& Yet everything sings somehow.
posted by jeremy on August 09, 2004
Returning matter; Antithesis of heat death: Compression to the utmost degree. An infinite loop of energy packed tight, tight, ever so tight... So many salarimen packed into the Tokyo fray & then, when all available space is utilized, impossibly, they overlap... & then, one million years? Or but onesinglefuckingmicrosecond later? One passenger screams, tears loose, implodes, explodes, the glory spreads, a great fire, a big bang, the Big Bang, spreading outwards...
& imagine the wave, a trillion spectra of shimmering radia pushing forwards into some unimaginable dark... Neutrinos, photons, electrons, quarks forming instantly & nebula, galaxies, solar systems, worlds cohering in the wake...
(& I tell you, babe, it hasn't stopped yet.)
Flash forward: A giant disk of gas weaving itself into semi-solid spheres, planetesimals . It is the most beautiful thing you've ever seen as rings of gravity, hungry, each attracting, pulling into itself, its direct future. The death of nebula is the birth of stars... The largest, the greediest, the alpha of this pack snarls, leads, finally ignites under its own weight: Brilliant nuclear flame & 6 billion years later we will call this beast the Sun
The oceans form. Land cools. Slowly the meteorites stop falling, some the size of Texas... & the carbon soup stops boiling, gently simmers & eventually, lunch is served. Laugh if you will, but dammit, somehow, we fucking got here. Somewhere, something like RNA learned to tango & eventually, DNA took the dare because, like they say, it takes two to tango, two to knife fight, two to love...
All of this even as a loose moon danced in the sky.
Large strange things swim in muck. Flowers are still 200 million years distant. The Cambrian is filled with gods gambles; If god is chance, these are the dice rolling, yet to stop. Five eyes stare at you & slowly blink & something with eighteen fins decides that you aren't edible & kicks away with rudimentary legs built of something like claws... & You laugh at blue sky, giddy from lack of oxygen because oxygen has yet to rule here.
Welcome to the morning of the first extinction.
It slams down. Hideous fist. The shock of it ejects enough soil, molten burning debris into space to cover North America with a thin layer of silt ... The comet was visible for a million years, a white smudge in the sky, slowly growing brighter, but there was nothing that could have noticed, each creatures simple brain concerned mostly with eating or not being eaten. Things grew bright, then fiery, then cold, then worse, then better...
Still, 90% of everything alive, dies. From the scant remnants, these cataclysmically chosen genotypes, everything alive today is descended: Our tough-ass tapeworm ancestors, surviving 4 more mass extinctions in various guises & incarnations; A billion years of squirming, fighting, hunting, shitting, pissing, roaring, creeping, fucking & fucking evolving, goddam adapting & the brilliant noise of it makes me so fucking proud.
2004: The sun rises, a bird sings; a red-headed finch by the looks of it & tiny, brilliant, proud, he flits about in the boughs of a giant cherry tree. At the same time, a primate, specie homo sapien, blond haired, blue eyed, known locally as Jeremy Dwight lights a foul-smelling Lucky Strike cigarette & stares at the last of the silver stars & wonders about his friend, his fellow monkey & how she's doing. She's been sad (imagine bleak space, irritatingly lost, comets between stars) lately... maybe forever & he hates this, hates it, fucking rails against it, a fucking jihad.
Life is too short for too much sadness.
Life is too sad for too much sadness.
Life is always too much, too much & not ever enough.
Still, he knows his friend, or at least he thinks he does & this sadness is null, a slippery spot, easily chucked if one can get a grip on it. The tragedy of it (imagine bleak space, irritatingly lost, comets between stars) is bullshit. He remembers the exact echo of her jokester laugh, her dork genius, her tough stuff ways & the fear evaporates. Lessons to be learned, he thinks. Mama universe bites us on the ass sometimes, teaching us proper.
This pup, she bright as fuck, be ok.
She be ok.
She be ok...
It's as simple as that.
Fuck it, kiddo, you'll be ok...
