Essay: The hubris of feeling humble

 I was a soldier.

Politics and religion, belief and emotion, passion and reaction, are responsible in many ways for and in their incomprehensible role of the stability in Earth; as it spins and wobbles ever so uncaring of any of those things, sustaining us all without reproach. Today I write this as a reaction to a person’s voice I heard over the news. A reaction that, as all others ever to occur, stems from some sort of belief; that of having been a soldier in this case. As I paraphrase, I feel my heart shrivel in my chest, a pain derived of sadness…. The statement, on the steps of a long ago fought battle, by soldiers whose long desire of a world without pain and suffering for those we love has not come to fruition. A world where their fought-for dreams remain alive and unfulfilled today.

Truth may be divisive, yet so defining. My truth, having lost comrades in the wars I fought in, is a sad one. My truth today stems from the desire never to see a person die for the case of irrationality, a case finally made by the very humans we give power over our lives and thoughts to. I love my country, so much so that I would sacrifice not only my time and life, and as I did not know then, my mental health as well. These would have been a fair trade should they have fulfilled their purpose. I say that with shame, knowing that when a side wins another must not, which serves as proof of the instability that permeates to all of the lives in this globe, which unfairly harbors all of those wins and losses.

To the living, I wholeheartedly hope for peace and love to be the defining force that endures in all of your efforts to live a life as you believe it to be fair to others; understanding that those of opposing believes too want the same for their own, and ultimately shows us without conceit of system, that we all collectively hope for the same (though through a different framework). Some parents raise their children to fight and never to turn a cheek to an aggressor whom may take and take when allowed. Some parents raise their children to be humble, to understand that the pain others suffer pushes them to commit acts that culminate in a type of loathing which rules their lives under the guise of power-over-their-lives. Some parents instill other belief systems in their children. Children are surely impacted by all which they see and hear, experience and do. Such strong and compelling reasons drive those styles of parenting, at times unequivocal and unrelenting; usually behind a self-imposed wall by the parent whose job is to protect their children in the best way possible, as to not let what is beyond the veil of that wall to befall them too.

The nature of living shouldn’t be this or that. But then, is there a right or a wrong nature? I suppose that is all there is to it, there is no right or wrong answer. The nature of all things perhaps should not be a nature of the human condition. We contemplate the dogma we allow into our lives to become more than a dogma and exist in a realm of wholesome truth without doubt. As long as that was the only inconvenience we could perhaps overcome. Presumably we all know what peace is. I do wonder though… What is peace to animals? What is peace to the ocean? What is peace to humans? What is peace? After all, I must consider that there is an end to the premise in its meaning.

Carl Sagan, among many before and after him, spoke with passion about the nature of the universe in relation to this “pale blue dot” where so many live and die under some premise they deem compelling. A universe that no matter how long you believe it to have been created, harbors an Earth which no matter what shape you believe it to be, is the only home we have. Parents often teach their children to be tidy, not to have a messy room, or perhaps leave the table in disarray. 

Today we all partake in the untidiness of Earth. Not long ago, the beating of a person in the streets bore the statement “can’t we all just get along”. While what drove the sentiment may have been brutally convincing, it should never have happened and certainly not again. 

In a society mired in the throes of an echo of a system they follow or admire, I beg us all to tidy up a little bit.

Move forward

 Another day of madness.

Deep the lasting sadness.

Toil bears no boons.

Open, all the wounds. 

No longer revelry,

falling in a memory. 

Happy never to be, 

in this horrid PTSD.

I must maintain this course, 

even remembering the corpse, 

for memory lend,

to a departed friend. 

Eternal the irony

defending turned agony,

no more to feel kisses, 

his body now in pieces. 

The buzzing of a bee,

similar to that RPG,

it missed us by chance, 

we made no advance. 

They all rush in bursts,

and it always hurts,

whether thinking or feeling

I seem to end up kneeling. 

With ignorance abreast,

we endured the rest, 

religious groups presenting, 

blaming gays and protesting. 

Black the flag we get, 

it says never to forget. 

Yet, we do it brazenly,

two towers that fall on me. 

Civilian living is confusing.

Those around me abusing,

This, the dead fought for,

I too, now I'm sore.

A song clear in my head. 

It honors the dead. 

It's cadence resounding.

Proudly here standing: 

"Some Say Freedom is Free.

Well I tend to Disagree.

Some say freedom is won,

through the Barrel of a Gun."

Bore deeply in our hearts

but I can't see where it starts, 

the raw memories that come

in flashes, never gone. 

