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8.7.2014

Magyar, Interrupted


I was looking for a sensible summary of the many worlds theory, and what did I find? A cat, who does not exist. Or maybe she does. Maybe she is dead and alive at the same time...

My cat is mine. Her name is Miina, which means a mine in Finnish. You know, like a Claymore. I do not own her. Her personality, her life is hers and hers alone... and certainly not Mr Schrödinger's. I refuse to accept the outcome of that dude's thought experiment, or the paradox illuminated by it, from which (the refusal, not the experiment) follows that nothing can ever happen. The world is fixed, as it is, and will never change. Nothing will happen, period.

There, I said it. We are standing beside a road, under a tree, waiting, and shall live happily ever after. Agreed?

Let's move on to happier thoughts.

But it is the thinking that is the tricky part.

If up to a point the cat inside the box is both alive and dead, there has to be a trigger, a little something that eliminates the other outcome... for instance, the possibility that the cat will survive the experiment. A trigger that fires the bullet that drops one of the two possible outcomes.

And that trigger just might be a thought. A teeny weeny innocent little slip of the tongue, I mean, mind.

I don't think opening the box qualifies as the trigger. No, something has to happen (or not happen) before someone opens the box.

This line of thinking can drive you nuts. Especially, if you happen to be me, and try not to think about my cat. Who, again, isn't mine, but hers and hers alone...

Is it possible for something to own itself?

To own something, you have to be something other than the thing that you're supposed to own; outside of it, so to speak.

All right. Make no mistake: NOBODY owns my (pardon the expression) cat. Not even her.

Are we clear on this? Good, excellent. Can we now just move the fuck on?

He's scared. He's really, really scared now.

Who's scared? Who said that?

Who am I?

This is the kind of shit that too much reflection and introspection and contraception may lead to. The kind of shit that drove my cousin to off himself. Although I can't be positive about that.

No one can. No one is able to tell you the infinite imaginable reasons behind someone's decision to die. There are so many candidates for a reason, countless alternatives, and they only multiply the second you try to grasp them.

You can start with just one thought. The fear of doing something irredeemable. Like turning a live cat into a dead cat. Some say that both cats exist at the same time, but I don't buy that crap.

It is precisely the kind of scifi pudding that, if you eat too much of it, will lead you into believing "the theory of many worlds"... that all the opportunities you lost, the chances you missed, they are still there, preserved in a freezer next to Walt Disney's corpse (if it ain't his, then whose is it?), and all you have to do is go back in time, in your mind, and the life you didn't live will actually come to pass.

And that's the idea, the reason why I interrupted Magyar in the first place.

Now, if you'll excuse me, we have some Germans to beat up. Figuratively speaking, of course.

I'm laying my trust at the feet of Fred's. The feet aren't his, but cut me some slack, will ya? Fred is my alter ego. No, I am Fred. Fred is me. In the best of all possible worlds.

We shan't overcome, and you can count on that, baby.





Mr Schrödinger didn't take into account one thing. The cat itself, who's a ferocius little beast, and will storm out of the box the second she damn well pleases, if I don't get to her first. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is life.

That is action.



Read the next dispatch,
"GRU and the Theory of Many worlds,"
here.

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