excerpt from The Number 42

Descriptions of how many Anunnaki there were and what role they fulfilled are inconsistent and often contradictory.

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What’s up! It was my birthday yesterday, and I actually feel good today. This getting old shit is brutal, and it’s hell on my appearance, but lemme tell you what...there’s something to be said for being trapped in your home, locked away from all your friends, unable to work or celebrate or do literally anything but drink a few glasses of wine and go to bed at eleven pm. 

Oh, wait. That’s actually awful. I WILL say that at my seasoned age, dealing with a quarantine birthday is not nearly the kick in the dick that it would have been were I, say, 22, so that’s good, I guess. Anyway, as today is the worst day of the year (the longest time until the next time anyone’s gonna pretend to care about me for a full day again) I thought today we’d just take it easy and maybe just go ahead answer life’s most unanswerable questions definitively, so strap in. 

For example, have you ever wondered:

Is there a god?

One of my favorite responses to this was a dude from Yo La Tengo in this article

who said, “Um, well, if there is, I'm certainly not going to piss It off by saying no.” 

This answer is good, and I really appreciate the specificity of the language here, but it’s, at its core, flawed logic. This will bleed into the next question a bit, but if there IS a god, it doesn’t give a shit about practically any of us, what we say, or any of the things that surround us, even in a macro sense. It couldn’t possibly, just from a logistical standpoint. I mean, yes. I get the idea that the Judeo-Christian deity is everything and everywhere, but that concept is somewhat new. Back in the day, there were a bunch of gods theoretically handling everything as a team and they were busy being gods first and foremost: fucking swans, smiting motherfuckers with swarms of various parasites, giving little tests to people just for fun and so forth. And the people who believed in those gods were, to put it mildly, more in touch with nature than we are today.

I’m not saying that being in touch with nature is necessarily a prerequisite to knowing the entity that created all things, but...well, i mean, maybe it kinda is? It seems like someone who watches the sun rise and set and names stars and tracks creatures and figures out which berries sustain human life and which ones make you shit blood maybe has a more holistic grasp on what the gods were going for than some old lady smoking Capris in a Manhattan penthouse. But I guess I really am just kinda guessing at that.

Obviously, as my buddy, Sean Nader says, the true nature of god is unknowable, and it’s my take that if there is a god, it’s not a dude in a Viking helmet or a dude in flowing robes or a diety with 90 hands, or a zealot of any kind. That makes no sense. The ONLY thing that ties our idea of what god could be to anything approaching something we could recognize is a bunch of dumb dogma that says things like “god created man in his image” etc. 

This is patent hubristic bullshit on the part of man. For one thing, if that were the case, god would probably look like an ape or a single cell organism (I don’t know where god would jump in on the evolutionary ladder that leads to modern man but I’m not even trying to go there right now). For another thing, nice god you got there. He looks like me? Gimme a fucking break. He could be anything and he looks like me? Totally. I don’t even wanna look like me, but the thing is, I have no say in the matter. I mean, I’ve never been tapped for even an associate demigod position. Seems unlikely to me that anyone with infinite power wants to look like me or you or even Michael B Jordan, to put it mildly. 

Beyond that, we’re only one of thousands of creatures on this earth, and not even close to the coolest looking ones. If we take it a step further and assume we’re not the only inhabited planet in the universe (more on that later), it’s really the height of arrogance to assume that god is taking on a human earthling form.

Ever consider that if there IS life on other planets, the ecosystem will be so different that even a very advanced species wouldn’t have to necessarily breathe or fuck or have blood or anything we recognize as what life on earth is all about? It’s a different ballgame entirely. But, fuck. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe every inhabited planet is full of dudes that look like Dave Grohl and/or Yao Ming. It’s possible, I suppose. However, I feel like it’s vastly more likely that there’s no rhyme or reason to any of it, beyond the weird unquantifiable energy that makes something alive. 

So, to get definitive, as I promised, here’s the answer, and it even kinda answers the “man is made in god’s image” shit in an esoteric kinda way: There is an energy that runs the universe. Some of it gets burned off entropically. Some of it radiates back to the sun and returns to earth and nourishes the new shit that’s coming up. In the same way that a lion eats a wildebeest (or whatever they eat) and shits it out and that fertilizes the grass that the new crop of wildebeests eat thereby sort of bringing life full circle. Such is the nature of what god is, an energy that takes care of itself and perpetuates and nourishes life with all the whimsy and cruelty of the reality of the natural universe. It controls everything, but it exhibits and requires literally no dogma. That’s the answer. 

But perhaps you believe there’s a specific deity. If you do, then you probably are asking: 

If there is a god, why does it let bad things happen to good people?

