Community season 7

My pitch:

Frankie is challenged to unravel, Abed is forced into empathy, Annie gets chaotic, Jeff loses his charms and wit powers, Britta becomes wise, Hickey dies, Elroy hates computers, Dean lets go of fetishes and cross dressing and gets into ax throwing and lumber sports.

And these things all come out through the stress of remodeling and squeezing into a small room. Troy gets back from sailing around the world, and goes off again just passing through. Pierce and Shirley are in the background but they seem to have found other groups.

Deep Space 10

Chapter 1

Yea, we're not as famous as that other one off Bajor, and the worm hole. Ours is only one that studies the biology of the various goldilocks planet in this remote part of the universe. You thought the delta quadrant was in the boondocks? The beta quadrant may be after alpha, but there's not a lot going on. But the planets have interesting plants. And now that nobody eats meat in the Federation, plant based food is really popular. People go nuts for the goldie lox fake salmon. Turns out obscure planets are popular for new versions of plants with various taste profiles not found in the usual beans and greens meals. 

So we're on a new planet collecting samples. We cook them up because of the oxalates, that remove the problem of the nutrient stealing aspect to raw plants. Of course various amounts of raw plans are OK, that's not a reason to not eat raw plants. Everything in proportion. Can you imagine they actually thought oxalates was a reason not to eat raw plants in the 21st century? Ignorance. 

Then something bit me, and everything went vivid. They know about insects that inject hallucinogens into mammals in the universe, but when you're not expecting it, it makes things fun for no reason for a little while. And I said down in the grass, and let the bugs bite me more, and then you're too high and wow, it doesn't wear off quickly. 

I beamed back up to the ship and watched The Secret of Kells, my favorite hallucination movie. It's an ancient kids movie about the Book of Kells. They think The Book of Kells might have had a few hallucinating monks working on it. 

After I slept it off, I was back into rotation on the ground, collecting samples, looking for something interesting for the scientist, and for the food scientists. There were medical applications too, like in the ancient Amazonian rainforest. It's a shame that was lost by over population. Now earth has a tidy billion population. People have to be incentivized to reproduce now that contraception is so easy and available. Not so many accidents and impulsivity. A billion is around the sweet spot for earth, but the applications to emigrate from other planets who are new to space travel also supplements the population. Earth isn't so human any more, there are quite a few other species who didn't mellow out, like A Mote In God's Eye. There are species that will literally die if they don't reproduce, and so their population explodes and collapses, and the cycles of that are quite horrible and violent. We don't allow any Motey species to emigrate, but they can visit on temporary visas for cultural exchange. 

Back down on the planet I found a bee like species that had a honey that tastes like pineapples and carrots. I got lost in a large plant that was a maze. 

They weren't impressed back on the ship. The spice explorers didn't find spice and they were leaving and there was a big party where the spice was flowing. I hooked up with a Bolian, I've got a weakness for blue women with ridges down the middle of their skulls that go all the way down. I was pretty exhausted and slightly sick from both the drugs and woman. I took a day off to recover. My boss looked at me askance. But I had a hallucination experience to process and I wondered whether I wanted to continue with the Bolian after how I felt after our fun. She was certainly a spirited lover, but I wondered if what they said was true about feeling sick afterwards. It also could have been the spice.

I was bailed out as the Bolian found another Bolian who joined the search teams, and politely broke up with me. I pretended to be heartbroken at the bar afterwards, hoping someone would try to cheer me up, but that never works. Except this one time. A Vulcan sat down next to me, and proceeded to march me through some logical arguments about some of the commander's decisions, trying to make me understand her perspective about some scientific matters, she was a geologist who was overseeing some of the mining projects on the planet. Sounded like the commander would sometimes not prioritize mining over other projects at time, and seemed to be trying to be fair and just not always give her what she wanted. I adore women who think they're always right and are logical, and was completely bewitched by her. She didn't even really think my devotion was of note, but she wanted to meet again, it seems she had a fair amount of grievances to download, and my non-judgemental attitude and my joining her made her want to confide in me, and we spent a few evenings together. Over the next month and years she seemed to really appreciate my listening and attention and while I wasn't a yes man, I was not confrontational when I could see she was just a bit oblivious, following her reasons of course, but there were obviously larger pictures that the commander was responsible to. Mining was something that was important and she was clearly used to getting her way often, but occasionally he would block her when a biologist would point out ecological dangers and wouldn't always give her all the resources because they had to be shared. I didn't feel like I had to enlighten her to the larger perspective, and sometimes I would give her gentle nudges, or articulate the commander's possible line of thinking, which she didn't get defensive about. 

