davidjmcgee's profile (website)
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Name: David McGee
Joined: March 2, 2010
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What's the deal with your nickname? How did you get it? If your nickname is self-explanatory, then tell everyone when you first started using the internet, and what was the first thing that made you say "wow, this isn't just a place for freaks after all?" Was it a website? Was it an email from a long-lost friend? Go on, spill it.
(Maybe there’s a desk. Maybe there’s a slideshow. Maybe the person speaking is wearing a very nice suit. The person speaking is given the name “You” but this is not meant to imply that the speaker must be identifiably “you”. The person speaking should, however, be able to speak very quickly.
Anyway, it starts with You saying nothing. Literally. Like this:)
YOU
Nothing.
(pause)
Nothing.
(pause)
Not even nothing, just __________.
(long pause. Then, amplified, or perhaps just screamed:)
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG!
(That was the Big Bang. Now it’s time to hurry. For the next section, imagine there’s a drill sergeant next to you telling you to HURRY HURRY HURRY. And DO SOMETHING INTERESTING ON THE WHOOMPS.)
Something something something something something. Stuff! Space! Everything! Dimensions. One dimension WHOOMP! Two dimensions WHOOMP! Three dimensions WHOOMP! Four! Time! Now we’re going somewhere. Five through eleven... uh...
(Weird hand gestures or do a dance or something. HURRY.)
Whoompa whoompa whoompa? Whatever. Fire ball. Hot. Extremely fucking hot. Lots and lots of fire in a little teeny tiny space, which is still new on the scene, so hot everything is like “OH SHIT RUN!” Spatial dimensions are expanding rapidly, trying to get some distance and time is like “Tick tock motherfuckers HURRY!” And the other dimensions are like “mind your own business, we’re doing stuff” and time’s like “yeah, but the faster you go the slower I can” and everything is like “Wait, what?” And time’s like “Huh?” And the elements are like “table for 118 please. WE HAVE RESERVATIONS.” And every bit of matter that has existed or will exist in the lifetime of time’s own life is in a spot smaller than this
(SHOW THEM THE TINY!)
rapidly rushing out at near the speed of this new thing called light. Forces pop up and the strong force is like “GRRR!” And the weak force is like “mehhh” and gravity is very serious indeed regardless. Nothing, meet the universe. Universe, welcome to it. It’s only been like a quarter of a second.
(You can take a breath now. Or several. Maybe have a glass of water? You’ve earned it.)
So time time time times a couple billion. From this:
(Show them how small space was.)
To this:
(Show them how big space is.)
Whoa. So. All that stuff is out there now, newly released into the “real world” and drifting in a post-matriculation aimlessness likely familiar to everyone. Lounging around. Thinking of getting a job. Finally some of it’s like “OK, fine, let’s get serious” and gravity sagely approves and some elements start to swirl spherically together and occasionally turn out to be massively fucking combustible. Like you know from the song!
(singing)
Twinkle, twinkle, monstrous fusion reactors,
Your mass is such that spacetime warps causing other bodies to tend to form orbits around you.
(back to speaking)
And other objects take the hint and start swirling too and it’s all really hot and steamy at first, but then, eventually, as in every new relationship, things start to cool down and get less hot and a little bit comfortable and this happens a billion billion billion times and clusters and formations and systems and galaxies and gas clouds form nebulae and dark matter is hiding everywhere, watching everything and chortling maniacally. Mwah ha ha ha. The universe is huge and has begun to coalesce, but it was this big
(Tiny!)
and now it’s not such a tyke anymore and everything is still moving apart from everything else at enormous speed, and gravity shakes its head sadly.
(That last part wasn’t quite such a sprint, but you can take this opportunity to breathe for a second, and maybe have another sip of your delicious juice.)
Narrow the scope. Focus on one star, chosen entirely at random. There it is. It’s hot. It’s bright. It’s yellow. Something’s happening. OH SHIT IT BLEW UP. Pick another one. Dies. Pick another one. Red dwarf! So tiny and red! Pick another one. Wait, that’s a pulsar. Playing the hot new jam beats. YEAH!
(Beatbox for a second. Pretend this joke isn’t terrible.)
We could do this for awhile. So pick a particular star, chosen entirely based on proximity to our current HEY LOOK it’s the sun! Spheres of stuff are starting to form around it. Nine of them! Or eight plus some bullshit one way out yonder! Plus a belt of asteroids hitchin’ up the ol’ astronomical breeches and way out there another band of nonsense made up of Dutch things! Kuiper? More like kuipSUCK.
(You can acknowledge that this joke is terrible.)
So yes planets! First one close to the star, small and rocky.
(Rocky theme!)
