civilization’s triumph

BEEP BEEP BEEP

i wake up every morning to the alarm of my old timex alarm clock. it’s pretty simple and effective, like many other timex alarm clocks. i’ve had it for years. recently, my brother got a fancy clock. it has all kinds of colors that you can set it to display. and it has all kinds of tunes that can have wake you up. not mine. i prefer the simple loud BEEP BEEP BEEP. i’m used to it. well-accustomed. comfortable. this was one such morning. BEEP BEEP BEEP.

my alarm clock is a simple one. no frills attached. for example, its case is a simple, durable, hard plastic, partly black and partly grey. i’d guess it’s some kind of polycarbonate, but i’m not too sure. i’m no chemist or materials scientist. polycarbonates are a type of polymer, or a substance with a repeating chemical form, in this case a repeating chain of a carbonate group, then 2 hexagonal carbon groups, then the carbonate again, and on and on. polycarbonates were first produced commercially in the late 1950’s. but nowadays, polycarbonates are a fairly basic plastic, which is used in all sorts of products and commodities and items. this is how “they” make polycarbonate. when i say “they” here, i’m referring to a long, complex chain of companies and supply chains and exchanges and sales needed to produce the chains of carbonate molecules. first, “they” need some crude oil. crude oil is a black hydrocarbon-filled liquid that’s found in huge pools underground. it formed when a bunch of tiny sea creatures called plankton died millions of years ago. their tiny skeletons drifted down to the ocean floor and piled up over thousands of years, squishing under their own weight. eventually, sediments piled on above them, squishing the dead sea creatures further. eventually, they squished so much that they turned into oil. “they” get the oil with huge drills, that dig deep into the earth, laying a pipe for miles and miles beneath the surface. when “they” reach the plankton graveyard, “they” stop drilling. they take a huge pump and pump out the oil as fast as “they” can. the “they”’s all across the world are in a very important competition as to how fast “they” can get the crushed up plankton skeletons out of the ground. combined, “they” currently pump up about 150 thousand liters of crushed up plankton skeletons every second of every minute of every hour of every day. the oil is then transported in enormous container ships that often crash and leak or through pipes that are poorly maintained and leak. the oil is transported to a refinery. oil is a complex liquid, made of many simpler liquids, and at the refinery, “they” separate the oil into all its components. this is a process that i don’t know much about, but i do know about how these refineries often explode, injuring or killing workers and nearby civilians. somehow, “they” separate the crude oil into all kinds of other hydrocarbon liquids which go off on their own personal journeys which eventually end up in our toys or our cars or our bodies or our atmosphere. some of the hydrocarbons are transported again, to a plastics plant. through a series of advanced chemical reactions at high temperatures, polycarbonate is formed. polycarbonate solidifies quickly when it cools, however, so before that tragic disaster happens, it’s injected into metal molds that have a specific shape, so the polycarbonate comes out in a specific shape. these molds are made of steel or aluminum, two metal substances which i am far too lazy to discuss the creation of. but be sure, therein lie the rises and falls of companies, entrepreneurs, industries, and the fortunes of real people too. finally, out comes the modern miracle, a piece of black polycarbonate in the shape of an alarm clock case. all that’s left is the quick shipment to the timex factory, where a bunch of electronics (which i’m not remotely qualified to explain) are stuffed and shoved into it, buttons are added, it’s painted, tested, and packaged in a little cardboard box, and the shipment to the store, where all those years ago, it was put on a shelf by a minimum wage worker, and my mother walked by it. she liked the number below the box. it was a decently low number, lower than the ones underneath the other alarm clock boxes. she also liked the name on the box. timex. she recognized the name, so the thing in the box must be a good, high-quality product. she picked up the box, walked over to a line of people waiting to purchase their selected goods, and then she swiped a card at the checkout station, in some strange plastic card-reader. that card was also made of plastic. this was an extremely important piece of plastic. but unlike the plastic alarm clock, my mother wanted a higher number on the card. swiping this card entitled my mother to leave the store with the alarm clock in the box without being accused of stealing. she drove in her car, which also burned an oil byproduct, by the way, to her home, where i lived too, at the time. she opened the box, took out the alarm clock, and plugged 2 metal sticks attached to it into a plastic rectangle on the wall. there was power in this plastic rectangle. how convenient. the power certainly involved all kinds of oil and oil byproducts for it to be created and to arrive at my mother’s home and my place of residence. the power made the alarm clock light up and start counting the minutes and hours. miraculous.

anyways.

as i was saying, my alarm clock was a simple one.

and my alarm clock was beeping.

