On Questions or Something Else?

The other day while I was browsing in the Philosophy section of Barnes and Noble, I was approached by an odd-looking (and possibly slightly disturbed) old man who asked me if I was "looking for the answers." Now, the trainwreck of a belief system the old man was to expound upon for the better part of 30 minutes is another story, but to his initial inquiry I responded in the negative. Later, I wished I had had the presence of mind to shoot back: "No, I'm looking for books." But it was a conversation with a friend about the encounter that produced the best answer, though it doubtlessly would have been lost on the old man. The response should have been, "no, I'm looking for questions."

And I am. When I read back on a lot of the things I've written here, I find many of them are peppered with questions. Many of them may be rhetorical, but that's alright. The point is, they're being asked, and whether they require no answer, have no answer, or have many answers, they all serve to stimulate the minds they're being posed to. Our language-filled world is rife with moral ambiguity, and often the only way that one can traverse the fractured, delicate social landscape is to pose questions, which help to illuminate ours and other's intentions and desires, as well as the occasionally murky chains of cause and effect and the consequences of potential courses of action.

And while I may always be looking for questions, that does not mean that I'm unconcerned with answers, only that the answers one uncovers should be viewed as a means, not as the end. This may seem like a backwards way at approaching the question/answer dichotomy. This is where a lot of people stumble, I believe, and why a lot of people fall into close-minded routines and ill-informed systems of belief. Many people stop at the first seemingly coherent answer provided to their inquiries, and depending on the context, this can be a dangerous practice. Many religious beliefs and social and economic ideologies are supported by steadfast adherence to just-satisifactory answers, and as a result, tolerance, understanding, communication and mutual respect often rapidly break down. And rest assurred, I'm by no means attempting to issue some sort of "final answer" in my ramblings here. I can't say for sure that the methodology I place my faith in (yes, in the protean realm of human consciousness and its place in the universe, even logic and science take a measure of faith) is the best path to the "truth" we all seek to varying degrees, but I've found that it has helped me to become a more informed, well-rounded, and high-minded individual. Questioning the world is never a waste of time, and the best answers will clarify the topic of your initial inquiry and instigate new lines of questioning.

It is true that you may not always find answers for the questions you have. It is also true that even in considering questions with elusive answers, the multitude of intuitive systems in your brain are shaping your opinions and options and helping you to become a broad and logical thinker. A little healthy skepticism and an inquisitive nature has never hurt anyone. Some revelations may be emotionally or philosophically disturbing, but few intelligent people should find themselves asking to be returned to their ignorance regarding issues that effect them so personally. One could argue that the occasional frightening discovery in the course of dedicated question-asking is likely only to help one in future considerations, and having many tiny bubbles burst throughout the course of one's lifetime is surely preferable to letting a single, vulnerable bubble grow and grow until someone or something finds the desire to stick a pin in it irresistable.

And so on and so forth. What's the point of all this musing you ask? Well, that's a question. I've already got you started. And what's the answer? Just an attempt to understand why I ask so many questions. Already I've stumbled upon some ideas during the course of this relatively stream-of-consciousness bout of pondering that will likely produce more questions. And maybe you don't agree with some of what I've had to say. Good. It's your right (and arguably your duty) to question it. It'll only help you to articulate and refine your own position. And however different your opinions and whatever you discover on your way to developing them, I'm hoping that at least on this point you'll agree with me:

There is nothing more important than uncovering and understanding what it means to be you.

On Giddiness Regarding the Impending Collision of Particles

Over the past few days, I've encountered several really interesting things that I know I should be writing about, but for some reason have been having trouble mustering the ambition to do so. As such, I've got a backlog of topics I'd like to consider here, and hopefully in the days coming I can bring myself to elucidate these strands of the otherwise hectic, whirlwind-style operating mode of my conscious brain activity.

The thing that's grabbed me by the lobes today (brain lobes, mind you) is the Large Hadron Collider, a $10 billion particle accelerator that has been built beneath the Franco-Swiss border. It is the collaborative effort of over 8,000 physicists from 85 countries. The collider basically is a massive, highly-magnetized, 17-mile underground loop that scientists will shoot opposing streams of protons through (at 11,000 revolutions per second!), smashing these particles together and hoping the results will illuminate our understanding of the forces of the universe. On Wednesday, scientists will turn it on for the first time, and, provided everything operates in the intended manner, the results produced by experiments within the collider could provide the hard evidence for a variety of hypothetical concepts with key roles in present-day models of physics. Conversely, they could also shake modern theories of physics to the core.

