Everything matters.

Sometimes you look back and imagine you had a time machine. You'd get in, armed with all you know today (and possibly a judiciously selected almanac or a stack of financial times or two) leap back and make the life you always wanted, correct your mistakes, seize all the opportunities.

It's tempting, isn't it?

See, you know those were mistakes with the benefit of hindsight. If you never made them to begin with... would you have learned from them? Or would every mistake fixed fade out a piece of your memory, like Marty fading from his photo, so you're all set to repeat it a few days / weeks later?

You'd be frantically racing back in time again and again and again, fixing mistakes that keep happening, over and over, wondering why your brilliant plan isn't working, while paradoxes fill your history and your memory turns into swiss cheese.

On the other hand... you can justify. What if you don't fix anything? After all, those were your decisions, even if wrong, and they defined who you are today. You proudly own your errors, stand by your stumbles, proud to be the product of choice...

But what if you've already been back, once, twice, more times?

The One That Got Away is the one you are married to now - will you remember her as TOTGA? The children you decided to have, or didn't. The jobs you stayed in, or quit. The investments made or passed over. Decisions made one way, or another.

What you remember is always going to be the product of those choices, minus the memories made by not taking those other choices.

Doing X produces A.

Doing Y produces B.

You can only do one action, and get that one outcome.

The other will be the road not taken. 

Do X, yearn for B. Vice versa, ad infinitum.

Regret not finding B. Lie awake nights, cursing yourself. Swearing to never repeat that. Leaping at the chance to do the next Y1 that looks like it will get you B1. On and on and on...

Until here you stand today.

Proud.

Looking back at A and B1 as the grand achievements of your life.

Idly lost in reverie - what if B, or A1 had happened instead? Sad? Angry? Drowning in pain, or overwhelmed with relief?

But... A or B don't matter in themselves. They're just how you feel about them. It doesn't matter what they were, you'd feel about them the same way.

So... does anything matter, then? Because whatever you do, it matters. Whatever you don't do, it matters just the same.

Everything matters.

My own private Narnia

So, do you believe in magic?

There are places that exist. Maybe they were real once, maybe they only live in the memories I have of them, selected, curated, gaps filled in with imagination and dreams, but who's to say what makes them any less real or false than objective, empirical reality?

There is a place like that I'm especially feeling tonight. A place of dreams, of wild imagination that  became reality before the eyes of their dreamers, came out into the real world and took shape and form, grew and flourished far beyond what they had hoped, beyond what they could have dared to believe.

Silicon Valley is a fascinating story, a myth made flesh, a world of games, stories, vivid, crazy, reckless, explosive magic. A place and time that changed the world. I showed us that you can dare to dream, and make new realities the way you wanted.

And yes, it comes with it's share of corruption, of cancer in it's bones and blood slowly blackening the golden sunshine with darkness and sleaze, with greed and lust and envy, a place where a thousand dreams died for every that lived...

But I'm not talking about the semiconductor factories, the garage inventors, the gamers and hackers and cyberspace architects and explorers, even the coders of the dotcom era or the VCs of the last decade past.

For me, it's always going to be a proof of concept, a place even in it's hard, expensive, gentrified avatar, with it's rents and commutes and affectations and cut-throat capitalism, it's still going to be a place where despite itself it can be a place where magic can happen. Maybe not the big, grand magics of overnight millions and free information and universal connectivity and equality, but small ones. Little things that are so huge compared to the realities of other places. Air, water, food. Interests. A chance to explore, to try. Stories and struggles. Not the destinations reached and prizes won, but a place full of the magic of trying, of running, of the journey.

And when you come out of the wardrobe back into your world, even as the past fades like a dream you cannot talk about, and you get back to the grind, you come back changed. You come back touched by the magic, fey, a little different, marked by a sunshine few understand. And even if you can never return - physically, temporally - you will always remember it as your own experience of it, not so much for what it was, but in what you felt there, what it did to you, how it made you feel. How it changed you.

And that's what makes it a magic place. Something that's yours alone, something unexplainable, intangible, yet so, so real.

