Mara's Room

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It's raining and it's not going to stop all weekend.




That's okay with me.



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I'm fine, I'm feeling better. Still crazed, but not as unhappy. I got everything I need. I got a good woman who loves me, I have a job that pays the bills and gives me a sense of doing something larger than myself, a way of being in the world, I got family and love galore.





So what if my wires are crossed and get all sparky from time to time.




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Plus, I'm not feeling conversational. If you know me at all, you won't take it personal. Maybe that's wrong, I don't know.






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Did you see the trailer for "Marwencol"?



I can't stop thinking about it. About Mark Hogencamp. About his violent and beautiful women, the SS troops, the Catfight Bar, the whole village. Brain injury as an avenue towards a strange and all-consuming artwork.


A whole new world.




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I keep bumping up against this concept of emergence. How the same forces that made the small-scale structures of atoms also made the large scale structure of planets, and galaxies, and the universe itself, and how the same insensate grinding along, flipping over of genetic cards in a game of solitare played by a blindman for thirteen billion years, made whales and lichen and bees and monkeys and us and how we're not anywhere special in the process, it just goes on and on without limit but it's going on past us, beyond us, we'll be buried in layers of accumulated silt like everything else that's come before us. And how the internet is going to be the start of a Matrix-like world where there's no difference between what's carbon based and what's silicon based, the whole of creation is going to be sentient, if it isn't already, and how all of it is, not exactly predetermined, but kind of unavoidable, inevitable. Things are the way they are because of these myriad physical rules, and you could roll the dice a million billion times and probably things would shake out pretty much the same.

The set of possible evolutionary moves is much smaller than the set of impossible moves.


We are the ants in the colony. We don't know what the fuck we're doing or why we're doing it. Or rather, we do, on this small, intimate scale of interpersonal interaction and house building and road-making and sailing and murdering each other. But we're blind to what kind of a thing we're building, and to what purpose.

And everything is happening on this limitlessly expandable and contractable fractal scale that we are smack dab in the middle of. Not because we're in any way unique, but because you are always in the middle of infinity. Infinite time, infinite space, infinite multiverses that split off from each other billions and billions and billions of times each nanosecond, soap bubbles in a limitless sea of soap bubbles.....


It makes the idea of an old bearded man in a white robe sitting on a golden throne in the clouds, getting pissed off if you don't believe in him seem pretty tame. A big failure of imagination.


Things are much stranger than that.



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I'm grateful to be alive.




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Namaste.




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