When she was called to another planet system, and left DS 10, she kept calling me, and we had a video relationships for years and years. She eventually asked me to marry her and wanted a human wedding, not a Vulcan one. Whether she was hedging her bets, and leaving open a later Vulcan marriage, or maybe she thought she was being really generous to me, I couldn't figure out. When the marriage ended a few years later, I didn't know what happened and I lost track of her. 

Chapter 2

Devil's Lake Monastery

"You are a true immortal. You stay sane by hanging out with the descendants of friends that are long dead. Today, one said a very familiar phrase you haven't heard in a long time."

I am a true immortal. I stay sane by hanging out with the descendants of friends that are long dead. Today, one said a very familiar phrase you haven't heard in a long time, “Sumus quid sumus.” We are what we are. That’s what my old friend John used to say. John was very successful and worked very hard to accumulate money. He found love and success, founded a huge family and created institutions that live on today. I founded nothing, and have no family. They call me the great malingerer. Or lazy. I never really saw the point in doing something because I had forever to learn or earn or build or do. I found it enough to just be. But being becomes old, but I got into a habit of not doing things. 

Then John the twentieth or something like that said, “we are what we are.” And I decided to activate. I was going to earn, then learn, then build. I looked out at the business world and saw that more than our needs were being met. So I got into luxury items. That’s not an easy game to get into. First I got into diamonds. Turns out they’re pretty common but controlling how many are available inflated the price. So to raise the price, I bought out a bunch of businesses and dissolves them. As my trove of diamonds rose in value, I sold high and collected a sum that could sustain me and grow in perpetuity. I would now turn to study.
I followed my interests in a zig zag fashion. I read Shakespeare and Darwin. I read the Greeks, and literature that just came out. I studied the various sciences, social sciences, math. I went to England and studied maths and saw some Shakespeare. I studied economics and reinvested my money. I read poetry for a year and wrote a few books myself, of poems and on Mary Oliver, Allen Ginsberg and the early American Buddhists of poetry.

I spent a year on butterflies, a year on tulips in the Netherlands, and a year excavating archaeology sites in India. I spent a year in a monastery meditating. I say “a year” but sometimes it was 8 months and sometimes it was 15 months. Rounding onto my second year of meditation I realized I wanted to build a monastery in my hometown of Madison Wisconsin. 
I went back there. When I was growing up the city was only 100,000 people. Now it was a sprawling metropolis that almost extended to Milwaukee in the east, La Crosse in the west, Janesville in the South and Dells in the north. It was a sprawling metropolis with bike lanes and green spaces. The university and the state capital were at the heart of it, on the isthmus between the two lakes.

I decided to build the monastery on the west bluff of Devil’s Lake. It took me years and years of political corruption to acquire the land since it was a state park. No worries, I had time. Meanwhile I searched the earth for the greatest architects. I decided to go with someone who wanted to build a monastery based on Frank Lloyd Wright because he was from Wisconsin. It seemed like a cliche, but when I saw the drawings I knew it had the winning design. 


The building would have a minimalist presence on the western bluff and I took ads out in all the newspapers in Wisconsin to tell the people of my plans and to hold a town hall meeting. Many people were upset, and expressed their feelings. Some people liked it. Some were upset it wasn’t a Christian monastery. I decided to include a non-denominational guest house for visitors of all faiths. I found that to be a great improvement. The more and more I read spiritual writing the more and more I saw how they all converged because that is what I wanted to see. 

Fudgies

Writing prompt: It's 2031, unhealthy food has been outlawed and you run a clandestine underground diner.

