story 667 (ἀνεξέταστος βίος οὐ βιωτὸς ἀνθρώπῳ)

(originally posted 11/15/2019)

Thanks to a noisy air conditioner in my hotel room last night I had plenty of time to think. Eventually those thoughts turned to story 667.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”

-Socrates

Is the same true of stories? Stories we tell ourselves. Stories we write down and share. Is the unexamined story worth reading, and if it is who’s responsible for examining it?

For example… the aforementioned air conditioner. It was grinding and humming and shuddering along and then finally it stopped. When it stopped it sounded like an F-16 landing on the bed adjacent to me. Then, after what could have only been three or four minutes and just as I was teetering on the ragged edge of sleep, it started up again.

Saying it was loud doesn’t do it justice. It sounded like a Doomsday machine. That’s the only way to describe it. A cross between the machine in Thirteen Ghosts and the machine in Mystery Men.

Right about now you have to be asking yourself if this particular story should stay unexamined, because clearly I’m asking a lot of you to begin examining it.

The chances you’ve seen either of the movies referenced, let alone both of them, is remote. Clearly you’re not going to jump on Netflix and watch both of them just to get a clearer idea of what my air conditioner unit sounded like.

So you have me lying in a hotel bed and you’re assuming the air conditioner is rather cacophonous as it starts up again but for me to continue is rather pointless because the humor lays entirely in its comparison to machines appearing at the end of movies you’ve not only never seen but now steadfastly refuse to take the time to see. You might even hold my taste in film against me.

You should be glad that Socrates is dead because he’d be ashamed of you.

And me. I get the impression, after reading about the man, that he would not be a regular reader of this website. I also think that it’s unlikely he’d have seen either Thirteen Ghosts or Mystery Men.

His loss.

He might even suggest that I examine a story before I post it.

He was like that, always sticking in his two cents worth. You know the type. Know-it-all material if I’ve ever seen it.

The question is, do you really want another story where I’ve thought about what I’m writing before I’ve started to write it? Where I’m actually striving for a point? Do you really want another story about entangled particles? I can’t help but think that answer is a big fat “No!”

For those of you who don’t read me on a regular basis (Hello everyone on the planet except for about seven people) entangled particles are those that a measurement/observation of one immediately influences the other, regardless of the distance between them. Einstein famously called the interaction ‘spooky action at a distance’.

I believe that some people get entangled.

“Jung’s theory of synchronicity says there are links between events beyond cause and effect.

Patterns the conscious mind can’t perceive. There is no such thing as coincidence or accident.”

— Doctor Tony Hill, Wire in the Blood (British TV show)

Makes you long for me to continue telling you about the air conditioner in my hotel doesn’t it? I would but it eventually leads to me writing about entangled people and how we grind and hum and shudder along and you’ve already made it pretty clear how you feel about that.

Thank goodness for quotes from people smarter than I am so I can leave you with something to really examine.

“Meaning is not something we find. It is something we create.”

-Neil deGrasse Tyson