Monday, August 4, 2014

George Carlin on the Life of Ideas

Playboy Interview: George Carlin


 • PLAYBOY • JANUARY 1982



"There are two ways to think about this existence we have. One of them is that it’s Wednesday and it’s three fifteen and we’re talking here in my home, and at four o’clock I have to leave for another meeting. Now, that’s a reality. But there’s another reality. We’re in the solar system of a second-rate star, three quarters of the way out on a spiral arm of an average galaxy in a thing called the Local Group. And ours is only one of billions of galaxies, each of which has billions of stars. Some star systems are binary, and there could be a planet that revolves around a center of gravity between two binary stars. So you’d have two sunrises and two sunsets every day. One could be a red giant, the other a white dwarf; two different-sized, -shaped and -colored suns in the sky. And there might be other planets and comets. In other words, f#@k Wednesday, f#@k three fifteen, f#@k four o’clock, f#@k the United States, f#@k the earth. It’s all temporal bulls&!t. I like thinking about being out there and not thinking about the corporate structure, not worrying about freedom and not worrying about guns. I chose a life of ideas. That entertains me. That nourishes me. And that’s why I run from this conversation." --George Carlin, 1982

For more, please see http://longform.org/stories/playboy-interview-george-carlin

And no, the irony of re-publishing a mere snippet of a much longer article (which itself was re-published from the even longer original interview in Playboy) for the purpose of celebrating long form journalism did not escape me. While we're at it, no, the absurdity of obscuring the cuss words in a George Frickin' Carlin quote did not get by me, either. 

Yet, here we are, on a Monday night at 8:51 pm on a planet in the solar system of a second-rate star in an average galaxy.

Sublime.

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