I’m sitting at the counter of a diner called Little Purity and I don’t know why. Coffee is resting here before me, but I can’t remember ordering coffee. And when the coffee is gone, I don’t remember drinking it.
A jump later and I’m walking through Prospect Park. There’s a dog at the end of this vein-like leash I’m holding. My dog? When did I get a dog?
A week, and then a month of this. I’m at places, at birthdays and tiki bars drinking drinks with little umbrellas sticking out—or standing in my boxers on the docks of Pier 25 looking over the Hudson. What’s happening? Has it, my body, finally got fed up and taken over?
Today, when my computer finds itself in my lap, my hand reaches out and clicks. I’m at a site. A news site. The article glowing on my screen states free will has been killed, or at least mangled.
Apparently, some scientists over in Germany somewhere had claimed they’d debunked the idea that we’re the ones deciding whether or not to install nipple rings or put down the eleventh beer. Nope, they said. We’re being, and have been, corralled from the start.
These scientists at the University of Freiburg had had volunteers come in to get rigged up with wires on their scalps, to get monitored. In a metal box like the ones escape artists fill with water and sometimes die in, the participants sat in a chair, and were asked to tap their finger. They got to choose the rhythm and amount of times. Some matched the beat of their own pulse. Others went at random. One man was taken away with a black bag over his head, after deep cuts of Toni Basil were detected in his sequence. They did whatever they desired. The point was, choose.
The researchers found that milliseconds before the finger taps, their machines recorded a faint uptick. Just before the tap. This neuronal activity was stamped the Bereitschaftspotential, or readiness potential. Some who look at upticks on their bleach-white cords of printouts have related reading them to infinitesimal time travel. If you know how to read it, they say, you can predict what someone will do before they do it. That was when our idea of free will began to die.
But now there is a new theory debunking the debunk.
In 2010, a man named Aaron Schurger had an epiphany. Maybe DMT-induced, we can’t be sure. But he believed the findings had been interpreted wrong.
Schurger said our brains hadn’t made up their minds before the fact. No. Our neurons were simply taking in the data and gathering evidence for each possible option. For every possible outcome. When our neurons accumulated evidence past a certain threshold, we, either pulled the trigger and blew the pesky fuckers away, or didn’t.
I turn my computer off. It’s quiet now.
What I think all this points to is some sort of determinism fused with the guiding hands of Virgil-esque high rollers suffering from venereal disease. They want to perma-fuck and they’re not giving that up. They don’t have time to find cures and potions to combat their pustules and enflamed glands. So, they get us to do the work for them. Since they know that one event previous to current determines this set of stimuli our neurons build “evidence” from, we are placed in tunnels of design. Like dominoes we fall towards a big ka-boom. Towards inventing a bone-white pill they can munch. Free will is not dead. Hairy-knuckled deviants with the true information on Bereitschaftspotential are just nudging us where they need us. Making sure we take the correct actions to keep the lights on. Lights above plexiglass peep shows. Above ritual mansion ball rooms.
Resting in my hand is a vile of coke. It’s gone. I can certainly feel that it’s gone and in me, but I know I deleted my dealer’s number over a week ago. What day is it again? My apartment is filled with non-Euclidean piles of magazines and Seagram’s bottles and dirty socks. A pyre of used up New Balances looms in the corner like a monster made of floppy tongues. It smells sweet. A mixture of sewage and cheese and dollar-store spray. Whoever controls my will, my tunnel, they clearly want me to devolve into some sort of animal. Or a gelatin.
I get up. My body forces me outside. On my way to the bar, I see a group of tall men. From my addled perspective here, Dutch-angled men looking down at a glossy BMW. Fawning. They are all aroused. I can see them sweating over cup holders and performance sunglasses and carbon fiber pens. Crisp button-down shirts with the sleeves rolled up. Marketing. Dreams of dreams of marketing success.
At the bar, the bartender is pumping some nutjob full of Haloperidol. He slaps the guy on the back and laughs. Tells him to expect the shivers, but that they will help in cutting weight. Looking trim already, he says. Looking good for the big date buddy. Maybe a bit more drugs for ya, just to be safe. Drop those pants. We’re going in the back door this time. Mainlines are all crusted up.
The song Emerge by Fischerspooner drones through space. I see the world. The world, a mind. Its faint upticks are longer and louder in comparison to what the old boys back in the German lab got. Boom. Boom-boom. It’s spiking the machine monitors in my guts, telling me something big is about to happen.
Time jumps faster and faster. New things emerge from the blank-black peripheral. Machines that bend. Simulacra and Simulation. There’s a homeless man taking a shit in the pile of garbage out front of Key Foods. There’s people eating kid’s cereal out of a sucking chest wound. I’m watching the news and it’s just reported the US Navy has confirmed the UFO footage people are passing around should not have been leaked. That it is all real. Signs are everywhere causing my body to turn left or right, corralling me in the faint uptick moments. There’s some major goal we’re all supposed to agree on. Everyone aspires to be a vice president. Everyone wants to live in a van. The furniture is multi-purpose. The once adhered-to roles dissolve. Like butter. Like flesh in acid.
I look out my window and all the tree’s leaves are blue. Bark is plaid now. There’s people in a line that seems to stretch to infinity. And when I’m all the sudden outside, I’m standing somewhere near the back. Can’t say I hate it. When you have a good liquor and other things waiting, it’s nice when someone offers to drive. So you can live comfortable in hyper-mediocrity.
