Cakes came with quite the past, but surprisingly little baggage. We met on the AT and ended up dating for a bit off trail, but it was he who called it when the absent arms of his abandoned mistress beckoned him. You got a great life, not trying to drag you down. You’re too good for this. Never met a more honorable addict. I gave him a credit card in his name, because holy shit, do you know how hard it is to dig yourself out of being blacklisted in America? He never used it. Cakes hustled for his habit, took pride in never stealing or relying on anyone else. Years later as part of rehab he texted with an apology that didn’t feel necessary. I never got back to him. One of those I meant to’s that becomes a wisp that becomes 1111 days. 

But I learned a lot about the world’s underbelly hanging out with Cakes. About how we treat the lower rungs of society. How claims of help intentionally set you up for failure, the judgement and assumptions made; how capitalism requires human step-stools and sacrifices. My family saw him as an addict, my friends saw him as a phase. I saw him as a creative soul caught up in a series of misfortunes that come with the territory, could have easily been me. The only difference between me and you is Gerard _{^{(my dad)}}, I once told him.

At 19 he was in a serious car accident that left him addicted to opioids, the Sackler family’s dream come true $cha-ching$! And to get you off of opioids, they send you to a methadone clinic. So yeah, he spent his twenties addicted to heroin for four years + meth for six. As a kid his dad used to take him on road trips to cheat on his mom, make him sit in the living room, watch a movie or something. I’ve met his mom. She’s incredible. So I don’t know, maybe it’s not the absence of fathers in households that’s a problem. It’s the quality of men.

Anyway. All that to say, Cakes never cared much for books or movies or podcasts, or consuming any news at all from the living world. He had little interest in watching anything on TV, except for a few animated shows, which made me feel a certain way. Okay but…cartoons? I questioned his detachment in relating to the human experience. How can you have empathy if you don’t know what’s going on?

Man, I don’t need to be reminded how fucked up and dark the world is. I’ve seen it up close. They make movies about my life. The animated shit? Feels less real. Even if it’s about real shit. 

Everyday life in America had shown him enough garbage. Which is how I discovered Bob’s Burgers is the best TV ever made. 

Seeing a version of a movie that’s since been completely scrubbed from existence except from the memories of a dozen people around the world launched me straight into the blow up yer TV part of Prine’s Spanish Pipedream. I quit consulting the ole’ boob tube all together after hearing myself repeatedly saying “Have you seen [insert show here]” in relating to real world events. I have a brain with the default setting of running connections in the background. Photographic memory + categorized experiences + solving puzzles in my sleep + taking leaps = blanks to fill. Everything I had recently seen felt like some kind of message. Because it all felt eerily familiar. OMG it’s like that Morning Show episode when AI uses Alex’s likeness to create a video of her doing something she didn’t do… I mean, they straight up admitted how the news is controlled in Succession. Not ready to go down the Severance road full of danger caution warnings.

It all feels plausible, it all feels possible.

The president’s henchmen murdered two more people just this past week. A father in Texas, and a father in Maine, both just going to work. Both were here legally, neither were the actual “target” and now they are dead and not a single soul is being held accountable. Worse, some folks still actively support this shit. The concentration camps, the violently aggressive ethnic cleansing, the blatant dismantling of United States Constitution. They’re cool with senseless murder. Trump was just forced to pay E. Jean Carroll $5.6 million. Because he raped her. So the sitting president of the “free” world is a known rapist and sexual predator and people are still proudly walking around in those red hats claiming they’re making America great again. We live in some fucked up times folks.

Unless…What if Earth is just a train stop like in season one of Westworld, but for the rest of the Universe? And the show is more of a mirror to our own existence and less a fictional world where men go to cosplay their fucked up fantasies and be basic bullies not one respectable woman today could tolerate.

Remember when Lorena Bobbit severed her husband’s penis with a kitchen knife while he was asleep in bed after enduring years of rape and abuse? John went on to make some porn, spend not nearly enough jail time for battering two more women, and WWF thought yeah, he’s our guy for this episode. Meanwhile Lorena kept a low profile and started a foundation for domestic abuse victims and their children.

