we ain't going nowhere

I thought you might have already known that about the universe, but I wanted to talk about dark energy and I wanted to start at the beginning. I once heard somewhere, I don’t remember when or where, or maybe I read it or someone whispered it into my ear, or maybe it was in a book, a movie, or a dream, but it is something I have always thought, and that is that you don’t really know anything until you can write about it, and not just repeat it verbatim. So some of my writing is just getting something straight in my mind, and I think you do the same, especially in those long stories about the bible and ancient history that you give me.

Black holes are the stars of tv science shows. They are always introduced with this ominous music and then these strange cgi effects like some huge bowling ball roiling through mist looking for innocent planets or suns, like half-naked screaming damsels who they swallow up like a Pac man thing and burp out the stray matter they don’t wish to eat at the present time. TV has to make a good guy and a bad guy out of everything or else they don’t think anybody will watch. If it’s about wildebeests then the lion is the bad guy and the wildebeest escapes. If it’s about lions the wildebeest still escapes, but the narrator sounds a little disappointed, poor hungry lion. Maybe the narrator will tell us that surely the lion will catch a wildebeest on the next try, but it’s nothing they want to show in person because most viewers are city boys like me who think of animals as Porky Pig and Donald Duck, and want to be shielded from nature red in tooth and claw, though we don’t mind at all seeing the dead bodies hauled away on stretchers on the evening news.

2001, it was de rigor for all us hippies to take LSD before we went to see it, because that is the only way it could be truly understood. But then of course we would have to see it again straight later in the week to figure out what was going on in it. Arthur C Clarke was one of my favorite authors from my science fiction days. I think I was close to 18 before I ever read a book that I didn’t have to for school that wasn’t science fiction. There is always this thing where people act like science fiction foretells the future, but the ideas are flying around already and they just pluck them off and put them in their stories. And of course most of what the stories predict never comes to pass.

How about those little tv/phone wristwatches that Dick Tracy was predicting when we were knee high to grasshoppers? Well anymore we have the phones that have wiped out wristwatches, but it turns out nobody wants to look at a little image of the person they are talking to when they are trying to navigate some difficult traffic situation, and now I’ve noticed that cell phones that used to brag about how little they were, are now getting bigger and bragging about that.

I’m not a big fan of spreading mankind across the stars like they used to say in the science fiction books. I don’t see what good that does mankind or the stars.

It’s pure speculation but I think the reason that we haven’t had alien spaceships landing on earth, or heard alien sitcoms with our big eared telescopes is that in order to reach a technological state much beyond what we have now you have to have a pretty aggressive organism, and an organism that aggressive is going to do itself in before it ever gets to oh, dilithium crystals.