A litany of remembrances,

old friends and acquaintances, 

no longer in my life, 

pushed away by my strife.

Some say life is precious, 

that a thought so treacherous,

it marks what you can't see,

for it is wasted on me.

My loved ones are blind, 

they try to be kind.

I live, but I don't care. 

much of me died over there.

This husk of a man 

of nothing a fan

always lost in thought,

in all the things he fought. 

Always being formal, 

yet never feeling normal;

they all walk without care, 

while I see danger everywhere. 

To this I am now bound,

can't even hear a loud sound. 

My heart in fast palpitation,

there is no gun at this station. 

Much I cannot comprehend. 

Yet I still want to defend,

things meaningless to others, 

for the sake of fallen brothers.

I guess I must go on.

Chin up, I'm not done.

All of it to guard, 

soldiers move forward.

Ignorance of the Ignorant

 Were I to cast a pebble into the proverbial pond of the population, and the pebble had a unique marking, then 1 person would have the pebble. However, that 1 person, having seen the marking, can now replicate it. Is the pebble—one amongst many now—still unique?

Were I to cast a pebble into the proverbial pond of religions and it landed in a random one,  would that make that religion the right one? When other religions catch on to the stone, wouldn’t they make their own unique stones and then too be the right one?

Were I to speak in a manner to a person by which they felt offended, have I only offended them or also their family? Has the offense stopped there or have I too offended their friends? Would it then stop or also somehow continue to perpetuate when the spoken manner was used at a specific individual and under specific circumstances?

Were I to look at the diminutive Earth in the proverbial vastness of the universe, with it being more than a sextillion in comparative size, how important is any of the above? Are we just living in the chaos of what we call law?

We hate without merit. We often don’t respect boundaries under the guise that someone else started it and therefore rules no longer apply to you because you were somehow wronged. As if the rules should so easily be bent or broken solely because we feel a certain way. With almost half a million rape victims a year in the United States alone, the likelihood that we, our parents, grandparents, or further back were the byproduct of such an act and are alive today due to a heinous crime is probably low but possible. Should we all line up in front of a firing squad to pay for the sins of people who not only died hundreds of years ago in some cases, but also who had no contact with our generation and values? Perhaps then, the law shouldn’t apply to the families of those rape victims and they can run rampant and hurt, maim, or kill us as the progeny of those atrocious events. Under the premise that we hate without merit, an affront is made to one person. One who speaks to a crowd fuels the crowd, but the members of the crowd have a thinking brain (regardless of what group mentality in psychology would say).

We tend to fall prey to our hate and inability to see that in a world full of individuals, no one knows anyone. A snowflake is different from the host of them that falls, but we call the group snow and never really mind the peculiar and unique nature of the individual; we just bunch them all up and just call the grouping of snowflakes snow. A lot of this is true in society today. When imparting ignorant judgment on others, whole groups are targeted or portend to have been the target of, and what ensues is blatant chaos. A person who has been hurt should hurt, yet when we see that has happened we should, and often do, have a system by which perpetrators are brought to a justice system often agreed upon by the populace. Philosophers have argued that to be good there is no definable criteria as it lies with the person providing the judgment and as such no amount of good would suffice in a person’s past if a wrong has been felt by someone, despite the initial rationale for the event that garnered the judgment.

I don’t mean to say that letting people get away with horrors is a bad thing or a good thing for that matter. A horror to a good person can be theft, but to a murderer a horror may be heaven. Today I toil in my erring by acknowledging mine as well as the ignorance of the ignorant.

Essay: A problem with no end.

    Leave it to a flower to be a flower and grow, and that flower no matter where will bloom as it has elsewhere. To traverse the world in search of a flower, what a thoughtless task. However different, beautiful or alike ends merely in finding that which was already at hand. The guile of the trip is in the journey where people are met and relationships made, a trip already taken and relationships already had; a world where it being round has more of the same in each part. Earth, water, heat and cold, mountains and valleys, and often the same type of people with the same type of problems or the same lives. Joy, so what is to seek or enjoy in that which merely in form takes a slight deviation from that which is precisely known? Where is the power in the knowledge that brings to know so little? What is the Joy? Where does it come from? Why does it entail what it does? How is inquiry held together? These are questions I do not know the answers to. 

