A Luncheon Visit

My son in law, Seeth, took me out for lunch the other day.

Just the two of us. It was a guys out day, I guess. It was nice. I brought him to a restaurant called The Great Catch, a Bit of Boston, in Zephyrhills, the town next door to where I live in Wesley Chapel, which is themed like a seafood shack on Cape Cod. There are several restaurants down here with references to New England.

One was called Coney Island Hot Dogs, which sadly went out of business a while back. I liked it. I think it is a Mexican restaurant now.

Another is a breakfast place themed like New York City subways and trains. I love trains. Always have. Since I was a kid. I remember taking the metro from New Haven into Grand Central station in New York as a child. I saw the 1964 Worlds Fair that way. What a trip!

I assume a lot of northeasterners moved down here and felt nostalgic. I’m one of them.

It’s nice for an old nor’eastener like myself to see a brace of nostalgia from New England in my new home. Thanks, La Florida.

Seeth and I, along with talking about normal stuff, you know? The weather, how we are doing, what is new in our lives, our jobs, or in my case, what projects I’m doing currently in my workshop since I don’t, you know, actually have a job or anything, what’s going on in our communities, the weather, he brought up something metaphysical.

What we thought about the world in general. You know?

You know: Life. The universe. Everything.

I don’t know how it started. But we’ve had conversations like this before. Seeth can be very philosophical. So can I.

My views have been all over the metaphysical spectrum all my life going all the way back to grade school and catechism in catholic school in the good old, very old, catholic church days of my youth, and through puberty, and coming of age in high school, and having a girl friend, who I loved and lost and regret.

And knocking my head against adulthood, and college, and marriage, and parentage, and obligations I did not anticipate, and religion whether it mattered or not-really let’s now be serious, and working a real job, and kid raising, and divorcing, and rebuilding my life, and salvaging my daughter’s life, and at 70 years old today, I really don’t know what the fuck I believe in anymore.

I’m kind of agnostic now. I don’t know what I believe.

But Seeth’s words struck me. I follow YouTube channels of scientists and mathematicians who say the world is really stranger than we can imagine.

Like. Bizarrely. Strange.

Robert Heinlien is purported to have said, “Not only is the world queerer than we believe, it is queerer than we can believe.”

That’s not just a monstrosity. That’s a heresy.

A heresy of science.

The Scientific method, going as far back as Francis Bacon, says that science is based on three principals.

One: The world runs on rules.

Two: The human mind can understand these rules.

Three: The method of revealing these rules is the Scientific Method.

 

That’s it. That is the basis of all modern science and understanding. All industry, technology, and modernity. And all of everything. Believe it like a religion or die like a heathen.

What Heinlein said was a violation of this principle. He said that we can’t understand how the world works.

It makes no sense.

The world is just... fucked up. Totally. And there is no way any of us can ever understand it.

Period.

Science, from what I understand, seems to agree.

Richard Feynman said that his graduate students would often come to him and say, “Dr. Feynman. Quantum physics just makes no sense!” And he would say, “Just shut up and do the math. The math works.”

That’s it? Shut up and follow the protocol?

Math is the holy spirit of science.

It is ineffable.

Un-understandable.

Just plain fucked up.

Like in every other religion. But it works. Don’t question it. Just use it. Take it as given and shut the fuck up you little, acolyte, scientific heathens.

I heard recently that some quantum particles can go backwards and forwards in time. Simultaneously.

Evidence or interpretations or incarnations of stuff at the Large Hadron Collider in Cern say so. So it must be taken seriously. Scientifically. So. And I believe it. How can I do other?

Shit, yes. How fucked up is that? Put that in your differential equation and derive it.

Science doesn’t tell us what the world is. It tells us what it looks like. How we perceive it to be. It tells us how it appears. What it means to us. What it puts on our plates and offers us for dinner. Take it or leave it, as our mothers used to say. That is all.

Not what it is.

