i spend a lot of time thinking about...
i spend a lot of time thinking about…
I spend a lot of time thinking about a lot of time.. and how we don’t have it. One way this manifests is that I have a fascination about the end of the world. Why not, we were all told it was gonna go up in flames as soon as the clock ticked down to July 5, 1998… or was it the party at theend of 1999.. or no, it was 2000 or 2001, i can never remember which is the real “first”.. maybe it’s December 21, 2012.. or January 19, 2038? wait, what about Halley’s Comet.. no the next time… with the cities dark we’ll surely be able to see it then. I’m sure the planets will align somehow sooner or later. Anyway you put, whether the world ends because we lose the clocks keeping it all in sync or because we bake our selves out of existence, or we blow ourselves up with bombs or designer diseases, anyone who lived through the end of the 20th century had to have spent a little bit of time thinking about the end of the world, even if it was to think that people who were worried about the end of the world are a bit crazy. I have to admit that when I was watching the New Year’s eve going into Y2K, and they showed all the lights still on in Australia, then New Zealand, I thought “How do i know that there is power three miles from that place? I almost got online to see if I could find some Aussies on IRC for a”first-hand” confirmation that everything was still OK. But unless we travel around a lot and see what is really happening somewhere else, we really don’t know what’s going on elsewhere. Big buildups in China? I kinda have to take the word of someone , but ultimately it’s all on trust. E-mc2 is just a fairy tale until you see it happen yourself, and so is much of the rest of science. For most people “science” is just the latest mythology that they’ve been handed by some authority. Have you ever taken a piece of rope, made a circle using it like a compass so the length of the rope is the radius, and then made sure the radius went 6 and a third times to to make it all the way around the circle? I think about the stuff they taught me in school and reconcile it to what I see. How come when I look down an east-west road on the solstice it looks like the sun goes further north than me and yet I am not in the tropics? (i understand it’s some trick of spherical geometry, ’cept I kinda lost interest in math at about trigonometry) I think about the position of the Moon in relationship to the Sun when I look at it in the sky (in case you didn’t know, when the moon is “full” the earth is basically in line between the Sun and the Moon.. for just a moment, then we are basically coming out of it. Oh, and there really isn’t any dark side of the Moon, just the side you can’t see… Does anyone else read anything interesting in the fact that the moon turns in exactly the right speed so that we don’t see that one side ever? What is she hiding anyways? Aliens could hide there if they really wanted to. i think about dumb stuff like what would it look like if my home was experiencing a famine. They keep saying that it’s gonna get warm and the wet parts are gonna get drier and the dry parts are gonna get downright inhospitable. How quick is that going to happen? Will I see it? By that time, it’ll be a little late to distribute survival hints by … um.. what medium? But I have some idea about what a global famine would look like because I watched “Soylent Green”. And I have some idea of what a police surveillance state looks like because I watched and read “1984” (does anyone read that or does the title just make it seem outdated now?). “The Postman” showed me how establishing communication between the inevitable islands of surviving enclaves of humanity when it becomes impractical for physical travel. I wonder how long the satellite systems will stay functional, and who will be talking to them anyways? What will people do if the polar ice caps all melt and nothing but a little bit of land? Will we jump back into the water like the whales and dolphins did at some point? By looking at end of the world films, I can get a glimpse of what people would do if some of these scenarios were to come to pass, and perhaps what some folks could be doing to survive. And some doomsday scenarios come to pass, as the people of New Orleans learned. Today it’s New Orleans, but what will we do when NYC becomes Venice and Venice becomes Atlantis? At least someone is thinking about these. Yeah, there’re lots of books about it but who am i kidding? i am of the first generation which had color television from the get go, of course I gravitate to videos and movies. J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, the prophet of the church of the SubGenius preaches that the world will end on July 5, 1998. That day, X-Day, is when THe Men from Planet X will arrive in the flying saucers with the Sex Goddesses to pick up the SubGenii while the rest of the world is destroyed. That that date seems to be in the past is just evidence that Things Are Fundamentally Broken and that we don’t even know what day it is, so the end could come at any time. Given all that, why delay anything? There’s no guarantee of a tomorrow or even today’s sunset.