My own private Narnia. 

Things are never just things

Clearing out a storage space is hard.
If you've been used to moving around, you already have a filter that ruthlessly throws away anything that's not needed any more, unless it has some use or sentimental value.
Things that get used, get used, wear out, get replaced.
But the ones that have an emotional connect - it's hard to see them again, because they're not just things, are they?
A little memory, a little piece of a life that once was.
A little moment in time, inconsequential but for the dreams that rode on its shoulders in the sun, laughing in delight at a bright and happy future they saw coming.
Now the moment lies still in it's bed of dust, crumpled plastic and yellowing paper, fading photographs and retro single... and dreams lie dead, incinerated in the nuclear blast of change, the hurricane winds of time. So destroyed they aren't even a memory anymore, except from the impression they left on these things.
A torn note from the back of a class book.
A receipt, a train ticket, a boarding pass, a membership card.
Things used till they were tattered and lovingly repaired.
Things pristine, never used at all, but bought on the wings of hopes and dreams, waiting expectantly in their sealed plastic covers.

Tiny little inconsequential things that can break you...

A reek of opulence

"Come, let's take a look," he says, striding up the corridor. I'm in one of the premiere, large-scale properties in the heart of the city, within an thirty minutes of most core Bombay and built for luxury. The place is huge, with multiple pools, tennis, gyms, 'library', clubs, cardrooms, restaurant, fountains, and a jogging track in the terraces. It's priced completely out of any possibility of my acquisition. This is just a visit. And though we both know this, the sheer pride and excitement of showing off this - the epitome of the high life, the measure of one's success, a chance to walk in the footsteps of the Rich - adds a spring in his step no expectation of wasted effort can dampen.

Yet.
I look around these mansions of the gods, and I feel - as Arthur C Clarke said - not envy, but pity.
The track is beautifully decorated with vegetation, to hide the ranks of construction cranes standing sentinel over the coming metro trainyard. The pools are long and wide, but only four feet deep. Everywhere. There will never be a cannonball in here, no sink into skullcrushing pressure until all you hear is your own blood. The clubs are decorated with plaster cast corals and random, mismatched brass and glass. There is no story, no ratty souvenirs. I think of the thirty-kilo geode D found in the Sahyadris and carried it for a day and a half down a mountain, taxi, train, and bus back home, that can far outclass anything on display here. These aren't even someone else's experiences, memories or even statements. They're an expression of an emptiness of mind, heart and soul, filled with objects. The library has more sofas than books. The children's play area has a nine-foot ceiling and accented mood lighting, where a single little girl sits quietly with her nanny, frightened by the hushed deadened soundproofing and the random parade of workers and supervisors walking through her play. An attached gameroom has two slightly older children listlessly gunning down faceless soldiers onscreen, unsupervised. The next room is bright, open, and airy... and filled with pool tables.
The rooms are tiny, open to rows and rows of windows and balconies. A chemical plant belches effluvients on periodic gouts of flame into the sky in the near distance. drills, sanders, grinders, and hammers are everywhere, and a fine,dry, powdery white dust fills the air, even if housekeeping keeps it off the floors as fast as it settles. There will never be a pigeon nest in these kitchens, a bat flying in from the ventilator or a bandicoot in the storage. There will be no feral, friendly cats or enthusiastically genial dogs. No lizards will stalk moths around a single yellow lightbulb in the shadow of a monsoon downpour. No cramped, tiny bookshops filled with more books than physics should allow. There will never be a trash leaves bonfire in the cold autumn evening with potatoes roasting in its heart.
I wonder where the kids will be able to get covered in mud. Which of the protected, decorative trees they can climb and brave the lines of red ants to get at semi-ripe, bat-nibbled mangoes. Where they can sneak out for a smoke, a plack-plastic-bag beer, or a sizzling greasy beef roll off the coals. Breathe in the dry, dusty smell of adventure from brittle, yellowing pages dug out of a stack of decades-old classics. Where they will not be under CCTV. Where they will not be watched and judged for their clothing, behavior, words, thoughts. Where they will meet someone who thinks so differently from them that a new side of the universe opens up.

