Drowning in skin.

So basically, dust is gross. Most people know that dust is composed partially of dead, exfoliated skin cells that are just kind of floating around in the atmosphere. And since the thought of your ancestors blowing the breeze isn't gross enough, I'm going to try to gross you out even more, with science.

The average adult human has enough skin to cover up 2 square meters (if you skinned him and laid his hide out like a pelt), and that weighs approximately 20 pounds. Fun fact: you will exfoliate approximately 8 pounds of dead skin cells every year. By bypassing some simple mathematical, scientific, and common sense laws we can know that 8 pounds of skin would cover up about .8 square meters.

So the question here today is: how long would it take for there to be so much dead skin that it would cover up the whole surface of the world? To start off this discussion, I'd like to bring up the fact that after all this time we haven't started having to use snow plows to keep the streets clean of our little tiny dead cells that have been piling up. There are three reasons for this, two of which are pretty gross.

The first reason is dust mites. These little tiny creatures feed off of your dead flesh. There's really not a lot else I'd like to say about them, but really all you need to know is that they're tiny and disgusting. Also they look like this.

The second reason may or may not make you gag. You're constantly breathing in hundreds of thousands of deceased epidermis particles which are being destroyed inside of your body. You're eating yourself, and lots of other people in the world. Cannibal. Sick cannibal freak.

The third reason is all but too simple: since the exfoliated cells are dead, they will eventually decay.

Because of these facts, we will be working in theoretical boundaries. If everyone in the world held their breath, all the dust mites simultaneously expired Avengers style, and the skin cells that are already dead ceased to decay, how long would it take before the entire earth was coated in "dust"?

Earth is pretty dang big, sitting pretty at 510 million (510,000,000) square kilometers. Since one kilometer is one thousand meters, 510 million kilometers is 510 billion (510,000,000,000) square meters.

There are approximately 7 billion (7,000,000,000) people on earth. In a year, all of those 7 billion people would exfoliate 5.6 billion square meters of dead skin. (7 billion multiplied by .8.)

510 billion divided by 5.6 is 91.07142857142857. This number, which I'll just call 91, because it is basically 91 for all intents and purposes, is the number of years of exfoliation it would take by 7 billion individuals to cover the earth in dead skin cells.

Okay, we covered the earth. Now what?

Well there's a problem. Assuming a large portion of those cells didn't get sucked into the sea and they just kind of floated on top, we've only created a layer of dead skin about an eighth of an inch thick. I want people to be drowning in skin. I want there to be people pushing themselves around in canoes trying to get from place to place. How long would it take for there to be a layer of skin 7 feet deep?

To make an inch, it would take 91 years x 8 (assuming the coating of "dust" was 1/8th of an inch thick). 728 years.
To make it to a foot, it would take 728 years x 12. 8,736 years.
To make it to seven feet, it would be 8736 x 7. 61,152 years.

By the time 61,152 years passed, all of that skin would weigh in at 489,216 pounds, which is only slightly smaller than Tony Stark's ego.

I kind of wish I could say there was a point to this, but there really isn't. I just hope you're grossed out now after thinking about dead skin for that long. To be completely honest, it kind of makes me feel uncomfortable and dirty.

Until next time, kids!

Vandal Trolling

Today I witnessed a man trying to steal the Ron Paul bumper sticker off the back of my car earlier. "How silly of him" I thought. "If he wanted one, he could have just asked."

After he gave up trying to take it and walked away I took it upon myself to make his support of the good doctor Paul known and placed an extra sticker I had on the back of his truck.

As I was driving away I could see in my rear view mirror that he was so ecstatic about it that he was jumping up and down! I think he was trying to yell thank you at me too, but I had my music on so I couldn't tell exactly what he was saying. "What a strange, nice man" I said to myself.

Take me to the moon.

Would it be illegal to go to the moon? I'd like to go there someday, even if I can't come back.

