I’m back from Cayenne for the moment. I will continue
writing as and when I feel like it.
This happened a few months ago, near
Chicago neighbourhood. Chatman is a neighbourhood guy -that’s Ch like shatman.
I’m at the door with Chatman and a guy in a blue striped
tshirt. Monday night is bin night (Wednesday night, and Friday night too). Chatman motions me to look at the truck.
Woah, new truck! That’s crazy maaaaan! The new truck is a layed-down cylinder ,
square mouthed, digesting dustbins’
contents.
Bin men wear a futuristic fluorescent yellow and green
jumpsuit and a facial mask. They work in a team: two at the back feeding the machine; one at
the front driving. The truck makes regular stops and has mechanical arms that
lift bins to its mouth once they have been placed in its talons by the waste
disposal technicians.
This vehicle’s tour de force was the unusual movement of its
abdomen: the cylinder turned upon itself like a smoothed out cement mixer, accompanied
by an intense clonking rrrrohhring noise. Sometimes it stopped spinning.
Sometimes it span when stationary, sometimes whilst moving.
We sit there watching as this machine passes by. Chatman
proposes a possible configuration of the cylinder’s interior functions. The
machine seems most likely to chew things up inside; to compress things.
Is this the first time you saw it? I ask Chatman
Yeah.
That shit’s crazy.
The future is now!
Toddler-type wonder ends as we talk and regain our adult, unimpressed fronts.
After that I went inside.
When you try and
imagine the future, there are many things we might have, like complete and
extensive demographic records or total, inescapable mobile phone network coverage.
The future colonises our lives with machines you never thought of.
