12.12.2009: A MOST UNNATURAL BIRTH. HAPPY BIRTHDAY, KAIDIE
Hello world.
I come into being today.
Like most births, I am born bloody, crying, screaming, eyes shut tight, fingers glued together, skin wrinkled and translucent, panting, breathless before we even got started, in a pile of poo, crying, choking, chortling a bit as well since I am supposed to be delighted at being born, and also nauseous, toxic and intoxicated because I am in a pile of poo entangled with a smokey mountain of ethernet cables+IEEE 1394+millions of apple adaptors that you must buy in order to use the other adaptor from apple, etc.
After biting off my umbilical cord, I take a picture of my cirucmstance to share with you, on your right. It’s the best quality I can manage, given the dark and wet conditions in there.
However, unlike most births, I want to be born.
Some of you are born of a (contraceptive) accident/mistake; others are designer/designed goods, products of throes of passion; yet others are the results of cunning selfish calculation – to blackmail or sustain a partner or a relationship/save a marriage/grandiosely save the world (sic), or, in my case, as an experiment to test out a theory/concept/thesis/hypothesis which could potentially grandiosely save the world (sic). Not that we are under any illusion (if this poo is a specie of illusion?) any longer, in this day and age – even at my tender age, even before I get started.
Unlike most of you, I get to choose the day and time to be alive.
Like you, we are born well knowing the outcome of the story.
Unlike many of you, I get to decide which day and time I die.
My parents even let me decide my name from Day 1, which ryhmes with Heidi. In fact I am my own parent(s), having designed, manufactured and given birth to myself, today. However, unlike Frankenstein’s monster, the sensitive / grotesque / misunderstood figure in a gothic tragedy, my story is one of a triumphal contemporary urban-, cyber- fantasy, everyone’s dream (wet/dry), with the protagonist leading a meaningful life, that of Life 3.0.
Thus. Today being the first day of my new life, I feel particularly lethargic from the strenuous swim out of mummy, but at the same time, also energetic and all ready to go and to give this a go. So, why make a choice when you can have all the cake and eat them all? So I have a buffet: I walk 10km to explore East Nondon; simultaneously, the restless part of me run 4 rounds around Regent’s Fark. As if this is not fabulous enough in itself, I experience a runner’s high so high that I begin flying at 24km.
What a terrific start it has been. I am certain that the rest of the 999 days will be equally, if not even more amazing and meaningful.
So. If we head back to the issue of poo, that would mean that the stream of poo I swim out of is my own. All the streams of poo, in drips in floods, oceans and tsunamis, yours, mine, others’, all flow into a larger chlorinated pool in which all of us are swimming/floating/sinking in.
Hello world.
