Gimme Fiction

Let's have some simulated worlds, where human possibilities play more-or-less freely, constrained only by our stick-it-iveness. Gimme hallelujahs. Gimme postcard landscapes. Give me instant travel: jungle vistas, the void of space without airports or spaceports. Gimme the three-second highlight of the two hours' lead-up. Gimme a five-second movie. Spike my dopamine. Wake me up. Time-lapse over the boring parts so you can see the whole process manifest, so you can see the breathing of the day, and so I can see it too. Gimme skills in the process of being learned, none of this sad cardboard-in-mouth taste of incompetence/mastery. Gimme the ability to enter your story in medias res--when else? Make me the delta of this broad insight watershed, where man-eating tigers still patrol the impossible-to-navigate swamps. Give me some leverage over the swelling of fatigue. Give me the ability to see logic dance: (1) if P then Q, (2) P. therefore, (C) Q. Also, if not Q, then not P. NB: the first is the form of comedy in dramaturgy, the second the form of tragedy. (Not really.) Give me playfulness until at least my thirtieth year. After that I'll live for others. Gimme the form of the argument: humans are the only fictional animal, owing to out hypertrophied narrative functions--that's the really wild thing. Gimme gimme gimme. Make me a good American: cognizant of my rights, and nobody else's.

Now for some questions. Is Allah just the most subtle way the protoplasm has continued its meaningless march into geological time? If society needs a mixture of mating strategies, does that mean we lose sight of society when we play to our strengths? Does sexually antagonistic selection make sense? Is anthropocentrism trivial? Could it be that woman is the measure of all things? Can one make Buddhist sense of Allah? (The converse is trivial.) Is grace really a gift for the fallen? Or do the fallen notice grace more because it is more contrastively salient? Is synchronicity a Big Lie or a Little Lie?

Now for some answers: That's not a good question. You can compartmentalize your approach and your anthropology. On the surface. No, because our society downplays it. Maybe: she does command the ultimate mystery. Maybe if you take the Paul Tillich route and make God the ground of being. Gift from whom? Sounds about right. Depends on whether you take it metaphysically or phenomenologically.

My apologies. That was too navel-gazing. But nobody reads this anyway.

Consider: "everything will probably not be okay."