Tubular

"My heart is sore pained within me:
and the terrors of death are fallen upon me.

Fear and trembling have seized me:
and darkness has overwhelmed me.

And I said: o that I had wings like a dove!
For then I would fly away and be at rest.

Lo, would I flee far away,
and live in the wilderness.

I would wait for him who will save me
from my cowardice and from the storm.

PSALM 55 "

For all its weirdness the bible has some good quotes in it. That one is from one of my favourite books, "The Many Coloured Land" by Julian May. When I looked up the actual passage on the net it was different in every source; translation issues I suppose, but the version the author used is cooler than them all. It's possible he took some poetic license, or maybe his version of the bible is just cooler than the rest. Strangely I also came across this passage from "The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" which is also cool:

"'I always thought that about the Garden of Eden story,' said Ford.

'Eh?'

'Garden of Eden. Tree. Apple. That bit, remember?'

'Yes, of course I do.'

'Your God person puts an apple in the middle of a garden and says, do what you like guys, oh, but don't eat the apple. Surprise, surprise, they eat it and he leaps out from behind a bush shouting 'Gotcha.' It wouldn't have made any difference if they hadn't eaten it.'

'Why not?'

'Because if you're dealing with somebody who has the sort of mentality which likes leaving hats on the pavement with bricks under them you know perfectly well they won't give up. They'll get you in the end.'

'What are you talking about?'

'Never mind, eat the fruit.'

'You know, this place almost looks like the Garden of Eden.'

'Eat the fruit.'

'Sounds quite like it too.' "

Ahh they were good books too. I may have to read them again soon.
Anyway the main point of this post was to have a chat about YouTube. I never really paid much attention to it till yesterday, when Amy showed me that Hugs video. Kind of made me realise that when you get millions of people posting up videos then every now and again you're going to get something quite special appearing. There's a certain strange feeling you get when you watch a video like that knowing that millions of other people have watched it too and felt the same way you do. It's perhaps an inkling of some kind of collective worldwide spirit of goodwill, or a shadow of some kind of great and beautiful higher state of human existance that may one day be achievable, if we can get the number of people embracing that spirit to 10 billion rather than 3 million. There's certainly a long way to go and lots of fucked up things that need to be fixed before it can happen, but maybe there is some hope for humanity in the distant future.
Aside from that aspect of YouTube there was also the video of the guy who took a picture of himself every day for 6 years. I've seen time-lapse videos before but there was a different feeling when it was over six years and it was a persons life flashing past. His hair was rather messy and he managed to position himself in almost the same spot for every photo, so it had a rather cool effect of him standing there with his hair getting blasted about by the winds of time while the world rushed past around him. Seeing things like that always makes me consider the nature of time and our perceptions of it. It's really an amazing phenomena, somehow allowing us to experience our little piece of eternity.