The guiding principle of Six Ridiculous Questions is that life is filled with ridiculousness. And questions. That only by giving in to these truths may we hope to slip the surly bonds of reality and attain the higher consciousness we all crave. (Eh, not really, but it sounded good there for a minute.) It’s just. Who knows? The ridiculousness and question bits, I guess. Why six? Assonance, baby, assonance.
You find yourself in the year 2125 but haven’t aged a day. How did you get here? What do you see? Buildings? Modes of transportation? Other humans? Please describe in detail.
I think most of us will be indoors in some sort of AI-driven digital entertainment (shopping, porn, soundscape) experience – likely augmented with drugs that help with focus and suspension of disbelief. Those who reject technology will be the true counterculture. And they’ll probably still read paper books and make other extreme anachronistic choices.
How can I get the insipid people sitting beside me in this café to cease their chatter long enough for me to compose five more seriously ridiculous questions? (I guess this leaves four more.) Additional color from actual conversation:
Person 1: I don’t think Tom likes me.
Person 2: No, wow, I am literally shaken to my very core by that.
Person 1: He like never says, “Hi,” to me in the mornings.
Person 2: Wow. You just need to tell him he’s being a total silly goose and leave it at that.
Noise cancelling headphones are pretty good these days. The nice ones, anyway. I used to write in a café in the afternoons, but I got burned out on drinking too much late-day coffee to justify taking up space. I also didn’t always care for people loudly whispering on their phones. Now I only write at home.
Please solve the following unrelated set of simultaneous equations using only sentences:
(Entropy – Mount Everest) / (Blue + Potato) = (Milan Kundera x Land Shark)2
Vanity + (Hunger / Love) = Turing Test – (Napoleon / Big Mac)
Philosophy, cheap food and questionable logic have fueled many a novel.
Is the novel dead? If it is, when did it die? If it’s not, why do people hate it so much they keep talking about its death?
People who say the novel is dead don’t read novels. Not good ones anyway. Maybe fewer writers can make a full career out of being a novelist (than a generation ago), but I think that people will continue to enjoy the transporting depths of a novel, even as digital entertainment becomes overwhelmingly engaging (see my answer to the first question above).
What would the world be like if money didn’t exist?
Money doesn’t exist. It’s a shared fiction. Barter sounds nice but would be a massive pain in the ass in a society with more than about ten people.
Choosing between the croissant, the theory of gravity, and the invention of the air guitar, which has made the greatest contribution to society? Why?
Croissants are one of the most elevated kinds of bread (the perfect combination of bread and butter in a single, handheld item). And bread itself is one of mankind’s most important inventions because it transformed basic ingredients into a simple, reliable source of nourishment, powering the growth of civilizations and cultures for millennia.
Thomas Kohnstamm is a Seattle-born and based writer and video producer. His new novel, Supersonic, is out this February.
Kurt Baumeister’s writing has appeared in Salon, Guernica, Electric Literature, Rain Taxi, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Nervous Breakdown, The Weeklings, and other outlets. An acquisitions editor with 7.13 Books, Baumeister holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. Twilight of the Gods is his second novel. Find him @ www.kurtbaumeister.com.
Photo: Brian Smale
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