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Michael considered fate at 17:27   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

I'm not sure anybody likes a mess - even those people with bedrooms that, as their mother would say, "look like a tornado went through". Those people, they're just more tolerant perhaps.. more easy going, less stressed out.. less neurotic? Maybe not. I'm just speculating on a hypothesis.

Anyhow, I'm not one for messes either but I'm good at ignoring them. When I'm having a particularly busy month I come into my room and climb in the bed, stare at the computer screen, and generally keep my eyes above the ground so as not to notice the piles of clothes, the papers, the empty chip bags.

Sometimes, however, it's just too much for me to handle and my skin starts to crawl like some many centipedes are roving around up and down my spine and I almost can't move. This is, essentially, mess depression. It's a special kind of depression - not one of lonliness or lack of self-worth or anything like that - it's a depression that embodies the very being of your mother sighing at you from the door as you stared at the tv as a little kid, not quite understand what the big problem with a mess really was.

And really, what's the big deal?.. this is where I'm at a loss. It seems fairly obvious that, in general, a mess gives you a uncomfortable feeling; but why? At some point one has to ask: what is the evolutionary advantage of cleanliness (and I'm not talking hygiene here, I'm talking folded clothes and neatly stacked books)? I think, perhaps, the answer might lie in the fact that our species - society - has evolved as well and the result is a growing global culture of material wealth, newness, shiny things, and fantastic plastic machines. This is, roughly, the same thing that Neal Stephenson was talking about in his essay "In the Beginning was the Command Line". For example: Japanese - once a terribly fierce race - now in love with big-headed cartoon characters and pastel colours? What's this world coming to?

What we're coming to is an epiphany only we're doing it collectively. This is not something that every person can understand on a personal level, but as a species we are evolving - without our complicit consent! - and it's a testament to the natural process. We are, roughly, all becoming soft in the middle. Killing isn't as easy as it used to be - for every person who lives on a cattle farm there are a million who buy their hamburger from McDonald's and are no longer exposed to the harsh realities of nature. We live indoors, with central heating, and more and more often these days we don't even spend some of our time in the real world - we call it the internet.

So where does the mess come in? The mess comes in when we look at a polluted river or a closed factory rusting away or a landfill. The mess comes when we look at starving third world countries. The mess comes when we see inefficiency, waste, and misuse. The ultimate mess? Nuclear winter.

It's inarguable at this day and age that almost everyone knows that a nuclear war would be a VBT (very bad thing) and not just for the losers - for everybody. I knew this subconsiously even when I was a small child. I would have nightmares of big dark things - blobs - filling every space but filling nothing all at once. A black darkness that you can't see. It took me a few years of repeats to finally figure out what those dreams were about but when I did it all made perfect sense. Don't nuke anyone.

Human collective intuition or just obvious indoctrination? Does it matter? Isn't indoctrination really just the same thing? Humans have an almost innate fear of snakes and horned beasts in the dark and where do you suppose that came from?

The epiphany? We're slowly realizing on a subconsious level that humans are our best resource. We owe it to ourselves to not kill eachother. We owe it to ourselves to not fuck up the environment. We owe it to ourselves to explore Mars. These are the things we are quietly whispering in eachothers ears at night in our sleep.

This is complicated and I've obviously over-simplified a lot of things but this, basically, is why I don't share the same sort of dread that a lot of my more environmentalist-bent friends do. This is why I'm not too worried about where this world is headed. This is why I am not afraid of nuclear winter anymore. We're evolving whether we like it or not and nobody's crack pot doomsday theory is going to change that.

Might as well start giving credit where the ideas come from: this one is from jaime, where I read about a girl and her hundreds of shoes, and if there is anything I hate more it's a big ass pile of shoes in a closet.. it gives me the messy-willies like you wouldn't believe.