Salemwire Brooklyn Reboots with Plastic Monsters

Lately I've been reading Darwin's The Origin of Species. This isn't a page turner but more of a meditation on naturalism and on the origin of various loaded phrases that have churned up into pop culture like bottles from another time on the shore of now. Recently while reading it on a C train in Brooklyn, I pictured four of my selves holding hands like a paper chain of people going back in time. It would only take four of me to go back to 1859, when Charles Darwin was struggling, at the end of his life, to stake his claim on the theory of evolution. As I looked up at the diverse faces across from me, I wondered if we could be considered varietals.

Let's just say that every time I come across the word monstrous in Darwin's work, people look just a little more monstrous to me. But I'm an imaginative sort and a wordsmith, so this is the effect words have on me. I also am fascinated by his usage of the word plastic. Plastic as we know it, the kind that floats up onto the shores, wasn't around in his day, so he means moldable. It certainly did not take me long to start looking at people as varietals of plastic monsters, which is all great imagination food for a writer who tends toward science fiction.

Last week I'd only read a few pages before the C train delivered me to DUMBO in Brooklyn, where I attended Make it in Brooklyn, basically a pitch contest where folks with a Brooklyn based business plan had 2 minutes each to vie for $25K in funding. Or perhaps these were plastic monsters vying for the dough. At any rate something booze-related nabbed the prize. I ended up introducing myself to a few of the pitchers, like the plastic monster from Timescape and a plastic monster space suit designer from Final Frontier. Ultimately I made my way over to the tall plastic monster emcee, who I thought was some Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce honcho but turned out to be a founder of Makerbot.

There were other brilliant plastic monsters with working prototype shoes for the disabled, toilets for schools in Senegal and an app for finding places to recycle your plastic monster plastic bottles. Moneyed plastic monster venture capitalists sat and stood in refined, mostly dark blue and black suits, eager to throw their moolah at ideas. Money, if anything, is intrinsically plastic, and requires great mental fortitude, aka faith, to believe in it.

I left this event feeling like I had just waded into a little tidal pool of Brooklyn evolution. I was not there for money but to see who was up to what in my 'hood. And let's just say I departed with visions of the near future, in which I'm using my Makerbot to make my own spacesuit out of recycled plastic bottles in which a toilet compost compartment, humbly designed in Gowanus, is screwed to my you-know-what and also features shoes that I can kick off and on in zero Gs when I'm heading for a cocktail in the Mos Eisely Cantina which has a special, I know, from the alcohol app.

I just happen to know a lot about spacesuits. Why? Because I read science fiction, dammit, written by plastic monsters like Neal Stephenson and Andy Weir. And I write it too. And now I narrate it out of Metapulp Studios, the smart science fiction, Brooklyn based company served by the C train.  Check this out, here's my first audiobook Joe4 placed right above that rocking spacesuit art cover of The Martian:

All right all you plastic monsters, have a great weekend. And Happy Birthday, America.