I have a hard time watching physicists on TV documentaries, even though sometimes I agree with their theories…or parts of them, I should say.  You see, the problem I have is that I know something about detection systems in various types of analytical instruments and in the most complex analytical instrument: the human body.  So I know we’re way too limited in our detection ability to figure out the universe.  It makes me laugh.  And besides, so what if we do figure it out?  It’s like this: If we figure out how to get through a worm hole into another dimension, what will we do when we get there?  Have a snack?  Do lunch?  This stuff cracks me up.  It’s really funny to me!  I mean, there might not BE chocolate in another dimension, so why would we want to go anyway?  On the other hand, I might still weigh in at 118 pounds so…where’s the shuttle?

I’m a smart cookie, but I still can’t wrap my head around infinity and trust me, I’ve thought about it.  But the truth is, no mere mortal can understand infinity because it’s just not possible.  Oh stop it.  I know what you’ll say: Infinity means there’s no end, that the system goes on forever.  Okay…explain it.  I mean really, keep talking until everybody really gets it.  Meet you at the cemetery.

See, that’s the problem.  But if you listen to physicists…and okay I do…they get downright giddy about the latest theory about…well EVERYTHING… but especially issues related to our ‘universe’.  Okay, so now there’s a name for the ‘stuff’ that holds the ‘stuff’ that started the big bang.  I was kind of disappointed to hear that; I thought they missed that little detail and I was enjoying that.  And now they have decided…some of them…that the universe is flat.  Well what a relief.  I thought it was just ever so slightly curved that we couldn’t detect the curvature and that made me lose sleep at night.  Well we now have data…the universe is flat.  I’m so glad.  What I’m really trying to say is: Who cares??

Except the people who are awake at three in the morning watching documentaries….and physicists.

Now we’re talking about membranes, where our galaxy resides kind of like a dot in a huge sheet flapping in the wind.  And there are supposedly multiple membranes that fluctuate and wave and occasionally touch and well what else could that do but create another universe?  Right.  Every time these membranes touch…BOOM!  New universe.  But we can’t SEE it.  See the beauty in being a theoretical physicist?  Tooth fairy, Santa Clause, ghosts, membranes.  I love this stuff.  I really do.

And…we still have parallel universes, in which I wholeheartedly believe.  If, they say, an electron can exist in many places at once, and electrons are some of the smallest building blocks of the universe; then surely we must be able to also exist in many places at once…dimensionally speaking.  And yes, that makes sense.  To me.  In another universe my ex was never even born.  See the beauty?

Now, we have the ‘bubble theory’.  Bubbles.  Guess which physicist was the giddiest about bubbles?  The California guy.  Go figure.  Our universe, in the minds of many California dudes I mean physicists, floats around like a bubble along with lots of other bubbles and may pop, or collide with other bubbles.  Dude!  That’s phat. I almost changed the channel on that one.  Guess where the California physicist was?  On the beach, of course!  hahaha.

Then they started talking about particle collision at the Fermi Institute.  The collider is far underground sheathed in protective material lest we create another universe or some such thing.  Now that’s something I’d like to see.  I would!  …but what if they move that sucker about 5000 more feet underground where conditions change just a smidgen?  Maybe there’s a simple California answer to that.  But my question is, if we get data, will we really know what we think we know?  By the mere act or method of observing, are we changing the data?   Well I think we are!  So there must be infinite answers and I want them all.

You gotta get this: if there are parallel universes, infinite ones…well there are infinite infinite test results right? Infinite ones here and infinite ones in allll of the other universes.  We don’t know, right?  We just don’t know.  I’m okay with that, can you tell?

The problem I have is that it always occurs to me that we’re pretty arrogant, we simple humans.  We are very busy trying to figure out the ‘universe’ when in essence, we’re still looking at ants through a magnifying glass.  We can’t even figure out what makes people want to kill one another and why are we not working on that?

We have no idea the limits (on the small side) of quantum physics, nor do we know how far our universe really goes.  I’ve always liked to think we were in the thumb of some giant being so large that we could never detect his movement.  Don’t laugh.  The California dude probably already thought of that.  And by the same token, look at your thumb.  It might hold many galaxies.

The bottom line is that we don’t know.  We’re not equipped to know, but we sure spend time and money trying to figure out where we came from and how can we get SOMEWHERE else…because we’re going to destroy our planet or it’s going to die a natural death.  There’s a good way around that…it has to do with sending our DNA out into the universe and spreading it around.  Then we can ‘survive’.  Oh that’s great, isn’t it?  We’ve just about destroyed THIS place; let’s go somewhere else and START AGAIN!

I’ll be dead, so…I don’t really care.

