This just happened:
Guy: “Whats the opposite of a bounded integral?”
Me: “Antiderivative?”
Guy: “Indefinite integral! thanks”
- #683
- #682
The War
We built our country out of love, and it was a most beautiful country where people loved freely and lived great lives of joy. Once, our dear neighbor declared war against us. We shed many tears on this terrible occasion. Then, the day of the war was upon us and we were ready: all our hearts were filled with love and nothing but. We had our armies of love, we walked and stripped bare, naked as we ran towards our enemies, nonviolent and gorgeous like a million little angels and the soldiers, the gay ones, the straight ones, the females, the males, they threw out their helmets, and they disrobed from the uniforms of stringent conformity as they threw out the helmets, and we saw their naked hearts, that beat just like ours, and in place of blood, there was only semen, lots and lots of it and the rains poured down upon us as if the gods were crying at the beautiful scenes unfolding in their vision and Evolution froze her sculpting arms to witness this revolting act, an improbable revolution of love, this implausible war of love.
- #681
I am on a train somewhere near Kyoto. I feel the lightest I’ve ever felt. I feel no burden, I feel like I was born today and I have no enemies. Like my muscles are perfectly carved and my bones are flawlessly cast out of pure calcium. I have no work to do. I have a beautiful day ahead of me, that stretches out like a delicious sliver of cream for eternity. The lightness of being is profound and remarkable. I will never forget how profound this is. I look at my fellow passengers and smile a toothy smile. I feel some of my lightness spread to them. My friend, she sits by the window, watching the gentle landscape, and I hug her with both my arms and a full chest. She is warm and she is happy. I can hear the beautiful rhythm of the train breezing over the tracks. And the Japanese countryside with its cherry blossoms and rice fields and far off snow caps whistles past me. I think, this is the end of my life. For what would life after death feel like if it didn’t feel like this. So light, and liberating. The fears have faded. Truly. And for ever, it seems. The world is a beautiful train billowing through the gorgeous mountain tunnels and verdant hill tops. I touch my checks and they feel moist and tender, like a baby’s buttocks might. And bloodless. As if they are made of apple rather than flesh and blood. In this moment, I am the universe and the universe is I. Nothing matters, because I am everything, all that exists. This has to be death. Or something.
- #680
Knowing When to Laugh
And while I sat there at the pond,
a small dragonfly beat its wings past my eyes.
And I swear I heard gears shifting then,
maybe a train on a distant track.And the dragonfly came back again,
and the focused train as well,
and when it flew past my eyes again,
it had no time to notice its voyeur.So I looked at my hands and feet,
Beaten, calloused, and scarred,
Wondering if they had ever ground gears
Loud enough to announce my existencea puffing of breath, a scratchy panting noise,
and the heavy crunching of iron and rust.
With a shriek like a banshee’s to tell me
when I have arrived at my destination.I remember hearing something once,
that a dragonfly only lives for a day.
And I’ve lived a dragonfly’s life now,
and where my purpose is I could not tell you.I marched back to your house,
chug-chugging underneath my breath.
I stared ahead, wondering if the banshee’s shriek
would make you jump.I sat at the table in the kitchen, waiting for you,
admiring the companionship of the salt and pepper.
I heard the shrieking and listened closer,
it was only the kettle, announcing its accomplishment.My head sunk into the wood floor that night,
My eyes rested on the horizon of the floor,
But your cotton feet broke my concentration
and when I followed you there was no chugging.You made me come to bed that night,
and I stared at the ceiling for hours,
straining my ears to the distance, and
I tasted metallic tears roll down my lips.I felt the chugging in my stomach that night,
the Chinese railway workers making tunnels,
the dynamite exploding in my stomach,
and the steel tracks as they nailed them to my bones.I fell asleep to their broken English,
shouting commands at one another,
and when I woke my stomach was empty,
so I snuck away from you and the bed.I went to the pond and hid beneath a tree,
And my chugging friend flew by me,
and I found myself standing and walking back.You stood outside, your fingers stuck inside your ears,
Your yelling seemed unnecessarily loud.
That’s when I knew to laugh;
all I needed was to find my tiny gold spike. - #679
The caller-id on the phone was unknown, and that usually means a telemarketer or some other waste of time, but I was feeling cautiously adventurous today so I decided to pick it up anyways, which turned out to be a good idea speaking causality-wise.
“Hey Sam. This is you, 25 years in the future.”
“Ok.”
“No surprise?”
“Nah. That surprises you?”
“I think I brushed the first one off as some sort of prank.”
A bit of a gambit.
“What’re you calling about?”
“Straight to the point then eh?”
“No need for beating around the bush.”
“Okay. Do you think you could try to write just a little clearer in our journal? I can barely make out what you wrote. Blue marker or whatever it was I can’t remember was a horrible idea.”
“Wouldn’t you know if I had?” I did have a journal. But it wasn’t blue marker, it was black pen.
“But I couldn’t tell you what you end up doing, could I? Can’t violate causality and all that.”
“And this conversation isn’t a violation of causality?” I thought about it. The only way that he would actually bring up the journal thing is if he noticed a change in the journal quickly after the call and felt cocky enough to be the one to incite the change himself. That was dangerous though, and it felt more of ‘time playing jokes’ then a change actually influenced by time travel.
If there’s a choice between a world-state that requires time travel to exist and one that doesn’t, the one that doesn’t will always win.
“Not as long as I’m careful.”
“And if you’re not?”
“But I am. After all, I remember getting all five calls.”
“Five? Why just five?”
“Do you know how expensive these calls are?”
“No.”
“Well, you will.”
“That’s the limit? Expense? Disappointing. Here I thought I was going to be rich in the future.”
A slight pause. “Not rich enough.”
“And it seems like you’ve pretty much wasted this one.”
“Yeah, this one’s just a primer for the next few.”
“Indeed. When can I expect the next?”
“Huh, don’t remember.”
“Well, you can decide.”
“A few years?”
“Long time. I probably won’t even remember this one.”
“One more thing. Drop out of college.”
“Huh?”
“Oops.” The line cut.