“The World According to Shake-A-Spear” a short play in five Acts.
Act III: Humility
[The scene opens. A tired man at his desk, snow falling outside his window. He is leaning on his elbow, face in his palm, contemplating turning up the heat or getting some coffee. The clock in the corner of his desktop reads 8:11am Perfect timing, he muses.]
“Ah but the heat in here is just fine. I will bring in some more ash wood that my seventy-nine year old father helped to harvest and delivered right straight to my house. I will have to thank him again.”
Under water, he might have been. Under so many crushing layers of it that it’s a wonder that he didn’t legitimately have a seizure. That was one thing he hadn’t had yet: an epilepsy-style seizure.
“They don’t even know the first thing about the spectrum of mental capacities. They don’t even call it mental capacities yet. Man am I am doing my best on this one but there are going to be a whole lot of people waking up at some point this year — there’s no damned way they can resist this much force for a whole year —
Yep. They will be waking up feeling pretty dumb a lot of them. That isn’t my fault but I bet they will feel dumb. Next thing you know my phone will start ringing and I’ll be hearing I’m sorry!
[Author’s note: Please DO NOT do this. Do not apologize for somehow ‘wronging’ me if you’ve come across me in this life because I don’t even think on that same plane of thought anymore. It’s just stairs, see? All it is is stairs.]
Stairs to go down, stairs to go up. Nothing but stairs. No way to get off this ‘knowledge tree’ and where would you go anyway? They’re just ants just the same as I am and as soon as a few of the brighter ones actually *SEE* it…well, when they see it…
Well, it will be like all of them are shouting Shazam left and right and from the tops of trees like a bunch of popcorn kernels popping in a popper.
What’s so special about me versus them? NOTHING.
Not one single solitary thing. I’m just the first kernel that popped and for that I get the lovely pleasure of being among the most likely of the kernels to get burnt to little black mark in the bottom of the pot by the time they get done celebrating and congratulating themselves for showing up in the bleachers to catch the not-especially-well-appreciated-up-to-now kicker launching one through the upright from the other side of the fifty.
[Justin Tucker: No offense, bro, but you haven’t accepted my father’s open invitation to come to the Unitarian Universalist Church in Albion, New York — yes that same Albion in which Charles Howard founded the first Santa Claus school — and to sing for them in one of however many languages you know. Are you still only at seven, bro? The Steelers kicker can do it in eight, pretty sure. And really I think a sort of a fuller, deeper baritone — but my father is a Raven, so, you know…]
Man you guys are just plain silly! You’re silly. Didn’t you know that someone was going to show up and spoil all your days with a little reality check for your mischievous behaviors? The girl who lived to the right of the photo about darned sure shoulda known it. Lovely girl and quite smart, but not smart enough to real-eyes that in a universe as big as this one, saying “to the right” of a spot on an oblate spheroid doesn’t really specify a point in the entire world unless…
Well, unless, that is, you have a ‘guilty conscience.’
LOL
Man has it been easy to rile these 1990–2024 humans up. Not on purpose. Not mean-spirited like. I always thought I might know what I’m doing. I’m just the one who kept at it is all.
I kept right on thinking I knew what I was doing. Longer than you all did. What, did you not expect me to continue to believe in myself just because you stopped?
All but my friend Captain Planet and a few others whose privacy I will respect. Yep.
Andrew Lane, Master of Sustainability,
Arizona State Dec 2016
MAJ, Army Reserve, 492nd CA BN
Oh and BY THE WAY.
[Voice fills with the fury of a thousand of your hurricanes and then subsides as if by touch of the button, “no, don’t scare them. They’re already plenty scared enough.”]
Yeah God, but HE WILL HAVE THAT DOG BACK or you know damned good and well I will not stop barking about it.
Andrew’s dog Regan was wrongfully stolen from him, I *know* this is the case and whoever is in charge of that sort of thing better make sure he gets that dog back by Independence Day or I swear to you I will go nuclear MY STYLE.
You can fuck with a man all you like — at least under your rapidly vanishing paper rulebook of human rules — but you will not take his dog.
Give it back and you won’t hear this again. Do it not and you’ll hear it ten times louder.
