On Batman

Another one of those times when I'm thinking way too much about something totally trivial.  Maybe it's good to let my mind wander on silly things for a minute.

Batman is seventy five years old.  That means most living Americans have spent their whole lives with him as a character.  After all that time, he is still insanely popular, even though he's becoming more and more antiquated as a character.  Everyone knows the story about how his parents were murdered and from that day forward he vowed to fight against crime.  Depending on the story, his parents' murderer may or may not be found, leaving even the greatest detective a mystery that cannot be solved.  I actually kind of prefer the time when it's not part of some greater conspiracy and is instead a random act of senseless violence that shook the city to its core.  The murderer was some sad, desperate person who resorted to murder more out of fear than anything else.  Then they were gone into the night, not realizing the thing they unleashed.

Gotham is supposed to be a stand in for the city of New York, although it's apparently a darker version of it, whereas Metropolis is the shining beacon of hope that shows what the world could be.  Never mind that they have Superman, who can solve most problems before they become problems.  The basic idea about Gotham is that the city has become so corrupt that its rotten to the core.  Every story talks about how organized crime really runs things and the police are all on the take.  If it's really a stand in for New York, that's basically saying that in a city of eight million people there are only two kinds of people; criminals and victims.  Somehow criminals have taken over ever facet of the city and anyone who opposes them is corrupted or destroyed.  Even before Batman arrives there is really only one police officer who is willing to stand up to the corruption and do the right thing.  So in what would likely be the biggest police force in America, out of over thirty thousand police officers, there is only one guy attempting to stem the tide of evil?

So Bruce Wayne dedicates his life to becoming the perfect instrument to fight against crime.  He does this by traveling the world and learning to become a ninja, because that's the most reasonable way to counter corruption in your home.  After a decade away, learning untold secrets that will help him on his crusade against injustice, he comes back to Gotham and teams up with his butler to start his one-man attack against the concept of crime.  Using the icon of something that scared him as a child, he dresses up as a bat and calls himself Batman, which may be a little on the nose if you think about it.

His real power comes from his willingness to do whatever it takes to fight against crime, except for using a gun or committing murder himself.  I get that if your parents were murdered by a gun, then you'll probably have an aversion to them, however, throwing razorbladed metal bats at people's faces, using explosives, and breaking bones with your bare hands probably isn't much better than shooting a small piece of metal at high velocity into someone in order to stop them.  Regardless of his method of choice, he's still one man fighting a fight, he knows he'll never win.  The stories keep making sure to point out that Bruce Wayne is a billionaire and uses his vast fortune to supplement his war on crime.  It seems like a drastic misuse of resources to have an armored car outfitted to look like a bat, a super computer that only he gets to use, and various pieces of tech that are necessary as the story requires.  He has the money and influence of Elon Musk and uses that to put on a cape, drop down into alleyways and punch out bad guys.  That's his war on crime.  It's like fighting cancer with aspirin.  Bruce Wayne could probably do more good with his money as a humanitarian than as a crime fighter.  At the very least he could use the money to make organized crime irrelevant by buying them out or creating opportunities for people that would mean crime would seem like the more risky option than the legitimate one.

Most of the time Batman is defined by his villains.  He lives in a city that has been driven so insane that it creates literal monsters.  It could be that his very existence helped create them.  It's almost as though he showed Gotham that it's OK to dress up like a lunatic and do whatever you wanted.  If you don't want to be just another widget in the system of criminals and victims then dust off that purple suit and name yourself after a playing card.  At least that way you'll stand out from the crowd.  Those crazies aren't even the real threat, they're just the most colorful.  The Joker is going to release a hot air balloon of poisonous gas on the city and only Batman can stop him?  What about the Gotham police force, the National Guard, the FBI, or the NSA?  That would be an act of terrorism and they're able to stop a lot of those plots long before they start filling up the balloon.  Try checking the abandoned fairgrounds on the edge of town.  That would leave Batman the ability to fight actual corruption.

I get that he's a fictional comic book character.  After seventy five years though, you'd think there would be a way to make him relevant to today's world, instead of constantly rehashing the same story over and over again.  What would someone with his willpower and resources really be able to do if he stopped and rethought his strategy on fighting crime.  That's probably where most people get lost and realize that it's a lot more complicated of an issue.  There isn't some evil Court of Owls that secretly controls the whole city.  Instead it's just people doing whatever they think they can get away with.  Since that would require a lot more nuance, we go back to the well of having a man dressed as a bat showing how bad ass he is by breaking the face of that would-be rapist.

On Halloween II

It occurred to me that this Halloween will be the last of its kind.  For the past several years there has been a constant question mark about what to do for Halloween.  Should we dress up and go to a party?  Should we stay home and hand out candy to hapless children brave enough to venture towards our house?  Maybe instead we should just scamper off into the darkness and be devils.  That's this year.  Next year though we will have a built-in reason to celebrate holidays in a different way.  Granted the tiny little person we bring with us won't be capable of saying 'Trick or Treat', but I'm hoping that her inevitable cuteness dressed as something easily recognizable and yet vaguely ironic will prompt people to dish out candy with abandon.

Halloween is one of the few American holidays that really attempts to twist reality a bit.  It's meant to be fun and feel just a little bit dangerous.  For a kid it's a bit like a scary movie coming to life.  Dress up as something else and go out in the world and ask for sugar door to door.  Who knows if you're going to make it back in one piece or more importantly, who knows how many boxes of raisins you're going to get stuck with.  I thought my days of dressing up and asking for candy were behind me, but now there is a chance to make a comeback!  As an adult if you dress up and go trick or treating it's very likely that you're going to get yourself arrested or at least not given a full share of candy because everyone knows you have the ability to just go out and buy the candy yourself.  As an adult if you dress up and go trick or treating in a combined costume with your child then at the very least you'll be entitled to 25% of said candy earnings throughout the evening in question.

I think the part that will be most interesting to me is trying to see the world through the eyes of someone who doesn't have my level of experience.  I don't pretend to understand all the various aspects of this world and probably know only enough to be dangerous.  I'm not the smartest guy in the room, but I'm also not the dumbest.  That said, I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on some of the basics about what can exist and what can't.  A child doesn't know that the goblin attempting to ensnare that hot girl in a bikini (what on Earth are they watching?) isn't real and is based on someone's imagination.  The lines of reality and fiction are still being formed.  What was a normal street in the morning is now something sinister in the evening because Halloween blurs the lines of reality ever so slightly.  Someone changed the rules for one night.  Never mind the fact that as parents we constantly try and warn our children about the dangers of strangers.  Then on one night we say it's OK to not only interact with strangers, but to go house to house asking people we don't know for candy.  It's the only holiday we celebrate where it's expected that you wander through your neighborhood relying on the good nature of your neighbors.  The other major holidays are more focused on turning towards the people you already know and celebrating the season.  For a child it's probably a strange paradigm that really speaks to the way we as a society has separated ourselves from each other.  Or it's about the candy.  Yeah it's probably about the candy.

On Superman

The thing I find most interesting about Superman isn't so much his fantastic powers, but more what he chooses to do with them.  I suppose it's fairly common to fantasize about what you would do if you could have super powers.  Now there are probably people out there who would immediately try to find a way to make these powers benefit themselves, because what's the point of being super if there isn't some kind of payoff?  So maybe using these powers to get a lot of money or a lot of sex or even more power aren't out of the realm of possibility as far as top on the lists for most people.  On the other hand there would be people like Superman, who would see these powers as a sort of responsibility to do more than just fly around and be rich.  Everyone knows what Superman is all about.  He's there to save the day when the day needs saving.  Helicopter about to fall onto that field trip of little kids with puppies from the shelter.  Superman will swoop in and protect them.  Bank robbery where the goons have robotic weapons attached to their bodies and are about to take hostages.  Superman will put a stop to it and make it look easy doing so.  It's a comic book world so the stories have to be fantastical to keep our attention.  Here's a question though.  Is what Superman does every day really a good thing?

Sure saving those kids from becoming street pizza is hard to argue against.  And bank robbers should probably be stopped, even if there is FDIC.  Still what if the person he saved today was someone that wasn't supposed to be saved?  Without getting too far along into the Final Destination scenarios, what if that person was supposed to die?  Their time was up and while it would have been sad for those who knew them, it was part of the natural order of things.  Instead you have this alien wearing a cape with a God complex coming into the situation like a red and blue monkey wrench and changing everything.  Sure you could argue that if they were meant to die then they would have.  Still someone or better yet, something, like Superman changes the rules for everyone and everything around him.  He's an anomaly.  On his own planet he's just like us.  Fragile and susceptible to the world around him.  On our planet thought he's a super man.  He can barely be hurt.  He defies the laws of physics.  And if you believe some of the stories, he may in fact be immortal.  A being like that stepping in to save someone from a runaway train is like us diverting the course of a river to save a few insects from getting washed away.  A chain of events were set in motion and possibly had a purpose and was then interrupted by a huge X factor.

