G. K. Wuori

Iron Filings – 21


Sometimes I just let my mind do what it will to see what happens. Everyone should do that once in awhile, although, if you do, and nothing happens, you might be a little depressed. I once let my mind wander off and it didn’t come back again for a long time.

Aliens
I’ve often wondered what it would be like to meet a being from another planet.

I have the feeling that it might not be all that different from visiting Portugal, say, or Paraguay, except that in Portugal or Paraguay they wouldn’t ask me what my nose was for or why I blink my eyes.

What would I say to an alien? “Nothing says lovin’ like something from the oven.”

That was a saying from my childhood. I think it was an ad for flour. You don’t see many ads for flour these days. I don’t know why that is. You can do lots of things with flour like bake bread or cakes or put it on your face and tell your boss you’re really not feeling very well and you’d like to take a few days off.

I wonder if aliens have to work.

Gravity
The earth is pretty hard and we have gravity, so if you fall you generally hurt yourself.

We have a lot of heavy air so even without gravity we’d probably stay put, though we might be unpredictable. The air might float away, too, but that’s something you try not to think about.

Without gravity there’d be no diet industry and a good many of the world’s economies would suffer.

Without gravity we’d have to re-tool almost all our sports, especially skydiving.

‘What goes up must come down,’ would no longer be true. Something like that.

Biology
As physical entities, we’re made mostly of water. That doesn’t make us very durable in the long haul, but it does make us pretty easy to dispose of.

I’ve often wondered what would happen if we could remove all the water in our cells and replace it with bread dough. Maybe pancake batter would be better. We might, as well, be easier to love that way.

Industry
Because we’ve learned how to manipulate a lot of natural materials we think we’re pretty advanced.

We’re not, though.

I bet ants and earthworms have moved far more earth than mankind ever will.

Birth
We bring our next generation out through women’s bodies. Women, though, hurt when they give birth. You’d think we’d have found a better way by now.

Nutrition
We eat living things because we’re not too sure about just what life is. Personally, I think it would be a lot more morally sound if we could tell a cow or pig or chicken just why they’re here on earth. Since we can’t do that, it might be ethically better to raise human beings for food.

You have to be careful about ethics.

Politics
We have nations largely defined by the manner in which one person is able to tell some millions or billions of other persons what they can or cannot do.

I’m sure we have six billion acres on the earth. If we just gave each person one acre and told them to stay there things would probably be a lot better.

It used to be said that all politics was local. In the age of the internet, though, all politics is electronic.

God
We’re not sure what we believe, but we think we ought to believe something. Most of us direct our lives through obedience to an unseen entity that requires our worship and our money. There has never been a verifiable return on that investment, but we still keep giving.

Sometimes it’s probably good to believe in something that can’t be seen because it limits the possibilities of disappointment. Nearly all horror stories fall flat once the horrific entity is clearly envisioned.

I don’t mean to suggest that God is like a horror story. Or maybe I do.

Killing
Though we have no hesitation in killing one of our species, we think there is no greater goal than to find one to love. Once, long ago, someone found one to love and then killed it. That gave birth to the entertainment industry. Romance followed and then things got all mixed up.

Republicans
They say no to everything and offer nothing as an alternative. They are, therefore, the No-Nothing Party. You heard it here first.

Wisdom
Our most noble goal, we think, is to achieve wisdom, but I’m not sure about wisdom anymore. I’ve seen a lot of it and it doesn’t always work.

I once had a dog who might have been wise. She slept when she was tired, ate when she was hungry, relieved herself when necessary, and barked at intruders (very loosely defined). She died when she was done.

A lot of times, too, we mistake being smart for being wise. Little children can be smart, but they’re never wise.

Smart is to wisdom what being athletic is to winning.

Physics
Instead of saying that the sun is rising or the sun is setting, we should say, “Well, we’ve moved again. I hope we keep it up.”

No matter how deeply I might know that space is infinite, I still wonder where it goes.

One day one of our space vehicles is going to come back to us and the pilot is going to say, “We reached the end of the universe. The door was locked.”

Money
We make each other buy life by using money. If we don’t have money we die. We might want to apply some wisdom to that equation.

I always pick up money that I see lying on the street or sidewalk. That, of course, lengthens my life, but it also make someone else’s life shorter. I have over three-hundred dollars of that found money.

A million dollars won’t get you very far these days. If you laid a million one dollar bills end-to-end it would only take you ninety-four miles.

On average, we’re alive for two billion, three-hundred and sixty-five million seconds. If you’d like to see how insignificant that is, just go to http://www.usdebtclock.org/.

War
No one’s fought a war yet without bringing God into it, so all wars are holy wars.

I find it interesting that “holy war” always sounds like it’s something much worse than, well, “regular war,” “normal war”?

I like the sound ‘jihad’ makes when you say it aloud. Sounds like a knife thrust into a personal place.

G. K. Wuori © 2010
Photo by the author