The first words are "I prefer living in..." The stupid scanner cut the top off.

I'll try. Let's see if I can commit to something.

Let me preface by saying I hate my astronomy teacher from last term. That fucker brought up asteroids hitting earth like nobody's business, like it was no big deal. Then I did a research paper on Asteroid Deflection Strategies in a weak attempt to soothe my fears. It didn't go so well, as a comet only gives us (at most) a 3 day warning that it will hit us, and potentially can destroy earth far greater than any asteroid. Lame, right? Sorry. There's a new fear on your mind. There were quite a few feeble attempts at asteroid deflections, but nothing to prevent the possibility of comets.

So that fear has been on MY mind, quite a bit lately. And it pops in at the most annoying of times, specifically right when I'm about to go to sleep. For some stupid reason my mind goes "hey.... hey Doug, wouldn't it suck if an asteroid were to hit earth right now?" and I go "yeah, but.... wouldn't it suck if a lot of things happened right now? C'mon dude, don't think of those things." But the brain? The brain won't drop it, in fact it's been doing that a lot lately. There's 120ft tall trees in my back yard that, if they fell, would no doubt kill me. On my way back form Canada, standing on the bow of the ferry on the way home, I felt unsafe because of all the windows-- that's right. My brain went "you know the odds of a sniper aiming at you are really high right now, with all of these windows." And my stupid logic side would not win the argument, I'd get away from the bow of the boat and go inside. I couldn't shut the voice of fear up. I haven't been able to.

That said, I fell asleep last night. A few hours later, a giant bang went off. Loud. Like an explosion. Not movie-house explosion, this had a bunch of subwoofing to it. I thought Hiroshima. I thought someone nuked us. I rushed up, looked out the window-- and my vision was blurry, I remember it being pixelated. I can't say right now if there were flashes, but I can tell you I thought it was real. I thought I was going to die. My brain was screaming "this is it, this is the asteroid. This is the nuke. This is the end."

My hands were shaking, my heart was pounding. I froze my gaze outside, just waiting for the wave to kill me from the blast. Waiting to be sent off into orbit and die violently. Waiting for fate.

Logic shut it's ass up at the beginning, the conversation probably went between emotional and logic like

E: HOLY SHIT WHAT THE HELL IS THAT
L: Are we hearing something?
E: WE ARE HEARING AN EXPLOSION
L Are we seeing something?
E: I DON'T KNOW, IT'S BLURRY. I THINK THERE'S A BLAST. YES. I'M SEEING SOMETHING
L: ...then, PANIC THE FUCK OUT
E: YES, PANIC!

It doesn't help that the weather right now is extremely windy, and that it's raining like crazy.

After the ten minutes went by... logic came back in.... asking a few questions. "Are car alarms going off?" The stupidest bit of proof to look for... and it picked a car alarm. No, no car alarms. "Are lights coming on in houses? Are people out in the streets?" No, nobody was out in the streets. Nobody heard anything. "Are dogs barking?" No, no dogs barking.

Logic then went "...well then... did we hear what we heard?" And I know I did. I know it.

I went online, I checked RSS breaking news feeds from the Oregonian, CNN, Reddit, Digg, etc.. Nothing. I posted in communities, "Did anyone hear that bang at 2am?!" My hands were still shaking, then somehow... I think I had to play a podcast of Selected Shorts, a voice to calm me down, I fell asleep.

When I woke up I completely forgot about the incident, mood-wise. I mean I remember it, but I was far more relaxed. I checked for replies, and sure enough, there's a stupid thing called Exploding Head Syndrome. It's when you hear a large explosion, gun shot, voices, right before going to sleep. Bingo. My dad had epilepsy (which is hereditary) but it eventually went away, so this might be some introductory form of that, I think I do need to be checked out for it.

I'm glad it has a name, I'm glad I'm not the only one to experience it. But it's a really frightening thing to have, because you can't help but feel as though it'll become the boy that cried wolf. You feel stupid for falling for it, something that's entirely in your head, but you don't at the same time-- because it deserves that sort of panicked response.

It was an awesome explosion. And it's awesome that my brain has that kind of power-- hell, I've had some dreams where I SWEAR I'm making out with Natalie Portman. And I love that the brain is so focused on protecting me, the organism. I love it. But I've always thought it's silly how something so self-aware, so educated on the universe, has such little control over the one thing keeping it going.

Now that I know what it is, I'll try and be prepared for next time and I think I'll have an easier time calming myself down. Hopefully if you ever have an experience you can search the web and find more comfort knowing that someone freaks out with you.

Atheists are just as annoying as the religious; both groups act like they have all the answers, and then preach about it to everyone until their throat goes dry-- not until people are convinced, because that doesn't happen. But nobody preaches about agnosticism, because it's not an answer you can preach about. However, that's what I'm going to try and do here, on an online journal of all places.

The universe has been around for a long, long, long, long, long time. Humans, have been around for a relatively short time. But within our short time, we've done so much; we've created societies, weapons, art. But we've also created video games. And what are video games? Miniature worlds with artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence that is stupid, created by us, and have no power of their own to leap out of their games, interact with us, or escape their fate. When the console is turned off, the artificial intelligence is still there, on a memory chip. it is not activated, it is, for all purposes, dead. That memory chip can be reformatted, erased, and then re-created. This technology has been around for only the blink of an eye, and is incredibly primitive.

And all the questions on why does god let pain and suffering commence, why does he do this, why can't he be seen. All asked while many miniature video game worlds commence entirely out of your power around the world.

What do the religious believe? That someone or something, somewhere out there in the vast universe, within its epic timeline, has done the same as us, and created us in the same way that we've created our own worlds. Without tools to prove our programmer's existence, and for whatever reason have been run on our program.

I'm not religious. Because the atheist point still stands, occam's razor, if we look dead we probably are dead, and how there's no reason to believe in an afterlife aside from fear of death. But to just be so cocky about that idea, especially while we sit on the brink of so many more discoveries in our galaxy, particle traveling, brain activity, black holes, time travel, etc.. It's just downright silly. Because as Matt Stone of South Park said, "Basically ... out of all the ridiculous religion stories which are greatly, wonderfully ridiculous—the silliest one I've ever heard is, 'Yeah ... there's this big giant universe and it's expanding, it's all gonna collapse on itself and we're all just here just 'cause ... just cause.' That, to me, is the most ridiculous explanation ever."