Some of my friends met up at the house my best friend Austin’s brother (whose name is Chase). This place had no air conditioning and no comfortable places to sit down, so he suggested that we go to the beach. “It’s 9 PM! People do that? Go to the beach at night?” I asked.
“Not really, but wait until you see it.” Chase replied, as we went out the door, relieved by the outdoor air. We all got into Austin’s car and drove about a mile or two to the closest point we could reach via car.
Although I had seen water on the way here, this area had a lot of brown dirt, not the kind of earth material you usually see around beaches. Still, Chase directed Austin to the parking spot and we got out of the car there. Chase then asked us if we wanted to go the long way or the short way, and we all agreed to take the short way, which was a dirt path through thick trees. We didn’t have any flashlights, and there was a point where it got so dark that we had to put our hand on the shoulder of the person in front of us to stick together (Chase led us, since he had been there during the day and knew the way) and not get lost. It felt unnaturally dark, as if we had found a hole in reality and saw no problem walking right in.
We were out of there and on the other side in less than a minute, though. I was slightly surprised Chase didn’t have some people there to jump out at us for a practical joke. Not because he was like that, but because it was the perfect place to do such a thing. That thought was put aside as we reached a clearing of sand at the end of the wooded area. As you looked toward the beach, there was either dark sand that faded off not too far from where you stood, or a star-plastered cloud-free void of space in front of and above you.
My appreciation of the scene was interrupted by people running away from me towards the ocean (which, at the time, you couldn’t see). I didn’t feel like spending the next hour searching for the group, so I ran right after them. The sand was soft and it was hard to run quickly on it, but its pattern and the darkness made it look like you were flying over some barren planet without an atmosphere. On top of that, there was a droning white noise sound like a sci-fi spacecraft engine powering up, growing louder as we approached the beach. The ground flattened out and got cooler, at which point the group had come to a stop ahead of me.
You could look out to the ocean, but it was pretty much a dark gray version of what you normally see. The real interest was the giant dome of stars around everyone. There were about four shooting stars every minute (this was without any notable/scheduled/known meteor shower) and so much going on in the sky you had to focus on about two or three bright stars or you were just looking at a twinkling mess. Again I was interrupted by people running off, but this time it was with sound. Very little sound, though; the ocean ambiance had a sound-canceling effect that made it so someone 25 feet away wouldn’t be able to hear you yell. I followed my friends once again, this time along the beach until we headed back inland to get a snack.
I think everyone was enjoying it more than they let on. They didn’t say anything about it while we were talking around the snack machine about how slow Austin’s car was or while we walked back to Austin’s slow car.
I remember as I was walking back out of the woods on the way to the car, I looked back up at the sky one last time. Disappointingly, the sky wasn’t too impressive there. Perhaps it was the dim lighting in the parking lot, or maybe a foggy cloud cover blew in. Maybe we stumbled through the dark into another world. Whatever happened, I recommend going to the beach at night, where land, sea, and space meet.
A Slide Show of my State of Mind
This blog is a slide show of my state of mind. All personal thought blogs are, really. I see too many blogs that follow an idea path and don’t ever budge. This is accompanied by a lot of comments by other people that also won’t budge (note that seeing this type of comments doesn’t mean the blog writer is unreasonable). I wasn’t liking what I saw, and I was able to take advantage of my personal observation by not being like that. I also observed that myself and everyone I’ve met for an extended period of time has had a history of being wrong, at least from time to time.
But, with this presents a problem. If I know this, and I am able to actually come to grips with that, why do I take a stance on anything at all, given it may be wrong?
It gives you, the reader, an opportunity to inform me of what I’m missing. The ability to look things up on the Internet is an amazing thing that gives today’s people a learning advantage no generation before has ever had (though some libraries I imagine were pretty fantastic). However, it’s not perfect; I’ve made many searches for information that have been disappointing. Some people know more about certain things than I do, and in order to get their point across as well as possible, the user will post or link to the best example of the idea they wish to convey that they know about. Instead of having to skim through a bunch of sub-par versions and spammy sites, I get top-quality from a reader’s perspective.
What about the four-dimensional factor, Steve? Won’t you look back on posts and say “Man, I was dumb!”?
Perhaps I will, but unlike posting drunk on Facebook, I can look back and know I was actually thinking.
There has already been an occasion where I was intellectually ousted. A reply to a post I made about racism blew away pretty much every point I had. One part in particular: “The power of racism is that it affects one’s thinking, drawing a person from objectivity and clear thinking. Racism overwrites the very reason Steve is counting on to counteract it.” – I previously had failed to identify racism as a mind virus (Man, I was dumb!). I came to realize that I’ve been banking on a social idea that counted on there being very few people with mind viruses. Racism isn’t the only one, and much of humanity is currently infected. My previous social ideas were, put simply, people unburdened by social obligations are most able and motivated to do good, productive things. Unless I can overcome the mind virus problem (and potentially others), I have to accept that based on my current information, Yvette‘s approach is better.
Is it better? I’ll have to do some research to attempt to find out if it is or isn’t. If I find enough good counter-points, I’ll be sure to bring them up. Thanks for participating in and watching my slide show.