Second one cloudy with 100% chance of methane. Third one all hot and gassy and particulate and looking good to start getting solid when OH LORD NO here comes some roided-up planet-sized object to smash absolute hell out of it and then it’s all messed up again, but most of it is like “what doesn’t relegate us completely to the land of drifting clouds of dust and ash makes us stronger” and swirls back together and the other part is like “FINE we’ll make our own special club” and it’s one small step for moon, one giant leap for moonkind. The planet’s getting busy. Hot at the core. Molten one step out. Crust always left on the edges. Oxygen sees hydrogen and is like “two of them? One of me? THREESOME!” and then shit starts to get wet. All the land says “Let’s get together, yeah yeah yeah” and Pangaea sits, its coast washed by the one sea, and it’s like this for a very very long time.
(Longest pause of the play. So, like, four seconds?)
And then something happens. Not to get too specific, but the Lord God creates life in His own image. And/or some sort of sludge is struck by lightning and then there’s a cell that gets really good at dividing. And/or a meteor crashes bringing deoxyribonucleic acid from upwhere which is likely but still sort of ignoring the root of the problem. Or some extradimensional homeboy playing a giant Sims game clicks “begin life” and then.
(You can start speeding up again.)
Single cells figure out a way to make copies of themselves. Cells begin to multiply and multiply. Some are better at this than others. Some are really really fucking good at this and get all over the place. Generations and generations and generations and occasionally some sort of translation error happens in the copy and those cells suck ass and die and sometimes an error changes something that increases the likelihood of that cell being able to copy itself and then all its copies are strong too and/or the Lord God placed Adam into a fucking garden and asked him to go ahead and start naming shit, but, I mean, come on.
The cells grow, change, combine, move around, shift and grow and grow and grow, enter into symbiotic relationships where mitochondria provide the energy, other cells provide protection, and midochlorians make people MAGIC. USE THE FORCE, SINGLE-CELLED, MITOCHONDRIA-HOUSING ORGANISM. But new generations come and there are multi-celled organisms and shit starts to get real and fighting occurs as it’s a bacteria eat archaea world out there. Some of the organisms change and change and change and take energy from the fiery thing up there and use carbon dioxide for food and plant themselves everywhere. Some of the organisms decide on oxygen itself for food and start swimming around looking to fuck shit up. Some are like I’M A FUN GUY, WHAT?
(You should be in a pretty mad linguistic sprint again by this point.)
Things get stronger and bigger. At one point something decides it’s too small a fish for too big a pond and what’s that big dry thing up there? DO. WANT. More follow. They spread out over the land. Volcanoes erupt. Huge earthquakes rend land from land and eventually continents begin to drift apart, and, like all expatriates, say they’ll keep in touch but never ever do. Some things get even bigger and even stronger and make more cells and start to have lungs and gills and then begin to produce cells that remember shit and now it’s really on. It took just a couple-six billion years but now creatures and plants begin to grow large and get huge and awesome and eat each other and small lizards and then big lizards and then THUNDER LIZARDS. DRAGONS! (not really) Feathers! Wings! T-Rex chasing Jeff Goldblum! HUGE COLLISION FROM SPACE.
(Second longest pause of the show. 3.4 seconds?)
Take two. Some things live. Turtles. We like turtles. Some things die. Like brontosaurus who SHUT UP HE WAS THE BEST. I DON’T CARE. Some things are like “being a lizard sucks, man, that shit is for the birds WAIT A SECOND”. Tiny mammals who have hair and breasts and have been hiding out think “ha-ha! Now’s our chance!” And they spread out everywhere and some of them stay tiny and forage and some of them get big and hunt and some of them get bigger and bigger brains and start carousing in the trees and plants that start producing flowers attract things that fly around and pollinate and the world is filled with flowers and beautiful things. Some monkey starts running around on the ground. More follow. Four legs go into two. Brains get bigger and bigger. Hitting stuff with a rock works better than hitting stuff with a fist. Pointy shit tends to win arguments. The concept of throwing things is discovered. Divergent groups of non-tree-dwelling monkeys meet and one wins and sorry Neanderthals buh-bye. Some animals become enormous and easy to find and the monkeys go crazy hunting that shit. Lighting strikes somewhere and fire starts and it’s scary as anything in the whole world except also hot and the rest of the world tends to get pretty fucking cold so what if we, like, not to sound crazy or anything, put a circle of rocks around some of it and then took one of these here delicious flying lizards and put one and one together to make BRUNCH? So they decide to follow the bigger animals wherever they go (USA! USA!) and to put sharp things on long things and it’s easier when there are several monkeys and so now we’re all friends. At some point someone’s like “Uh, also, I mean, I know walking forever and ever is fun and all, but these particular things growing in the ground appear to not kill most of the people who eat them, so maybe we should, like, not eat every single one because if we leave some more tend to grow and then we can eat those? How about it?” And things start to get planted on purpose near caves and if you squish a berry and rub it on a wall you can make pictures of stuff and people and boobs. Scrapey scrapey one rock against another this kind of looks like a dude LET’S WORSHIP IT. Caves get crowded but it rains a lot so stack shit on top of other shit and crawl in there and it’s more or less dry. Build bunches of them together. Fight some groups and not others. This group is our group and we must stick together. Find a good spot to live and the group keeps getting bigger. Thunder and lightning are scary and there must be something bigger than us getting pissed, let’s be afraid of it. WAIT, IT MUST BE LIKE THE STATUE DUDE. LET’S WORSHIP IT CAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT WANTS. Let’s build huge things of stone and give that dude robes and kill that chick. Let’s take these plants and put them in rows and bring water from the river to make them. LET’S GET CONSCIOUS. Now we’re talking. But not to ourselves! ‘Cause that’s CRAZEE.
