035 📻 The present vanished into the past in the future.

Hello, everyone. I am Ithaka. And this is Sponge, a podcast of absorption and reflection in the process of returning to or becoming our most unreal selves.

The theme for today’s episode consists of both statements and a bunch of questions.

In the present, the past has vanished and the future has not yet materialized. Thus, the past is a figment of the imagination and so is the future. Moreover, in the future, the present will become the past, and in the past, the present was the future, so this very present moment either will be a figment of the imagination or used to be one. Given this, what is the desire to be in the past, the future, or the present? Moreover, what does it mean to be in the past, the future, or the present?

These questions are what I absorbed from “Now Wait for Last Year,” a story written by Philip K. Dick. And in this episode, I will point to some representations of time or… lack thereof, which I found fascinating.

Spoiler alert, everyone. Spoiler alert. “Now Wait for Last Year,” by Philip K. Dick, is a fictional work. In this episode, there will be spoilers. If you plan to read “Now Wait for Last Year” and do not want spoilers, do not listen to this episode at this time.

So, what’s this book about, overall? From the blurb, quote, “Earth is trapped in the crossfire of an unwinnable war between two alien civilizations. Its leader is perpetually on the verge of death. And on top of that, a new drug has just entered circulation – a drug that haphazardly sends its users traveling through time.

“In an attempt to escape his doomed marriage, Dr. Eric Sweetscent becomes caught up in all of it. But he has questions: Is Earth on the right side of the war? Is he supposed to heal Earth’s leader or keep him sick? And can he change the harrowing future that the drug has shown him?” End quote.

Yeah, lots of things happen in this book. Time travel, a war between different planets, political strategizing, drug taking, and a marriage that is falling apart.

But what interested me the most in this book isn’t any of that. The story is set in the year 2055, and what interested me the most is a place called Wash-35, which is short for Washington D.C. from the year 1935. Meaning, in the year 2055, there exists a place that replicates Washington D.C. from the year 1935. Who created this place, or rather, who provided the monetary means to create this place, and why? A man named Virgil Ackerman. He is a rich businessman who profited from the war efforts. He was at the right place at the right time, which is even more impressive, given that this story features a drug that allows people to travel in time, however, Virgil Ackerman was at the right place at the right time before the drug—at least, in his timeline.

This drug, by the way, makes some people travel to the past, others travel sideways, and yet others to the future. But people don’t have a choice in it; for whatever physiological, biological reason, the drug does what it does differently to different people.

At any rate, Virgil Ackerman did not have this drug when he sponsored Wash-35. He just had a lot of money because he became rich by having just the right kind of business at a time of war.

Regarding Wash-35, the book says from the POV of our main character, Dr. Eric Sweetscent, quote, “To everyone but Virgil Ackerman, the Washington D.C. of 1935 was a waste of time, since only Virgil remembered the authentic city, the authentic time and place, the environment now so long passed away. In every detail, therefore, Wash-35 consisted of a painstakingly elaborate reconstruction of the specific limited universe of childhood which Virgil had known, constantly refined and improved in matters of authenticity by his antique procurer—Kathy Sweetscent—without really ever being in a genuine sense changed: it had coagulated, cleaved to the dead past… at least as far as the rest of the clan were concerned. But to Virgil it of course sprouted life. There, he blossomed. He restored his flagging biochemical energy and then returned to the present, to the shared, current world which he eminently understood and manipulated but of which he did not psychologically feel himself a native.

“And his vast regressive babyland had caught on: become a fad. On lesser scales, other top industrialists and money-boys—to speak in a brutal and frank way, war profiteers—had made life-size models of their childhood worlds, too; Virgil’s now had ceased to be unique. None, of course, matched Virgil’s in complexity and sheer authenticity; fakes of antique items, not the actual surviving articles, had been strewn about in vulgar approximations of what had been the authentic reality. But in all fairness, it had to be realized, Eric reflected, no one possessed the money and economic know-how to underwrite this admittedly uniquely expensive and beyond all others—imitations all—utterly impractical venture. This—in the midst of the dreadful war.” End quote.

Not only that, this Virgil Ackerman, he’s old. He’s really old. You see, our main character, Eric Sweetscent, is an artiforg surgeon. That’s what they call surgeons for artificial organs, in this book: artiforg surgeon. PKD does this a lot, it seems, creating new conjoined words.

