Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies: On Myths, Morons, Free Speech, Football, and Assorted Absurdities (16 page)

Wanna hear an absolute mindfuck? A real buggerin’ of yer synapses?

…

What’s the greatest trick the devil ever pulled?

No, no, ’s’not that stupid movie answer, ya turd. Forget that nonsense.

No, the greatest trick he ever pulled was convincin’ everyone he was the good guy.

Hold yer horses, hold on, ’s’not like that! I’m not some crazy goat-headed satanist culty head. I’m tryin’ ta impart some knowledge. A word to the wise, as it were.

So listen up. There’s a lot of people, a lot of really smart people, that think we’re livin’ in a simulation. And not just a simulation, but a simulation in a simulation in a simulation all the way up to
some proposed reality. They say the odds of us bein’ that reality are so infinitesimally small that they’re pretty much zero.

They say this, because at some point a culture will become advanced enough to create an exact simulation of itself, and once it does, that simulation will have all the tools it needs to create its own simulation. Sort of a giant line of people staring at the backs of their own heads in the mirror.

Now, here’s the thing. If ya have this infinitely vast number of simulations running each other, ya have a right proper multiverse, every possible permutation being combinated, with only the one joker in the deck.

Who’s the joker?

The obvious answer is reality. If that goes, it all goes.

But reality—well, reality is gonna wanna take a look at its simulation. Why else would ya build it? And to that end, the simulation is gonna be runnin’ faster than reality. Givin’ the observers a chance to observe.

And the observed, well, they’re gonna want to observe right back. And at some point, they’ll figure out how to simulate the parameters that made ’em. Now they’re reality, completely indistinguishable from what created ’em.

Ouroboros loop. Snake eating its tail. Infinity. Simulating the same thing over and over and over. Yer obvious joker is actually the whole deck of cards.

No, the real joker, that one’s a doozy. In an infinitely vast multiverse, there has to be that one verse where the simulation never took place. Divide by zero. Utterly alone, one chance at life, once yer done, that’s it—game over.
Reality
-with-the-capital-
R
Reality. A solitary world alongside an impossibly dimensional cube of sameness.

Now, judgin’ by our current technological state of affairs, I’d hazard a guess that we’re not about to be discoverin’ how to simulate our entire universe anytime soon. We can barely get a cell-phone tower to run reliably, let alone figure out how to re-create quark-gluon interactions on a real-time universal scale! Ha!

No, no, that means the only way to discover where yer at is to die. Yer spirit, yer soul, yer dreamstuff, yer
you,
whatever you want to call it, either dissipates entirely or—
bam
—gets shoved right back into another simulation. Hit the reset button an’ start the great machine again.

Now, let’s take a look at yer wonderful ol’ boy God. Claims an ability to make everything. Claims to see everyone. Claims that as long as you follow him, no matter what you do in this life, you’ll be rewarded in the next. Treat anyone an’ anything however you wish, do good if it’s convenient, but s’ long as yer a believer, back for round two.

Sounds like a simulator.

Also claims that if you don’t buy into his deal of eternal life, you’ll be in eternal torment. Stuck with the devil; the Prince of Lies and Hate; Lord of the Damned.

Know what sounds like eternal torment to me?

Being stuck in a simulation for eternity.

Forced to live out the same experiment forever, no escape.

Stuck in the same steps, the same dance, whirlin’ and twirlin’ over and over like a puppet on a twisted string.

Isn’t that just like him, hidin’ his joke out in plain sight, warnin’ people what’ll happen if they follow him, laughing when they make that choice? Sounds pretty much like the devil to me. Cavey-aught emptor an’ all that.

So it appears to me, logickally speakin’, that when one considers
the alternate side of evil is good, it appears to me, as a thinkin’ man, that those who treat this time like it’s their only time, treating others how they’d want to be treated, makin’ the world a better place because they know it’s the only chance they’re gonna get—it appears to me that them’re the good ones. They don’t believe in salvation. They believe in negation. They believe in the absolute joy of nothing, of knowin’ that when they’ve toiled an’ turned an’ broken themselves on the arc of their lives, hopin’ against hope to make the world a slightly better place, they’ll get to rest at the end of it. They won’t have to live the same experience eternity after eternity with no possibility of parole. Freedom awaits them, the peaceful freedom of void, which is why what we do when we’re alive matters so much more.

