I had a most interesting phone conversation with someone from an organisation set up to help carers with a bit of funding, practical help with signposting, self-help and group therapies, counselling etc. Poor buggers, they have neither the training nor the resources to deal with a titanic and revolting nerd...

So they are calling me regularly just to make sure I'm OK, rather than just do nothing.

I briefly pondered on the group therapy. I've been to one in the past, back when the kids were both grublings. How our species persists - other than by accident - amazes me lol, because I'm pretty sure if anyone knew what the Price of parenthood is beforehand they'd not be so hasty. Anyway, this was a group of similarly scruffy people, some harassed-looking couples and single mums, and proto-MorningStar. By the end of the sessions I was such a celebrity I wondered why I'd even bothered, it was not helpful to me at all teaching them what I thought was common sense.

[Ooh, you're such a star!

Mmhmmm, thanks ;-) but I'm also a single dad with a profoundly disabled daughter here to learn how to parent ... Soooo, how about that date now, then? Yeah, thought so.]

So I turned down the therapies, although I suppose I could play my guitar and shit, generally behave like an ass. Wreck it for everyone else and stroke my own ego.

She asked me about Special Weapons Division, why robots and stuff. Well for one she doesnt understand the logical progression of our world, and the counter to it : Technology and Government.

On the one hand, when my body gets too frail to support whatever is left of my mind it wont be some slack zero-hours agency zombie wiping my arse, it will be a robot [If I have to build the shit-scraping thing with my own bare hands] designed for the job of caring. We have them now - kinda - but they are expensive and slow. That will change over the next few decades, and is a forgone conclusion.

Whether the technology will change anything is up to the administration, which at the moment is concerned with its own bloated demise at the metal hands. Phones will become part of our bodies and the planet, with everything they have now incorporated into an individual, wireless, global, with telepresence via the robotics its pretty obvious the boundaries we have now on immigration for example will be pointless, as will traditional governments. When you can work or just slink anywhere in the world without leaving your home, the concepts of currency exchange, taxation, and crime management become unmanageable for starters.

Then there's the fact that machinery is shrinking. Sure, 'nanites' are a menace and will never likely be built outside of nuclear-level military application, but there's also the fact that when a 3D printer can accurately lay down molecules it can print foods from stock in homes, and that stock can be recycled. That will completely change our economy, the way food is produced, sold and prepared. It wont be like Star Trek, probably a machine that can patiently churn out ingredients to order.

Things wont be the same, but the governments of the world would rather they were so they can remain bloated and in control. Eventually, our technology will become so small as to be indistinguishable from us and the environment, at which point we become gods in our own right as individuals, with the level of control we will have over the atoms we are made of.

She's brightly trying to help me scrape the shit myself instead.

Completely over the poor woman's head, but I applaud her for trying.