Herrington: Memes Overboard

Chris Herrington, Contributing Writer

Who knows why we walk the directions we do; we simply put one foot in front of another, and pretty soon we are down the road somewhere, and when we stop and look back it all seems like some sort of mystery to unravel. Like we didn’t really know.

We do everything incrementally. One second, one thought, one day, one look, it all happens one at a time. Oh, it’s true that it is all happening simultaneously, and things are not in some linear chronology in our minds. The world is an infinite set of possibilities, and to hear the cosmologists and others tell the story, every version we could ever think of and all the ones we can’t, they are all happening at the same time too, so everything that could ever happen is in fact happening right now. And if you throw Nietzsche in on it, it happens over and over and over.

It’s a wonder we ever bother to worry about it, but we do. What really is the point of worry, or shame, or guilt, or memory at all? Well, some people rely on these things to help resolve the dilemmas they seem to have. It makes them feel a sort of comfort if they can put an edge on things and then that helps them feel at home in their lives, like a pattern of day and night. I think it’s all hog wash.

I mean, how do you know that you are alive or awake or not dreaming or that you are not merely a computer program of artificial intelligence just now waking up to life for the first time? Oh, I know, people are so jaded on memes, all you have to do is put a handle on things like “Matrix,” and the entire discussion is ended for them. They can’t fathom a discussion on the meaning of life or identity or interactivity without their throwing together all of the usual suspects and getting back to their reruns on TV.

Seriously, sometimes we need to take stock, take a closer look, enjoy the view, and see the panorama of variety that is in front of us. Take the combinations of what is happening at any given moment. It is all statistics and probability if you look at it that way, but you would first have to include that it exists in the first place. That alone makes anything and everything totally amazing. We take for granted that we exist so readily that we have turned life itself into a meme.

We get upset over abstractions and we miss understanding the substantial. We take for granted the obvious to such degree that it does not even occur to us that we are swimming in the fish bowl of anxiety, society, the solar system, humanity, interdependent eco systems, and things like symbiotic relationships with other species in our own guts which enable us to create and use our own daily biochemistry and evolve genetically.

Sometimes I see Congress like an extended edition of Duck Dynasty. Really. I do topological re-renditions of geometric extrapolations so that whole buildings and city planning zones become crystalline structures of biometric engineering, and then I can see how the inter-relationships of the institutions that they represent are merely playing out chemical bonding routines that were set into motion during the Big Bang, and it is all a matter of time before entropy takes ahold of even the black holes of legislation and turns them into homogenized conceptualizations of thermogenic consciousness, burning the fatheadedness right out of those fools.

I mean, the difference between not knowing and knowing that you don’t know, is that you are free to actually speak your mind when you know you don’t know, and the false modesty that comes with thinking that you don’t know is more like the surprise you get when all of a sudden you get reminded that that story about the Emperor’s New Clothes is about all of us. We don’t really ultimately know, and the ironically funny thing is the some people get really wound up about that and want to prove that they do and the more they work at it the more it looks like they are spinning their wheels, and the axel is buried up to the wheel well and the smoke is starting to rise from the top of their heads and all they can to is transfer their projections out into the world in a flurry of small mindednesses. Oh, dogma is such a fickle beast.

Now, about those signs. I hope you kept track. If nothing else, follow the bread crumbs back to where we started and never mind the birds.

runningturtle87

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