29/06/18 The Hunter Born In A Parking Lot

“In the future, we will have machines to broadcast our sleeping dreams! It will be like a cinema!”

“Oh! And is it any good?”

“Oh yes! Oh yes! Absolutely!”

Homeless was poor, destitute, and he was in need of money. In order to buy food.

Today#7 was stinking of ‘male’ deodorant and had good body hygiene; he was walking away from the subway station, doubtlessly pursuing the door of one of the many skyscrapers.

They were walking across a busy street intersection, at the fast pace imposed by the one of the two which had access to money.

Homeless poured more energy into his opening.

“For starters, a single dreamer is a eight to twelve hours of continuous live footage all by themselves! When it takes one year to make a movie, and crews of thousands of men, the sleep cinema - or rather - the cipema will take off with virtually non-stop broadcasting of movies after movies after movies, all unfolding from the imaginative subconscious of some dreamers, all by themselves, without any need for extra legwork.”

“Except, maybe, delaying the feed before it reaches the audience, and having some guy cutting it if it becomes inappropriate, of course,” he finished.

“This sounds very interesting. When will they take off?” asked #7.

“Oh! Right around the time we invent the brain radar. In about... fifty years.”

“Brain radar?” #7 reacted derisively.

“So that’s the machine that reads people’s thought, and can automatically convert them into sounds, images, videos, and so on and so forth. It can also fish out memories long forgotten,” spoke Homeless, “And then, also, you know, dream artists could totally be maintained in artificial sleep for extended periods of time - even entire years! What are the moral implications of an artist wanting to wake up and being maintained in sleep his entire life? Just because his movies are THAT good?”

It appeared they had arrived at Today#7’ workplace. He climbed a short flight of stairs, and entered without inviting Homeless; that meant it was over. Homeless went back to the subway’s exit door, being snickered at by the beggars.

He was not a beggar! He deserved every penny he got!

He was not a welfare leech! He was not voting left wing! He was not a mindless pawn! Modernity had not achieved the Destruction of His Soul!

By the end of the morning, Homeless had gone through twenty wage slaves, having made two dollars from #11. Each time, he improved on the original tale to make it more interesting; meanwhile, he made it a point of coming up with something new for the afternoon, as he did not want to mistakenly repeat himself, and be characterized as “boring” in the court of first impressions.

In the between hours, from around ten in the morning to three in the afternoon, Homeless usually went to the stores and screened special discounts on cheap food such as beans and rice. He could probably afford doing “expeditions” away from the city, and purchase in bulk in places that were less expensive, but he preferred making sure he left nothing of value inside the Village when he wasn’t around. It felt like a good safety mechanism to not have too much on himself either. Obviously, most homeless people actually ate better than he did; slaves had access to a variety of free food options, as long as they pledged allegiance to the system. As long as a man accepts to be less than a man, then he is allowed to be paraded as the mockery that he is! Homeless revolted against this aspect of human nature: they give a dollar to the person that does not try to achieve anything, not to improve their life, but to feel superiority. It is a form of sadistic negative reinforcement.

Two dollars was enough to buy a bag of dry beans. He put it inside his backpack, along with his matches, his financial capital, a water bottle, a sewing kit, a wooden spoon, liquid soap, his boiling pan, and his tent. In his pockets he was carrying a toothbrush shiv; he had an actual knife in his shoe.

“An iron mining drill so powerful that it depletes the iron in the blood of the people on the other side of the world, shooting right through the core!” was his afternoon story. It did not make two dollars.

As the sun was setting, Homeless walked back to his Village. His tent was bluish, and his “spot” was under the part of the bridge for the cars that were going away from the city. He was allowed to live amongst the beggars, in spite of their mutual dislike, because he was not deemed particularly dangerous or violent. There was safety in gathering like this, the downside being, of course, being surrounded by drug fiends, criminals, people with mental problems... the list went on.

Most homeless people had some sort of serious problem.

Not him. Simply put, the lot he had chosen, to be free, was not a realistic outcome given the circumstances of his condition. Without property, inheritance, any real money, an orphan, the world had been engineered around him such that he was expected to wake up at six, go flip burgers somewhere, give away his entire life energy to some genuinely unattractive effort, day after day, year after year, all the while smiling and pretending to respect the lizard-people manager? He refused to support the system in any shape or form. Not even by being characterized as a “burden” that required special avenues of molestation! He saw right through every measure intended to corrupt his quest for freedom! The sheep present their neck to the blade, oblivious!

Not him.

He ate his beans, one of his longer boiling staple meals, kept the boil water in his water bottle - a manner of a disinfected, makeshift bean tea - and went to sleep.

In his tent, on that particular night, he pondered what exactly would have made him a happy life; doubtlessly, it would have been to live out in the wild, hunting, fishing, building a shitty wood cabin, completely alone. Alas! This world had no wilderness. Only gigantic estates of billionaires, and “public parks” guarded by rangers, neither of which had any tolerance for the Hermit, the person that never asked to be born to become twisted into a useless cog to a useless machine. Soon enough it will all be parking space anyway, without any wildlife, any ability to sustain life - truly independent life. An entire planet covered in asphalt!

Pleased at his own idea, Homeless knew he had tomorrow’s morning pitch in the bag, and fantasized about his success, as he drifted away unto dreams of his own.