Folks, you don’t want to hear louder from a guy like the guy that just wrested the control of the keyboard from me. That’s why…
We’re going to do this calmly, quietly, and in a manner as free from hysteria as we can manage. This is not hard. You’ve got people who are
FAR less
Bright.
Kind.
Considerate.
Forgiving.
Congenial if not charismatic.
than I am and you have no right (actually you rlly and trlly don’t have) to restrict me from the things that I earned as this planet will now be handled as a strict meritocracy until we can get our brains aligned like something other than chimpanzees.
“How DARE he! How dare he take EVERYTHING and distribute it in whatever way he pleases. He hasn’t earned shit in this life. Hasn’t worked one single hard day.”
yep. sure sure. we’ll do it. I’m sure we’ll do it. We can have our “Planet Earth has Talent” and you can have your thousand contestants just like I already said you could, should, or at least that I’d support.
We’ll wire it up live, get a bunch of cameras pointed at everyone and then we’ll have categories. It will be like Miss America and Mr. Olympia at the same time. Everyone will be judged under the exact same parameters as everyone else, and everyone in the world will in some way be granted a true voice.
If you think I haven’t figured out something as simple as that you’ve got some rocks in your head.
***I have figured out how to wire my brain so that it works at the very least tens of thousands of times faster than anyone I’ve come across***
I intellectually ‘wiped the floor’ with Scott in the last couple of scenes here and I actually did it in a fashion that made it possible to
keep him from feeling too bad
Listen to that again, and PAY ATTENTION:
I actually needed to build myself into a better man. I NEEDED TO do that. Did YOU need to do that? Did you need it as badly as I needed it? Is there something wrong with me that I would pursue being a better man?
Have we really gotten to the point where we’ll fault a guy for actually trying to better himself?
“Oh yes, but you can’t openly observe it. That would make people feel bad.”
LOL
Oh yeah, you’re playing by rulebook Brian Kent gives two fat shits whether you want him to play by your rulebook or not and you realize I don’t have even one shit to give you.
I just have a little shit to give you.
And I picked on Scott because Scott has a good sense of humor and won’t get a heart attack if some Carcharodon carcharias jumps out of the water and snatches a “few loose” baby Pagophilus groenlandicus off a ledge while his sightseeing boat floats by.
Here’s what we’re selling today (well, not today, but once we figure out the smartest way to put this into a pill — I’m guessing by June at latest we’ll be wrapping the info system for it [Author’s note: sincere estimate]):
The Enlightenment device. It is a short program, which I estimate will take no longer than eight hours — probably far less than that — and which will render anyone who does it (sort of as Masterclass does its stuff)
- a hundred to a thousand times more adept at using their God-given and evolutionarily-developed brainpower
- freedom from vanity
- significantly bolstered hope, better moods, and
- more freedom from stress — which may be the most significant of the killers of individuals and species.
Only four things until I can figure out how much we can pack into an eight hour period — all of these being ballpark estimates, because the optimization puzzle turns out to be quite solvable, given a few reasonably easy to agree upon parameters.
[Scene II: the knock at the door]
“Ah blast it! Why can’t I have x-ray vision so I can see whether that’s the cops, the FBI, the CIA, some reps from Google or just the guy who has been trying to get me to put solar panels on my house?
My do *I* need to deal with all the stress? I mean all of it?
The reason, of course, was because human beings are extremely good at what I’ll call “m-superposition games.”
And now there are definitely a few people in the audience who are looking at each other and saying,
“wtf is he talking about? Quantum theory? I’ve heard of superposition but…m-superposition…and games?”
So glad someone ****FINALLY**** allowed me to speak for them (i.e., as I believe they would say something.) It is such an utterly high honor to allow someone your voice — like that person is then
Representing you.
That basically means you’ve allowed them to be your representative or liaison with the community. It means you trust them so very much that you are allowing them to speak FOR you.
This isn’t really much different than having them be your lawyer, I think.
[That was for those people who errantly began to believe I thought I was God or something. That I had a “God complex.”
Let’s address that one, shall we? Let’s have ChatGPT4 do its thing:
ChatGPT4:
A “god complex” refers to an individual’s belief or perception that they possess god-like qualities, such as omnipotence, omniscience, or invincibility. It is a term used in psychology to describe a personality trait characterized by an inflated sense of self-importance, superiority, and a belief that one is above the rules or limitations that apply to others.
