Moon colonies or not, when the calendar hanging on your kitchen’s wall surpasses Blade Runner, you’re officially living in the future.
It’s very difficult for me assess these past ten years. On the one hand this was the worst decade of my life: By 2010, despite the fact we were going through rough times due to the global economic crisis, I still had full-time job working as a designer for a small architect firm in which I went through many lows and highs, until I was finally asked to leave five years later; in retrospect I should have left much sooner but I had become too accustomed to my employer’s childish tantrums and his pettiness, the same way you grow used to a tight shoe or an uncomfortable chair.
Back in 2015 I thought that with my long experience and talent, finding a new job in what I’d been doing for the previous fifteen years –furniture and interior design, drafting and architectural renderings– would be relatively easy, and I was in no rush to get back into the workforce since my settlement had earned me a bit of money. Little did I know that by then I would start a tiresome litany of sending out resumes with almost never getting any response back. The few times I managed to land a job similar to the one I had before, the conditions were even worse in many respects –the commutes were longer, just like the hours; the levels of stress were worse; my new employers were even more arrogant and irascible than my last one; the working conditions were sometimes appalling –in one of these ‘offices’ (which was barely a barrack next to a factory) I used to get all my papers wet whenever it rained!
By now, I’m still sending out resumes via email and looking for jobs online, but at 46 years-old I have ZERO hopes of finding anything, because nowadays companies are only seeking young inexperienced kids fresh out of college, willing to slave themselves for peanuts. I admit this angers and bitters me, because I feel I could have still accomplished so much more! I was really, REALLY good at what I did, you know –but don’t take my word for it; here are some examples of the projects I participated in –from concept to execution– in the past:
Not too bad, eh? And there’s plenty more where that came from!
So that’s one of the things the last decade brought me: The abrupt and unceremonious end of my career as a professional designer… and the terrible fear of ending my days in abject poverty.
But… on the other hand, between 2010-2020 something completely unexpected happened to me. I’ve became “the Red Pill Junkie.” What started out as a silly nickname I coined around the mid 2000’s that I used to leave comments on the Internet –which I then continued using, when I became a news administrator for The Daily Grail in April of 2007– has turned into my nom de plume and my digital persona. I don’t remember when I wrote my first blogpost at The Grail –I’m not even sure it’s still there, after Greg Taylor made so many changes to the webpage– but I do remember how hard it was to write it and how long it took me until I was fully satisfied with it. If someone had told me in 2010 I was going to become a professional blogger ten years later, that my nickname would appear on the cover of a book, and that I would end up being the guest on the same podcasts I used to listen to, back in those long nights when I stayed up all alone to finish a rendering, I would have laughed out loud in disbelief.
Blessings in disguise? Mmmmmmaybe…? Just don’t bring it up when my phone bill arrives, mkay?
Yes, I’ve become something of a minor paranormal quasi-personality during the last ten years. But as I told Erica Lukes on one of my last interviews, that and five bucks will get you a cup of coffee –Protip to anyone thinking people enter this field in order to make easy money: they don’t.
Don’t get me wrong: I *am* grateful for the true opportunities this ‘popularity’ has given me; like the chance to reach out to personalities I’d admired for years, and sometimes even meet them IRL –like Vallee in 2016(!). I just wish the price I had to pay for this semi-professional hobby hadn’t been that high…
People often ask me: “so when are YOU gonna write a book?” I often reply to them what I read or heard some time ago: that someone should only write a book when they want to read something, and they are unable to find it elsewhere. I myself am still finding all sorts of great books which were sometimes published several decades ago; obscure books with a lot of great ideas which leave me to the conclusion I don’t have really anything original to add to the discussion.
If anything, I would be interested to try the route of creating a graphic novel, which would be a nice way of adding originality to the UFO topic. Unfortunately that would imply a lot of hard work and learning more about the creation of comic books; maybe I could collaborate with someone more experienced in these matters, but I would at least like to have some assurance the project could have a chance of being profitable –unlike those damn t-shirts…
Speaking of unlikely profitable projects, one thing I have been working on for the last few months is something a few friends of mine and I are interested in launching next year. I won’t discuss it any further for the time being ,because there’s still many things to be completed and figured out until we officially launch it, but I can reveal two things: It will be about UFOs and it will be crowd-sourced. Once we make the announcement I hope we manage to gather enough public interest to make it viable, so stay tuned.
Other than that, I don’t know what else to add aside from wishing everyone a happy new year, despite how effing cliched it sounds and how improbable it looks at this point. I will not hide the fact that my prospects for the future are very bleak, and not just at a personal level: our house is in flames, folks, and we’re letting egomaniacal lunatics with a death wish running it into the ground.
If you’re still secretly hoping for Jesus or Maitreya or the Pleiadians to arrive at the very last minute to save us from Thanos, I’m sorry to break your little bubble of delusion: NO ONE IS COMING TO SAVE US. We will have no choice but to do it ourselves; it may not be too late, but by now we will not be able to skip a lot of hardship and pain coming our way, faster than we care to admit.
The last decade saw the fruition of a truly connected world, something which was a pie-in-the-sky dream for countless previous generations. This connectedness hasn’t turned into the idyllic utopia the hippies from the 60’s expected, and in many ways it is helping to resurrect the nasty ghosts of prejudice and fascism our forefathers thought they had defeated. We are like monkeys burning our fingers with the fire we’ve just invented how to make –here’s hoping we will eventually get the hang of it.
Use that gift to exchange wisdom and beauty–instead of hate and snark– with people you may never be able to meet in person. Try to be part of the solution and not part of the problem. To paraphrase Joseph Campbell, let us keep on joyously participating in the many sorrows of the world as best we can.
Feliz Año Nuevo.
Absurd by Design 