Photo: Maarten Inghels
Years ago, I found this cobblestone on the street in Brussels with the golden inscription “I USED TO BE A MOUNTAIN.” Like a speech bubble rising from a choked rock. After all these years, I still haven’t been able to find out who made it—there’s no record of it anywhere as a listed artwork. I see it now as a poetic intervention by an anonymous city dweller.
The complex atoms that make up you and me were born out of the hearts of exploding dying stars billions of years ago. Those atoms drifted, floated and danced across the universe, onto our planet where they were again moved, mixed and rearranged to make this walking talking meat skeleton powered by electricity.
Orchestrated by electrical messages but I think powered by ATP.
ATP (and any molecule, really) is just a particular configuration of electrical particles that use electromagnetism to hold together some mass.
I guess if you include the electrostatic interaction in the “powered by electricity” above and not just the common meaning of electricity which is electric current.
Yeah, they lost me at electricity. I think this is a copypasta.
Much of the water you and me drink, used to be pee and fecal sludge.
That’s why Gatorade is much better!
That’s actually a mildly depressing way to put it. Reduced from a majestic, imposing, mass to something humans tread on without a second thought.
Oh, for fucks sake not everything is holy and should remain immutable forever. Not everything humans do to their environment is bad.
Besides, this is probably granite which would have been under a mountain that got worn away. It was probably buried underground and quarried. No one saw a big impressive mountain and chopped it down.
Going off, chopping mountains, as one does. On a more serious note, are there examples of this? I only know of humans raising mountains and usually they’re not of the good kind.
Edit: It appears this is a thing humans are doing. And it looks just as horrific as I feared it might.
Yeah, mountain top strip mining is a thing but it’s done for coal, mainly. It is horrific.
😒
With a tough guy tattoo like that, you just know he used to be a decorative stone in a fountain or some shit.
Brussels toynbee tile.
I’ve seen an animation about this: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NBVCIgfyciA
Had I seen this two weeks ago when passing through, I may have hunted it down.
I passed through Brussels in 2023. I wish I had stayed a little longer. I really liked it there.
Driving around North Wales 😢
No. That used to be flowing magma.