Sumer! Mesopotamia! Nubia and Egypt! Pyramids and cat worship and wrapping guys in cloth after taking their brains out with sticks. Take papyrus and dry it just so and press it and then use that old berry trick and I’ve got a GREAT idea let’s get a book deal. Writing stuff down. Carving stuff. The flood seems to happen regularly what if we call that THURSDAY? One group is like “Oy vey, fuck this, too many gods, we out” and they walk around a tiny desert for forty years for some reason and then they kill absolutely everything and everyone they can find. And write it down. TAKE NOTE, AS THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER. More and more large groups of people start to crop up. Greeks give funny hats to each other and sail around and eat... cooked helicopters? Gyro? I don’t know. They look for yellow wool and have sex with Gods and discover all sorts of triangles and delicious, delicious pi, which helps with circles and what happens if instead of one dude being in charge we all get a say?
And Socrates asks questions and Plato makes stuff out of balls of colored clay AT THE SAME TIME developing the idea of ideas existing separate from their forms. I HAVEN’T FACT CHECKED ANY OF THIS. Chinese civilization thrives and, and Middle Eastern civilization thrives and they invent algebra also known as “the gebra” and Mayans invent a calendar but get bored after counting to 2012 and North Americans paint with all the colors of the wind. Macedonia rises up, and over time figures out how to make the Greatest Alexander the world had ever known. And he rides around taking over shit and then says, hey you know what would be nice? If we took all that stuff that was written down and put it in once place. Let’s call it the Big Awesome Book Room. And his advisors chat and come back with some other suggestions and one of them is library even though they, uh, didn’t speak Latin. But some people did! Cause Rome is formed by two dudes who used to suck wolf teat and aqueducts and amphitheaters and take the Greek gods and give them other names and trade routes and exploration and Julius Caesar goes and finds the Celts and they’re weird and naked and Vesuvius blows up, buh-bye. Buildings are getting better and art has become its own thing and Ptolemy says the sky and everything in it is circular and sits in nested spheres and gravity is just absolutely horrified at this idea but chooses not to say anything and one of that group of people who left Egypt a long time ago to walk around the desert and kill everybody rides around a city in the Western part of Rome on a donkey and they’re like, “for real, kill that dude” and that turns out to be a very interesting decision with a bunch of consequences they really couldn’t have foreseen at the time. Rome’s built roads and figured out agriculture and Chinese people separately figured that out, awesome, and they’re eating things with sticks and developing gunpowder and making thousands and thousands of statues and then burying them cause why the hell not? And Australian things have pouches and big legs and tiny arms and that’s just the people! And the North Americans who are also Indians have killed everything really big long long ago and have to make do with bison and corn. Vandals ride into Rome and spray-paint the shit out of everything and Rome falls apart on account of being just too damn big and then everybody gets stupid for a long long time and all of Rome becomes extremely complicated and strict, by which I mean byzantine, by which I mean Byzantine. I don’t know anything about Africa. Or the Southern Hemisphere in general. Sorry. Public school. And the library burns down and nobody knows math or basically ANYTHING and British people are like “Whole place used to be run by a Welsh dude named Arthur, and he basically invented the concepts of roundness and tableness” and everyone else just goes with it and that one Jewish dude who got assed by the Romans gets more and more and more popular as everyone argues about the details. And a mountain comes to a dude named Mohammed, and he tells a bunch of people that he comes from God and they believe him, which turns out to be a very interesting decision indeed. And Norse people are like “we gotta get the fuck out of Norway, it sucks up here. all we have is herring.” and they sail to Greenland and then go burn down the London Bridge, as prophesied in the song. And the Chinese figure out how to shoot stuff out of other stuff and the Islamic Caliphate takes over Jerusalem and that pisses off a bunch of other people who decide to attack it over and over again with consequences that really ought to have been foreseen by everyone and the Turks decide they’ve had enough of that Byzantine shit and there goes Constantinople and what’s left of the Roman Empire. But new information and goods and nice footstools and whatnot have come West with the Otto-Men and some Italian people realize that people used to know stuff, and they start looking into it and knowledge and art and culture get naissanced yet again! And knowledge spreads and is written down and Jan Hus suggests some religious practices and gets torched and Martin Luther suggests some others and doesn’t ‘cause Gutenberg figures out how to make copies of stuff quickly and without using a feather quill and ink so the ideas get out there and now there are even more divisions in the followers of that one Jewish dude and if they had just let homeboy ride around on a donkey once in a while how different everything would be. JESUS.
