Hello, world.

Hello world---that is the typical first print statement content a C language programmer uses, whether in testing or in teaching. It is not a bad way to begin a conversation potentially open to everyone on this little chunk of rock with peculiarly favorable conditions for the formation of pretentious collections of molecules like ourselves. I say pretentious in that we like to believe we are different somehow from the natural world in which we live and that belief is often contradicted by the painful realities of biology. That being said, I know, as do most people with a mind not barricaded by defense mechanisms, that human existence does include experience that cannot be explained in terms applicable to the so-called laws of nature (unless you take a quantum mechanical Alice-Through-The-Looking-Glass view of the macro world---something not yet justified by any unification of the current laws of physics, the elusive Theory of Everything that would bring Einstein's Relativity and Gravity to the negotiating table with Quantum Mechanics). And one of these things we experience that seems unique in the Universe of mere things (I say mere things with tongue in cheek somewhat, being not entirely hostile to monism) is music. Emotion is not unique to humans (and I'm confining my discussion to our own cosmic backyard at the moment), but includes mammals generally I guess, the limbic system having proliferated in most of us since it was offered as one of the tools of evolution some 150 million years back. Something about rhythm and tone seems to evoke emotion, and that, for me, is music. Emotion is rather like the tone controls on your stereo, coloring verbal thought (you might feel the blues, you might be cherry hot, grin) and flooding the mind with sometimes undefinable feeling perhaps not even amenable to word. So, I always play it as I feel it.