27/32, Sunday May 16, 2010

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, we all know from The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, is 42. It is amazing that it’s such a simple and transcendental answer, especially since it took a supercomputer known as “Deep Thought” about 7 ½ million years to calculate and check. You’d think that Deep Thought would have come up with an answer that contained a bit more detail, but unfortunately for humankind the “ultimate question” was lost and with it the significance of 42. Bummer.

Now, there are some pretty militant people in the universe that don’t want to know the ultimate question because then we would understand what 42 might mean, and then we would understand everything there is to know. Scary stuff if you ask me. I mean, imagine if you know everything that was, is, and will be then life would be pretty boring. No novelty, no pleasant surprises, no new songs to learn, no new breaks to sweat over, no more adrenaline rushes from playing onstage, no more new recipes from JD. You’d already know it all. From this human’s perspective, omniscience might be highly overrated.

However, I want to announce that I know how and where to find the ultimate question, or at least where to start looking. This revelation came to me during a musically induced trance meditating on the question “what am I going to write my column on this week without any new ideas” while trying to avoid doing some other overdue work on my desk. Pressure from procrastination does have its benefits in focusing the mind. My revelation involves the numbers 27 and 32. Once it became clear to me these numbers have special meaning, I had to meditate further and after consulting my calendar I realized those numbers have a particular significant meaning only once every year, which by chance just happened to occur on this, my column day. Actually I don’t think it is by chance because if my calendar is right, 27 and 32 will be significant numbers every year on my May column day. How eerie is that?

For you to experience the same enlightenment that I had from my revelation, I am going to leave it up to you to meditate on the numbers 27 and 32. The answer should be fairly easy to come by and once you understand that you will also see the path to discovering the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. If, after all that, you are still looking for enlightenment, then come address the CBA Welcome Oracles during their collective musical trance induced while communing around a Coleman lantern generated space-time discontinuity. I can guarantee that the Oracles will enlighten you in unexpected ways.