Thoughts From Years Past

It’s been almost two full years of regular publishing here on Substack for The Cosmobiologist. And it has been one hack of a ride!

I’m not sure for others out there who write a lot how you prefer to keep tracks of your writing or notes over time, but one thing I used to do many years ago was keep a single running document of my writing or notes each year. These days, I mostly just keep notes in one place and go through it fairly often to find little evergreen gems to write about since I write so much, but there was a time when I wrote a lot more fiction and kept my notes more like a diary. But because of that, I can look back on some past years of my own writing and wonder about what I was thinking when I wrote those things.

For example, I was going through an old external drive and found some of my writings and notes around this time of year from back in 2016 through 2019.

I thought it would be fun to share some excerpts from those below.

You can tell me what you think was in my mind when I wrote those things in those years (and, if you like ‘em, let me know where you think I should take them if I were to write them out fully).

A writing challenge for today: use the words lawn, time, and check

Rolling about in the grass of the lawn on a hot summer’s day. Somewhere out there, away and beyond, the rest of the world is rolling by, but here is the place for now. The blades of the grass grow into the hands of a clock, some long, some short, and all of them pointing in just about any direction over the ground. Time has no meaning here and it’s not welcome here, at least not for now. The blue sky is patched with clumps and strips of cloud, with some sun beams shining through in some places. The enlivening stench of the Earth below grabs and pulls, as microbes and macrobes toil and churn the rock and the soil in the happenings of their lives. The inorganic, the organic, the matter, the life; the checks and balances of the cosmos from the smallest scale to the greatest. Time can wait, right now there’s just everything here. A point in time with a little bit of a curve on either side, falling away to no notice. Here on this lawn, in this grass with this Earth, all there is to know is now.

As Jackson sat talking with the strangers around their campfire, he suddenly noticed that in the fire, among the logs and the embers, were what appeared to be charred bones. As he stared further, he saw what looked like a human skull under one of the burning logs. Perhaps these strangers weren’t quite as friendly as he had hoped. But there was warmth and they were sharing some of their casked ale with him, something he hadn’t had in quite a long while. Still Jackson slowly drifted his hand down to his revolver to check that he could draw it quickly if needed.

After the ship came in contact with what appeared to be some trash from an advanced civilization floating in space (and which they brought onboard), the machines quickly came online and started acting to devour the ship and to use its resources to build more of themselves.

It was decided to use a large nuclear mining explosive to destroy the ship’s reactors, thus destroying the ship and as many of the machines as possible with it.

The Commander’s last words to the crew:

“Our mission was to set out into the unknown voids in time and in space, to explore the diversities of worlds and of living things, to find out, truly, once and for all, if we were alone in all of this. We have completed that mission in the greatest and the worst of ways. We don’t know where these machines came from, we don’t know how long they’ve been out here, and we don’t know if they’re even aware of what they’re doing. Whatever they are and wherever they’re from, we’ll never know. It has been an honor working with all of you.”

In the wilderness, [our main character] discovers that there are people who’ve found out how to live free away from the “zombies” who have been controlled for so long through tech, social media, and VR environments that they can’t think for themselves. We find out that there is a network of advanced AIs keeping the digital worlds alive for people but who also unintentionally are driving the hive-like behaviors of the zombies.

Honestly, I have so many started-stories and fragments of ideas to write about. If I were to take all of my notes through time and turn each into an essay, a short story, or a book, I would probably have need for an entire city library to hold everything. And I’d be willing to bet you have a good number of ideas of your own!

It’s fun to experience our minds wandering and tottering about on ideas, even if most of them will never be fully explore or realized and may just be something fun to think in the moment. But it is a lot of fun to revisit our old ideas anyway and to consider what we were thinking in those moments.

What’s your own favorite idea that you’ve had but have never followed through with?

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Until next time, stay curious!