You  will learn nothing here except that the world outside is a loud, dirty, dangerous place to be despised and shut out. The emptiness will grow and hole left by where fun should have been will gradually fill with arrogance, conformity, and entitlement.

And then they will wonder where they went wrong, or mh more likely, pretend it never happened and blame the Other.

We wanted to keep them safe and comfortable, so we locked them in a solitary padded cell.

In building heaven, we have created hell. 

Secret

Secrets are... light. Not emotionally, psychologically, but physically they have no weight at all, no matter how big they get.
That's why keeping secrets is an active task.
You need to be there, pushing them back under the black waters before the brownian motion of life jitters them to the surface, staring you silently in the face with their blank, dead, sightless eyes.
Dead men tell no tales, they said.
Dead men sing like canaries, because they lack both ability and reason to keep their secrets any more. Every misstep, foible, brutality and act of evil, big and small, surfaces sooner or later. The dead don't care. It's the living that run around pushing the tales back, carefully handcrafting that unnatural artefact of groupthink called truth.
Secrets stain the water, glow in the dark, whisper in the shadows, their odor faint but pervasive.
They are unmissable, unforgettable, immortal.

A zero sum game?

There are 24 hours a day.
There are 3000 calories a day.

Within large or small variations, this is largely true of everyone.

Not.

If you spend three hours in your commute, you have 21 hours.
You could watch TV, play games, read books, travel, exercise, write.
You could watch movies while travelling, read while eating,  walk or cycle to work and combine the commute with exercise.
You still need food.
You still need sleep.

So, you compromise.
You don't read that book because you wanted to watch a rerun of The Office.
You don't hear that podcast because you were tired and groggy and just dozed instead.
You didn't go for a run to get another hour of sleep instead, because you gave up three hours of sleep last night to finish the game.

Everything costs something.

Sure, you could increase time. Be healthier, walk faster. Take a helicopter to work. Eat less, sleep more. Get more energy in each day, get more done. After all, it's not the years in your life, but the life in your years, right?

But that's hard. God, that's so hard.  Such few people can do it, and at most... another 10% out of each day? Another 20?

Or  you could be the average you want to be, doing what you want, because that is what makes it all worthwhile, that is what gives you the best feeling you can get.

Life's too short to burn on pain.
Each day's too short to burn on struggle.

Not? 

Horse Latitudes

Adrift. 

No sense of what comes next. Goals are an abstraction, an intellectual exercise to give just enough meaning to some tasks to stay ticking, but... the one overarching thing, tying it all together? Not so much.

Back then, it was philosophically easier. 'Be better'. Earn more, eat better, experiment, meet girls, buy stuff, work out. Everything was easy because it was all incremental, measurable. Windfalls and gamechanging paradigm shifts were rare but possible windfalls. The steady climb continued. 

Now, it's a zero-sum game. Better in one means worse in another. 

What do you choose, how do you prioritize? 

Maybe ennui is an easy way out, because it sets a low bar. Just survive the day. Makes the work, the commute, tolerable. Seen in the context of what Life was supposed to have been, you'd just step off the train. If there are no goals, there are no failures to reach those goals, and life in survival mode... goes on. 

Where are the grand design plans, the one thing that can tie it all together - work, family, personal, social, financial, societal, self-actualization lodestar destinations?

Is this growing up? A mid-life crisis? 


Waiting. It's hard. 

Perceived Realities

As I gradually come awake, I'm aware of the last fading remnant of my dream sliding away into oblivion; the tail end quickly glimpsed as it slithered away into the dark door, all that's left to remember the experience by...
Except 'glimpsed' isn't the right word.
It took a while to process, but I now realize why this dream had this strange yet familiar texture, falling between visual, symbolic, auditory, where meaning was there but the source felt so chimaeric...
I was dreaming in text.
I was dreaming in that mental state that translates letters on a page into image, sound and smell, without source and without engaging an awareness of the act of conscious reading.
Huh.
Explains a bit of how dreams can be so hard to remember... you're trying to reconstruct the act of reading, not recall.

