I Don't Believe In Science
I've never heard a scientific theory that made a lick of sense to me, on any kind of a level. I prefer my own crackpot experiments and conclusions, no matter how much they might contradict the official version. I can't get my head around even the most basic nonsense. I don't know what a cell is, and I sure as hell can't begin to understand evolution, let alone the mysteries of the human body or outer space. Ignorance is the easiest thing in the world, of course, and it keeps my sense of wonder unpolluted by anything so boring as truth. Believe whatever you want to believe, that's my basic philosophy, but why bang your head against a wall? What's the use of trying to comprehend the incomprehensible when there are so many records to listen to and so many books yet unread?
I'm an idiot, but it's not like I'm not curious. The other night I put a red licorice Nib in the toilet bowl, just to see if it would dissolve, and how quickly. It was two o'clock in the morning, and nothing happened to the licorice for quite a long time. Eventually, however, the thing started to fuzz out a little bit around the edges, and some time later it had taken on the appearance of a blood clot there in the bottom of the bowl. There were red streamers trailing away into the water in all directions. I eventually took a piss, curious to see if the uric acid would accelerate the process of disintegration. It didn't seem to have any noticeable effect, though, and unsure what, if anything, I hoped to prove by the experiment I flushed the damn thing and went back to listening to records.
Here's another sort of scientific thing I've noticed lately: driving in to work on 394 I always see all kinds of birds loitering on the light poles along the highway and lined up on the telephone wires that cross the road. I'm talking about hundreds of these birds, all huddling within the margins of the highway. There can be a wire stretching all the way into the distance on both sides of the road, but these congregations of birds are confined to the area directly above the pavement. So I figure that either these birds like to watch cars or the highway traffic creates some kind of rise in temperature around the road that makes hanging out there more comfortable for them, sort of like the way street people will camp out on subway grates in New York.
Damn if I'm not some kind of naturalist.
More Insomnia Stuff
Lying awake in bed that night, he listened endlessly to the long caravan of a circus moving through the street from one Paris fair to another. When the last van had rumbled out of hearing and the corners of the furniture were pastel blue with dawn, he was still thinking.
--F. Scott Fitzgerald, "Notebooks," from The Crack Up
All he could do was transcribe the interminable babbling voice of the night, the insinuating perverse voice of the demons.
--Pietro Citati, Kafka
Data:
According to the A.C. Neilsen company there are 20 million Americans watching television between the hours of midnight and three a.m.
In 1894 Marie de Manaceine conducted sleep deprivation studies in which puppies which were kept awake four to six days died.
In 1954 New York disc jockey Peter Tripp, in a publicity stunt aimed at raising funds for the March of Dimes, stayed awake for 200 hours, and experienced episodes of "nocturnal psychosis," including intense paranoia and auditory hallucinations.
The nuclear accidents at Three Mile Island occurred at 1:23 a.m. and 4 a.m.
The chances of dying are greatest between the hours of four and six a.m.
An Incident in Florida
One time I was in south Florida, in the central part of the state, and I was staying in a roadside motel in a little swamp town. The desk clerk had sold me a six-pack of beer, and I sat around watching something called "The National Bird Dog Field Trials" on television until the local station went off the air. I couldn't sleep so I went back out to my car and drove out to a truck stop diner at the edge of town and went in for coffee and hash browns. I sat in a booth near the window and eavesdropped on a conversation between two guys and a woman at an adjacent table.
"They can finger you with nothing but bones," I heard one of the men say.
"Slivers," the other guy said. "The fucking scientists can nail you with nothing but slivers. You have to be burning very hot to do it right, and they can still figure you."
"You can't just toss a body on a plain wood fire and expect you heard the last of it," said the first guy. "That won't cut it. It wasn't just teeth they found."
"And all that swamp out there," the other guy said.
"Gene wasn't thinking," the woman said. "He was crazy to burn her, that's all. It wasn't no thought."
"He still would have been wise to take a step back and bury what he had left," one of the men said. "Bury it deep."
"Swamp it," said the other. There was laughter around the table.
"Gene fucked up," the woman said, and everyone nodded their heads and kept right on forking food into their faces.
Laying the Foundation of Premature Decay
Wakefulness during the time when one ought to be asleep is frequently a distressing condition, undermining the strength and incapacitating for active and efficient work. Insomnia or sleeplessness often afflicts those of active mental habits and lays the foundation for premature decay.
When sleeplessness overtakes a brain-worker it is a sure indication that less intellectual work must be done, and that he ought to betake himself, if possible, to out-of-door exercise in the pure air of the country.
--Encyclopedia Brittanica, Ninth Edition. 1899.
Hopeless Valetudinarianism
Indeed, attacks of [sleeplessness] may, not infrequently, be directly traced to some mental disturbance. It is only by firm and judicious support to the mind, that the patient can be preserved from hopeless valetudinarianism, or even, in some instances, from sensual indulgences in spirit drinking and opium eating.
--James Russell, M.D., "On Sleeplessness." British Medical Journal, November 16, 1861.
7:51:37 PM 
|
