Read Online Every Day is an Atheist Holiday!: More Magical Tales from the Author of God, No! by Penn Jillette - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Penn Jillette
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real definition, we’re time traveling. I’m time traveling in any real sense.
New generations will be seeing more and more high-quality video from times they weren’t alive. They’ll be experiencing part of a time when they did not exist. This is a fairly new thing. I have home movies my brother-in-law and my nephew ripped to computer video that I can watch of myself learning to juggle at age twelve. The sixties and seventies are pretty well documented, and lots of people alive today weren’t alive then. My high school girlfriend, Anne, who is some sort of genius scientist now, thinks any theory about the modern world changing human nature is bullshit. Anne points out that what humans do is adapt. It’s what we’re best at. We got good at going faster than the speed of sound and being able to talk to people all over the world at once. That doesn’t fuck with our attention spans. None of that changes our humanity.
But I wonder what all this time travel does to our sadness. I know we’ve adapted, but how is sadness affected? Just one hundred years ago, the old lady down the street was always and eternally the old lady down the street. You could hear stories about her as a young person, and you could read things she wrote as a young person, and maybe even see a drawing or photograph of her as a younger person, but these were little glimpses. Soon we’ll have hi-def 3-D images of our grandmothers sexting.
Davy Jones died in February 2012. We have a lot of pictures of him at age twenty. We have video and shows of him at twenty and now he’s dead at sixty-six and it’s all laid out there. Mortality is rammed down our throats through our eyes and ears. Paul Newman is the most attractive human being I have ever seen in person. I saw him live and realized the camera was not kind to him. The camera made him uglier. The camera makes David Letterman look better. Off-camera, in person, Julia Roberts is wonderful, but looks a bit like a tapeworm. That’s a lot of mouth to see up close. We don’t have the technology yet to capture the beauty of Paul Newman. But we do have enough technology to watch him get old. Paul never got ugly and that helps my heart, but he got old. Pretty doesn’t always hang in there, Mr. Gibson. Things you’ve felt can show in your face sometimes. Movies can show us aging at its prettiest, and that’s Paul Newman, but it’s still sad. It’s still a bit melancholy to watch
The Left-Handed Gun
become
Nobody’s Fool
. We live so much longer now than we used to. We are more aware of how time flies and what changes have happened and will happen. I can no longer remember the feeling of holding my daughter in one hand and her being barely bigger than my one hand. She’s now a little girl. And she will be a young woman, then a woman, then an old woman. I show her pictures of her daddy as a baby. “Did you poop your pants?”
“I sure did.”
Piers Morgan was trying to scare me with death. Fuck death. He can’t scare me with death. I got death hanging. Death is November 9, 1909—death is nothing. I’m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I’m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can’t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children’s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.
Motherfucker.
Piers, you have no chance of scaring me with death, because all the fear possible is contained in life. The awful truth of how sweet life can be is enough to crack me every second. That black-and-white picture of my mom, alive, and bursting with her future in her little wool hat and matching mittens—that, Piers, is what scares the shit out of me, and your TV religion can’t protect any of us from that. I’m not afraid of a hot lead enema followed by some serious ass-to-mouth with Satan—give it your worst. I’m afraid of a life that is so full of joy
New generations will be seeing more and more high-quality video from times they weren’t alive. They’ll be experiencing part of a time when they did not exist. This is a fairly new thing. I have home movies my brother-in-law and my nephew ripped to computer video that I can watch of myself learning to juggle at age twelve. The sixties and seventies are pretty well documented, and lots of people alive today weren’t alive then. My high school girlfriend, Anne, who is some sort of genius scientist now, thinks any theory about the modern world changing human nature is bullshit. Anne points out that what humans do is adapt. It’s what we’re best at. We got good at going faster than the speed of sound and being able to talk to people all over the world at once. That doesn’t fuck with our attention spans. None of that changes our humanity.
But I wonder what all this time travel does to our sadness. I know we’ve adapted, but how is sadness affected? Just one hundred years ago, the old lady down the street was always and eternally the old lady down the street. You could hear stories about her as a young person, and you could read things she wrote as a young person, and maybe even see a drawing or photograph of her as a younger person, but these were little glimpses. Soon we’ll have hi-def 3-D images of our grandmothers sexting.
Davy Jones died in February 2012. We have a lot of pictures of him at age twenty. We have video and shows of him at twenty and now he’s dead at sixty-six and it’s all laid out there. Mortality is rammed down our throats through our eyes and ears. Paul Newman is the most attractive human being I have ever seen in person. I saw him live and realized the camera was not kind to him. The camera made him uglier. The camera makes David Letterman look better. Off-camera, in person, Julia Roberts is wonderful, but looks a bit like a tapeworm. That’s a lot of mouth to see up close. We don’t have the technology yet to capture the beauty of Paul Newman. But we do have enough technology to watch him get old. Paul never got ugly and that helps my heart, but he got old. Pretty doesn’t always hang in there, Mr. Gibson. Things you’ve felt can show in your face sometimes. Movies can show us aging at its prettiest, and that’s Paul Newman, but it’s still sad. It’s still a bit melancholy to watch
The Left-Handed Gun
become
Nobody’s Fool
. We live so much longer now than we used to. We are more aware of how time flies and what changes have happened and will happen. I can no longer remember the feeling of holding my daughter in one hand and her being barely bigger than my one hand. She’s now a little girl. And she will be a young woman, then a woman, then an old woman. I show her pictures of her daddy as a baby. “Did you poop your pants?”
“I sure did.”
Piers Morgan was trying to scare me with death. Fuck death. He can’t scare me with death. I got death hanging. Death is November 9, 1909—death is nothing. I’m not afraid of nothing. But time passing is something different. I’m terrified of time passing. I tremble at the thought of my little girl growing up. I can’t face my son growing stronger than me and helping me up the stairs. I quake at the prospect of looking at my adult children’s faces with eyesight worse than I have now.
Motherfucker.
Piers, you have no chance of scaring me with death, because all the fear possible is contained in life. The awful truth of how sweet life can be is enough to crack me every second. That black-and-white picture of my mom, alive, and bursting with her future in her little wool hat and matching mittens—that, Piers, is what scares the shit out of me, and your TV religion can’t protect any of us from that. I’m not afraid of a hot lead enema followed by some serious ass-to-mouth with Satan—give it your worst. I’m afraid of a life that is so full of joy
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