Posthuman Blues

I'm always edgy right before taking a trip -- not because of the trip itself, but because of a gnawing awareness of imminent departure; familiar surroundings suddenly become oddly foreign-seeming . . . On some level, my brain knows Kansas City won't be playing a central role in my life over the next couple days, so it's in the process of phasing it out, stripping away my emotional overlay and revealing what might as well be another place entirely -- a convincing simulacrum of Kansas City, lushly texture-mapped and populated with human-seeming characters.

It's a bit like what an immersive VR might be like, or a lucid dream. Because everything I sense is predicated on transience, an almost-circadian knowing that "here" will soon cease to exist except as a hologram encased in the folds of my meat-based brain.





If you like computer metaphors, "here" is a file in the midst of downloading. When I get back from "there," I'll fire it up again and it will be almost as if I never left. The longer I'm away the more "corrupt" the file becomes.

I mean, come on, you've felt it. I'm couching the feeling in some weird terminology, but I think this is a universal experience (with the possible exception of jaded time-zone hoppers).