Everything All At Once. With Penguins.

Everything happens at the same time, more or less. By which I mean at this moment everything that is going to happen at this moment is happening even if this moment may not be this moment where something in particular is happening.

Here, let me draw you this diagram using a hundred or so trillion dancing penguins to represent everything that is happening and a wheel of Swiss cheese to represent this moment. (Ignore the holes in the Swiss cheese, they aren't meant to represent an absence in the absolute of this moment, they are merely there as part of the Swiss cheese even though that means that part of what makes Swiss cheese Swiss cheese is the absence of Swiss cheese in certain places. So I guess anytime you happen to be in the absence of Swiss cheese you may actually be in the presence of a part of Swiss cheese.)

So penguins and a wheel of Swiss cheese.  And a dance number. Something simple, choreographed to a player piano piece. No hats or canes for the penguins, I don't want to make this confusing.

5 or 15 notes or bars (or whatever we chop music up into in order to make sure penguins make the right move at the right time), each penguins does a spin on its left foot. On the note (yes, I'll go with notes) DINK. The music goes dunk dunk DINK and on DINK the penguins spin on their left feet. Or to put it almost exactly the same way: In the moment of DINK all penguins spin on their left feet.

But apparently the moment of DINK does not occur for all the penguins at the same time. Or so people with jobs which impress former classmates at high school reunions have told me. (That's what I meant by "apparently.")

So in the moment of DINK 50 trillion penguins might spin as choreographed, but another 25 trillion might be experiencing the second moment of dunk and the final 25 or so trillion penguins are experiencing the first moment of dunk.

Technically the moment of DINK is not happening all at once but still everything is happening at once.

I think.

There is a really good chance I'm completely wrong about this especially as I don't care whether I'm completely wrong. That's not to say I'm reckless, it's just to remind you that you didn't pay for any of this nor did I even ask you to read it. I just needed to distract you long enough to try and synch up a particular moment for spectacular results which do not involve dancing penguins or Swiss cheese (in it's presence or absence).

But you already knew that because I just told you.


(written 5/22/10)