7 Dave’s Cat
Dave once had a pet cat.
He had bought it from a pet shop, much to the surprise of the owner, who, as his customers were all penguins, mostly sold just fish.
Dave had bought it to try out an experiment. He had got the idea for his experiment from a magazine article about a man called Schrödinger.
This guy had thought up an experiment with a cat in a box, where you didn’t know if the cat was alive or dead or not, or something like that, and knowing the answer to the problem would mean answering the deepest mysteries of the universe.
It was a big problem in physics where particles didn’t exist until you consciously perceived them, and it didn’t make any sense to anyone. They had described it as the large awkward ‘elephant in the room problem’. So Dave thought he could help.
So on the way to the pet shop, Dave had also picked up an unwanted cardboard box from the supermarket, one which was big enough for the cat to go in, and with no holes in it so that it couldn’t cheat. He had asked at the supermarket for the other things needed in the experiment, a hammer, a bottle of poison, and some radioactive plutonium.
However, annoyingly, they were completely out of stock, which was probably due to them having a buy one get one free promotion the week before or something.
So he made do with a baited rat trap, and a lottery scratchcard glued to it to create the same sort of random effect.
He had popped them into his shopping trolley on his way round, which irritatingly seemed to veer off in different directions all the time, as if it had a mind of its own, which probably accounted for all the strange looks he was getting.
Perhaps they are just jealous he thought.
When he got back home, Dave had set it all up and had sat there quietly for an hour or two trying to work it all out; just staring at the box with the cat in it with the trap and the lottery card, or perhaps just at a box with no cat in it at all. In the time that he was thinking he also tried to think of a name for the cat, and as it was a male cat he decided to call it Dave.
Dave the Cat.
It was a really tough thing, trying to work out if the cat was dead, or not, or even if it was still in there. Eventually after two more hours he got fed up of waiting for the answer to arrive, and he quickly stuck his wing in under the lid, just to have a quick feel, to see if it was still in there and moving.
He had figured that without actually looking at it, without perceiving it, this would give him the information he needed without being conscious of it. He figured that if he did it fast enough, then the action wouldn’t count as ‘perceiving’ it, and he would know the answer. He would sort of trick it, unsuspecting like, and get the information quickly and rapidly, without actually changing it, or disturbing it.
Sort of catch it unawares.
It had been a very long and embarrassing five hours in casualty, and Dave shuddered at the memory.
The worst of it had been explaining how it had happened to the doctor, along with the strange looks at him in the waiting room, with his best scarf wrapped around his wing. But mostly at the loud cardboard box next to him which growled warningly when even anyone came near it.
It was all fine until an old lady had come in with a little dog called Miffy. She had sat down and put Miffy on the seat next to Dave. Apparently Miffy had had become quite nervous and irritable after his operation two weeks before.
It had been a ‘casteration’, whatever that was, which was ‘necessary’ as he was becoming ‘troublesome’. Miffy did look quite nervous and insecure.
The lady had asked Dave if he didn’t mind if she opened the box, and say hello to his ‘kitty’. Dave didn’t mind, but unfortunately ‘kitty’ did, and Dave had to go back to the queue again while the doctors spent ten minutes detaching ‘kitty’ from her face.
Nature was a strange thing, and worked in very mysterious ways.
Miffy though looked quite pleased and excited at the incident for some reason. But then he looked sad again when the lady came back. Dave felt sorry for Miffy.
While she was away Miffy had told him conspiratorially, that the lady had given him the operation as part of the global demasculination control process that was going on, whatever that was, something to do with the competing female side of the collective mind.
Apparently she was very ‘New Age’, whatever than meant, and she was behaving this way in reaction to the male Jungian-style control psychology, which had in itself become a sort of religion, or collective control and belief structure.
This was also why apparently Jung was surrounded by powerful women who were trying to control him, and making sure he didn’t do anything dangerous like breaking it, or stupid like seeing too much and really working it all out.
But Dave wasn’t really into conspiracy theories, and he just smiled back politely.
Dave had read up quite a lot of psychology and philosophy stuff; Jung, Gebser, Deleuze, Sloterdijk, and even seen some very modern stuff on the Internet, and of course on ‘Penguintube’ where it was all made very obvious.
So he knew a lot about what was really going on, and what it all meant and how it all worked, and how easy it was to be drawn into assumptions about what it was all about.
You just had to see what had meaning, structure and logic, combined with scientific proof, and not get drawn along with too much of some of that psychobabble.