So, thanks to Eric Sweetscent’s expertise, Virgil Ackerman has lived a long, very long life. Mr. Ackerman says that, if something were to happen to him as he is having sex, quote, “ “…the dead man’s control in my right fist, carried for such emergencies, would summon Dr. Sweetscent here, and he’d dash in and right there on the spot, without removing me, he’d take out that bad, collapsed old heart and stick in a brand new one, and I’d—” He giggled, then patted away the saliva from his lower lip and chin with a folded linen handkerchief from his breast coat pocket. “I’d continue.” “ End quote.

So. See. This. This is combination of the need and want to live this long, while replacing various organs multiple times, and the need and want to preserve the Washington D.C. of 120 years ago, is what fascinates me. Not only that, remember, from the first quote, which I will repeat: “…to Virgil it of course sprouted life. There, he blossomed. He restored his flagging biochemical energy and then returned to the present, to the shared, current world which he eminently understood and manipulated but of which he did not psychologically feel himself a native.”

So, Ackerman does not feel himself a native in the year 2055, at least according to Eric Sweetscent’s observation, to which I agree. Despite that, Ackerman wants to live a really very long life. He wants to keep going indefinitely, it seems.

This is so fascinating. The man would have been dead. But he is alive. And where does he get his life force from? Apparently, from Wash-35, a place that ceased to be 120 years ago, but has been forced to sort of kind of stay alive by being replicated in a clearly incomplete way.

So, for Mr. Ackerman, the place does not even have to be real. He just needs and wants the illusion to be real. At the same time, he isn’t satisfied with his imagination alone. He desires there to be something physical, something tangible, so that he doesn’t have to fill everything with his imagination, and instead, only parts of the place.

So… as he keeps prolonging his life, he lives in the year 2055, and will live in the year 2056, and the year 2057, so on and so forth. As he does so, he imagines, as in, remembers, the Washington D.C. of the year 1935, vividly enough to verify that Wash-35 is authentic enough. In Wash-35, he is accompanied by people, such as the rest of the Ackerman clan, who remind him that he is actually from the year 2055. It’s not like Virgil Ackerman is alone in Wash-35, completely submerged in the babyland’s story, as a little boy.

So it’s like… what is Virgil Ackerman’s present?

It seems that in the present, he is either thinking about the future or the past. He thinks about getting the next artiforg or getting to Wash-35. As he gets his artiforg he thinks about the next artiforg or again, Wash-35. As he is in Wash-35, he’s thinking of the next time he’ll be in Wash-35 or the next time he’ll get the next artiforg… so on and so forth.

I think the reason this setup is so interesting for me is that these days, more so than before, I think of time as nonexistent. We in the physical world do perceive it, because we are in these… avatars, these bodies, which are specifically designed to allow us to experience the wonders of time. By this, I mean that, if there were no time, yes, in some ways we would be freer, but also, we would not be able to experience things. For example, we may jump from a scene with a seed and then next, to a scene with a flower in full bloom. But we won’t be able to experience the planting of the seed and the gradual growth of the seed and the seasons and the flower bud and then the gradual blooming, so on and so forth. So, if there were no time, in some other ways, we would be less free. In other words, because there is time, in some ways, we are more free.

But if we weren’t in these physical avatars, in these physical bodies… time needn’t necessarily exist. Time needn’t necessarily seem so concrete as it does in this realm. In fact, maybe time, fundamentally, doesn’t exist. It only exists here.

And given these thoughts, what Virgil Ackerman does is so fascinating. Perhaps it’s a matter of experiencing everything all the time? That’s what he wants? But I do wonder if he is experiencing even one thing fully. Also, perhaps it’s a matter of believing that things must be tangible. For example, clearly, remembering a.k.a. imagining Washington D.C. from the year 1935 in his head is not enough for Virgil. That isn’t real enough. He does not consider his imagination real.

And this aspect. This position that unless one sees something in the physical realm, it’s not real, this is also something I ponder frequently, these days—whether that’s actually the case. To get straight to the point, I do not think that’s the case. I am more and more thinking that everything is energy, and I mean this literally. Also, I mean that, yes, because we have our bodies, we can experience graduality in time and space, but also, energy is free.

Ya know, by now, the latest physics, or the latest popular physics, is so well known that you may have seen a video that describes how timespace can be folded.

