The Constant Humming Sound

Constant humming sounds move around the house. A small bird battles tirelessly to stay seated on the highest willow branch, and then gives up as the wind pushes him off and into the brink. In the sky above storm clouds loom, and crashing noises from the cat and my daughter rummaging through the closet sound off. A cluster of fresh bananas sit in front of my face, at the edge of the counter, waiting to be devoured by the soon homecoming children. Multiple twinkle lights are out in the strand that is up still from Christmas time two years ago, but the feeling is that of peaceful light, and so they stayed up, still working to work their way out. Above me I see the toy boat I made with Elliott and Gideon, sitting on the windowsill projecting out seeming to say, “Someday I will sail away too.”

This is a momentous afternoon indeed. I am turned off, and turned inward in a somewhat sublime state of mind, waiting for my lovely wife to come home to me, after swimming at the gym, so we can make some dinner, maybe sing or play a song with the kids, and finally settle down alone and together to digest the day. 

The world is spinning, per usual, and sunlight will begin to fade soon. I haven’t completed my work, my school, or my chores around the farm yet. I still need to fix that eternal hole in the ceiling, teach my children to be good when they grow up, and not forget to water the plants whenever my wife is away. This, my friend, is the meaning of life. Eat, sleep, worry a little, try to help where you can, and just keep moving. 

My skin is older now, a little less soft perhaps, more wrinkled, more sun-spotted, more weathered. I like weathered though. I am after all a geologist, and I don’t regularly admit this, but I love the metaphysical part of the science even more than the reality of it. It is not the billion-year-old rock that mystifies me, nor the way we figure out how old it is, nor the incredible pressures that yield a particular mineral like garnet, but more the fact that these things simply exist. Marvels of the past, somehow here today for me to review and judge, specimens for Danny’s pleasure and pensating (yes that is a real word now; Urban Dictionary).

I like the world I see today. I love the future. North Korea aside, Trump or not, Socialism vs. Capitalism, all the wrongs, the terrible wrongs like Syria, Bombings, Masses against the Few, just are temporary. Please don’t mistake what I am saying for disingenuous, or evil. I am not a nihilist. I know these things matter, but as they move to the next stage, as the world embraces for our own human mass extinction, I fall back to the beginning of time to find some of the peace and light that gave way to the world we have below our feet, in our food, in our products, and now spread around in the air for all to breathe. We all start with good intentions, at least the vast majority of us, but often the end is cluttered and confused. I don’t see how an end could be any different; ends are normally a bit messy, so are beginnings, it is the middle where the cruise-control seems to be most applicable. 

We all dull out, need sharpening from time to time, and after a while simply need to be replaced by another utensil. This is the future for me, my children giving rise to theirs someday all replacing me in the moving step-wise action of a nation, a dawn of singularity perhaps, a perpetual revolution of the world for which we never were meant to understand. How could we ever gather the ideas of the world, understand the past, understand the complexities of time and space? Easy for the physicist genius and simpler yet for the philosophical master or cleric, but absolutely impossible for me.  

I hope to find a peaceful place to lay. A place that gets torn asunder by the vastness of time.  I want to be plunged deep into the earth’s underbelly, down deep enough that my remains turn colored, turn streaked, striped, banded, and spotted. I want the timescale to recognize me for my presence, all of us, for that blip of a second, that micro-millisecond of respective time that we even mattered. Maybe the last triceratops thought the same thing and hoped for some similar end. Why not? Can’t it be possible that once upon a time there was something like us, something that had the cognizance to embellish a story to gain attention, lie to get what it wanted, kiss another with sweet affection, or care for the outcome of an event due to its impact on the world? 

Sometimes I wonder if maybe, just maybe I have too much time on my hands, but what if I have too little.  What if the end is near, or if I were to have an aneurysm in the next key stroke? What if I would have missed the opportunity to ask why, when, how, who, where...

Truth or dare; do you look at the mirror at night and see the real you?  There is something there you know, a person, a soul of some sort that looms above the fleshy skin, a something that tingles in the back of the eyes when stimulated, a kind of creature that lives off of the energy of the sunlight. 

So this is it, the end of the stream of consciousness, the end of me for the day. Like a little machine, I will go forth now to feast on the fuel that the earth creates, using all the members of the external, and embodying a little something that is akin to a spark. No one knows when they will cease to think, and least of all I, but keep up the good work people…Just a little longer now, and all of us reading this will not be around to clap or boo.  

Cheers…