A Likely Not-So-Short History Lesson and a View on the World According to Bonnie Speed

 

Recorded during 05-150 Analysis of Engineering

Inspired by events of W98

February 24, 1998

 

There once was a time historians consider of little consequence, when all had their designated place. The world was without mystery or wonder and every being knew what lay ahead, including all consequences to every action.

 

Life was simple.

 

All essence was of such a simplistic nature that alarm clocks were fascinating.  It was generally known that if you jumped up, you would come down, and nothing could change that.  The masses were aware that if you harassed a bear, you’d come away with significantly less skin.  And nobody pondered over how they got the caramel in the Caramilk bar – they knew.

 

Every day the sun rose and every night the moon gathered with starry brilliance in the night sky.  Everyone relied on that; a one constant occurrence amongst changing seasons and ever illusive feasts of fortune (i.e. laughing at people who pay one hundred dollars for six tapes of an A&E special presentation whey they could have quite easily taped it off TV with a five dollar tape).

 

Sometimes little fat fish were heard reciting Shakespeare and proving The Mean Value Theorem, but people never wondered.  It was generally known that fish have always had more folds in their brains than Homo sapiens anyway.

 

Once, rumour has it, someone disputed the fact that Calculus is the root of all evil and attempted to prove it with some wild story about some newt in a wig and a tree that threw apples.  Obviously nothing ever became of that.

 

It was a fine time.

 

An entire civilization lived in harmony, animals and plants and rocks and water all existed in a time before the magnetic poles shifted. North was south and south was north and everything was positive.  Everybody was positive.  When glaring at an approaching cumulo-nimbus cloud looming over the horizon people would sing “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!” at the top of their lungs, since to be positive was the logical thing to do.

 

With the absence of negative, it was almost as if there existed no positive, for positive is contrary to negative and how can +3 exist without –3? Consequently, the world saw no matrices or static guard or blacklight or bobsledding.

 

And that was the way, and it was good.

 

Then the poles did shift.  The world did change.  The shifting brought on the spontaneous generation of the all-powerful negative, followed by margarine, then redox reactions and then bile, broccoli and basement cellars.  All of the afore mentioned which, foreign to the once prosperous and thriving world, altered things so dramatically that the word “whatever” changed its meaning from an innocent pronoun to an everyday expression used to display mendacious doubt.

 

Things were never the same.