I See Now, Before and Afterwards

Well this has been great, hasn’t it? Between the sickness, fatalities, the job losses, the stand downs, the destruction of dreams and the stay at home restrictions there has been, as Iggy Pop and the Stooges sang, “No Fun”

And once you absorbed and hopefully managed mentally with all that, there were still a myriad of petty grievances that, as the now sadly departed Jerry Stiller talked about in the classic Festivus episode of Seinfeld, must be aired.

For me the worst has been -

1. Can’t visit my daughter interstate

2. Can’t go for a surf

3. Just want to reinforce - Can’t go for a surf!

4 The unprecedented overuse, even when not accurate, of words like unprecedented

5. The appalling Budget Direct TV ad which rips off Braveheart. Derivative, poor production values, no compelling proposition, self-congratulatory, lazy and everywhere.

But as Monty Python once said, “Shining like a stream of bat piss when all else is dark” there has been some good, or if not good at least thought provoking aspects, to come out of all this.

Five good or at least positive things

1. Great content to watch like the remake of High Fidelity as a series, the Sci Fi thriller DEVS, the wacko movie Under the Silver Lake, the doco PUNK! plus new series of Killing Eve, Ozarks, Mystery Road.

2. Final clarification, if it was needed, of the malaise in the heart of the USA, no better shown that by the behaviour of its President. I fear it will make no difference though.

3. Some time, if you wish to use it, to read, to think about your life, about the world and just review what is what; a good opportunity to try to be positive and understand to worry about only what you can control.

4. Signs of a stronger sense of community, more self-improvement and self-sufficiency

5. Our response from the Federal government down to the average individual that shows how well we have coped and prevailed. It does seem to be true that Australians are at our best when we are in the shit. It is when things are good that our worst selves rear their heads.

There have been a few areas of bullshit though. The idea that we are all in this together is obviously true but that does not mean we are all impacted in the same way.

Take Gatesy for example. Australia Post has of course been struggling to deliver anything in a timely manner thanks to the huge surge in demand due to online shopping. They seem to wish they could still just worry about letters, even though the obvious need to adapt to the fact that hardly anyone sends letters anymore seems to have escaped them, which is strange as they are the monopoly provider to Australia of letter delivery.

As a result Gatesy is running low on supplies of Pinot Noir and other fine wines as delivery times blow out. Combine this with a lockdown which prevents him from further diminishing the recreation fishing grounds of South East Queensland and he is not a happy chap.

On the other hand his brother Blaze was ahead of the curve the whole time as you would know if you read my post from February 4 - “Blaze and the Apocalypse”. https://www.chestbeatingbyword.com/home/2020/2/4/blaze-and-the-apocalypse

Now as we slowly but surely emerge from hibernation Blaze is concerned about the possible second wave of infections.

With this in mind and after watching the Science Fiction series DEVS more than once, he has informed me that there is a parallel universe where everything else is the same but there is no second wave. I told him to keep searching and find the one where we are happy, surfing millionaires, the Bee Gees never got a recording contract ever, Kong won ten world surf titles, beer did not make you fat and the USA was Australia’s bitch.

I guess I need to backtrack here and explain the series DEVS [on Foxtel ]is basically about this obsessed Silicon Valley dude building a massive quantum  computer with enough power to locate the position of every particle of matter in the universe at a given moment. The idea is that with this computing power plus a concept called Determinism, which is basically the idea that if you know everything that was happening in the universe at one moment, then you would know, in principle, everything that was going to happen in the future, and everything that did happen in the past, he could do some cool things like fix up some lingering personal issues.

But wait there is more. DEVS also uses in its plot, the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics which basically says that there multiple if not infinite universes existing side by side.

Why would that be possible?

I am glad you asked.

Let me cite theoretical physicist Sean Carroll from an article in the New York Times,” Any time a small quantum system, like an electron, is in a superposition and comes into contact with the outside world, the universe branches. A superposition means that it could be in two different states — for example, spinning both clockwise and counterclockwise — at the same time.”

I mean that helps, right?

The dude in the show has got his reasons for building all of this and it is not just world domination but there are spies and evil henchmen and murder. It is a cracker of a show and worth checking out.

I think, if I understood Blaze correctly, he is hopeful that if he can link up enough second hand Dell hard drives that he too might do the same, thereby knowing about the possibility of the second wave of infections and what numbers will win Lotto next. He was exploring the possibilities, you might say. The scary part of all this is that if you believe in the multi world theory there is a universe where all of this is possible and Blaze is successful. How do we know it is not this one?

Six songs about universes, quantum mechanics and particles

Across The Universe – The Beatles

Higgs Boson Blues- Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds

Racing for the Prize – The Flaming Lips

Particle Man – They Might Be Giants

Quantum Theory –Jarvis Crocker

Lonely Electrons- Astral Code