Alien Art
This was going to be the title. But I lost track and now I don't care. I care about a lot of more fundamental things these days.
Yeah, it's an excuse. I have to keep posting or people will think I'm dead.
They told me that.
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These days I spend a lot of time wondering.
The US Government has now joined much of the rest of the world in admitting we see things flying in the sky that exhibit apparent technologies far outside what we have developed to this point in human history. (Doesn't mean we couldn't or haven't produced it - just says that right now, we imagine how it works, and if it works the way we think - it's beyond us. But in truth, it might not be.)
The US Government has admitted recovering bodies of non-Earthly apparently living creatures. It admits examining them. It admits they're not from Earth. Not from Earth. Not earthly. Life exists elsewhere. Intelligent life, possibly superior to us (the indication being there are all sorts of communities of beings out in space that are not as advanced as we are.)
I heard one former official say that there are those in the intelligence community who believe UFO crashes (and why should something so advanced - crash in random fields? How come no UFO crashes in the middle of NYC?) were all "tests" to see how we'd react to the introduction of what seems to be ridiculously advanced technologies and alien races.
They think that. They said that to congress.
We were so busy fighting with each other over topics chosen for us by the extremely wealthy - guns, oil, abortion, control - that we all utterly ignored this.
I suggest you can go to YouTube - or any so-called "news" outlet - and see the CSPAN recordings. I saw them. I could not believe this was being revealed and the entire population went - oh, aliens? Yeah. So?
All this time there has been a theory that society as we know it would collapse if we found out humanity wasn't the alpha predator in the universe.
Turns out, it didn't.
Now what?
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Because we can all agree there are aliens (at least I hope we can get past the government-sponsored denial) I wonder what aliens think of human art.
Specifically, music.
I imagine a group of alien scientists (if they have such things) discussing human social behavior.
"Well, they build huge structures to live in. They dam rivers and generate electromagnetic forces they utilize in their regular lives. They travel through their atmosphere in metal ships utilizing primitive combustion propulsion. They surround their planet with sensors and communication devices. Travel through the oceans in propeller-driven tubes. And they kill each other, purposefully for a variety of opaque reasons and sometimes entire civilizations clash and destroy giant swaths of their populations. They like to believe there is some universal benefit to their destructive tendencies. They like to believe this violent intensity is a beneficial hallmark of their species.
Because otherwise, they're behaving worse toward each other than the other animals on the planet.
"Oh, and they make these weird noises and seem to go into states of synthronized mental processes in the presence of the vibration they make."
Some being somewhere has got to find this mysterious.
Or maybe every species in the universe has such a thing.
Far as we can tell, frequency and vibration are what things, everywhere, are made of. So music may indeed be a fundamental force of nature. Music may be a force that motivates our living, the way electricity causes a light bulb to illuminate.
Do aliens have music? Have we ever heard any of it? Most aliens we know about have no ears. So maybe their music is utilizes something like the weak nuclear force.
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One US Government official spoke about the fact that though we see UFOs everywhere (and we do, and we have been - I see them myself) and have recovered some and even the pilots - it seems there is some sort of "non-interference" rule they are trying to follow. Why don't they land on the White House lawn?
The individual hypothesized that the craft we see run independent of spacetime, and so could be time machines, and if so, perhaps they - are "we" - from the distant future (why not the past?) And due to the all the time-frame paradoxes science fiction writers try to write around - they don't want to come back and accidentally kill their grandfathers and so become non-existant.
I actually heard someone say this in a congressional hearing. We can't even time travel one nanosecond yet, and we're discussing ships moving through time like water. We're discussing it seriously, in public.
Now I guess congress talks to all sorts of loonies these days - especially regarding politics. So maybe nobody was particularly shocked at the reality this guy was explaining. They all live in their own bubbles of artificial reality, and aliens apparently aren't a part of that. The guy could have said - I have proof the world will end before I leave these chambers - and they would have all yawned. Now if he said - "I have proof your political opponents will wipe you off the map by January of next year in an incredible landslide of public opinion," then maybe they would have listened.
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All of this is incredibly amusing to me because in a way, I have no skin in the game anymore. In a fraction of a year my tenure as a productive member of society will end, and I will retire to theoretically reap the benefit of 43 years of labor. I am not comfortable with this. And I have cancer that will kill me someday. Don't know which day, but that makes life interesting.
Stage one is to extract myself from the working world. Believe it or not, I don't want to.
Now I know why all those retirement aged guys I knew as a youngster hesistated. To me - retirement was a perpetual vacation. To me, retirement is when I become a lazy, financial burden. Perpetual vacation is how you drag down your community.
I don't want to stop my life. Work has been my life. Work is why I am not a famous writer - I used to write, jetlagged, at midnight in various cities around the globe - and all of it was sleep-deprived blather. Work is why I missed my daughter's 2nd birthday, and missed most of their soccer and softball games. Work is why I never pursued music or other things I might have loved trying.
