NOTHING
★★★★★ (3 out of 5)
Hello, and welcome to my week-by-week review of everything in the world. Today I am reviewing nothing.
As a reviewer of everything in the world, one of the things I must review is nothing. In fact, nothing is most of the world, because according to science, it’s most of the universe. Without nothing, everything would be everything. With nothing, everything is something, except for nothing.
When I am searching for something, and if I can’t find it, I end up with nothing, which is exactly what I started with. It’s disappointing to open up a box or a door, expecting to see something, and be confronted with nothing. In these ways I don’t like nothing.
I tried to experience nothing myself by making an appointment for a sensory deprivation tank, where you float in a pitch black, soundproof compartment full of warm salt water. When I arrived, the man at the counter said I didn’t need the snorkel I brought with me. That was quite a relief because I had never been snorkeling before and I didn’t want to spend my hour of nothingness learning how to snorkel.
The experience wasn’t as nothing as I had hoped. I could still feel things like water, my head hitting the wall as I drifted into it, and a sense of loneliness and isolation.
I thought a better way to experience nothing would be to get black-out drunk. Because I don’t drink often, I thought this would be an easy task. I asked the woman at the liquor store what their most powerful beverage was and she directed me to the store’s display of Cabo Wabo Tequila.
I drank until I passed out, but unfortunately I still experienced things. Specifically I experienced a dream where I was being rushed to the hospital. Then I experienced the realization that it was not a dream and I was in fact in the back of an ambulance.
Walking back from the hospital the next day I overheard a police officer say, “there is nothing to see here,” so I immediately rushed over to see what nothing looked like. It turned out to be a corpse. This was very disappointing on so many levels, because not only was the corpse not nothing, it was my mailman Sol, who I liked a lot. He’d had a heart attack while on his route.
The good that came from Sol’s passing was that instead of my mail coming that day, nothing came! It was okay. I could take it or leave it.
Please join me next week when I’ll be reviewing my new wallet.
