Weird stuff is better than average stuff, that much is certain. If we stick too rigidly to our comfort zones, than any outside ideas are confusing at best and terrifying at worst.

Through frequent excursions outside of said comfort zone, we can prepare ourselves for the vast unknown in ways that will allow us to integrate new ideas gradually into our existing knowledge.

Let's not be too high minded - the same principals of which I'm speaking are as applicable to dirty jokes as they are to art or religion. Exposure to dirty jokes increases your tolerance for even dirtier jokes as exposure to Christianity increases your tolerance for Scientology.

For your own growth, instead of lamenting "Why does anybody believe/do that?!" - try to explain their beliefs or actions better than they could. Practice makes perfect.

Tube Cult 3

Miranda slowly rose, still dripping liquid from her gaunt, naked body. I made a mental note to double check the calorie levels being used in the tank as I watched the youngest male drape a terry cloth robe around her.

"My children," she repeated. "I saw that all of time is immediate."

"Yes!" "Yes, yes!" Their staggered responses came from all over the room. The boys were sitting or leaning on an array of lab equipment -- the eldest in the sole chair. The girls were prostrate at Miranda's feet.

I spoke up, partly to stifle the growing silence, and partly out of sincere concern, "Miranda... how long were you -"

"I saw that causality is an illusion," she snapped at me. "Reality is a stream of information culled of irrelevant bits."

Her "children" cooed quietly in chorus, "Causality... reality..."

I slowly backed away from Miranda who remained as motionless and unnerving as a gargoyle. I reached the desk and sat down in front of the monitors, checking over my shoulder one last time to ease my suspicion that Miranda would spring into a fury and claw out my eyeballs. My suspicion was not eased in the least.

I skimmed over the data that the computers had been collecting. Miranda had been in the tube for 6 weeks -- longer than any of our test animals. The charts showed that her brain activity had practically ceased. It was unlikely that she was even able to dream, so we were probably looking at brain damage. I doubt it was possible for her to have "seen" anything.

"Consciousness!"

I nearly shit my pants as I leaped up and sent the office chair rolling out behind me. Miranda had spoken centimeters from my ear.

"... is not strictly physiological. We made the mistake of discounting the metaphysical. These bits were in fact relevant. I saw that."

Tube Cult 2

I turned to sprint to the back room housing the stasis chamber and slipped on the pool of coffee nearly falling to all fours. I clambered to the security door and fell against it looking for my security card. I found it and slid it wildly through the card reader until finally the door opened and the smell of stale sweat and incense poured out of the room.

It was dimly lit with candles whose light barely overcame the neon blue glow of the stasis fluid inside of the chamber. There was no scientific reason for it's color, the fluid itself was clear; Miranda said she just thought it looked awesome. Miranda looked awesome now, bathed in that neon blue light, suspended as if levitating, and completely naked. She was inside the chamber which was a clear glass tube about three feet in diameter and eight feet in height.

I was stunned, standing there contemplating what is must be like to be in stasis. Every physiological process in Miranda's body was virtually halted, with the exception of higher brain function. She wasn't breathing and her heart wasn't beating except for what could rightly be described as random signals "escaping" from the brain stem. Before the first human trials, for all we knew the chimpanzees were completely unconscious up until the point we drained the stasis fluid and administered the injection to wake them.

These thoughts continued to race through my mind while I slowly scanned the room and saw the source of the smell. Around the base of the stasis chamber, intermixed with the ring skinny white candles, were incense burners silently smoking. Around the ring of candles and incense there was a ring of nude students prostrate and whispering - their lips almost touching the floor. I recognized the four males as students from around campus, but the three females were strangers.

The hum from the equipment in the room suddenly turned into a din of beeping and buzzing, but above all I could hear the naked students on the floor wailing. I think that must be what it sounded like when Pharaohs died. Suddenly Miranda twitched briefly in the fluid as it began to drain into the floor of the tube. The volume of the wailing increased, and I could finally make out words, "It's time! Miranda's here! Get the syringe!"

By this time I was backed up against the wall as if the floor were crumbling from the center and was about to  give way underneath my feet. I watched the females of the group scatter about the room. The thin brunette ran to the controls and ran the program to raise the glass tube into the ceiling. She continued typing rapidly to confirm that Miranda's vital signs were becoming stronger as expected.

The heavy brunette strode to the glass cabinet on the wall and began preparing the syringe to wake Miranda, and the blonde took a large wad of sheets and towels from a closet and quickly formed a bed extending from the stasis chamber out into the middle of the floor.

The males collected Miranda from the metal grating at the floor of the stasis chamber, who was now crumpled up like a rag doll. They laid her out neatly on her back in the makeshift bedding. The heavy brunette administered the shot, and the group reformed their circle around Miranda. They rocked back and forth on their knees praying. Miranda started shivering violently and suddenly stasis fluid began to flow from her nose and mouth. Now she was coughing and expelling the fluid in short geysers. The crowd started wailing again.

The strength slowly drained from my legs and I slid slowly to the floor. I leaned against the wall unable to do anything but watch in awe.

Miranda was now catching her breath and her hands weakly went from one student to the next, touching their heads as they wailed. When she had touched every one, they were suddenly quiet. Miranda's mouthed opened and then stayed motionless for a moment before quietly saying, "My children."

The heavy brunette clasped her hands together and put them over Miranda's navel, and without raising her head she asked "Where did you go? What did you see?"

Tube Cult 1

I was thrilled at the prospect of finally getting off the road and away from the scrutiny of HD cameras and studio lights. I was exhausted from answering the same inane questions at every stop. Univision questioned the impact of our invention on immigration. Fox News accused us of being godless scientists out to prove some crackpot theory, consequences be damned. CNN dropped our recorded segment and instead ran a trending cat video.

