Followup Pt. 1

I did twenty pushups in the dark and thought about GRB-080319B. Over the course of history, people have been capable of thinking few things whilst doing pushups, therein revealing one of pushups’ truest qualities. One of the most popular thoughts must be the age-old riddle: am I really pushing myself up, or am I pushing the earth back down? But now that I’ve learned about GRB-080319B, I wonder more about what it’s like to walk into a kitchen after one’s pushups in the dark to find a hairy tarantula right there on the wall. Where in the world might I live to do that? Sri Lanka? Would I fear the tarantula, once it had the possibility to exist in my kitchen, in my hemisphere? Or would I simply find a giant pot and try to catch the hairy thing and turn it loose on the other giant insects outside? Would it threaten small birds? Could I sell it to someone online?

I watched a video of Tom Jones dancing in 1969 and thought about GRB-080319B. So much happened over the course of the 7 billion years it took the light of GRB-080319B to get here, all of it contained in that blooming pomegranate of light. Tom Jones was in that pomegranate, acting all wild and kissing the girls, their moms were sort of upset but still dancing, perhaps experiencing an adult version of jealousy, a thing so convoluted it takes on names we haven’t yet come up with. My knowledge being limited of the borders of the universe, I suppose it’s possible that we’re just one of the first stops for old GRB-080319B, just a roadside attraction on the way to the big pony show. 7 billion years later down the road, someone else might catch an eyeful, and, squinting hard enough with the right prescription glasses, might see old Tom Jones, disintegrating into particles at the speed of light, jumping aboard for the next destination, flailing his legs around like a wild animal, lost in the ether of time.



I shaved thinking about GRB-080319B and I don’t know who I’m going to vote for anymore, and I wished for a bigger beard for the end of the world. It never comes in like I want it to, and I’d like to know I had it good and scruffy for when things started to get heavy. A beard might be a sign of strength in a time of great crisis and confusion. A sign of confidence, of magnetism and natural understanding that hair was no stranger to my cheek, and I might prove a real leader of the human race in our final hours. Because something must be coming, spiraling at us from any number of billions of years away, fated like a cataclysmic baseball off the universal swinging bat, thinking: bleacher seats.

Arthur C. Clarke posted his final message to Earth via Youtube on March 19 from his house in Sri Lanka. He was 90. I listened to three minutes before my computer stopped working and I felt lonely so bit my fingernails and thought about the end of the world. Arthur was so old in his video that he had a hard time talking, but I found another later in which he chats online with Leonardo DiCaprio to raise funds for wild gorillas, and that made me more positive. If Arthur believed it was worth taking time to raise money in order to preserve gorillas, I might find it worth time to continue my daily activities, like going to work and flossing. Sometimes when I get to thinking about GRB-080319B too much it doesn’t make sense to keep doing things the same way over and over again. They say the explosion took place some 3 billion years before our earth and sun were formed, and just got here now. I haven’t been sleeping very well. Arthur died three minutes before GRB-080319B appeared, and they want to name it after him.

They say that GRB-080319B was the “birth scream” of a universe, marking the beginning or end of a black hole, an occurrence never before seen by the naked eye. I too am visible to the naked eye, and was born as such, with a birth scream all my own. My mother had a scream too, and my father most certainly would have had he been watching. However, my birth scream happened in a small white room in Cedars-Sinai in 1984. When I looked up the hospital today it didn’t look familiar, it had a star of David on the front, and I’m not Jewish. However, I am currently involved with stars. If GRB-080319B were to return to its birth site, 7 billion years away, it might not recognize anything either. A small white room may be a large black space on the other side of the universe. There might not be a concept of white walls out there. There might not be a Cedars-Sinai.


In the report of GRB-080319B’s discovery, it was said that a satellite called Swift was drifting through the night sky “serendipitously” when it came upon the gamma ray. There are only so many times in the life of a word that it will be used so well as serendipitously was then. Because it could have been floating unexpectedly, but it hadn’t been. It could have been simply unassuming, focused on another task, but it hadn’t been. It had been drifting. And it had been drifting serendipitously. When a gamma ray travels 7 billion years to reach what might have been the first of naked eyes, one might assume it’s forced to travel so. For what good is rushing about, when the borders of space themselves have never been so broad and inconspicuous? Because what is any activity over a span of billions of years, of ice ages and cataclysmic failures and successes, life and death and life and death and life again, of biking through the suburbs on a sunny afternoon? One can only hope it is the same.