Double Flee A

hotel california

I once heard someone say that since the release of this song it has been playing on a radio station somewhere in the world, constantly. There is no way of knowing this to be true, but when I was a kid and I heard that, I believed it. Kids believe a lot of things, like that they can do a cartwheel down the stairs on their fingertips. Did I ever post anything about that before?

Anyway, the rotation of the song Hotel California remained pretty much unchanged for my first twenty years in Tennessee; a couple of times a day on the classic rock station you knew it was going to come on.

Playlists change, even at the classic rock station, from year to year. One year might be Bob Seger heavy, then they might shift it to the more psychedelic Led Zeppelin for six months, and so forth. But Hotel California never changed, and it was this conspicuous transcendence of "the over-played rule" I suspected governed playlists at classic rock stations everywhere, that drove me to contemplate the nature of reality.

Hotel California became, for me, the basis of a thought experiment. "Is the world I experience just made up, and did the person making it up get lazy and that's why I have to hear the same song at the same rate my entire life?" Maybe I wasn't supposed to notice the song always being on, maybe I'd found a crack, and it made me want to find others. What a useless and sudden dead end that turned out to be. Nothing ever materialized, the world wasn't made up just for me to experience, classic rock radio stations are just swinging from the jock of Hotel California, for reasons I will never understand. It's on somewhere right now, I guarantee it.

I found out later there was a guy who also was investigating how the world, if it was made up, was made up very poorly. His name was Stephen Jay Gould, and his series of natural history articles was bound together into books like "the panda's thumb", in which it is demonstrated that if the panda was designed, it was designed very poorly. (Therefore it wasn't designed, kind of thing.) His book "wonderful life" is on my top twenty list. It was good to see that there were other more interesting ways to go with "is the world made up" thought process than the stupid Hotel California one.

Now I've seen enough evidence that the world developed on its own, according to a few simple rules (different life forms competing for the same resources, following the path of least resistance to get there, there's your panda's thumb) that I don't wonder after it any more.

posted by dale @ 9:01 AM