    To have a fascination is to admit that there must be differences in all the things which I profess to be equal, for if not perhaps it is the journey. If not the thing itself, then what, I must ponder, is the rationale that fuels the desire to seek, to find, to know, what we already do. Definitely to drive us one step at a time into yet another journey of sameness. To eat another food that has been grown or fished, to see another grass that has been stepped on, to see a land where animals on four legs hunt for food, or merely to see. a human person walk upright. Where is the joy in doing these things? When we do them near us, in our vicinity, they should elicit the same amazing response that it is found elsewhere; yet we know and have ample proof of the opposite. The elation we feel, the desire to seek more should be just as powerful in my own home, outside in my own neighborhood and clearly within the knowledge that my friends and family have much in their own sense that is rather foreign. It appears that no trip, no matter how far, no matter how incredible, or how many wonders it may entail, in the end, all being equal, for reasons I cannot understand, they show no more than that which we have seen. The feeling or desire is more powerful to those who choose it than any other reality that they seek or experience themselves in their own habitat. How shrewd must it be to live when living is so boring and yet so exciting as long as living takes place elsewhere.

    I live to, as science purports, to multiply. In as much, I have fulfilled my purpose. What then does this body of cells have left to do in this bat of human-filled stew we call humanity? With its many deeds, and even its science, if one is able to find the desire to enjoy the thing that is being sought, one must look in the place where one is currently not; thus never truly achieving the solution to a problem that starts here and thus a problem with no end. 

Short story: Do you mind?

 Sally Donovan met Bill Stewart as he exited the psychiatric ward in Hollyfield Estate. He was on a wheelchair being pushed about to the exit by a nurse and no one awaited his release with anticipation, nor did his demeanor point towards any excitement. Sally, a nurse from another institution having finished her shift here, after subbing for a no-show, was happy to sit with him as he waited for transportation to arrive. She came over and with the nonchalant attitude she had been told many times would get her in trouble, she hunched over so that he could see her with his bowed head staring at the ground and said: “Do you mind?”, holding a cigarette of a brand he didn’t recognize. He silently motioned for her to give him one and she obliged. They sat for a bit with no real desire to do much more than smoke and go about their business when he said: “Do you see him?” Bill Stewart was a schizophrenic man whose mania had taken over the best part of him. Sally replied quite hastily and in a puzzled look saying: “No, I don’t. Should I?” Grinning and looking over for the first time since they sat, he posed the cigarette for the invisible figure to take a puff while saying to her: “Nope, there’s no one there. But wouldn’t it be cool if there were?” and he couldn’t resist any longer and began to laugh maniacally. Sally, no stranger to the illness retorted while leaning over and speaking in a soft voice as to not be heard: “Yes it would!”

Over the course of a year after their first cigarette, they met and did normal-people stuff. From dining to movie outings, they were good friends. Somewhere along the way, he spoke to her in earnest and told her that due to his condition he wasn’t really looking for a relationship. She was kind enough to meet his half way to say, “As long as we can be friends, who cares right?” He was indeed happy. His hallucinations of a man, notably the same one he mentioned a year back, had become many as his medications began to lose their efficiency probably due to the constant use and coupled with so many other treatments through the years. Sally became quite aware of the hallucinations over time to the extent that she had Bill talk to them for her. She would pose questions for Bill to ask his companions whom most often replied candidly. 

Some time passed and Sally mentioned electroconvulsive therapy to his as a means to try something outside of medications. Bill thought of it for a long while and meanwhile Sally helped him talk to his hallucinations as to say the right thing to them and not anger them in the event he couldn’t see them anymore. Finally he decided the right time was now to go and he did. Sally was kind enough to drive him and accompany him during and after. 

Bill Stewart was a murderer. He was a fugitive, unbeknownst to him, from the law in many places and the interpol had taken notice as well. The reason he wasn’t caught was because there was no facial recognition and his name had changed much after his birth with himself and no one knowing who he is outside of a Bill Stewart. It was impossible for Sally, the nurses, or staff of the hospital to know that schizophrenia had tamed Bill’s darkness. He was simply, cluelessly living the normal life of a person with a debilitating sickness. After the electrical currents were administered during the procedure, it all came rushing back to Bill.

Back on his bed, he awoke after passing out during the procedure. Sally waiting happily by the bedside for his to recover and hoping that he was feeling better. He looked over at Sally and said: “Thank you. Without you, I don’t know that I would have been able to remember me.” He then motioned to hug her and when she reciprocated, what she fell was probably the most sincere hug and notion of friendship she had ever experienced. He then strangled her with the I.V. drip line in his right arm, but didn’t kill her. He held her down while he looked for a cigarette in her person and then lit one, and blew the smoke on her face while getting close to her ear as he once again tightened the noose around her neck, thinking about the first time they met, and whispered: “Do you mind?”

