Be startled by the norm. Be amused by it.

I am distracted by the knowledge of the existence of the smallest things that are see-able, know-able only by the monstrous great hadron collider. I am diminished when I tilt back my head and stagger to witness the Milky Way above me in the rural night sky. I stand and wonder that its vastiness and my puniness are made of the same tiny whirling and shaking bits. We are the same.

I am distracted by my witness of life past and present. Ancient now rocky creatures compete for my attention with the shuffle of people feet in line at the grocery store. The wrinkly smiles of oldsters make me imagine what they’ve seen and known and what they think about it. I study with microscope and metrics the material manifestation of past peoples and I see the network of acquisition, perception, use, and discard as a near fluid model of experience for each person, each dusty old thing on my lab table. It makes the rest of my life confusing.

I am distracted by cooperative synergy in my world, near infinite but not infinite things converge so that any physical and simultaneously cultural moment can exist. I slip the leash onto the dog’s head for walkies and I am lost: how did this dog become, how did this leash become, the door, the key, the fence gate, the sidewalk, the rain falling on us, the birds, the bugs, the asphalt’s damp smell – how is it that they all inhabit the same space to make the dog walk be? More distracting yet, each remotely sentient entity will perceive this synergistic span differently and each non-sentient will impact and be impacted uniquely.

How unutterably strange when all of the processes conspire into a formulation that is funny. What is funny anyway, to the bunch of tiny bits that make me? I think about the bits changing place and position to allow me to see and think, be amused, and laugh alone and crazy into the sky until the dogs tug the leashes for the next spot to sniff.

The world around me is remarkable. I am a visitor here, a perpetual tourist in my own every day.

Welcome to WideEyedFunk. May you find the world joyfully startling too.