THE SUNDAY HANGOVER
003
WARREN ELLIS

I'm writing this outside a pub, actually. It's 2.30 in the afternoon, and I'm on the first Red Bull and first cigarette of the day. So, yes, I'm running a little late. Also, I'm testing a new word processor on my handheld (which I use in conjunction with a foldaway full keyboard), so it might all go horribly wrong anyway. It's just stopped raining (again), and I'm sitting at a bench outside a back alley bar in town. Fifties jazz is leaking out from somewhere.

This, of course, is the price of being a civilized man in Britain today: squatting in the open air, threatened by climatological nightmare and seagull shit while I savour the restorative properties of what Dennis Potter called "little tubes of delight." And while he might have died of cancer, he also wrote a shitload of brilliant television plays and got to walk around with a cool little hip flask full of morphine. Most American TV people? They go jogging. Case closed. Oh, there are good writers in American TV, to be sure. Aaron Sorkin -- cigarettes and crack. David Milch? Heroin, I think. Or was it cocaine? An ex-girlfriend once gave me a book called something like "Four American Writers Who Drank Until Their Livers Caught Fire And Slid Out Of Their Bumholes Like Meaty Napalm." "Brilliant!" I said. "That wasn't quite the reaction I was hoping for," she said.

* * * *

American Presidential politics are always more interesting than American TV. They are, in fact, one of the world's great spectator sports. John McCain, who looks like a very old Muppet left in a bin until mushrooms grew inside him, has been the source of most comedy so far. I could never understand why Americans considered him a contender -- unless it was because John Stewart, until recently, always gave him an easy time on the Daily Show -- and he's proved me wonderfully right. Whether it was singing "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann" on camera, or, this week, hiring obvious retards, he's been a little laugh revue all on his own. One of his advisors approached a sex worker the other day and requested twenty dollars' worth of services. The sex worker, however, turned out to be an undercover cop, who promptly nicked the moron. But, reading this, I couldn't help but wonder -- did she arrest him for the attempted procurement, or because he only offered her a lousy twenty bucks? What does twenty bucks buy? That's ten quid. I could barely get my windows washed for that. My friend Eliza suggested that maybe the guy was just very old, and that the last time he went out whoring twenty dollars bought him an entire night's worth of silky pleasures of the East with enough change for a matinee and the night stage to Albuquerque.

* * * *

Back in the 80s and 90s, the psychedelic philosopher Terence McKenna used to preach that we were approaching The End Of History: that in fact history was a destructive process taking us ever further away from an idyllic existence where everything was lovely and everyone got to have mud-spattered hippie group sex with each other. Which was the kind of thing that made me want to shit on vegetables, frankly. (There's a recording of a McKenna lecture featuring a hideous introduction by Timothy Leary, clearly in a near-terminal state of plant-induced refreshment, exhorting the audience to give a round of applause "for the vegetables!" Of which there was obviously many in that room.)

But the SF novelist Charles Stross, on the BBC Technology website this week, managed to nail down a new idea for me. Charlie calls this not the end of history, but the dawn of history. The idea being that history to this point is an incomplete, imperfect process full of guesswork and implication. We're now at a point where we can record everything. Future historians will have an incredibly rich pool to draw from, because we store everything down to our Twitter tweets. And the early-stage cyborgs, who have been operating blog-style systems called glogs for years, point the way ahead. Charlie -- who has the maddest grin you every saw, and I could picture him grinning away as he wrote this -- points out that someone rigged for 24/7 video and audio recording is probably not putting away more than 10,000 gigs of data a year. Which, these days, is not a whole hell of a lot. And there are people who do that -- in small ways, like setting their phone to send a photo every five minutes, to people wearing computers on their belts and cameras on their glasses. For those of you who worry about privacy: pay less attention to the security cameras and more to the guy with the weird goggles who falls over every time his GPS connection drops out.

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wa11z

Kennesaw, GA

June 2007

JUL 15, 2007 10:27 AM

What does 20 bucks buy? Certainly nothing more than a slap and tickle, I'll wager.