And more people fight and the Portuguese and Spanish start sailing around trying to find a faster way to get spices and Copernicus says that Ptolemy was an asshole and that doesn’t go over perfectly well and then Galileo says Copernicus is right, Ptolemy was a moron plus A SILENT P? WHAT IS THAT? And that doesn’t go over very well either, but some people with books look into it and are like “yeah, probably” and a Spanish dude basically wipes out a continent with smallpox and guns and slavery and then in England they put a chick in charge and they kick ass for a while and a dude writes plays about kings and lovers and Danish people and a the chick dies and they put a Scotsman in charge and that writer guy writes a play about Scottish people and ghosts WHICH HAS A NAME WE SHALL NOT MENTION
(MACBETH. You can mime this or mouth this or something if you want to.)
and an English ship comes back from the West with something called “tobacco” which it turns out gets you high and Newton is like “what Galileo said, but also EVERYTHING ELSE BAM WHAT” and gravity, for the first time in its multibillion year existence, smiles knowingly. And more and more guns are being made and people are sailing hither and yon and one French dude claims to actually be the actual Sun and people are only going to stand that shit for a couple... hundred... years or so and Hobbes is like “people suck, so we gotta have kings” and Descartes is like “Guess what number I’m thinking of? ME.” And Locke is like “Don’t tell me what I can’t do, BOONE.” And ideas and ideologies spread and more factions of more churches and more fighting and so so so many people are stolen from one place and murdered and tortured and forced to work in another place which everyone is basically just sort of OK with? Yeah. Then in the newly unpopulated and then repopulated land of the European colonies on North America some people don’t like not having a say in things and they fight! and win! and Thomas Jefferson is like PEOPLE SHOULD BE FREE and John Brown is like WHAT ABOUT SLAVES and everybody is like LALALALA. And Karl Marx is like “I don’t think ANY of this is working out so well” and Charles Darwin sails around and writes a book that says “Uh, I think we maybe just maybe started out basically as monkeys” and that goes over about as well as Galileo only WAY WORSE. And then the French are like “Hey, what ze Americans said” but instead of “People should be free” they’re like “Reign of terror, les bitches!” and then Napoleon takes the opportunity to wail on everyone and Jefferson buys the Louisiana territory. And everything is getting bigger and faster and dirtier and travel between places is easier and easier because of engines and internal combustion and lots of mass murder and everybody is fighting everybody basically all the time and Perry sails to Japan getting them into the whole “world” thing and people try to end slavery and there’s a big mass-murdering kerfuffle about that noise and then they invented the wheel! That actually happened way earlier, but I forgot. And factories produce stuff fast and faster and Western expansion and the age of Empire means a small group of people from a tiny Northwest portion of one continent are basically in charge of everybody else and then an Austrian dude gets murdered in Serbia and lots of people kill lots of other people for what seem like really good reasons at the time and airplanes start flying and Fleming discovers some mold on bread and it turns out that mold can kick bacteria’s ass and more and more knowledge comes with more and more war and Einstein says “Yeah, what Newton said but how about all THIS shit WHAT YOU GOT HOMIE” and Gravity for the first time ever throws itself a little party. And then another Austrian dude decides “let’s try all THAT nonsense again” and he goes apeshit with the killing and the Japanese decide it’s the perfect time to take over Asia and basically every place else and the whole world starts fighting the whole rest of the world even as knowledge expands. We’re getting smarter and smarter and able to kill more and more people at once and all the scientists figure out how to make a weapon that will fuck everything up and they use it and the war ends and a few Russians start killing the rest of the Russians and everything is very tense and murdery for a long time and we learn more and more and discover that things may not be what they seem and chaos may reign and order may be a myth on the scale of the Greeks sleeping with Gods because the closer we look the less we know what’s going on and there’s just so much evidence for all of life being part of one glorious and beautiful whole and such vast potential for these once-monkeys being able to make the world into a wonderful and beautiful place.
(It’s gonna happen this time, you know it. But it isn’t. Not yet.)
But we just can’t bring ourselves to do it and so we learn and fight and argue and fight and art moves through phases and knowledge moves through time and the world was once huge and is now it’s tiny and everything we know about ourselves and the rest of the universe is reachable from every place on the planet from shiny electrical devices. We have the capacity to know everything and to learn everything but we keep fighting and keep fighting and keep fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting etc.
(Don’t say et cetera. I mean that you can keep this up as long as you deem prudent. But it should be a little while, anyway.)
And everything we know about ourselves from monkey-hood all down is only this long
(Show them the tiny tiny tiny!)
in a stretch of billions of years, and yet when we talk about it, how grand it seems. And beautiful and hopeful. And sad. And the universe keeps spreading apart, faster and faster, and as we get farther and farther from everything else the closer and closer we get to each other.
(Take your moment. Smile.)
Isn’t it great?
(Then make like you’re mowing them down with a machine gun. It was supposed to be funny, but it’s not, it’s just kind of sad, and you don’t quite know what to make of it.)
