More Intricacies of Living

Every aspect of living is immeasurably complex. Somewhere online I came across an assertion that there are approximately 18 decillion colors (that figure is represented by an 18 followed by 33 zeros) available for our eyes to distinguish between. Glancing at the menu showing on the left side of my computer, I see dozens of small graphic icons, each representing an item from the menu. And I consider that every letter of every word in that menu and every graphic image comprises dozens, if not hundreds (or more) pixels. When my eyes sweep down to my desktop, they are greeted by an impossibly large number of intricate patterns of the teak wood grain. The clutter on top of the desk hides at least two-thirds of the slab of teak and the extraordinary intricacy of that hidden wood. Patterns caused by slight variations in the teak surface make visible a texture that is, at once, smooth as glass and rough as a mountain range. The distance between the nearly-invisible peaks and valleys of the desktop suggest to me that mountaintops and the plains below them illustrate a similar geography—but the relationships between zenith and nadir are radically different. Pieces of paper, each decorated with letters and numbers produced by ink, litter my desk. Every miniscule droplet of ink that left those images on the paper, is composed of countless molecules. Threads of wood fiber, probably much thinner than  a human hair, are bound together to form those sheets of paper. Speaking of hair, when I glance at the front of my shirt, I see several strands of grey; they may represent the first few hairs to abandon my head in response to my recent chemotherapy session. How many more strands of hair remain attached to my scalp, I wonder? Could the answer to that question have any practical value? How, by the way, is practical value measured? Certainly, there must be a way to equate and/or differentiate two items by measuring their practical value…right?  Infinitesimally small is not always a characteristic of complexity. An unfertilized chicken egg is a single cell, billions of times larger than the tiniest single-cell creature. The smallest single-cell organism is, depending on which source one chooses to believe, the Mycoplasma gallicepticum or the Mycoplasma genitalium or one of various other itsy-bitsy creatures. Complexity runs rampant throughout the smallest “things” to the largest. If I were to take time to view, for just ten seconds each, and catalog a description of every square millimeter of space in my study, I suspect I would be tied up until well after the thousandth anniversary of my presumed death. I say “presumed death” because we cannot know precisely what death is. That reality is a little hard to fathom.

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Aphrodite, considered the most beautiful of the gods, was married to Hephaestus, the god of metalwork and fire. She was unfaithful to her husband, though; his brother was her lover. I have been interested in Greek mythology for a long while, but I’ve always shied away from delving into it because I am afraid I could never fully understand all the familial relationships. Perhaps a graphic Ancestry.com family tree might help me capture and appreciate those relationships.

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I want to sit on the deck, drinking an espresso. And so I shall. I probably won’t go to sleep out there, but it’s a possibility. I still am tired, despite a night of more or less solid sleep. In an ideal world, I could call a bakery and have delivered to my home a couple of klobasneks (with jalapeños). I’ve always called them kolaches, but only recently re-learned that kolaches are sweet pastries; my favorites are savory klobasneks. I would like a big apple fritter delivered to me, as well. I write about apple fritters too often; perhaps I should instead write about and worship peach fritters.  And off I go; no pastries, but tasty dark espresso in an attempt to ward off napping so early on a Sunday.