Her radiant joy was piercing my soul,

Through years I lived in darkness,

But I found a smile at the end of the road,

It may be a moment, it may be a minute

I could of kissed her but I didn’t.

Now I return to my cold dark  cell,

counting the days til freedom comes,

Struggling through this lonely hell,

Hoping to see her against the sun.

Though it burns me, my thoughts remain

A memory of those laughing eyes,

So strange a feeling, so alien a sight,

How a smile could bring darkness to light…

Yet for all that striving, all that searching I have not the freedom I desire. In my search for freedom, I have become less free than when I started, because I desire freedom more strongly now than ever before. I long for purpose to find me again, for a path to be made clear…

Yet still I fear, if I let go of my desire to be free, I return to atrophy and nothingness. I may be at peace with myself, but at what cost? Without meaningful work and purpose, I have no status or identity.

Sometimes I feel like I’m lost in my own mind. Fantasy and Reality mix, but which is the fantasy and which is the reality? I thought I knew but doubt keeps eating away at me. Do aliens really exist? Maybe they do exist, or maybe I believe they exist. Or they might not and I am delusional… but how can you know for sure?

What I know is, here I am. The past is boring, the future is unknown. Will the unknown future follow the boring past? The world is full of fakes, pretenders. When the pretenders meet the true subject of their imitation, their illusion is shattered and they become pathetic. But the world is full of magicians, weaving illusions to keep the truth hidden. But they can also become so good that truth bends to their will.

I must close my eyes now, and rest. I shall seek the truth another day.

First is the scale for individuals, where we rank relative to each other. At the bottom is the poor, then the working class, then the millionaires, the multimillionaires and super rich, then the billionaires. I’d say the average person makes about 60k a year, spends most of it and saves a little, and in 40 years manages to save enough to retire for maybe 20 years before they kick the bucket. Then there are the business owners and other successful people who have managed to earn a few millions. I would put professional athletes and actors/movie stars in this category. However, before you think of them as rich and invincible, be aware that quite a few end up broke well before their sunset years. Sadly enough, this is where most people set their bars when they think of ultimate success.

The super rich I would say as people having at least 100 million or more in net worth. As far as I know, the only way to be worth this much is to own a very successful business, or to inherit it. It is generally too much for someone to make on wages, although exceptions do apply for the super stars in their industry (who usually happen to own investments as well). Then we have the billionaires, a zone that is exclusive to wealthy business owners or inheritance without exception. At the top we have the richest people in the world, which tends to hover at around $50 billion.

Now lets take a look at the richest people in the world and where they stand. For this purpose I am constructing a fictional billionaire called Mr. Average.  The top ten richest people in the world has an average net worth of $34.2B and average age of 66 years. Mr. Average will take on these characteristics, he is 66 years of age and has a net worth of $34B. Assuming he lives to 100 years, he can expect to live on average 34 more years. That means he can anticipate spending $1 B a year until time of death, at which point net worth becomes irrelevant because he can hardly take his wealth with him to the afterlife. To spend $1B in one year, he would need to spend $2,739,726.02 every single day. Assuming he buys a ferrari every day, hosts a $100,000 party every single day, and otherwise pisses away another million, he would still be left with $1.4 M undisposed.

So I think it’s clear, $34B is a fuckload of money but what is it really worth? What if I said you could be Mr. Average at whichever age you are? The only price is = you have to die. Would you accept? If you did then you’re a fool, cause you’re dead and will never get to enjoy any of that $34B. Okay, I’ll give you a break. What if you can be Mr. Average with the $34 B, but in return you would lose function in 3 of your 4 limbs and be horribly disfigured. Deal? Think carefully about this, you will be a paraplegic and horribly disfigured billionaire for the rest of your life, with no possibility of recovery. No? How about the life of your most cherished loved one? If you take this one then you’re not even human. How about 3 of your 5 senses? How about even just one? How about freedom? You can be a billionaire but you also have to be a slave, you have to do what master says.

These are trick questions, all of the things I mentioned could not be cured by money. Would money make your loved ones come back from the dead? There are things – many things, in this world worth more than a billion dollars. Yet people would risk their lives for money, and not anywhere near a billion dollars, not even a million. People would risk life and limb for $10,000, or even less.

The only conclusion I can draw from this is that money gives people a sense of self worth. If you have no money, you feel your life is worthless. If you have a lot of money, you feel your life is worth more than others, and indeed other people feel the same too. Society is built on rules of conformity, and one of those rules is that a poor person’s life is worth less and a rich person’s life is worth more. Anytime you look down on someone because they are poor, you are enforcing this rule, and any time you wish you could be someone else who was rich, you are ingraining it into your heart. But in reality, is your life worth more or less depending on how much money you have? In my opinion, all our lives are worth as much as any billionaire. If you can realize your own worth, then envy would never touch your heart.

Don’t get me wrong, money has it’s uses. And it’s definitely better to have more money than less, but it shouldn’t define a person any more than how many pokemons you have. One final question, just to get the scale right between individuals the world as a whole.

Say I was Mr. Average and worth $34B. How much of the United States would I be able to own? Or even California? $34B, would that be enough for me to buy a city and rule it with an iron fist? Would I be able to field a private army and defend my lands? When you think about it that way, $34B really isn’t that much is it?

It also got me thinking though, about the perfect drug. In the show they make crystal meth without the added toxins and contaminants, therefore giving a clean hit. However, the front for the business is Los Pollo Hermanos which is owned by Gus. Ironically, the drug lord and the chicken baron are the same man. But if you think about it, which of Gus’ products is a better drug? Meth gets people high, without the contaminants they probably stay alive longer, and they sell for a high margin. However the market is limited, and it’s addiction varies. Chicken, or food on the other hand…

Can food be the ultimate drug? With food, there is absolute dependence. If you do not eat, you die, every time. It’s unlikely you will ever overdose on food, and people typically use every day. It’s legal in every country of the world, and all the world leaders use it. The market for food is the entire human race, and basically anything alive. That market trumps the market for drugs every time.