Work was my excuse for not being a good human. Now it will go away.
I really have to hope I'm a good human, because I no longer have an excuse.
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I've known a lot of people who died. Some family. Some friends.
There was no way to put myself in their position though I tried to imagine - what do you think about at 3AM when you're dying? What do you dream about? Are your dreams like small deaths?
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Who will take care of my dogs when I am gone?
Does my wife know how to change the filters in the water treatment system?
Will my grandson even know he had a grandfather who loved him even though they only met once?
Will my children use their inheritances well, or will they squander my life's work?
After a generation has gone by, I will not be remembered. My entire existence as a human being may as well never happened. I have done nothing to change the world for the better.
Will my wife remember to get the oil changed in the truck?
Who will plow our driveway when it snows?
Is there anyone who would appreciate all the electronics I have built or will everything I have built simply be tossed into a dumpster to be forgotten?
What if I die suddenly of a heart attack, and my wife comes home to find me? How can I make death predictable and managable?
Will anyone love the things and people I loved in life, and care for them the same way?
Should I even be thinking about this now? I'm in treatment. Maybe it will go well.
But it probably won't.
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My dreams are the same incoherent stupidity they have always been. Being closer to death hasn't changed them in any way.
Or I'm not close to death.
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I have nothing to do these days. I'm afraid to commit my time to a project because in theory, I'm still working. I am employed, but in tech - once they know you're not a player anymore, there isn't much for you to do.
I attend meetings every week. I say nothing, and I am asked nothing.
I sit in the living room, on my laptop, listening to Microsoft Teams meetings and wondering how much longer I've got. If I knew I was going to die next week, would I be sitting listening to this meeting about software development?
Um
It seems unlikely. I mean, if it was you, you'd take time and check things off the bucket list, right?
You're not me.
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See, you think to yourself - if I was dying I would do this or that.
In fact, you want everything to stay the same. So you do your damnedest to keep everything flowing the way it has been. Wake up. Shower. Commute. Work. Go home. Dinner. Sleep. Repeat.
Keeping that intact seems to be of utmost importance.
But biology has different plans for old Joe.
So I announced I would retire - I have to - this body is not capable of performing at the level it has for 40+ years. This mind is dulled by pain and heavy cancer drugs.
They do not get out of me what they pay for.
I should leave.
I will.
Then what?
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You have heard this happens. It's real. None of us believes it.
Time is more valuable than money.
Now I know it's true.
With work no longer a crutch I will spend more time with family - I hope I can travel.
I will spend time with my dogs.
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Back to aliens.
There are people who have been studying aliens and their technology - as it appears here in our world. They have been studying for a long time.
They say the hieroglyphics and legends are real. There really was an Osiris. There really was an Ea.
We - were created by them. We are their experiement.
Someone who has been studying this phenomenon thinks that.
And I will suggest to you there is a connection he hasn't made because he believes that - he believes all humanity will be incredibly depressed when they find out (all these UFO guys are worried society will collapse - and we have proof it doesn't.)
I suggest to you that if we are a creation of aliens, then "we" exist outside of this physical realm.
See, "they" (who probably need our cooperation) suggest we have much more ability than they do. "They "keep reminding us we're far more powerful than we know.
"They" brought "Us" here. We agreed.
They tell us that we are not these bodies - we simply occupy these bodies.
If you were going to try to explore this space time - and you could only come into this space time sporadically in your UFO ships - wouldn't it make more sense to put on your exploration gear before simply jumping into the deepest part of the ocean?
I don't believe "we" are "them." I believe we are a race cooperating with "them" for our mutual benefit.
And here we go trying to blow the whole thing up.
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If death is endless nothingness - so what? If so it won't matter to us.
But I posit this whole thing - this life - this earthly experiment is here because it does matter to us.
By the way, the Hindus and Buddhists have been saying this to westerners for eons. There is "us" and there is "this" and we keep coming back to it.
Karma
Who am I to argue with 5000-year old beliefs?
Maybe we think there's a benefit in forgetting. Maybe forgetting we're something different is part of the experiment.
Our thing is to master earth life.
Not sure we're there yet.
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Ok I don't feel like writing anymore today. Not sure what aliens have to do with anything.
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Maybe this.
The night before I went into my first chemo I was out getting the mail at the end of the driveway. It was February. It was frigid and dark.
As one is wont to do in these life-altering moments I looked at the sky and said, "If this is going to kill me give me a sign."
A peach-colored orb appeared over my garage.
It traversed past me, over my head, and went into the trees and disappeared.
And I got this weird happy feeling in my gut.
My read on this is they said, "Of course you're going to die you ninny. That's what this is about. Now stop whining and go do your job."
By the way
that really happened.
So
What next?