It was a windy day and she shouted at me from the street, two stories down below, that she needed a cigarette. I would throw them down in futility as they were continually caught in gusts of wind and carried off into trees; cigarette bird nests building up like snow drifts on remote Canadian highways. She kept on making the signal to throw down more: two hands raised towards the sky before quickly flicking her hands down towards her shoulders. 

“Throw more, Throw more.”

The pack was soon empty and I looked back into the hotel room, towards the end table, to see if another pack lay next to the bed. My eyes, however, were caught by the low quality carpet that the end table’s legs were plunged into. Each little, worn, tired loop of carpet seemed to be trying to lift the table up; I could hear each loop whispering about destiny and divinity as they believed themselves to be the foundation of all things; commands shouted among the loop groups at each of the four legs.

I saw a second pack atop the table, and gingerly walked over to pick it up, crushing as few of the carpet loops as possible.

I met most of my friends on the head of a pin. We had wandered aimlessly across a two dimensional surface of pockmark metal: manufacturing defects that undermined the sheen of a perfect cylinder. Heads down and shuffled feet continued until a moment when we suddenly found ourselves at the tip of a device meant for securing fabric or otherwise entertaining children as they pushed into the body of a plush tomato stuffed with batting. The loneliness of this single moment lead us to an opposite pole where a utopia meant a moment spread out in time; a circle that encompassed a place that belonged away from solitude.

John Playfair said on witnessing geological formations that had clearly taken millions of years to come to their current state, "The mind seemed to grow giddy by looking so far into the abyss of time." I stumbled on an article mentioning him talking about this (it's actually a good article) and it struck a chord with me about something I've been thinking about a lot recently: The Ping. The Ping is so named, not by me but a friend of mine (just recently, actually, when I had the pleasure of being put awash in her ideas and brilliance), as I was telling her about my hope that, in my lifetime, I will witness communication from aliens. 

And I'm not under the impression that we'll be sitting here on Earth and suddenly be in some Snapchat exchange with folks from another star system (maybe our own sister: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/05/our-sun-has-a-sister/361962/), but I think there will be a moment that a structure of information will wash over earth, a wave finally coming along as an overly calm break, and we will see it's inherent structure and realize that there is a message within it. Nothing fancy. Just a Ping. And it will be hundreds of years before anything really comes of it.

But the abyss that will open with The Ping will be altering of our experience. It will expand our dimensionality of how we see the world; something 2D, now is 3D. Or maybe it's a little like western movie sets that all become real buildings. And as I spoke about this desire for The Ping I realized the emotional quality that existed in how I was speaking to my friend (and that her face looked far less emotionally engaged), and that my Ping, is maybe not all people's Ping. And I thought suddenly about how when some alien pokes us with an electromagnetic wave, not everyone will look skyward as one large group and all have a new sense of their humanity. I think I will. But probably a lot of people will use it as a way to deepen previous convictions; to show they were right about X, Y, and Z. 

Most the time we are presented with new information our first response is to fold it into what we already know; to slightly augment, but mostly bolster what are the foundations of our truth. But The Ping is something that I think, for a moment, would pull me into a moment of reflection on the entirety of my truth. Like an accountant auditing a business, but instead of auditing finances, this would be an audit of truth. It doesn't mean everything is necessarily wrong, but there may be a lot of basics that have shifted in a subtle, but important, way.  

The Ping is romantic -- I'm romantic -- and there are small Pings, too. It's any moment that speaks to a fluidity in things that we have almost allowed to completely harden; time, space, and belief. It speaks to essences, infinities, and scales where language fails. But I think it's good to be looking bright eyed and bushy tailed to the heavens every once in awhile to see if The Ping has made its entrance. It's an outlook on the world that I feel is better than the alternatives (like irony and cynicism).

They said we were stacking stones, waiting for god. The best I could tell, we were just  making a clock tower with a big bell in it. The bell currently hung between two mules parked outside of a blacksmith's shop. They didn't have names, but everyone said their ears were perfectly shaped like almonds. The bell was suspended by a small bamboo stalk, across the mule's backs, hanging about 2 feet from the ground; dust settled easily under the bell and sound was absorbed as if carelessly walking into the ocean. Like I said, I didn't know much about why stones needed to be stacked, but over time -- cleaning the surfaces, making things square -- that bell ended up just about where the tops of the trees ended. I also don't think I ever figured out anything about god, but once that bell was struck, pulled gently by a rope attached to the braying of a donkey, the sound didn't walk aimlessly into the ocean, it seemed to wander around in the clouds; maybe a bit like someone sitting quietly alone reading a newspaper.

Has anything every been too fast? Or too furious? Seems impossible...

We'd practice together everyday while laying around on the floor of a friend's garage. Our first song was titled "Ken Griffey JR doesn't care how I drive, he just loves me." We thought it was hilarious and talked about what our friends would think about it when we eventually played it for them. We'd go round and round changing verses.

One night it got a bit late and we decided to go to the cinema after practice and see some Marvel movie that was in theaters. It was one of the ones where no one is wearing a cape. The theater had a new addition of ham and cheese popcorn; we both were really excited. I suggested we write a new song called, "Ham and cheese popcorn tastes good while falling in love in a theatre." She laughed and rolled her eyes. 

We never played any of our songs to our friends.

It's been exciting to see this piece come to life. It's also been awesome to finish a whole two days early from opening and have 48 hours to sit around, bite my nails, and hope nothing breaks. This has also been one of the more nebulous pieces I've made in recent memory, in that the ideas that have gone into it have contracted and expanded within my head a lot more than usual. Where it started is still there, but it's a bit like a 40 year old talking about what sort of lunches he had in kindergarten and how it currently impacts his life.