The other problem with Superman stepping in to save someone from a fatal situations is that once he's done it enough times people will start to expect it.  At first people will continue to take every precaution that they normally would.  Wearing a seat belt.  Putting on a helmet.  Not juggling that running chainsaw while riding a unicycle blind folded in busy traffic.  When Superman comes along to save them from an accident it will be kismet.  He was supposed to be there to save them from harm.  Eventually though the expectation that Superman will be there to protect them will override other safety precautions.  The construction worker doesn't bother to tie himself to the support beam because if he falls Superman will swoop in and save him from falling to his death.  At this point Superman becomes like a parent who is there to catch their child before they fall.  In this way people will never know any sense of danger.  Sure they may be scared at the time, but in the back of their mind would they just assume that Superman is coming at any minute?

No matter how fast or strong or well-intentioned Superman is, he's still just one man.  He can't be everywhere at every time.  Even if he were running at 99% efficiency when it comes to saving people there would still be people falling (literally) through the cracks.  So how would someone like that have time to have a relationship with someone or hold a day job as a journalist?  I don't know much about journalism, but I do know that when they write things, they tend to have to do some kind of research beforehand.  That takes time.  Superman is going to allow that burning building to continue destroying lives while he gets the quote from the mayor about the upcoming budget talks?  How would he even be able to take off the costume if there is something happening every minute of the day?  Maybe he just focuses on Metropolis and only gets involved in the really big events that are worldwide?  The guy can fly around the globe in minutes so for him knowing something terrible is happening across the country or the world would be like looking across the street and seeing your neighbors house on fire and thinking it's too far away for you to do anything about.  Everyone he doesn't save would either be a conscious choice or a failing on his part.  It could be he'd have to start doing triage in his head.  If I save this commuter train from derailing then I save 250 people, but if I save them then the 45 miners caught in a cave in will die.  Does it become a numbers game for him?  And would he start having to make judgement calls on who he saves and why?  Would it be women and children first and maybe people who are known to be assets to the human race?  At this point isn't he essentially playing God?

At this point wouldn't he have so disrupted the natural order of things that everything would be contingent on where he was and what he was doing at any given moment?  The things he would be changing are based entirely on what he chooses.  Would mankind still be in charge of their own destiny with someone like him around?  Granted Lex Luthor is a megalomaniac, but his point about Superman isn't wrong.  Having a god-like alien around stops us from achieving our own fate, for good or bad.  We are often defined by our failures, sometimes more than by our successes.  Only after we've seen the error of our ways or have lost something do we really understand our potential to overcome.  Constantly being protected is comforting like a security blanket, but in the end it starts to do more harm than good.  I'm not saying that I wouldn't love to have a real life Superman around, if only for the sake of knowing that someone like that could exist, no I'm saying that we should be our own superman and work on being more than we currently are.  Capes are optional.

On Missing

It's a strange thing when something you own goes missing. While it may in fact still exist in some way, the fact that you can't find it makes one wonder where it goes until you find it. As a kid some of my favorite things were lost forever. For what seemed like an eternity I wished that I could get a specific Transformer. This Transformer changed from a cassette tape into a black panther. Now I know it's not the most logical choice for a robot trying to maintain a disguise, but the heart wants what the heart wants. Finally I was able to get my hands on one. I played with it endlessly until one day I did something terrible. Our house had floor vents where the heat came up. They were slatted in such a way that they could be closed to stop air from coming in, but on this day they were wide open. The thing with a slat and something shaped like a cassette is that my child brain couldn't stop itself from inserting the toy into it. I still remember the horror of realization of what I had done as the Transformer leaped from my fingers and slid into the ventilation system. I immediately tore the cover off and stuffed my little arm as far down the vent as it could go, but it was no use. My toy was lost. For weeks I would periodically check that vent, in hopes that maybe by some miracle my toy would return to me, but it never did. For all I know it's still rattling around somewhere in the old house, waiting to be discovered. Another part of me thinks that maybe at some point it simply ceased to exist and no amount of searching would ever find it.

I loaned my favorite GI Joe to someone, going against my better judgement, and when I asked for it back he said he "lost" it. Now while it's true I think he was lying in order to keep what was mine, I often wonder if that action figure exists anymore. Sure there were probably thousands of that kind made back in the day, but what happened to mine? Where did it go? With energy it's believed that it cannot be destroyed. It can only be transformed. I doubt the same rules apply to toys from my childhood. Maybe they're both sitting in some landfill. Maybe somewhere someone has them and is thankful someone like me lost them in the first place. Maybe they somehow managed to get recycled in such a way that they became something else. That's the problem with things that go missing and are never found, we just don't know. For us their existence simply stops.

If you think about all the things you've ever owned in your life and how much of it is no longer with you. Old toys, old clothes, old furniture. Things that once were so important to us are gone, usually to make way for something new. As I've gotten older I've made a point to try and give away things rather than throw away what I no longer have a need for. I'd like to believe that someone out there got a little bit more use out of it before finally having to pitch it into the garbage. I've talked about heirlooms before, which seem to fall into their own category of item, even if that classification would be hard to describe. What about older letters or old photos? At one point it was important enough to put pen to paper and record the thoughts of the moment. The moment is gone and all that remains are those words on some crumpled paper. If that paper is lost what happens to the thoughts that were associated with it? Are they both lost into that endless void where all lost things seem to go?

Maybe it's a little arrogant to think that just because we can't see something it doesn't exist anymore. Then again our reality is the only one we know so until proven otherwise we are bound by what we can interact with, so on some level it doesn't matter where it is if we can't perceive it. It's entirely possible that we're not meant to find certain things once they go missing. It's also possible that there are things in our lives that we're only meant to have for a short while before they move on to wherever they're headed. It's very much like the people who pass through our lives. They don't cease to be when they leave our lives. Maybe those inanimate objects that tumble from our grasp are off living a whole other life beyond us. I'd like to think that's possible.

On Crazy

They say if you're crazy then you won't know you're crazy. You'll just assume that what you're thinking is perfectly normal. I doubt that's always the case, but it's probably strangely comforting to most people out there who have bizarre thoughts and hope they haven't crossed over into lunacy. Still it's probably hard to know exactly at what point a person goes sailing off the edge of sanity. Like many things in our lives, it's a subtle change over time. Just look at how you think about things now. You probably didn't always have the same exact thoughts meaning your current point of view could be a relatively recent development in the way your mind works. Sometime in the past you believed something that you don't anymore. You may not even know at what point you changed your mind. I'm not talking about something like the existence of Santa. It's usually something more fundamental in the way you perceive the world that shifts throughout your life. Next thing we know it seems like it's always been that way and we accept our new reality as fact and move on with our lives, hardly remembering how it was before.

The thing is we tend to take a lot of what constitutes reality for granted. Never mind the fact that reality itself is hard to define. So in a way reality becomes this mutually shared experience that everyone sort of agrees upon after the fact. While it's happening though it's different for everyone. The same event is viewed in diverse ways and after it's been processed by everyone we come to a general consensus about what happened. That is assuming everyone's perception isn't skewed in some drastic way. Imagine if you woke up tomorrow and everyone except you believed that the sky was green. Not only that, but in their minds it's always been that way. The idea of a blue sky is unheard of. Now for you you have memories of a blue sky and your personal reality is suddenly counter to the shared reality. In that situation who is right? How do you know you haven't taken the first step towards going crazy?

In movies there are those times when a character finds themselves in a situation that defies logic. They're talking to someone who isn't there. They feel insects crawling over their body, even though no one else can see them. While we're watching these scenes we can't help but ask the question "How would you not realize what you're thinking is crazy?" On the outside it seems obvious that what's happening isn't real. Why would aliens from the planet Zersus-7 be trying to read your thoughts through your toaster? When you say it out loud it sounds crazy. To the person it's happening to though it seems real. It may seem crazy to them at first, but it doesn't take long for something to become the new truth. Like I said at the beginning, we've all had beliefs change over the course of our lives. We believe that our thoughts are the truth. To someone else it may seem irrational, but for us it's our reality. Each of us knows a person who has done something that made no sense. Most of us know there have been times that we ourselves have done something that made no sense. At the time it seemed right. Later we come to our senses and realize that our thought process was off in the weeds. What if we don't ever come to our senses though? What happens if despite all indicators to the opposite, we continue down that chain of thought? The people around us my start to question our ability to navigate reality.

Of course there are times though when our brains try to put the brakes on something that seems to be bordering on false. Again in the movies they like to do this when some unbelievable situation comes smashing into a person's reality. The waitress is suddenly being chased by an evil cyborg from the future. Aliens have invaded and destroyed every major city in America. The dead have risen and have a taste for human flesh. These are all situations where initially the mind is going to reject the premise and try to find a more reasonable explanation. How do you know what you're experiencing is real? Sure you just saw robotic overlords set the ocean on fire, but the same brain that sees that could believe that you're actually Napoleon returned to life in order to finally win at Waterloo. How can we ever truly distinguish what's really happening compared to what's happening within our mind? We hope that someone else can confirm what we believe to be true and that more people accept it as fact. It's when someone's perception is in the minority that it gets labeled as crazy. We like to believe that the majority opinion is the right one when it comes to the acceptance of reality. If each of us is experiencing our own version of the world at any given moment then how can there ever really be one unified reality? Does that make us all a little bit crazy to someone else?

