Life, lurking within tent

Popcorn. Cop porn. Be there a difference?

The recording session from which the next Bo Molasses album should be thrust kicking and screaming (guitars and harmonica) into the world is planned for this coming spring. I’ve written lots of music for it, but no lyrics as yet. Inspiration for wordly-wise wordies is in shamelessly short supply.

My ability for outstanding use of alliteration is not.

I had planned to spend the festive season getting down to some serious work, and had reassured my fellow bandmates as such, but I’ve procrastinated and procrastinated until physically, no more procrastination is possible.

If a Procrastinating World Champioship had been held over the Christmas period, I would have won. (Except, I probably wouldn't have got round to sending the entry form in).

Lately, I've essentially done nothing but tread water about a mile and a half offshore in the Sea of Nowhere, smoking dope, drinking beer infront of the box, desperately hoping a conveniently lashed together raft will just happen to drift by upon which I can paddle back to the Beach Of Being Creative, Getting Off My Arse and Doing Something.

But, unfortunately, there’s been a moderate offshore breeze and well, time has just slipped quietly by.

I think I’m in what’s called the creative doldrums, perhaps a symptom of my current state of mind. I keep thinking, surely my life must have some point to it? But then I think, hang on - perhaps there is no point to life, and therein lies the rub.

Life certainly has a habit of sneaking up behind me, slapping me hard on the back of my head and looking away innocently when I spin round.

I find life just too confusing a concept to contemplate. I can’t quite get my melon round the actual origins of it, of how we came to be here on this planet of ours in the first place.

I mean, when I stop to think about it, the whole basic concept of life on Earth is just so outrageous. The fact that we exist on a giant ball of rock in the middle of nowhere is so far-fetched, so hard to believe, it just has to be made up, you know?

I’ve recently read a book by Michio Kaku, this particle physicist chap who claims that our universe may be nothing less than a membrane hovering near ten other parallel universes that multiply like soap bubbles when they collide.

Hmnnnnn...

And I saw this article in a magazine recently giving credence to a theory I’ve heard before, you know, about the Earth. That it could be nought but a microscopic speck in the constitution of some other vast living entity, like, I don’t know, an atom in the cell of an eyebrow hair on the forehead of a beaver.

Actually, do beavers have eyebrows?

Well, maybe beaver eyebrows wasn’t the exact example they used in the magazine article. Can’t remember exactly what they compared our planet to now, you know, in terms of its infinite smallness, but, well, whatever it was, it got me thinking.

Thinking how strange it is that there are only two pretty much universally accepted hypothesis of how life on earth came to be.

It basically boils down to The Theory of Evolution versus God.

Why aren’t there more theories? Why aren’t there six or seven? (Maybe there are, and I just haven’t heard of them).

Similarly, why are there only a handful of official styles for people to swim? Why does it just have to be breast stroke, front crawl, backstroke or butterfly? Why can’t you just combine elements of all of them, you know, depending on your mood?

The doggy paddle with breaststroke legs, for example.

I mean, if some Olympic athlete stepped up for the final heat of the 100m. freestyle and dived into the pool, surfaced, then began to doggy paddle his way up and down, people would find it a little odd, wouldn’t they?

He also wouldn't win.

Anyway, of the two hypothesis about life on Earth, I’d like to think I believe in the theory of evolution because I’m not a religious person at all, at least in the traditional sense of going to church and believing in God and that he created everything.

Then again, I find this whole idea that living creatures developed at random from tiny single-celled organisms in direct response to their environment so hard to believe.

First there was a big bang in the middle of what was up to then a vast nowhere, then millions of years later single-celled blobs began mooching about in primordial swamps and eventually morphed into creatures so advanced they were able to invent cheese, build trousers and fly rockets to the moon.

I’m not so sure.

Take ears, for example. Ears are there to detect sound, right? And sound is basically air moving about. But until you’d grown a set of ears, you’d never know that moving air about even made a noise.

So what happened?

How did so many of earth’s creatures know they should grow ears?

Did the majority of creature-kind just embark on evolving them by chance, albeit simultaneously, you know, on the wild off chance there might be some sound about to listen to?

Or was it merely a few select adventurous species that went for the ear option as their contribution to the evolution effort, just to find out if sound existed?

And if that is how it went down, then presumably thousands of years later when they discovered that sound did exist and it was really groovy stuff, well, then they must have let a lot of other creatures know, ‘cos so many of them have ears.

But that begs the question, how did they let the others know?

By mime?

Sometimes I even worry that I’m not actually real and everything I see and experience has been artificially created in my mind, like a computer program.

I can easily imagine my whole life being part of some closely monitored scientific experiment carried out by some superior being in a laboratory somewhere.

I mean even the astronomer royal raised the question of whether mankind itself was just a computer simulation. And he’s the astronomer royal, for balloon’s sake. If he’s not sure whether this shit is for real or not, what kind of chance do I have?

Oh, what am I rambling on about?

It’s all so complicated; as is the concept of a supreme being having created everything. But please don’t get me started on the possibility of a supreme being and the conceited notion that somehow the universe must have been preordained for us humans because we’re so well suited to live in it.

That’ll just make me feel dozy.

Anyway, I’ve come to the conclusion that time is the most precious thing we have, you know? And by that I mean the time you or I have here on this earth.

Thing is, unlike money or possessions, it’s unquantifiable. None of us know how much of time we each have.

Imagine if after you die, and assuming there is a heaven, or some sort of holding place you’re taken to - a pre-heaven auction house if you will - and you were given a big fat wad of ghostly earth money to bid against all the other trillions of undead souls to buy back your own time on earth again.

How much do you think it would be worth, you know in earthly pounds and pence? Or Dollars or whatever?

How much do you think each second of your life would cost, you know at free market value?

It’s mind blowing to think about it.

Personally speaking, I wouldn’t try to buy back my own life. Well, at least my own life so far. I’ve made far too many mistakes, gone wrong too many times to want to do it all again.

Nah, I’d be happy to move on to the afterlife, if indeed there is one, and hope that my earthly experiences would stand me in good stead for whatever fate awaited me.

Then again, on the other hand, if I could buy my life back and relive it knowing what I know now so perhaps I could do things a little differently, well then of course I’d go for it like a shot.