If you’ve found your way here, you may be following me in some fashion on-line, or you may have been a reader of previous other-named blogs or columns (The Everlasting Walkabout, The 40 Yr. Old Hoya, The Two O’Clock Feeding). Reinvention is the soul of creation. Just ask Madonna or David Bowie.
Or, more truthfully, I just get bored, and fields wait, fallow, weed-festooned, and I need to start again.
Thus begins Schrödinger's Doug. The name of this new foray into the blogosphere is courtesy of my friend Keith, who recently admitted two days before my drive to Houston that he didn’t know what state I was in - Virginia, Texas or New York – unless he opened the internet and looked. Keither's descriptor: Schrödinger's Doug. And here I extend that theoretical quantum state to you, the reader – for when you aren’t in the blog, I might be writing, drinking, traveling, bitching – and much like the quantum state of Professor Schrödinger's theoretical cat, you can guess all you want, but you won’t know for sure how it’s going unless you open the box – er, blog.
I make no promise you’ll know afterward, though. Quantum physics is a bitch.
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It's a funny thing when lightning makes the national news twice in one day without killing anyone, as it did on Tuesday. No fatalities. Not even a park ranger blown out of his shoes. But it did start a couple of fires: the first on-board the Discoverer Enterprise, BP's recovery vessel in the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps in answer to someone's errant question of “what else could go wrong”; and the other outside the Solid Rock Church in Monroe, Ohio, where the church's famous six-story tall King of Kings statue – affectionately dubbed Touchdown Jesus for the way he called a play – was turned into icon flambe'.
Vengeful God? Angry Earth? Just some really great can't-make-this-up timing? Alanis Morissette having her way with the universe? I don't think Ironic Lightning is a sign of the end times.
It does make one wonder if there's something more spinning in the atoms around us, something with a perverse sense of humor, when two bolts initiate such high-profile mayhem. But we're also people who go out of their way to look for patterns. Dark Side of The Moon links up with The Wizard of Oz. The assassinations of Lincoln and Kennedy are like weird mirror-twins. We seek order in our chaos, turn the universe around as if it's an enormous puzzle box, and sometimes we get the human genome, discover a lost city or species, figure out some far-flung mystery that has eluded us as a race since we were aware of mystery.
And sometimes, we get Mayan predictions of the end of the earth (and John Cusack's “what was I thinking?” career decisions therein), or the Bible Code, or the men who wear tinfoil hats to block CIA thought experiments – who perhaps themselves are looking for a bolt of knowledge from the blue.
We're curious, wanting to control everything put before us. We tame the land, then the seas, then the skies. We want to dominate the natural world. We want to understand weather in order to shape it. And when something we simply can't control or put reason to or wrap our logic around and find ways to deal with comes along, we seek patterns and reason inside of it like trying to pry wisdom form a fortune cookie. Surely, this must mean something. Mashed potato Devil's Towers and all that.
The universe may just be a random set of circumstances. Or it may be a magical and lunatic thing that burps and scratches and has its way with us and our conventions for its own amusement over how we respond to stimuli. Hard to say.
But you might ask the roasted stick figure standing outside the church in Ohio.
