The Holidays always get me thinking about Chaos
Theory.
In simplest terms, here’s how Chaos Theory works. I want to
spend the holidays with my loved ones but I’ve already promised
my family that I’ll come visit them.
So I go to LAX. But there’s fog in London and a blizzard in
Denver and somebody stepped on a prehistoric butterfly in the middle
of a Jurassic safari so instead of being emotionally assaulted by
my parents in Boston, I wind up in a plastic chair in Northern Kentucky
next to a sweaty guy with an ipod who thinks I’ll find his
music library endlessly fascinating. I started out with the best
intentions but . . . The
Law of Unintended Consequences took hold.
Chaos Theory is to the Law of Unintended Consequences as Zen
is to Tao.
Just in case any of you are preparing to take some bizarre metaphysical
S.A.T. (E.D. I tried to find a lucid comparison but it seems
impossible - on purpose! Those links are definitions. I'm still
reading them. I think this sentence is smarter than I am.)
So now it’s a new year and I’m very happy to be home
from not going anywhere at all.
My wife picked me up at the airport. She’s premenstrual.
Robert Heinlein once described PMS as a syndrome that causes women,
for four or five days out of every month, to behave exactly the
way men do all the time. I think he got that right. I think men
are constantly overwhelmed by our emotions, our passions, our fears
our rages. That’s why we’re taught from a very early
age to repress everything. Don’t feel. If you feel you’ll
crack. If you crack you’ll cry. If you cry, you can’t
function. Don’t feel, don’t crack, don’t cry.
Women tend to be sensible and rational. They only experience the
overwhelming emotions for a few days every month. It takes them
by surprise every damn time. Lord knows it takes us by surprise.
"Honey, could you pass the salt?"
"You want the salt? Take the whole fucking table, Babe. I give
and I give and I give..."
Men are also clearly more romantic than women. We know that ‘cause
men invented the tradition of bringing a flower on the first date.
First of all, that’s very male, isn’t it? “Hi.
I hardly know you, but look! I went out and killed something. Here.
It’s dead.”
But also, if women had invented the tradition of wanting a flower
on the first date, to this day you wouldn’t have told us what
it is that you want. We’d still be collectively guessing as
a gender. Showing up at your door with the best intentions, wanting
to impress you . . . “Hi, honey. Pig?” Wrong again.
So my wife’s premenstrual and I’m male so we spent New
Year’s Day just watching the news together and weeping.
Polar bears have been put on the endangered species list. And it’s
about time, too. You almost never see polar bears around, do you?
That’s just awful, the death of the polar bears. That’s
huge. Do you know how hard it is to kill off a polar bear? These
guys have no natural enemies. They’re two tons of heavily
insulated killing machine. Scientists have figured out the only
way to kill off the polar bears would be to build an army of SUVs
and run them in shifts 24 hours a day for decades. You know how
they figured that out? Observation.
See? That’s the law of unintended consequences. I wanted to
feel safe in my big luxurious SUV. Instead I got floods and wind
storms and dead fuckin’ polar bears. Who saw that coming?
I just wanted a car that would impress women. Wrong again. “Polar
Bear?”
And an ice shelf broke free in the arctic, measuring 42 square miles.
The size of eleven thousand football fields. That’s almost
half the size of David Blaine’s ego.
The thing broke free and it’s floating (E.D. now it’s
frozen into the winter ice that it ran into, but come spring…)
– just to give you a sense of the magnitude of this event,
if that ice shelf were Britney Spears, she’d measure 42 square
miles. And you’d have heard a lot more about it on the news.
And it wouldn’t be wearing panties.
So, there’s this huge ice break and Miles O’Brien, the
science guy on CNN says, “This could be proof that global
warming MIGHT be real.” Might be real? At this point everybody
agrees it’s real. The scientific community was unanimous on
this decades ago. There were still some corporate stooges saying
it was nonsense in the seventies but then even they started coming
up with alternate theories about what was causing it. “Okay,
it’s real, but it’s not our fault. It’s cyclical.
It’s volcanic activity. It’s all the cow farts.”
At this point even EXXON is getting ready to put out a book called,
“If We Were Killing the Planet, Here’s How We’d
Be Doing It.”
But there’s Miles O’Brien on CNN, the “Science
Expert,” saying it could be proof that global warming might
be real. Next week he’s doing a groundbreaking report on the
possibility that Galileo may have been right with his wacky theory
of Heliocentricity.
A couple of months ago, Stephen Hawking, one of the greatest minds
of our time, said that we should be working right now to figure
out how to colonize mars. Although, in fairness, it’s completely
impossible to tell when the guy’s being sarcastic.
But I’m pretty sure he was serious. And if he was . . . how
great an idea is that?
“Yeah, we’d like to exchange this planet for one that’s
not broken, please. Something a little farther from the sun . .
. say, earth-orbit adjacent.”
“Awww, what’d you do to it?”
“No. It was like that when we got it.”
“It. . . it’s all brown. And there’s a hole in
it here and . . . it’s missing a big ice shelf the size of
a giant Britney Spears. . . I’ll tell you what. Store credit
for any two items from the asteroid belt.”
“Hmmm. We really had our hearts set on Mars.”
“Sorry. Mars is taken.”
“There’s someone on Mars?”
“Oh, yeah. Not a lot of ‘em., yet. But a couple little
metal and silicon rover things’ve struck up quite a little
romance and we expect a happy teeming planet soon.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. Those are our rovers. We sent
those rovers there.”
“Ah, yes. That’s the law of unintended consequences.
Have you studied any chaos theory?”
E.D. I've decided that this article belongs in the Science/Nature
Dorkdom. I had to look too many things up. YAY... our first Science
Dork Column.