On Tomorrow

Tomorrow has the potential to be a fantastic place. No one can ever really be certain about what tomorrow will bring, but the possibilities may seem endless. Now it's true that today can be a pretty good indicator of what's going to happen the next day. Sometimes though we have no idea what's in store for us. For some that can be a great source of hope. Tomorrow might be a little bit brighter. Tomorrow could reveal the answers we're looking for. No matter what happens today, tomorrow will come. The promise that the days will continue on regardless can be something of a lifeline for people to hold onto, giving them just enough strength to make it through today.

While it's true that tomorrow can be a promise of better things, it doesn't always deliver or live up to our expectations. Take a look at old movies or books and you can see how people dreamed the world of tomorrow would be. Flying cars, colonies on the moon, or robots doing our chores for us (ok the Roomba is close on that one). Some of these ideas are more fantastical than others, but they all held out hope that by the time we got to this point things would be better. Now I'm not saying that things are disappointing because yesterday's tomorrow doesn't live up to the expectation. It's just that it makes one wonder what stopped us from living the dream. Were those ideas about what could come next so far off because they were based on incomplete information? Did we see what was already a reality and built on it in such a way that it would be impossible to achieve?

Back in the mid-80s people liked to believe that by 2005 we'd have major technological advancements, but if you compare the world of 1985 with today it's really not all that different. At least not in the way that we expected. Computers are faster and smaller. Still the general idea about the computer is relatively the same though. It's a series of circuit boards processing 1s and 0s. Today's computers may have more processors and memory, however, they're still doing the same exact thing, just better. The automobile hasn't managed to get off the ground and still runs on gasoline. It can get miles to the gallon and they're generally safer, but a car from twenty-five years ago could sit next to one that was built today and get the same general results.

Nostalgia is all about looking back fondly on the past. We remember how things used to be and maybe make them out to be greater than they actually were. In the end though the past is just a memory. It's already happened and the only thing we can do is hang onto what was. With the future though it's anyone's guess how things will actually turn out. It's that bit of the unknown that keeps us moving forward. We don't know how things will be so we are only limited by what we can dream up. Now like a lot of dreams, reality may not always get there. At least not on the timetable that we'd like. Someday we may have flying cars, but it's more likely that tomorrow we'll have something completely different. The idea of a flying car will seem antiquated. The holdover from the past's vision of the future. Fifty years from now the things we're dreaming up today may seem like quaint ideas based on the little information we have now. The differences between yesterday and today can seem both small and great at the same time. For some it may seem as though the promise of tomorrow wasn't fulfilled. For others it's just the beginning. Tomorrow isn't so much a destination, but an idea to always be traveled towards.

On Purpose

There was a show once that had an episode where everyone in the world not only believed in past lives, but remembered them as well as they remembered yesterday. The main character of the story was the only person who didn't know his own history. In the end he helps people forget their past lives so they could move forward with their current one. I had a similar story idea where instead of past lives, people knew exactly what they're true calling was. This might seem like a good thing because there are many people out there who feel lost. They don't know what they're supposed to be doing and a little bit of guidance would go a long way. The problem with knowing though is that maybe your true calling wasn't something awesome. Maybe it was something you were meant to do, but at the same time it felt wrong because it wasn't something you or those around you hoped for. Instead of being a great musician, you are a seamstress. Much like the show about past lives, the main character would help people forget their calling and just experience life as it came to them. That meant there was a chance at going through life without always having a clear sense of direction. A past life or a true calling, they both could be viewed as a sort of destiny. Destiny can imply there is a lack of free will because it's meant to happen regardless of what we do to prevent or enable it.

A true calling is an interesting idea though. It would mean that each of us has a purpose in this world. Only a few get to figure out what that purpose is though. And it's hard to say if we ever really know our true purpose in this world. Is it really our calling or just the one that we've created for ourselves? Maybe it comes down to belief. If we believe that we're living up to our real purpose then maybe that's all that matters. We've all heard stories about someone who was great at something who at one point could have made a different choice. The writer who could have stayed as a carpenter and may have been entirely happy with that choice, but wouldn't have gone on to write the great American novel. I suppose it brings up the question of by which standard is someone's true calling really judged? To the outside world it may seem like the author has found what he was meant to do. To the author's family it could seem like a frivolous way to make a living. To the author himself there could be the longing question of 'what if' that sticks with him, regardless of how successful he has become. Just because we're good at something doesn't mean that's what we're supposed to do with our lives. Sometimes our talent towards something is just that. I don't believe that people are singular in their abilities. We're all multifaceted. Sometimes in ways that even we don't understand.

It also got me wondering about what other people know. When you meet someone for the first time you may not know what they know. In fact in most cases you can only have a partial understanding of everything they have experienced. The person you passed on the street could be a geneticist or a computer programmer working on artificial intelligence or a mind blowing artist. On the surface they may be very similar to you or me. They watch television or laugh at funny pictures of cats, but they have a deeper understanding of something you may never fully comprehend. Thing is that in a lot of cases the same could be said about you by someone else. We tend to take for granted the knowledge we've acquired. The lifetime of experience we've gathered up serves as reference for everything we will do. The question is though, does that knowledge always serve to lead you towards your true calling, if there is such a thing?

Are we put here for a reason or are we just the eventuality of cosmic chance? Given the size of the universe and its age, it's hard to really comprehend how all the complex things must be in a specific order for each of us to be born. Life as we know it could be considered a miracle since for as far as we can see out into the abyss, there is only us. That's not to say there aren't others like us out there, we just haven't been able to find them. Could be that somewhere out there is another miracle. So if our life is by some sort of design that would mean we each have a purpose in this world. If that's true then how come only a few of us ever really figure out what our calling is? Could it be that our purpose is to search our entire lives for it and not find it, so that those who do find their purpose have it mean that much more to them? Seems like a really inefficient ratio of undefined purposes in the world. This gives more strength to the argument that maybe there is no grand design to the universe. That everything and all people are guided by nothing but chaos. Those that do find their true calling are more fortunate than they can imagine because they are the exception. Maybe there is no such thing as a true purpose, only the purpose that we create for ourselves and those around us. Maybe we define our own route through the universe, regardless of if there was ever a plan for us or if it's all just a collection of random events colliding with each other.

On Under the Sun

It's been said that "This has all happened before, and it will happen again." That can be kind of a strange concept for some people because we'd like to believe that our lives are distinct and what we're doing isn't something that's been done before. The thing is though it's entirely possible that there is nothing new under the sun. If you think about it everything we do now is influenced by what we've done before. I'm not just talking about a single person, but the whole of humanity. It's next to impossible to escape the influence of not only our world's history, but our genetic history as well. If that's the case then could it be there are no more truly unique ideas left to be had?

Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure for the person who is out there right now dreaming up things the world has never seen before it must seem like no one else has had the same thought. There are close to seven billion people on the planet and each of us has a entirely exclusive view on the world. So while each of us experiences the world slightly differently than the person next to us, the law of large numbers implies that there is a small chance that somewhere out there someone may be thinking exactly what you're thinking right now. Granted that person may have already thought of it long before you were born or they could be a baby at this moment and will grow up to eventually have the same exact thought that's going through your mind at this moment. If that's possible for one person and a single thought, then wouldn't that mean every thought or idea can also fall under the same concept? Is everything we do, say, or think just a derivative of what's already happened before?

Do you remember the first time you fell in love? Maybe you had heard about it before or even seen it with people around you, but it wasn't until you experienced for yourself did the notion really take hold. Depending on your age it could have felt like not only were you experiencing it for the first time, but no one else in the history of the world felt what you were feeling at the time. The thing is though, people were falling in and out of love for thousands of years before you caught up to it. At the time it was the first moment you ever felt anything like it and for some of us every relationship is just a variation on that initial feeling. Even our idea of love is guided by how we felt the first time. If that's the case then can love be a new feeling or just a recap of our first experience?

There is an old myth about a patent office commissioner, who on the eve of 1899 becoming 1900 said that everything that could be invented had already been invented. That there was nothing left to discover or create. Humanity had reached its apex. It's an old story told usually to prove that no matter how far we think we've come, there is still more to discover. I don't disagree that a hundred years from now people will see and experience things we couldn't even dream of. The people a century from now may look at those wonders and take them for granted, in very much the same way we regard email or traveling thousands of miles in a matter of hours. Those things are commonplace to us now, but there was a time when they were only dreams. Still an email is just a message from one to another. The means of delivery have changed, but not much else. Those boys were the first to have controlled and powered flight and flew over a hundred feet. Within ten years airplanes were delivering packages. Within twenty years there were commercial flights for those willing to pay. The Wright Brothers are given the credit for being the first and many took their ideas and went to the next step. Still the Wright Brothers weren't the first to conceive of the idea of human flight. That had been dreamed up long before they got around to their tests.

