Randoms

I cannot tell myself to just blindtype my way through a session of blogging anymore. I don’t know what happened. It seems as if something snapped within me, something that made it easier for me to just write whatever came to mind. I type this with my eyes clothes, focussing on the words as they spew forward from the brain, flashing briefly before the darkness in my eyes and letting themselves be shot onwards to my fingers.

I haven’t written with a pen in ages. I remember talking to a poet who said he couldn’t write with a computer because for him, his pen was the normal extension of his brain, as if the two were one. I never made the connection between words on paper and words in the head this literally, perhaps mostly due to the irritating characteristic of my handwriting to become illegible soon after production.

Out in the desert, a boy is strolling around on his bare feet, leaving imprints in sand that vanish seconds after they are made. Step by step, he loses himself more and more in the void around him. For the first time ever, there is some real silence. No radiation, no humming from a faraway urban oasis. An ideal zero decibel.

This infinite universe of sand is clearly not bothered by its lone traveller. Sure, imprints are erased and grains of sand replaced/misplaced, but the natural order of the desert is always maintained. It knows that soon everything will be back the way it was and nobody will ever know that there was ever a traveller there.

The beautifully cruel coexistence between boy and desert must end, somewhere, sometime. But there will be others to take their place…

To convince

 “I want you to sedate me, insert a syringe in my veins, release millions of chemicals in my bloodstream and just let me be.”
“Sir, this is a bakery! Wouldn’t you just like a croissant or something?”
“Words, words, words! But tell me, are you alive?”
“Sorry?”
“Yes, are you truly, really alive at the moment?”
“…”
“No, you aren’t, which is why you might as well inject me with all the sedatives you sell, and do yourself a favour and give yourself a shot too!”
*takes out syringe, unwraps the sterile bag for the needle and hands it over*
“Sir, I don’t know what to do with this…. Boss! Could you come over here?”
(whispers:) “We’ve got another crazy one…”
“Oh, what’s it now? What do you want?”
“Hello, I was just asking your lovely employee if she could sedate me.”
“Listen! There won’t be any sedating here, not today, not tomorrow, not ever!”
“Well, if you put it that way, I might just have to pull down my trousers and urinate all over this queue of wonderfully unhappy people…”
“What?”
“It’s not difficult, either you help me get my kicks or else your clientèle gets it… from the hose, that is…” *looks at hose*
“What’s wrong with you?”
“Well, what’s wrong with you? SEDATE ME!”
“I wouldn’t know HOW!” (to employee, whispering:) “Call the police.”
“I’m willing to pay! Here’s a thousand euro, now fill up the syringe and let me FLY!”
“This makes no sense!”
*opens up trousers, lets trousers drop, slight arousal in the queue of customers*
(employee to boss, whispering:) “I wasn’t the tenth caller to the police, so I didn’t get through to the studio for my chance to win a police visit…”
(boss:) “LOOK, alright! What if I fill this syringe with some ketchup, would that do it?”
“KETCHUP? How old do you think I am? FIFTEEN?”
“OKAY, OKAY! What about detergent and bleach…? Mixed with… wodka? And some… ground up Xanax?”
“Sounds de-Lish! Chop-chop!”
*pulls up trousers, injuring self on foreskin with the zipper*
*94 seconds later, syringe is inserted into protagonist’s veins*
“There you go!”
“Thanks! That’s much better.”

*falls to the floor and dies*

*money is quietly put into boss’ pocket*

My universe is bigger than yours!

Currently, I am reading Stephen Hawking’s latest book “The Grand Design” (I actually had to look up the title on Amazon because I forgot what it was – the book is in the bedroom and out of reach) and finding it quite interesting. In an interview, he said the book basically provided proof that there is no God and also that there are not one, but several, possible thousands or an infinite number of universes.

I was intrigued of course and looked forward to future conversations with religious people (I was going to say “wankers”, but that’s hardly fair, considering the act of wanking is frowned upon by some religions) where I could just blow them away with evidence that we are, in fact, quite meaningless beings (which shouldn’t be depressing, oh no, it should be liberating if anything!).

