“This quote is unbelievably laden with significance
considering what I’m about to write.”
-Shakespeare and Thoreau, in a rare, heretofore undocumented collaboration

“I no longer have time to rewrite, revise, or edit. There’s just too much to say and too little time.”
-Edgar Allen Poe
(In a fictional, alternate-reality)
CUSTOMER OF THE MONTH
Jim McNamara-For his noble ability to shoulder through the great Schlitz shortage of ‘11’ and his dedication to introducing an exciting new product to the Yacht Club by consuming gallons of Chocolate Milk Stout. Also his explanation of why the bar towels burst into flames, and how to prevent a repeat of said incident.

It’s such unfair bad luck that the first two feral cats I ever was accosted by loved me unconditionally, and felt disinclined to continue being feral.

I only say it’s unfair because it caused me to develop an amazingly incorrect understanding of feral cats. None of the dozen or so that have wandered into my life since the death of year-old Owen Meany last May 4th have had even the slightest shred of intelligence. They are much more like rats, scurrying furtively, hissing and fighting, and not showing the slightest gratitude at being fed. Feral cats have become my new favorite metaphor for the human condition, so if you have any interesting stories, I’d love to hear them.

And speaking of de-tumescing, when’s the last time you read, much less wrote a good book report? Remember what a nightmare assignment that was back in grade school? I dreaded writing book reports and I loved reading (Still love reading!). Well, like many of the tasks I loathed as a young student, such as show-and-tell and spelling bees, writing a book report now has an appeal it lacked back then. Maybe because it was an assignment and I resented it? Who knows? Anyway, they aren’t called book reports when you don’t have to do them. They’re called reviews.

While I was tending bar the other day, one of my finest customers, and a dear, dear friend, Troy (who also, by the way, came up with that crazy novel Ridley Walker by Russell Hoban) produced a book from his giant, omnipresent backpack (he’s some sort of a student so cut him some slack) and handed it to me, saying he would like my opinion on it. Well, my immediate thought (and believe me, I don’t often have immediate thoughts) was that it was stupid and beneath me. It was called Bigfoot in Georgia for God’s sake! Needless to say I assumed he was joking and started to hand it back, but after a few minutes he convinced me that he at least was serious, so I agreed to take it home and read it. I was very disappointed because I was certain that another Yacht Club patron had destroyed his credibility, and Troy’s, up until now, had been rock solid.

So, I toted the offensive little book home and read the first few pages. Two hours later I finished (It’s only 150 pages long, so don’t think I’m some sort of freaky speed-reader). I’ll be danged, beau! This little gem is great. Not only is it non-hokey, but the scholarship is impeccable. The annotations actually hold up under additional research (minimal, granted). If anything, it might be a little too academic for most tastes, but the sections on the various legends of the Coweta, Yamacraw, Cherokee and Creek Indians in Georgia was chilling and really sparked my imagination. And most importantly there are no fuzzy photos of possible Sasquatches. Just pictures of odd markers set up in the woods (Very Blair Witchy) and a few contrasting the Georgia wilderness of a century ago with modern urban blight. Plus, there’s a really great map of all the counties in Georgia which I could look at for hours. The book was small, fun, full of shy, good-natured hairy monsters, and ultimately educational. In short, the book was the Yacht Club.

Everybody thank Troy when you see him, and if you’re interested in checking Bigfoot in Georgia out for yourself, it was written by Jeffery Wells (who looks exactly like Gus the Dart Player). Plus, it was written in 2010, so it’s literally hot off the press (Pine Winds Press). Neoteric esoteria for you crossword puzzle types.

Now, since I laid down the rails, I know where your train of thought is going as it pulls out of Homo-Erectus-Station. “If there is some evolutionary precursor to modern man running around the north Georgia Mountains,” you are undoubtedly asking yourself, “what is the future of our species as the technological singularity approaches?” In essence you need to know. . . .

HOW TO ACT WHEN YOU BECOME IMMORTAL

Whether you thumbed through the February 21st edition of Time magazine while standing in line at the grocery store, or actually read Ray Kurzweiler’s The Singularity is Near back in 2005, you are aware that our technological progress is advancing exponentially any way you want to measure it, and has been for over a century now. And if you are at all familiar with exponential growth, you know it pretty much starts off slow and then goes nuts. Computers aren’t just getting faster; they’re getting faster faster. And they’re getting better faster and littler faster and more diverse and innovative faster. And, gulp, they’re getting smarter faster. At the pace we’re on, there’s no reason to think we won’t be capable of reverse engineering the human brain by 2020 (That’s only nine f*cking years away!).

On top of the bottled-beer cooler, next to the big window-table in the Yacht Club is a white, three-ring binder called The Terry Williams Memorial Science Archive available for anyone to peruse. It is filled with magazine and newspaper clippings about amazing but true biotechnological devices, which have been implemented in the last few years. From prosthetic legs and arms, which can be controlled by thought, to tiny cameras implanted in the eyes of the blind, allowing them some limited sight. (Don’t even get me started on the grain-of-rice sized implants in the tongue that enable paraplegics to move a cursor around on a computer screen and operate radio-controlled wheel chairs.)

