diaries, uninterrupted #2

Photo by Felix Mittermeier on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Thursday, March 13, 2025. There are people who never think about the vastness of the universe and how every single one of us is but a speck of dust whose life lasts a fraction of a cosmic nanosecond, or rather: I don’t really know whether these people exist, who am I after all to have certainty of anything like that, what I wanted to say is more in the tone of there must be people etc., right, I didn’t mean to come across as pretentious and know-it-all, in any event, there must be people in the world who are so busy going about their lives that the vastness of the universe and how small they are in it simply isn’t their top of mind thought, or maybe there aren’t, but there must be, and if that’s true, then I wonder how could one go through life without thinking at least once about the universe, not about planets and stars and galaxies and black holes per se, but about the immensity, the endlessness, the blackness upon blackness upon blackness of it all, to the point that your brain freezes and refuses to continue to elaborate, or to continue to find sense to something that makes none, but anyway, I myself probably think about this too much, possibly, like for an exaggeratedly ample amount of time, if ample is even the right word here, but assuming that it is, I devote a disproportionate amount of time to that, and it’s not that I can think about the vastness of the universe and how insignificantly small I am in it while doing something else, like in the back of my mind, I can’t really, and maybe I don’t even want to, because these are thoughts that deserve my full attention, at least up until that brain freezing point beyond which everything shuts down, but even if I wanted to, I couldn’t, and this sounds like one of those circularities, a diabolical loop I can’t get off of, but that’s the way it is, really, and so I was thinking about all this while walking back home today and I suddenly stopped and looked up to the sky and saw a few white clouds drifting by, the same clouds that people looked at thousands of years ago, I thought, one of the immutable things about this minuscule world of ours, the sky and the clouds, although I’m sure that a sky and cloud expert would dispute this statement, that they would say you’re wrong, even the sky and the clouds have changed over the millennia, and here’s why, dummy, and they would embark on a detailed scientific explanation of why that is, and I would listen in silence because I don’t really know anything about any scientific topic regarding the sky and the clouds, but also because I don’t care whether they have really changed, scientifically speaking, I couldn’t care less, my point being that, regardless of their scientific texture, the sky and the clouds were already there seven thousand years ago, as well as two thousand years ago, as well as yesterday, when people looked up from wherever they were, whereas pretty much everything else they looked at on the ground has changed dramatically, that was my point, and then my thoughts went back to the universe and its absurdly unimaginable dimension, which is not even a dimension, as for a dimension to be called that it should be referred to something observable and measurable, whereas the universe isn’t, like when you go to the movies and get a seat too close to the screen and your eyes cannot take it all in and you end up having to reconstruct a scene by looking at it in pieces, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle, and after a little while your head hurts and you give up and go home, and so when I was thinking about all this I said to myself wait a minute, what if the universe, instead of being so vast, were microscopic, infinitesimally small, all contained in a tiny little dot, which isn’t that far-fetched of an idea, as I once heard someone say that every cell in our body is a universe in and of itself, but then if that’s the case, I thought, we’re losing the infinity aspect of it, because as complex as a cell might be, it’s still a cell, and whatever’s inside the cell could break out, couldn’t it, whereas how could anything possibly break out of the universe, to go where, exactly, as there’s probably nothing beyond the universe, outside of the universe, or maybe there’s something, there is an outside, like you get out of the blackness and break into the whiteness or something, the very idea of which would make my brain implode if I only entertained the thought for ten more seconds, because hey, it’s already enough trouble even trying to imagine how vast the universe is, and now you’re telling me there’s something outside of the universe, you’ve got to be kidding me, right, and I suddenly remembered an interview I watched, I forget with whom, where at some point they say that writing makes the universe small, under your hand, and there you have it, and you can do whatever you want with it, shape it at your will and pleasure, and this last thing put a smile on my face and I was ready to continue thinking about it when the phone rang and it was the plumber saying apologies sir, but I can’t come today, we’ll have to fix your sink tomorrow.

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“diaries, uninterrupted” is a new series released with no particular cadence, whenever I feel like it. These are imaginary journal entries -- generally one to three per issue -- written in a stream of consciousness style, meant to be read in one gulp of air, without pause.

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