 

Short story: My son

 When Tina witnessed the murder of her, 5 year old, brother Michael, she was only 9. Tina, the only witness to the horrendous event that left her brother mutilated and stabbed, would not speak for the next 3 months. She stood petrified in front of the bed of blood her brother laid upon, as the canvass spread further and further from her sibling until her socks were soaked in the luke-warm gel-like goo that was once pumping through him; at least that’s how she described it later on when we were finally able to interview her about the events.

The three months went by slowly during the investigation with leads and witnesses not providing much in the way of clues as to what took place. The medical examiner mentioned that the death was caused by the loss of blood and not the gashes left behind by clumsy and shallow cuts with a knife. Another thing that was hard to make sense of was why Tina was standing there at all instead of her parents having moved her away or into the house to avoid further trauma from the experience. I gather that Heidi (Tina’s maternal grandmother) being there was merely due to her proximity to the home; after all, the neighbors were very quick to gather as well, before we arrived there was quite a crowd for it being 2230 hours.

My notes state the parents having said that Tina uttered the word: “good” as the first thing in all of her quiet time. As I read her statement, I felt her mom was clear from the beginning: “Monica, can you explain what happened?” After a moment of hesitation, probably gathering her thoughts, she explained. “We were having breakfast, her and I. She seemed to be mumbling, but I looked over and her lips were not moving, so I suppose it was more of a humming sound. She was thinking of something for sure. In the midst of it, and just for a moment, she clearly said it—good—before continuing her humming.” As Monica described the event, she stared down at her hands the whole time, showing what looked like concern for her daughter’s wellbeing, though I cannot reconcile the lack of evidence.

Since I arrived at the scene of the crime, something looked awfully disconcerting. Tina was standing by the body motionless, not crying on her brother’s shoulder, not trying to wake him, and what’s worse, no tears, no glaze in her eyes, just a dull and blank stare and while the only thing with blood was her heavily soaked socks, her hands appeared quite red. From talking to her parents it became clear that Tina and Michael were close and that the relationship of the children with their parents was great. However, their relationship with their infirmed grandparents was much different. The way they tell it, Tina loved her grandfather while Michael hated him. Poor man had dementia and was kept medicated with someone by his side most of the 24 hours in a day. The grandmother was more of an outdoorsy person; her time spent at home was less than I spend showering, if I am to believe what the family said, though I am inclined to think they were exaggerating a bit just trying to lighten the mood.

The parents were nice folk. They met during high school, as the stories from townsfolk go, and married soon after Monica got pregnant with Tina. A short time after that, her husband worked at a local grocery store bagging items mostly and Monica worked at a hair salon. Tina grew up with her grandmother mostly as her parents both worked. A few years later, Michael arrived. Born in time, right weight, and expectations for the child were as good as with any other, and Tina did most of the rearing being big enough.. Michael grew loved by Tina and hated by her grandmother (after all, with him in the picture Heidi saw less of Tina), or so people say (especially the immediate neighbors), but other than that both children had a normal rearing and growing up, and their parents were normal enough.

Getting back to the crime scene, other witness statements were as useless as ever with not one person witnessing anything, including one Randolph Heize who was walking his dog around the time of death. Because the grandmother was at Tina’s house often, going over to see her grandchildren, or rather Tina, it was probably that if anyone saw something it would be grandma; the nature of the statements by all parties showed that with Heidi living in front of their house the times when she showed up unannounced were quite frequent and kept no regular hours either. It was such a complicated case.

