Rico Penguin

  I’m a fairly young man, most of the time I don’t even think about it, but then there are those days. I in part blame the recent healthcare battles between the two unusually short sighted parties that make up this adorably dysfunctional American political system.

  I find that it is only exacerbated by me currently watching a marathon of House M.D.. Now I understand to a small degree some of the intricate ways that our minds try to correlate everything we experience to ourselves and to other things we know. As it stands I’m fairly certain I’ll actually make it to at least my 50th birthday. Now I’m hoping for at least triple digits but I tend to be a realist. Perhaps a naive realist (in other words not one).

  But I was thinking about the Macabre (Macab?) and how much we are infatuated with death. It is the greatest of ends (dare I say the ultimate one), it is something so powerful in our psyche’s that we create entire stories around just what happens instead of death. I even wonder just how much of our infatuation with death ties in with the nearly violent battle against national healthcare.

  Imagine if you will the concept at its rawest. There are quite literally people who find problems in the idea of preventing disease, pain, or death. There are literally people who see life-health-as a business. This is, to me, the ultimate erotic obsession with the macabre. I can in no way describe how disgusting this view is. There are no amount of words, no amount of gestures, no amount of violent acts, no amount of hypocrisy, I can think of no level of anything that would describe or display just how much I detest these people.

  Is it extreme? Oh yes. Is it short sighted? I’m sure. However this is true. Because at the end of the day, I feel nauseous to the point of nearly vomiting just by discussing death. When I feel minor discomfort I immediately assume it is something that is cutting off years from my life. All of these feelings, each of them compounded a trillion times over would not nearly be as bad as any of them actually being true. I cannot even truly grasp the terror of finding out that your life is about to end, even if that about is 20 years from now. The ultimate macabre is that all these fears, all these pains, and indeed millions of lives could all be spared, but they are not because of a bottom line.

  Personally, and again I’m sure this is part of my own hypocritical naivety, there is no amount of money that is too much to stop these fears and these realities. Mainly because there is no amount of money that has value when everyone is gone.

  I often wonder how many people are overlooked in the world. There are something like 7 billion people in the world, that is an absolutely astounding number. While we all generally have similar organic configurations the slight variations in each person entail that something amazing can be done by them.

  But it troubles me that so many could die before their talents are discovered. So many people who can actually sing overlooked because they aren’t as attractive as “Generic High School Voice #4”, so many folks who could build grand buildings but don’t get the proper education, discover the cure for cancer but never get the proper science education, great writers who never flourish because of illiteracy.

  7 Billion people in constant rotation. Amidst these folks are some of the greatest ideas of this generation and certainly many of the greatest ideas never thought in the past. Where once great ideas found persecution we now likely are amidst an equally devastating situation of being overlooked.

  I wonder honestly how many great ideas and how many fantastic talents will die by the end of this month. How many of these people will even have close friends or families that knew of their abilities. Just how much have we been stunted technologically and culturally because of trivial issues that could be resolved with an ounce of common sense and maturity.

  For me it is a startling thought, an unsettling pool bubbling at the base of my stomach. Even at the most emotionless level, just thinking of the lost data, it is shocking. At the emotional level it is a good bit heartbreaking, to think of all the lives that could have been great, how many flames merely flickered instead of burned.

  I wonder if we’ll ever reach a point where people will all be granted the chance to do what we do best. Where we’ll credit those who truly earn what they get, where each death can be one of completion and comfort as opposed to another instance of lost opportunity and shattered dreams.

She was one of my best friends and easily the sweetest cat I’ve ever known. You will be sorely missed Cleo. It is always the best that leave first, entirely unfair.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30890934/

  Now it isn’t an isolated incident, there are nations that have been battling for hundreds if not thousands of years merely because of a disagreement in literature. I know people say that even without faith we will still have conflict but I tend to think that once people are fighting over which is better, star trek or star wars, we’ll be able to step back and stop it much easier.

  In my mind I wonder though, what benefits do religion give you that you couldn’t acquire by simply being a positive human being? Neither is necessary to have the other so this is not a case of parsing how you could do one without the other.

  Just how much dependency on a belief is too much is another thing I’d be interested in knowing. When you ignore simple medical care and allow your child to die, when you rush to develop nuclear weaponry simply to attack another group of people who disagree with you on a single aspect of your life. At what point do we step back and just say “Whoa”…likewise just when will I start using question marks again to end my questions?