It wasn’t all really his thing, he had just been driven by the need to find out what was going on and what it all meant, some understanding of what was happening to him and what was going on, without getting drawn into these new ‘religions’.
Actually his ‘religion’ was more along the lines of fishing and sunbathing, and the structured management of doing what his wife asked him to do as quickly as possible so he could maximise time spent on the first two things.
They say that ‘curiosity killed the cat’, but Dave thought Miffy was hoping it would be the other way around. Dave also thought it was strange how dogs had evolved; what had made them be what they were, what had made them change into what they had to be today. Why did they behave so much like their owners, what did that say about them, and why had nobody thought about this?
To pass the time, Dave had started reading some of the magazines on the table in the waiting room. There was one which had an article on the new Mars Rover which was very interesting, Dave liked space things, and especially things on Mars.
This Rover was called Curiosity, which again was a strange coincidence.
There was another magazine which was called Mindless Gossip that the woman had been reading, and it seemed to be more of a comic with pictures of people. Dave couldn’t help have a quick look through.
On the fifth page, along with lots of other adverts for things you may want but didn’t need, like trousers, there was one for remote controlled collars, which were decorated with diamantes in a choice of colours from red to blue-white with LEDs, and there were even invisible ones.
Apparently the remote control was for training purposes, to give instructions and administer correction. The advert had a banner across it
Black Friday Special
Now with free bag of reward treats
for the little hero in your home.
Dave put the magazine down quickly, and was careful to avoid any eye contact.
The lady who ‘owned’ Miffy eventually came back. Luckily she didn’t blame Dave and seemed to be quite polite about it all. She picked up a newspaper from the table and started to read it. Dave couldn’t help looking over her shoulder.
The articles in the paper all seemed to be all about violence, politics, and worldwide chaos.
She eventually closed up the paper and started re-reading the front cover again; it was all about soap operas, explaining which TV, film, and sports stars were sleeping with who, what they were wearing, and who had operations to make them look strange.
“Isn’t it terrible all this news?” said the woman putting the paper bac
k down on the table and gesturing at it to Dave.
“Why is everything in such chaos, and why doesn’t someone just do something about it all?”
She looked at Dave, Dave looked at Miffy, who gave him that ‘See? I told you’ and then that ‘duhhh’ exasperated look.
Any potential to cause change by this ‘hero’ had been effectively countered by a whole range of subtle and sophisticated control systems, from attitudes, chemicals, beliefs, and physical constraints.
It was hard to be a tall poppy when someone has cut your leaves off.
When it was eventually Dave’s turn, the nurse was very kind and gentle bandaging his wing up, explaining that that sort of thing happened all the time and that this had been the third one that day. Which had made Dave feel a little better, she was very kind and Dave liked her a lot.
Dave looked down at the ground, sighed, and shuddered again in embarrassment.
Dave thought that the fundamental problem in general was perception; after all the cat knew it was in the box, it knew if it was alive or dead or not, and that knowledge was probably coming from the cat’s mind. Probably the box knew too, and everything else around did as well.
It was just Dave that didn’t, or perhaps he did, but he wasn’t letting himself know, after all he didn’t need to know everything.
So this view of reality that we had was somewhat fundamentally flawed. We were perhaps looking at everything in the wrong way, from the wrong direction, and only in part. He was trying to describe it all from one way, of what we knew, understood, and what we could perceive as physical reality.
Which obviously was a limited perception, a small piece of it all, from a narrow set of dimensional thinking. So with only one side of the story, you could only describe what the other side was like by what you knew, which was fine up to a point.
We were trying to organise it all, make sense of it from the wrong direction or context, when of course it didn’t if you only had a limited scope. There was perhaps a more complex reality of which we were only seeing part, a sort of reality within reality, of which we could only make part sense of and perceive, or only needed to, as the other larger part didn’t or wasn’t useful or have meaning, yet.
Perhaps it was all evolving together, one big system, one within another, all exchanging programming information, defining and influencing one other, and that it had all that had been going on for a long time.
Dave had also read another article in the magazine that said that everything was a hologram, and that everything could exist anywhere in the universe instantly, and that things only existed if you saw them with your mind, whatever that was, and wherever it lived.
It sounded like an odd way of looking at things, especially as they all obviously weren’t everywhere.
If everything was a hologram or software or information, then we were only able to see things from that perspective, and in that context. So when you went down to the basic binary code and pixels, there was nothing below that that made any sense.
Obviously that information was being created or projected from something else that did, something that was trying to make sense of itself, like iron filings in a field, that gave you the shape, direction and scope of a field as it changed and developed; but you couldn’t actually see it, but it was there, and you were only seeing the shape of it.