It's 2031, unhealthy food has been outlawed and I run a clandestine underground diner called Fudgies. Sugar was the biggest sin, but there were also people devoted to meats. Normally you saw people looking perfectly healthy, not overweight, no teeth missing. Inside my diner, all the people were not perfect, there were flaws. They were almost a badge of courage. Toothless husseys hooked up with fatsos. Meat loving animals hooked up with like. I expanded into the next building and made a disco for people to dance and copulate. Things got pretty viviparous so I opened up a hotel above the disco. The hotel attracted more oddballs and it became a kind of hookup hotel for the strange. I added a bar, for people who were unusual but not into unusual food. They were unusual in other ways. Then people complained that they didn’t want to drink but still meet up so I created a cafe for the strange. The Cafe for the Strange was a hit, and I had to expand and create a restaurant. The restaurant had conventional food. From one end of the block you got the ordinary food, but strange people, and then at the end of the block was strange food. It became a block that attracted people and soon like business grew up on the other side of the street and down the block. Pretty soon I was the king of StrangeTown, and the cops started raiding my diner, trying to put it out of business. There were a lot of cops eating there when they raided it, and they let them all go, and the cops went back to the precinct and talked to the whole group about letting it remain open. Kind of like Paddy’s the bar that stayed open throughout prohibition. I had to make it a bit of a speakeasy, without glass windows. But aside from hiding it from plain sight, I kept getting and making all the banned unhealthy foods. A vegan version opened up across the street. They focused more on sugar. With that business being drained off I had to focus more on meat. It was pretty gruesome in the back, chopping up all that flesh, grinding up the meat for hamburgers. Pork chops and hotdogs. You could get all the banned foods.
Marijuana had been legalized 22 years ago, and people would get very high and then go out to eat. They were more impulsive, and I opened up a donut shop, the perfect high food. The block was booming. The cops allowed the illegal stuff if it wasn’t flaunted. The neighborhood grew and grew and grew. The size became a problem. When it was small, you could ignore it, but when it got bigger, the politicians began to want their cut, and when we resisted the shake down, they started writing vindictive legislation to force the cops to break it up. It was during the riots of 2045 that my daughter was born. My wife was vegan, like almost everyone now, and wanted me to close Fudgies, but was a regular at the bakery, gobbling down the sugary treats. We used only ethical sugar that didn’t use animal parts to process it. We only used ethical dyes, no crushed red bugs.
My business partners wanted to open a gambling parlor. I drew the line there, and they opened one anyway. Pretty soon gangsters began to lurk around the neighborhood, lending money and shaking people down to get money back. That drew more law enforcement and legislators who wanted to only win. The bullets flying made me move out of the hotel and into the suburbs, driving in daily to review yesterday’s take, and make sure everything was running well. The business ran itself and I began to take more days off to spend with my daughter. I knew there was some skimming by some managers, but they kept it reasonable so that I didn’t have to intervene because it was so obvious. In the end I sold out everything and just retired. I put my money into a portfolio and bewitched by a new business, I went into the money markets. I hired hordes of math students just out of college, and listened to them. Soon they were spinning off business of their own and the whole ecology of money market was altered by my involvement in it. That is when my story begins. My daughter just graduated from college with a math degree, and I was going to get her into the family business. But she wasn’t into it. I should have listened to her.

The Viewers

Narrative junkies. The accumulated history of the world had produce virtually unlimited things to watch. Throughout time, the narrative has not changed--cliff hangers--what will happen? The urge to see how things unfold. It takes many years until you begin to see the flaws in the narrative, that it is not real. It's not like a methadone program, it's not like the Matrix where bodies provide energy, it's maybe a third option. People are allocated small rooms with a cheap but functional screen with unlimited streaming of shows. They will quite happily it there all day. You can store thousand and thousands of them in their blocks.

The program started not because of the viewers--people who have renounced life to view life. It was started because of their parents. Like the family gets tired of the elderly and puts them in a home, there were programs like Willowbrook to warehouse the problematic.

Many people were against the program. They felt that work was inherently good, to be a viewer was to be discouraged. But the workers who didn't want viewers in their houses, they had a political coup, and got blocks and blocks of these units. 

They are quiet neighborhoods. The "pods" are soundproof, so you don't have to bang the walls. You can jack up the TV as loud as you like. A couch, a viewer, and the pablum pipe, that has nutritious smoothies that provide bare sustenance. There is a pull out toilet. 

Sometimes the people leave their pods for short periods of time. Turns out you get what you want, and you want something different. That's what the social engineers counted on. Sneaky therapist lurk on the street and engage the viewers in conversation. The average time of viewing lifestyle has been cut down to 12 years. After that time, the average person begins to yearn for more, even more than all the wonderful programming. The viewers tend to good at anticipating scenarios, and tend to do well, after their viewing period.

But that's a fraction of the people. Many of them atrophy and develop health problems. The medical social workers find dead person every once in a while. The shut in problem with the elderly is the same problem here. Because of the isolation people die frequently. Along with the CO2 and smoke detectors, which never go off because nobody cooks, is also a death detector. If there was a fire or a carbon dioxide leak, thousands would die, so they still need the detectors even though they're never used. There is the occasional electric fire. Conditions in the pods are not always that great. Society doesn't want it to be first class pods. It's more of a containment thing, and the viewers are not politically active. But their parents occasionally can be shamed into agitating for better conditions. The Pod lobby in Washington is only second to the NFL lobby which keeps the violent game of football from being banned, because it's "American". The third largest lobby is the anti-pod people.

Plus the drug companies like the pods. The Viewers tend to like stims so they can stay up late and catch the late night shows.

