The sins of the son are not the sins of the father.
Do you really want to go on a Pixar-level adventure? Do you want to experience all the tropes of growth, betrayal, and growth again? Are you SURE you want to live and breathe every moment of it, just like I have? Remember, consent is STILL the most important thing in a room, or a house, or a country, or the world. But fine, I'll give it to myself.
Let's start with me saying that I have never been abused. Period. Dot. Full stop. Hold short. Line up and wait. Now read it again if you need.
My parents may not live forever, but at the very least I can predict they will live long lives and die naturally. My dad is an actuary (recently retired), that means he's an expert on probability and very mathematically intelligent. My mom was in sales for a while, including after I was born in West Palm Beach. She spent a lot of her later years as a romance writer, I have a hunch I'm a character in a few of her books. I did not consent to that but I find it ironically amusing so I consented after the fact to help sell her writing.
I was an only child in a loving home. I may have been adopted, but all data points to a very normal childhood. I always felt I was extraordinarily lucky to have been born into my family by chance; despite wanting to go to Rio de Janeiro and own a yacht as badly as I did, I was thankful to have parents to spend time with and could forget about things like fame. Nothing was wrong, year after year. When problems did arise, we could have a discussion about what to do next. My dad would always remind me: "Do you still want to be a pilot? Because this thing you're hooked on will prevent you."
Until about a week ago, I always answered yes, and changed my behavior to fit into the "Air Force Pilot" proud-father-and-son persona. But this time I had lied, and it was a huge fucking lie. When I realized what I had done, and it took a while, I could no longer answer yes until I'd fixed it. I had to change my behavior away from being a pilot and husband. My father and mother being alive are worth far more to me than some cloth wings on my flight suit. That's why I've been so weird lately: I had to tell everyone without confirming the bias of anyone.
Betrayal is a real thing, just like currency. It can be exchanged as easily as making a transaction, you can build on it, layer after layer, and off of it you can become rich. Is that a world we want to live in? Where you can't tell if a pedophile really died by suicide? I don't. I want a world in which mental health appointments aren't career-ending or divorce-forcing affairs. I want a world where the microphone in my phone will rat me out for having a beer or missing a workout, but not something I said with three people in the house when I was bursting at the seams with anger. Unfortunately, that world isn't ours yet; it's not even Altered Carbon's world yet.
The problem with having a beer to relax with your family, is I may honest-to-God make a mistake that can never be truly undone. It's as close to thoughtcrime as possible, it's disgusting to even think about unless you're totally honest. It may take years or decades to undo such a betrayal, but every time I see my family alive the truth gets reinforced and confirmed. You lose the power of thought when you're under the influence. You lose the ability to consent, to recognize consent, to recognize your own mind's power. That's morality at work.
We have so many currencies it's impossible to keep track. There's cryptocurrency, penny stocks, pennies themselves, gold, credit, or silver coins with Caligula's face imprinted. Happiness is the opposite of betrayal.
Morality is the currency of the Universe. Well, no. Energy is the currency of the Universe, in it there are four forces. Morality is something different, it's more binary than the rest of the world. Living a life with ethics and morals in mind scales greatly when you want powers such as forcing a hurricane away from you or willing a pond into filling with water. It scales even quicker when you start making decisions based off of social media accounts or Google, whose algorithms are fined tune to reward you as long as you keep scrolling. This effect is extremely powerful, as I've come to learn after Googling it.
Allow me to explain why I think I was chosen for this particular book. There's so many books on the White House coming out every day, why does mine matter more? Why do I matter? Well, at some point, tech companies started reaping the harvest that is our data. In February 2003, Google acquired Blogger.com, and thus acquired almost every word I've ever written about my awesome, interesting life online. That shouldn't matter, they harvest everyone's data. Billions of people are stored somewhere, and that's creepy until you figure out how to use it to your advantage. What came next, I believe, was a chess match between me and a supercomputer, and eventually I believe a team of people became involved; but my life up until now has been a intelligence face-off of epic proportions. And I WON! (We won. We all won.).
Google does not have the power to create a hurricane. I know that for a fact because my refrigerator might've stopped making noise. Google does not have the power to force a hurricane away from Tampa, Florida. There's only one person alive who's smart enough to predict something like that. Only entity I can think of, that during a media blackout, could predict someone's pool and pond refilling within days of his dad coming to the aide of his deteriorating mental health. Of course in hindsight, there was a tropical depression leading to more rain than we've had in months. How could that be possible and me not know about it?
Well, the first thing I had to do to find out, was apologize to my extended family for texting them hundreds of messages which were predetermined (by me), at four in the morning. Behavior like that is what gets you committed; but in the end they accepted my apology and the pond filled up in less than a day.
In the next chapter: Perpetual Motion Machine of Morality. I'd love to keep writing but I have a tumor on my neck that's making me lose sleep and act very hyperactively. Google hyperthyroidism, then Google hypothyroidism which is what my wife has. There are no coincidences in the Universe.
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