I'm having a beer at my balcony in my hotel in Krabi and I'm listening to a live rock band in the distance play Smoke On The Water
How cool is it that somebody can write a song and have it played live all over the world decades later
And how cool is it to be able to recognize these songs- ordered sets of vibrations- to have them stored in the meat-computers we call brains
They next played Born To Be Wild, now playing Paranoid. I can't see them but I know I share a common bond with these faceless musicians
And how cool is it that I can encode these thoughts in symbols called language and send them through electromagnetic waves around the world
And you can read them, and hallucinate what I'm experiencing, and perhaps relate. Reality is already so much more magical than fantasy
One of my favorite essays begins by pointing out the fact that Harry Potter was written before Google and iPhones were ubiquitous
When they want to learn spells they use ancient technology called books. Dead wood inscribed with ink. Magic isn't as magical as modern tech
