User blog:HumphreyDumphrey/Absurdity

I think we're too good at adapting.

The novel is too quickly the normal. Aliens. Our brains adapt. More aliens. Those new aliens were not a surprise. Aliens should always be a surprise. But first contact made the second wave seem mundane: all in the space of a single paragraph.

Writing a book in public is absurd, so it might was well be an absurd book.

The world is absurd. That we exist at all is an absurd, wonderful and miraculous mystery. And then we expend giga-watts of human energy fighting over whose made-up version of how it happened is right. And not just arguing, proper fighting, with swords and guns and projectile airplanes, and drones. It's tragic. And it's absurd. And should be mocked. Mercilessly.

It should not be normal for the democratically elected representatives of the people to be vile and reviled. It should not be normal to choose your news based on the flavour of your politics. It should not be normal to be advertised at while you are taking a shit.

After the break, more absurd things that are normal...


 * The purpose of this paragraph is to make you feel bad about yourself. You know how you sometimes make judgements about other people? Well they're doing it to you too. You are not rich enough, or pretty enough, or famous enough, or popular enough. You wear the wrong clothes. Your car does not impress anybody. You are not nearly as much fun to be around as you wish you were. Buy something. Buy this product that your brain, in its associative brillance, has now attached to celebrity you neither admire nor like, thus increasing its value. How? Why? Because we're absurd.

....and we're back. I hope your self esteem is sufficently dented to maintain the economic growth cycle.

Recapping. Our brains evolved over billions of years, and they are fine tuned to identify the unusual. This is important. Being able to correctly identify the shadow in the corner as belonging to a psychopath with an axe makes you more likely to get laid, and accidentally become a parent, thus improving the species chances of survival.

WELL THAT'S A RELIEF!

But jumping at shadows that are actually shadows makes you much less likely to accidentally impregnate and/or be impregnated, because people think you're a bit intense and/or creepy. So over many millions of years the peopel who didn't notice unusal things that were there and the people who did notice unusal things that weren't there got more-or-less bred out.

So our brains are fine tuned to recongise novely, then accept it as normal the next time we see it. And now we accept the ability to fly in heavier than air machines as perfectly normal and complain about the leg room. We accept the ability to press a button and have the story on the machine in the corner turn into a different story. We accept that the new story is probably no more interesting than the last one. We accept that eventlually we'll just settle on something, anything, just to avoid having to turn the thing off and find something esle to do.

I want a time machine. I want to bring a person from 1969 to now, preferebaly someone who has taken lots of halucinogens, but is currently not tripping. I want to see them totally lose it. Because the world we live today in is more absurd than anything mind altering chemicals could inspire back then. We're surrounded by magic and we're already over it.

It should not feel normal to remove a small device from your pocket, poke at the screen a few times, and watch a video of a person you've never met embarrassing themselves. And it should not be normal to want to find and choke a person you've never met whose comment on said video made you want to find and choke them. And it should not be normal to send pictures of your dick to strangers. Unless they asked you to first. And even then you perhaps ought not be so willing. But what is and what ought are not the same, and the world is absurd, and perhaps it is as it ought be after all. Sorry Dave .

The point is rather irrelevant. But bears making regardless, we have come to accept the absurd as normal. And that's really dangerous, because it means we just might let them get away with even more of the shit they've been getting away with up until now. We have reached a tipping point.

We may well have reached that point milennia ago and just didn't notice, but it seems to be intensely apparent now. But it's not apparent. Because it is normal. So if the absurd has been accepted as normal, how then to point out the absurdity of it all? It's an arms race. We must out-absurd it all. More absurdity please! I'd like an absurdity pancacke with extra madness and a side order of surreal. And some anchovies.

This is what we are doing here. We are amplifying absurdity. Writing a book in public is absurd, so it might was well be an absurd book. It seems normal aready.