The Bleedin’ Firstness Caper
You think you’ve got it, man. The holy grail of origin, the immaculate conception of invention. You tracked that sucker down, a gleaming artifact in the cluttered swamp of history. Feels good, like snortin’ that pure Bolivian marching powder. But hold on, Tex. Take another hit, this one’s laced with reality.
The deeper you wade, the murkier the muck gets. Whispers creep outta the fog, tales of shadowy figures who did it firster, cruder maybe, but there they were, clawing their way outta the primordial ooze with the same damn thing. Your pristine first becomes a blurry second, then a hazy third.
Don’t even ask about fourth. It’s a goddamn ouroboros, this invention game. The tail eats the head, the past swallows the future. Time melts, dissolves in the acid bath of human ambition.
A name slithers out, a forgotten one, a hieroglyph carved on a bone unearthed in some fetid dig. This one, this nameless one, birthed the spark, the seed that sprouted in your precious first. The first becomes the second-hand echo, a faded photograph in a cracked frame.
But the madness doesn’t stop there, friend. You plunge deeper, down the rabbit hole of forgotten libraries, into the whispering crypts of forgotten civilizations. Layers upon layers of precedence peel back, each one revealing a cruder, more primal version of your first. The pristine becomes the profane, the origin a tangled, pulsating mass.
By the time you claw your way back, blinking in the harsh light of the present, your first is a pale imitation, a flickering ghost in the machine. It laughs at your naivete, a hollow echo in the vast, unknowable void. The concept of “first” dissolves like sugar in acid, a meaningless construct in the face of the infinite regress of influences, a cosmic joke played on the hubris of man.
So, you think you found the first light bulb? Think again, daddy-o. Some Sumerian dude was probably charring his ass with a flaming rock back in the day. The first car? Cave paintings suggest some enterprising troglodyte strapped a wheel to a wooly mammoth and went for a joyride.
Everything’s derivative, man. A twisted tapestry woven from forgotten threads. The only truth? The itch to make something new, some primal urge that burrows in your gut like a mutant tapeworm.
So, stop your frettin’ about who did it first. Just grab the goddamn tools and get to work. Maybe you won’t be the first, but who cares? Leave your own mark on the mess, scrawl your name on the crumbling wall of history. That’s the only firstness that matters, baby. The one you carve with your own blood and sweat.