People with a god complex may exhibit the following characteristics:
- Narcissism: An excessive focus on oneself, often accompanied by a lack of empathy for others.
- Grandiosity: A grandiose sense of one’s own abilities, intelligence, or importance.
- Authoritarianism: A tendency to seek and assert control over others, considering themselves the ultimate authority.
- Lack of Empathy: Difficulty understanding or sharing the feelings of others, as the individual may perceive themselves as more important.
- Need for Admiration: A constant desire for admiration and recognition from others.
It’s important to note that the term “god complex” is informal and not a clinical diagnosis. In psychology, traits associated with a god complex might be observed in certain personality disorders, such as narcissistic personality disorder. However, not everyone who displays traits of a god complex necessarily has a diagnosable mental health condition. The term is often used colloquially to describe extreme arrogance or a superiority complex.
Well, I would argue that the term “Narcissism” may or may not apply to me. Unfortunately, this is the one thing on which your whole theory depends, if you’re a finger pointing member of the “that guy isn’t God club.”
The reason I have an “excessive” focus on myself — if I in fact do have such an excessive focus — is that I know that I can only change myself. I can’t change any of you. I’d drive myself witless before I’d ever get you to the store, Miss Daisy.
Yes so anyway…
The package does include what twentieth-century humans would probably call ‘near godlike’ intelligence. The rest of the easy-to-be-rewired personal qualities I will not dangle in front of you like I’m dangling a computer in front of a crew full of chimpanzees somehow finding themselves on a whaling ship in the middle of the sea and down to their last wailing harpoon.
And if you *really* think I misspelled ‘whaling’ right there I swear, Alice, it will be down in that rabbit hole with you permanently or…
well…
and, since I suppose I’m doing this extended scene in that way, you can sit there from the perspective of the camera that is recording me doing this all, LIVE without the benefit of a hundred grips, best boys and best girls.
I’ve had to get a grip, but it was a in-one-hundred-ways-ratchet-strapped-down grip on my soul to ram my brain through the channel I needed to swim through to effectively figure out a way of “canceling out global stupidity.”
You don’t have the language for this yet, but you *do* have YouTube so you can watch the rest of this act unfold in front of you through what amounts to a shoulder camera I have. Me. Just typing away.
To eight billion drones on autopilot via the channel of Twitter even though I am more or less “well aware” that not a single one of you is currently capable of ‘getting this’
on the first pass.
You cannot do it.
You ARE NOT Jada Pinkett-Smith and you don’t have anyone manning guns or secondary controllers. You need to sit your ass down for a moment and realize you’re on a speck of dust flying through a pretty typical galaxy.
You’re special? Oh yeah? Enter the contest then. See if I care. You’re special based on what talents you have and how well you use them to benefit the world and the people around you.
You don’t make a significant mark on the world by a cretinous troglodyte like the cops in the basement of the “Gateway to Holidayland.”
You’re going to try to police the hopes of a guy like me? You’re going to police a guy who attempted to brush a cloud of mosquitos off the nose of a thirty plus pound Chelydra serpentina?
No not with a broom (i.e., from six feet away) but with your iPhone in your bare hand?
You’d try to police a guy like that? I mean, let’s pass some psychiatrists around, guys. Let’s take a dozen of them and get them in the room with me and you and the rest of you terribly smart people from the lost land of “these people are hopeless.”
You’re not hopeless anymore. Nope. No siree. Why?
Well, because you finally found yourself a guy who was listened to his heart enough to hear it saying,
“Why shoot for Gandhi’s shoes? Why would you shoot at a man’s shoes? To get him to start hopping? Because you wanted to scare him?
Why not just get over with if you were going to shoot him? I mean, you’re point blank range, a few quick pops…really…”
No, dummy. You’d shoot over his head — and you would only do that because you wanted to do far better on the morality test of civilization than a guy who was born in 1869!
Eventually a light will come on. I know it will. I trust my fellow overly-watery stardust packets riding along on this Pequod II.
It really only took looking where we were going.
