To All the Babies Born 9 Months From Now
Welcome to Planet Earth. Earth is the name of everything that is not the sky. Every human ever lives on Earth, but not everything that lives on Earth is a human. You are a human, in case you were wondering. As a human, you’ll spend most of your time doing gobbledygook. I do hope, though, that you’ll do much less gobbledygook in your life than what we’ve all done.
As I’m writing this to you, most of the gobbledygook-inig has been put on pause, because everyone got sick from it. This happens every now and then, but not often enough for us to learn from it. When this happens, we’re all sent to our rooms to think about what we’ve done. A lot of people die, too. More on that later.
For now, kiddos, some ground rules (the ground is what everything rests on):
Numero uno: There is nothing more important than a living thing. A living thing is anything that will try to survive, no matter what.
Number two: it doesn’t matter if the living thing is as big as an ocean or as small as an ant. It doesn’t matter if there’s a whole bunch of these living things or just a few. It’s still important.
Number three: not all of these living things get along. For example, this thing that latched onto our gobbledygook is called the Coronavirus, and it doesn’t get along with humans very well, which is why our gobbledygook is on pause. Another example: humans don’t get along with anything except things that we find useful at the time.
Number four: all living things are useful, all of the time.
I’ll have more of those later.
But now, here’s a word of advice about the adults feeding you, changing your nappies, and rocking you to sleep. You might think you have them well trained, but just a few bedtime stories from now they’ll start telling you to “do this” or “not to do that”.
Here is what I have to say about that, babies: Don’t listen to one doggone word of it. Do you know why they’re feeding you and changing you now, baby? Because you fell out of one of their bottoms one day. Do you know how that happened?
I’ll tell you.
Those two were locked up in a room while all their normal gobbledygook was on hold and they got the idea that this was a good time to do the thing that makes a baby. In a time like that, where it wasn’t considered safe to go outside, can you think of it!?
Don’t be too harsh on them though, babies. Because, but, you see that.. these are anxious times. Humans aren’t used to this kind of thing. You see, most our gobbledygook is meant to distract us from what it’s like to be alive. You may not understand this yet, kiddos, but being still and quiet and with your thoughts and feelings is a one mighty large lollipop.
If there is one thing I wish for you youngsters, it’s that you get to the center of it. I hope you never understand what I just said to you. I hope that it sounds bizarre, absurd, and perhaps even a tad pathetic.
You see, most of us humans were born not too unlike you. What I mean by that is one day we just realized that we were alive. What makes us different is by that point we were waist deep in a whole mess of a thing called education. Education is when someone who was taught how to teach, teaches you what other people taught them. They tell you stories other people have deemed important so that you may become “meaningful contributions to society”. A society is a group of people who either behave like their parents told them to, or as far the opposite as they can stomach. A “meaningful contribution” is anything that keeps the gobbledygook alive.
Meaningful contributions used to be things like making tools for people to use to meet their needs. A need is anything that keeps a living thing alive. But we stopped caring about that detail a few hundred years ago, when we thought that our tools should do the work for us. This really backfired on us, babies. Now we spend all our days and nights working to keep our tools alive.
Keeping your tools alive is called gobbledygook.