The Re-emergence of the Wormhole in the Space-Time continuum!

The SMS tone on my phone goes "ding-dong' and it gets everyone 90% of the time and me on mornings while I'm snoozing, and only then, which is a pretty good payback I guess for everyone else I've annoyed with it. The best (worst) time was when I was still asleep in Joris's apartment and he'd already long gone to work (I'm not lazy, it was 9 a.m) and it rang and I thought it was the maids. So I jumped out of bed in a panic, looked for something to put on and went to open the door. Nothing. It took me a few seconds to realized I'd just fucked myself.

Still, funny things like that always put me in a weird but good mood for the rest of the morning, a little reminder of how retarded life can be sometimes, and how despite the fact that I have not heard a door bell that actually sounds like a door bell in a long time (they all go buzz these days), my concept of what it should sound like is still there for ancient times before key cards and such.

Phillip has also now managed to lose a bunch of his cards, or rather he has forgot their hiding place. Everyone has that. You know, a certain article X that are always lying around until one time you think, fuck that, I'm going to keep it in a safe place. And then you do, and then you damn hell can't remember what that place is, or whether the maid has mistook it for rubbish and tossed it away (Joyce Supermaid never does actually, you think she has, but she's actually just kept it in a really safe place. In fact, she's so good at her job she can find un-used condoms (i.e. still packaged) from the previous tenant the morning some of her children complain they're out of condoms. She does this while airing the room and chastising them on what dirty little boys and girls they are).

Back to the lost cards.

While I was in Budapest, Trina came to visit me, arriving at some ungodly hour like 6:30 in the middle of February. Where it's fucking god-ass cold in Central Europe  (And damn you Central Europe deniers, the CE does exist, it consist of the Eastern part of Austria and the Western part of the former Soviet Bloc. Uh... Duh. There's even a university called the CEU, but uh... yeah it's in Hungary, and they really want to differentiate themselves from neighboring Romania, I guess. Only when they get back Transylvania will they begin reconsidering this geographical labeling)

Trina arrived and I was about to start shouting at her because she hadn't picked up her phone since last night, so I was starting to get worried... and then she told me a really weird story.

Trina: "Oh my god, my phone battery is gone."
Isabella: "You mean you've gone flat."
Tri: "No my battery is missing. The battery is not in my phone."
Isa: "Huh? Maybe you took it out?"
Tri: "Why would I do that? I was on the train. The last message I sent you was just after I set my bags down. I had a sleeper carriage with another girl."
Isa: "Someone must have taken it then. Maybe they really needed a battery. Man it's weird."
Tri: "I was sleeping on my bag. Like a bolster."
Isa: "You're a heavy sleeper...."
Tri: "Yeah but still!!! My phone is still here, only the battery is gone! Fuck, it must be supernatural man. Spirits or something."
Isa: "There's always a rational explanation for everything that does not require the presence of phantoms."
Tri: "Fuck how you gonna explain this then?"
Isa: "Someone played a prank on you?"
Trina: "No way, I was sleeping with my bag!"
Isa: "Okay, okay, but I still don't think it's ghosts. I prefer some other explanation other than ghosts."
Trina: "What else? Ugh, I don't believe in ghosts either. Man I'm still freaked out."
Isa: "You know sometimes wormholes might appear in the space-time continuum when uh... parallel universes brush against each other. One just happened to occur right at the point when your train was travelling at 150km/hr from Prague central station to Keleti station at the point X in xyz space, devouring your phone battery and nothing else."
Trina: "What the fuck. It might as well have been a spirit."
Isa: "I think you were just fucked off your head to be honest sometimes there's convincing holes in our memory that has nothing to do with parallel universes, especially if you started binge drinking and becoming a vegetarian at an early age... "

The rest of her stay in Budapest was peppered with me offering this ridiculous SF explanation everytime she brought up the topic of the lost handy battery and of Richard siding the strangeness of the whole damn thing (he believed in the homeopathic machine with the silver balls)* and Ruiter swearing to god there was a reasonable explanation for it all.

*This machine had 2 parts. The silver balls and the machine the silver balls were connected to. The machine was a box with electrical mumbo-jumbo in it. You could put in something you were allergic to into the machine, connect it to the mains, and fire it up, while holding the electric balls. If you were allergic to say.. dust, you could put dust into this machine, hold the fucking balls, and you would be cured of your dust allergy. Yeah right.

Turtles, Spiders and Other Assorted Religious Beliefs.

Under my religious views on my many dating profiles and facebook page, I have entered "Atheistic Pantheism". Ash, MGM, Joris and myself were sitting on the Roof waiting for something to happen and having a conversation about spirituality. (It was a warm tropical night so I was topless as usual, for the purpose of being able to receive more sensory stimulation, which J was more than willing to administer) MGM was giving me a bit of  a hard time as usual about my views on such matters as he has something against my appreciation for Richard Dawkins (whose books I find entertaining and fairly educational and enlightened me from the bonds of Born Again Christianity, which is not a bad thing really).

He also has something against Atheism in general, because, truth is (and what is that, really!)  we can't really know for sure what we do know. Look at Principa Mathematica. Not that I have ever even touched it with a 10 foot pole, but I am currently engaged in a very accessible graphic novel, Logicomix, about Bertrand Russel's life.

At the end, we are all of us standing on a tower of turtles upon which the foundations of reality rest upon. By the way, what is this reality we speak off? As long as we do not see any black pixels, then the illusion is maintained... be grateful.

Or maybe not. One has to ask... some arrive at their last turtle by years of determination and genius, other lesser beings (i.e. me) through other means that suit a personality used to immediate gratification... Actually in this case you don't care if there is any foundation, only that you know all is illusion.

Ash asked me what exactly this "Atheistic Pantheism" was. I said I didn't really consider myself an Atheist, more Pantheist, perhaps. But not many get the subtleties of the multitude of beliefs that do not include an anthropomorphic God, so Atheist was just more convenient.

TBH, I actually chose the word because it made it seem like I was really serious about my beliefs, which I am, but while laughing about it.  For now, I know what I like to believe, and it's good enough, until my next round of 'spiritual-discovery', perhaps after some exciting things have happened at the LHC. (At this point, I ask the question, Has the large Hadrom collider destroyed the world yet?)

Seriously though, the only reason why I have such a lame ass self-important tag for my spiritual views is because Phillip has already taken The Mild Manner Anti-Christ. Damn it! Gaiman's Lucifer comes to mind at this point...

We cannot know for sure when we ask questions like what is consciousness, or where did we come from, or where we (not the human race, but rather everything that at some point had the property of existence) are going. It's turtles all the way down young man! Said the old lady to Stephen Hawking after his first speech at the Royal Society. Supposedly the theory of evolution rests on a taller tower of turtles that have properties more consistent with empirical reality and are a different breed than the one that form the foundation of the religion of Green Ham and Eggs. But still who is to say what we experience is not some kind of conjuring trick by a higher being in the Nth dimension?

But I don't much like the analogy with the turtles to be honest. It's very cute, which for many things in life is a property that is good enough to instill a general sense of likability to its subject, but not here. I prefer to think of beliefs resting on a net of things we assume to be true. Some nets are bigger than others, which means you can walk around on them for a much longer time before you reach the edge. Who knows the fuck how the net is being held up, probably by hungry spiders resting on more hungry spiders, what the fuck. But personally, the more room for questions, and the deeper the rabbit hole, the more I like it.

We all know that it's Fairy Dust that answers everything though...