Kali's Temple of Doom

Carl as an Every Day Tool of Self-Awareness

Yes, I know, I have been whining. And as I’m still breathing and with an Internet connection, it hardly qualifies as actual suffering… Especially if I can take a moment out of my ordeal to mock god, “Hey, pal! Do you wanna get another kick in before you finally kill me, because it looks like you missed a spot!!!”

And then it occurred to me that the date of our blog-a-thon was fast approaching and I had yet to sit and consider what I’d submit this year for Carl. I though of making it a Me and Carl thing, since I had a touch of pneumonia as well. Then, all I could think of was how would Carl react to my solution to the technical problem last night when the nebulizer was simply not working.

I turned it on and off; I moved it on the surge protector, I checked and rechecked the belts… Finally, I used all my advanced technological knowledge and I whacked the top of the unit, which set it whirling like a kitten in love and me breathing like Darth Vader in a misty field.

Despite the silliness with which I choose to highlight my experiences in the last few days, the truth is that I put myself at further health risk because I knew I could barely afford treatment. In the Demon-Haunted World, Carl wrote, “Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. Advances in transportation, communication, and entertainment have transformed and unified the world.” Knowing all of this did not significantly make a difference in my decision to apparently play fast and loose with destiny. But that is a failure in domestic policy that can wait til tomorrow.

Not that I necessarily fall for it beyond the comfortable mental criticism of my upbringing, which has quietly settled on the words that Einstein made echo across generations, “I cannot conceive of a god who rewards and punishes his creatures or has a will of the kind that we experience in ourselves.” I suspect that a god that emulates us has to be one of the scariest things ever invented.

My brain is not working properly right now, but I still want to contribute here, so I will try to unify my thoughts. One of Carl’s tenets was that the universe was an evolving entity (as is humanity). Sagan gave us all the scientific method in both simple and complex ways to start classifying the information we rapidly gather about our world. This is all he ever want it: Adapt this knowledge to your everyday life and grow from it, even if you use it sporadically and then just to mock your own condition.

posted by KaliAmanda @ 11:15 PM