Once again, The Move.

I've been moving for most of my life. My parents moved when I was a kid, then I moved to study, then work, then moved again as leases ran out, either salaries or rents went up, found rats nesting in the kitchen, got married... 
I thought the mother of all moves was in 2014 when I packed up a life, a wife, a baby and a country to fly nine thousand miles to a new continent. 

Hah.

Here we are again, and this one's the biggest yet, because we're packing it all up this time. Last time we came, brimming with relo assistance $$ and confidence, living out of 4 bags. This time, it's going to be a 20-foot container and everything is coming along. 

When you buy decent stuff, it shows. I happily gave away all my campaign equipment in 2014 because it was, frankly, worn out crap. What I have now is still crap, but it's better and pristine-new crap. 
When you buy decent stuff, there's a color scheme. For example, all black furniture. 
Little gewgaws like a hook to hang the headphones. 
Bags and pouches and boxes and cases. 
Enough extension cords and boards to reach the moon and light it up, too. 

There's also a sense of sadness - not in the detritus of finding things long thought lost and now useless, but in finding new, never-used things acquired on hope and dream, now looking at a future of gathering dust in a storage box. Snow boots. mittens. snow chains. carpet cleaner. jogging jacket. all the things Bombay will never offer an opportunity to use. 

But at the same time, there's also the determination that rides on a deeply-banked substratum of anger - mine. Why should I abandon what I want just because of circumstance? This life was mine to make of it what I wanted - what gives anyone else the right to take those things away? 

Interestingly, even here, there's a purge. As things start getting boxed up, drifts of plastic, labels, packaging, and all kinds of junk starts appearing magically - all the things you never knew having or getting. 

Some things never change, I guess. 

Doing the right thing

Listened to a fantastic PoV the other day - there's so much information in the world, it can't be processed, it must be filtered. And with that filter comes bias. And with that bias comes an erosion in the nature absolutes. 
Which means, you can't tell what's the 'right' thing anymore. 

In the past, there were codes, defined and accepted norms of behavior. You knew what you were supposed to do, and so did everyone else. You knew what the consequences of your actions would be. If good, you'd want them known, you'd crow about them, and if not, you'd hide them behind closed doors and in the dark of the night. 
If you were caught, you and everyone around knew what was to be done - ridicule, reprimand, punishment, banishment, excommunication, execution. 

Now, it's all suspect. Everything seems to be serving a hidden agenda, or even just an overt one. Everyone is surrounded by people who tell him he's right, and if he isn't, finding the right people to agree with you takes minutes - even if they live on the other side of the planet and need Google Translate to understand you. 
Everyone's in a bubble full of their own farts. 

Knowing this, living this, how can you imagine anything you believe is real? Anyhting you believe is right, someone else things is wrong and vice versa, and they're right there to tell you. 

In the past, there was a 'done' thing, which wasn't necessarily the 'right' thing - by the standards of me, here, now, with my education, culture, class, and social background -

But it stopped you second-guessing. 

There is no right or wrong, and there may never have been. 
But there's always an is, and a not is.

And if it is what it is - how does it matter either way? 

cracks

older now, i can see
cracks in reality
the hidden spaces around corners
under your feet, behind your head
squirming around your blindspot like an eclipse corona
i walk in sunshine
turn, quick,
gaps in the world
inside, dark figures, shadowed
whispered conversations in unknown language
levers pulled, buttons pushed
strings held, tangled, webbed
laughter
not the good kind
sometimes there are marionettes
not very good
jerky, frozen grins, see the strings
sometimes, worse, they come out in masks
talk to you
if you talk to them they invite you in
sometimes suddenly 
bits fall through and you see them scurry from the sun
chittering in short-lived panic of discovery
and we laugh
and sing
and dance
and be eaten

Never signed up for this

she's in that dreamstate between awake and asleep, twitching, once in a while reaching out to make sure you're there
you watch that little face, soft in the backwash of the streetlights leaking in through the blinds
and you imagine Life thundering down age's tracks at her, with everything it can throw
and something
something squeezes your heart in a fist
love, terrifying in it's coldly uncompromising, absolute, killing, crushing weight, and you can't breathe
or terror, so deep and enmeshed into your being its warmth fills you with a fever, burning
does it matter? is there a difference?
every day, every second, you push this down, lock it up, don't think, turn your face away into books, reports, tv, parks, the next thing to do, place to go
because if you didn't it would destroy you
but sometimes on nights like this you can't
then that one little hand reaches out again
and you will never have a choice about this, ever, this feeling
and she sleeps

To boldly go where everyone has gone before...

