Yesterday I came back home and asked Claude to help me think about a short science fiction story. I've had this idea in my head: how cities would survive a catastrophic heating of the planet given almost limitless energy. Geodesic domes covering entire cities, cooled with water from the sea which is then collected and desalinated. Claude was trite suggesting story lines, but still it was useful as a way to avoid traversing well known storylines.
For example, I said "once a geodesic dome is put in place, it's expensive to expand it, so people start digging underground, creating a city underneath the city" and Claude says "Oh that's a great idea, why not have social stratification and the poor people leave at the very bottom levels, the rich at the just-below-surface level because it's cool, and the working class at the top layer where it's hot". and I'm like "no no Claude that's not what's gonna happen, it's people who don't care about reality, who think the world has gone to shit, the ones who willingly live underground in a virtual life. They don't care not having windows when their window into their reality is a VR headset.
Pretty soon two characters emerged: once cynic, wearied, hopeless, distracting himself with pleasures; the other a mystic engineer who insist there is hope for humanity and for the world at large (inspired by Buckminster Fuller, I guess).
I have no intentions of taking this anywhere, I just noted it was a pleasant creative activity I had with AI. At the end of our rendezvous I asked it to write the short story and it was quite terrible but I was kinda glad about it, if I ever turn this into a short story I'd like to be the one doing the heavy lifting.
I've been going to Bikram (hot) yoga at the new studio. It's an altered state of consciousness experience, but not in a good way. I take big gulps of water before entering class (as I do before my walks) and don't drink during class. I notice I'm the only person doing this, but God knows why I like to flirt with dehydration.
I see why people get into it. I'm reminded of my brother, who was 16 or 17 when he became a Mormon. He described to me his experience of conversion: they told him to pray to God to ask him if the Mormon church was the true church, so he prayed and he had a spiritual experience which he associated with the Mormon teaching. What I feel is that people who haven't had any kind of meditation or prayer practice are often prone to associating what is a universal experience to a particular religion or practice.
I write this because there's a range of experiences I was unfamiliar with, stemming probably from the heat and physical exertion, and then the deep relaxation that happens afterwards, which could be interpreted in a subtle body way. It's also interesting to note that most people who do Bikram don't do more vinyasa style class or vice-versa, but I also see the skills are transferrable, today it was my fifth class and it's already difficult to distinguish me from an advanced practitioner. The teacher joked "very good, but you do everything with a vinyasa accent", which means certain subtle things like the positioning of the head when you bend over your knees, or the shape of the hands, reveal what is your native practice.
This morning I saw a man curled inside a cardboard box without a blanket, sleeping. I felt great pity, and I was reminded how callous I've become towards homeless people in Europe. I was not always like this, in Mexico I used to carry spare change to help people out, even if it's for a fix, because that's the most effective way of reducing their suffering, even if it's just a while.
In Mexico city once I saw a man rummage through the trash, looking for something to eat. I approached him and gave him 5 pesos. He thanked me and scurried away. I sat on a bench to smoke a cigarette in front of a stale fountain. The man came with an instant soup in a styrofoam cup, and scooped up the stagnant water from the fountain and scurried away again.
I was puzzled for a moment: what did just happen? Then I understood: I had given the man sufficient money to buy the soup, and the store has a microwave to prepare it, but it wasn't enough money to buy the water bottle too, so he came to the fountain to fill it with water, and went back to the store to put it in the microwave. I know this to be irrational, but from then on my minimum charity is the cost of an instant soup and a bottle of water (around $1 in Mexico).
I've always known the most important thing is acknowledgement and attention. Homeless people are treated as invisible, and being seemingly invisible myself I can relate to that feeling, so I greet and sometimes ask how they are doing. I started doing this with a lady who wanders nearby my home, but one day that she wanted to speak with me (to plead for money) I said I was in a rush to attend a dance class (which I was) and she's like "no no wait wait" and I'm "sorry not carrying cash and in a rush bye", and from then on she doesn't acknowledge me, and I've come to do the same. We no longer exist for each other, nor I've made an effort to connect with the other homeless people who roam the streets near metro Tirso de Molina.