Lance Olsen - Calendar of Regrets

To read the thoughts spray-painted along the swimming pool walls is to understand Mr. Lou Reed's lyrics.

Your name means nothing , they say.

Hell's cuties.

Nighttime flight.

Oh, yeah.

Make no mistake about it, friends. This is the zone of cars sunken nose first into the briny slush along the shoreline, back halves jutting above the surface like huge rusted fins. The zone of derelict cafés and dented golf carts propped on blocks in grassless yards. The zone two hundred feet below hope possessing a heat so malicious it can clear the searing streets for weeks on end, a pollution so ferocious it can evacuate the vast inland blue of every boat and swimmer for months at a stretch.

And you may ask yourself, well, how did we get here?

At the turn of the last century, the story goes, the eminent California Development Company, seeking to realize Imperial Valley's potential for unlimited agricultural productivity, dug irrigation canals from the Colorado River. When not-unexpected heavy silt loads commenced inhibiting the flow, engineers created a cut in the western bank to allow more water through. Jump to periodic Biblical rains. Jump to periodic Biblical floods. Jump to breaching of the levees.

And witness, if you will, nearly all the river's mighty flow rushing headlong into what till then had been known as the arid bowl-like Salton Sink.

By the time the breach was closed in 1907, the present-day Salton Sea had been formed: fifteen miles wide, thirty-five long, an average of thirty deep.

Instead of evaporating, as some innocents had predicted, it more or less maintained itself by massive agricultural runoff from the Imperial and Coachella valleys. Combine that with the increasing salinity and inflow of highly polluted water from the northward-flowing New River, and witness a wild chemical broth that began to spawn monstrous algal blooms. The blooms starved the water of oxygen. The lack of oxygen spawned voluminous fish die-offs. The voluminous fish die-offs spawned immensely elevated bacteria levels. The immensely elevated bacteria levels spawned massive bird die-offs. And…

And what else could one possibly do when played such a surreal hand except make it into a tourist attraction that failed almost as soon as it was imagined?

All of which is to say: welcome to Dreadland, friends.

Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

And welcome to my humble vessel. My listing luxury liner. The inside of my head for the next twenty minutes…

Yo, Jolly Roger. Dan here.

Where you phoning from, Dan?

Seattle.

And what do you do there in the beautiful Emerald City?

I'm a member of this group of artists?

What kind of artists?

We're called The Heraclitus?

As in the Greek river one can never step into twice?

Yeah. Exactly.

And what, Dan, is your group's medium?

Cells.

As in small rooms in prisons?

As in one or more nuclei surrounded by cytoplasm and enclosed by a membrane.

Human cells?

Human. Cow. Fish. A stem cell is pretty much a stem cell. It's what you do with one that's important? We're into biochemical engineering.

I sit before you, metaphorically speaking, deeply impressed.

We take these like, um… frames? Think of them as frames? Polymer scaffolds? And we grow the cells on them into… stuff. You differentiate the cells into whatever you want them to be. Bone. Muscle. Liver. Whatever. Then you cook them in a bioreactor for a couple of months.

A bioreactor?

Yeah. This, um, this device that supports a biologically active environment? They're used a lot in tissue-engineering?

What sort of stuff are we talking about here?

Stuff that's kind of unimaginable, but not really? You can, like, embed an iPod Nano into a, um, dog's heart?

Say again, Dan?

With a hole in it for the dial and earphone jack and everything? That's what I listen to you on sometimes.

…?

Or you can craft this bio-jewelry? Real goat eyeballs, maybe, that you can hang around your neck? Or say you want to decorate your computer with human teeth? Or make your trackpad out of cat-tongue tissue for better traction? You can do that, too. Except that's not the really cool stuff. We're in the process of giving people the option to grow extra little things on themselves? On their, like, bodies? Not prosthetics or plastic surgery or whatever. We can, like… Okay. Picture tiny devil horns for your forehead made out of real, you know, growing bone tissue? You have to get them filed down every once in a while, just like you get a haircut? Or instead of a tattoo of bat wings on your back? You can get small living batwings implanted? One on each shoulder blade? You can't fly or anything, but still. It's pretty cool. Or maybe a miniature set of gills just below your ears… or maybe, like, on the back of your hands? Or what about a squirrel's eyeball on the tip of your dick?

Okay, Dan, now you're starting to scare me.

Oh, no. There's nothing scary here, Jolly Roger. I mean, no animals are hurt or anything? And if you're uncomfortable or whatever, you don't have to join in. But someday?

Yeah?

Someday we plan to make little chimeras.

Chimera?

Little like fairytale creatures? One of Snow White's seven dwarfs, say. An angel. A miniature Loch Ness monster for your bathtub? Stuff like that. They won't be alive or anything? They'll sort of be like stuffed animals, only built out of real skin instead of cloth.

Won't the skin go bad?

We treat it with a polymer. It'll basically last forever.

You're an aesthetic pioneer of the flesh.

I don't know. I mean, actually, this whole thing's a pretty old idea.

From back in the days when we thought science fiction was merely a literary genre?

You ever hear of FM-2030?

A radio station?

A futurist. His real name was Fereidoun M. Esfandiary? He was the son of this Iranian diplomat. He taught at the New School in the sixties and wrote a book called Are You a Transhuman? He said he was really a twenty-first-century person who just happened to be born in 1930. He called himself temporally challenged? He always talked about how he had this tremendous nostalgia for the future. That's where he got his name. He said he wanted to live to be a hundred years old so he could see the year 2030, which he thought would represent this like huge breakthrough moment.

Things just get interestinger and interestinger.

FM argued that we're all transhumans, really. As in transitory humans? In the sense that we're all always evolving? Not figuratively. Literally. Every species is an intermediary species. Meaning humans are just these always-already mutations waiting to happen. Except most of us don't want to think about stuff like that too hard? We don't want to contemplate the consequences of being in-process organisms?

So we're back to your Greek river, only made of soft tissue.

Why settle for being who you were born as? Why settle for being the person you were ten minutes ago?

Thanks for your report from the epidermal front, Dan from Seattle.

Hey, we all love your show up here. We tell everyone we meet to listen.

Well, you've certainly given us plenty to keep us awake tonight. Keep us posted, Dan, all right? Let us know when the lights have changed. Let us know when it's time to cross the street………

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