How fucking humiliating.

Finally, after nearly a year of touring, Miranda emailed me saying that she needed me back at the lab at MIT urgently. That kind of message was typical of Miranda, so I wasn't worried. To the contrary, I rushed back home as fast as possible to get back to our now famous research developing what we refer to internally as "stasis chambers." It was Miranda's enthusiasm which inspired us, honestly. She believed that if we had stasis technology ready now, then that could enable space travel to distant galaxies today.

Sadly, all stasis chamber prototypes thus far have only enabled up to several weeks of stasis. Even state of the art technology of year of our lord 2012 could only get one stranded in 6 weeks, not to another galaxy. Six weeks plus 60 years of your life wouldn't even get you to the nearest star. Nevertheless, we believed our research would be vital one day, and it looked like the American public agreed.

Before I was volunteered for the position of Chief PR Liason, we were designing our first human trials to be conducted on student volunteers. Miranda had already compiled a roster and contacted the test subjects as I flew off to my first stop in New York. No information on those trials had been released yet, even to me.

The Monday after arriving home, I showed up to the office with my laptop bag and my coffee excited to hear the scoop from Miranda. I couldn't find her. The lights in her office were off. Her desk looked like he hadn't used it in weeks.

I swiped my card to enter the lab and turned on the lights inside. Everything was quiet. Papers were stacked neatly on the matte black counter tops. The 3x3 bank of computer monitors that display sensor readings for our latest stasis chamber prototype were black.

"Slackers." I flipped the switch to turn on the monitors and grabbed the latest status report from the top of the stack and began reading, proud to be the first one doing anything useful that day.

I sipped my coffee over the report. "Subject 14 reported the same continuous dream scenario. In stasis for 6 hours but has recollection of one continuous dream that seemed to last for months in which Subject 14 was involved in drug trafficking for a troupe of mimes from Bolivia."

One dream that seemed to last for months? Wild stuff.

The report continued, "Assuming that human subjects can endure the entire 6 week safe period of stasis, the subject could live through years of dream experiences. Tomorrow is the big day."

Unprofessional shit, leaving personal memos in your status report. I glanced up at the monitors and back at the report. My brain was still slowly processing what was on the screens as my grip loosened on the coffee and the scalding black liquid ran down my legs.

Somebody was in the stasis chamber at that very moment, and their life signs were faint.

Today was about 13.75 billion years in the making. Any one of those years, months, days, hours, or moments since the beginning of time could have happened differently and contributed to a wildly different present.

Likewise, my actions at this very moment could be influencing billions of years of history before it's even made.

This is why I strive to return the toilet seat to the down position.

It's at this point where chaos theory and cosmology meet to create quite a dissonant worldview. My actions, beliefs, or even my entire life - even the lives of every living thing on the planet, are relatively minuscule in "the scheme of things." But "the scheme of things" must be understood as a system of actors which are interconnected in mostly undiscovered relationships, where minute changes in any part of the system can have a surprisingly substantial impact elsewhere in the system, or even on the system itself.

Even in a still bucket of water, the addition or subtraction of a single molecule impacts the position, orientation, and behavior of an incalculable number of molecules sharing the bucket.

For some people, these beliefs could paralyze day to day decision making, but for me, it comforts me to know that perhaps my negative thoughts toward that Pontiac that just cut me off will perhaps cascade into a lifetime of misery and dissatisfaction for the driver.

I packed up my brief case and hurried to the car, hoping to beat the traffic home. I went over the bridge and merged onto the main strip and turned onto the long web of roads that would eventually lead to my home where my wife and son would be waiting.

I thought about the joke my boss told that morning and laughed again. He always came equipped with jokes that were only funny because of their desperate attempt at being wholesome and inoffensive. The best one he told was about a talking fish. Or actually, it may have been a donkey. No - it was pitch black outside and the man mistook the donkey for his wife -- something of that nature. Everybody got a kick out of it, anyway.

I pulled into the drive way and put the car in park and reached over to pick up my briefcase.

"Shit!" I shrieked. There was a porcelain white girl with auburn hair grinning from ear to ear with her face pressed against the passenger window. "What in the hell are you doing here, girl?" I popped open the door and jumped up and tried to look stern.

The girl came running around the front of the car with her arms held out yelling, "Daddy! Daddy! Daddy! Daddy!" She jumped as high as she could but only managed to hug my thigh.

"Laura! Get out here and get this child off of me!" I couldn't pry myself free from her, so I hobbled to the front door hoping my wife would come to help me, but a stranger stood in the doorway wearing an apron and drying her hands on a dish towel.

She looked deeply concerned. "Honey, what's the matter?"

"Who are you!? What the fuck is going on here?!"

"Jim! Language!"

I staggered backwards, dropping my briefcase and almost falling. My eyes darted around frantically looking for anything familiar, but I was lost. I had driven down the wrong road to the wrong house and been greeted by the wrong family. Jesus - save me from this place. I stumbled to the car and fell into the driver's seat and got ready to leave as fast as I could, but then I froze. The girl was clinging to her mother's apron, crying. She looked like she had just seen her father fall out of a plane at cruise altitude. I turned the car off and calmly stepped out of the car. I cautiously walked to the front door where they stood. "I'm sorry," I said to them.

"Welcome home."

My mother taught me that anything small enough to fit into a pocketbook must be cheap, otherwise people would think of it as free. In love we torture ourselves waiting for the next petty favor, but we take the important things for granted. We prosecute marijuana dealers to the fullest extent of the law, but turn a blind eye to unlawful business that occurs on the scale of trillions of dollars.

The human mind fixates on the details which we believe we can more easily control, but perhaps too often and too soon we let the big picture go unnoticed to avoid feeling powerless.