#endless thread

I think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. That there isn't their life and our life. Nor your life and my life. That it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled with it as deep as entanglement goes.

― Anon

“As for grief, you'll find that it comes in waves. When the ship is first wrecked, you’re drowning with wreckage all around you. Everything floating around you reminds you of the beauty and the magnificence of the ship that was and is no more. And all you can do is float. You find some piece of the wreckage and you hang on for a while. Maybe it's something physical. Maybe it's a happy memory or a photograph. Maybe it's a person who is also floating. For a while, all you can do is float. Stay alive.

In the beginning, the waves are 100 hundred feet tall and they crash over you without mercy. They come 10 seconds apart and don't even give you time to catch your breath. All you can do is hang on and float. After a while, maybe weeks, maybe months, you'll find that the waves are still a hundred feet tall but they come further apart and when they come, they still crash all over you and wipe you out. But, in between, you can breathe and you can function. You never know what's going to trigger the grief. It might be a song or a picture. A street intersection. The smell of a cup of coffee. It can be just about anything. And the wave comes crashing. But in between the waves, there is life.

Somewhere down the line, and it's different for everyone, you find that the waves are only 80 feet tall or 50 feet tall. And while they still come, they come further apart and you can see them coming. An anniversary, a birthday, or Christmas, or landing at O'Hare International, you can see it coming for the most part and you prepare yourself. And when it washes over you, you know that somehow you will, again, come out the other side soaking wet, sputtering, still hanging on to some tiny piece of wreckage, but you'll come out.

Take it from an old guy. The waves never stop coming. And somehow you don't really want them to. But you learn that you'll survive them. And other waves will come and you'll survive them, too. If you're lucky you'll have lots of scars from lots of loves. And lots of shipwrecks.”

I loved listening to this short interview from the Endless Thread podcast on Here and Now today on many levels. My favorite level was proficiency in video games is the best preparation for proficiency in minimally invasive robot surgery.

Herman Cain, former businessman, politician and Republican candidate for president, is the inspiration behind the subreddit, who died in 2020 after contracting COVID-19. Before he died, Cain had made statements downplaying the pandemic and refused preventative measures such as mask-wearing.

Today's episode is a deep dive into The Herman Cain Award subreddit. We meet a moderator and a Cain Award nominee. But we find these two people on opposite sides of the COVID vaccine debate may have more in common than they realize.

"Dogs in Elk" is a story that went viral after being posted in an online forum in 1999. It was a hilarious and bloody plea for help, posted by a woman whose three small dogs had moved in to an elk carcass, taking up residence and refusing to leave.

The Endless Thread podcast performs a radio-play reading, and describes what little is known about the essay's history.

The podcast has been doing an ongoing series about the history behind memes, which has been very interesting.

Here’s the original essay, posted to the late Jerry Pournelle’s web forum.