You take a piece of paper. You draw two dots, some distance apart. The fastest way to get from dot A to dot B, in our physical world, is to draw a straight line. The fastest way, if we could bend timespace at will, is to fold the paper. Make dot A and dot B overlap.

Yeah, such are the things I think about these days, and… as soon as a person can imagine that—this folding of timespace. I mean, for the dots on the paper, it literally happened.

So I wonder. As soon as I imagine something, does it exist? And, see, this book, “Now Wait for Last Year” also inevitably deals with parallel universes or parallel realities. So it’s like… Well, even if I didn’t have the drug that takes my physical body to a parallel place, if my mind can do the traveling… who is to say that that isn’t real? I mean, before the drug was developed, just because due to the lack of the drug, people couldn’t get to the parallel places… spacetimes… does that mean that those spacetimes don’t exist? If we can’t verify that they exist, do they not exist?

In this vein is the idea of 호접지몽. This is the Korean pronunciation, I do not know the Chinese pronunciation, I am sorry. The English translation seems to be “The Butterfly Dream.”

From Wikipedia, which is so handy for short summaries, quote, “The most famous of all Zhuangzi stories—”Zhuang Zhou Dreams of Being a Butterfly”—appears at the end of the second chapter, “On the Equality of Things”.

“Once, Zhuang Zhou dreamed he was a butterfly, a butterfly flitting and fluttering about, happy with himself and doing as he pleased. He didn’t know that he was Zhuang Zhou.

“Suddenly he woke up and there he was, solid and unmistakable Zhuang Zhou. But he didn’t know if he was Zhuang Zhou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming that he was Zhuang Zhou. Between Zhuang Zhou and the butterfly there must be some distinction! This is called the Transformation of Things.” End quote.

I am sorry that I likely butchered the pronunciation for Zhuang Zhou. I apologize. I tried listening to Youtube videos to get the pronunciation and… it’s difficult. It’s difficult to mimic.

Quote continues, “The image of Zhuangzi wondering if he was a man who dreamed of being a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming of being a man became so well-known that whole dramas have been written on its theme. In the passage, Zhuangzi “[plays] with the theme of transformation”, illustrating that “the distinction between waking and dreaming is another false dichotomy. If [one] distinguishes them, how can [one] tell if [one] is now dreaming or awake?” “ End quote.

Indeed, how can one tell if one is now dreaming or awake? Even if you’re a lucid dreamer, how can you tell that your dreams are dreams and not this so-called 3D reality? Do you call the 3D world the “reality” because there are more restrictions to time and space? Because, I hear that the reason dreams seem “senseless,” in air quotes, is that there are fewer restrictions in the timespace, which is the case as you move to higher frequency planes—at least, so I hear. I wish I could travel to other places. So far, I have not been able to. But who knows what will happen in the future? Now wait for next year, I say.

I will repeat the theme for today’s episode only once, unlike in other episodes, because it’s so long. But I think it’s helpful to repeat things when it’s the audio format, because, unlike with written things, or video things, you can’t easily go back and forth in time, searching for the present that you want to be in.

So, I repeat the theme:

Now. Another quote from the book that touches on these questions is this. This is a passage with Jonas Ackerman, who… I think he’s the nephew of Virgil Ackerman? Well, one of the members of the Ackerman clan. This is a passage between Jonas Ackerman and Eric Sweetscent. They are in Wash-35, which is built on Mars.

We start with Jonas saying, quote, “ “It’s distinctly hard to keep in mind that we’re on Mars, not even on Earth in our own time—I don’t like it. I like things to appear what they really are.”

A thought came to Eric. “Do you object to a stereo tape of a symphony played back in the evening when you’re at home in your apt?”

“No,” Jonas said. “But that’s totally different.”

“It’s not,” Eric disagreed. “The orchestra isn’t there, the original sound has departed, the hall in which it was recorded is now silent; all you possess is twelve hundred feet of iron oxide tape that’s been magnetized in a specific pattern… it’s an illusion just like this. Only, this is complete.” Q.E.D., he thought, and walked on then, toward the stairs. We live with illusion daily, he reflected. When the first bard rattled off the first epic of a sometime battle, illusion entered our lives; the Iliad is as much a “fake” as those robant children trading postage stamps on the porch of the building. Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment—the present—has little meaning, if anything.” End quote.