There is an idea about the universe known as eternal return. The general idea is that the universe is made up of a finite amount of matter. The matter has a limit, but time itself is unlimited. From this the universe has no starting or ending state, because the matter that makes up the universe is constantly changing its state. Since the number of possible changes is also finite, eventually the same state will recur. This really all means that time is not linear, but it's more cyclical. All that is a complex way of saying that the universe is in a constant state of recurrence. What has happened will happen again given enough time. The whole thing can call into question the idea of free will. If everything has already happened or been done before by someone else under similar circumstances then are our choices really our own or just a matter of eventuality? Then again maybe it doesn't matter if it's all been done before and will all be done again afterwards. For us, at this moment now, it's new and unique. Maybe that's the only thing that matters.

On Monsters

What makes a monster monstrous? Sure it can be something overt like tentacles coming out of its mouth or an extra set of eyes that seem to stare straight into your soul. The thing is both of those traits can describe several species of animals, which are nothing close to monsters when you really look at them. They're just different. Sesame Street and Pixar both have shown us that monsters may not be as horrible as they first appear. Like a the Solifugae, it may look strange at first, but in the end it's just an arachnid that does what arachnids do to survive. For us it may seem strange for something with multiple legs and eyes building a web or paralyzing its victim with venom before devouring it alive. Yes, that may seem strange, but is that really worse than a species that keeps animals trapped in cages their entire lives, only letting them out so they can be slaughtered and turned into tasty treats we often can't finish and ultimately throw away? Who is the monster then? Much like the whole discussion on evil, maybe a monster is just a matter of perception.

I like the idea of monsters though. With it being that time of year, I've started thinking about what it is that makes some monsters frightening while others just seem boring. I guess it comes down to what scares you. It's been said that one of the scariest things out there is simply the unknown. Or as FDR said "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." That could be taken to mean that fear is somewhat self-generating and perpetually building upon itself. So it could be argued that the scariest monster is the one you never fully see because your mind is going to fill in the gaps and scare you more than anything else lurking out there.

In that idea there are some monsters that are scarier because they're small rather than because they're knocking over a skyscraper. Some people have an irrational fear of spiders or other various bugs. Sure if Cthulhu showed up in Time's Square they would be frightened, but it's the little things that freak them out. With a giant lizard or butterfly attacking it's necessary for it to show of its strength by smashing something. Now if you happen to live in the apartment building next door then that's a pretty good display of power and is probably frightening because most people don't want a build to land on their head. After that initial display of power though you kind of know what to expect and can really plan the rest of your day. Chicago is in ruins so don't go into the city today. Avoiding large monsters is theoretically easier for those not directly under foot. With the little monsters like bugs or viruses you can't always see them, but you know they're nearby. If a giant cockroach attacked New York City most people would get the hell out of there or at least know a general direction to head away from. Now if billions of mutated regular-sized cockroaches started feeding on people's faces where could they go? Let's face it, even though they've cleaned up the city quite a bit, there are cockroaches all over. They will probably outlive us in the event that we get into a nuclear exchange with North Korea. So there are millions of monsters hiding just behind the wall and no matter where you go, they are there.

Of course that's not to take away from the big guys out there. We live in a time where the largest land animal is the elephant. As far as I know elephants pretty much eat fruits and vegetables and like to play in the water. There haven't been too many reports of herds going on a rampage and attacking villages in Africa or India. Now in the ocean that's a different story. I love the water and feel very comfortable near and in it. Still I understand that most things in the water would love nothing more than to eat you, or at the very least bite off a piece of you before deciding if they're going to eat you. The largest creatures in the water are whales, who seem to be pretty content to eat some of the smallest things around. I suppose to krill a blue whale would be Godzilla, but to us we like them so much that there are CDs of whale songs out there. Anyway my point is that we have no concept of something large wandering around that treats us as food. The dinosaurs are long gone and are probably the basis for a lot of the large monster stories we have today. T-Rex was probably something you didn't want to see racing towards you. We know a lot about him now though. Remember what I said about the unknown. The more you know about something, the less frightening it seems (well in theory in anyway). So we know more than ever before about what dinosaurs did when they were walking the Earth. Ultimately they are just animals. Granted they were really large animals. With that knowledge we take it to the next step. What is T-Rex was bigger? What if he never died? What if he got exponentially smarter to the point that he could operate a rocket launcher?

We take the things we know and add our own imagination to it to create something that scares us. It makes me wonder if monsters are required for us as a species. We need the idea of them out there for some reason. The problem is that we have plenty of monsters that wear human faces and it makes me wonder if maybe we use monsters as a way to consolidate our fears into something we know isn't real. There are plenty of things out in the world that we should be afraid of. A monster is a fun way to get scared. In that regard maybe monsters aren't so bad after all.

On Dreams

When you're dreaming, are you alive? That question has always stuck with me because it got me wondering where we go when we're dreaming. I suppose technically we're still here, but we've gotten lost in our own minds. In most cases we can't control our dreams and are more or less just along for the ride that our subconscious has laid out in front of us. We have no control and it's essentially required reading. Our minds need to dream in order to function properly. There are a lot of theories on what our dreams mean or how they're constructed. It could be they're simply a mash-up of our conscious thoughts combined with those tiny thoughts that hide in the back of our minds. Together they are molded into some kind of narrative that we are able to understand. Well maybe not always understand, but at least recognize. Some people believe they have a handle on what specific images mean in dreams and maybe they're right, but all things mean something else to the individual. Animals in a dream may typically represent something for most people, but for someone with unique experiences regarding animals, it may mean something entirely different. Granted we all have unique experiences with anything in the world so then how can there ever be one set reference guide to what something in a dream means?

Notice that no matter how vivid your dream is, it tends to fade quickly once you're awake? It's almost like you're not supposed to bring it back with you to the conscious world. It was only meant for that time when you're asleep. There was a time when I tried to capture my dreams in a journal when I woke up, hoping to look back on them with eyes that were awake. The problem is that for me a lot of my dreams can't be relayed into words. They tend to be images shaped by thoughts and emotions and attempting to put them into words would be an exercise in futility. Plus not every night resulted in some seemingly cosmic journey through my deepest thoughts. Some nights were mundane, just like there are some days that pass by with little to look back on. So once again the dreams are only visible at night like fireflies.

Have you ever attempted to explain a dream to someone else? It's a lot like the problem with writing them down, there is so much lost in translation. You may get the basic plot out, but the impact it may have had could be lost if they don't share the same ties to the subject matter as you. There is a difference between reading about a tornado's destruction and living through one touching down near you. You can never fully share the whole experience with someone else unless they've been through it as well. So what's really going on when we're dreaming? Is our mind trying to tell us something? Are the thoughts of the day being sorted out after hours in a way that will make sense to us in the morning? If so then why do dreams seem to lead to more questions?

I mentioned how dreams fade, but there are a select few that stick with us for some reason. Life is made up of experiences that we carry with us. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. We carry them all with us, but we only consciously remember a handful in comparison to all the memories we have stashed in our mind. What's special about those experiences that we choose to remember? In some cases it seems like there is no choice at all. We simply remember it while other things get filed away, even if we'd prefer to keep them up front for easy access. I've talked about how perception shapes memory and what we remember may not always be exactly what happened. In the end it may not matter what exactly happened because we lack the ability to go back and verify one way or another. So we're left with only our memories to guide us through life, regardless of if they're accurate or not. If you were to try and classify experience it could be narrowed down to a few categories: real & factual, real & perceived, or manufactured. I'm simplifying of course, but ultimately the events in our life once they pass can be broken down into those groups. You can look back on yesterday and review the events of the day and say to yourself everything was real & factual. Next week, next month, or next year could you still say that? Somewhere along the way those memories get pushed aside to make room for new information. So what we once were so sure of as being real & factual get shifted into real & perceived without us even knowing it. There could eventually come a time when even that is called into question and we start to wonder if it was all just manufactured by our minds. If that can happen with so-called "real" memories then what's to say that the opposite couldn't be true? What started out as a manufactured experience eventually is regarded as something that was real. After a certain amount of time can our brain even tell the difference anymore? In a sense the dream becomes reality.

There is another kind of dream though. It's not the kind that we only experience when we're asleep. It's the hope we have for ourselves. It's something we wish for, even if it's not achievable. In some causes those kinds of dreams can haunt us long after we originally thought of them. They can be the driving force for some people's lives, which could be a good thing. Once someone looked up at the sky and wished they could fly. Instead of just accepting that it was a dream, they went on a mission to make it a reality. It just shows how powerful our minds can be when a simple idea alters the world around us. The sad part about these kinds of dreams is that they too can fade given the right circumstances. Dreams, like memories, can get lost in the shuffle. A child can dream of becoming an astronaut and eventually forget that the dream was ever there. Instead it's been replaced with something else. Maybe something that seems more achievable or less whimsical. Not ever dream can be realized, in fact most probably don't. Reality takes precedent over those fleeting thoughts. If a person created the means for people to fly based on a dream then what's to say that our dreams can't also shape reality? Maybe the limit is only there because we put it there.