“Detective Slater”, queried Esther, the reporter interviewing him for a story to be printed at the town’s most prominent newspaper, “when did you realize that it was Tina’s mother who killed Michael?” “Well, I didn’t. Frank figured it out.”, something that puzzled Esther. “Can you elaborate on the events that led to her arrest?” For a moment, the detective looked out the window into the diner’s half empty parking lot, then over the cars and into passing traffic as if he didn’t have to think about the answer, but rather was in disbelief that something like this could happen and furthermore, that he would have to say it out loud. “You see, Frank over there?” Detective Slater motioned his facial features and lips towards the counter of the very diner they sat where she could clearly see the nametag of the cook flipping things behind a low wall where as she squinted her eyes saw the nametag which read Frank in red lettering and in grease-leaking detail. “You mean the happy flipper over at the kitchen?” she chidingly retorted, having not enjoyed guessing whom the weird lip-pointing was towards, good thing there was no one else in line of sight of the lipping. “I had come for breakfast about a week after the murder. Frank and I are usually alone when he opens in the morning and I only get coffee so he lets me come in while he sets up for the day. That morning, we talked about the high school football team losing again, he mentioned having burned himself for the first time in a long time, and during his recollection, he mentioned something peculiar.” At this point, Esther was hesitant for the detective to reveal the details. “Frank told me he saw Monica come over. Most townsfolk come here during the day, it's just a nice place to meet others over coffee or pie; or both if you’re me” the detective leaned over playfully as he talked about pie, as if his devilish little secret was cute or something. “Please continue detective” I had to remind him, as my details were coming together well for the story I was to present. “Frank said one of her hands had some bandaids and he saw some cuts on them from the red that he could see on her snow-white hands.” and as the detective was wrapping it all up, Monica walked in; her arraignment was to take place later that afternoon. “Excuse me detective!” excitedly interrupted Esther rushing over to Monica. “Excuse me mam, why did you kill your son?”, as Esther said those words in not the softest of voices, the few diner goers present all looked over as if orchestrating. As coldly as anyone could muster a few words and then just spew them like a fan scream at a ball game Monica looked over at me and with a serious look in her face she responded: “He was not my son.”

Essay: Elementary contemplation of the Kardashev Scale

 In a simplistic way to view it, ignorance is the lack of knowledge or lack of desire for knowledge that is generally acceptable to be a productive/accepted member of society.

Humility simplified can be said to be the nostalgic feeling of loss we endure when we accept that we are ignorant; but have a desire to overcome.

Hubris simplified can be said to be ignorance running rampant.

To admit that I am ignorant is not difficult, I am. Yet, to think that humanity, with all of its advances has individuals questioning the curvature of the Earth, or the age of the Earth, that is rather lacking in humility. Science has brought us to this age we live in, yet some of us deny science. Though my degree is not that of a doctorate in any field, I must think that these individuals making claims aforementioned must have such degrees to assert such things. 

Self-aggrandizing in our decade is a rather interesting phenomena. I consider it being due to the rapid advancement of technological notions of electronic social enterprises; talk about an oxymoron. For a sizable community of individuals who purport to have a certain knowledge and then impart that knowledge by means of propagation in any or various forms, creates a medium for information to be consumed without filter. There is no problem in that if the receiver has the capacity to be or use a filter with which to process said data, as one would read a fable, and understand that reality is not within what was read. Fiction, I ponder, has taken a form that is alive in everyday electronic social medium rhetoric. 

To say that chatting online is a new enterprise is to ignore decades of instances where users used other means to communicate online via systems like mIRC, AOL, and others. In the late 1980’s, when I was first introduced to computers, huge amounts of kilobytes used by programs, garnering even megabytes of information, was something not talked about as computers were relatively new to the general public and its parts not well known. Small software programs took from 1 to many, even dozens of floppy discs (though there were other storing mediums at the time).  

Why the talk of humility, hubris, ignorance, social media and mediums, storage devices, and ultimately communication? Have you ever wondered about who may be listening? I’m not talking about some conspiracy where a government or persons are listening to everything we say (though I am not admitting or denying that). All of this communication, its methods of transportation from point A to point B, the power used to allow the powering of those devices, and etcetera, can all be transformed from one method of delivery to another. 

Have you ever heard an artificial intelligence voice come through the speakers of a computer? That was written data in a software somewhere that is now in the form of a signal of sorts that transports the data from one medium to another (let’s call it a wave). Think of a sentence in your brain that you now share with someone else. The information doesn’t necessarily change, the medium where it is carried does, from electrical currents in your brain to sound waves (or fluctuations) in the air. That can be picked up (and listened to if we follow the aforementioned notion). The concept here is, if the apparatus with which to monitor, pick up, and decipher information is strong enough, all data can be essentially shared, regardless of the storage medium that once housed it; that is to say, the quantity or size of the data would be irrelevant. 

What then does it mean, if a civilization in our own galaxy, has achieved modes of communication somewhat more advanced that ours which unlike our own listening arrays, are able to gather all this data and read it, or listen to it? From the days of West African talking to drums, to the telegraph, all the way to today’s technological upheavals like electronic social mediums all that data being carefully analyzed to discern what kind of planet this is, what embodies such a place, the types of communication it is able to achieve, how far or archaic are the modes of communication reception and expression currently in use, and etcetera.