Two specific sentences here are really interesting. The first one being, “all you possess is twelve hundred feet of iron oxide tape that’s been magnetized in a specific pattern… it’s an illusion just like this.” Indeed. See. We accept this so easily. Recorded tape: an illusion. Recorded video: an illusion. But what about this thing called reality?

Usually, with video, at least with film, it’s 24 frames per second. We know that there is a specific number of frames per second, which creates the illusion that things are moving. So, what about the universe?

The second interesting sentence is at the end. “Humans have always striven to retain the past, to keep it convincing; there’s nothing wicked in that. Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment—the present—has little meaning, if anything.”

Eric Sweetscent’s idea that without continuity, the present has no meaning, is quite interesting to me, given how, the best place to be in, for me, during meditation is to feel no continuity. To be unaware of continuity.

By the way, eh, what I call meditation, I don’t even know if it’s meditation in other people’s dictionaries. I don’t force myself to breathe calmly, for one thing. I used to think I had to do it, but after the shitstorm of earlier this year, I am glad, so glad that if I internalized one thing from that experience it’s to never ever tell any emotion to shut the fuck up, or anything that may sound more polite, but basically means the same thing. And you can tell whether you’re doing this to yourself, regardless of the degree of superficial politeness, by feeling your body. The body remembers, and it’s always with you so long as you’re alive in this realm. Regardless of superficial civility, if you tell your emotions to shut the fuck up, they’re stored somewhere in your body, most commonly in the form of tenseness. See. The more I meditate, the more I love my body; it is such a loyal companion. And I also love my ego more. I don’t understand what it means to eliminate the body or the ego through meditation or similar practices, and do not have any interest in eliminating either one of them. I love them both.

And, similarly, every single emotion, I try to love, which—as mentioned in some other episodes on this podcast—does not mean that I go all huggy or kissy on them. It just means I let them be. And after that, they go on their own ways. There is nothing else for me to do, such as forcing myself to breathe calmer. I can feel them leaving me, completely content, which leaves me content. I mean, it may not all work smoothly in one session, I may listen to them for a few days or, and they may return after having left, sure. But the key is that I leave them be and they go on their own way, and there is nothing to force, and thus, I do not force myself to breathe, and from that state comes a timeplace or lack thereof where there is no continuity. It’s the most amazing feeling ever.

Now, I don’t endeavor to be there all the time. Personally, if I were to endeavor to be there all the time, I don’t know why I’d bother to live. I am in this physical world with the body and ego I love. They’re there to be appreciated and used. However, occasional lack of continuity? Oh, so amazing. It’s great. Especially because after the emotions leave, you will literally see the world changing. The physical world. Not the imagined world.

Continuity is an illusion anyway, even though I think that often, partly, because we believe in continuity, it seems so undeniable. The reality, the completely tangible and provable reality, is that, if you could move to a place, and no one knows you, and you could allow yourself to forget everything from your past, you can start a new life. A completely new life. And that does not render your present meaningless. It may feel like it’s become meaningless because of the notions of those around you or yourself. Maybe some people will pity you for having no memories, or you will pity yourself. But it’s not something absolute. It’s just a notion that a person must have a past. Or that doing something for a long time is a good thing.

And when I say that it’s “just” a notion, I’m not saying it’s easy to eliminate such a notion just like that. It’s not, at least not for me. I’m saying, it’s “merely” a notion in that it isn’t absolute. There is no universal law that says humans must come with baggage. There is absolutely no law that says for a person to go around carrying baggage, especially telling the external world all about the baggage, intentionally, is a must. What makes the carrying around inevitable despite that, frequently, is 1) the belief that the past is required to build a present or the future, and 2) because one cannot let go of the past, even if one wants to, because one is actually suppressing it deeper into oneself. Perhaps one even thinks that they did let go, but they actually didn’t. And the way one can tell if one belongs in this group 2 is by examining one’s body and one’s external world. Seriously, the reflections are very literal. Once I experienced it, I could not deny the exactness anymore. I thought I was having different problems throughout the years, but at the fundamental level, they weren’t. Everything came down to these four things:

1) Wanting to be loved.

2) Wanting to give love.

3) Not wanting to be abandoned.

4) Not wanting to abandon.

