Good Addictions

Thirteen point seven billion years, the age of the universe. One planet out of billions we live in. One of seven billion people on earth, I am, and counting. Millions will be delivered today, millions will end today.

An infinitesimal spec, I am.

Act I:Enter life, push, push, push – mother spread on hospital bed screaming, baby in shock crying the very first breath, and counting.

Act III: Leave life – another pain, more lasting for the temporary survivors until they make their own exit.

And the in-between part. The living and trying, the giving up or not giving up part, the failures and burstings of the fantasy bubbles, the growing old and weary and alone part, the not understanding anything part, the memories that stubbornly refuse to fade, the expectations that refuse to wane. The futility of all endeavor. Inequities, war, disease, famine, torture, injustice – just trivial affairs of some species on some planet which looks peaceful from a distance, as everything does.

Living life – another pain… The good news – we can hide sadness but we can’t hide happiness. And happiness, like laughter, can be contagious.

I am so insignificant, yet I am the observer, whoever this I am is. Is it a dull movie, a good movie, this life? Mister or misses, actor observer or just never there sir. Without my consciousness – the lenses and auditory devices in my head – tainted and necessarily corrupted, but still, without my own consciousness, there would be nothing.

I am surrounded by many people. I am alone. It is just the hiss and hum between my ears. Otherwise, a constant absence from a fleeting present.

I am the sleep walker, the conditioned. Pavlov’s dog. Deterministic and probabilistic at once.

Believe what you wish to believe but you are the believer. No one else is doing the believing for you. It is still your head, regardless what the object of the belief is.

I, the observer, observe my insignificance.

The sound of a sad trumpet reverbs gently from around the corner as the snowflakes glide sideways down. New snow, and heaps of it on the cars and pavements absorbs the pollution of noise and buries the greyness of street and dust. Snow is joy for it meant days off from school during my childhood. How we held on tight and watched closely. Is it going to stick? We got two centimeters. No wait! Now three! Road to school is shut. Stay up. Stay in. Next day, free day. Snow battles. Play!

These are childhood memories from Jordan but now I am in Helsinki and it has been heaping down on us those white flat crystals, knee high and thigh high, deep but not deep enough to overcome preparation. Roads of course never close here, and the work machine never stops its grind. You are guaranteed another day at the office but at least they let you work from home or from bed sometimes.

But then how did I forget the trees. The beautiful trees. Trees and snow definitely mix. Standing like over shot raindeer antelopes in white.

And the trumpet sings on and a girl walks by without a hat and smiling to the night. I think she wants the snow to touch her hair. And the lamp post throws some light on the white on this night. It is always night in Helsinki winter, but even if the above is black, the ground is bright.

And another girl walks by this car-free street (all the Finnish girls are pretty, it seems to my half-drowning eyes.) And I lean to one side and inhale my tobacco stick without a word – the observer, and all I can conjure, as now the trumpet vibrato tremors the sub-zero breeze – is life is a mystery. Thirteen point seven billion years of heritage and that’s the best I can do. What a pathetic earthling.

Now, besides the warpage of space and time which I just personally felt without the need to read about it in a physics book, quantum mechanics has proven that energy can spring out of nothing, and since energy and matter are interchangeable, then something can come out of nothing, and you can kiss forever goodbye your obsessive need for a creator to balance the equation. The universe could have been created out of zilch, nada, rien.

You are not convinced? It doesn’t make sense you say? Well, it doesn’t have to. Physicists themselves think Quantum Mechanics is crazy. Einstein himself spent a good portion of his later life attempting to disprove his own theories.

But it is observable and passes the test. It is all about Heizeneberg’s Uncertainty Principle. No woman no cry. This Heizen showed that we cannot know both location and velocity of an electron. The more we hone in on its location, try to lock it in place, the crazier its velocity gets. Like a bee in a box that gets angrier as the box closes in on it, angry enough to break out. Apparently, that’s why you can’t force an electron in a nucleus. Space and energy have a somewhat similar behavior. Probability goes crazy when you shrink space-time, producing energy out of nothing, and I am not a nihilist but maybe I should be.

Not only am I so insignificant, I don’t belong. Not to the place I was born, not to the self-absorbed and mundane, artless and utilitarian America or its vast but little copy cat sister, Canada. I don’t want to belong to the Arabs living in Helsinki. I can’t belong, even if I wanted to, to the Finnish culture, though I like aspects of it. I don’t even belong to the group of non-belongers.

