Shut up juice

Was feeling sorry for myself the other day, as I sometimes do, and I took it upon myself to loathe in wanton self-pity.  Things weren't quite going my way.

So when thoughts of "Oh, woe is me" and "Life is so hard and unfair" creep into my mind, it only takes about five seconds for my so-called hard-knock life to remind me that there's a lot to be thankful for and there are plenty of others out there that have legitimate cause for complaint.

As bad as you think you've got it, as crappy as your day has been, and for all of your perceived problems, I promise you that somewhere, someone else out there is getting dealt a much crueler hand; like that elderly gentlemen who lacked all muscle tissue, who had crutches for extensions of arms and whose upper body was all contorted like a reject pretzel; or that child, the same age as your own kind, with leg braces and a cane; and what about that mom with the aluminum stick leg for a prosthetic?  You know, the one that someone honked at because she was too slow crossing the crosswalk (yeah, that really happened--there are some real quality people in this world)?

So just when I thought my day had turned to complete shit, and right on queue, life's karma pimp-slaps me with the aforementioned reminders that I've got it pretty good.  All of these reminders, mind you, in a fairly affluent community in one of the most advanced and richest societies ever known; say nothing of those poor bastards living in countries like Syria, Sudan, or North Korea.

So when thoughts of "Oh, woe is me" and "Life is so hard and unfair" creep into your mind, take another drink.  Down that boutique coffee store's coffee and feel thankful for what you've got, knowing full well, that somebody's got it worse and, for now, that somebody is not you.

My Glasses

Say something about my glasses.  I dare you.  Once, when I was 7, I broke an aluminum baseball bat over another kid's cast (yes, he already had a broken arm) because he called me "four eyes".  He had it coming.  Go ahead; make fun of someone because of a weakness, you can't help it.  It's innate.

Later, in second grade, my moniker reared its head again, this time with much different results.  I cried.  Standing in line for the school bell; I couldn't help it.  I couldn't help that I had stripes taped to the middle of my lenses to keep my eyes from pointing inward.  I'd worn glasses for longer than I could remember (since I was two) and now I couldn't hold it in any longer.

I tried to explain.  "I'm farsighted"  I said.  "Oh, so you can't see far away?" someone twitted.  "No (you dumb-ass), I can't see close-up," I replied, now getting emotional.  "Then why do you need glasses?" the grilling continued. Now completely balling and wanting desperately to end this discussion, "because I have a lazy eye."  (It turns out that I have a condition called Amblyopia, which I found out quite by chance sometime last week;  but you wouldn't care.  You can't see past my glasses.) Continuing to try to explain this to other 7-year-olds was proving fruitless.  Catching wind of the unraveling situation now developing at the back of Room 106, Mrs Hobson finally stepped in; I was a snotty, blubbering mess, but I had stemmed the bleeding for now.

Fifth grade was really the last time I ever heard about it.  Maybe everyone had gotten used to it.  Maybe everyone had outgrown it.  Maybe it was the fact that I punched a kid's face in on the school bus for telling me my eyes were all messed up.  "Now your face is all messed up", and nobody said shit after that.  No one could; I got contacts in seventh grade.

It turns out that contacts were not a good fit for someone with my hygienic habits.  I never took care of them.  I slept in them.  Contacts are terrible.  They suffocate your eyes.  The blood vessels in your eyes grow and expand while attempting to get more oxygen.  They grow across your pupil and blur your vision.  I didn't need them.  My self confidence had grown and I realized that glass could be cool.  Elvis Costello was cool.

I got some big, thick black framed glasses, just like Elvis wears.  Just like the BCGs that marines wear; and I rocked 'em.  They became my trademark. They became part of me and I was only reminded of the pain they had once caused me during drunken collegiate wrestling matches fueled by testosterone and alcohol.  Slapped from my face, they'd skid across the floor, and for a brief moment, time moved in slow motion.  My weakness was exposed.  My glasses, skirting a midst stomping feet and falling bodies, had to be saved.  I needed them.  I had become inextricably linked to something that, for so long, had caused me so much pain.  Now I wouldn't live without them.

Couldn't live without them (though they effectively do nothing to correct my Amblyopia; I rarely use my left eye at all--to it's detriment).  They have become a staple of my face.  I like my glasses and I think I'm going to keep them.