And these always go together. Loving and giving love go together, abandoning and being abandoned go together. Also, love and abandonment go together. In one’s head, in the realm of logic, it may not seem to make sense to love and abandon at the same time. But in the realm of the heart, it is very… feelable. So feelable.

And, see, everything turns into something related to meditation, because these days, it’s almost all I do. And this is a podcast of absorption and reflection in the process of returning to or becoming our most unreal selves, so it’s inevitable that I talk about what I do. And… I talk about this as much as I do because I am so in the early days of this endeavor, and already, I am so glad, so so glad that I did not take the path of the intellect. See, you don’t have to listen to me. But please, consider not listening to those who say that they have done meditation or any other inner work practice for, like, ten years, and they tell you they still have the same life problems they had ten years ago. Like, sometimes, they’ll tell you they’ve had various life problems since, literally, birth. And, it’s amidrable that they’re trying to figure out alternatives, but, that’s them, and you—you who are listening right now—for you, please, consider not listening to folks who… still have the same problems after many years. It’s just like how you would not invest your money with someone who keeps having money problems.

And… It’s almost impossible to say this to anyone one on one, because people, me from before included, are so in love with their problems. I thought I was being logical, or at least realistic—which is the most blinding notion of all, this notion of a concrete reality.

There is nothing on the outside. There is nothing to look for or to look at, outside. Whatever you’re looking at is you anyway—not only in the poetic sense, but literally. Although… poetry is often literal. It’s inadequate to separate literal from poetic. It’s like separating beliefs from reality.

Anyway, we’re in love with our problems quite often, perhaps because mainstream culture frames a lot of the popular problems as normal, and therefore desirable. Being normal is an incredibly desirable trait, in mainstream culture. So, popular problems are popular in that they’re distributed widely across the population, and also, in that they’re popular. Like, well-liked. Deeply well-liked. On the surface, maybe not. But deep inside, oh, very much well-liked.

And sure, it is a person’s right to keep their same problems for a decade, two decades, three decades, until they die. They can do whatever they want to. But since you’re listening to this, all I’m saying is, “Hey, if you’re ever gonna get into something new, including meditation, maybe… maybe it’s a good idea to try a method that improved someone’s life, if you want to live a problem-free life. Or a more problem-free life, in comparison to before.” And by problem-free, it can mean many things. It can mean that the problem actually disappeared or that the person doesn’t see the same circumstances as a problem anymore.

Yeah. Basically… try the methods that worked for someone. This may sound obvious, but… I don’t know. I guess the underlying reason of why someone might want methods that are not eliminating the fundamental problems can be different for different people. From my observations over the years, there were cases where people were really into tradition or some kind of approval stamp—as in, unless some teacher had this lineage of some kind, they didn’t believe that it could work. The problem is, inner work, you gotta do it yourself anyway. The teacher can know all the right things, have the right qualifications, and you can understand everything in your head. And nevertheless, the result could be you becoming like ChatGPT trained on the teacher’s knowledge, instead of you being a human who actually felt the work in your heart, with your whole body.

In some other cases, I’ve observed when people are really logic-based, to begin with, regardless of whether it’s about meditation or not. Everything they absorb, they absorb in a head-first way. This is when someone looks at a painting and needs to read the summary of the life of the artist, to figure out in what year the painting was painted, so they can rest assured that what they think they’re feeling is historically accurate. The problem is, the inner work that actually brings about changes resembles the experience of standing in the middle of an art museum, staring at a painting, and crying tears of joy.

It’s the anti-Cliffnotes. Anti-ChatGPT. Gosh, I love ChatGPT for being such a handy example.

So… yeah, meditation talk. Can’t help it. It’s so practical. This isn’t theory, folks. I don’t have much theoretical knowledge, and I am at this point afraid to have unnecessary theoretical knowledge, because of the aforementioned instances in which I’ve seen people who’ve tried so hard for decades get to absolutely nowhere. It seems that meditation, the kind I want to do, resembles writing, the kind I do.

Just be there. That is all. But it was so scary to do it, because what I was surrounded by, all throughout my schoolyears, and thereafter, was the opposite. I was taught the linear worldview of, I guess, Newtonian physics, like everyone else, pretty much.

But someone gave me permission to just be there, in the case of writing, which you can hear more about in episode 22.

And then someone else gave me permission to just be there, in the case of meditation.

