Ted

Can you really take a vacation from yourself?

Ideally I’d like to not respond to the same person for two posts in a row. I broke that rule last night when I wrote about Innomen’s work twice in a row, and I was going to break it again with another I-post tonight.

Then I saw the second episode of the ninth season of Rick and Morty.

Rick and Morty is my favorite English-language show - mostly on the basis of its first six seasons. Which weren’t perfect but better than the two that followed. I own a box set of seasons 1-6.

Not sure I’ll ever buy 7 and 8.

The ninth season premiere last week wasn’t a new nadir. It was mostly one long fight scene. With clever moments, though not enough to redeem the episode. I was not looking forward to the next episode. The commercials showed Rick at a bowling alley. Huh?

Of course that all made sense once I actually saw the episode.

The bowling alley Dream Lanes is where Rick lives out his dream of being someone other than himself: “Ted”, a regular guy without any of Rick’s baggage. And with friends!

Who turn out to be aliens - natives of Beloi-6E, a planet four hundred light years away from ours yet basically identical. Except that there is no Rick there. Just Ted. For two weeks each summer. Which corresponds to winter there. That’s one more difference. Maybe there are others¹ that I missed on my first viewing.

Which wasn’t interrupted by sleep because I was eating dinner. I almost always have to multitask if I am to watch TV without passing out. It’s a miracle I somehow stayed up through the season premiere of Rick and Morty.

I hope I can stay up through this episode when I catch a rerun. Not because it’s objectively great TV. But because it was like seeing myself in a mirror. And my other self. My Ted.

I just realized that Rick’s Ted is living one of my fantasies. His home is an RV.

It’s as if writer Jess Lacher (German for ‘laugher’ - fitting for a comedy) had tapped into my brain. Which surprises me, because I did not like her other two episodes at all (“Summer of All Fears”, the eighth season premiere, and another season eight episode, “The CuRicksous Case of Bethjamin Button“). But maybe RVs are a cliche among those of us with Teds. Fantasy personas. Attempts to run away from ourselves.

Some of my Teds own old VW vans like this one reminding me of a blue LEGO van I built and disassembled in 1982. Photo by BUTTON74 licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

As Ted, Rick has no memory of his true identity as “the smartest man who's ever lived”. He believes he’s “a PVC salesman from two states south.”

Most of my Teds do remember me. But their memories of their own lives are more vivid. More meaningful. None want to be me. And unlike Rick’s Ted, they’re not just Ted for two weeks a year. They’re Teds forever. Reality has been rewritten, retconning my old self out of existence. Each Ted has permanently replaced me in his (or her) corner of the multiverse. Nobody misses me, not even him/myself. There’s a kernel of reality in fantasy.

A fantasy that has been ongoing for over four decades. Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) opened the door.

I read a newspaper movie review - an extinct genre? - of Zelig in junior high. At the time I felt even more alienated than usual. I wanted to be like Zelig, a “human chameleon” who could physically as well as mentally transform himself to be like the people around him. Who could stop being himself.

Who could become Ted.

A few hundred words on newsprint had changed my life. By making me think of other lives that never were. By the time I saw Zelig on cable, the escape route in my head had long since been paved.

What started out as a road became a multilane freeway with countless offramps into alternate universes. Infinite flavors of … cope.

Yes, I am a hypocrite. NO COPE represents an ideal. I fall short of it. But in my defense, I don’t confuse my cope - my Ted worlds - with this world. I see no redemption for this world.

Most of my Teds do. They are Christian and therefore on the other side of the divide that Hermes of the Threshold described:

The greatest distinction in belief is not between secularism vs. religion, or religion vs. ideology, but redemptive worldviews vs. non-redemptive worldviews.

Christianity believes that the good will be redeemed with the Second Coming and Judgment Day.

Redemption is not necessarily Christian or even religious in general:

Communism, capitalism, secularism, socialism drag eschatology into history, with Whig history-as-progress; material conditions are destined to get better indefinitely, so long as the right ideology is adhered to.