“I think that now I am mostly agnostic,” I replied to Seeth’s observations about the world earlier. “I just don’t know what is going on in this world and I probably never will. And you know what? I’m good with that.”

I guess I’ve reached a comforting conformity of non-committal commitment. Make with that what you will.

“Though I have gone through phases all my life of religious beliefs and atheism,” I continued, “which is a normal oscillation, I think. All things considered and all people included. We all change our minds now and then.

“Now I don’t know what to believe.

"Though if I was pressed for it today, if someone wanted a direct answer. If my feet were held to the fire. I would say that I am left of center in my beliefs; political, social, and spiritual. I am an old school liberal from the Baby Boomer era of the 1960’s and proud of it, but I am not someone whose beliefs lie at the extreme nut job end of each side of the spectrum. Either way. Right or left. I am sympathetic to my fellow man and woman.

“And above all else, I try to understand other people. I always have. And I love everybody. That includes you, by the way. My son and you, my reader of this essay.

“Spiritually, I believe there is something out there, something greater than us. A god/God if you will. And that It/He/She is controlling everything. But I don’t think any religion in the world has a real concrete idea of what that God is like. They are all right and they are all wrong, which makes no sense at all. But that is life. Ultimately senseless.

“Basically, I have no fucking clue, I guess.”

Seeth said that he is fond of the Zen religious beliefs, which I readily agreed with.

“Buddhism,” I advanced, “preaches that everything is God,” I said, finding myself glad of some common ground with my friend/son in law.

“I feel that might be true. You are God, I am God, those trees, grass, and houses are God. As well as that toxic waste site at the edge of our town is God.

God is the totality of living and life. The earth, the planets, the galaxies. God is reality. God is existence. God is good. Great, even. God is evil. Horrific, even. God is right. God is wrong. God is everything,”

God is a horror. And an honor.

That’s funny. And frightening. Terrifying, actually.

God is a joke.

Horrifyingly so.

But a joke on whom?

The most horrifying thing I have ever heard in my life is that we are actually eternal. We live forever.

We just keep coming back. Over and over again.

New universe. New planet. New life. New history. New everything. New nothing. And nothing ever changes even though everything is new. And different. But the same.

If that is truly true then, we will just go on living.

Life.

One day after another.

One life after another. Eternally.

Doing good things. Doing bad things.

Making civilizations and building dungeons.

Fighting wars and constructing cities.

Writing plays and epic poetry.

Doing great deeds. And dread ones.

Loving and hating each other.

And dying at the end.

And being reborn.

Somewhere else.

When we die in this life, we will be reborn in another somewhere else as someone else, man or woman, sinner or saint, great person or grisly one, and keep on living in another universe. On another planet. In a distant world. Much the same as this one. Like we have done eternally before. And will do eternally into the future. Just like the slice of God that we are. That you are. That we all are.

You are eternal.

Forever.

I reminded Seeth of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the Reality Bomb, the explosive device that was so powerful it could destroy everything, past, present, and future. Time and space. Matter and energy. Now and eternity. All dimensions. All universes. Everything. Everywhere. All at once. Now and forever. Gone. And how horrible it was.

“Why didn’t they use it?” asked Arthur Dent, the protagonist of the story.

Good question.

“I believe we just have to make the best of the time we have,” said Seeth as I drove into the driveway of my house in Wesley Chapel, Florida.

The American southeast. Just above Tampa, Florida. With its New England themed restaurants. In the United States. In a universe that exists. For now. For a little while. And then is gone. And replaced by another. Happier or sadder. Or just, different. New. Or the same. In the end. Or the beginning. Universe. Full of us. Doing it all again.

May we have a world supporting essence. A reason to be.

Wise words from my son in law.

I must consider them.

But in the end, I have one last desperate thought.

You are all that is. All that was. All that will be. All that can be and all that can not be. All that will ever be. All that won’t ever be. Never. Forever. Always. Nowhere. Everywhere.

Life. The Universe. Everything.

You are God.

For your own sake, I hope you do not exist.

I Pity You.