Let's be real, galactic colonization is not going to happen anytime soon. 

1. There's no hyperdrive/warp. The physics we have today say it's impossible. Say, in a few years / decades we figure out that it is possible, we'd have nuked / diseased ourselves into oblivion, never mind the Grey Goo apocalypse. 
2. If there were, even going at X times c where X is a triple-digit number would still take years, maybe decades of real time, shipboard, not relativistic time to get there. Which means the ship is effectively a generation starship, which means the mass of all things needed to sustain the humans aboard outweighs the humans aboard by 25 gajillian tons to the kilo. Plus the colonization stuff. Even if the drive did ALL the moving point A to B, just think of the logistics of getting it into the ship and down again. 
1. Cryosleep? Still not as cost-efficient. 
3. Ok, so don't send humans. Send a digitized bank of DNA codes for everything needed, a nanotech factory, and an AI / semi-AI to make it all happen. Will fit under a couple of dozen kilos, but still leaves the rest of us right here. 
4. No hyperdrive, no space elevators, no all-powerful benevolent AI to stop us from nuking / diseasing each other into the void, sea levels rising... we have a few decades at best, and time's running out. 
5. Terraform the solar system? Absolutely. It's hedging bets, and we have the tech (or will have in five years) the means to get there. Maybe in 50 years, even the means to survive there, in a place with different gravity, different soil, different air, different temperature... assuming any of them exist. Stretch goal, but doable. 
6. Space stations, then? As the Earth fades away after the asteroid impact / Singularity event / zombie apocalypse / nuclear winter, there will be a dozen to a few hundred little lights floating in orbit or L1 to 5 points, maybe even the moon... recycling air, water, food... racing on their little centrifuges to make sure their children gestate normal and their bones don't turn to jelly... 
7. Leaving the final, most economical, most doable answer: 

Vaults. 

Weight is not a problem. Space is not a problem. Go deep enough, and soil is not a problem. Gravity is not a problem. With efficient scrubbers, even air, water, and minerals are not a problem. All you need is a solid door and a long, long time. 

Dozens, hundreds, thousands of vaults. 

With functional ecologies, seed or DNA banks, cryosleeping residents tended by robots, or even - as the ultimate backup - that same nanotech factory and DNA bank buried deep underground or in near-Earth orbit with a thousand-year alarm clock ticking away... 

We're here. Whatever happens, we will survive. The planet may die, but we will remain. 

On Bollywood

My relationship with Bollywood's been fairly interesting, I think. 

When I was growing up, Bollywood consisted of this blur of imagery and drama that would happen for a few hours in a week, maybe a Friday evening movie or a bunch of songs in Eastmancolor on a flickering, crackling, bulbous little CRT... but most of all, it was music. Music everywhere, on taxi cassette players, mikes on the corner, brassy, disjointed bands, and everywhere, radio. Single-channel MW bands on battery-powered transistors sitting in faraway corners, singing away in the background. Somehow, always associated with travelling, with holidays and memories, the comfort food of music. 

It's probably the nostalgia factor, but I guess also because I was most of the time too young to really get what was happening. 

Then sometime around Chunky Pandey, I got old enough to understand the stories... and hated them. And the music - however good it might be - was forever tainted from then on with shallow, selfish, misogynistic, boorish, and embarrassing behavior. 

But all that had come before - I think it's pretty much set the tone for what music should be, as far as I'm concerned. There has to be melody. Imagery. Erudition. The ability to paint a lifetime in a few charcoal strokes, just abstract enough to let you fill in the blanks with what you wanted the story to be. Soothing. Distantly on the edge of hearing, yet constantly there. Familiar enough so you can sing along. 

