I wanted to say something or do something. But before I could, I had to understand the nature of physical reality and the nature of consciousness -- otherwise every word or every act would be utterly meaningless. Or might not even exist, so why bother?

Fortunately, when I looked it up on the internet, it turned out that all these issues had been thoroughly thought through and resolved by the great minds of history over the last few thousand years,1 and so I could just go ahead, standing on the firm foundation of their answers, and say or do whatever the fuck I wanted to say or do, without fear of utter meaninglessness, and even though I really have no desire to even want in the first place.

EVENTS

It was the day after the leader of World Terrorism had gone on world television, live, and, in the middle of a heated rant about ripping out and eating the hearts of his murderous fascist enemy, suddenly broke down crying uncontrollably.

But the leaders of The Free World, cowering in their bunkers out of fear of his ubiquitous omnivorous invincibility, had all missed seeing or even knowing about it.

Because, rather than getting constant hot news updates from their staffs, they chose, instead, to listen to nothing but 24/7 tapes of soothing maternal voices saying everything's gonna be all right. No one's gonna take away your ultimate infinite potency.

A day later, when he had recovered his composure, the leader of World Terrorism came back on world TV and blamed his breakdown of emotion on abandonment in childhood, fear of failure, loss, and innocence.

He also expressed his criticism of the practice of breaking off pieces of the world and selling them for spare parts.

"While you humans are busy trying to reproduce yourselves in machines, and trying to distort or shift your preordained bell-shaped curves by means of rabid fundamentalisms and genomics," he told them, "the cosmos is busy opening up whole new metaphors, far beyond the puny similes of physics, cog psych, and MTV."

People didn't know how to respond.

Some thought, in these final days, of giving the world a lifetime achievement award in appreciation of providing a permanent home for what had previously been the nomadic 7 Wonders of Nowheresville.

Instead, they just awarded her a new disease -- but a disease that killed without suffering or pain and, in fact, killed with a long slow period of utter bliss ending in a golden moment of absolute joy, user-adjustable as to degree of subtlety.

"This is so you can save your population the embarrassment of being shaken off into space," they told the world, "when their piece of geography or tribe or virtual association gets packed up and carted off for resale."

As it had been during the Cambrian Explosion for a different blockage, today they thought Universal Immorality was the only way to get past that lump in the throat of evolution: consciousness.

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NOTES

1. Though today's great minds or hundred-year Shakespeare typewriter monkeys still pretend these questions remain unanswered and continue to pretend to tackle them in voluminous numbers of words, really they are just dotting the i's and crossing the t's in their footnotes, till tenure runs out.

This, of course, isn't anybody's fault, it just happens that the vocabulary and library of routines for functioning in this space are already well established, and so all that's left for the people who use them is to, at best, reinvent the wheelie or reconceptualize the nuclear dump site, over and over again.

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