Persistence of Memory

Reincarnation is possible.  Not the karma-driven reincarnation that Buddha would have you believe, but chemically driven reincarnation.  The kind where your collection of chemicals reassemble themselves again to regain consciousness.  As Sagan put it, your "star stuff" can again become self aware.  It happened once, and though extremely improbable, it can happen again.

Why do I ponder such improbabilities, and if it's so improbable, why do I care? The answer is both simple and contradictory:  time.  I seemingly have had all the time in the world to allow my mind to wander far enough to arrive at this conclusion, yet I have very little time to do anything about it or to capitalize on my existing self-consciousness (life).  I run, and lately, I have been doing a lot of it.  The majority of my running happens several hours before dawn, in a pain tunnel devoid of humans, with clear views of the Universe, a few families of deer, and the occasional coyote.  The perfect venue to let my mind contemplate such obscurity.

Like it or not, all organisms are just ensembles of highly organized and complex chemicals, proteins, and electrical impulses working together for a specialized purpose: life.  Through millions of years, evolution has made us into the most advanced form of life ever known.  When we die, it will only take fractions of frames in the cosmic calendar to reduce us back into our chemical constituents.  In the process, our carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, oxygen, and sulfur are returned to Earth.  We are dirt.  Worm food; to be reused or taken up by other organisms; to remain useless bits of nondescript material tucked away in a pocket of the Universe never to be touched again; to be recycled into a polyethylene plastic bottle, or in the unquantifiably slight circumstance, to have your chemicals reassemble into life.  And even less likely, to return to life as Homo Sapiens.  Except this time, it is no longer you.

Herein lies the most painful and disturbing part:  except for regaining consciousness, becoming self-aware, and being human, you have no notion of your previous existence.  Chemicals have no memory.  You owe your current existence to an infinitesimally small chance.  You are you because planets aligned.  Pure chance.  For you to come into being again (in any form) would require overcoming equal or greater odds.  Even so, assume your chemicals in all their complexity are able to reassemble into human form.  Now further assume that this reassembly happens in the very next generation.  You are reborn into a world which still contains your friends, loved ones, and your offspring.  You potentially walk the Earth side by side with the very same people that you brought to be; though you (and they) would never know it.

No recollection.  No memories of your previous life.  Nothing.

Having made it this far, you should consider yourself one of the lucky ones. Perhaps if you are really lucky, your star stuff will be reborn into that plastic water bottle; leaching yourself into its contents to be ingested by another human, made part of their DNA, and passed on to their offspring (and for your sake, I hope this person isn't a total douche bag).

...but chances are that this is the only shot that you'll get.  You will only live on through the memories of others, and even then, for only a generation or two. Your life is in their memories.  Make them count.

Frog Poaching

There's a parable out there that goes something like this:  If you put a frog in a pot of boiling water, it will jump out.  However, a frog in a pot that is gradually heated will be peacefully unaware of its surroundings and will be cooked alive.  This metaphor often finds use in describing a reaction to change.  Abrupt changes are met with an immediate response, while gradual changes, playing on our innate ability to forget and acclimatize, often go unnoticed.  Not being one to accept things at face value, I decided to put this to the test; not metaphorically, but literally.

My local pet store was more than willing to oblige; PetSmart was running a special on Northern Leopard frogs at $14.99, buy one get one free!  Perfect. Two frogs in the bag and I was on my way, but not before the clerk tried to sell me on a small terrarium for my two little buddies.  She seemed overly concerned that these two find a good home.  Not wanting to blow my cover, I reassured her that I had just the place for them.

I rushed home with Hippity and Hop, as I had named them, riding shotgun.  As I drove, I began to formulate the method for my experiment.  I would begin by testing the second part of the anecdote; Hippity was going in first.  He was quite at home in four inches of room temperature water and a pasta-pot, but homeboy knew something was up as soon as I cranked on the burner.  The gig was up and Hippity was having none of this.  No longer sitting on the bottom, he swam around the pot faster and faster as the temperature rose until finally climbing up the side and leaping out.  That wasn't supposed to happen!?  Like any good experimenter and wanting to ensure that this was no fluke, I repeated the test, this time with Hop.  No difference (though Hop proved to be a trooper--that little bugger lasted way longer than I thought he would before bailing)!