You don't know who's singing, who's composing, who did the music or what film it's from. It's like reading a comic from the middle of a series you found in a box of junk on a vacation afternoon when you had nothing to do. You don't know why they're singing. You don't have any visuals to go with them. 

All you know is - this is awesome. 

And I guess that's why there's always going to be that genre that exists only in my head - the soundtrack to those drives in the dark, the walks in dusty golden winter sunlight, browsing through second-hand bookstores... and sometime between KL Saigal and Baba Sehgal, a little golden RD-Rafi period that's can only be labelled 'the most awesome childhood ever'. 

unfinished stories

we don't know where they go, or where they come from. they just are. today. now. that's their perfection, with no excuses and no apologies. they are complete because they do not try to be complete. everything is meaningful, everything is chaos, and everything is infinitely ephemeral. 

Think of the books you really loved, the stories, the b-grade movies you watched drunk, baked, on mute. The music videos that seemed to be trying to say something. The middle issues of a story arc in a moldy yellowing stack of comics you found under the stairs. The flower found still preserved lovingly inside a book in a second-hand store. Yellowing portraits of strangers on a wall. The pastiche of flickering images stitched together in the channels you flipped past at 1 am, too tired to sleep, too sleepy to be really aware of what you were doing. 
Dreams with no meaning. Emotion without reason. Images without plot. Music without words. 

They happen, and you stitch them together into a story that's all yours. It's a story born of your memories, your experiences, your interpretations of what you saw. It's may not be what happened, but because you don't know what did happen... it could even be true. It's a story that nobody else would have, and it's a story that depends on so many moving parts in time that it could never have been anytime before, or anytime since. 

I love these stories. I don't want the series to continue, the the hero to get his vengeance, the loose ends tied up, and the curtain to fall. 
I walk into the middle, and I make it mine. 

Why was this so important? What happened to you, that you should want this? Who is she? Why do you see that face in your nightmares? Are you really going to pull that trigger? Did he ever forgive you? Did he forget? Will he remember? 

Invent your own past, your own reasons for people to be who they are, for things to be what they are. Leap in. Surf. Leap off and make up the rest when you run out of pages. 

Every waking moment is a story you invent as you go along. Every moment past is mystery to be deciphered. Every moment coming is a world of possibility where anything may happen. 

What else is there to live for? 

on demons.

Just a quick brief little note
demons are terrible adversaries to have. you know, they're really quite small? tiny enough that you won't even notice them, take them seriously even as you see them around you, on you, you won't believe they're a genuine threat even as they work their way in under your skin... but it's only when you try to pull them off, out, that you see them for the grain of sand in the oyster, the moth in the circuit, the little linchpin that brings the whole machine crashing down, immovable...
but there's also a weakness they have that few use against them - as unbreakable, as stubborn, as unreasoning they may be, as completely able to subdue your will and read your mind, they're still trapped inside of your head.
their reality is the reality that you feed them.
they cannot be broken, cannot be fought, but they can be... deceived.
lied into little boxes, locked up in the dark cellars and a pleasant but heavy cabinet moved in front of the door, not used for much but scrupulously kept full and heavy. Once in a while it tries to move and you quickly push it back before anyone notices. sometimes when it's quiet, you can still hear the footsteps, the scratching, the growl... and you ignore it the way you ignore everything that can't be got rid of.
you ignore it like you turn a back on an enemy, but you can never forget he's there.
going to be forever a part of you.

the little lies are the tiny little silver keys that lock the door
the spoonful of sugar that lets the medicine go down

two hundred and fifty days now, and it still hasn't realized it's been caged

broken

we all have things to do, places to go. 
people to be. 

and then there's some of the others, the ones who show up now and then. the occasional status update, blog post. a friend we caught up with after too long who mentions what he'd heard. a mention in Midday. 
the ones who did what they wanted. what we wanted. 

