Showbiz

There is no more quintessentially human experience than to be killed by your own invention while you’re showing it off.

In 1896, Sylvester H. Roper was demonstrating the new steam-propelled bicycle he had invented (beating, it must be said, several professional cyclists), when he crashed and died.

In 1912, as a publicity stunt, Franz Reichelt jumped from the Eiffel Tower wearing a full-body parachute of his own design, which didn’t deploy properly on the way down. His last words to the assembled crowd were “À bientôt”, or “See you soon”.

In 1924, Alexander Bogdanov, an early pioneer of blood transfusions, sought to increase his own lifespan by injecting himself with the blood of his younger students. Unfortunately, one of his students had malaria, and Bogdanov died soon after.

The climate apocalypse will be like the internet backwards.
It’ll be like a horror movie forwards.
It’ll be like a starfish shrivelling in a wheelie bin.

I guess this is less of a question and more of a comment.

I keep having this vision of an astronaut,
floating in space,
smiling serenely as he sets his own oxygen tank on fire.
It annoys me, this image.
It’s not even a metaphor.
It’s just literally what we’re doing.

I wish I could still be optimistic about space.
To still have those giddy Carl Sagany feelings where you let the sheer size of the Universe completely insignificise your sense of what’s possible.
But it seems like the only people who want to go space nowadays are billionaire creeps who want new worlds mainly so they can make new age-of-consent laws.
And I can feel my goals shifting to something more achievable,
which is just making sure that they burn along with the rest of us.

It’s not a particularly optimistic moment, is what I’m saying.
And I mean, Carl Sagan wrote all that stuff while thinking that nuclear bombs could drop at any moment, so I know it’s possible.
But right now it just feels like:
Armageddons in the mirror may be closer than they appear.

Which is when the mirror becomes a comfort.

My grandmother always said, the height of showbiz is shooting yourself out of a cannon
directly down the barrel of another cannon.

And if there’s one thing my grandmother taught me,
before she exploded,
it’s to always call the means of your death “showbiz”

so that people can laugh at it