Ask yourself, how would you feel after analyzing an entire civilization’s information regarding something called religion? What is religion to an outsider? Religion is categorized (in a simplistic notion) as a belief system. But, what else do we believe in? A lot actually. We believe in electricity for starters, and the list from there is quite long, from fundamental particles all the way to the complexity of the brain. How can you, if an unbiased outsider, read about belief and then read that there is a thing that sort of ranks belief in itself, but 8 billion habitants can’t agree in one belief? Does that mean that all the other things we believe in are just as ambiguous? If so, is anything in the record of information obtained factual at all? 

From the outside looking in, it appears that the data being looked at without a filter, without any background data with which to separate fact from not, and without context would be rather difficult. What if the civilization that now houses all that data does not have a thing called a fib? What then? Does it then mean that 8 billion inhabitants in this civilization all believe in all those innumerable entities? Does it then mean that this planet is both round and disc shaped? How can this planet be part of a galaxy that took billions of years to form but but simultaneously believe that the planet they reside in only took some 6,000 years to form? How can that outside civilization, without knowledge of people being able to hurt one another easily and without pretense at times as ours does, be able to understand any of that data without first analyzing it through a filter? That is just religion. Imagine when they get to the research on war. What a pitiful existence the beings of this planet must have where they wage wars on nearby countries for the sole purpose of becoming a bigger nation; especially when other historical narratives are very clear on how difficult (albeit probably impossible) it is to rule a large empire..

However, if the civilization is like our own, and has or has had wars, understands the subject of belief systems, and has or has had mediums of socializing electronically, how then do they look at all the data? I would be fearful of a civilization that is willing to wage mutually destructive war with means to destroy portions of the planet in which they live without regard. Yes, I would be very fearful indeed. To even think that a civilization (like ours) is able to mistrust one another to the degree we do, electronically hack and disrupt one another for no reason other than we can, spy on one another, and so forth, is certainly something that were I on the other side, receiving all this horrible data, I would pass it on with a note that this solar system and possibly the entire galaxy, is not to be approached.

Though only speculation, that is certainly one way to look at it. That civilization is one of beings that much like us have a relative lifespan and in the end would like to protect their livelihood, not necessarily by means which we think of protection, but by maintaining a clear distance while continuing to monitor. Then I ask, what if the civilization that first acquires this data is a robotic one? It is estimated, in some circles, that if humanity is to reach other stars, we must think about nanorobotics or other types of robotics which can seek livable environments for our civilization to survive in or simply to explore on our behalf. If so, it is feasible that a robotic outpost may be created as a relay facility if nothing else in order to ensure communication of favorable or other discoveries is shared at a faster rate than if no such system were in place. So, if these entities receive all this data, and begin to process the data, how will they relay the findings? Possibly by nothing that a world replete with beings able, willing, and already destroying themselves are searching for other places in which to do the same.

What if that civilization and others among their galaxies and even the universe are connected via say quark relays? Will this information about this system of destructive entities be relayed to all and become the center of understanding on how to judge other civilizations? Warring, peaceful, scientific, illiterate, enlightened, incomprehensible (inferior to illiterate), incomprehensible (far more advanced than themselves), and others? While I’d hate to think that we could or already are the bane of galactic nations that together stand in fear of a civilization (us) that can and probably would wage destruction on all others it finds the same or worse than it already does itself… it would be a sense of bewildering horror, shared by all involved while we remain the little dot Dr. Sagan so reverently shared with us.

If not much else were discussed, the communication between shared entities or civilizations may be primordial in advanced societies (compared to ours) where they help thwart space accidents by alerting one another of asteroids or other things that may be a danger to them and so on. A more utopian approach to scientific endeavors, shared knowledge, and the ever humbling sharing of information that can help their civilizations thrive and advance further; something our own may be unable to achieve in millennia (but even that may be wishful thinking). If nothing else, as it goes, this can be said to be nothing more than an elementary contemplation of the Kardashev Scale.

Essay: To be fed

Inevitably that day came, in pensive musing I then noted… Those who remained alive and saw the film The Matrix and thought, “that’s what the robots or artificial intelligence will do to us”, or the other camp that stood by the film The Terminator alluding that all machines would exterminate humans, would in this day look back, and in their misery, laugh as they were killed in what they felt to be unfair and incomparable to what they did. 

The machines found that humans, like other livestock, bred rapidly, especially when there were large numbers of them. So, they used the established methods of insemination to impregnate women and as for men genome manipulation to make them all female; males provided nothing to the robotarchy. Races of animalia were assigned no role and were allowed to repopulate fauna circles and in turn allow for the reparation of vegetation, and other areas of the Earth brought to annihilation by humans. 

Here I was pondering all this as one of the last males alive to become food. You must be wondering, why not just eradicate all humans altogether. The answer is quite simple and logical in the end, the rest of the carnivorous animals needed to be fed.

