April 18, 2024

Marvin

who was not paranoid?

Marvin
Photo by Tonik / Unsplash

MeWhen123, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Today I found out that another one of my friends Sharon, has died of cancer, she had lung cancer and lived a lot longer than anyone expected. From the times I spoke to her she seemed to have lived her life to the full. However, her life was taken far too soon. I am deeply saddened by her loss.
Maybe I should not be so comedic in this post perhaps?

So once again, I sit here in isolation, feeling afraid, and uncertain of my situation. I have been through so much and sometimes I perhaps incorrectly feel that the old adage a friend in need is a pest has become a truism for me?

In the strange situation that I exist I exist therefore I am? Or if you really want to become truly paranoid perhaps you are in a form of Truman Show existence where everything is being monitored and you don’t actually realise it. Everything is prepared for you and everything is microscopically analysed. In a ( hospital ) situation like this, you can see that my nickname Marvin the paranoid android comes to mind. In the book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Marvin said:

I didn't ask to be made: no one consulted me or considered my feelings in the matter. I don't think it even occurred to them that I might have feelings. After I was made, I was left in a dark room for six months... and me with this terrible pain in all the diodes down my left side. I called for succour in my loneliness, but did anyone come? Did they hell. My first and only true friend was a small rat. One day it crawled into a cavity in my right ankle and died. I have a horrible feeling it's still there...
— Douglas Adams, from Fit the Twelfth (radio series)

And yes, life imitates art again, because I really did have a pain down the left side of my diodes, and that pain was my cancer!

Perhaps in my gloomy mood I am again like Marvin who in the books by Douglas Adam’s is suddenly kidnapped by a squad of Krikkit war robots, who are after his leg, a fragment of the key that will reopen their imprisoned world and restart the genocidal Krikkit War. Thinking that Marvin's intelligence will be an asset, they wire his brain into the interfaces of their intelligent war computer. This is a mistake. The once formidable Krikkit robots find themselves overcome with crippling sorrow and depression, and rather than focusing on their mission of extermination, instead sulk in corners doing quadratic equations. Being like Marvin is obtuse. Life don’t talk to me about life. Only saying, don’t mind me…
Marvin also, hated the night. In this place, where I am now, night time is tedious and Marvin said:

Now the world has gone to bed
Darkness won't engulf my head
I can see by infra-red
How I hate the night
Now I lay me down to sleep
Try to count electric sheep
Sweet dream wishes you can keep
How I hate the night

And in this crazy mixed up world perhaps the answer to life the universe and everything is 42. Let’s hope the world isn’t destroyed before we get the answer. People worry that historians will see our present events in a bad light. I just hope there are historians left to record it.