BEEP BEEP BEEP

the beeping noise told me it was time to wake up. i didn’t want to wake up, but i had to. i had to. at that time in my life, i very frequently “had to”. at that point, my brain was still trying to revive itself from the shock of being taken straight out of deep sleep into being completely awake due to the piece of plastic next to it. i then made a critical error. my brain’s knowledge and sleepy state combined in the worst way possible. i thought two thoughts which are simple together but rather dangerous when combined. this is the exact opposite, by the way, of common salt, which is composed of two of the most toxic and dangerous chemical elements there are, sodium and chlorine. sometimes, people would release chlorine, which is a gas, to kill other people. but my two thoughts alone were safe. thought 1 was this: “this beeping noise is annoying, so i’ll stop it by hitting a little button on the alarm clock”. thought 2 was this: “i know i can still make it (whatever it was in this case. unfortunately, i forget, by now.) if i wait a few minutes, so i’ll just lie in bed a little while longer.” most everybody recognizes these 2 thoughts, and knows their ill effects, and yet most everybody has fallen for their deadly combination. at least once or twice.

when i next woke up, it was about 10 minutes late for it. as a result, i was in a rather panicked state, because it would not delay for me. i had to accommodate for it.

at this point, i thought a very dangerous thought indeed. far more dangerous than the combination of my previous two thoughts. the idea that plopped into my brain was as follows: “well, i’m already late for it, so i might as well skip it and take the day off”. most of the time that people said “i might as well”, in fact they should not have “as well”.

i went outside for the first time in years.

sure, i had, on countless occasions, even the day before, went somewhere else. and the “went” and the “somewhere else” involved going through the outside, but i had not gone outside. i had only been passing through. whenever i was outside, i was “not there yet”. at that time in my life, i was very frequently “not there yet”.

the first day in years i went outside was also the first day in years i really took a good look up at the sky. the first day in years i really took a good look up at the sky was also the first day in years that god performed a miracle there.

i’m an atheist, so i don’t believe in the existence of a god or gods. therefore, god has to try really hard to show me something really astonishing in order to impress me. god had to put on a really good show to make me believe in god for a moment. i like that. i appreciate when someone makes the effort.

i recalled that when i had looked up in the sky in the past, i had only seen one sun. well, “seen” isn’t quite the right word, because i knew you shouldn’t look directly at the sun. human eyes weren’t built for that. but i knew, or at least thought i knew, that there was only ever one sun. as i was standing just outside the door of my place of residence, looking up, there were at that moment about 15 suns.

each of the 15 suns was a different color. they all sparkled and twinkled and swirled around the sky. one was white with blue polka dots. another kept splitting in two and reforming. slowly, the suns calmed down their swirling and twinkling. their turbulent youths over, they learned discipline and matured and formed into a neat, orderly row. but it wasn’t perfect, as a couple suns were bunched up at either end. i guessed that the ends were more important, and multiple suns were jostling for those crucial positions.

I

this was a letter in the greek/latin alphabet. i recalled vaguely at the time that this alphabet traced its roots from the phoenician alphabet, and even from egyptian hieroglyphs.

over the course of about 15 minutes, or maybe it was 15 hours, the suns moved into different shapes which became letters and spelled out a couple intelligible english sentences. god’s miraculous suns were so kind and convenient, weren’t they?

I AM GOD. GOD IS REAL. BUY ZELATON BRAND HARDWOOD FLOOR CLEANER TODAY.

hardwood floor cleaner was a kind of chemical that removed stains from floors made of wooden planks. my place of residence had no hardwood floors.

i was dazzled by god’s fine display.

i was so dazzled that i entered my oil-burning car, and oil-burned all the way to a nearby retail store. the motto of the store, or more precisely, the motto of the corporation which owned the store, was “get more, pay less” or “save money, shop better” or some such thing. i ran to the “home” section of the store, and scoured the shelves for a name i liked. after a few minutes of scouring, i found it. the name was zelaton. zelaton brand hardwood floor cleaner. today. it was today. it was always today.

after swiping my plastic card on the plastic card-reading machine, giving me the rights to that bottle of zelaton, and going back to my oil-burning car, i found that my car was in fact not where it should have been.

the car was gone.

the pavement of the parking lot was gone. the ground was gone. the normal sun and god’s suns were gone. the sky was pitch black. pitch black with white little polka dots. stars. i stood in a black void. the void was crying. the void’s tears were made of huge balls of hydrogen gas undergoing nuclear fusion. the void’s tears were made of plastic. stars made of plastic rained down the void, down through the place where my car had been, and into the place my car had gone. my car had gone a lot of places, but it was done going. my car was gone.

well, more precisely, the car wasn’t gone.

it was destroyed. totaled. wrecked. ruined. crashed.

i had driven it into a tree about 500 feet from my house. this wasn’t because i was a terrible driver or because i was driven off the road by another driver. this was because i was blind. that is because i stared at the 15 suns that god put in the sky for me for a quite a bit too long.

technically speaking, i was not blind. see, i had been neglecting getting broken parts of my car fixed up, as all the little numbers associated with those sorts of operations were too big. the number inside my little plastic card was too small. i hadn’t fixed my airbags. i had struck my head violently against the steering wheel. i was dead.

what a shame.

and unfortunately, at the moment i died, even though i had believed in god after the miracle god put on for me, i have a short attention span. i stopped believing in god approximately 24 thousandths of a second before i permanently lost consciousness.

that meant i would be going to hell. i wondered, what would i find there?

BEEP BEEP BEEP