But the field was not there to see - it was like gravity you couldn’t see that – you could only perceive it by what it affected.
Dave liked gravity, he was very grateful for it, equally he liked the ground, they were both very much ‘in the now’ things, and you knew where you were with both of them.
It was probably where his mind was - in that field thing all around him like a bubble but with no time or space to it. It was translating part of itself into something he could see and feel, along with everything else. But not all at once. It probably knew the cat was in the box, as the cat was part of it, and the box too.
Perhaps it knew everything, or was just like some sort of mind operating framework, on which everything existed. If it knew about the cat he wished it had told him - told him if it was still there or not, and or, dead.
He rubbed his wing where it still ached from the memory; somehow it didn’t feel like a hologram.
The next day he had taken the cat back to the pet shop and asked for a refund. He explained that the problem was that the cat wasn’t dead, it hadn’t ‘shuffled off its mortal coil’, and worse than that, he could still see it, so it also hadn’t ‘ceased to be’. He had then waved his bandaged wing at the shopkeeper as evidence.
The shopkeeper was surprisingly friendly, and very quick to exchange the cat for some fish, he even helped Dave out of the door, and put some extra fish in his box free of charge.
The problem now was that Dave had to try and start thinking ‘bigger’. He had to put himself into something that had a bigger perspective, look at things from another direction, and think of things in a different way, outside physical reality, in a different way to that which he had evolved to do so in the past.
Which meant he was going to need a bigger box.
One that was big enough even for an elephant.
8 Dave’s Christmas Hat
Dave didn’t like Christmas. It wasn’t that he had anything against it; it was just that he was expected to do so many things, and it was always a bit of a let-down, you know, always somewhat disappointing, overhyped, predictable?
He was supposed to get all excited for weeks beforehand; he was supposed to get presents and cards for people, relatives, even ones he didn’t like. He was supposed to sing songs, eat too much, see the same old movies, and watch everyone else having a great time, just doing the same old thing year after year.
But not Dave. This year he just couldn’t see the point.
Worst of all though, and this really was the most awful bit, he was supposed to wear his Christmas Hat; the red woollen itchy one, with the white pom-pom on the end of the pointless floppy cone. Every year it came out of the Christmas box.
Every year, he had to put it on, and every year he had to keep it on, for days.
Of course, it itched like mad, especially in the heat, and he looked really stupid in it.
He really hated that hat.
So Dave was not a happy bunny, and even though he didn’t know what a bunny was, he was sure he wouldn’t be a happy one. The only thing he knew about bunnies was that they lived down rabbit holes, and they lived in fear and ignorance, and were controlled by chemicals.
In any case he certainly wasn’t one, and he certainly wasn’t a happy penguin, that was for sure.
He could never understand what Christmas was all for, and why it was all during the hottest time of the year, when the sun never went down, so you couldn’t sleep off the hangovers.
His wife seemed to love Christmas though; she would get all excited - looking forward to it all, wrapping presents, sending cards. Which to Dave was all a bit odd and pointless, as they saw all the same penguins every day anyway, so what was the bloody point.
She also spent a lot of time deciding what she was going to wear, and getting anxious if ‘the big day’ would all go ‘OK’, and everyone be ‘merry’.
She always wanted everything to be ‘just right’, ‘perfect’, ‘happy and jolly’, spending almost all day putting up bits of coloured seaweed here and there, on bits of stupid driftwood. Which he had to help with, because it was ‘traditional’, oh and did he mention ‘stupid’?
He had tried to work out why it had all started, and when it had all began, and what exactly was being celebrated. He asked his best mate –
“Well,” said his mate “its traditional innit? You know one of them pagan festival fingies, wot sort of got taken over? All to mark the end of the year, and get rid of all the food, you know, and everyone hopes it will be a white Christmas?”
And he laughed.
Dave looked confused.
“Look, it’s a laugh!!” His mate continued, �
�Something to get everyone together, have a bit of fun, a bit of a singsong, you know, tell a few stories, jokes, games, dancing that sort of fing - catch up on some gossip. Nuffin’ wrong with that is there?”
And he looked at Dave questioningly.
Dave wasn’t so sure though, and after several hours of asking around, nobody could really give him a proper answer. It seemed that nobody knew why they were doing it, or what it was really for.
But of course, in doing so he had also made everyone else think about it, and he had started to make people worry, and now he was also worried; worried that he may be turning into a bit of a grouch.
Dave The Penguin Page 9