But seriously…
This life, this universe, this plane of existence… and my particular path through it… please allow me a moment to overthink…
Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote a short story called "'—All You Zombies—'" back in 1958, a story rejected by Playboy magazine then published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Call it narcissism, call it main character syndrome, call it correct, but the narrator in that story could arguably be the only actual sentient, literally self-actualized being in their universe.
And what a strange life that would be, knowing with absolute certainty where you came from and absolute uncertainty where anyone else did.
I have moments, alone in my house, late at night, pondering my existence alongside life, the universe, and everything, where that is me. And you, my faithful and potentially fictional readers, are just zombies whose existence and provenance are utterly unknown to me.
Because I look at my life, past and present, and can only wonder.
I don’t get it. My life. This life. The lives of the people around me, that I read about in books and on the interwebs, that I interact with every day. Or every other day. Or once every twenty years.
Or maybe it’s all just in my mind.
“Living my best life…”… at least on social media.
But maybe actually living my best life.
Maybe always living my best life, for my whole life?
And yet this “best life” is set against a backdrop of war and misogyny and racism and sexual violence and ignorance and trauma and abuse and inhumanity and evil and horror and books in a series being published in different trim sizes.
What the actual hell?
And so I try to make this life mean something. Try to not have it be a life uninspected. To make a “difference.” But to whom and for whom?
And who the hell even says “whom” any more?
Am I wrong to even want to defend the Queen’s English in this world, this universe, this plane of existence?
This is what happens when I can’t sleep, when I’m alone with my thoughts, when I start to pick at the internal logic of the world I see around me.
I. Get. Curious.
And sometimes that is a terrible terrible thing to be.
Because I begin to wonder. And ask questions. And pick at the sometimes frayed edges of reality because sometimes watching those edges unravel lets me see beyond that reality. If “reality” it ever was.
Because seriously.
How does any of this even make sense?
How does my life make sense?
My one thread through this reality, maybe just one of billions of threads, maybe the only thread that’s actually holding this reality together, maybe the only thread there actually is.
Or maybe a completely irrelevant thread left over from the actual weaving of the universe, just temporarily holding closed the front right outside pocket of the magic blue blazer of the universe until removed by said universe at the direction of the care instructions tag of said blazer once purchased and brought home.
Fridge noise.
Oh but what a magical noise.
I sit here now, on my kitchen couch, being watched by a Cookie Monster cookie jar and an oversized LEGO “minifig” made out of full size (but not oversized DUPLO) LEGO bricks, and all I can do is marvel at that noise.
A noise that is aware of itself, that hears itself, that recognizes the noise that is itself, alongside and within the glorious noise of the universe. A noise that is the universe hearing itself, seeing itself, knowing itself.
The universe’s best life.
Maybe the only reason I am here is to bear witness to that best life.
But seriously…
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why?
