[AKN #92] Do You Ever Get Swept Up In The Interconnectedness Of The Universe Or Is That Just Me?
LAUGH: Two Quick Jokes Which Made Me Laugh, LOVE: 1940s Rap Was Dope
Sup homies?
I’ve been having some wild dreams recently, but I haven’t been telling people about them because they don’t have a strong plot or make any sense. Just a lot of nonsense.
Like I had this one last night where I went to my high school homecoming game and I was there with a bunch of people I didn’t go to high school with.
We noticed we were losing and looked to the student section to bring the noise in a close game, but it was empty.
We asked around and ends up the students had something else going on…as if most high school kids have anything else going on except homecoming.
Then I looked back at the stadium and it was now a hilly terrain and we were transported back to the old times where they just invented the forward pass.
I watched this Bronko Nagurski look alike run around, break a few tackles, and then throw a long incompletion.
Then I woke up.
I guess my subconscious is a big Walt Whitman Wildcats fan and it longs for a return to a simpler game of football where we cheered on strong Eastern Europeans whose mutant strength was never quantified, but rather alluded to in regional folklore which spoke of how effortlessly they lifted hand plows?
Anyway.
On to the newsletter!
LIVE: Do You Ever Get Swept Up In The Interconnectedness Of The Universe Or Is That Just Me?
All things are made of atoms.
Little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling when they are squeezed too close together.
Literally everything.
What you just ate, your phone, and your signed DVD of Tyler Perry's Madea's Family Reunion are all made of atoms.
These particles are hella small.
How small?
But that’s OK. Cause its not the size that matters, but the swirling activity in an electron cloud which animates everything into existence.
Where did all of these atoms come from?
The stars.
Every single day you interact with the byproduct of billions of years of star explosions and collisions which by some happy accident formed the Earth.
So to review.
Everything is made of tiny, imperceptible building blocks you cannot see and all of these tiny blocks you’ve ever interacted with originated from star on star crime or star suicide…
Like are you comprehending how absurd this is?
Bro, YOUR MOM is made of star dust. And you are too! But it’s kind of different.
Like you require some five trillion trillion atoms, but your momma is so fat she requires a hundred trillion trillion atoms.
Ouch. Get burned.
Speaking of burned, I want you to truly understand how absurd this is by walking through the journey of a single carbon atom in a candle.
From Candle To Keyboard: The Journey of A Carbon Atom
The year is 1780 and Benjamin Franklin is on vacation in Great Britain when he lights a candle so he can see the orgy he is about to participate in.1
The moment he sparks the candle, Franklin releases both his inhibitions and carbon atoms from the candle wax by the stress of the reaction.
One particular carbon atom forms carbon dioxide, joins the other gases in the air, and floats right out of the window which was open to allow the Founding Father to stay cool during his sexual exploits.
The atom floats through the air for a couple hundred years participating in thousands of reactions such as being absorbed into the ocean and then released again back into the air as carbon dioxide.
The process continues until in the year 2022, that atom finds itself outside of a mint leaf garden and gets recruited by a particular plant to help it convert solar energy into chemical energy.
The plant takes the carbon dioxide along with water and sunlight and through photosynthesis produces glucose, oxygen, and water.
So our little carbon atom took itself from the world of inanimate objects and parlayed that into now being a fundamental building block (glucose) of a living fucking plant.
And that plant gets harvested and sold to a local SF artisanal coffee shop, Philz.
Now along comes my privileged ass where I buy a mint based coffee drink for the low, low price of $6.25 per cup. Can’t blame our little carbon atom for price gauging…
I swallow my pride as well as this coffee and along the way ingest some of the mint leaf.
Over the next several hours, my body takes the recently ingested mint leaf and converts the glucose stored in the plant into adenosine triphosphate (ATP) which will keep that energy stored until my cells need to use it.
Then I sit down at my keyboard and my body uses this stored energy to write a belabored post about the interconnectedness of literally fucking everything.
So in a very real way, it is completely and totally possible that Benjamin Franklin’s Great British Spank Off indirectly provided the energy for this post.
That is fucking crazy.
I need to say it again cause it really is mind boggling.
Everything is made of atoms which originated as stars, these atoms went through an unthinkably large number of transformations from one form of matter to another, and by some divine intervention ended up being spun into everything you see in front of you. Including you.
And one day, you will die and your atoms will be returned into this swirling pit of chemical reactions which will one day turn into a tree, diamond, another human being, or any other possible derivative of carbon.
So be nice to yourself.
Because even if you hate your current form, your atoms are like a thousand years away from being a shark with a laser beam on its head. And I love that journey for you.
LAUGH: Two Quick Jokes Which Made Me Laugh
LOVE: 1940s Rap Was Dope
No one slapped harder than The Jubalaires.
They would absolutely headline Coachella.
CLOSING TIME:
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Disclaimer: Opinions expressed are strictly my own. Who else’s would they be?
Mahalo,
K.Rapp
For real, Benjamin Franklin was apparently a big ole slut when he was serving as the ambassador to France between 1776–1785. Based on his amorous letters with several Parisian salon women during the American Revolution, one writer has called him a “foxy grandpa,” while another historian has described him as a “septuagenarian” “with sexual appetites of gargantuan proportions.” How fun is this fun fact?