Some of the plausible results of colliding particles on such a large scale seem straight out of science fiction: the unveiling of alternate spacial dimensions (Now Coming to You in Astounding 5-D!), the creation of micro black holes, and, according to a few overzealous apocalyptic types, the end of the very world as we know it. Of course, the latter option shouldn't rightfully be included in a list of "plausible" results, but such histrionics should certainly be considered when gauging just how charged the scientific atmosphere is around this momentous event. It is truly exploratory science, and many physicists are steeling themselves, preparing to potentially have their understanding of physics torn to shreds. While the main focus of the experiments conducted within the LHC will be to finally produce tangible evidence of particles called Higgs bosons (something I researched briefly and won't even pretend to understand, though apparently essential in the Standard Model of particle physics for explaining how massless particles can combine to create matter that does have mass), scientists also hope to gain a better understanding of the origins of the universe by creating situations similar to those that existed immediately after the Big Bang.

Even with a less-than-lay comprehension of modern physics (especially astrophysics, to which the LHC seems particularly relevant), I've found myself giddy with excitement all day. Wednesday will mark a momentous occasion in the history of science, and science always (well, usually) makes my day. I only lament that the publication of results from LHC experiments will probably take considerable time.

A final thought on all the doomsday trappings that are attached to the operation of the LHC: some of the more extreme opponents of the project have hypothesized that the LHC could produce a black hole large enough to result in the accretion of the entire planet, and a few have gone so far as to file lawsuits in an attempt to prevent the LHC from being turned on. While this possibility seems to be of almost no concern to those scientists operating the LHC, its consideration from an imaginative standpoint produces some interesting questions. What if a significantly large black hole was produced by the collider? Obviously one large enough to swallow the Earth wouldn't allow us to react to (or even be aware of) the disaster (another thing interesting to ponder, because those claiming it as a legitimate possibility would never discover they were correct should they actually be), but what about a smaller black hole that consumed less than the entirety of the planet's matter? Where exactly would the hole exist, and how would it effect people? How would the world be informed about a black hole disaster when so little of the world has any working understanding of what a black hole actually is? In the realm of speculative-science-become-nightmarish-reality, who becomes the authority on just how to inform the world of the situation, let alone devise a method to address the problem? How do you cordon-off a black hole when one can never know whether they've crossed the event horizon (that being the point at which you can no longer overcome the black hole's gravitational pull and escape)until it's too late? What does the process spaghettification look like (that is, before a person/thing is reduced to an imperceivable strand of elementary particles)? Even with a painfully amateurish grasp of the bare basics of quantum theory associated with black holes, starting to ponder such things is near migraine-inducing. I can almost understand how some overly paranoid, astrophysics-distended naysayer might actually convince themselves that the LHC is the ultimate, terrible expression of the purest form of nihilism. Blah.

My lobes hurt.

On the Human Response to a Recent Tragic Event

The morbidity of human nature can be alarming. I recently read that at least 12% of the reduction in traffic speed at the site of an accident is directly attributable to people slowing down simply to stare at the carnage. Two days ago, there was a terrible head-on collision almost directly in front of my place of employment. The front parking lot and the main road that runs past the store were blockaded by emergency personnel, and the eerie scene that was presented whenever one stole a glance out the window was that of flashing lights, reflective vests, and uncountable pieces of vehicle detritus strewn across the landscape.

The only talk that occurred within the store regarded the accident. People asked what happened, were the victims local, how badly were they injured, did you hear it, did you see it? They commented on the tragedy of car accidents, on the foolishness of modern drivers, on the proliferation of accidents in recent weeks, on the unsafe road and the types of individuals that take advantage of it. No one really had any answers and no single person had any better connection to the events than the rest of the people that milled about the store. Rumors that someone died surged in and out of circulation on that day and in the days since, and still no one really knows besides the rescue workers, who aren't obliged to share any information. At times people became visibly agitated when their claims of a fatality were met with skepticism, as though being robbed of the ability to drop such weight on the less-informed was a tragedy in itself. Anyone who claimed to have information was in a position of power, and the occasional struggles between those with conflicting stories were both pathetic and alarming.

