The Plan

Sometimes, it’s all you can do.

I’m very grateful that, when things get a little too rough or scary, I can still find solace in the almost incomprehensible absurdities of existence - the most absurd being, of course, that there is an existence at all.

My life is pretty ridiculous. I mean, I sleep in a car. One of my grandest ambitions is to spend the rest of my life pretending to do things in front of people. I suffer from inflicted celibacy, but that’s OK because I seem to be single in the bones. I find that I can finally commit to a fitness program when I leave myself no alternative. I have some serious debt issues, and I’ve ensured that my chances of having a ‘normal’ future are virtually nil. The way things are going, it looks like I’m in exactly the right place at the right time.

I love it.

The gag, of course, is that your life is no less ridiculous than mine.

The nuts and bolts of the universe - such as we understand them at this point - can squeeze the brain until understanding drips out your ears, but there’s no reason to cast so far afield for befuddlement. I’ve mentioned it before, but bread blows my mind. Well, not bread exactly - I mean, I can accept that there is such a thing as ‘Rye’ - more the process by which someone (or some group) managed to envision bread in grains, and then make bread happen. Don’t bother looking it up - the early history of bread is filled with ‘probably’s and ‘perhaps’s. Wikipedia puts the emergence of bread in the Neolithic era - around 11,000 years ago, at which time the Food Network was only available in France.

Even simple bread takes a lot of steps that, to me, are astonishingly non-obvious. You have to start with whatever grain you’re going to use, many of which don’t really look like food in their natural state. You have to grind your grain up into flour, which is tough to imagine happening by accident, and sort of weird to imagine happening just for the hell of it. You have to mix your grain with water, which is quite a bit easier to see happening than the other stuff. Then you have to cook your mush. I kind of figure that immediately after gaining the ability to control fire, early people went around cooking and burning every damn thing, so this one doesn’t boggle me too much either. All of them together, however, sprain my noggin.

Robert Spuhler and I were discussing gelatin not too long ago -a substance whose provenance is so unlikely that I’m pretty much convinced gelatin doesn’t actually exist.

These things shock me because the road from their initial appearance to their final product - the processes by which they are refined - are so distinctive and unnatural. To see bread in wheat amazes me.

But there are plenty of other ways to be shocked. You want to marvel at the age of the universe and the interconnectedness of all things? Try this one on for size: Gold.

Most of you know this, so in brief: the order of introduction of elements (according to current evidence and theory) in the early universe goes hydrogen, hydrogen, hydrogen, and then helium as things cool down enough to allow the formation of atoms, and so on through the Periodic Table, adding heavier and heavier elements until we get stars. Yay! The thing is that if we end there, we’re missing a lot of elements (obviously, since several are essentially manmade.) It turns out that, as far as naturally occurring elements are concerned, anything heavier than iron can only be synthesized in a supernova - including, of course, gold. So for Earth to have any gold at all, many many stars had to be born, live out their entire lifecycle, and explode - before our planet was anything more than the tiniest cloud of dust.

That’s pretty cool, but now think about the California Gold Rush. Think about South Africa. Think about your idiot friend who thinks he NEEDS gold Monster Cables for his home theater system. Wonder if The Wizard of Oz really is an allegory about the move away from the Gold Standard. Think about that spike in Promontory. Look at your wedding ring, or those earrings. If you’re me, you can think of the ruined motherboard in your sorely-missed laptop. Hell, in all likelihood you have trace amounts of gold inside of you. Every bit of it, every last ounce, came from really far away.

The stuff that started out as some undefined potential, became hydrogen, became a star, became gold and became the frame for your glasses has been around for a LONG time. The stuff that makes you is no different.

Now THAT is ridiculous.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 11:30 am and is filed under Random, Musing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.