I can hear my heartbeat in my left ear. A heart can go at any time, and you’re gone. If you’re lucky, you expired on the sofa and your corpse can binge watch the next eight seasons of the Gilmore Girls Netflix revival. Spoiler: Rory will have a few dozen more babies out of wedlock and live off the (coerced) kindness of (taxpaying) strangers. But she’s still strong and independent modern woman. Her situation won’t reach critical mass until a few dozen more bastards pop out.
I had researched neck pulses and blood flow for one of the chapters in PBS. The Internet whispered into my heartbeat-ear the best way to kill someone with a knife to the neck—”slicing” is a stupid movie cliche. You stab the knife behind the windpipe and saw out to sever one of the two carotid arteries. If you have the right knife you can nail both of them. Sounds reasonable to me. Google’s motto is still “don’t be evil” so I’m preemptively absolved if I need to practice this on someone. That also sounds reasonable to me.
People talk of the heartbeat of the universe, but they are scared of microbes and black holes. You don’t need to be weary of something that can kill you only if you do something stupid, like licking public doorknobs or opening the airlock when your suit has a leak. You have to “check yourself,” as the saying goes. There’s probably a reason why the universe reacts the way it does to us, and it’s not because we don’t know the “theory of everything.” Stephen Hawking might be great at shooting but he’s aiming at the wrong target. Please leave an insensitive Lou Gehrig’s disease joke in the comments.
The universe has a heartbeat but it’s nothing like ours. Creation has its own life and we’re living in it, playing catch-up.
2 Comments
I dearly love your sarcasm; it’s one of your best talents.
There’s too much snark commentary in the world, and not enough genuine sarcasm. I don’t want to lose my cynicism living amongst all these dysfunctional social philosophies.