What is it about the misfortune of others that piques our interest so? Upon finding out that the accident involved no one they knew, people either launched into even more prodding lines of questioning or seemed to completely lose interest in the event all together, even as it continually threatened to usurp one's attention, unfolding mere yards outside the door. It was as if one type of person were requesting permission to further explore their morbid curiosity, and another type of person found the anonymity of the event not nearly morbid enough. Either way, it seemed as though very few people had a reaction that seemed entirely appropriate.

But who am I to judge the proper response to such an event? I was the one who spent the day chiming in time and time again, answering the questions as they entered the highly charged air.

There's Nowhere You Can Be That Isn't Where You're Meant To Be. It's Easy.

It seems likely that a person would be nauseated if they could be presented with a physical collection of all that has been written about human partnerships since the inception of language. Such a collection would constitute a small-scale Library of Babel, and if one could ever read every tome that lined the shelves of its lengthy halls, they wouldn't have any better understanding of love or commitment or partnership or humanity itself than they did before they undertook such an epic task. It's a terrible irony that we can spend our whole lives looking for something we are unable to define, and that given as many chances as we are to try to satisfy our desires, we often die without knowing whether what we had during our lives is what we had intended to gain all that time.

It is a law of the universe that people are irrevocably social beings. Though general ideas of love and happiness have changed drastically over time and across cultures, people need to be with people. It is one of the true blessings of our existence, and it is also one of the most painful things we must endure.

And having sampled the highs and lows of love and commitment, which should a person let win out in the inner battle that ensues when it's time to start over: the steely, jaded mind or the leaping, idealistic heart? And which does a person usually end up following? What terrible games we must play with our souls.

What do you do when you feel close to another person? Do you pursue romance, so that intimacy can be amplified to lovely, dizzing heights, or do you maintain some form of distance, so that you never have to be afraid of crashing from those highs, of damaging your bond and opening a rift that might never be bridged? How does one ever know which is the right answer? And how frustrating is it that we can never really know whether our gamble paid off, because we can never see what lies down the other road once we've passed the fork?

And time, it's always fleeting. What do we do about time? It often feels like it spends us with cold indifference, and there is so little of us to spend. How painful it is to feel as though you might never be satisfied with the amount of time you have left to spend with someone you care about, be it weeks or years or your whole natural life. But paradoxically, how wonderful it feels to have someone who so strongly stirs your emotion.

I've had to catch myself, because this all seems nearly pessimistic. It's not hopelessness or negativity, though, just thoughtful consideration. I don't know that I could ever be convinced that it isn't worth it to give yourself over to someone you care about. I know that I'm always at my happiest when I have someone close to share experience with. I merely struggle with finding ways that seem sufficient to let them know how important they truly are.

Sometimes it seems an impossible bit to swallow, but it's true: all you need is love. And at times, maybe a little patience, too.

Following the Stream of Consciousness

Prior to 1668, it was generally accepted that maggots "spontaneously generated" from rotting meat. If you left your steak laying out on the counter, you'd better believe it would give birth to a healthy assemblage of lovely, wiggling rice-lings. After the 17th century, people smartened up a smidge and realized that maggots don't arise from decomposing flesh. No; they arise from the waxed cardboard boxes that meat products are shipped in! The incredulous need only to take a gander at the cardboard dumpster behind my local grocery store. The meat cutters threw a bunch of empty cardboard boxes in early in the day, and by nightfall, the whole perimeter of the dumpster was crawling with infantile insects! And the dumpster for garbage? Not a single squirming maggot. If that doesn't prove my hypothesis, let me remind you that evolution is only a theory, and for that matter, so is gravity. Suck on that, Francesco Redi!

Take a moment to imagine: A dirty old man, pants pulled up to his man-breasts and suspendered securely in place, with an enormous chunk of chocolatey waffle cone stuck to the front of his t-shirt collar, just hanging out, obscured from his geriatric awareness and skills of detection, screaming out to the rest of the world like some cruel joke at the expense of the elderly, probably at one point delicious, likely to fall off at some future moment, doubtlessly right before he slowly eases into his chair, now mashed messily into the ass of his pants, where it will be seen by an all new group of snickering people when he goes out tomorrow.

