A few days ago it was announced that there was Venusian gas of a type commonly associated with life, and that it was hard to explain the gas without the presence of life. I felt my irritation level rise once again, as it so often does when exposed to the general fascination with this particular topic. The fact of the matter is, as far as I'm concerned, fuck off with your extraterrestrial life, or at least, start to care about the life presently here all around you first before you start bothering with that shitty Venusian gas. I get very exercised about this although like a lot of things it might be because I don't really understand why it's important. Why is it important?
I actually got to thinking about this because for much of today I have been in bed. I felt sick, I think because of the food I got delivered last night although who knows (I almost always cook for myself; yesterday was a little treat). I lay here (yeah I'm still in bed as I write this) feeling pretty crummy most of the time,* and for a time Nancy came in - the first time she's got on the bed while I'm in it, since Helmi showed up (and Helmi was here too, under the bedclothes, down the end) and did her famous Nurse Nancy act which I always enjoy. Later, like about half an hour ago, actually I think because I felt to see if she was still there and found her paw, Helmi got up and sat around looking a bit dazed as well one might who has been asleep or cowering or something in between the entire day. And for a second I thought, do the cats wonder why I stayed in bed today? And if they don't care, how do they see it? How do they see my activities and behaviours?
I can only imagine they don't care that I was in bed (except that they might have liked it, I think Nancy did anyway) and they certainly don't wonder why I ever do anything I do; the notion is not in their mental vocabulary. Life is not like that for a cat. Even if I trained them to know that every time I rang a little bell I would throw a tennis ball at them, so that before long the little bell would send them scurrying, they wouldn't wonder why, they'd just know that it was true. So screw your venusian gas. What does it have to offer us? What bugs the hell out of me with life on other planets is the incredible lack of imagination of all the people who imagine that it would be somewhat on a human level, seeing us as a contrast or a comparison. For god's sake. Cats live with us all day long and they engage with us but they can't understand us, and we can't understand them (nor do we need to). Humans and beings from other planets are as likely to have a commonality as an orange and a piece of chalk on a table. Can they get along? In the sense that (in this hypothetical scenario) they both exist in reality, yeah.
It only just occurred to me to wonder (because as so often happens it turned up in my head as I started thinking about life on other planets) what the song 'Life on Mars' was about, so I read the lyrics (not that clear) and the wikipedia entry (a little clearer - explains it's surreal, impressionistic). Not important really, I suppose though for many in the early 70s this was Bowie's schtick, with the 'Space Oddity', 'Life on Mars' , Man who fell to Earth thing going on.
* I was very productive though, bunch of emails, wrote about a thousand words of a journal article and reconceptualised it quite well I think
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