The more you try to confine me to a place, lest the heart find peace, the more I change direction just like the electron or the crazy bee. Not that I am proud of not belonging. Sometimes even if I want to belong I can’t. The problem is that I am no loner and was never designed that way. And while my self is insignificant, the other problem is that my happiness, also due to faulty design, was made to be significant to me. Call it what uncle Freud called it, the id, if it makes you feel better.

Thirteen point seven billion years and seven thousand million homosapiens…

How beautiful it was when one character in one book I read did not care for her happiness. That did not mean she was unhappy. I wonder if she was cold and detached, or enlightened and free. I met Finnish girls who were both very cool and very cold and wondered if you need one to have the other. We are so alone and at the same time so connected to each other. I am especially connected to beauty these days.

But do we need to examine our lives to be happy, if Socrates and Epicurus were right? So they guarantee and give assurances that thinking, even taking a high dosage of it, will not harm or kill – Hemingway, Nietzsche, Virginia Wolfe or Kafka style? Luckily for most industrialized earthlings, thinking is too expensive and they can’t afford it for it requires time. And time is well spent laboring to pay the bills. So what did you do with the miniscule time window in which you were thrown in this planet? I paid the bills. You hear that.

I

Paid.

Them.

Bills.

Put my name down in earthling archives.

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“You think we’re too easy?” my two-night stand Finnish friend asked.

When we love someone, we love the person but also the look, the physical being, the object. We are visual. We remember people’s faces and bodies. Perhaps we first see, then hear (and even then our seeing distorts what we hear), and then think. It all starts with seeing. Women complain that men objectify women. But that is only because women are so beautiful, and not always by accident. They labor to make themselves so. Push-up bra. Pedicure. Mascara. (Though nothing beats the wrinkled and cozy, feminine morning dew, sweet sweat, just-out-of-bed look.)

Whole industries have sprung out to cater to their beauty needs, and even in the historical (and current) context of women’s economic, political and social press-down by men, this can’t be solely in response to fat cigar-smoking, hairy Harry, financier-Dicks demands for women’s beauty. It has to be a freer-market response to an instinct that some female earthlings possess, like that of cats licking themselves clean. And women are competitive beasts. Women magazines, bought by women, photoshop any mistakes nature and time bequeath, and objectify women’s beauty more than anything. Women are at fault also. Or perhaps beauty itself is a disease that everyone is trying to catch. And do you think it is any fun to see a beautiful derriere and luscious lips and protruding breasts and smooth skin and soft face and watch all go by and salivate Pavlov-style without reciprocal existential acknowledgement? Is it fun to be a helpless slave? It is pain. We men need support groups, solidarity hugs, brunches. But we’re a boring rotten bunch. The only place I could imagine groups of men on long tables doing brunches is in the lock hole – inmates of desire. All because of hormones. We are the un-chosen ones. No, it’s not in our design to group-hug and rub cheeks. If you see a group of elephants or whales or others of our ancestral mammal-variants, they will invariably be female. The loners all have that extra piece of hanging flesh.

Women complain that men objectify women. We all objectify. Maybe it is more apparent and vulgar by men, men who will be treated as second class sex and be left to sink with the Titanic – courtesy of women and children first, but at least the band played on. Men will stand in line and be rejected entry to many a night club. Wrong genitalia, sorry. Too high level of testa. Not good for harmony. Not that I disagree. We are the uglier sex.

Gather up fellow Adams and repeat after me:
We, the abundant and always readily available and willing to serve kind mother nature,
We – the ones identified via the extra elongated piece of flesh located precisely between the legs and above two round objects – we hereby pledge that in order to serve nature, we have to labor harder. We need to push, push, push ourselves, even when we are not feeling to be competitive.

13.7 billion years for the universe. Seven billion for earth. One point eight million for Homo Erectus. Two hundred thousand for Homo Sapien – the “modern” humanoid. Forty thousand years ago when we reached what we called the Americas. Curiosity. One amazing human trait. Migration for curiosity’s sake. Adventurous, yes. Ten thousand years ago, the beginning of civilization. And now, sitting in a vessel, ten kilometers high in the sky over the Atlantic, going at nine hundred kilometers per hour, tackling peanuts. Evolution of science. And it wasn’t even intended as a mode of transportation when first conceived – this flying machine.

You think we are too easy?

Tags: Helsinki, snow, twist on quantum mechanics

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 25th, 2010 at 11:42 pm and is filed under Letters. 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.