I’m pretty gay

I thought the signature in japanese was so “I draw bad manga”.

The Bitch Machine

One morning I went out into the front yard and found a time machine.

It was covered in old hand-me-down clothes and broken toys.
The insides of a washing machine, a cardboard box from Panasonic filled with other, littler flatpacked boxes.  pieces of broken slate.

Dumped? by some unscrupulous dumper?

A giant, brass time machine.

I recognised it as soon as I saw it. Time machines all look alike. Theyre pretty obvious.I knew it would change everything. This was an awesome discovery.

YES

YES

YES

The control panel has a pretty huge clock built into it. A few of them, all telling time in different methods. Like a rich-person clock.
Analog ones. digital ones. There was a crude sundial, and another thing which looked like it measured time too… only it was hard to explain.

And a big Chesterfield armchair to sit on. Right in the centre.

Time machines never really stop moving through time.
They dont jump from one time-period to another, and then sit idle.
To a time machine, there is no such thing as idle.

A time machine exists before it was built. It exists long after it was destroyed.  They are built in a timeline long collapsed under an infinity of past time-traveller paradoxes.

It says all of this in a thousand different languages, etched into metal by unknown means.

The universe might only be the way you see it for the split-second you experience it. After that it might be broken by another paradox, undetectable by our minds.

Alternate timelines breaking and jumbling around when someone kills their own grandfather.
A dog is king of the universe for the millisecond just before this moment. You dont remember. You consider this moment to be the only true timeline. A second ago you probably had twelve legs and it was the rightest thing in the world.

Sitting in this machine, I pull the brass handle by the Chesterfield armchair and nothing happens.

In some other universe, I’m running around as dinosaurs chase me through a ruined city and breathe fire.

In this universe, it just breaks.

Godless

Ant farms are a microcosm.

This is pretty obvious. But it isn’t just a reflection on society. It’s a reflection on the nature of life and existence and everything.

What are they? A society of ants.
Ants on their own are stupid. More than stupid. An ant on its own will wander aimless. An ant will engage in a tug of war with another ant over a bread crumb, neither ant gaining ground, for hours and hours and hours.
Theyre both engaging in a very borderline, basic function. A system of reactions to reactions to reactions.
But when you combine them, suddenly they’re capable of huge tasks. Feats of architecture and cunning.

Singularly stupid. On mass, intelligent.

And who is leading them? Their queen?
The queen is mislabled. She’s just a giant vagina. An ovary. She’s a chicken birthing slave child after slave child. She’s a robot factory.

At the centre of the ant colony, there is no centre. There is no hive mind or combined intelligence. Ants just act the way they do,and the queen just works the way she does, and somehow in the middle of it all, it all just works.
Everything just comes together.

Ant farms are a microcosm.

Our brains are the same way.
A neuron is stupid on its own. It’s a single cell. it’s useless.
but combined with trillions of others, suddenly the aimless whatever of that cell in unison with others… it just works.

We have this idea that we are someone and that we have a soul. Maybe this is true.
Most likely, we are this bizarre haphappence that floats on top of a raft of aimless drone cells.

We are the manuscript of the billion monkey typewriter jockies.
Given enough time and enough random attempts, something amazing can appear out of nothingness. A sea of atoms combining on their own, writhing. Some things stick. Some combinations seem to exist better than others and they continue to float around.

Nature, or whatever you want to call it, is the most ruthless editor of all.

Proteins form. Then things more complex.
When something is created, randomly, that functions a little better… over time it replaces the old. The old dies, the new remains.
Little changes to its form occur as random mutations. Failures are destroyed.
Successes progress.

The only reason we expect to see a god somewhere behind all this, is because it’s our nature.

It’s as if, one day, that last change occurred, and our brains were switched on.
And we looked around and we saw ourselves and we saw the world. We saw the tools we had made out of stick and bone, and we saw the fire we had lit, and we recognised our nature.
selfish little imps that we are. Small little self-absorbed things, stuck in our own experiences… We saw that we were creators… we saw that we constructed and manipulated things into other things. And drawing from these experiences, we extrapolated…

There must be something like us. Something that creates. And THAT is where this all came from.

Silly little monkeys. Stupid little atoms, all bundled together in your little teams. Your little self-contained cell societies.
Your little ant farms.

We are what we are. Random little robots that float around. Caught up in this experience. This hollow, imaginary experience.

Insects.