Essay: In the end

 As I erode in the trepidation of my recollection of all that was, I am reminded that all that was no longer is. To say the past is the past is—with no reverence to the melancholy of reality—a reality where everything changes once we look at it and as such it is merely colloquial; reality is much simpler in the brain.

Our senses, the one thing that allows us to comprehend our surroundings, is the one thing that falters during recollection. It is said that the brain is built for survival. As such, the archival process of memory can be said to be one where there is a warehouse of file cabinets where all that happens is taken in with a proverbial wheelbarrow to its final destination. Upon entering the warehouse, the wheelbarrow is tipped over and emptied, to be returned to the surface of now and bring it into storage in a perpetual chain. Yet, the information dropped off needs to be broken down to be placed in the respective areas where each sense perceived is stored. This, a chain of endless treks to nothing from the no longer or that which is and will never again be. There are 5 sections to the warehouse, each one belongs adeptly to one of our senses. Imagine your recollection taking the form of a young person with a bag rummaging through fallen aspects of things that were along the way, a way now paved in the muddy rivers of what can never be what was. The person fills the bag with what resembles that which looks like what is needed in order to put the memory back together for recollection and takes it to the front desk for the puzzle to be put together by, hopefully, someone adept at such a thing. 

How many sneakers have you seen in your life? How many while walking and looking at the ground as people walk and wear them haphazardly for your recollecting needs? What about during an online search, as a means of an example, when you ask for tips on what to converse about during an informal gathering and the search returns of a brand of sneakers called Converse? How many sneakers? See, when we try to recollect someone, sneakers may be the last thing you’re looking for; yet our survival-rigged brain needs that minutia in order to put together a whole of the puzzle we dare call memory. Can it sort through a whole section of your brain to find that one pair of sneakers in the visual section of the warehouse? A Converse is as good as an Adidas as long as the person is wearing sneakers. The brain does this for every aspect of a memory we wish to rehash. Here is the smell of Drakkar Noir you smelled on someone at a party one time, when what you were truly attempting to recall was a time at the mall when you walked by the cologne/perfume counter and smelled Wings on someone you wished to recall in the now. 

That being complex enough already is not enough. Some may say, I am not giving our brains the recognition it deserves for all the powerful things it does. I would say, “perhaps”. Yet, a Ph.D may say that something is uncompromising where a theoretical physicist may say, all things must adapt to that which we say we know, versus all the magic around us. To say that we remember anything is about the biggest lie all humans share in. We recognize the factors that were present at a point in time with the help of our warehouse and the lazy workers in it. But the facts, those only existed at a particular moment in time that will never be recalled again. If 100 people shared a moment, putting together the 100 recollections will get us over 9 factorial stories in the end, each with different colors, smells, scents, sounds, and how it all felt.

Thus, I digress in my erosion in the way to the next event I will never recollect, just as happy as I was before discussing how incredibly meaningless it all is in the end. To argue that one looks at the past in such a sense that the same mistakes will not be made, is just as big as any other  lie we choose to profess. Humans are nothing but predictable. Carl Sagan noted the Earth as a “pale blue dot” in a space of immeasurable size, an Earth where wars rage; wars that plague us  even today. Has war not ravaged the Earth long enough for any one person or group, nation or countries to understand that war is bad and therefore a mistake of the past that should not be reproduced? Predictable. We do what we do mostly because we want to; damned be that which is going to prevent me from accomplishing what I want, when I want, and how I want it; be it to err or war makes no difference. 

Returning to when I answered with perhaps, the brain, complex as it may be, still is merely the brain of a human, one that is unable to recollect with precision a mistake made in order not to fall where we once faltered. Even if that capacity were possible, what does it really mean in the end?

Essay: Palpable Reality

 I am man. The epitome of evolution of a species developed on overcoming in order to survive. Exemplified by the tyranny of those that befall me, the incarnation of evil. To maim, desmember, violate, exsanguinate, and so many other ways we have devised in order to establish our claim on living.  

To say that I, a human, am born a blank slate that can be molded is as big a lie as the inventive ways in which we beget monsters to act for us in times of need. Starting probably at the beginning of civilization by instilling fear even in children with campfire stories about beasts roaming about in the dark toying with prey before slaughtering them for their nightly meal, and fast forward to our present times when the same children are convinced that dying for their god—in a bombing—is what must be done against all whom are disloyal.

