It's 2.15 at night, and I'm tired. Not so tired that I'm ready to go to bed, but tired enough that I fantasize about it. It's right there, not ten feet away from me, warm, comfortable with way too many pillows on it, but what could be harder? What could be harder when I've got a hundred thoughts still whirring away to completion on the 19 year old chunk of matter I've on top of my eyes? So here goes another attempt at writing something so I can clear my head.
On a night like ths I'd like nothing more than to sit back with a cold cup of coffee, preferably an entire pot of it on the heater, and listen to old CDs full of Kenny G or Stevie Wonder and just watch these thoughts go by. Just to be conscious for a while of the things I realize I'm unconsciously processing. No help, just to wave at them as they pass me by, one uncompleted string after another. Maybe even put on an old movie that I haven't seen in a while on my computer. That's something about me, I like to just watch movies on my computer. Most of the people I've known go on about home theater systems and kick ass stereos, but I much prefer my SE215s, or any decent set of earphones. To me a stereo is just a wireless way to listen to stuff while I'm working. Or maybe even take those off and listen to my crummy old laptop working away at some background service or daemon I've never known to exist. Listen to the drive heads move in coordinated unison with the elegantly engineered stepper and its unbelievably tiny driver enclosed in green soldermask. To the disturbances I imagine are created as electric pulses whizz by in front of me as fast as they're allowed to, through the tiny traces I see snaking away in front of me. To the multiplex of signals created and destroyed every nanosecond, whizzing by each other like a giant multi-storey ant colony completely unaware of their destiny. Maybe they're self-aware. Maybe if humans could perceive yoctoseconds, they would see these tiny signals making choices they think change the way their lives lead, acting them out, making new ones until they reach their destination and are terminated or re-transmitted in a new form, different yet all so similar to the previous one. In the Hitchhike's Guide to the Galaxy, Earth is revealed to be a giant computer running a program and all life in it as part of that program. I'd like to think that intelligences exist that we never will perceive because they move too fast or too slow relative to our idea of time to allow any kind of communication, or even recognition. They live and die in the time we take to inhale just one molecule in the billions we consume in a second; but are their lives, if they existed, any more different than those we believe to lead?
