Dear Mr Squic, I hear you’re writing an advice column. Is it really wise for people to ask your advice?
Sincerely,
The Editor
Allow me to answer your question with a long meandering story. Have you heard of television? Books perhaps? The human drive to tell stories is one of the things that drives us, defines us, and makes us more and more who we are. There are theories that posit the emergent property of individual consciousness is nothing more than meat whispering electric whispers to itself in a manner that happens to coincide with observable reality.
A story, fundamentally, is what human memory is. A story is the context that surrounds an action, a person, an item, it is a directed spotlight that shines towards a specific target. A story must, therefore, HAVE a target. Without a villain there can be no hero, without a disaster there can be no rescue, without- The point is, friction and relative measures are the very stuff that humans are made of. Not simply a collection of moments and actions, but the REASONS for those actions. The CAUSE of those moments. A story is a compressed “everything-that-is-needed-for-the-understanding-of-this-specific-focus” bundle. Stories are important.
In service of telling them we have created rules, shorthand and shortcuts, traditions that go on to become tropes or become so ingrained that they define a genre. At their core, stories are a framework into which we can attempt to insert the world. A way of containing a universe within a landscape that we can understand intuitively. With that groundwork laid, are you sure you are asking the right question?
Consider the alternative, the existential desire for information that each human craves as we recontextualize and organize the universe, as we experience ourselves experiencing ourselves through the medium of sleep, where our mind is left to ponder the mind pondering the mind pondering the mind pondering the-
Someone should make a movie out of that.
Regardless, the point I wish to make is this: the question you have asked misses the point entirely! The far more reasonable question, the core question, the string that plucks the code and makes the world sing, is as follows:
Wouldn’t it be funny?
Send your question to Squic at bpl.thelegion@gmail.com
Squic is a standard human with the normal amount of biological material. He contains fluids AND bones, which is considered a desirable combination.