So in nine years you add two plus two and voila! You have a device that’s a hundred times faster, a hundred times smaller, and a hundred times smarter that slides into a little slot behind your ear. (You don’t want it implanted too deep as there are sure to be people determined to steal them by any means. But that’s only nine years away, and the age of immortality isn’t due to roll in until 2045 (one year after I die, I guarantee it!).

So, what does this mean to all you cool young cats who were born in 1990 and who are therefore enjoying your first year of legal drinking at the Yacht Club? First of all, it means you’re going to be a customer for a long time. But before you get too excited about that eternity of Yacht time, before you start counting your life rafts before they are launched, let me advise you, my little friends, that if you are old enough to read this you are barely going to be squeaking in to the age of the immortals by the skin of your perfect oyster-grown teeth. You needs must limit your intake of pleasure-inducers to products available over the counter at the Yacht Club and not be caught loitering in the back parking lot, or the alley across the street (Yes, we know why those shoes are hanging from the utility lines). I have a feeling They aren’t going to be handing these powerful implants out to every loser junkie who whines for one.

Another thing I highly recommend you long-living youngsters work on is patience with other people’s philosophies. A lot of time has been invested in people’s thoughts about life and death. I suggest to you that it would be unwise (I know wisdom is abhorrent to you at your age) to dismiss other’s beliefs out of hand until you have died and been resurrected. Otherwise you will be criticizing something you don’t understand which is distasteful and ignorant. This is especially true about religious beliefs. If you candidly search your own mind for the reason you think someone else’s religious faith is misplaced you may be surprised to discover that you “just know” there is no God or that you “can’t believe” any God would do this or that. And if you are honest with yourself you will realize that your belief system is founded on just as rickety a foundation as those you scorn. Unless, of course, you’ve crawled all over both sides of death.

Which brings me to the probability that that is exactly the uncharted wilderness you will be mapping out. I highly recommend not having too many preconceived notions as you set forth.

For decades now the science fiction world has been mired in space-travel analogies between exploring the galaxy and Columbus discovering the new world. Hell, everyone thought space travel was going to come before uploading human minds into computers. Oops! Talk about putting the lander before the booster rocket! But when you think about the distances between the stars and the amount of time it takes to travel between them, it totally had to be this way. It’s 30,000 light years from Earth to the center of our galaxy. Since rocket ship speeds are most emphatically not increasing exponentially, I can assure you that no human will be leaving this solar system any time in the next hundred years, unless something totally drastic and unforeseen happens (and that’s a sad thing to hold out for).

It turns out that the analogy between space exploration and Columbus-era nautical exploration, which seems so perfect when you’re watching Star Trek, is flawed to the point where the two are literally opposite endeavors. Columbus didn’t know how far he was going or how long it would take. For a trip to Mars we would know those quantities down to the millimeter and nano-second. Columbus didn’t know what he would find, but found a perfect, fertile land for humans to thrive. We know exactly what’s on Mars, we’ve prodded and poked it and observed it with all kinds of fancy instruments, and it sucks. No, my dear, dear friends, space travel is out. Uploading the human mind onto computers is in. Once people get used to living for hundreds of years maybe we will reach out beyond our planet again. Almost certainly we will, but until then we will be concentrating on how to assimilate these long-lived little rascals who are just now having their first beers at the Yacht Club into our Earth bound society.

One immediate concern that comes to my mind as the “immortal youth” (let’s call then millennials) start to outnumber us doomed oldies in the next couple decades is that anyone who’s memories and experiences are safely stored in a back-up bank will have a pretty cavalier attitude toward death. We have a couple pretty good rules in the Yacht Club, no physical fighting, and no being an asshole, and I think they will translate into the language of these millenials to a certain extent, but you know how it is when you combine liquor, youth, pretty girls and immortality. Some of us oldies could get hurt, permanently.

And then there’s the inevitability of the current staff of the Yacht Club succumbing to the ravishes of old age and death. It may seem that stalwarts such as Meredith, Doyle, Anna and Faylynn have been at the Yacht Club forever, but there was a whole decade of Yachting prior to their arrival! Though it is unclear through the mists of time, journals (or logs) exist telling of a time dominated by such mythical creatures as Dara, Billy Girl, Matt, Dog Boy, and Oui Oui. Although there are sporadic, unreliable reminiscences occasionally by such ancient patrons as Randal (five-time Customer of the Month winner) how much credence can be given to a man whose Daughter is already old enough to drink in the Yacht Club and who, herself, may be too old to be considered a millennial? Then you’ve got your middle tier of Jen, Laura, Shane, Danni etc, who, maybe if they won the lottery within a year could use their relative youth and new-found wealth to get decent implants maybe in the twenties and thirties (if they keep their physiques tip top and their noses clean) but the point is . . . there is, inevitably, going to be a new, fourth round of hires over the next decade, and those people will be standing behind the bar in the Yacht Club for a long, long, long, long time. I’d be nice to them if I was old, which I am.

-Gino 2/25/11