Starstuff

The indomitable human spirit. Ever heard of it before? It's what keeps a chubby kid from reaching for another chicken nugget. It's the glitter in the eyes of the gambling addict that keeps hitting the slot machine for just one more try. Look at em go, he's in it to win it fr fr. How inspirational. Even when he lost his home and started drinking moonshine from a junkyard radiator to pass the time in between shifts. Such unwavering conviction! But why do they say human spirit? This is hardly something unique to the hunter-gatherer monkey variety of sentient pounds of flesh. 

Just look at the noble birds, for example. Chirping away those mating calls like anyone's business, just hell-bent on getting lucky. What dedication to its craft! Life has always been tenacious like that. From the moment the first living cells emerged from the hot volcanic ducts of the blue ocean, or perhaps even what came before it. From the noble gases like helium to the planet's formation, things have always been.... happening. How proactively persistent is the nature of reality! 

I mean, to think that mere mortals like us are made of the same starstuff is, well I suppose it's pretty much on par for course when you put it like that. In fact, what's the deal with all this stuff anyway? I mean, who decided that struggle, courage, faith, and perseverance were so damned noble in the first place? Sounds like some BS if you ask me, but don't tell anyone I said that. After all, we should consider ourselves lucky to be here as it is. So what if you didn't work out today? So what if you didn't read your book? Who says you need to find a mate, earn a living, settle down, and have kids just to be successful? What's that? You said it? Well, I'll be damned, I mean whatever floats your boat man.

Why all that pressure, though? Isn't it enough to just exist in spite of all the colliding rocks and random hazards? Just yesterday I heard an entire family of three got electrocuted when the father hung some clothes to dry over some faulty wiring. Where's the honor in that? Isn't it all just random particles colliding with one another? What a miracle is life! Let's just enjoy it while it lasts. Huh? Untimely deaths like those are rare and exceptional, you say? Living in moment to moment is a rather empty existence? 

So, what? You pop out a few kids to carry the legacy, and leave them to figure it all out for you? Just leave something behind that folks will remember you by? That's more than most could hope for. I suppose I see what you mean, but listen, man, my whole point here is that it's all just whatever like it's not to be taken too seriously. I do hope that we can agree on that, at least. Sometimes you have to be serious, you say? Well, how do you know which is which? You don't get it? I mean to say that how do you know when to be serious and when to have fun? Is it just something you make up along the way, something you discover, improvise, or get forced into?

I suppose people get forced into things all the time, don't they? I don't think anyone asks to be born, and they certainly don't choose the life they're born into. Or maybe they do, we can't really tell. I certainly feel like most of the time, at least in my heart of hearts, that I somehow chose this life of mine. It just makes sense to me, and when I put together everything I ever seen, from the smallest of moments to the largest of things, it just doesn't fit together any other way. You might say that there is no God and that we live in a random universe where things just happen because we can't prove nor disprove the existence of universal sentience.

They say that the universe has no need for a consciousness of any kind, that this experience of an I is a mere survival mechanism developed by bags of meat in order to proliferate and sustain its kind. Hence, the idea of "we are just the universe experiencing itself doesn't make any sense at all" and so on and so forth. Yet that whole jumble of words doesn't make any sense either. As if you can explain away everything in this world with cold hard logic. And you might say, "Not yet we can't, but just you wait!" I mean hey, I'm no party pooper of any kind. If you want to give it a go, I won't stop you, it does take unreasonable folks to make real progress, after all, but don't pretend like it isn't absolutely banana-sundae crazy to want to neatly categorize everything in the universe into neat little boxes that all make sense. 

Why do creatures always end up making these noises at each other without ever understanding what's right in front of them? I mean, at the end of the day, aren't we all a little bit wack-a-doodle-do when push comes to shove? From the birds to the trees to the hairless monkeys in front of their screens, we're all a bit mad from time to time and in between. Just like the planets revolve for no damn reason, perhaps we too enjoy these changing seasons.