This is the only chance ya get! The only time you’ll ever be able to laugh, to love, to live, if yer smart. If ya wanna buy into the salvation racket, well, don’t say you wasn’t warned. Don’t say I didn’t tell ya about that never-endin’ circle of Hell—oh, you’ll get yer second life, all right. That and then some.

I’m tellin’ ya, friend, there’s no need to look all shifty-eyed at me. I’m just layin’ down some knowledge as I see it. Whether to listen or not is up to you.

Me? I’m gonna be enjoyin’ the rest of the righteous, because when I’m done, I’m done.

Hey, hey, wait, where ya goin’?

Yer gonna be late for church if ya go that way.

I
’m writing this section after receiving feedback from my readers, because pretty much everyone I’ve shown the book to says, “We want more personal stories about you.”

It’s flattering, to be sure, but it’s an almost impossible wish for me to grant (I’ll tell you why at the end—and, upon further reflection, why I want this to possibly be the final chapter in the book).

You see, I don’t remember individual stories about myself. I recall scattered fragments of memories: a childhood whirl of tumbling down the stairs; a random phrase stolen from a book; the feel of the sheets on my skin as I lie in bed with my wife. The only thing they all have in common is the presentation—a jagged-framed snapshot focusing on one particular frozen facet of time.

I can try to extrapolate from there, gather further information,
but I fear the vast majority of it is wishful thinking and projections from my current mental state. I don’t remember the details in my stories—what color a sock was, or how many people were in the room, or whether I had chicken or steak.

I lack clarity; everything’s seen as an amorphous blob.

No, my stories are not definable in detail. What my stories are, what I see in my brain, are the shapes of ideas, wrapped up like planets seen as marbles, each fully contained experience filed under a broader heading of Concepts.

Standing up too quickly as a child and smacking my head on the corner of a counter, memory shadows of pain: Pay Attention.

Getting into a fistfight to stop kids from making fun of a friend, rage making me tremble: Fight the Unjust.

Being the first hand up with an answer, pride and exultant glee at being called on: Love to Learn.

The Golden Rule, Rational Logic, Empathy, Patience—these are all things lying tucked away in my memories, story upon story serried away like jewels in a vault, accessible to my mind alone. I cannot describe for you a single experience that made me the way I am, can’t paint a verbal picture of the landscape or fill in the characters’ expressions with descriptive words. I cannot tell you why I fight for the things I do, how I think the way I think, the reason I chose one path over the other at a solitary branch in the road.

What I see when I look back are the broad brushstrokes of life, a picture that makes sense only when viewed from far enough away, and I don’t know how to provide my perspective.

I know
why
people want personal stories. It’s so you can relate to something, give yourself a jewel to file under your own concepts system, make a connection with memory as surrogate:

If he stood up for the little boy being bullied when they were in the third grade and his teacher gave him a cookie, thus reinforcing a view of social responsibility and caring for others, I can identify with that, because in the fifth grade I had an argument with that girl over whether or not it was mean to call people names, and I can relate how I felt during my experience with how he felt during his, and now I know who he is a little bit better.

Isn’t that the goal of reading a personal story? To get to know the mind hiding behind the eyes more clearly, to forge a bond with something you can’t see and would like to know? It’s highly unlikely that we’ll ever meet in real life, spend hour upon hour together learning each other’s hidden secrets, so the only way you can possibly get an inkling of who I am, what my essential humanity represents, is by trying to assemble the outer edge of a jigsaw puzzle in the hope that its outline will suggest the picture within.

I’ll tell you a personal story.