Well, this one is easy. If we take at face value that there’s a specific god-being, then clearly, it's either an aloof dick or it’s bitten off more than it can chew. There’s literally no other explanation for why any sort of omnipotent being would let babies have cancer or let moms that work back to back 12 hour shifts in 2 different fast food restaurants in order to care for their kids suffocate from carbon monoxide poisoning in their cars in the 20 minutes a day they have to sleep, and somehow still let Tommy Lee be rich. That’s not just capricious dickishness, that’s not giving a fuck at all.

So, to answer this question: It’s because if there is a god, god doesn’t care about you or anything else in the slightest. Consider the dinosaurs. They were around forEVER, and they were cool as shit, and at a certain point they all just up and died. How do you curate something for that many millions of years and then just get bored of them and wipe 'em all out? Seems like the kind of thing a bored toddler would do, not an all knowing, loving, omnipotent being. So, to sum up: if there’s a god, why does it let bad things happen to good people? Because that god CLEARLY couldn’t give less of a fuck about what’s going on down here. That’s why. 

Okay, moving on.

What happens when we die?

You know what the saddest thing is? Having a lot of people at your funeral. If you die when you’re like 15, your funeral is gonna be packed. If you die when you’re 90, no one is there. If you happen to be one of those few people who really truly impacts the world at large, you’ll get the Ayatollah Khomeini huge mob of people all over the streets, but even then, that’s a lot of people totally beside themselves that you died, and that’s a bummer (legal notice: this is in no way an endorsement of the theocratic clerical regime that controls Iran).

Now, of course this raises the “well, what about Gary?” quandary. Gary, for our purposes, is a person that no one gave a shit about (who cares why), and maybe he died when he was 35 and no one came to his funeral because fuck Gary. Here’s the thing: everyone dies. In this case, Gary’s death isn’t sad. Gary’s death is, like all death, inevitable. It’s Gary’s life that was sad. Ah. This is sad. Let’s continue.

So anyway, what happens when you die? Your life force energy radiates back to the sun in a random order that renders who you were completely humpty dumptied (in that there’s no putting it back together again) and your energy trickles back to earth in spurts, and bonds with the living things here on earth that need that energy to thrive. Unless you die in space, in which case, you’re just like a computer that someone threw in the pool. You’re just off. Either way, you’re not really you anymore, but hey! If you ever had trepidation about going into space, here’s a good reason to support your gut feeling of not wanting to go.

But, before you let this depress you, consider that before you were born, you were already not alive for an infinite amount of time. You shouldn’t be scared of death. You’ve already done it once and you turned out fine. Just have a beer and soon this will all be a distant theoretical thought written down by some jagoff you barely give a shit about if it gives you the heebie jeebies right now. But yeah. That’s what happens.

Is there life on other planets?

Yes. If the universe is infinite (which we’ll get to later), then there’s life out there. We’ve already discussed that life out there need not look or behave like us at ALL, but some people think that infinity as a baseline means that everything that can possibly happen will happen. I don’t know about this. Seems like wild wishful thinking to assume that since there are infinite planets there’s one that’s just like earth, where I’m living the exact same life but I have two dicks (instead of my usual 3). That shit, to me, is just fart sniffing theoretical mumbo jumbo. I mean, I’m no big city astrophysicist philosopher, but it seems like we exist on an infinite timeline (which, I’m aware is linear, and therefore a whole different kind of infinity) and there’s an infinite amount of spaces in an inch (again, a different infinity) and there’s no me with two dicks in either of those infinities. 

At this point, you’re probably thinking “hey dumbass, you’re conflating infinity and string theory,” to which I’d reply “yeah, I know, but either way, it’s complete bullshit. String theory’s not a real thing. It’s an intellectual exercise. I don’t care how cool you think Rick and Morty is. Deep down, you know that shit ain’t real. It’s the noah’s ark tale of theoretical science. Fuck outa here w that shit. 

But, short answer: yeah. There’s life out there. It’s probably algae that thrives on nuclear ice dust or something, and even if I’m wrong and it’s a whole planet of Lucy Lawlesses, we’re never gonna see 'em, so who cares? Whoopity fucking doo. 

What’s the best star wars movie

A New Hope. The storytelling is so tight, even by today’s standards. It’s like: emergency! Good and bad established!….

AND that’s where we’re gonna leave you, folks. I will tell you, I tackle such issues as “Is a hotdog a sandwich,” the friend zone, what’s beyond the universe and how to write a song. But don’t take my word for it! Subscribe and find out for yourself. It’s cheaper than one value meal a month, yo. For all the answers to all the questions of life, the universe and everything, you really can’t deny that it’s a pretty great deal. Anyway, thanks for reading! xoxoxo