And then the sun goes down today,
(You say.)
and then there is tomorrow.
(Blackout.)
(Maybe there’s a desk. Maybe there’s a slideshow. Maybe the person speaking is wearing a very nice suit. The person speaking is given the name “You” but this is not meant to imply that the speaker must be identifiably “you”. The person speaking should, however, be able to speak very quickly.
Anyway, it starts with You saying nothing. Literally. Like this:)
YOU
Nothing.
(pause)
Nothing.
(pause)
Not even nothing, just __________.
(long pause. Then, amplified, or perhaps just screamed:)
BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANG!
(That was the Big Bang. Now it’s time to hurry. For the next section, imagine there’s a drill sergeant next to you telling you to HURRY HURRY HURRY. And DO SOMETHING INTERESTING ON THE WHOOMPS.)
Something something something something something. Stuff! Space! Everything! Dimensions. One dimension WHOOMP! Two dimensions WHOOMP! Three dimensions WHOOMP! Four! Time! Now we’re going somewhere. Five through eleven... uh...
(Weird hand gestures or do a dance or something. HURRY.)
Whoompa whoompa whoompa? Whatever. Fire ball. Hot. Extremely fucking hot. Lots and lots of fire in a little teeny tiny space, which is still new on the scene, so hot everything is like “OH SHIT RUN!” Spatial dimensions are expanding rapidly, trying to get some distance and time is like “Tick tock motherfuckers HURRY!” And the other dimensions are like “mind your own business, we’re doing stuff” and time’s like “yeah, but the faster you go the slower I can” and everything is like “Wait, what?” And time’s like “Huh?” And the elements are like “table for 118 please. WE HAVE RESERVATIONS.” And every bit of matter that has existed or will exist in the lifetime of time’s own life is in a spot smaller than this
(SHOW THEM THE TINY!)
rapidly rushing out at near the speed of this new thing called light. Forces pop up and the strong force is like “GRRR!” And the weak force is like “mehhh” and gravity is very serious indeed regardless. Nothing, meet the universe. Universe, welcome to it. It’s only been like a quarter of a second.
(You can take a breath now. Or several. Maybe have a glass of water? You’ve earned it.)
So time time time times a couple billion. From this:
(Show them how small space was.)
To this:
(Show them how big space is.)
Whoa. So. All that stuff is out there now, newly released into the “real world” and drifting in a post-matriculation aimlessness likely familiar to everyone. Lounging around. Thinking of getting a job. Finally some of it’s like “OK, fine, let’s get serious” and gravity sagely approves and some elements start to swirl spherically together and occasionally turn out to be massively fucking combustible. Like you know from the song!
(singing)
Twinkle, twinkle, monstrous fusion reactors,
Your mass is such that spacetime warps causing other bodies to tend to form orbits around you.
(back to speaking)
And other objects take the hint and start swirling too and it’s all really hot and steamy at first, but then, eventually, as in every new relationship, things start to cool down and get less hot and a little bit comfortable and this happens a billion billion billion times and clusters and formations and systems and galaxies and gas clouds form nebulae and dark matter is hiding everywhere, watching everything and chortling maniacally. Mwah ha ha ha. The universe is huge and has begun to coalesce, but it was this big
(Tiny!)
and now it’s not such a tyke anymore and everything is still moving apart from everything else at enormous speed, and gravity shakes its head sadly.
(That last part wasn’t quite such a sprint, but you can take this opportunity to breathe for a second, and maybe have another sip of your delicious juice.)
Narrow the scope. Focus on one star, chosen entirely at random. There it is. It’s hot. It’s bright. It’s yellow. Something’s happening. OH SHIT IT BLEW UP. Pick another one. Dies. Pick another one. Red dwarf! So tiny and red! Pick another one. Wait, that’s a pulsar. Playing the hot new jam beats. YEAH!
(Beatbox for a second. Pretend this joke isn’t terrible.)
We could do this for awhile. So pick a particular star, chosen entirely based on proximity to our current HEY LOOK it’s the sun! Spheres of stuff are starting to form around it. Nine of them! Or eight plus some bullshit one way out yonder! Plus a belt of asteroids hitchin’ up the ol’ astronomical breeches and way out there another band of nonsense made up of Dutch things! Kuiper? More like kuipSUCK.
(You can acknowledge that this joke is terrible.)
So yes planets! First one close to the star, small and rocky.
(Rocky theme!)
Second one cloudy with 100% chance of methane. Third one all hot and gassy and particulate and looking good to start getting solid when OH LORD NO here comes some roided-up planet-sized object to smash absolute hell out of it and then it’s all messed up again, but most of it is like “what doesn’t relegate us completely to the land of drifting clouds of dust and ash makes us stronger” and swirls back together and the other part is like “FINE we’ll make our own special club” and it’s one small step for moon, one giant leap for moonkind. The planet’s getting busy. Hot at the core. Molten one step out. Crust always left on the edges. Oxygen sees hydrogen and is like “two of them? One of me? THREESOME!” and then shit starts to get wet. All the land says “Let’s get together, yeah yeah yeah” and Pangaea sits, its coast washed by the one sea, and it’s like this for a very very long time.
