This is my belief: there is nothing out there.
No stars, planets, meteors, comets, black holes, no galaxies. The sun and moon, simple holographic images. There are no subatomic particles, no muons or gluons or neutrinos or rouge electrons flying around like mosquitoes. Literally nothing, and it’s not just me.
Convince me that what I see when I look up is real, not a monumental multi-governmental conspiracy. That all those space shots, the photos, the data, isn’t an elaborate hoax and that all astronauts aren’t cyborgs?
What if even the media were fooled? All this time we were convinced that NASA was searching for evidence of life on Mars, when, in fact, it was all a sham, a violation of the public’s trust. Only more billions given to research teams and agencies set up to supposedly examine this phantom universe. Suppose all that money was actually going into a few powerful people’s pockets, more powerful than Trump or Buffet. Shadow people.
There is only what we can see right in front of us. We are completely alone.
The universe, if you wish to call it that, consists of frozen darkness, stillness, too empty for desolation, too amorphous for indifference, and too indifferent to worship.
So we all live in false belief and eventually die and disintegrate into the same nothingness surrounding us. There is no beginning or end, only the present.
Given all this isolation, duplicity, matter-less inkiness, seeing as none of us will travel anywhere after an inevitable, often nightmarish death, can you possibly see past the phony façade, negotiate the meaninglessness of everything, and possibly loan me 10 bucks until Wednesday? – Joe Del Priore
Joe Del Priore is a frequent contributor.