and when they intrude into our consciousness, so rudely shouldering aside all the comfortable preconceptions of all we held dear about our goals and place in life, it's a complex feeling. 
we're happy for them. they are friends, after all, and they did got something, did something extraordinary. 
we're also envious, because sometimes we want to be the one standing there. we want our face in the photograph, our name in the air. it's a reminder of the things we still have to to do, the things we now never will do. 
we love them because they're our past, and we hate them because they could have been our future. 

the broken ones. 
it takes something extraordinary to get to somewhere extraordinary, to do that something great. greatness is not a comfortable condition, not a soft, gentle, 'approved' state. greatness is a bitch. greatness drives us with curses and a whip, strips the fat from our flesh and later, the flesh from our souls. it drives us while we live, it drives us bleeding and struggling to our deaths, and it drives the spark that makes us what we are beyond that. 
it breaks us first, because the smooth, functioning, well-oiled cog the world wants us to be, that keeps everything moving along, is not what does great things, is not capable of achieving the extraordinary. 
it's only after we break, after we no longer fit in with the engine of the world, that we are free to walk that different path. 
we call them sacrifices. the family, the relationships, the career, the retirement plan. the house and the car, the degrees and the diplomas, the promotions, bonuses and increments. these are all the things we drop, we tear ourselves free of. 
it hurts. every one thing left behind is a rebirth, with all the blood and screams that come with it. 
some people are born just once, into that one life. 
others suffer their rebirths again and again, for a;ll the new lives they bring. 

but we don't see the agony, the suffering, the self-doubt and the regret, the failures. we just see the end, and it mocks us with the mirror it holds up to ourselves. 

but. 

but. 

did you think you were the perfect one? seriously? everyone has choices we chose. mistakes we made. 
secrets in the deep dark of our hearts, words and faces that will never see the light again except for those times when we revisit them, alone, in silent nights while our world sleeps around us. 
the world we so carefully put together. 
the perfect world that shouts out, i am whole, complete, all there. there's nothing wrong with me. 

but there's something wrong, isn't there?
something wrong with everyone. 
we all want that perfection, but nobody's perfect. we all want that shining glossy well-rounded life that everyone aspires to, but we know that under that pristine surface is things we did not do, people we left behind, choices we didn't make and hearts we broke. 

we want to build fairytale palaces on shifting sands. we do. 

we don't need to pity the broken ones their hard choices, or envy them their dreams. 
we are the broken ones. 
all of us. 

That one perfect word

It's a warm, starry, moonless night.

Let's go out, you and I. Walk out into the dark, lie down in the soft grass, and look up. 

...

See that star over there? 

Now, see that one? 

Now, see how in one glance you traveled a distance greater than all of humanity through all of their history, put together? How that one flick of the eye covered a time greater than the existence of mankind, maybe of the planet under us? 

That's the power of imagination. That's the power of what a phrase in a book can do, a million times over, a casual word spoken by a stranger in that perfect moment, that one unique context that your life, knowledge and being put together, that shook everything you were and everything you thought the world was and would be. 

The last electron that smashes down the lightning bolt, the last neutron that triggers the critical mass chain reaction. 

Little things, tiny things, insignificant things that can shatter universes. 

Ripples in the air, squiggles of pigment on paper. 

Reading can be a terribly dangerous thing to do. It can be terrifying, if you think about it. That one word will suddenly come around the corner of the next page you turn, the next link you click, and change everything. For everyone. At any time. 

Terrifying.

Exhilarating. 

A storm of thought that can rip off your mind's sails, wreck you, sink you... or take you to a new continent, a new world. 

That's why we keep turning the pages, riding the storms. We fear it, yet we seek it, a glimpse of that one perfect word. 

Maybe follow it. 

Maybe... one day... if it doesn't rip us to shreds first.. capture it, make it ours. Tame it. 

It has the power to make us the master of our universe. 

Waiting for the Singularity

Nearly there. 

It's been a long ride. We nearly didn't make it so many times. We still might not get there, but we can see the ribbon stretched across the track now. 

