Space and Hyperventilating

Although my blog was taken over by the restoration of the restaurant for 6 weeks, it is now returning to it's regularly scheduled program as the restaurant is now up and running! Stop in and get yourself a drink and a meal!! We're all very excited and looking forward to things returning to normal- if you can call the LDC that! Thank you to everyone! 
***Please be advised that this blog will now revert to it's initial state: including massive doses of sarcasm, politics, cursing-  even making up new and interesting curse words- and lastly, general random thoughts that in all likelihood, no one but me cares about. If you were just checking in to check on the LDC, thanks for dropping by but feel free to censor my rambling out in the future... 

I was contemplating a blog on space... why? Space used to make me hyperventilate when I was a kid. No seriously, I'd literally hyperventilate in the car... and now, if I really think about it... it probably still would. 
It all started because my science teacher in 4th grade told us that the sun could have solar flares and that a meteor could hit the Earth at any time.  This insight led to my little kid brain freaking out completely and honestly believing that we would all be dead in the next 24 hours if I didn't do something to stop it. Ironically, prior to this knowledge I really wanted to be an astronaut. I didn't think space was dangerous, I thought it was curious and full of new things to see. And of course I took great pride in memorizing all the planets, trying to learn every constellation out there, and even attempting to learn about the planets' various moons and the length of each "day."  I learned we really don't know anything about space. Except that it's dangerous out there. The sun can give us sunburn AND potentially create an Earth-sized bonfire. Star Trek isn't real, neither Kirk nor Picard could save me from being disconnected from my space shuttle.  Space is still growing and it'd be easy to get lost if I went on a space mission. Suddenly choosing a profession like "fireman" was making a lot more sense to me. Except, I had this nagging feeling that it wasn't safe for anyone here either. 


Around the same time I started actually contemplating song lyrics and became terrified by Bowie's "Ground Control to Major Tom"(otherwise known to the human race as... fair enough, I get it: Space Oddity). That was the icing on the cake. Done. If I went into space I'd probably be forever disconnected from the entire planet and lost. Eventually I'd run out of air and die. Holding my breath wouldn't help- I asked my Dad, who had no clue what I was talking about and inadvertently just told me,"If you were in space in a car, in a space ship, in anything, if you didn't have oxygen you couldn't breathe." He had no idea all of my questions about whether the car was "air tight" or if you could breathe your breath back and forth with someone else forever were spawned from legitimate fears of the end of the planet. Over. No more space fantasies. 


I was also unintentionally and completely unknown to myself meditating occasionally when I was a kid. I only realized much later in life when I started teaching myself to meditate that that is what I was doing. Mainly, I'd do it on the bus or in the car, staring out the window as things passed by. I'd be off in my old world- thinking without doing so- and I'd suddenly have this feeling like I "got it", so I'd be frantically trying to recollect what I was thinking or what it was I "got" and could never fully do it. Then I'd try to get to that point again but of course, you can't when you're forcing it... It made me either really excited or really nervous. Really nervous...Really excited. I wasn't sure which.  I was certain (incorrectly of course) I knew how everything worked- without words or explanation, or even knowing what this "everything" was since I had no idea where my brain had veered- but I absolutely had to figure it out so I could tell someone. Anyone. They could validate it and then I'd know why I was on Earth, what Earth was doing, and maybe then space wouldn't be so scary... 

Close your eyes and consider this: You are floating outside the Earth looking back at it. Could you even do it? I mean yes, you probably envisioned whatever satellite picture you've seen of Earth from space and you're thinking I'm an asshole for asking if you could do it. Okay, now really envision you are NOT on Earth and you are just looking at it. The actual thing. Not a picture. Okay, now slowly consider turning your back on Earth. Nope, can't see it... just endless nothing-something out there. Now you're floating away, you turn back to grab a glance and the Earth looks like a levitating beach ball floating in nothing-something. There is nothing protecting this beach ball from anything. It just is. It's just there. There are billions of people meandering around living in their 'little world', and that whole big mess is floating unprotected and in the most insignificant way possible in a potentially infinite amount of nothing-something. Oh and you're alone while they're doing that. Just you and the nothing-something. What's at the edge of that? No clue. Is there an edge? How could we ever know when all science and math is created based on man's constructed tools of measure? What if one isn't one?! Then everything is wrong: nothing is anything but a representation of something which makes no sense if the representation is less than accurate by even a hair. Unless of course, we're satisfied with "good enough." For the most part, we are.

This is where I'd start hyperventilating as a kid. This is where I still hyperventilate when I'm really focusing on it, and not just because of space but because it brings forth an infinite number of questions regarding existence and reality (hence the blog name.) Luckily right now I'm too busy typing and living in my own little 'world' to be really seriously considering the complete lack of security the Earth in and of itself offers (let alone the effects of the things that exist on Earth) because it's just another insignificant thing floating in nothing-something with all the other insignificant things floating out there- even if we rarely consider that because we're too absorbed in our day to day lives. Which really, in the context of space, don't really exist. I mean they do but only in the sense that a spec of dust behind a chair does. 


The forever horrifying part:  The non-point point....
Frantically searching and analyzing every little thing to find a "point" to it "all". Good luck. You're crazy if you even want to know. My fear as a kid was that I'd realize there wasn't one- I (we) am (are) insignificant- and I am pretty sure it still is... space is endless and infinite. We like to think it's "there" and we're safely "here" but really, we're part of it. More than likely, a completely insignificant part of it and the 'point' is probably not quite as abstract let alone as important as we'd like to think. So all of the things we do to "improve" and "advance" and make Earth "better"... moot. At least from a big picture point of view, and by that I mean REALLY BIG picture. However, if I stick to not thinking about space, I remember there's here and now. After all, it's the day to day meandering that makes our lives our lives, right? Right? I'll settle on that in lieu of hyperventilating for today. 

All images pilfered from google images. None of them belong to me except the feeling the cartoon girl has in her chest as she breathes into that paper bag...