A Seagull Seeking Help

THE FACEBOOK PHOTO was of a seagull all tangled up in rope or wire or something. Along comes a good samaritan, who untengles the bird. Set free, it rises and flies away, uninjured. Facebook, reliably predictably catering to my tastes, gives me much such material, animals in pain or peril, rescued by a damned good human being. They even show the bird, dog, cat, or baby grizzly at the vet, being given a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down, a bite to eat, and a certificate of good heath, with a warm cat bed nap for good measure. Happy endings supplanting a sea of troubles, just my melodramatic cornball style. You gotta hand it to Facebook; they know more about me than I. Artificial Intelligence has me wrapped around its little finger, or tentacle, whichever appendages IA sports when in organic bodily phase. The puppies and kittens by the side of the highway, where some svil person dumped them, caught in roadside beartraps have AI written all over them, CGI. I lap it up, like a kitten at a bowl of cream. I like to fantasize about being a hero. I envision myself pulling people from burning cars and or buildings, hitting the game winning home run for my beloved Yankees, making the game winning Michael Jordan shot. I go further. I see myself sitting behind the Resolute desk in the Oval Office, or the dissolute desk as it should currently be called, ruminating in dreadfully dark, Lincolnesque somber solitude, bravely approaching an impossible no win decision of munumental import. You don't have to save the planet or conquer the world to be heroic. A wise man once said that a gambler is anyone who gets out of bed in the morning. How true that is, in our inherently risk filled lives. Said wise man was a good friend of mine, and might not mind the following permutation; a wise man is anyone who arises each morning with a pure heart and great thoughts, and, if nothing else, tries to do some small something or other to improve herself and the world, if only incrementally, if only a little. That Goethe quote I use so often, including yesterday, is always on target. "We are made immortal through the effects of our actions". I have always considered myself important, if only through the effects of my actions. We elevate ordinary people to "celebrity" status in these United States of Advertising, merely because they entertain us, they bring us escape from lives from which we really ought never try to escape, because our allegedly puny, insignificant little lives are, in actuality, every bit as important and meaningful as those of, say, Taylor Swift or Travis Kelsey, who by the way, would agree completely. Again, its the butterly flapping its wings and triggering a sequence of events which result with the utter destruction of human civilization thingie. A compounding magnification of cause and effect, what scientists call "causal connections". Einstein showed that electrons at opposite ends of the universe communicate with each other, and he called it, profoundly, "spooky action at a distance". We humans can be assured that we have far more importance in and influence over the universe than a couple of electron far apart, jabbering away. Despite the fact that we are but tiny smudges of squirming organic molecules scurrying about on the surface of a tiny planet orbiting an ordinary yellow star at the edge of an obscure galaxy, we matter. Never let anybody tell you otherwise. You, little ole you, have an impact on the universe, no more or less than anyone else, but, nonetheless, an impact. You should feel important because you are, because you exist. The teeny tiny little ole you adrift in a cosmos of inconceivably vast proportions and thus irrelevant crowd has, ostensibly, a point, a point that is demonstrably incorrect. If nothing else, be assured of this; you are here for a reason, a reason of the universe's choosing, God the universe, God the mind, and, most important of all, you matter, if only a little.