A Molecular Deconstruction of Keanu Reeves

Instead of doing my homework, I write an essay about nothing. My fingers click clack away at my keyboard and I have a spurious sense of productivity. Hopefully, this abstraction of my string of consciousness will transfer the jumble of messy wires in my brain into someone else’s, lighting an uncharted track. Or, this could essentially rot the brain of an unsuspecting victim. 

I think about words and how they're just little ideas floating around the ethers, belonging to nobody and no time or place. Whatever I speak or think of isn't even mine. At best, it can be somewhat original. It's funny how I maintain a fundamental sense of self. 

As a brain, I can think about anything; my brain thinking about itself, thinking about itself, thinking about how other brains think about themselves thinking about themselves. When I think about the logistics of it all, my brain is trapped inside my skull which is trapped in a flesh vehicle of atoms parading around another, certainly more complex vehicle of atoms which I’m made in the image of, called the earth. Earth also happens to rotate in a full circle every 365 days facing a big ball of fire called the sun which is one of many planets in our vast universe that never ends. In the same ways in which the universe sustains my life and therefore my string of consciousness, I can't conceive of my consciousness just as I can’t conceive of infinity. Something about neurons firing? Tiny little pathways of nerves producing word vomit and small talk. Seeing, feeling, perceiving, doing - seeing, feeling, perceiving, and doing things that are absent from everything but thought. Something out of nothing. This is what we say about the big bang, first there was nothing and then there was everything. I can’t necessarily suggest here that the universe has a collective consciousness like I do - but absent of that we’re really quite alike. Everything in the universe works in tandem, every atom surely is doing their part perfectly otherwise there would be a nuclear explosion or something to that effect. I’m told that my brain takes up 25% of my energy at all times in order to work perfectly so I can survive. But the universe has no time for self-sabotage, as a perpetual well oiled machine it's never looked inwardly and criticized a black hole or a pesky meteorite. Though it has what we can understand as flaws, they’re not mistakes. I, being a lucky product of the big bang, have been here for trillions of years as my atoms, doing their thing or whatnot. I’m probably a recycled dinosaur, or its drinking water, or a mosquito, or a dolphin. Also dirt, poop, grass, lava - I’m sure at this point I’ve been it all. Now I’m here. Those poop molecules are conscious. See I never really minded being poop until somewhere in my childhood I realized I was, say, a person - and now I mind, big time. First as I am a great homo sapien meaning that I’m, as we put it, too smart for my own good - I’m frankly embarrassed. I would’ve rather been told that I ascended from the heavens on a gold gilded chariot. But seeing as my other fellow humans, seeking logic in its most pervasive sense, have let me know that everything I am can be explained with science, we’ve learned the art of self-effacement. But here’s the good thing, our consciousness remains the biggest anomaly of science. And so here we’re encouraged to think we possess something special. What we can’t understand, like consciousness, is akin to magic. Magic is exactly what can’t be explained by science or any other observable means. Magicians can bend the laws of nature, time, and space; magic is the only way we can cultivate something of nothing. Though we can’t make a rabbit appear out of a hat, we can think of it and conceiving of supernatural things holds the utmost importance to us. We’ve cultivated religion, deities, spells, monsters - all attributed to some aspect of the human condition. It’s because we want to achieve something greater than this well-oiled machine we find ourselves trapped in the confines of. It’s our inability to manipulate the laws of our space-time continuum that we find ourselves looking inwardly towards ourselves and others for some type of scapegoat as an explanation as to why this is, and this is the pinnacle of our suffering. Though we are a part of the universe of which nothing greater can be conceived, this doesn’t suffice and this is our fundamental problem. We have to be something more and we’ll spend our lives seeking this out. Why is a product of the universe feeling sorry for itself now? Welcome to the human condition, how embarrassing.

 Next to magic there’s fame, where you can become some enigmatic, illusory idea in the public's domain of everything breathtaking, showstopping, and existence confirming. It’s why we call Keanu Reeves, mind you, the perfect human being, a star. Stars are everything perfect, bright, and beautiful in our vast evocative universe which has created everything just right. We see their beauty and purpose so objectively and we do not question it. Stars entrance us by their magnitude, observing them is one of the few experiences in which we find solace in feeling utterly inferior to the universe. It’s our very problem that we think we need to possess magical abilities in order to be a star. But seeing as consciousness is something of magic which has produced more beauty and terror than the universe ever could - I think we’re good.