I's a relay race that's lasted thirteen billion years. Physics of gravity, nuclear transmutation and supernovae, to chemistry of elements becoming molecules and complex hydrocarbons, to biology's replicating strands and evolution, to the oxygen-making algae, complex multicellular organisms, that first step out of the ocean, the hand and the opposable thumb, sparks from a flint into fire, charcoal marks on the cave wall that told stories and sang songs, from the domesticated wolves to the invisible virii that delivered gene-modifiation therapy, to silicon minds and global networks... 

We nearly didn't make it so many thousands, millions of times. That bacterium smashed into space under a world-ending cosmic bombardment, only to return aeons later. That specific configuration of planets. The asteroid that hit, and all those that missed. The Ice Ages, the Black Death. A Nuclear Winter that almost happened. Maybe others that did. 

A dying planet unable to cope with the demands we make of it, a species ripping itself apart and all others around it in paroxysms of imagined slights and self-destructive responses. 

We've danced on the edge of the cliff for millenia, and it's second nature now. 

Just another generation, maybe two. Then we can hand over the baton, sit back, and settle peacefully into history as our successor solves all our problems once and for all and goes ahead with Life. 

Touched by a Dark Angel

I see Her sometimes out of the corner of my eye, a flitting dark shadow far away, right there in front of me, going about her work, and I always try to watch the expression on her face. She's sometimes absorbed, serious, curious... sometimes wistful, even compassionate... and sometimes there's a cool, unimaginably alien indifference as She shatters lives and breaks hearts, a remote blankness the ant sees on the oncoming car's wheel... 

We've never spoken, but I could swear She knows what I'm planning, exactly why I'm trying to stay just far away enough so She can't reach for me, but keeping Her close enough to watch, make sure She can't sneak up on me on one dark night, around a blind corner. So far She's mostly amused, not insulted... and why wouldn't She be? She's seen this before. So many billions of times before. The ways and means have varied, but in the end it's all come down to that moment, when the light fades on all the pleading, the tears, the fights, the pain. 
The moment when the light fades away into the silence. 

A baby and a middle-aged man, one a stranger, one the remotest acquaintance, yet...
One is dead, the other is dying, and behind each unknown face I see a familiar one looking out, through that tangle of hair, and is that a wink?

We've all been there, she whispers, done that. Give it your best shot. You're interesting. Maybe I'll give you a little chance. Just to see how far you get. I got the razor to your throat, the bead on your head, but... let's run, anyway. It's fun. 
And who knows?

She's looking directly at me now, like the few times before, and wherever I am, whatever I'm doing, I can feel that glance, sliding in like an abstract icicle shard, a diamond-edged scalpel slicing through hopes, dreams, fears, desires, wants, plans, every resource I've saved and every defense I've built. Straight to the heart it goes, and stops, with the faintest single crystalline-cold tingle of a touch that reverberates through my life, then goes back, a little reminder of how close she can get, and how ephemeral the world and all I held close in it was, to begin with. 
A little reminder of how it can all end. Anytime. 
Anytime She wants. 

That's fine, I whisper back, I know you're there, but let's run anyway. It'll be fun. 

And her razor grin widens as her whipcord body relaxes, and - yet again - that tiniest nod. 
Go.

And we run. 

We run through traffic, through blaring horns, skidding rubber, and hurtling metal; we run through the billion, trillion little killer lives hanging in the air waiting to take root; we hurdle open manholes, dodge fizzing, spitting power lines, skate under crumbling, creaking edifices, and past dark alleys glinting with watching eyes and waiting steel. We run past claws, teeth, stings, and talons, we run through deserts, skate over thin ice, jump dark chasms, through freezing cold, open flame, and a witches' brew of poison, we run through night and dark as thunder growls in the building clouds... 

We parkour through that dazzling, dizzying obstacle course called Life and and I can still see Her, still here in the corner of my eye, effortlessly pacing me in the distance, and She's laughing in delight. 

And She's laughing because, no matter how tired, how damaged, how heartsick, I'm laughing too, and I will keep laughing till all the laughter runs out, into the silence at the end. 
But for now, this is the most awesome thing ever. 

And we run.