And I am eternally grateful to both of them for giving me the permission, not like, monitoring me, but simply telling me that it is okay to not go from point A to point B in a straight line, and instead, just fold the paper. Fold the paper and you’re already there and all you need to do is just be there.

If only I had lived like that from the beginning.

Although, if so, then I could not have experienced this.

Ah. Yeah. This is what you get for listening to this podcast. I guess this is what this podcast will become, more and more. It’s always been about my reflections, but now they will be even more literally my reflections.

Anyway, back to time and its illusions. There is only the eternal now anyway, if even that. This eternal now will become a figment of the imagination in the next moment. It’s not something to be clung to. See, something like “staying in the present.” People mean various things by that, it seems, with various intentions. It’s like with the word “meditation.” I can’t really tell what people mean by that word alone. And with something like “staying in the present,” it’s like… I feel like you can’t stay in the present by trying to stay. Trying to stay assumes that there is a very clear timeline. And presently, my notions about timelines are definitely as blurry as they have ever gotten.

There is a popular assumption, also represented in some stories featuring time travel, that there is a timeline that cannot be altered. The past is in the past and the future is in the future.

But truly, the past is imaginary; therefore, the past is as malleable as the future. What isn’t malleable, often, is the notions we have around the lack of the malleability of the past.

Here is another quote from the book. This part describes the effects of the time travel drug. It sounds very unpleasant. It sounds quite painful.

As described by Kathy Sweetscent, who is one of the people who travels back in time, quote, “…even as the objects in her office settled massively against her, they became, on another level, remote; they receded in a meaningful, terrifying fashion. They were losing, she realized, their animation, their—so to speak—working souls. The animae which inhabited them were departing as her powers of psychological projection deteriorated. The objects had lost their heritage of the famliar; by degrees they became cold, remote, and—hostile. Into the vacuum left by the decline in her relatedness to them the things surrounding her achieved their original isolation from the taming forces which normally emanated from the human mind; they became raw, abrupt, with jagged edges capable of cutting, gashing, inflicting fatal wounds. She did not dare stir. Death, in potentiality, lay inherent in every object…” End quote.

And then, later on, she says,

Quote, “She felt impotent—and yet overwhelmed with her potential power; she experienced both sensations at once, finding the mixture radically unpleasant.” End quote.

See. If there ever is going to be a time travel drug, I wonder. I wonder if it cannot help but be this unpleasant and painful. Because, the drug taker isn’t doing anything. Something is being done to them. Maybe it’s this one-sidedness that causes the pain.

Whereas, if one were to achieve time travel—let’s just hypothesize here—through something like meditation, then… like, even at the beginner level, like me, you can feel the disappearance of doer and doee.

Kathy Sweetscent, in this quote, also talks about feeling both impotence and overwhelming potential power. It kinda sounds like something that would happen if one were to be thrust into the world of oneness while clinging to the world of duality.

So… yeah. “Now Wait for Last Year.” Whenever I read Philip K. Dick, I think about the parts of the story more than the overall story. I rarely care about any of his characters, but there are always numerous intriguing ideas in his stories.

And the main reason I go back to his stories is for the vibe. There is definitely a PKD vibe. The words like artiforg surgeon and robant, which I think means robot servant, add to that vibe. But more deeply, or rather, more on the surface—but not in the sense that the vibe is superficial, instead, rather, in the sense that the vibe works like an elegant veil that wraps the entire story like a gift—on the surface, there is this… air of nonchalant melancholy. And sometimes, more than the plot of the story, I want that vibe. Conveniently, his novels tend to be on the shorter side, at least given the average length of novels in the year 2023, it seems. Also, he wrote a lot of stuff. So, there’s a lot of stuff to feel the PKD vibes from.

I also like the covers. It seems that someone did a great job branding every single cover of his stories with big letters saying PKD. Very clearly, PKD. You can see from a mile away that it’s a PKD book. I love that.

So… yeah. That is all. I wish you all a very pleasing present moment, which will vanish into the past, in the future. Thank you for listening.

If you liked this episode of Sponge, please share it with a human.

You can find a link to the full transcript in the show notes. Also, visit ithakaonmymind.com to find out more about everything else I do, besides Sponge.

Stay true, everybody.

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Music

Gruber – Bionic
Jane & The Boy – Miss You Missing Me – Instrumental Version
2050 – Neon Skies

Image source
https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/agostino-ramelli-theatre-of-machines

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