On Trapper Keepers

Whatever happened to Trapper Keepers? I know it's not true, but it feels like when they stopped being useful to me they simply stopped being made. There are a lot of memories about those middle years of school, but the one constant were the various Trapper Keepers I owned. Each one was like a marker for that school year. In a way it stored all the memories and events for that year.

Like most kids I loved summer, if only for the fact that it meant I didn't have to go to school for three months. It was a way to break out of the structure of school and enjoy some freedom. At least from a kid's perspective that's how it is. When we're children we don't always realize the fact that three months out of school means that our parents had to sort out what to do with us that whole time. So when it came time for us to return to school there was a bit of celebration for parents. Finally we were a problem for someone else to deal with. Being the little nerd that I was, when it came time to go get school supplies I was usually so excited. I remember going to the store and looking at all the new folders and brightly colored pencils. There were lunch boxes with new designs that I didn't even know existed and once I saw I just had to have. It didn't matter how lame my lunch may have been, but I had to eat out of a Fall Guy lunch box. While looking through all the supplies I would try to imagine all the situations where I would get to use them. The pictures I would create with my colored pencils. The mistakes I would remove with my handy eraser. The idea of what I could do with them sometimes was better than what I actually did with them.

I wish I could tell you that it was a thoughtful process deciding which Trapper Keeper I would ultimately use for the year, but in most cases it came down to me grabbing what was the most visually appealing at the time. Sure there were several second guesses and in some cases I would literally drop what I was doing and run back to the stand to switch out what I picked with another. In elementary school we had music class for an hour. I'm not sure if they still do that anymore. I don't think it was every day, but it happened several times during the week. We would stop whatever we were doing, line up, and go the music room to spend an hour with Mrs. Aune. Her room was like magic. First off, it wasn't shaped like a normal room. It was oval and had levels built into it like a stadium so we could look down towards the center of the room where her piano was. On that piano she always had what I thought were the coolest toys. Throughout the room there were pictures of music. At the beginning of the school year we were told to bring in a folder. This would be our special folder. I'm not entirely sure what we actually put in it other than it was paper. Every year I had a hard time picking out that folder. It had to be special because she said it was special. Back then I still believed in things like a special folder that was good. Those folders weren't used every day. Most of the time they were stored away in a closet behind us. Only on special occasions did they get pulled out and passed out. It was those moments where I would just stare at my folder because at that age it was easy to mesmerize me with just a picture. Actually it's still easy to do that to me, but usually it's a different kind of picture now.

When I was picking out my folder or Trapper Keeper I would often wonder who it was that came up with the designs and pictures. Obviously they were aimed at children and meant to promote other products like whatever cartoon or television show that was popular at the time. Those folders were fine enough, but found myself drawn to the more abstract designs that were created by the mystical machine known as a computer. Sure those folders were mass-produced and there was a chance that another kid picked out the same design as you, but it seemed like those designs were unique. Or at least my combination of designs was unique to me. As children we sometimes allow inanimate objects define us. Actually I guess as adults we allow that as well. My Trapper Keeper was an expression of myself, even if someone else had actually created it. I carried it with me every day so it was an extension of me and my thoughts.

I'm not exactly sure when it happens for other kids or when it happened to me, but somewhere along the way I stopped putting forth as much effort into my school supplies. I became less concerned with form and more focused on functionality. Finding those folders with the unique designs was no longer important to me. A plain red, blue, or green folder served the same purpose. A Trapper Keeper was eventually replaced with a binder or the individual folders were just tossed into a backpack and pulled out as needed. That trend continued on through high school and into college. I wonder if that was because the work we were expected to do was more serious or were we allowing ourselves to become more jaded about school? The container was less important that the contents because the older we got, the more our school work started to consume us. Sometimes I would miss those designer folders that were stashed away for special use only. It reminded me of a time when I thought school was almost magical in the possibilities that it offered.

On Music

Music is kind of a special thing for me because more and more I realize that I need it. When I go a day without hearing some kind of music, the day seems to have been missing something. It wasn't always that way though. I'm not entirely sure when it happened. I suppose like most kids I grew up listening to whatever my parents were listening to. For some that can be downright painful. I'm pretty thankful that my parents listened to stuff that I liked. I grew up with Pink Floyd, Queen, and Journey. Most of it was on vinyl because back then cassette tapes were only just starting to appear, so the music had a unique sound to it that I think has been partially lost with today's digital age. Part of me misses the pops and scratches that came along with those songs. As a kid I just assumed it was part of the song. I think in a lot of cases music captures a certain time for us. It's almost like a Normal Rockwell painting, in that it recalls a nostalgic time that maybe didn't exist exactly how we remember it, but the music brings us back there anyway.

As I got a little older I started to stray away from what my parents were listening to. I found that the music on the few radio stations just wasn't my kettle of frogs. This was the 80s so you can imagine the type of music I'm talking about. If you like that sort of thing then good for you, but for me it was like listening to someone strangle a baby elephant. There was only so much Poison, Def Leppard, or Cinderella I could listen to before it all started to sound the same to me. At the time it felt like there wasn't anything I wanted to listen to so I did the only logical thing I could think of at the time; I just stopped listening to music all together. Sure I would hear the occasional song if someone else was playing music. I just wasn't actively looking for anything and mostly didn't care about music.

In high school each classroom had a television in it. This allowed for the faculty to broadcast various things on the closed circuit system. In the mornings students were able to get in front of the camera and basically do the morning announcements. Often they'd have some extra video or music before or afterward. For the most part these were things you could watch without thinking. One morning in freshman algebra they played a video from some band I had never heard of before. Some stringy blond haired guy was singing about the world's worst pep rally. When the video finished my algebra teacher said "What the hell was that?" That was the question alright. Before that moment I had never even heard of the band Nirvana or that music like that could exist. It was like a whole new world was opened up to me. I know that may sound like I'm overselling the impact of Nirvana on the musical world, but for me they were a big deal. I would imagine there are moments like that for a lot of people. It could have been they first heard The Beatles or Metallica. It's at that moment that you realize the world you thought you knew had so much more to offer.

From that point on I wanted to know more music, even if it didn't sound like what I heard just then. Not long after I bought my first CD, which I bought from a guy on the bus for ten dollars. I listened to AC/DC - The Razor's Edge over and over, not because it was exactly a great album, but because it was my first CD. It started to snowball from there. New music just kept appearing seemingly out of nowhere. All the time prior to that I had just assumed what was being played on the radio was all there was. My friends became a great source for new types of music. Every time I would go to their house it seemed they somehow gotten a hold of some strange new band I would have never even known to look for. Most of this stuff wasn't the kind of thing that they played on any radio station we could pick up. It was up to us to go out and find it on our own. Even now when I see my old friends they still manage to challenge me musically, playing stuff that I had no idea was out there. One of my oldest friends is a DJ so it's kind of his job and passion to discover new music, something I still haven't found a knack for.

At one point I got the idea that maybe I wanted to create music. My friends, who were infinitely more musically talented than me, were playing guitar and drums so I figured I should try something. I managed to convince my parents to buy me one of those electronic drum pads for Christmas. It didn't take long for me to realize that I had no musical talent. When I was in elementary school they put me on triangle because I couldn't play anything else. As for the drum pad, I might as well have been standing on the back porch banging pots together and yowling like a cat for as good as I sounded. I resigned myself to be more of an appreciator of music than a creator of one.

I've talked about the state of FM radio today. It hasn't changed that much since I was a kid. If a person only listened to what was playing on FM radio they would be missing out on so much music that's hiding out there. I'm not saying all radio is bad. For the past ten years I've been listening to the college radio station in Boulder (shamelessly plugging Radio 1190). While I don't like everything they play, they have consistently played music that I would have never heard otherwise. If I had to choose only one source of music for the last ten years, they would have been it. It's nice to still manage to be surprised by music when sometimes it feels like everything has been filtered down to appeal to the lowest common denominator.

On the First Half

One of the things I really like about Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds is that it had the potential to be an entirely different movie. The entire first half of the movie plays more like a screwball romantic comedy rather than a horror movie. And because of that it feels a little bit more real when something actual does go wrong. Too often in movies there is very little setup before the main event happens. Some try harder than others, but for the most part you're just waiting for the new ice age or aliens to come busting in. In doing that it's a lot more difficult to care about the characters because they are just props for the action rather than fully formed people experiencing something. Horror movies tend to be even worse about this because more and more there is a kill before the credits start rolling. Someone possibly famous meets up with a grisly end, which is supposed to prepare us for what's eventually going to happen to all the other characters in the movie. So by the time you meet Perky Girl #2 and Douchebag #5 you already are trying to figure out how exactly they're going to get butchered.

