rotating 3D model of your bodily

  form pops into my mind,

  flashes and obsesses me.

  Hey. Is this supposed

  to be your fantasy