How different life would be under a matriarchy. Ooo what if the theme of this world is The One In Which We Do It?? But which characters are real? Which ones are the hosts? And how can you be so sure? I mean they’re gunning down people in the streets just because they can, and not nearly enough people are having the human reaction collectively necessary to MAKE IT STOP, to the point I’m convinced Earth is mostly made up of hosts. Robots. The human experience is lonely like that.

Or maybe we’re seeing the destruction of multiple dimensions clashing before our eyes, like in Dark Matter, where there are infinite realities in which a person lives out every single nuance of possibility available in some parallel universe, like a version of you splits off and lives out each and every choice, tendrils on an octopus times infinity. The series follows a physicist who is ultimately abducted by himself after another version of him creates a multi-verse machine and figures out how to bounce between them and decides this is the best version of his life. But turns out, he’s not the only version of himself who invented the multi-verse machine who also ultimately decides they chose the wrong adventure and want this one. My brain explodes if I think about it too deeply.

But I might have to plug the propaganda machine back in for the next season of Silo. I accidentally watched a trailer recap.

We do not know how long we’ve been underground, or who built the silo, or why there is no life outside the silo.

No one really knows why they live in these concrete underground tubes, only that they do. Because it’s not safe outside. They call things from the before times relics, things like photo albums and watches, clocks. TIME. It’s considered a crime to own an unapproved relic. All relics must be registered and approved. The knowledge people are allowed to obtain is only from approved books. It’s all written down in the Pact. And for the safety of the community, of course. They live on top of each other, floor after 144 floors with a winding staircase down the middle and yes, the levels carry meaning. Mayor’s office and IT on the top floors, education + admin + community spaces, most living quarters, basic society functions in the mid-levels. Mechanical and Industry at the very bottom, in the down deep. Elevators are forbidden. People just exist this shitty little existence without plants and sunlight, no fresh air, some better off than others, and very few question any of it.

We do not know why we are here.
We only know the world outside our sanctuary
is death.

But if you have a problem with it or challenge authority aloud, you reserve the right to ask to go out to clean, so in theory the whole Silo can watch you die. If you don’t believe the air is poison, by all means, go clean the camera lens strategically placed to show the people the conditions out there, so we can see the wasteland even better. This plays out a few times. Quite the spectacle. But the main character is dope as fuck and with the help from a badass lady with lots of unapproved relics from the Before Times, fashions a suit to survive the expected elements long enough to discover there ARE MORE SILOS ALL AROUND THEM.

What if everything you knew to be true…
was just one big lie?

My favorite part is Freedom Day. The whole Silo gets together to celebrate their “freedom” without knowing anything about their actual history or what freedom even is, not unlike the 4th of July in the United States of America. There’s a silo-wide party, you get some time off work so no one really questions why, because it’s different from the rest of the days, free cake! live music in the stairwell! what a treat, a welcomed change to the toil of being a cog in a wheel.

Before we can know why we are here
Before we can know why everything is as it is
Before we can know how it all will end
We need to understand how it all began.

They say some mysteries are best left unsolved but I call bullshit. Maybe Unsolved Mysteries was pumped into our veins in the 90s to make us think we needed protection from the boogieman, who turned out to be an elite group of perverts in high places covering up pedophilia, sex-trafficking and some satanic cult worship with heavy ties to governments all over the world. 

I mean, that episode in Black Mirror tried to tell us. In fact, all the episodes in Black Mirror tried to tell us. About social media, about the bees, about surveillance, about AI, about humanity, about our fall, about it all. And here we sit, watching as they destroy us from behind a screen like it’s some kind of movie we’re not starring in. I don’t know. Maybe the first indicator screens would screw us all was that flashing fuzzy TV in the middle-of-the-night scene in Poltergeist, beckoning the little girl to come closer. They’re heeeeeeere.

Wake up.