With The Birds the movie could have kept going without ever actually having the birds attack. They didn't even need to change the title of the movie since the first meeting of the two main characters centers around a pair of love birds. So when the first attack happens it's actually kind of jolting because you almost forget you're watching a horror movie. Now you get a sense that these real characters are going through something unexpected. Even Full Metal Jacket did this to some degree. The entire first half of the movie is about boot camp. You know that it's eventually going to be a war movie, but in order to get to that you have to experience what they experience. For them boot camp was its own kind of hell. The actual war was just a change of scenery. Granted most people feel that you could stop watching the movie after Private Pyle takes care of things in the bathroom. The rest of the movie is a pretty standard war movie. The only difference is that you've been with the main character through some horrific events before he even went to Vietnam. Few movies are able to successfully pull this off though. More often than not any attempt to do so comes off like a movie is confused about its own type. Is this a romantic comedy with some paranormal elements or a paranormal movie with some romantic elements? Ultimately it should be a movie about real people, the backdrop could be really anything as long as you believe the people aren't just caricatures.

Sometimes I wish you could remove the titles from a movie. Imagine going into War of the Worlds without the initial narration and titles. It's some movie about Tom Cruise and his two bratty children. Extend that a bit, showing that they are in fact people living a life not entirely predetermined by the fact that aliens are going to burst from the ground in about fifteen minutes. Then when the storm comes it's a little more shocking. Hey wait, there are aliens in this movie?! Love it or hate it, the show Lost did a good job of that right off the bat. When I first started watching it I had no idea that it was going to have all this mystery. I thought it was just a movie about people who survived a plane crash on a tropical island, which in itself could be a pretty interesting concept. Then all of a sudden there is something huge and probably monstrous moving through the jungle. What was already interesting just got even more so because something completely unexpected happened.

In today's age of nearly instant information it's difficult to hide anything from moviegoers. I remember as a kid my parents decided to take me to what was supposed to be a cute holiday movie. This teenager gets a strange little creature as a pet and cuteness would ensue. That movie was Gremlins. The previews made it seem like the whole movie would be about a boy and his mysterious little friend, kind of like E.T. When the mogwais started to change into gremlins the parents in the audience started to get worried. This was not the cute holiday movie they had been promised. Then creatures are attempting to chew faces and getting blown up in microwaves. As a kid I thought this was awesome because I had no idea it was coming, that and I was a kid so the grosser the better. Gremlins or a movie like Gremlins couldn't come out today and have the same impact. The internet, the movie trailers, and even the MPAA pretty much tell you everything that you're going to see before you see it. I know it must be hard to try and promote movies today without giving away the store. Here's a hint though, you don't try to convince a person to watch a porn by showing the climatic gang bang scene in the trailer. You do that then they have no reason to pay for it. Then again today's audience have attention spans that can be measured in nanoseconds so if you don't grab them quick, you might not get them at all.

The other issue with today's movie is that there is a big push to stick with brand recognition rather than something new. You say "Harry Potter" and people will know exactly what to expect. You say "Percy Jackson" and unless you read the books, you have no idea what that's supposed to be except that it's probably a Harry Potter ripoff. It just goes downhill from there. Imagine if they tried to make Star Wars today. Would it be successful when you've got so many other well-known science fiction franchises? So when you go into a Saw movie you know that no matter who you meet no matter the circumstances, you're probably going to see them caught in some elaborate trap that threatens to dismember them. Sometimes that's what you want though. You don't go watch a Saw movie for a thought provoking look at the horror genre. You go to see the new fancy trap that rips the skin off someone's face and feeds it to them. I think that's why a movie like Audition is so disturbing. You may have been told it's a horror movie, but the first half lulls you into thinking one thing and then smacking you with another. I guess the question really comes down to if people want to be blindsided by a movie's true intention. I'm sure a lot of people would rather know what they're getting into because there is a bit of safety and comfort knowing that you're going to watch a monster in space movie. I just wonder how much more effective the plot would be if you didn't see it coming. It's a lot like life in that regard.

On The Maker

This isn't to go into the various iterations of God, but rather the idea that there is something out there that created us, or at the very least influenced life. When I was young I believed in the Christian version of God because that's how I was raised. Then as I got older and more cynical I stopped believing in anything. Everything felt like chaos and there was no reason why anything happened, good or bad. The idea of God felt like a fairy tale told to children to keep them from having sex or doing anything worthwhile because it scared the old people. While I was in college I entertained the idea that aliens planted us here as a sort of experiment. It seemed as likely as some mythical man in the clouds who essentially created man out of nothing and woman from pieces left over. Lately I've been starting to wonder if there isn't something that could be beyond our understanding. Something that operates on a level that makes us seem insignificant, which if you think about how large the universe is, really isn't that hard. Most people have heard about the near mathematical certainty that life exists elsewhere in the universe. Just the sheer number of planets that are out there indicates that something somewhere is also alive and possibly asking the same questions we are.

I can imagine thousands of years ago there were events that couldn't be explained. It's human nature to question things and try to understand the world around us. So with the lack of definitive answers, ancient man came up with his own about how things were made. At the time it was impossible for them to grasp the idea that Earth and everything on it was just a speck in an endless ocean of space. Certain things must have seemed like magic. Magic is really just science we don't yet understand. Look at all the things today that we pass off as impossible or label as paranormal. In a thousand years we may have a better understanding of our reality. I'm sure there will always be questions or things that defy explanation. I think that's really the nature of things. So the concept of God was created to help explain the unexplainable. Who knows maybe there is something to those beliefs and something is out there. I just don't know that anyone has ever gotten it completely right, if they were even close in the first place.

If there is something all powerful out there then it's probably so incomprehensible to us that our brains may turn into jelly trying to understand what it is. Plus maybe it's not all powerful, but to us it might as well be. I've talked about our perception of time being a major limitation for us. Imagine if being omnipotent was really just able to see time in both directions. For us that would be god-like. Add to that an understanding of how reality could be shaped by those experiencing it and you'd have something so much more evolved than us we'd look like sea monkeys to it. We as a species like to believe we're so advanced and compared to everything else on this planet we may be. In the grand scheme of things we're pretty young and might as well be a teenager telling our parents how the world really works when we have no idea what's out there. For all we know there could have been whole civilizations that have risen and fallen a billion years before we crawled out of the mud. If that's the case were they "made" by the same thing that created us? Is that what God does, goes around randomly making new life and letting it do its own thing?

I'm not saying it's impossible for something to have created us, but imagine the power something like would have to have. Do you honestly believe that something like that would care about what we do on our little planet? Its motivations are beyond alien. It would be like us giving a crap about some microbes on an ant hill in Africa. What happens to them has very little impact on our daily lives. In fact most of the time we're not even fully aware that they're out there until something points it out to us. Plus there is the possibility that The Maker didn't really make us at all. Maybe instead it just gave us a little nudge and that was enough for us. If you think about it, what's more likely, that an ancient being created us as a fully formed human and didn't imbue us with more than a rudimentary understanding of the world around us. Or that through a subtle manipulation of events and circumstances it was able to ensure that life was able to spark on this planet, which by most standards should have been just another molten rock spinning in space. From there it was up to life to find a way to survive and even thrive. Ok both sound completely unlikely, but here we are so something happened. Maybe it was all just chance and the perfect confluence of events allowed life to exist.

Getting deeper into it all, what if there is more than one all powerful deity-like thing out there? There is the assumption that it's just one thing behind the curtain pulling the strings. What's to say that there couldn't be more, some of which are operating on different levels. Or even stranger, what if it's not a thing at all, but rather a series of things that operate in conjunction with each other to create a larger being? It could be that within this cloud there are several layers to it. Much like our own bodies there are so many pieces that operate independently of each other, but at the same time need each other to continue on. Those individual portions could be influencing reality in their own way, without the larger portion being aware.

Books and movies always try to bring the idea of God down to something we'd understand. God takes on a human form. God gets involved with the day to day of a single person. God loves skeeball. Whatever it is, it's basically anthropomorphizing something that defies our understanding. In reality it would probably be like us trying to talk to a starfish.

So who knows if there is something out there that moved reality in a certain way that it would be considered our maker. It could be that all this is just something that happened by chance on some random Tuesday a hundred billion years ago. It's the question that will keep us wondering about ourselves and where we come from and maybe it's a question without answers because we may never fully understand it.

On The Motion of the Source

Technology is great. It seems like every day there are new breakthroughs that border on science fiction. Each new development leads us to another. Sometimes I wonder if our technological limitations are only held back by our imagination. Or maybe it's the other way around. One of the main themes in Dune was that computers were ultimately a limitation to human potential. We thought that computers and technology would be the tools that made us better, but in fact the mind was the true tool to our advancement. The message was that technology, while seemingly beneficial in the short term, was actually going to eventually stunt our long term growth. We have yet to uncover the true potential of our own minds so it's anyone's guess as to what we are really capable of. Instead we rely on computers to do our thinking for us. As I've mentioned before we're giving up the ability to process simple things because a machine is doing it for us. The whole idea is that the machine frees us up to think about other things. What are those other things though?