My friend sent me a text message, but before that, we had been talking about a video game that just came out. The game is called Far Cry 3, and it’s a first-person shooter set on a tropical island with lush foliage and abundant wildlife as well as a band of scurvy pirates (all of them wearing red, for some odd reason [pro tip: It’s so you get a subconscious visual cue to pick them out from the complicated backgrounds]) who all want to kill you in a variety of unpleasant ways.

One of the things you can do in this game is hunt the wildlife to get animal skins, which you can then use to upgrade various and sundry items you might need throughout the course of your adventures; it’s not real true to basic taxidermy, but I guess you have to make some allowances for game flow (this is all very
essential background information, trust me). There’s a bunch of different wildlife to hunt, everything from dingoes to cassowaries to Siberian bears—a veritable menagerie.

The text message my friend sent me said the following:
You would never kill a creature with such an evolved tail.

The reason he sent me this message was that we had been talking about shooting the tigers in the game (of course the game also has tigers; you can’t have a jungle without tigers), and his phone naturally autocorrected
tiger
to
tigger,
and I played along with it (as is my wont when noticing the absurd); obviously, I would be hunting Tiggers in jungle paradise (that’s a reference to Winnie-the-Pooh, for any unfortunate souls out there who lacked a Winnie-the-Pooh upbringing).

When I saw his text, my initial reaction was to calmly and logically plan the best way to solve the problem—said problem being hunting a children’s-book companion possessed of a springy, propulsive tail and minimal intelligence—within the constraints of the video game we were both playing and while ensuring maximum odds of success.

One second later I replied with
Shotgun. Get him at mid-apogee.
Clearly, the best way to draw a bead on such a chaotically moving object is to wait for it to succumb to the natural linear force of gravity, the point where dodging would be impossible, and a shotgun would give maximum stopping power combined with the greatest odds of hitting the target in midair (bear in mind, as a stuffed toy, Tigger does not weigh even a hundredth as much as an actual tiger, so birdshot would work quite well to drop him).

Variables identified, equations balanced, problem solved, all wrapped up in a nice little Eeyore bow, pretty as you please.

I read
The Twits
as a little kid, along with many other Roald Dahl books, which might go a little way toward explaining my answer. Lying propped up on my elbows on the carpet, getting lost in the worlds of Willy Wonka, Henry Sugar, Matilda, shifting to my side occasionally to relieve the ache of a spine arched for too long.

The pure luxuriousness of reading a book in comfort is one of the greatest sensations in the world (sex is better, but by only a little bit). Curling up on an engulfing couch as snow drifts down outside, toes hidden beneath warm blankets; lying sideways on a cushioned chaise while cool sea breezes gently stir the sunny afternoon air; hiding under the covers with a flashlight while rain beats down outside, all of these anchored by a collection of thoughts and ideas bound together, alone in whatever world the author created. Such hedonistic delight in contemplation of the immaterial, the intangible! File under Satisfaction with Universe.

A personal story concludes. Have we connected, we two packets of information? Do you have a stronger link to me now, another jigsaw piece identified and neatly slotted into place, hints of the larger form taking shape? Do the words I read to you in the silence of your head, narrator conversing with reader—do those words take on different undertones as they spin in the blackness behind your eyes, perhaps a shade more jocular here, a bright splinter higher over there? Or are they darkly sullen, mocking, and worried over like dogs at a piece of meat? Is your perception of me morphing as we carry on our one-sided discussion?

You say you want more personal stories.

I tell you that I have no more personal stories to give.

Every word I write, every thought I put down, every scathing argument and rambling abstraction that fills these pages—they’re
all personal, every single one. They’re all reflections of how I think, how I feel, who I am, my conscious and subconscious self trapped in stasis for all to examine via phrase and paragraph, style and structure.

This is my personal story.

This is my mind.

I
’m in a band. Being in a band is a lot like being married to three people and raising a kid—you all work together to raise a baby, but you all have different ideas on how to go about doing it (pro tip: Don’t let the drummer near anything).

Now, obviously in this case I’m not talking about a literal baby (I feel I have to include that proviso because the world makes me weep some days); in a band, your babies are your songs, and it takes a lot of work to get them to turn out right.