2023-02-27 Journal Entry

🍃 Season: ❄️ Winter 🔆 Weekday: Monday 🗓 Date: February 27, 2023 📅 Week: Feb 27 – Mar 5, 2023

Alright my brain is a potato at the moment, so I’m not going to try to write anything right now. I feel like I’m being impatient about finding a good “what if” or whatever. I’m sitting here wanting to rush out the gate. It feels like I’ve had a similar problem for a really long time, which is this feeling of having a lot of “ambition” or something but not being ambitious about anything. I don’t have this story that’s bursting out of me, but I want to write.

So let’s use this time to think of some of the scenarios present in some books that I like:

Slaughterhouse Five is basically “what if you could see time all at once instead of moment by moment.”

Wolf in White Van is “what if people in a role playing game took their roles seriously.”

Pure Colour is “what if this version of the world was just God’s first draft.”

Why Don’t You Dance is “what if we asked for what we want as we wanted it.”

Lincoln in the Bardo is “what if spirits could see what Honest Abe did the in the graveyard.”

Arrival is “what if aliens visited but used a totally different form of language.” Also, “what if language truly could fundamentally transform how we perceive the world.”

What if instead of the future we could see alternate pasts? How would that affect how we perceive the world? At first, I think there’s a bit of sadness in that, if your life isn’t going great. Well, I suppose it really depends on the contents of your alternate pasts — they all end the same way, the present being what it is, but they also could be more or less meaningful than the way they currently are. If your marriage just ended, there’s a bunch of reasons why it could have ended. Perhaps instead of your spouse cheating on you, they died in a horrible accident, or perhaps you were unable to provide a child for them and so they left, or perhaps they became an alcoholic and you left them. Perhaps the partner that they had secretly yearned for your entire marriage finally confessed their love and your spouse left you. Are any of those particularly happier than others?

I guess all in all it gives perspective, but probably not much else? I suppose if there’s the past where your partner cheats on you, in reality there’s probably a time they’ve thought about cheating on you, but that’s not very interesting now is it.

I just had what I thought was a pretty good idea: what if apocalyptic cults were right? The interesting here is that they’re right about the fact that the apocalypse is coming, not that it’s inevitable. What if there was a cult working to avoid the apocalypse?

There’s this tribe in Colombia that supposedly sings from a cliff every morning, believing that they must do so in order for existence to continue. What if they were right? What if they were destroyed? What would happen?

I can see a scene where an old shaman presents to us the end of the world.

Of course, I think I want this in a more urban setting or something, but I like the idea. Lemme simmer on that for a bit.