In another time, another place...

I've been hearing Brian Greene on various podcasts and radio programs recently. He must've had a book come out this past year or something.

He's a physicist of the theoretical kind, pondering string theory, quantum mechanics, and popularizing the theory of the multiverse... that thing that has been out there for quite some time as an idea, but is apparently growing in mindshare, because it's not just in science fiction any more.

Another time, another place, another life. Another me. It is all so very alluring, because it grants us the fantasy that we could have made different choices.

And, for me at least, that they could have made different choices, too.

You combine a couple of pitchers of beer (shared, don't worry), a Friday night, a little too long on facebook looking up ex-girlfriends and even ex-flings, adding to the master list (yes, I have a spreadsheet, and after this past month I had officially lost count...), and wondering about the still-friends and the used-to-be friends, and...

We have Brian Greene.

It is all so very amusing in its self-inflicted sardonicism.

Oooh, that word was too long and atypical. Chrome doesn't recognize it as a word. Well, fuck you, google. You aren't omnipotent yet. Just omnipresent. There's a difference.

 So... yeah. I'm left wondering about the choices that weren't so very different that would have put Serino and I with Danielle and Lauren as next door neighbors, babysitting Frank's kids as we talk about the good times back in Austin. Or the seemingly little choices that would have Mel and I painting walls together next weekend even though I wouldn't really want to. Or, for that matter, the random flukes of chance that didn't land me married shotgun style to any one of (guh) dozens of pretty and kinda pretty girls.

I could've ended up married and miserable just as easily as I could've ended up married and grateful.

None of those choices were really all that harsh, nor terribly "deep" at the time. Nobody faced a court martial or jail time or knew they missed out on marrying Brad Pitt or Mila Kunis. Nobody got hurt... often at all, but surely, at least, not permanently.

(wince)

Ok, some of us got hurt. By some of them. But I digress. Read the archives.

But we were all so close. In a universe so vast as Brian Greene paints it, where everything that could happen probably did, where even the fantastic breadth of what makes us "human" or even "unique" is but a random, but finite, occurrence on a scale so vast that every atom in my body is surely exactly duplicated a quadrillion light years from here on a planet just like ours with a bona fide twin in every possible way...

Sigh. I could have married Texas Lauren. Or Mel or Kim or... any of them. And we could have made it. Loved it. Lived it.

There exists a world, out there, where all of those great things happened and are happening and will happen. There exists a place where someone more like me than, well, me exists and is not blogging right now, not drunk right now, not enjoying a nice Napa cabernet. He has a clingy girl that wants to be a girlfriend and finds it refreshing, not disturbing, as I do. He misses his Mel and his Kim and his Amanda, yet hates his Laura less and loves the world a little more.

Those billions of other MEs out there aren't better or worse, though. They aren't anything. They are merely the end result of the sheer breadth of the cosmos.

Maybe I just found god.