(Longest pause of the play. So, like, four seconds?)
And then something happens. Not to get too specific, but the Lord God creates life in His own image. And/or some sort of sludge is struck by lightning and then there’s a cell that gets really good at dividing. And/or a meteor crashes bringing deoxyribonucleic acid from upwhere which is likely but still sort of ignoring the root of the problem. Or some extradimensional homeboy playing a giant Sims game clicks “begin life” and then.
(You can start speeding up again.)
Single cells figure out a way to make copies of themselves. Cells begin to multiply and multiply. Some are better at this than others. Some are really really fucking good at this and get all over the place. Generations and generations and generations and occasionally some sort of translation error happens in the copy and those cells suck ass and die and sometimes an error changes something that increases the likelihood of that cell being able to copy itself and then all its copies are strong too and/or the Lord God placed Adam into a fucking garden and asked him to go ahead and start naming shit, but, I mean, come on.
The cells grow, change, combine, move around, shift and grow and grow and grow, enter into symbiotic relationships where mitochondria provide the energy, other cells provide protection, and midochlorians make people MAGIC. USE THE FORCE, SINGLE-CELLED, MITOCHONDRIA-HOUSING ORGANISM. But new generations come and there are multi-celled organisms and shit starts to get real and fighting occurs as it’s a bacteria eat archaea world out there. Some of the organisms change and change and change and take energy from the fiery thing up there and use carbon dioxide for food and plant themselves everywhere. Some of the organisms decide on oxygen itself for food and start swimming around looking to fuck shit up. Some are like I’M A FUN GUY, WHAT?
(You should be in a pretty mad linguistic sprint again by this point.)
Things get stronger and bigger. At one point something decides it’s too small a fish for too big a pond and what’s that big dry thing up there? DO. WANT. More follow. They spread out over the land. Volcanoes erupt. Huge earthquakes rend land from land and eventually continents begin to drift apart, and, like all expatriates, say they’ll keep in touch but never ever do. Some things get even bigger and even stronger and make more cells and start to have lungs and gills and then begin to produce cells that remember shit and now it’s really on. It took just a couple-six billion years but now creatures and plants begin to grow large and get huge and awesome and eat each other and small lizards and then big lizards and then THUNDER LIZARDS. DRAGONS! (not really) Feathers! Wings! T-Rex chasing Jeff Goldblum! HUGE COLLISION FROM SPACE.
(Second longest pause of the show. 3.4 seconds?)
Take two. Some things live. Turtles. We like turtles. Some things die. Like brontosaurus who SHUT UP HE WAS THE BEST. I DON’T CARE. Some things are like “being a lizard sucks, man, that shit is for the birds WAIT A SECOND”. Tiny mammals who have hair and breasts and have been hiding out think “ha-ha! Now’s our chance!” And they spread out everywhere and some of them stay tiny and forage and some of them get big and hunt and some of them get bigger and bigger brains and start carousing in the trees and plants that start producing flowers attract things that fly around and pollinate and the world is filled with flowers and beautiful things. Some monkey starts running around on the ground. More follow. Four legs go into two. Brains get bigger and bigger. Hitting stuff with a rock works better than hitting stuff with a fist. Pointy shit tends to win arguments. The concept of throwing things is discovered. Divergent groups of non-tree-dwelling monkeys meet and one wins and sorry Neanderthals buh-bye. Some animals become enormous and easy to find and the monkeys go crazy hunting that shit. Lighting strikes somewhere and fire starts and it’s scary as anything in the whole world except also hot and the rest of the world tends to get pretty fucking cold so what if we, like, not to sound crazy or anything, put a circle of rocks around some of it and then took one of these here delicious flying lizards and put one and one together to make BRUNCH? So they decide to follow the bigger animals wherever they go (USA! USA!) and to put sharp things on long things and it’s easier when there are several monkeys and so now we’re all friends. At some point someone’s like “Uh, also, I mean, I know walking forever and ever is fun and all, but these particular things growing in the ground appear to not kill most of the people who eat them, so maybe we should, like, not eat every single one because if we leave some more tend to grow and then we can eat those? How about it?” And things start to get planted on purpose near caves and if you squish a berry and rub it on a wall you can make pictures of stuff and people and boobs. Scrapey scrapey one rock against another this kind of looks like a dude LET’S WORSHIP IT. Caves get crowded but it rains a lot so stack shit on top of other shit and crawl in there and it’s more or less dry. Build bunches of them together. Fight some groups and not others. This group is our group and we must stick together. Find a good spot to live and the group keeps getting bigger. Thunder and lightning are scary and there must be something bigger than us getting pissed, let’s be afraid of it. WAIT, IT MUST BE LIKE THE STATUE DUDE. LET’S WORSHIP IT CAUSE THAT’S WHAT IT WANTS. Let’s build huge things of stone and give that dude robes and kill that chick. Let’s take these plants and put them in rows and bring water from the river to make them. LET’S GET CONSCIOUS. Now we’re talking. But not to ourselves! ‘Cause that’s CRAZEE.
