the problem outside the peanut

An expert on dinosaur teeth came into my office and asked me my thoughts on what happened before the Big Bang. I drew something resembling a peanut on the whiteboard, then produced an equation for the speed at which a particular internal combustion engine should motivate a two-ton truck, 65 mph. Then we observed that the truck was actually traveling at 50 mph. After a long discussion, the tooth expert asserted that there must be something wrong with my math. Maybe, I kindly suggested, there was something wrong with his mother's math. The truck that weighs two tons must actually have more mass somewhere. Hiding. Mass that doesn't affect the gravity of the truck, but which affects inertia in some other way. He explained that some dinosaurs may have had feathers. I called him a communist.

The peanut is a closed shell. There is nothing outside the peanut. If you try to crack the peanut open from the inside and look outside, you can't. So what about the rest of the whiteboard? The part outside the form of the peanut? This entire space is inhabited by a giant elephant, and if you ask too many stupid questions about what's outside the peanut, the elephant will find the peanut and eat us all. There's nothing outside the peanut, like I said. What happened before there was a before? That's one of those stupid questions.

Our conversation is being monitored, he said, from Tokyo. Why would anyone be so creepy without cause? I asked. It is because they are afraid of what you mights say about them. Who is "they?" It's hard to say, and you probably don't even know them.

I made notes on the conversation for my office records and placed them in a file folder before heading out to the store. I had been craving sushi. It was still early in the evening, but it gets dark relatively early also. I have stopped being able to recall the directions from the office to the supermarket. It is a series of steps, pauses, turns, and breaths stored somewhere in a physical memory. It plays out automatically so I can be free to concern myself with other matters. And why these other matters should somehow be more important than the way to food, I am not certain, but the fact remains that all I thought about on the walk was whether or not to make dinner plans for this Saturday. I was tempted to buy a bag of chocolate-covered peanuts, but opted instead for whiskey.