Still, I’d like to see more effort thrown into understanding PEOPLE.  What makes people cruel and heartless?  Why do some people have the kill gene and some do not?  How do we deactivate the kill gene and if we could, how could we stop overpopulation?  Well we’d have to, wouldn’t we?  Now that’s a good question, isn’t it?  Wouldn’t you rather know about that than cosmic bubbles, dude? Maybe not.

I love the Fermilab building though.  I might not like all of the wild theories, but the building?  Coolest I’ve ever seen. You should google it.  Seriously.

We do one another great harm as humans, don’t we? 

I watched a documentary about a death row inmate, convicted of a triple murder and sentenced to death. He killed these people when he was 18 years old.  As the documentary progressed I was stricken numerous times about how fragile we are, what barbarians we are, and about how one choice…one decision made in a fleeting moment…can lead to utter devastation…to others and ourselves.  We just keep on going, walking, taking in stride the damage to ourselves and others…and we go on.  Some of us go to the death chamber and are injected with chemicals that kill us; others go on to new lives in strange places and we go on.  I am amazed by us.  We should be dragging along, barely able to take the next step because of the damage; we should have dropped off limbs and hair; we should be bone thin and starving, yet we walk on…just like it never happened.  No, it’s not healing.  You don’t heal from some wounds.  Not these.

The young man, this murderer, might have been envisioned as a dark, huge, brutal monster had I not seen his face close up as he spoke to his final interviewer; but he was a child…a child with dark circles under his eyes illustrating the stress under which he existed, though he fought with his whole psyche to deny it, or look away from it…to pretend it didn’t exist.  Even though he was well into his second decade of life by the time of his execution, he was a child…probably with an IQ in double digits and not high ones.  It made me very sad. I do not believe he should have been killed.  He was clueless.  He was in no way someone who could have understood  accountability, let alone be held to it.  He was a boy, in supreme denial of his own past actions and those about to befall him.  He never apologized to his victims’ families, never acknowledged them in any way, except to forgive THEM for the atrocities they put upon HIM by killing HIM.  What happens to us to make us so confused and so unacquainted with just doing the right thing?  Where is the reality check? His last words included something about being in heaven.  Heaven?  I don’t know…he said he had become a man, not the boy he was when he got there…but no.  He was still a little boy, plain as day.  He wasn’t a misguided boy; he was an UNguided boy who no doubt died clueless. 

And none of his victims came back to life.

His accomplice, the same age but clearly a man, was extremely bright, intensely human and in the moment.  It was obvious he could have been anyone, done anything he wanted to do…but for his choices and possibly the choices of others.  His father spent the majority of his own life in prison because of, he said, drugs and alcohol…choices.  He blamed himself for his son’s life sentence, and he may have been right because his son was raised in utter poverty without benefit of a father.  I’m sure that affected the son’s choices…and his options.  So sad.  I watched, wondering what might have happened if this young man had somehow inherited an ounce of INTEGRITY somewhere along the line.  He might have been a scholar, could have been.  His father, by the way, now sober, was also a very bright, very human, feeling person…he grieved the loss of his son’s freedom too late.  This man could have been an absolute pillar of his community…you could tell. But he chose a life of addiction.  I felt such an absolute sense of the wastefulness of humanity, watching these people, these prisoners and murderers. My God.  What a colossal shame.

I have seen the same waste around me, in people who had a goodness about them, wrapped in putridity and hatefulness.  A waste.  I have watched the goodness become infinitesimal and the evil take over, spilling into the lives of others near them.  And they go on, slogging through the death and despair around them…like nothing happened. Just another blow stricken for humanity.  Good job.

Family members of the victims, and friends, were as different as a handful of stones scooped up from the river bottom.  But different as they looked and spoke, they were all forever changed, forever burdened by a grief they could not comprehend.  There was such a sense of helplessness about all of them.  All of them isolated themselves, cut themselves off from the world for fear of further devastation…actually doing more harm to themselves, because loneliness is painful too.  It makes the hole in your heart bigger, doesn’t it, even though in a strange way it feels safer.  I’d make a terrible juror.  I’d want to make everybody feel better.  Everybody. I’d want to make sense of it somehow when no sense can be made.  None of these people deserved the grief heaped upon them; where is their justice?  I don’t think there is any.  You can’t turn back time…at least not yet…and that’s what you’d have to do.

The captain of the death squad, the head of the lethal injection team…ultimately decided he couldn’t kill anymore.  He was also a warm and compassionate man.  Sounds strange, doesn’t it?  A compassionate killer.  After over 120 deaths to his credit…or detriment really…he just couldn’t do it anymore, and he now believes there is no reason for any human to kill another human…law or no law. And I thought, “Too bad he didn’t realize that sooner.” Followed by, “It wouldn’t have mattered.”  And he cries about having done his job as a professional…killer.  I am understanding humanity less and less and looking upon us with greater and greater disdain as I age.  I should have been a cat.  Cats don’t care.