——–

So what if there actually were vampires, and we harnessed their powers to go to space? I mean, doesn’t having vampirism solve most of the problems of space travel? Vampires require no oxygen, they are impervious to cold, they can survive on consuming a liquid and don’t expel bodily wastes. Plus, they have built in hibernation, so they can sleep all the way to Alpha Centauri without special equipment! Being evil is just a plus.

In the book there are clearly defined barriers to human interaction. Logic and order seem to define our social customs, but in some cases emotion and feeling can conflict with these. The real world is about conflict, emotion, unresolvable situations. One of these unresolvable situations is death.

Death is a road we all travel down from. In the end of the book, Xiao Shi Yi Lang travels down the road to death, to a battle he cannot hope to win. Following him is Shen Bijun, a beautiful woman who is conflicted because she has fallen in love with Xiao, but is also married to another man. In the end love prevails, and she follows him down the road to death. Shen’s husband, Lian Chengbi can be described as a perfect gentleman, but his humanity has been confined by social customs. As a result he lost the only thing that mattered – love. He in turn, follows his love down the road of death.

We never find out what happened at the end of the road, but it doesn’t matter. Just like death, you don’t know what will happen until you reach the end of that road – but we all travel toward it.

What if time is circular? There is day and there is night then day again, and time that has come before will come after, and time of the future has occurred before? But if what has come before has already occurred in the future, how is there a moment here and  now? This is when I realized I’m thinking about time 2 dimensionally. What if there is a third dimension to time which differentiates between the “past” and the “future”, because time travels circularly in a spiral?  Whereas a circle can be traced infinitely, it is essentially still the same circle and you would essentially travel in the same place. Therefore time would not exist because there is only one “unit” of time, which is that circle, of which nothing new could possibly happen. However, time that moves not only in a circle, but also in a spiral can go on indefinitely, while repeating the cycles of day and night, or past and future, but traveling on a different plane so as to avoid traveling on the same spot, creating the concept of time?

Space is probably also infinite. We could basically choose any direction and go on infinitely. On the planet it is because the world is round, so like the circle analogy we would travel on the same spot eventually. But in space what if it is because space is actually infinite? If space is not infinite, what would happen if you reached the edge of space? Would you just not be able to go anymore? Would it be a barrier through which nothing can pass, and as alien and as frightening as the infinite? Trying to imagine absolute nothingness is probably as hard to imagine as infinity, and I am not talking about empty space of which there is nothing there. I’m talking about non existence, the kind which does not exist. So how do you imagine or sense something that does not exist?

Maybe I’m horrible for hoping the world would end, that billions of people should die or turn into flesh eating zombies, but on the other hand billions of people have already died in the history of this planet. Any atrocity you can think of probably occurred at some point in time, not just some shit people made up. At least in my apocalypse, people still exist to bring hope and salvation to the world.

You know what would pretty much solve every single problem on the planet right now? A big ole asteroid. No more catholic priests molesting kids that go to church. No more health care debate. No more drug killings on the Mexican border. In fact, the whole planet would be space dust. So next time you’re worried about all this superficial shit in your life, maybe you should wonder who’s watching the skies for you.

Have you ever used something but have absolutely no idea how it works? I have. There’s so much science and technology we take for granted because it’s designed so we don’t have to understand how it works. Let’s take even the most basic things, such as steel. Even with all the knowledge at my command through the power of the internet, I don’t think I would be able to create a bar of steel for use in the most basic tool. I have a rough idea of what is needed: coal, iron, smelting tools, high temperatures, but I have no idea how to get the iron out of the earth, where to look for iron, how much iron is needed and so on and so forth. Hell, I don’t even know how to grow food out of the ground so I won’t starve to death in the winter.

If the world was to end, we would finally be able to appreciate all the things we have. A bottle of water would be more precious than a bar of gold, and indeed that is how it should be because you do not require gold to survive. History and culture, the knowledge that the people who came before us had and passed down, even those little sanitary wipes, all these things would be valued 100 times over what we do with them now. We would be able to appreciate the technology that allows us to have running water, to cure sickness and infection, to even get from one place to another. We would be able to appreciate all the technology we lost, all the comforts and capabilities these technologies have given us, if we actually had to restart at the bottom of the tech tree with the fuckin wheel.

In the new world, it wouldn’t matter who you were before. Everyone would be equal. Were you a millionaire, billionaire, or broke? Upper, middle, or lower class? Do you have a nice house or a fancy car, or do you take the bus? You see, in society we enforce the concept of inequality – some people are just regarded as better than others. All the wealth and status is just illusion, something perpetrated by society to justify inequality. If the world was to end, people would finally be able to regard each other as equals. You’re either a survivor, or you’re dead like everyone else. That is, until we run out of enemies to fight and turn on each other.

Back to the basics, what is life about? Wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of all the things you don’t need and live simply, without having to worry about someone coming and taking it away? For many of us the only life we know is in the city, we aren’t capable of living independently of one another. We need electricity and running water, so we have to pay a utilities company. To pay we need money, and to get money we need to get it from someone who has it. Meanwhile, we also have to pay taxes, we have bills, we pay insurance. So really, a simple life is a thing of the distant past – unless everything was to change and people could begin their lives anew.

So I guess that’s what it represents for me, a new life. A new frontier to explore, new adventures to be had. And who knows? They way we treat this planet and each other, an apocalypse may not be far off. Unsustainable things tend to blow up, and if we don’t figure out a way to live in harmony with the world, in a cycle of sustainability, we’d only have ourselves to blame when it happens.