The weirdness that is my brain.

Time is precious. Very precious. So precious it is, that we are each given a very small portion of it, yet must work and work to do make some sort of important contribution within the unknown fractional amount we have. I, on the other hand, have decided, apparently, that I will "credit" my time to the future.

Let me explain.

When I feel I have something important to do, I want lots of uninterrupted time in which to do it. I plan on taking this time at some future date, let's call this date "Wednesday," when I have no guitar lessons or meetings that I have to go to. What ends up happening is I get 1/50th of the work done I wanted, get annoyed with myself, and tell myself that I'll work extra hard the next day. In other words, "Thursday." When I wake up Thursday, I take forever to 1. Get out of bed, 2. Shower, 3. Eat breakfast, 4. Read the Bible and have a time of prayer (this is actually one of those things that ends up getting scrunched to the end of the day when I have the consciousness of a narcoleptic Kiwi bird). By the time I'm ready to start on my project, it's time for me to go give a guitar lesson. My students won't show up, yet I will have wasted my time with two 45 minute car trips and nearly an hour of sitting in an office. Upon returning home, I'm tired from doing stuff, but I've accomplished no real work. All the sacrifice without the benefits.

Now, this diatribe is a million miles from where this article was supposed to start, being all ill-formed in my brain and whatnot, so let me get on track.

The other day, I was at Red Lobster with a couple friends of mine. We'll call them "Joey" and "Mike." Which are their real names, so it's convenient. We were having many discussions about rather random topics, such as movies, when we started talking about clones. It was an innocent enough topic, but it started my neurons a firin' (hence the title of the article today).

I started thinking about the strangeness of our universe and the many different creatures that may exist way out in the cosmos. I remembered the movie, Multiplicity, starring Michael Keaton and Andie Macdowell. The movie featured Michael Keaton as himself and his three clones, each representing a different part of his personality. Neat enough concept, taking advantage of the "clones in movies" craze about ten years ago. But I wonder if this concept couldn't be taken further.

Let's say we go to some alien planet far beyond any star we've yet seen. The dominant species on this planet has a peculiar trait. Whenever a female is pregnant, she gives birth to identical triplets, all of the same sex (male or female, no two boys and girl mixes or anything). The triplets stay together all their lives (in terms of proximity, not physical attachment) each performing a different function within the family. One of the triplets would be the worker, whether it means earning money or raising the family. The next would be the reproducer, the one that passes down the genes to the next generation. The last one would be the recreational triplet, going out and experiencing life. When these creatures get married, they would stay together as triplets. In other words, triplet brothers would all marry a set of triplet sisters, and would live in the same house and share the same meals, everything. Perhaps they could share memories somehow, some sort of cord that they would attach to each other to share the experiences.

I would like to see what would happen when a mother would give give birth to a single child that had the traits of a standard set of triplets, three in one. How would his society react to such a person? He would be complete in every way, yet might be more limited because he has to do everything himself. How would he live?

So, you see, the moral of this article is that I spend lots of time thinking about the world and the basic premise of stories, but I never get to the nitty gritty of writing them. Kinda sucks.