Sumer! Mesopotamia! Nubia and Egypt! Pyramids and cat worship and wrapping guys in cloth after taking their brains out with sticks. Take papyrus and dry it just so and press it and then use that old berry trick and I’ve got a GREAT idea let’s get a book deal. Writing stuff down. Carving stuff. The flood seems to happen regularly what if we call that THURSDAY? One group is like “Oy vey, fuck this, too many gods, we out” and they walk around a tiny desert for forty years for some reason and then they kill absolutely everything and everyone they can find. And write it down. TAKE NOTE, AS THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER. More and more large groups of people start to crop up. Greeks give funny hats to each other and sail around and eat... cooked helicopters? Gyro? I don’t know. They look for yellow wool and have sex with Gods and discover all sorts of triangles and delicious, delicious pi, which helps with circles and what happens if instead of one dude being in charge we all get a say?
And Socrates asks questions and Plato makes stuff out of balls of colored clay AT THE SAME TIME developing the idea of ideas existing separate from their forms. I HAVEN’T FACT CHECKED ANY OF THIS. Chinese civilization thrives and, and Middle Eastern civilization thrives and they invent algebra also known as “the gebra” and Mayans invent a calendar but get bored after counting to 2012 and North Americans paint with all the colors of the wind. Macedonia rises up, and over time figures out how to make the Greatest Alexander the world had ever known. And he rides around taking over shit and then says, hey you know what would be nice? If we took all that stuff that was written down and put it in once place. Let’s call it the Big Awesome Book Room. And his advisors chat and come back with some other suggestions and one of them is library even though they, uh, didn’t speak Latin. But some people did! Cause Rome is formed by two dudes who used to suck wolf teat and aqueducts and amphitheaters and take the Greek gods and give them other names and trade routes and exploration and Julius Caesar goes and finds the Celts and they’re weird and naked and Vesuvius blows up, buh-bye. Buildings are getting better and art has become its own thing and Ptolemy says the sky and everything in it is circular and sits in nested spheres and gravity is just absolutely horrified at this idea but chooses not to say anything and one of that group of people who left Egypt a long time ago to walk around the desert and kill everybody rides around a city in the Western part of Rome on a donkey and they’re like, “for real, kill that dude” and that turns out to be a very interesting decision with a bunch of consequences they really couldn’t have foreseen at the time. Rome’s built roads and figured out agriculture and Chinese people separately figured that out, awesome, and they’re eating things with sticks and developing gunpowder and making thousands and thousands of statues and then burying them cause why the hell not? And Australian things have pouches and big legs and tiny arms and that’s just the people! And the North Americans who are also Indians have killed everything really big long long ago and have to make do with bison and corn. Vandals ride into Rome and spray-paint the shit out of everything and Rome falls apart on account of being just too damn big and then everybody gets stupid for a long long time and all of Rome becomes extremely complicated and strict, by which I mean byzantine, by which I mean Byzantine. I don’t know anything about Africa. Or the Southern Hemisphere in general. Sorry. Public school. And the library burns down and nobody knows math or basically ANYTHING and British people are like “Whole place used to be run by a Welsh dude named Arthur, and he basically invented the concepts of roundness and tableness” and everyone else just goes with it and that one Jewish dude who got assed by the Romans gets more and more and more popular as everyone argues about the details. And a mountain comes to a dude named Mohammed, and he tells a bunch of people that he comes from God and they believe him, which turns out to be a very interesting decision indeed. And Norse people are like “we gotta get the fuck out of Norway, it sucks up here. all we have is herring.” and they sail to Greenland and then go burn down the London Bridge, as prophesied in the song. And the Chinese figure out how to shoot stuff out of other stuff and the Islamic Caliphate takes over Jerusalem and that pisses off a bunch of other people who decide to attack it over and over again with consequences that really ought to have been foreseen by everyone and the Turks decide they’ve had enough of that Byzantine shit and there goes Constantinople and what’s left of the Roman Empire. But new information and goods and nice footstools and whatnot have come West with the Otto-Men and some Italian people realize that people used to know stuff, and they start looking into it and knowledge and art and culture get naissanced yet again! And knowledge spreads and is written down and Jan Hus suggests some religious practices and gets torched and Martin Luther suggests some others and doesn’t ‘cause Gutenberg figures out how to make copies of stuff quickly and without using a feather quill and ink so the ideas get out there and now there are even more divisions in the followers of that one Jewish dude and if they had just let homeboy ride around on a donkey once in a while how different everything would be. JESUS.
