I got this in September of last year. I had been thinking about it for a year starting from when I was having the weird relationship with the German lesbian. We talked about it, and she seemed to understand. It was part of what I liked about her. Most folks seem to look at me like I'm a bit of an oddball when I show it to them.

When people ask, and they often do, I give them the quick and dirty explanation. It's an exothermic chemical reaction. The left side is the reactants, the right green line is the products, the red hump is the activation energy. At a personal level, the blue ball on the left hand side is where I am, the green line is where I want to be, and the red hump is what I have to do to get there. It's a reminder that if I want to get someone where other than where I am in life, I am going to have to put some effort into it.

Life is chemical. Not all chemical reactions in our bodies are exothermic ones that have the same energy curve as the one in my tattoo, but all reactions have a similarities. Endothermic reactions can have an end product with a higher energy state. The activation curve may have little humps in it for intermediary states. All reactions will have resting states at both ends with lower energy than the states around them. Those resting points are stable zones where chemicals remain in a constant form longer than points around them because points around them slope upward. So for microseconds or years, the chemicals that constitute our existence remain at those low points until something energizes them and pushes them over to the next resting state.

There are trillions of reactions of this sort going on in my body every second. They are part of a chain of chemical reactions that lead back four billion years to the primordial soup when a series of such reactions turned into a self replicating chain. All of them require energy to get over the hump of less stable states between more stable states. For the most part, that energy comes from other chemical reactions that link together. We humans get the energy by consuming other organisms. Consumption is the chemical reactions of muscles breaking the chains of other reactions and making them our own through digestion. In the process, we combine oxygen with carbon and create carbon dioxide. Plants get their energy from sunlight and separate oxygen from carbon dioxide. In it's most basic, life takes carbon from the atmosphere through photosynthesis and then re-releases some of it through respiration. The process is complicated, but it boils down to something simple, churning the atmosphere by adding and subtracting carbon and using light to power the reaction.

The process of things transforming from higher to a lower energy state is also connected to the processes that are defining our universe as well, although these are taking place at levels that go beyond the chemical. Our universe is continuously expanding and cooling, slowly moving towards lower and lower average energy states separated by greater and greater distances. At some unthinkable time in the future not only will chemical bonds cease to exist, but atoms themselves will break down into their fundamental components, leaving nothing but an impossibly large void of isolated elemental particles. So the exothermic chemical reaction is connected to a more fundamental process of particles going from higher to lower energy states that describes not only life and chemical reactions, but everything. The personal struggle described by my tattoo is universal and fundamental.

When we learn the exothermic chemical reaction in school, we don't attach all these layers of meaning to it. It's a way of visualizing a basic process of change over time. It's a limited, focused description of a physical event - an abstract representation. That's where its power and the power of other abstractions of this sort come from - their ability to simplify the mysterious. So what I'm doing by expanding it, adding levels of meaning to it, may seem to defeat that purpose. "Hey Dude. It's just a simple graph."

The reason I want to add meaning to something like the exothermic chemical reaction or the square root of negative one or the prism is because I think that religion's draw is richness of meaning within it. People reflect and meditate on God's love for the world, and the notion of sacrifice presented by Christ. They draw on these things and apply them to their personal lives. And I think that people have to have things that they can do that with. The problem is that the notions they are drawing on are based on views of the world that were developed more than a thousand years ago. Those views no longer make sense in the world today.

I think the richness and fullness of the abstractions I have tattooed has always been there, it's just that we already had these systems in place that were already contemplating how we fit and how it related to us personally and how it should all influence how we act, and Science was seen to strictly play the role of explaining how the physical world worked. Meanwhile those physical explanations were totally undermining the basis for the religious reasons.

I'm sure that scientists wouldn't relish attaching a lot of secondary meaning to their physical symbols. After all, some of them are adherents to the religions I've just mentioned. For others, it would unnecessarily distort their purity. Then there is this tendency of people to want to drive things the other way. When secondary and emotional significance is given to views of physical reality, people then use that secondary meaning as basis for refusing to accept changes when new evidence shows that a new physical model needs to be adopted.

I think that leaving the void is a mistake though, and leaving systems in place to fill that void that are contradicted by our new understandings is also a mistake. However, it should be clear that any secondary meaning has to take the back seat to changes in our understanding of the physical reality that secondary meaning is there to interpret.

So anyway, it's my 46th birthday on Wednesday. Yeah me.