Maybe the technology we create to make life easier is really slowing us down. In a way we tend to use it as a crutch. There is this belief that if technology can't solve the problem then maybe it can't be solved. I find the concept of time travel endlessly fascinating. I've been thinking about it lately though that maybe technology will never reach a point where it provides us with a means to travel through time. Then again that's based entirely on the fact that as of right now it seems next to impossible. So what if the way to travel through time had nothing to do with physical travel, but rather conscious travel? There was a book by Richard Matheson called Somewhere in Time where the main character used the force of will to travel back in time. What he did was mentally concentrate on a specific time and his body followed. Maybe there is some hope in that idea. There are times when you kind of "zone out". Your conscious mind slips off somewhere. So technically are you not really there? Your body my still exist in the same location, but your mind is somewhere else. What if we were able to take that and go to the next level and instead of just mentally checking out, we then focused our ability to mentally traverse previously experienced times?

It's been theorized that all moments are existing at the same time. If that's true then how come we aren't able to remember the future? What is it about our perception of time that causes us to only view time in a straight line and we can only see what's behind us? If all time is happening at once then one day it might be possible for us to re-experience the past. We would need to just alter our perception. I suppose the would be two schools of thought on that, assuming any of it was possible. 1) You could go back and experience it, but not change it because you can't change a memory. 2) Since the past, present, and future are all happening at the same time then what's to stop a person from altering any point based on previous knowledge? I'm sure everyone has moments in their life that they wish they could back and change. Or even bigger, how many times do you wish that you had today's knowledge yesterday? Imagine where your life would be if the younger you had the experience of older you. I won't get into the whole potential paradox idea when it comes to time travel. Instead I wonder about how you wouldn't know to make the right choice until you made the wrong one. It's only then, when you regret what you've done, that you realize you should have done it a different way. Maybe somewhere out there you already made both choices and it's up to you to decide which route to take.

If the mind believes something then the body is forced to believe it as well. We've all heard about this with the placebo effect. Even hallucinations can cause physical effects because the mind creates its own reality. So while believing something may not make it so, sometimes the mind can't tell the difference between actual reality and perceived reality. I suppose as far as the mind is concerned there is no difference because we all live in our own realities. Everyone else is just a visitor as their reality bumps up against our own. So what's to say if someone truly believed that they traveled back to 1912 that they didn't? We may think them to be crazy or delusional because their perception of reality differs from the accepted norm. How can we ever know what the mind is really doing behind the scenes? The advances in technology can potentially solve many of the mysteries of the universe given enough time. Can that technology ever really help solve the mystery of ourselves or what we're capable of? Maybe one is just a precursor to another, but it's us to figure out which comes first.

On The First

Mushrooms are kind of a mixed bag when you think about it. There are kinds out there that are delicious and tend to be fantastic on burgers or salads. Then there are kinds that will just plain kill you, regardless of how delightful they may taste. It makes me wonder who was the first person to try a mushroom and which kind they tried. I would imagine if it was the poisonous kind then his friends may have looked at each other and decided to go ahead and skip eating the fungus, which I would imagine would have been a setback for mushroom recipes. Of course if they sampled the not-going-to-kill-you kind then everyone involved would be happy to know there was another food source growing in shady areas. There is, however, a third scenario. This is the one that got me thinking about this whole situation in the first place. I have a friend who is very allergic to mushrooms. Even touching them causes problems. I try to imagine someone like her coming in contact with mushrooms for the first time, before anyone had an idea that they could be eaten, and wonder what would do when they had an allergic reaction? Think about if the first guy to try mushrooms had a fatal mushroom allergy and died after trying them for the first time. Would mushrooms have been treated much like poison ivy, as in you avoid it at all costs?

In a lot of cases I bet people think that a person would have had to be very hungry to eat certain things for the first time. Look at the lobster or crab. They are like giant underwater insects and while they're moving around, there is very little about them that looks appealing. Somewhere along the way though someone got the idea that they would crack them open and eat whatever was inside. I don't know if you've ever had raw crab before, but it's not a very enjoyable meal. In fact there is a very good chance that when eating raw crab you can get sick. I wonder if someone tried it raw first and decided to cook it after they stopped vomiting or somehow a burning crab came screaming from the ocean and someone just figured it smelled good enough to eat. Then again maybe it wasn't desperation at all that prompted the first bite. It could have been someone had something similar and decided to take a shot at those clawful creatures. I would like to thank whoever it was who figured out that melted butter goes great with them. Although to be fair, melted butter goes great with so many things.

Those examples are food related and I could go all day about different kinds of food that seem like things people would avoid rather than stuff into their maw. The first people to do things must be equal parts curious and crazy. Birds have been around for millions of years and I'm sure that ancient man saw them and wondered to themselves what it must be like to fly through the air. It takes a special kind of person to go beyond just wondering what it might be like to actually trying to figure out how to fly. The Wright Brothers get a lot of credit when it comes to flying, as well they should, but there were people studying flight long before they actually flew those hundred feet. Leonardo da Vinci conceived of an Ornithopter flying machine back in 1485, but never actually built it.

How is it that some people are able to make the mental leap to something that previously wasn't thought of before? Is it ever more than one person that comes up with the same idea at the same time? An example would be that while da Vinci was pondering the nuances of flight, was there someone somewhere else thinking the same exact thing? It's like the scene at the beginning of 2001 where ancient man is fiddling with the bone and notices that with enough force it could smash something. Then suddenly the idea spreads to everyone nearby. Soon those who learned the new idea can't remember a time when they didn't know it. The movie Inception makes reference that an idea is a lot like a virus in the way that it spreads. I don't know if there's ever been a calculation on the speed of thought, but I'm betting its speed grows exponentially as it passes from one person to another. Yell the word fire in a crowded room and the panic will spread faster than an actual fire, meaning the idea of a fire is like wildfire.

All this makes me wonder what firsts will we see next. You've heard the phrase "making progress in leaps and bounds" and that just shows that once an idea is introduced there is potentially no limit to what other ideas it may create. In 1946 ENIAC was shown as the world's first computer. Look at how far computers have come in a relatively short amount of time. Imagine what will happen when someone somewhere is the first to come up with whatever is next. People will wonder how is it that we've gone so long without thinking of that before?

This is Ponderous

How come the mosquito, who has been around for millions of years, hasn't evolved in a way that instead of injecting us with something itchy and annoying, they inject us with something delightful and pleasant? I would imagine if they did that they wouldn't get smooshed as fast as they do now.

On Conspiracy

I do love a good conspiracy theory. They are entertaining little pieces of fiction, which in most cases can never be proven or disproven, making them endlessly fascinating. We live in a pretty amazing world where often times truth is stranger than fiction, but at the same time the truth can be mundane. As I've gotten older when I hear the sound of hooves I think horses rather than zebras. That's not to say that I've given up on my ability to over think wildly exaggerated ideas about various topics. Occam's razor tends to suggest that entities must not be multiplied beyond necessity, which is just a nice way of saying keep it simple, stupid. With that said which is more likely, in 1969 a government agency successfully launched three humans 225,000 miles to the Moon in a vehicle that cost over 24 billion dollars and was only used for six missions over the course of three years or the entire event was faked on a sound stage and the billions of dollars reported were actually spent on other things entirely? Maybe it's more fun not knowing the "truth"

As humans we're storytellers. It's just part of who we are. In 1947 something crashed in the New Mexico desert and I'm betting that someone saw something they didn't understand so rather than simply admitting that it was likely man-made, they instead believed it was alien in origin. I would imagine in 1947 Roswell coming across the debris of a high-altitude surveillance balloon with anthropomorphic test dummies would seem pretty other-worldly. One guy tells another guy and the story grows from there. It must have been like the game telephone with a big fish story at its center. When man was first sailing the oceans there were stories of mermaids and leviathans. These must have been based on something someone saw and due to whatever circumstances they were gradually exaggerated. Even nautical maps had notations "Here Be Monsters". We have essentially replaced our sea monsters with space monsters. Maybe in another thousand years space monsters will have been replaced by dimensional monsters. Really whatever we don't fully understand becomes a tall tale.

When I was in college I knew someone who really believed in the idea that Area 51 was home to alien spaceships and recovered bodies. He had in his possession pictures of Groom Lake taken about 25 miles from the base, just before the government bought up the surrounding land. At the time it was interesting to see this fabled secret location. Of course the pictures were somewhat blurry being taken with a telephoto lens on top of a ridge. All you could see were a few dozen buildings and a runway, but that was enough for us to imagine what could have been going on there. We would scan the picture, looking for Hangar 18, where we knew the evidence of extra-terrestrial life was hidden away.

