Station-Keeping

I found out when I was like 9 that I wasn't going to live forever. I can't remember what exactly drove the point home, but the first stabbing pangs of existential terror are easier to metabolize when the in-between times are filled with Scooby-Doo reruns. Not only is it the benefit of the flitting non-fixation of a juvenile mind, but I'm certain ghost-riddled narrative subconsciously provided the grasping, desperate possibility of an afterlife.

Only as an adult do you put together that all the supernatural beasties and poltergeists on that show turned out to be low-level human swindlers in rubber masks working for banal, quotidian material gain and the prospect of post-death persistence was a fabrication, but at least we can't say it was a lie. The mask always came off by the end of the episode. The false hope was fleeting but then explicitly dispelled. The same can't be said of literally any churches.

As I've gotten older, the fear is still there, with my naked psyche laid bare in front of the radiating, burning prospect of its eventual non-continuance as cartoons have lost their potency as a distraction against inevitable annihilation. But less than the insensate, infinite darkness, the upsetting part is the idea of the universe having the audacity to spin on without out me, very particularly the part with human people in it, here on earth, where I keep all my stuff.

I don't like the prospect of the things I'm going to miss. I'm not being purposely morbid. I do appreciate the things I have been able to witness in my life. Being born in the mid-1970s, I've hands-on experienced literal miracles of technological and social advancement. When I was a kid, I remember marveling at Pong on a black-and-white CRT television and now I can play Wordscapes on my phone. In my hand. In full color! We live in a land of wonders. 

Amdist all the Apple-branded ups, there are bound to be a few downs. Like today when I found out that a theoretical framework for a working warp drive now exists. Sure, some of the processes and ingredients are still ?????? and <shrug emoji>, but it used to be made up of obvious fiction and the unsticky ethereality of pure hope. The very enthusiastic and optimistic article says it could be built in, like, a hundred years, which sounds so great on an evolutionary time frame. But I don't live on an evolutionary time frame, I live on one constrained by how long my internal organs all want to keep working. Which is bullshit.

And worse, we're living through a global human crisis where internal organs are quitting on the job left and right.

So I'll probably not make it to see people zipping around to Proxima Centauri. Or I guess more likely an unmanned probe equipped with a pretty decent iPhone camera. Or maybe a monkey or a dog. Although by then if we're going with non-humans, the dolphins should be able to talk by then, so maybe they'd be a better choice.

But then I guess also I don't have to worry about the dolphin coming back fully sentient at the head of a fleet of attack drones to exact revenge on the captors who sent it off to almost certain death. And that's why I can find it in me to be content with my lot, the epoch I was born to experience. And also why I always go out of my way to be extra nice to all mammals.