Hop had the extreme misfortune of being first up in the boiling pot part of the experiment.  I set the burner on high and got a solid rolling boil going.  After I was sure that the water was heated uniformly, it was time for Hop to perform his best Greg Louganis impersonation.  Plop--in he went!  I stood back, half expecting a scalding frog to come jumping back at me.  Not so much.  Hop gave a few kicks but the temperature proved too much for him.  He nearly instantly went stiff as the life fizzled from him.  By the time I got him off of the burner and out of the water, he was all puffed up like an amphibian pierogi or something.  Weird!

Even weirder was the outcome; the results of my experiment were completely contrary to that of the parable. Who knew?  So, the next time that jerk in your office uses this stupid analogy, you can tell him how I dispelled that myth.  As for Hippity, I opted to return him to the store.  What was I going to do with a frog anyway?  They give me the creeps.  Someone else can get some enjoyment out of a slightly used $7.50 Northern Leopard frog.

Mind Blow

How about a not so little thought experiment?  One that will leave you not only questioning your being, but the existence of everything that there ever was.

Take the smallest things in the known universe; the molecules, atoms, protons, quarks, bosons, muons, and those that are still not known. Now grow them into peptides, proteins, RNA, and DNA capable of replicating themselves in cells which divide and multiply to form life-forms of all kinds, some with seemingly infinite complexity.  This is you (though you probably don't think of yourself this way).  You (we) are nothing but an assemblage of chemicals that have gained consciousness of themselves and their surroundings; having gained consciousness, we are able to think, ration, and reason.  Formed from the Universe's common elements, we have come to dominate the tiny dust spec that we inhabit.  Because of our self-consciousness and our pretend dominance of Earth, we deem ourselves kings of our dominion.  The one and only intelligent being.  Masters of the Universe. Humble yourself.  Look skyward.

Those dots you see are other stars.  Starting to feel small?  If you live in the right area, you may see what appears to be a strip of clouds.  That is an arm of the ten billion year old Milky Way, our Galaxy, and there are many like it in our Universe.  It is even suggested that there are many universes!  Fifteen billion years ago events, as we know them, were set into motion that lead to life as we know it.  Though it likely exists, the laws of physics may prevent us from ever knowing if life exists elsewhere (it likely does--although it may not be as we know it).

Why did it happen?  Where did the original matter for the Universe come from?  What was going on before that?  When does it end?  Where does it end?  What about the other universes?  Can we find another suitable place to continue our menial and ultimately doomed existence?

It has taken us about five billion years to get here, and if our species lasts that long, we will have about five billion more to figure it out.  It will take our descendants 30,000 years to travel to what is thought to be the next nearest habitable corner of the Universe.  The odds that we would come to exist were staggering, but the odds of something like us not existing somewhere else are even more staggering, but can we make it there?
Suddenly our understanding and mastery of our surroundings seems horribly lacking.  Pathetic.

Ohio: A picture montage

Fate

I killed a black snake today; I know, terrible isn't it?  I like snakes, but this one happened to be six feet long and was meandering slowly along my winding route home.  As a general rule, I do not swerve to miss animals and don't get in my way when I'm driving home from work. I'm pretty sure that I got it with both tires, though I don't think it died quickly.

As I drove away, I could see it writhing in pain in my rear view mirror. Flopping and twitching on the hot tarmac, this snake was destined to suffer a fate of: slowing being cooked on the South Carolinian asphalt, being eaten by buzzards, possums, or wild boars, or getting the mercy-kill from another passerby.  I contemplated turning around and doing the latter myself, but that would've delayed me from getting away from work as quickly as possible.  So as I raced for home, my contemplation soon shifted to that snake's fate.  That snake was snuffed out early.

While I don't think wild animals' life expectancy is anything like that of domestic animals, I doubt that Mr. Black Snake awoke on this morning thinking "today is a good day to die."  In fact, I'm sure it was quite the opposite.  One wrong move and nature's course of history was changed forever, but are we that different from the snake?  Sure, we're our own sort of wild-domesticated animal; engrained with preserving ourselves, but no longer hell-bent on survival.  We're all going to die sometime and hopefully we can make our peace beforehand, but what if we happen to be as unlucky as the black snake?

I first became aware of my fate at a young age.  I pulled the string on my sister's explanation of the dinosaurs' extinction and the ball quickly unraveled.  I wasn't going to be six years old forever and, as it turns out, I wasn't even going to be around forever.  I've recently become more conscious of my own mortality and, quite frankly, it sucks.  I'm never going to get to do all of the things that I want to do.  At some point, my being will abandon those that I love and leave them with only memories. 

Live life to its fullest, leave nothing to chance, and have no regrets.