theprisoner wrote:
Hey Gadget Guru, ya know, it's rare i find somebody who displays a higher linguistic dexterity than myself. kudos to you.
Thanks, but I do this mainly because I discovered some years ago that "chicks dig words". It amazed me when I learned that most guys on dating sites apparently make NO effort to impress women with what they write, so once I knew that, I found that even moderate effort expended would pay dividends (until they eventually learned that other expected life skills are not necessarily concomitant in me).
About 15 years ago, this response from one particularly intriguing woman kind of "put me over the top" in dedicating myself to trying to evoke a strong emotional response by writing something compelling:
"Wow. Thanks for the great response. Best one yet."
When I first saw her profile, I thought "No way she's going to even respond to me unless I can make myself stand out", so I came up with this silliness for the initial email, which apparently struck a chord with her:
"Born in the radioactive inferno of a star, a pair of carbon atoms drifts aimlessly through the cosmos. They cling to one another, spinning round and round, dancing in the void. Eons pass, and they find their way to a gathering of others. Slowly they amass, an irresistible force drawing them all near. From the sparse clouds of dust billions, then trillions uncounted join into something more. This nascent conglomeration of scintilla becomes a new planet, orbiting a young star. Soon pulled apart by immense forces, the pair of atoms lose contact with each other, and find themselves trapped in a chaotic and violent storm of creation.
Intense heat, immense pressure forces matter into new structures. Continents form, oceans condense, mountains rise. Ages pass, and the new planet settles down into a calmer state. Near the ocean lies a secluded valley, still visibly torn by the great stress of its birth. In a hollow in the rock a small pool of still water sits, containing methane, ammonia and hydrogen. As has happened many times before, a bolt of lightning from the clouds above strikes. This time, however, something is different. A seemingly innocuous new compound has formed from the energy of the strike. The precursors of life have spontaneously asserted themselves upon this place.
This new force upon the planet will seem at first unworthy of comment, and promising little. But progress is made, despite countless failures and missed opportunities. Variations in pattern lead to new opportunities. One tiny mutation spawns a whole new line of development. Eventually this progression leads to a marvelous level of sophistication, allowing a mere collection of atoms to become aware of its own existence.
Billions of years have passed, and yet our original pair of simple carbon atoms have never found their way into the stream of life. But at last their day has arrived, and they begin their new era by being integrated into most complex and wonderful structure ever known, that of the human brain. Each of the pair of atoms finds itself within the mind of a clever creature, one that considers itself apart from others of it's kind. But these two minds are just two of over six billion, separated by distance, isolated by inclination.
The end of this story has not yet been written, as the fate of the two motes is as of yet unknown."
And also this (which I had written earlier, but it seemed appropriate to add at the end):
"So what brings you to this marketplace of mysteriously monikered misters and maidens? I think that this method of finding a potential life partner is more than a little strange, don't you agree?
Imagine, with subtle movements of my fingers, I close tiny switches. A trickle of current is allowed to flow, stimulating registers in a silicon chip. Another series of circuits translates the state of those registers into a cacophonous sound, oscillating along a few miles of copper wire. The sound is then pulsed into laser light, bounced through a maze of paths and dead ends, ultimately to be reconstructed at the other end as nothing more than an array of tiny glowing dots on the face of your screen.
And with just these dry, technical functions as my intermediary, I expect to give some impression of who I am, what my dreams are, the most indefinable aspects of humanity. It's all just bizarre. Any alien anthropologists observing mating rituals of early 21st century humans must be confused as hell."
_________________
Darron, temporary "Rat of NIMH"
16 Oct 2021, 9:58 am
