Tonight I came across this picture:
It made me recall something I had offhandedly said to a friend the other day as we got off the bus. We were talking about the trouble we'd inevitably get into at Burning Man, and he said (incorrectly) that he didn't think we'd be partying too hard. To which I replied, "we're going to be eating mushrooms like Mario." What does this photo have to do with any of that? Look closely. I remember at the time I had taken it, hiking through the Presidio one weekend, that the pipe in the background resembled one from Super Mario. I half expected to see a red and white man-eating plant rising up from it as I approached, chomping madly at the air.
If there ever was a carnivorous plant inside that pipe, it had long since been incinerated by an expectorate fireball from the mouth of an Italian plumber. Wow. Google tells me that Mario didn't actually spit fire, he threw it. The sound it made was the source of abundant confusion. I've been wrong about this for two decades; who knew. Well, everyone who knew...knew.
It's strange to have known something to be true, and then to come to know that what you had known was in fact false. The new known replaces the old one and makes you feel that the old known wasn't something known but rather something believed. Then you think about how the certitude you felt then is the same as you feel now, and you wonder if this too is just a belief posing as a known, waiting to be replaced.
It would seem nothing is ever known, truly. But how could I know that?
No comments:
Post a Comment