You know what's disgusting? Bezoars. Apparently a good way to form one is to either eat your hair on a daily basis, or eat way too many over-ripe persimmons, which turn into a disgusting, gluey substance when exposed to stomach acidity. Personally, I prefer the second option, because it allows you to create a bezoar out of whatever materials you'd like. Just eat a sizeable quantity of your sculpting material before you eat persimmons and you'll get the bezoar of your dreams (after coming out of surgery, of course). Anything goes: your collection of movie ticket stubs, handfuls of paperclips, or all that beautiful, smooth sea-glass you laboriously collected on your vacation last summer.

It's currently raining. Many people will claim that their favorite smell is the earthy scent that fills the air after a brief rain. Almost none of those people know that the name of that smell is petrichor.

Combos are the official cheese-filled snack of NASCAR. It seems to me that they could have had the entire "Official NASCAR snack" market cornered, but they screwed up by electing to be very specific. Hypothetically, at any moment there could be a massive proliferation of various snack-types that NASCAR could sanction, and the official cheese-filled snack would be lost among a sea of official creme-filled, official lightly salted, official kettle-cooked, official hand-molded, and official whatever snacks ad infinitum ad absurdum. Really, it's too bad, because Combos are pretty gross, and while NASCAR fans are pretty indiscriminant about what they shovel into their sweatpants-straining paunches, this character trait will also work against Combos when additional official snack-types begin to crowd the stage.

And what the heck? I thought Batman Begins was supposed to be good.

The Past 24 Hours as a Brief Series of Vignettes

• A modern tragedy, though hardly of Grecian proportions: Gritty Baguette, or Did The Goddamn Filling On My Chipped Tooth Just Fall Out Again, performed recently as a monologue in Panera Bread.

• A man with a long, hooked stick, having just delicately placed letters on the marquee beneath the Senator Inn's bold road-side sign, packing up his materials and walking off, the words "INQUIE'R WITHIN" emblazoned in red for all to see (or be oblivious to). Me, dying of an aneurysm at a remarkably young age.

• An over-ripe banana with a pinched wound in its flesh, spewing countless fruit flies like blood cells, or tiny benign hornets wrested from their hive by some awful, instinctual compulsion.
  

On the Night, Which Ideally Should Involve Sleeping

Would you say that driving at night is a lot like having a near-death experience? The deliberate reduction and intense focusing of your field of vision, the world-at-large jetting through your periphery, too dark and muddled to perceive? The tunnel of light that directs you to your destination? All with some heightened state of alertness, some drive towards awareness that paradoxically seems to slow everything down and draw it out like so much spindly thread. And you're alone. Even when with passengers you're alone, their faces falling back into the darkness at the fringes, their haunted voices echoing into the tunnel from somewhere outside in the muffled world. And like planets or blazing stars, streetlamps and porch lights dart by, ambiguous markers in the universe as you make your way through it.

On a night drive I see a black garbage bag on the side of the road, and I wonder if it contains dismembered limbs. It is late and the thought troubles me, even after the bag has been whisked out of my narrow tunnel of light. How does such an association become formed in one's mind? I've never encountered a trashbag of body parts before. It's one o'clock in the morning, and a man sits in a chair on his front lawn, alone, poking at the tiniest of campfires. On a darkened gravel road, a tremendous lunar moth, blanched in the high beams, wheels up into the night and then comes crashing to the dirt, over and over, as though its only wish is to inter its ghoulish form.

Something about the windows down, about the wind. Something about tires on road.

In the intensity of the headlights, the yellow lines produce lonely epileptic patterns, become hypnotizing, but only until the brightness of a passing car pulls your eyes away. You know you shouldn't look, but you always do, as though the blinding whiteness is the very end you seek after moving for so long through your obscure tunnel. Still, you press on.

The tunnel allows you to feel your movement through time. The present is forced upon you, while behind you, the night consumes the past. No glimpse in the rearview mirror can ever afford some image of the rapid succession of moments that have just careened through the illumination of your headlamps. A set of feline eyes glow on the shoulder, a cat that only exists in the narrow sweep of your light.

When I pull into the driveway, sometimes I just sit for a few minutes and listen to the summer frogs. The world is dark and my tunnel has dissolved. I listen to their cries, and they almost seem to be cheering, telling me, "we're so glad you made it, welcome home, welcome home."