WCS
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there's a cemetery i frequent. it's reallyy pretty. roads loopy loop all around. somewhere on its 100 acres there is a tree-lined road where i always park. my view looks just like the picture above.
i spend on average 8 hours a week here. the graves to the left and right of the trees always have fresh colorful things on them. some whirl and go "oooohhh mmmmm!!!!!!!! yeahhhhh" with the wind. it gives the sensation of being in a field of evenly spaced deluxe edition wildflowers.
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some molecules underground were commissioned as photoreceptors for soldiers in ww1. the closest nutrients to me are labeled jacob and marie something and lars. they are unoffensive but do not inspire much of anything. doesn't change, that most people become boring with exposure. rigorous trials have determined that jacob, marie and lars are best at commiserating and testing out jokes.
this blog isn't about the best uses for the dead though.
there are other people that like to visit, despite the lack of shopping and nightlife (literally). it's more a place a cat would enjoy. there are nice warmed benches to sit on. everyone is fucking polite. personal bubbles extend for a few hundred meters and nobody judges. i can't tell whether this is the result of empathy, reverence, or self-preservation instincts suggesting to not mess with distraught people. whatever mix of these it is, it's nice.
few days ago, i notice a little movement out of the corner of my eye. down the grove to the left was a lady slowly weaving between the trees on foot, slowly, examining all the plates. she was looking for someone. some search algorithm in her brain prompted her to comb in a zigzag pattern. to wipe her eyes with her polkadotted sleve when the sweat drip became too much, to shield her eyes from the sweltering sun so she could read. what an incredible machine, trying to find the remains of another one.
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i suppose then, that this blog is about molecular interactions.
someone more knowledgeable would start with quantum mechanics. i don't know much about those at all. so we'll go with covalent, ionic, hydrogen, metallic and vanderwaals forces all going to keep atoms together. don't know much about those either. all your orgo stuff and amino acids and rna and dna and peptides to polypeptides and twists and turns and foldings of proteins. consistent self-replication. to the shapes of proteins conferring their functions, building cell scaffolding and being enzymes and countless other stuff i've forgotten or never even heard of.
to cells, cells with sensory apparatus, cells with locomotive abilities to multicellular organisms. neurons. processes upon processes. sexual reproduction by primordial sponges and corals. cephalization. brainlike things and brains? invertebrates, vertebrates. neural correlates of consciousness. organisms being hardwired to select for mates with good dna via all sorts of cues. brains with parts assigned to stick things in other things and pop out more humans. or not.
what kind of sick high level shit is this? our lord and savior Flash himself couldn't dream of creating this. we are organisms that made starcraft. organisms that will one day build self-replicating machine life. all of this is nature.
and now here, on an entirely difference scale where this all plays a part, this lady and all her cells with their retinue of universal wonders are inexorably being drawn sweatily towards those of her dead companion. at this moment the distance between these two masses is steadily decreasing to a distance of 6 feet. we'll assume she doesn't dig him up.
but why???? there is no reproductive opportunity here. there are no resources to gain, or information to gather. no observers to prove her humanity to, no way to accumulate social credit to spend later.
from brief readings on the biology of grieving it seems reasonable to believe that it's there to keep individuals together. making us bond with a fear of loss is a great survival mechanism! but when you do lose someone, does your brain prioritize seeing them again while telling itself it's impossible? is this then the equivalent of a computer crash? a human crash.
visiting a grave then may just a carryover from that instinctual drive to be together. fulfilling some objective despite already failing the mission, like shooting all the scientists on silo in goldeneye and still blowing it up and escaping via elevator. losing all your bases and floating your buildings. the loops of circuits firing in her brain making each leg move to find a name, to fulfill some protective function. like buckling a passenger seatbelt to make the beeping stop?
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what attracts her to that grave then is some biological imperative that results from infinite baby forces, to keep mammals together in the interest of propagation. a force that is separate from those of chemistry as we usually see it, but is still real and significant. metachemistry - so absurd but still so normal at the same time. it's the level that you and i exist on.
it is commonly accepted that existence is a mindfuck. even recognizing that i still i find myself struggling with it constantly. i think it's because it's hard to really focus on anything when you're flying really really fast in space. have fun everyone