  That’s where I stand though, I’m just not grasping the gain. The benefit of glorifying death over life. For now I just read the newspaper and see event after event that is pretty upsetting. Taking course after course where there is a single theme that holds true.

  However amidst it all I’m pretty positive about life, that to me is what counts. In case you were curious .

[ Index ]
Part 1 – The Introduction
Part 2 – From Universe to Solar System
Part 3 – From Solar System to Earth
Part 4 – From Solar System to Earth

  So time has passed and we have reached what we would now call Humans, Homo Sapiens, or any other clever naming agent you can grow to love. There is little to talk about here, not because much hasn’t happened, but because it is all easily accessible in the plethora of required history courses you will take in school.

  One can hope we’ll survive ourselves. Assuming we do we have many millions of years to go before the current theorized end comes (the scientific one not all the religious ones that pop up annually). We are years away from what is the predicted end. That’s a much less clean way of saying 1 Googol years from now, or (arguably) even cleaner would be 1 with 1 hundred zeroes following it. It’s a fantastically long time that even I didn’t quite grasp till I saw it written out in this post.

  Over this time we’ll have stars born and stars die. Black holes will grow and shrink (via a process championed by Stephen Hawking). Galaxies will soar away from one another with each passing day, planets will be consumed in the expansion of stars, the Earth will be scorched by the sun (all things left as they are). Eventually all matter will be stretched to an extreme and ever widening point where heat is no longer generated. This will leave an entire universe with absolutely no action which technically would also mean that time has ‘ended’.

  I’m skeptical as I’ve stated before. We have not accounted for the excess gravity all over (the idea behind the possible existence of dark matter) and frankly there tends to be new information found with each passing year and certainly with each passing decade. It’s not to say we don’t have ages, 1 Google years is an amazing amount of time. So many wonderful (and unfortunately terrible) things can transpire between now and the purposed end.

  My theory? While I’m hardly a better source than any astrophysicist I think that there is some currently unknown rubber band response to the expansion. At a certain point the stretch will get so extreme that everything will then rocket inwards. It seems quite reasonable to assume that this is what has happened the X amount of times in the past and will happen the X amount of times in the future. Of course there is also the possibility that the recoiling inwards is exponentially proportional to the expulsion outwards with each ‘bang’ and perhaps we are experiencing what will end up being the final shot. Who knows, it would be quite unfortunate but we still have far more time than needed for just about anything.

  It is currently the state of all things mortal or otherwise to reach a state of inaction, it would be nice if we put more energy into prolonging and enhancing the time of action we each have. With each dollar we spend on death instead of life we are creating a large imbalance that could indeed snowball one day. I just hope it hasn’t already begun.

  I’ve left out unimaginably large amounts of time, but that’s because who knows what will happen down to the number. The chaos effect makes estimating things highly difficult if not impossible. Neat stuff.

    One of my favorite mammals is apparently in what could be a very very poor position. Now what makes this interesting is that there is apparently no definitive cause. This mysterious killer has only one call sign that may or may not be the cause (it could actually just be an opportunistic mofo). It is possible that as many as half a million (that’s 500,000) bats have died because of this mysterious murderer. To me the scariest part of it, besides the entire mystery, is how it kills. These bats go to sleep and their food reserves burn out before they ever wake up so they starve to death in their sleep. While that does generally seem like the best way to go I don’t know if I’d like to see half a million people mysteriously die while sleeping.

    It seems odd to me with hundreds of thousands of bats are dying from some mysterious agent that could possible be transferred from cave to caves by people and the best I see from spelunkers (cave diving) is that they are upset. Some are trying to figure out how their business will survive. I understand the fear but it is certainly odd to guilt trip the bats for dying in throngs.

    On the other side though imagine if whatever this agent is were to jump to humans? A mysterious organism that has yet to be identified has the potential to kill hundreds of thousands in a relatively short amount of time. Anything with a 90% mortality rate should most certainly be understood before it is brought within spitting distance of humans. We’ve already got AIDS and I’d hope that we’d only have one seemingly impervious disease at any time.

These soft
almost silent
swift winds
carry carols
the fatal
calling card

Death kisses
sweetest
treats all
chocolate covered
candies
inexplicably
inescapable

so when
the whisper
comes calling
the strangers
confectionary
penitentiary
an infinitely
dark embrace
a place
of infinite grace
awaits