The thing about Area 51 is that if I know about it then it must not be a secret. I think of it as classic misdirection. In this case Area 51 is the beautiful girl in the magic act. You're looking at her while the secret to the trick is being done just out of view. I'm sure at some point the Groom Lake area was used as an actual secret facility, but the secrets there aren't that mysterious. They were developing top secret planes. The U-2, SR-71, and even F117 were developed there or places like it. By the time the public found out about the SR-71 Blackbird it was already being scheduled for retirement, after being in service for nearly a decade. The first flight of the F-117 Nighthawk was in 1981, but the Air Force didn't acknowledge its existence until 1988. You can't do something like that if everyone knows you're building it. So it's better to just let people say it's a UFO. And technically speaking at the time it was just another unidentified flying object, but just because we don't know what it is doesn't mean someone somewhere else is also as clueless about its origins. I'm guessing if there are secrets being kept, be it alien or otherwise, they're not being kept at a place as publicly known as Area 51. It's more likely that some random, seemingly abandoned location in the middle of nowhere is the new home for super top secret projects.

Another person I knew in college was a major conspiracy theorist. Some of the stuff he believed makes me think that he's locked away in some bunker right now, living off the grid. He told me that the moon landing wasn't faked, we actually landed there just fine. What we found there was never revealed to the public though. Just on the horizon there were multiple alien crafts. A message was sent telling us that we shouldn't return. He believed that was one of the reasons why NASA had stopped live broadcasts of lunar landings. Aliens were real reason why we stopped going to the moon in 1972. It had nothing to do with the crippling cost of launching people into space. According to him the military knew about alien spacecrafts for awhile. In fact they had even come up with protocol in the event that someone saw something that couldn't be explained. The codeword was "Santa Claus". This way if someone saw something they could they just saw Santa Claus off their port side. Anyone not in the know would chuckle, but in secret there would be a mad scramble to find out where this alien craft originated from. He had found this information through research of various sources, some of which he allowed me to read. He told me that by reading these books, which were published on a limited basis, my world view would forever be changed. Then one day I never saw him again. He still has my copy of Office '97. A conspiracy theorist could think that he was silenced, but more likely he dropped out of school like about 85% of the other students who started the same year as I did.

There is always the argument how come someone like him would know this information? If aliens did exist why do they always buzz by Farmer Bob's field and not land in Manhattan? How come the guy with the super secret knowledge is someone who seems to be a couple tacos short of a combination plate? Maybe it's because those Illuminati guys know that no one would believe him when he starts spouting off about reptile people infiltrating the highest levels of the government. Or it's more likely that the poor bastard is bordering on delusional because in addition to alien cover-ups, they believed they were the reincarnation of Napoleon.

Now I'm not saying that there aren't secrets being kept from us. Some are for our protection and some are kept from us simply because they're dirty and we wouldn't like it very much if we heard about them. There are things that the common civilian doesn't need to know, even if we feel it's our right. Tell you what, how about the government reveal their secrets after you reveal your darkest secrets to the world. There is this sense of entitlement by some. They believe that everything should be revealed to them regardless of the circumstances. It doesn't make a lot of sense to share certain things because we're not the only ones who watch CNN. There are some very bad people out there who are constantly looking for an edge to use against us. So maybe it's better that I don't know if the CIA is secretly assassinating troublemakers in various parts of the world.

Now there are some situations where the official story just doesn't make a lot of sense. It's times like that where due to a poorly constructed explanation people attempt to fill in the gaps with whatever they can. Example: I think that there was more to the Kennedy Assassination than what was revealed in the Warren Commission's report, but I have a feeling the real explanation is probably nowhere near as interesting as the theories that have been floating around for the last fifty years. Did Oswald act alone? Was he a patsy? Were their rogue elements in our own government that wanted to essentially pull off a coup de tat? Who knows? What I do know is that the President was riding in an open-top car in the middle of Dallas and was considered by many to be contrary to the status quo. It didn't help that the last successful Presidential assassination was in 1901 and the last reported attempt on a President's life was over ten years before Kennedy was killed. In the end it really doesn't matter what happened because in the almost half century since that event there have been so many other things that take priority.

I think in some ways a conspiracy theory is also meant as a comforting device. In a strange way it's better to think that there is some secret series of events, which are controlled by someone. It's either that or the world really is chaotic and no one knows what could happen next. Which is more scary to think about? Is it easier to think that 9/11 was something the government knew about and even promoted in order to push their war on terror or that nineteen guys managed to slip through shoddy security and slam planes into buildings because no one had considered that idea to be one to worry about? It's a popular theory because something like the PATRIOT Act wouldn't have a chance of passing on September 10th, 2001, but on September 12th the door was open to what many believed was a serious breach of civil liberties. At the time there was a phone call from Flight 93 that indicated the flight had been hijacked, this information coming after the world knew America was under attack. This plane was the only one to not reach its target, instead it crashed in an empty field, only a few miles short of hitting a populated area. I remember at the time, before the details got out about what happened, there was a thought that the plane had been forced down by the Air Force. By then the military had to be aware of the situation and the possible target being the White House. Rather than allow the flight to continue, they shot it down over an unpopulated area to minimize casualties. The thing is no one wants to hear about that. We know it's the right thing to do, but it's not something we want to know about. I know there are some people today who still question what really happened because they can't accept the official story.

In the years since 2001 there hasn't been another successful terrorist attack on American soil. Now that could be because everyone is hyper aware of the world around them or because the threat wasn't as great as we were lead to believe. I have a feeling it's probably somewhere closer to the middle of those two ideas. Every so often we'll hear a report of how a potential attack was stopped. The suspect had a bomb in his shoe or they were carrying binary liquid explosives. Whatever it was, it was stopped. Then on the other side you hear about the fundamental failings of security that's in place. One might wonder how is it that there can be such gross negligence and yet we haven't suffered the consequences since the September attacks? So maybe the story that it was all just an elaborate plan to get us to go to war is horrifying, but less scary than the idea that at any moment it could happen again.

Did Paul McCartney die in a car crash in 1966, only to be replaced by a lookalike? Did the USS Eldridge vanish into another dimension when the military attempted to render it invisible? Was the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean actually caused by a nuclear experiment by the Indian government? Is there a secret society that's quietly controlling the world for their own gain? Or is it that when more than two people attempt to share a secret it inevitably gets out, meaning that it's next to impossible for all these secrets to stay secret for very long? Maybe the conspiracy is to make sure that there are always conspiracy theories out there to distract us from the truth, whatever that may be.

On Imagination

We are surrounded by make-believe. It's almost as though there is more that is imaginary than that is considered real. Television shows, movies, books, music, art, fantasies, and even memories are all built on a foundation of what comes from the mind, much of which is fabricated in some way. This isn't a bad thing, but it makes me wonder what's really real then.

I've talked about how perception shapes memories. So the same event between two people could be remembered in vastly different ways, but to each person it's reality. It could be said that imagination is attempting to fill in details that the mind simply can't or won't recall. And that's just the past, but both the present and future are constantly filled with imagination. If other people are anything like me then their minds must wander off, thinking about various things. What you have to do next, what could have been, what you would like do be doing. With all of these we're picturing events or creating situations that haven't happened. The mind is almost constantly creating its own reality by simply imagining it into existence.

Every story ever told requires imagination, be it from the person telling the story or from the person hearing it. Stories based on real events force us to envision how it must have been. Books and movies attempt to consolidate that information and build the image for us. Even pornography is based in make-believe. The people are real only in the sense that they are portrayed by actual people, but the events and situations leading to sex are often pretend. Plus the whole point of pornography is to help people create a pleasurable fantasy.

When we were kids we spent a lot more of our time using our imaginations. We would make up games or pretend we were somewhere else or create elaborate stories (sometimes only for the sake of trying to get out of trouble). I remember spending hours sitting with my toys, just building dozens of scenarios of fun. And that was enough for us back then. Somewhere along the way we start to use our imagination a little bit less, allowing someone else to do it for us. Instead of playing a game we created on our own, we watch a movie with a structured story and someone else's ideas being fed to us. We stop creating our own fun and only allow ourselves to be entertained.

I believe that there is so much made-up stuff surrounding us because it creates a form of escape from reality. The television show has a world where characters are interesting, smart, eccentric, or sexy. The real world has that too, but with make-believe characters those attributes can be accentuated beyond normal levels to create importance. Even so-called reality TV is just another form of escape. The people on the shows aren't exactly real. They are put into controlled situations for the sake of entertainment. They know they're being watched and are putting on a performance. People watch because it's different from their own lives. No one wants to watch a show called "Your Shitty Job", which is based on your day-to-day activities at work. There has to be a gimmick or something special to cause people to try and imagine what it would be like to be there.

Our own self-perception is often based on imagination. We believe ourselves to be one way, which may not be how we appear to others. I won't say how we really are because someone else's perception of you may only be real to them. So in a sense we are all just fantasies. We create ourselves. So if everything is based on imagination in some way then is anything real? Or is it that they only way something can be real is for it to be imagined? And if we imagine reality then how come we're sticking with this reality and not something else?