arobotlivesdownstairs

I’ve known since I was 11 that I existed in a finite idea space, since my father informed me from his death-bed, which is what he called the living room couch where he used to lay in the evenings, pontificating to his children, the three boys and one girl, of which I was older than my sister, and younger than my brothers, the truths and contentions surrounding his world view that he shared with precisely no one outside of those he could control, those being us, his motherless children who listened out of a form of fear, closer to dread, that he was steadily losing his mind after the death of his wife and our mother, the woman he had loved deeply for just over 19 years before holding her blood in his arms after the driver and the snow and the windshield had taken the part of her he loved out of her in front of him and left just the body and the blood, knowing instinctively that we would do better to forget his rambles as we grew if we were to be healthy, functioning adults, but also knowing that we’d have no real choice in whether his words would affect us, and we would essentially be doomed to think in the ways he prescribed as adults until we could systematically recognize and destroy each of his teachings as their effects revealed themselves in the contexts of future situations, that each person will have exactly 35 moments of convergence in his or her life, which was the term he used to describe that periodic experience where several seemingly disparate ideas we’ve consumed through readings, conversations, films, and other media fit together in an unexpected way and we are suddenly capable of creating something truly interesting that has not existed before because of that combination that no one else has in their heads in precisely the same way, but he clarified that usually those moments only exist in the brain and, due to external factors like working life, relationships, apathy, and psychological problems, most of us unfortunately will never manage to manifest outside ourselves, but that we were nonetheless assured that we’d be able to exploit if we simply listened to his other death-bed advice, which included avoiding long-term romantic relationships, committing to a regimen of mindfulness meditation, and undertaking menial, well-defined, blue- or entry-level-white-collar work as our career foci where we would have well-defined borders between the necessary element of labour and the evening opportunity to explore the ideas we generate, and that these strategies would not only benefit us, but also the rest of the world, because of the rarity of this possibility in others, and the “inertia of civilization”, but still it was important to remember that there was a limit of 35 times that that would be possible for each individual, a maximum he calculated by averaging the lifetime output of those whose ideas and inventions he respected, so that even my and my sibling’s well-trained capabilities were finite, like a countdown clock starting at 35, where our ideas would decrement the counter until we would one day reach 0 and know definitively that we would no longer be useful to ourselves or society, like my father, who claimed to have already had all his moments, the last of which had been this one.