“Day 2: Postmodernity” [Interlude] lyrics

“‘Reality’—an endorsement I no longer need, it won’t make me money, it won’t win me friends, it doesn’t let me influence anyone. Everyone refutes reality just by stabilizing inside whatever despair or anxiety they’ve most recently crashed into. (Bright day; breakfast; here’s when the woke demand justice and the anti-woke becomе racist; Plato’s embarrassed now for some rеason—well he should be, it’s basically a free-for-all now.)”

We wake (if we ever slept) to find our hotel room transformed into a replica of the Library of Babel. Colson is already up, furiously typing on seven devices simultaneously. “I’m rewriting the whole internet with my preferrred perceptions,” he declares. “By noon, I’ll have replaced every cat video with a frame-by-frame analysis of Heidegger’s Being and Time. By dinner, I’ll have turned Twitter into a journal of Borgesian studies.”

We venture out into a marketplace where ideas are the currency: stalls sell similes by the pound, conceptual perceptions are traded like stocks, and there’s a black market for mystical paradoxes. Colson haggles with a merchant-philosopher over the price of a paradox (“2+2=5”)—eventually trading it for a handful of post-ironic memes and a first-edition copy of McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Massage (the typo, he insists, is crucial).

Lunch is a feast for the orderly mind. Each course is a deconstructed unity—appetizers of epistemological foundations; a main course of concessions to existentialism; a dessert of pure reason (“We’re all afraid how hot we are might actually matter. My final answer… is no!”). Colson dissects each dish with the tyranny of a surgeon and the temperament of a poet, surfacing stable meanings inside every bite. “Taste that?” he says, savoring a morsel of cognitive dissonance he located inside the rat sewer of X. “That’s the flavor of late-stage capitalism’s techno-utopian optimism: Gap jeans.”

The afternoon is spent in a VR museum of Babylonian perspectives, but with a twist—we watch the French Revolution unfold on social media; participate in the Industrial Revolution via a gig economy app; and experience the Renaissance through an AI-generated immersive art installation. As night falls, we find ourselves at a library where the DJ spins Kantian categories instead of records, and the dance floor is a living, polychromatic representation of the collective unconscious—Colson moves through the lectures preceded by Jung’s enduring charm, orchestrating debates, instigating mosh pits, and leaving only bewildered and enlightened skeptics in his wake.