There are even reality TV shows about Viewers who are forced into playing football. They earn viewing time by training and winning.

Then there are the Viewers murderers. Every once in a while while there are people like the mercy nurses, people who aligned with the anti-viewers, who are like the nurses they find every few years who has been secretly killing people who just won't die in the nursing homes. They are very righteous people who can also care for others. They have a line in their head, and when someone crosses it, they feel free to eliminate them.

Former views have become famous and powerful, and also support the community like the Jews in New York City support Israel. They don't want to live there, but they like the idea of it. An option. And yet there are so many forces against it.

The holly wars of inaction and action would never be resolve because they both fight in the wrong way.

Snuff Video

I was bored because I’d watched all the things I thought would be interesting on Netflix, and so I went over to my friend’s house. He was always doing something interesting.

He had on a video, someone was running with a  video camera on their hat. You could hear the grunts and the breath, and feel the jiggle of the camera and the fellow ran along tracks and rocks out somewhere.

Where is that?

Minnesota.

Who’s that running?

I don’t know.

Where’d you get the video?

Someone gave it to me.

My friend and I used to run together, but now we were middle aged, and I’d stopped running because I prefered to drink and watch Netflix, and he was obsessed with his artwork. Every week or so he was on some new process. One week he was just pounding on metal trying to make it do what he wanted. Another week he was doing these elaborate pipe cleaner sculptures. There were a few months where he was doing this lego things. They all seemed kind of neat, and he explored the potentials of the materials, and always had something new in his studio. His studio was an apartment, but besides the bed, and the kitchen counter, it was really a studio. My friend painted and sculpted, he did video projects, and he even clacked away on a typewriter obscure impressionistic poetry.

The guy was running in the background. I could tell it was a guy because of his masculine grunts.

My friend was on one of his pet themes

The man pug you into Netflix today?

No, I’m pretty sure it was me who watched the last season of Arrested Development.

Isn’t it funny that they don’t even hide the label of what the show is doing to you?!

I think it’s about the show, not what it’s supposedly doing to you, and do you think I have arrested development?

We all do. As an artist I regress to the state of a child so that I can do my art. It takes it’s toll, sometimes I have a hard time getting out of the child position.

So why are you busting my nuts?

I’m trying to wake you up. Don’t you want to be awoken?

You’re the great awaker?

Call me what you want, that’s your box, not mine.

The video of a man running continued.

I told my friend about my new girlfriend. I was trying to figure out of she was too needy or if I was too selfish to give her what she wants. My friend would call that my pet theme. The woman I was with had it all going for her, but she had chronic fatigue syndrome. Which meant she didn’t have much energy. She had energy for work, she had energy for me to take her out. But beyond that she wasn’t really present. She slept a lot. I was trying to work out if I wanted a woman who was more awake. My friend, who has all kind of theories, said he didn’t believe in chronic fatigue syndrome, and called it lazy-excuse-to-sleep-a-lot-syndrome. He said he got some of his best ideas when he was really tired, and had been working hard, and let his guard down. He had cycles, where he’s stay up for a few days and then sleep for like a day. He wouldn’t take his bipolar medication to make his sleep cycles conform to the norm. “Who cares, I’m an artist, I like it when everyone is asleep. Nobody to bother me when I’m working. But mostly nobody bothers me except you, and really I can keep working while you’re here, so you don’t really bother me. I need some human contact.”

The runner kept running.

He had a few friends, and his art dealer, and every once in a while he’d go to a bar and sometimes pick up a one night stand. He was too into his art to care about someone else, and the women figured that out, and would leave in the morning. I think he made a point of ignoring them so that they got the picture.

The runner seemed to be getting tired. There were gaps. He stopped a few times and then groaned, and started up again.

My friend made some coffee. He would often quit coffee, because he said he was just using a maintenance dose, and that’s addiction. He’d had trouble with drugs, but was past that. The biggest thing he used now was coffee, and every other time I went he’d serve me tea. Today we were back on coffee. My friend liked to talk about future trips he was going to take when he drank coffee. He’d traveled the world whenever he had a big jackpot of money from his art. Every once in a while he was hot, and he’d use the money to take a break from art and travel the world. He’d pay a few months of rent up front and go away for a few months. He’d come back broke, and that would be part of his hungry artist process. He traveled cheap mostly. Sometimes he’s “slurg” on a hotel room to take a shower and catch up on sleep.

The guy on the video fell down. He twitched a few times and then the camera was still, with the world tilted to the side. Then you couldn’t hear the breathing, it just stopped. Just the wind blowing the grass and trees in the distance.