And more people fight and the Portuguese and Spanish start sailing around trying to find a faster way to get spices and Copernicus says that Ptolemy was an asshole and that doesn’t go over perfectly well and then Galileo says Copernicus is right, Ptolemy was a moron plus A SILENT P? WHAT IS THAT? And that doesn’t go over very well either, but some people with books look into it and are like “yeah, probably” and a Spanish dude basically wipes out a continent with smallpox and guns and slavery and then in England they put a chick in charge and they kick ass for a while and a dude writes plays about kings and lovers and Danish people and a the chick dies and they put a Scotsman in charge and that writer guy writes a play about Scottish people and ghosts WHICH HAS A NAME WE SHALL NOT MENTION
(MACBETH. You can mime this or mouth this or something if you want to.)
and an English ship comes back from the West with something called “tobacco” which it turns out gets you high and Newton is like “what Galileo said, but also EVERYTHING ELSE BAM WHAT” and gravity, for the first time in its multibillion year existence, smiles knowingly. And more and more guns are being made and people are sailing hither and yon and one French dude claims to actually be the actual Sun and people are only going to stand that shit for a couple... hundred... years or so and Hobbes is like “people suck, so we gotta have kings” and Descartes is like “Guess what number I’m thinking of? ME.” And Locke is like “Don’t tell me what I can’t do, BOONE.” And ideas and ideologies spread and more factions of more churches and more fighting and so so so many people are stolen from one place and murdered and tortured and forced to work in another place which everyone is basically just sort of OK with? Yeah. Then in the newly unpopulated and then repopulated land of the European colonies on North America some people don’t like not having a say in things and they fight! and win! and Thomas Jefferson is like PEOPLE SHOULD BE FREE and John Brown is like WHAT ABOUT SLAVES and everybody is like LALALALA. And Karl Marx is like “I don’t think ANY of this is working out so well” and Charles Darwin sails around and writes a book that says “Uh, I think we maybe just maybe started out basically as monkeys” and that goes over about as well as Galileo only WAY WORSE. And then the French are like “Hey, what ze Americans said” but instead of “People should be free” they’re like “Reign of terror, les bitches!” and then Napoleon takes the opportunity to wail on everyone and Jefferson buys the Louisiana territory. And everything is getting bigger and faster and dirtier and travel between places is easier and easier because of engines and internal combustion and lots of mass murder and everybody is fighting everybody basically all the time and Perry sails to Japan getting them into the whole “world” thing and people try to end slavery and there’s a big mass-murdering kerfuffle about that noise and then they invented the wheel! That actually happened way earlier, but I forgot. And factories produce stuff fast and faster and Western expansion and the age of Empire means a small group of people from a tiny Northwest portion of one continent are basically in charge of everybody else and then an Austrian dude gets murdered in Serbia and lots of people kill lots of other people for what seem like really good reasons at the time and airplanes start flying and Fleming discovers some mold on bread and it turns out that mold can kick bacteria’s ass and more and more knowledge comes with more and more war and Einstein says “Yeah, what Newton said but how about all THIS shit WHAT YOU GOT HOMIE” and Gravity for the first time ever throws itself a little party. And then another Austrian dude decides “let’s try all THAT nonsense again” and he goes apeshit with the killing and the Japanese decide it’s the perfect time to take over Asia and basically every place else and the whole world starts fighting the whole rest of the world even as knowledge expands. We’re getting smarter and smarter and able to kill more and more people at once and all the scientists figure out how to make a weapon that will fuck everything up and they use it and the war ends and a few Russians start killing the rest of the Russians and everything is very tense and murdery for a long time and we learn more and more and discover that things may not be what they seem and chaos may reign and order may be a myth on the scale of the Greeks sleeping with Gods because the closer we look the less we know what’s going on and there’s just so much evidence for all of life being part of one glorious and beautiful whole and such vast potential for these once-monkeys being able to make the world into a wonderful and beautiful place.
(It’s gonna happen this time, you know it. But it isn’t. Not yet.)
But we just can’t bring ourselves to do it and so we learn and fight and argue and fight and art moves through phases and knowledge moves through time and the world was once huge and is now it’s tiny and everything we know about ourselves and the rest of the universe is reachable from every place on the planet from shiny electrical devices. We have the capacity to know everything and to learn everything but we keep fighting and keep fighting and keep fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting and fighting etc.
(Don’t say et cetera. I mean that you can keep this up as long as you deem prudent. But it should be a little while, anyway.)
And everything we know about ourselves from monkey-hood all down is only this long
(Show them the tiny tiny tiny!)
in a stretch of billions of years, and yet when we talk about it, how grand it seems. And beautiful and hopeful. And sad. And the universe keeps spreading apart, faster and faster, and as we get farther and farther from everything else the closer and closer we get to each other.
(Take your moment. Smile.)
Isn’t it great?
(Then make like you’re mowing them down with a machine gun. It was supposed to be funny, but it’s not, it’s just kind of sad, and you don’t quite know what to make of it.)
And then the sun goes down today,
(You say.)
and then there is tomorrow.
(Blackout.)