Idolising Children?

It has been a while. A lot has happened. I haven’t stopped writing.
A book is due out in September. I blog at http://www.geekdad.com
And, I’ve begun writing shorter stuff again. Even done a few spoken word gigs.
Which has lead to this collaboration with Darren Solomon from Science for Girls. It is an awesome album.

In B Flat

It has been getting twittered a lot - so I thought I should post the words. (These are probably slightly different, I tweaked it after the recording…for performance purposes)

Information
By Daniel Donahoo (2009)
she unplugs the device
no bigger than her thumb
from the computer and it smells electric.

“My life’s work,” she says. But, it isn’t her life’s work.

You see, we store information like an Escher painting.
It shouldn’t all fit in there. But, it does.
And every day we manage to fit more and more into smaller and smaller spaces until one day
she says,
we will be able to fit all the information the world has
everything that everyone knows and believes and dreams
into nothing.

All the words and pictures, the voices and videos,
the ideas and the daydreams,
the games
the past and the future.
It will all be there. Stored and filed.
Tagged with relevant keywords.

Our hard drives will be thin air.

They will make nanobots look like elephants.
And elephants will be in there too. Tagged. Accessible with search terms
like ivory and mammoth,
like largest land dwelling mammal

We will process away at nothing and understand everything.
We will think of the word and the information will slip in, not through our ears or eyes –
but straight thorough our skin. Information will breathe in and out of us.

Our knowing will permeate as deep as it does wide.
Our work here is to learn

so much,

to be so full of knowing,
that all there is left to do is unlearn.

Humanity must get to a point where we let go.
Leave the useless ideas and the spent ideologies in the recycle bin.
like an adolescent brain shedding neurons.
like a snake slithering from its old skin.
like an old man who has come to understand so well the point where reality meets the intangible that he is able to decide which breath will be his last. And, he will enjoy that breath more than any other he has taken his entire life.

And, her life’s work is more than four meg flash drive.

My life’s work, she says, is the impact that this has.

This is not about what I produce. This is about what others receive.