Snippet from the intro of an awesome book,
A Short History of Nearly Everything. There's a piece or two missing because I typed it from an audio book.
“Congratulations! I’m delighted you could make it. Getting here wasn’t easy, I know. In fact I suspect it was a little tougher than you realize. To begin with, for you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble into an intricate and intriguingly obliging manner to create you. It’s an arrangement so specialized and particular that it has never been tried before and will only exist this once. For the next many years, we hope, these tiny particles will uncomplainingly engage in all the billions of daft cooperative efforts necessary to keep you intact and let you experience the supremely agreeable (but generally underappreciated) state known as existence.
Why atoms take this trouble is a bit of a puzzle. Being you is not a gratifying experience at the atomic level. For all their devoted attention, you atoms don’t actually care about you – indeed, they don’t even know that you’re there. They don’t even know that they are there. They are mindless particles, after all, and not even themselves alive! It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust – none of which had ever been alive, but all of which had once been you. Yet somehow, for the period of your existence, they will answer to a single overarching impulse: to keep you you…
… You may rejoice that it happens at all! Generally speaking in the universe it doesn’t, so far as we can tell. This is decidedly odd, because the atoms that so liberally and congenially flock together to form living things on earth are exactly the same atoms that decline to do it elsewhere!
But the fact that you have atoms, and that they assemble in such an orderly manner is only part of what got you here. To be here, now, alive and in the 21st century and smart enough to know it, you’ve also had to be the beneficiary of an extraordinary string of biological good fortune. Survival on earth is a surprisingly tricky business. Of the billions of billions of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, 99.999% are no longer around. Life on earth is not only brief, but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life, but even better at extinguishing it. Not only have you been lucky enough, since time immemorial, to be attached to a favoured evolutionary line, but you have also been miraculously fortunate in your personal ancestry. Consider the fact that for 3.8 billion years, every one of your forbearers on both sides has been healthy enough to reproduce and sufficiently blessed by fate and circumstances to do so. Not one of your pertinent ancestors was squashed, devoured, drowned, starved, stranded, untimely wounded, or otherwise deflected from its life’s quest of forwarding a tiny charge of genetic material to the right partner, at the right moment, in order to perpetuate the only possible sequence of hereditary combinations that could result – eventually, astoundingly, and all to briefly - in you.”
- Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
awesome book. read it.
Blog. Blog. Blog. Here we go. Time to blog. A funny position to be in, having previously shuddered at the mere sight of the word "blog".
So... (nathan stares blankly at screen for three minutes). So why, then? I used to wonder why people would fart into the wind like that - pouring out their thoughts and desires, hopes and fears into a chaotic and cluttered cloud of digital information we call the internet (and the Russians call the Интернет). The concept of a diary turned completely inside out, with a billion people looking over your shoulder whenever you write. An arena for whatever-"ists" on any political or social spectrum to holler at each other in, resulting in nothing but further posts. So... why, then?
Freedom to create, i suppose. In all honesty, i prefer creating music over writing. But, as a musician whose vocal ability is next to nil, i tend not to write lyrics much. Since i never sing lyrics, writing them out just feels like poetry to me. And while i respect poetry, i'm just not a big fan. I feel the same way about the blues. Maybe it's because my old english teacher shoved Shakespeare down our throats all the time, and i saw no point in an art form that had to be explained to death to make one iota of sense to me. "Poets are people who muddy waters to make them look deeper" - i read once. I don't agree with it, but it definitely sums up how i've grown up thinking of poetry. My dislike of poetry is silly and irrational, but hey, some feelings are hard to shake even when you don't agree with them anymore. Anyways, where was I? "Freedom to create!" - I suppose i should add "...regardless of the coherency, content, or consistency of output". I admit, i do love writing in a space with no preordained order or rules... wordplay with no demand to make "sense" (not something you can get away with in a conversation, outside of a mental institution).
For example: "Rusted metal folds and tears, but cold sweat never dries!"
Sounds deep, huh? It's not. I just like the way it sounded when i wrote it. Sorry (not really).
For example: "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously"
That one's from Noam Chomsky (in linguist mode)... he wrote that sentence to demonstrate how a phrase can be simultaneously nonsensical yet grammatically correct.
It was part of a larger point which i forget and, frankly, don't care about right now. It's just something that pops into my head whenever something makes sense on the surface... until you really think about it. You know, like life, existence, etc. Which I have been dwelling on alot the past year (quarter-life crisis stuff). Now that I've graduated university, I've returned to the mental state I was in before I was bombarded with over two decades of institutionalized education. I am not much smarter now (which is ok, since i was a smart kid) - there's just alot more interesting clutter up there in my skull. My best friend Justin first met me in the school yard when i was six. He found me mesmerized in the sandbox by myself... when he approached and we met, I immediately bombarded him with a hundred unanswerable questions:
"...man, nothing makes sense to me! If everything started with the Big Bang, what the heck was here before that? Nothing?? That doesn't make sense! There's no such thing as nothing! Nothing cannot produce something! God?? Who Big Banged God into existence? You mean either Nothing or God has been here for infinity? But infinity is just an abstract concept! Nothing makes sense to me! By which i mean Nothing does NOT make sense to me! What the heck?!"
... i think we then played with Transformers after that. And now i'm back in the same boat, except I now say "fuck" where I used to say "heck" (i was going to say "tomato, tomato" here until i realized that the meaning of the phrase is lost without actually hearing the different pronunciations ... although seeing it in type shows the meaning of the phrase more clearly).
Where was I ?
(don't you dare say "between H and J!")
I do love writing.
(I know, that not where I was, but it's where I am now. Deal with it.)
When I used to get stuck writing a paper and I didn't feel opinionated enough, I started keeping a half-full mickey of whiskey and a pistol in my desk drawer. It made me feel like an eccentric and opinionated writer (truth be told, it was just an inside joke with myself). Nothing says OPINIONATED like a drunken armed man. I should clarify: I wouldn't actually drink the rye. And the "pistol" was actually a cap gun, though it was dye cast steel and didn't have one of those lame fluorescent orange plastic tips which let bank tellers know you didn't mean business. Anyways, it was the thought that counted, and a placebo dose of opinion was all i wanted. Guns are pretty retarded, unless you hunt. Hunting (for food) is not retarded (and this is a vegetarian talking). Whiskey is not retarded (i do enjoy the odd rye on the rocks), though it tends to make people retarded.
Well, my head hurts. I haven't had breakfast yet. I'm out. It's been a slice. (well that was anticlimatic)
Embrace nonsense! Jelly toaster tinsel!
-nb