One thing that also made me frown was his postulation about the number of universes. My first thoughts were: “aren’t you happy with just the one universe? Isn’t that big enough for you, or what?” My laymen’s mind was also struggling with this concept because it did not answer a basic question: if this universe is infinite, where would the other universes be, if they too were infinite? Somewhere along the line, they are bound to “meet” and share recipes or something (I hear universe D makes a chocolate mousse that’s simply divine!). I know this line of thought is simplifying things way too much, which is why I needed Mr. SmartyWheels’ theory about the subject, before I write him a know-it-all e-mail about a teensy-weensy little detail that he overlooked.

The book, being a “popular” publication, includes many illustrations, comparisons with footballers and even some cartoons and jokes (e.g. in a bit about consciousness: “does the Caenorhabditis Elegans with its 959 cells say: ‘that was a damn fine bacteria I had back there?’” – I had to smile doubly, because it was so unexpected to have humour in a book like this, but then I imagine him dictating this sentence in his computery voice to whoever jotted it down, killing all fun the joke could have been), but they help to lighten the sometimes, admittedly, somewhat boring content – e.g. a whole bit about particles and the trajectories they take; all very fascinating to some degree, I’m sure, but I want to get to the no-God and multiverse part!

I am about halfway in the book and I’m sure it’ll end with a…. big Bang (pun definitely intended), maybe Stephen will also tell me where to find those other universes, give me a map to them, or tell me where I can find the portal. Maybe he will end with a romantic thought: “the portal to the other universes is… in your heart, you must learn to love yourself in order to discover them.” Or maybe it will be a hate-filled message: “let us power the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland with all the nuclear energy in the world, and let’s also burn some Chinese children, so that we can create the biggest black hole in the history of our universe, so that we may destroy it faster, FASTER! Mwahahahaha!” (I am remembering the Doomsday announcements about the Large Hadron Collider when they were starting it up – what if those scientists’ REAL research is about wanting to see whether we live or die in a black hole? Then we are royally screwed! WAAAH! ABANDON ship…. err.. PLANET… err… UNIVERSE!)

I really can’t wait to read how it ends…

🙂

 

Pimping it up

My last couple of days have been spent with a text on hip and knee replacement surgery that focussed on some experimental drugs that help rotting patients from rotting too much and dying. The company, whose name I may not mention (lawsuits and such) but it is known for an erection facilatory aid and also for experimenting new drugs on poor African children (the majority of which ends up dead and too far away for anyway to care or file claims). 
It may not be 100% clear that the new drug is efficient, several tests have proven to be largely inconclusive, but all efforts are made to sell this new product to as many government bodies as possible. For a test study, some 4000 young people were found who needed a replacement hip or knee. I was quite baffled to find out so many younger people (18 – 35, but still) needed their hips or knees changed. Since the Company That Shall Not Be Named does not reveal any information about its subjects, we can wonder – given its history – if some Company officials went to Africa again to shoot some unsuspecting youngsters in the knee or hip and then do their tests on them. Well, in this case, a lot of them survived, so they have no reason to complain (and even if they would, who would hear it?). I think there is only one reasonable explanation: Doctor Mengele’s brain was harvested after his death and put at the head of this pharmaceutical company. 
Do I feel guilt for helping this company rake in billions with which it can bribe anyone who might rail against them? Maybe a bit. But the dominant sensation is boredom, though. You cannot date a medical research study, let alone sleep with it, kiss it and fondle it. Everything about it is just so… dull. Gory details are eradicated (how nice would a sentence like this not be: "and patient X’s hip was so full of puss, it exploded in the study doctor’s face, who then took his revenge with a nice dose of Our New Medicin! Hail to the Medicin!") and there is no room for originality (e.g. "instead of a placebo, we gave control patient Y, whom we had shot in the hip three times, a pill filled with researcher’s urin concentrate"). 
The more texts I read like this, the more convinced I am that the only reason we haven’t cured AIDS is that the research on the subject is just so boring. If I were a researcher, I’d just pick a subject to research with the least possible amount of publications, so that at least you won’t have to struggle through all that boredom. Lighten the text up, insert some jokes ("how many hip replacements do you need to qualify for free parking?" Answer: "Soup kitchen!"), insert a rhyme ("and there he was without a knee, the pill he got was filled with pee"), insert a pop quiz ("how many knees does a centipede have?"), use some cartoons, etc, etc…
 
They’ll probably never get it over at the pharmaceutical companies…  

*sigh*