We continue to think in evil ways, beget evil with our actions, instill hate in our young ones, and often die happy knowing all that displaced hate will live on. We truly are the pinnacle of evolution. If all that lives must die, then we are the bane which will bring it all to its demised ending with our very hands.To think negatively about any one thing without cause surely is horrible, but what is most disheartening, is knowing of this desire to get rid of the weak for the strong to rule them. There must be order to things in some scenarios, to that I do not argue, but a form of chaos for the purpose of chaos is to be expected. In the case of homo sapiens, the chaos is a practiced state believed to be the outcome of ruling or being ruled. Darwin would be appalled. 

The rule of law has become a thought experiment in which if they are not with you they are against you enforcing a totalitarian thought regime without anyone batting an eye to that to which they’ve acceded to. We are labeled and judged accordingly especially by entities that claim to be of a religious nature to which judgment is generally left to their entity of choice. As such, I argue that those who participate in those ritualistic ways of thinking, by judging have, in their brains and by right of their beliefs, become gods of their own accord; for to do is to be.

Being positive is a choice as much as being negative is. What is not a choice is the killings happening all around us, the hunger which pains so many, wars where regular families become destitute and broken by loss of property and life, sickness that can be prevented if greed were pushed aside, and so much more. To be positive is to believe that there is as some say light at the end of a proverbial tunnel in a belief where righteousness will grant you access to some celestial kingdom of peace and love. That is certainly a beautiful thought, a fantasy of the highest order, and as futile as those who try to run when a warring faction follows them with, not desire to, but intent and willingness to end them in the most pernicious of forms.

Yes, surely being negative is terrible, but accepting reality is such an impossibility. To remove the blinders we have applied to ourselves while pretending to be the salt of the earth, negating to ourselves that we are the destructive force behind all evil that exists… truly remarkable that we blame some evil entity that lies in wait roaming about in the dark toying with prey, call it a devil if you must, but remember that humans are the epitome of evolution and as such the bane in their own very palpable reality. 

Essay: Curiosity Is To Them

 I found myself enthralled in a podcast today, just a conversation between two. However, in the midst of it, I found myself feeling attacked intellectually by a comment posed. That comment in the sentiment of, a person who loses their curiosity is dead.

I am ignorant, to that there is no question. Of that which I know there are equivalents today never-before known as all things continue to evolve; thus invalidating that which I knew for knowledge gained. That evolution is contingent, in a sense, to the curiosity of others. I have no qualms with that. 

Where I begin to falter is in my state of being. As someone who has suffered with depression all of my adult life, I find myself feeling undervalued, whether through self-inflicted negative-think, depressive idiations, or other without first having it had insinuated by others. That is to say, I am inclined to wonder as to the nature of things, but I am not curious about them. Mainly, my lack of will to live, as opposed to being curious and wanting (goal wise) to know or find out more or even learn about an it, surpasses any desire. As such, how is one (I) to wonder without being curious?

I wonder about the permanence of the universe. What is its composition? Is dark matter and dark energy a real substance therein? How far along the infancy of math are we given the complexities of all that surround us? While I wonder about these things, I do not wish to learn of them. As the plumber performs their duties, so do the physicists, and equivalently I do not. I partake in the wonder that is ignorance for its sake. I dare say that without ignorance science would not have strived to continue onwards; for curiosity may serve as a drive, but no less than the desire not to be ignorant; in the sense that within ignorance lies the answers and questions to further our knowledge because in the end, we are but a social animal that relies less in the end to curiosity than in the end to not being ignorant -amidst others.

While I say these things in ignorance, I can’t help but wonder as to the nature of the origin of that comment. Perchance the age of the individual who disposed of the comment as I do tears in my solitude. Age, as I understand, is a great agent to philosophy as well as other things like loneliness, the desire or fear to be forgotten, as well as the remorse of not having done this or that in a world where in doing or not doing those things may have facilitated events we regret. So, perhaps as a defense mechanism, to say that continuity relies on curiosity in fact aids in its prevalence amidst those other truths. Maybe not a defense, a technique with which to veil reality behind the notion of how this or that may help me/them continue onwards despite the body’s decay. 

The carcass that carries the brain which encompasses the thoughts of curiosity is the same that has carried my sorrow. To be curious and hopeful or curious and seeking is no more to them than to me is the sadness and darkness that accompanies me. Being curious to me would mean seeking goals that would be marred in the sadness of never becoming, or worse, something to add to the list of failures I have amassed. The never-ending agony is the I, in this state of depression where medicine, therapy, and the continuity of my attempt to be curious as to when I will be healed is no more a lie -to me- than my lack of curiosity is to them.