There is a chill and I feel it whenever I close my eyes.

Nothing comes in through the plastic in these walls; it must be surreal.

The fact is, I can’t explain everything. Not everything always corresponds with facts. I don’t know why this is, except to say that it makes sense. At least there is an internal consistency with the unknown.

We have a handle on some things. There are some things we know. For instance, we know that the universe is an ever-expanding sphere that has continued to grow ever since the Big Bang.

Actually, we don’t know that anymore. Researchers have recently decided that the data shows that the universe is likely contained within a soccer ball-like sphere, with the surface being composed of equally-sized panels. They don’t have any insight yet as to what’s on the other side.

Things change so rapidly these days. I can’t keep up. And I don’t want to, either.

Let me know when you’ve got it all figured out. Tell me about the universe and God and creation and ghosts and time travel and the dinosaurs when you really know. I don’t want to spend my time learning theories, and I don’t really think that my kids should waste their time learning this stuff as if it were the gospel truth when all it really is is someone’s interpretation of filtered and flawed and incomplete data. If you’re going to teach it, at least admit that you’re just pretending. Teach us for the advancement of our theoretical minds, not for the notion that we’re getting the real story.

I don’t know where I was going with this.

Three years ago, a time traveler from the year 2036 visited our time and answered hundreds of questions in internet forums. He showed us his time machine and gave a brief explanation on the theories upon which it was based. At least from a theoretical standpoint, it made sense. He left in 2001 to go back to 2036, to an America that was (is, will be ?) very different from the one we know right now. I didn’t see that on CNN. But I did see coverage about a shipload of plutonium that never existed.

A hundred people died in a boating accident in Nigeria over the weekend. If that had happened in France, I’d be telling you something you already knew. And we don’t even like the French.

If we don’t know what’s going on in Africa, how can we claim to understand what’s going on 10 trillion light years from here?

How can we even explore what’s going on 10 trillion light years from here unless we can commit to learning what’s happening an ocean away? We’ve got a lot of fucking nerve, if you ask me.

The human mind can grasp quite a bit, yet we focus on dealing with things for which there is no evidence. We try to piece together bits of bones from reptiles with brains the size of a peanut who lived hundreds of millions of years ago just to make cool models in museums but we seem to have no interest in learning why a suicide bomber straps himself to a pack of C-4 and wanders into a restaurant full of children.

The only explanation for the suicide bomber is that he (or she) must be crazy. But we know for damn sure what the dinosaurs ate for breakfast a hundred million years ago.

Even though it’s chilly, sometimes sleep is what I need.



- posted by seanmh @ 2:17 PM