I don’t know how I would feel if I were the victim; I don’t know whether I would want the perpetrator to be killed.  Maybe I would. I couldn’t be the one to do it, so…just exactly what does that mean?  I’m essentially saying, “Somebody kill this person.”  Nice.  When I was a few interviews away from possibly being chosen for a death penalty case jury, I became physically ill at the mere thought of having to decide whether or not to cause the end of someone’s life.  I don’t have the kill gene.  It was a good thing to learn, I guess. 

But I do have the compassion gene. Sometimes I wish I didn’t. 

We just do one another great harm as a way of life.  It’s accepted as the norm.  One way or another, we manage to do it.  I have spent a lot of time studying human behavior, my own and others’,  and the more I learn, the sadder and more incredulous I become.  We have become uncivil to one another, unkind and uncaring and we have the nerve to say we love one another while we know we are lying about that, and WHILE we do one another harm and know we’re doing it.  We think we know what love is, but we don’t have a clue, any more than that child on death row.  That kid was homeless at the time of his crimes, having been thrown away by his ‘loved ones’.  Oh…they came back and were there when he was put to death.  Nice. I really should give up trying to figure it out. 

I called love ‘parasitic’ a few weeks ago and I’m not sure I’m wrong about that. I keep looking for love out there in the world, not for me, but just to see whether I can even find it… the kind that doesn’t involve taking something or expecting something from someone.  I don’t think it exists.  And don’t say, “I’m a parent; I know about unconditional love.”  Real love goes both ways.  It doesn’t always come back.  I think if you illustrate real love, arrows would go BOTH ways with no payments, no bloodsucking, no killing, no harm done.  We can’t do it.  We humans can’t do it.

I think we are far more comfortable harming one another for the sake of selfishness, than we are really loving.  Really loving.   Love has become a comsumable rather than a donation. If we drew an illustration of the direction of love, more arrows would point inward than those pointing out.  If everybody takes and nobody gives, won’t we run out of love and compassion?  Isn’t that what we’re doing? 

Do you love anybody just for the sake of loving them?  I mean expecting nothing?  Come on now…tell the truth.  You’re getting something or you wouldn’t be there.  It’s true.  That’s human nature in the rawest form.  Take.  Consume.  Survive.  Tina Turner said, “What’s Love Got To Do With It?”  Right.  But I think real love has much to do with it…if we could only do it.  Something made this murderer void of compassion, selfish enough to steal the very lives of people, not even realizing there was wrongdoing involved.  I think it must have been lovelessness. 

As a race, we don’t do love well anymore…if we ever did.  I think we’d have fewer inmates if we did.  I know; there is evil in the world, just for the sake of evil…but the people who are in jail because they were unguided or unloved…I think we’d see fewer of them if we knew what love means and we just tried to do no harm.  Is the world better off without this child/murderer?  I doubt it. And I wonder what he might have become if he had been loved.

I have to get this off my chest. 

We live in a metropolitan area, one of the best!  As such, there are highways everywhere!  Not surprisingly, there are many homes which back up to these thoroughfares and many agents insist on fomenting the idea that because there is a highway in close proximity, the property is not only not as valuable, but downright appalling.  I call major BS on that.  Not everybody sees fellow drivers as the Devil! Some of us don’t give two hoots about traffic noise, and a great house is still a great house, even WITH a highway nearby.

Where do we get off saying we love the area but let the ‘other ones’ buy the houses near the highways…you know, one of the infrastructure aspects that MAKE this a great place to live??  That attitude affects our real estate market and it’s making smoke come out of my ears!

If one desires to live in a metropolitan area, then surely one would expect there to be metropolitan STUFF like HIGHWAYS and STREETS.  I think it would be a grand idea for agents to stop badmouthing these properties and let clients make up their own minds.

Here’s an example of a bad agent conversation:  Client: Oh no!  It backs up to a highway!  Agent: You’re right.  It’s noisy!  Let’s leave. 

How about a GOOD agent conversation:  Client: Oh no!  It backs up to a highway!  Agent:  True, but it gives you quick access for commuting and by the way…how much time do you spend outside?  Client: Hardly any.  Only when we’re grilling out.  Agent:  How quiet do you need it to be for grilling out?  Client: Not quiet at all.  We usually have loud music playing. 

Case closed.  Try overcoming the objective with some good solid communication and you might find out there IS no objection. Marketing 101 folks.

The bottom line is that there are some fantastic homes in close proximity to highways.  During your ‘quiet’ times, guess what? The highway will also be quieter because it’s everyone else’s quiet time too!  So agents, remember your job is to protect our market…meaning our property values.  ALL of them.  So don’t be the grinch out there. 

I think I heard on the news this morning that some people who are banned from flying…as in, on the do-not-fly list…were granted license to learn to fly jetliners. So..they can’t fly, but they can FLY. Good grief.