For many years, I believed Ayn Rand’s Objectivism - or more precisely, my idiosyncratic interpretation of it - was “the right ideology”. Snort.

Redemptive ideologies are very powerful psychologically. They stabilize the psyche. As long as one has hope for the future, despite trying present conditions, one can address life’s problems, band together with others who share a similar redemptive worldview, and unite in shared collective action.

I was a neoCON warblogger after 9/11 because I could “band together with others who share[d]” the delusion that Bush’s wars would ‘redeem’ the Islamic world … somehow. So stupid. Sick.

A non-redemptive worldview detonates all of this. The world is fallen and will not get better, period.

I see the world as the product of the interaction between a minority of scammers and a majority of suckers. I was a sucker, but now I’d like to think of myself as a stalker. A few stalkers stand outside the scam and can only watch as it claims generation after generation of victims.

Furthermore, the world is based in philosophical pessimism; everything is finite, nothing lasts forever, nothing one builds lasts, life is pain, and existence requires the consumption of other living beings.

I am reminded of this Note by Innomen (okay, so I ended up mentioning him in three posts in a row after all):

Something about the whole nature community that annoys me. You pretend to love these animals and then 100% shrug your shoulders at a system that skins and eats them alive. The same people that claim to love seals also love polar bears. Wait, what? That’s a tough sell. The ocean is a hyper carnivore self expanding suffering factory. The second floor of the whole food web is basically tiny shrimp. Everything on the menu screams in some way when chewed.

I think even plants scream. (Update: I just found this story from last April claiming that they do.) Is sap really so different from blood?

I used to believe we could redeem ourselves by transcending the consumption of life and becoming machines running on pure energy without killing any plants or animals.

Two and a half decades later, it’s hard for me to be that optimistic anymore, not when I have so many problems getting AI to do what I want. Yes, I am a LOSER in all caps, but surely I can’t also be the worst prompt writer in the world. And many of my prompt do produce the desired output: textual descriptions and fake photos of the worlds of my Teds.

I used to write novels about them. Draw pictures of them. Later I retouched photographs to simulate them - both with and without computer assistance. AI made all those efforts unnecessary. I’m glad I put in the work, but I’m also glad I don’t have to anymore. I don’t have time to do so anymore. I barely have time to even play with AI. I’m too busy with reality.

And that’s a good thing. There’s lots about reality I do like. Such as the sounds of birds. The wind flowing around me as I walk with the sun overhead and rainbows in the distance. The weather in Hawaii is wonderful.

I don’t want or need to have Ted on my mind 24/7.

I usually escape from Ted in my dreams. Escapes from my escape!

And my escape has in turn made me understand reality better.

For instance, if my Teds weren’t Christian, I wouldn’t have started to read the Bible to understand them better. To get into character.

Researching my Teds has taught me so much. I can see now how little I know about America. How almost everything I see about the USSA from Hawaii is focused on a few cities: New York and LA, not so much Chicago, and not at all Phoenix, which is the fifth biggest American city. My Teds mostly live in the America that’s not on TV or in the movies. A ‘foreign’ country that I find fascinating. A real place. My Teds aren’t real, but their hometowns usually are.

Although I enjoy escaping, I don’t want to go full isekai (otherworld). I just want to step out of Hawaii for a few minutes a day. Like the woman in the 1985 Twilight Zone episode “Dreams for Sale” …

… who has a family …

… but only in VR …

Dig those 1985 computer graphics!

… for a few minutes a day …

… to escape from her living nightmare as a worker in a massive factory 23.X hours a day.

Which is worse, this or AIs putting us out of work?

I can be myself for 23.X hours a day - even in my dreams. Isn’t that enough?

1. While prepping last night for what was originally supposed to be tonight’s post, I stumbled on DC Comics’ Strange Adventures #175 (April 1965). One of the stories in that anthology - I won’t give away which one - involved a “parallel world” with subtle differences like steering rods instead of steering wheels in cars. That’s the sort of the difference that I might spot if I saw the Ted episode of Rick and Morty again.