Maybe I'll just work my whole life; I'll save up vast amounts of money and construct a space ship. If I still have any friends by the time I get that old we can go together. We can get space suits and everything. If we decide we don't want to go back, that's fine. Space is as good a place to die as any.

I'd love to die on the moon, actually. We can get out of our shuttle and lay down, weighing only a fraction of what we would on Earth, and just kind of rest peacefully. We'll talk about our memories and all the good times and the bad times; the times that made our lives worth living. We'll talk until we run out of things to say, and then we'll reminisce until we run out of air to breathe.

As the world turns, everything will get darker and darker, leading up to the point where there's so little oxygen left that we fall asleep forever. Hundreds of thousands of miles away, life goes on. They'll look up at night, but they wont even know that the man on the moon and his friends have ceased to exist. Our hearts wont beat and our minds wont think and our muscles will never contract again.

~

There are some people out there who have someone they'd like to spend the rest of their lives with. Life may be fleeting, but it leaves from you slowly with love, compassion, and every other emotion like a mother lets her child leave home. You may live a hundred times in your life, but you only die once, which is why to go to the moon and die with any person who considers myself to be their friend would be the best death ever. I'd love more than anything to lay down and see Earth off the in the distance, and with my final breath know that there's a rock in a vacuum that contains everything I've ever known. To anyone else, the people on that rock might as well be amoebae on a petri dish, but to an amoeba, that's all they ever needed to be to mean everything.

Fall Is Upon Us

The horrendous heat wave has (hopefully) passed for good, fellow Oklahomans. Like a fine wine, the leaves on the trees will become more appealing with age. The bold, vibrant greens will slowly transition into a mellow array of oranges, yellows, and browns. The soft, fleshy texture will leave them and they will shrivel up. Detached from their life force, dead in the gutter, trampled underfoot and scattered to the four corners of the world, the once sought after shade in the summer will litter the ground like locusts in a plague.

The waves will swirl around your feet, drawing the heat out from your body. The goosebumps raise every hair on your skin as a northern wind rushes between the cracks in your fingers. The spring showers' work is slowly undone as everything around you reverts to a lifeless state. The nurturing sunshine that made your heart blossom seems farther away than ever.

Every year, month, day, hour, minute, second, decision, expectation, distrust, and promise you have ever made has led up to the moment you're living in right now. All of the moments in the past were made up of moments just like that one happening as we speak. Every grain of knowledge inside of you floats away like a mote into the cosmos.

She paved the way for the spring rain that grew the grass and the trees. She was lurking behind the sunshine that grew your love into a beautiful flower. She is the frigid north winds that make you shudder; the waves that draw your life away have a name, and that name is Autumn. Love will writhe in defeat as the seasons change like all things do, and the dead, cold hearts will be kicked aside. They will decompose, rot, and be forgotten as they slowly amalgamate into the earth.

Time will pass. Hipsters will take pictures of their pumpkin lattes and post them to Instagram. The snow will fall and melt, and the sun will shine again. The warm rains will seep into the ground, and the forgotten, dead, and rotten love from the year before will serve one final purpose and fertilize the new grass. The leaves will bud more bountifully than the year before. The sun will beam once more, and the memories that would keep you from repeating past mistakes are thrown into the ocean, only to rise again months later as an ironic souvenir, along with the numbing waves at your feet in what you hoped would be the distant future, but inevitably happened upon like wildfire, and without remorse.

Your footprints will be left behind you in the sand as you pace mournfully, only to be washed away with the cold winter waves. The tears you cry will be blow away by the chill winds, and for a time your hope will, like all things, die, only to be reborn with the new year, blossom in the spring and summer sun, and pass on once more.

Human beings are one with nature, and our behavior mimics each other. Whether we came first or nature did I don't know, but I do know that there is always hope in the future, as well as the knowledge of futility. Like the blades of grass and the leaves on the branches, our hope will spring to life and die just as swiftly, until all things pass. This is the sorrow of all men and women. This is our curse. This is our fall.