Wednesday, May 27, 2015

I love stories


Ok so something you ought to know about me: I like to create stories in my head. It’s mostly just for me, I don’t expect other people to give a damn, but I’ve been doing it since I was a child so I’ve become pretty practiced at it, and super aware when I’m doing it too. 

I’ve always loved stories as well as creating stories. In RPGs’ as well as fiction – in fact I remember remarking on my love for the gods in the role playing game D&D, because they were actually worth worshipping and had real power (in game only of course!) You pray for healing and it can actually happen in game. This seemed to both amuse and annoy one of my friends but my point is I’m well aware that I sometimes enjoy and wish fantastic stories were true. What a weird and interesting world it would be if say ghosts were real? Or vampires. I love to play the what if game, but well a part of me knows the improbabilities, knows the difference between reality and fantasy and it just won’t shut up.

So the other day I heard strange noises in the kitchen, like sounds as if the kittens were messing with the dishes, except I saw the kittens right in front of me and they were lazing about as cats are inclined to do. 

Me,(mental voice #1 –MV1): Ha! they’ve developed an out of body method of searching for food! Those adorable scamps.. .

Me, (mental voice#2-MV2): Yeah right, that’s silly! Might as well say it’s a ghost cat.

MV1: Ooooh! Ghost cat, now that’s fun, but Cat’s already can walk through walls right!?

MV2: mm well yeah there was that bit about Schröedinger’s cat but that’s a thought experiment about quantum mechanics, not really the same thing. You’re thinking of the Heinlein novel The Cat who walks through walls – but that’s not necessarily what’s happening here. In fact it might as well be time travelers from the future spying on you and using their superior tech to keep out of sight but every once in while you perceive them in some small way anyhow, so those sounds were them accidentally knocking the dishes, not our cats or your ghost cat. That’s just as likely and just as improbable. . .


MV1: Maybe it’s a time traveling ghost cat! So climate change isn’t solved by humans before we knock ourselves back into the iron age and cats with their superior predatory intelligence evolve and slowly eventually using science they learn about our civilization and even surpass us and build a time machine to come back and study the lives of their earliest ancestors who are living as pets with us. It’s sort of an anthropological study for them, ooh plus palentology, except. .

MV2: Except we’re their dinosaurs so correctly you should say Homeotology? And well Anthropology is the study of our history so feline history maybe you should say Felistology. Oy vey, this is ridiculous! So why are they still ghosts?

MV1: They’re ghosts because that’s the tech they’re using to hide themselves, a sort of out of phase with our dimension tech, you know like they used in Star Trek TNG- you know the episode but damn I don’t remember their technobabble for it, don’t make me look up that ep on Netflix just for technobabble! Aw well, what does it matter what words we use?, they’re cats and they’ll have developed their own language.

MV2: nope don’t waste your time looking STTNG stuff up, this is distracting enough! Language well yes, and boy will it be necessary if they’re to evolve and learn stuff. Hell they’re communicating now using body language and scent and where does that lead them?! – Cat Club.

MV1: but we don’t talk about Cat Club!

MV2: No we don’t talk about Cat Club. Anyway, that all sounds fun but why here? this seems a rather humdrum location to come back in time to? And our cats can’t be direct ancestors anyway, they’ve been spayed/neutered. So why here? this house is not that remarkable and there are many other people with cats, many other households that these future cats could decide to watch.

MV1: I don’t know, maybe all the others were destroyed in some major disaster. Flood, earth quake, so many possible, no wait that would mean they found our bones or rather our kittens bones ugh, well maybe not since that would imply an imminent disaster here. I don’t know, it doesn’t matter they maybe just guessed and got lucky or we got lucky depending on how you look at it. . . . I swear I saw something out of the corner of my eye the other day and then it wasn’t there, maybe that was them out of phase and just barely perceptible.

MV2: Don’t try to change the subject. ..(face palm) whatever.. .when you saw that or almost saw that, you were looking at our carpet which has a busy pattern, so maybe it was just the usual visual tricks our brain likes to play? You know when you look at mottled bathroom floor tiles in public restrooms and sometimes see faces, then look away, look back and can’t find the face again? Maybe it was just that?

MV1: You know sometimes you’re no fun. I say let’s just wait and see, maybe I just need more evidence? So let’s pay attention, there have been more of those sounds from the kitchen, maybe if we go in there we’ll learn something.

MV2: I’m not going in the kitchen for this. .for one I’ve got this cat on my lap. She’s comfortable, and I’m comfortable sitting here trying to read the internet, and there’s a lot of internet to read, so why don’t you let me get back to it!

MV1: lazy!

MV2: no, busy!

-Five minutes later -

MV2: What’s that smell? Oh and here comes the brother heading to the kitchen. ..he’s cooking pizza. Hah! It was the oven making those sounds as it warmed up and from here it would sound sort of like kittens’ clinking the dishes together. What was that I was saying about your improbable explanations?

MV1: yeah, yeah, but there’s still the matter of the seeing things out of the corner of my eye. You wanna explain how that has anything to do with pizza? It happened a couple of times, but not today.

MV2: duh! You know they don’t have to be related to each other at all. If you really did see something it was probably one of those damn centipedes. Hopefully the cat’s will find and kill it before you have to actually lay eyes on it off the carpet!

MV1: ugh! Fine you win, but just remember my time traveling super evolved cats from Earth’s future could still exist just because I thought of them as per the end of Heinlein’s Cat who walks through walls. You know, the many-worlds interpretation and how Heinlein suggested that writers create their alternate versions of the universe just by imagining them, so remember that my improbable evolved cats could exist in some alternate verse just because I imagined them!

MV2: yep! Sure, but we’ll never know, will we?! And when you think about it do you really want that responsibility? Think of all the seriously flawed worlds envisioned by humans. We’ve made up a lot of stories over the centuries, some of them are super dumb (Twilight). Beside C.J. Cherryh did the evolved space faring cats thing better, you know that right?!

MV1: Ok sure that’s true. Fine, I’ll just thump my head against this wall here! Yeah I know there’s nothing new anymore per the postmodernism so yeah, just go back to nibbling on the internets you culture bunny. . .

MV2: No need to get whiney. You know if you really want to write a good story it takes work. Asking these questions of you is my way of showing you the work you need to do, but if you don’t want to do it you don’t have to expend the effort.

MV1: Maybe the next idea. .. I do love the time travel part though.

MV2: yeah, time travel is fascinating.

-the next morning-
ZORCH! (The electric fly/bug swatter strikes again.)

MV1: Stupid centipedes. . . Shut up!

MV2: I didn’t say anything!
***

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