The Silent and Brave revision: page #69

Dreams of literacy, fueled by beer and adrenaline (the body’s defense against alcohol) fracture my slumber. Why, I wonder, do we believe that order may be constructed out of chaos? All of us shall pass. Our bodies will stop healing themselves, our DNA will replicate incorrectly, our minds will descend into madness. On a larger scale, the earth will fall into the expanding sun, which will itself run out of bouncing electrons and extinguish one day. I heard yesterday that Stephen Hawking, who is way smarter than I am, guarantees a technological disaster that will destroy life on earth within the next 10,000 years. I got you, Stephen. I’m writing a book about it.

Still the dishes must be done, so that, laughing with one another,  we may eat off of them again. I do them now, listening to Miles Davis, thinking how many decried jazz as animalistic, without rules, encouraging nihilism, encouraging the rise of lesser minds.

I remember sitting in the hot tub at the foot of the mountains in Breckenridge, addled with THC, thinking that words are the greatest invention of human-kind. Communication. Art is the ability to relate our ideas and dreams to one another. It is the closest we come to sharing minds.

Within our words exists the necessity of order. It is how we fight entropy. For man is capable of both great and terrible things. Empire. Self-examination. Realization of a greater power. Though the world spins out of control, and tricks us into superstition, worse, into believing our own importance, still there is a greater soul, unselfish, that can guide us and shield us from horrors, and populate the stars, and keep the lights on. It exists in all of us, maddening sometimes, but necessary. It is all our job to hold it together, to fight the good fight, to learn to love, and to create the future.