Zeno’s Asteroids

Taco night. Both hard and soft shells this time. And this evening, I substituted chicken for beef. Oh yeah.

I stood at the kitchen sink, using a new pair of meat scissors to cut the chicken breast into small bits. The breast was quite thick, so after I cut it into strips, I further cut each strip along its full length to make two half-thick strips.

It seemed to be taking a long time.

Give me a mundane or repetitive motorized muscle-memory activity, and it is only a matter of minutes - I have come to learn - that my mind falls into free association with long-ingrained memories.

It was Zeno’s Paradox. You know, that one. The one which states you can never reach your destination, because you must first travel half the distance, then after that half the remaining half, and half of that, and so on. This requires an infinite number of steps, and therefore Zeno would say you can never complete your journey.

Fortunately, the instructions on the taco box made it clear that Zeno was not invited to dinner: “cut chicken into pieces.” I assure you that’s what I did, and I promise you that we, in fact, did cross the finish line and eat the end result. I don’t know how far along Zeno of Elea is at this time.

Thank goodness Atari, in 1979, also didn’t pay heed to Zeno. Their classic arcade hit Asteroids was hugely popular among earth dwellers of my time, and I spent countless quarters to have the privilege of splitting space-touring boulders into halves. And each half into halves again. And again. And, I believe, again. Eventually, after cleaving an ancestral boulder into its terminal descendants, the final shot from the tip of the triangular spaceship vaporized the vectored graphics out of the game's memory entirely.

Bon appetit, my Asteroid brethren. Now for some Betty Crocker Hershey’s Chocolate brownies. How will I ever finish cutting them?

Atari’s 1979 hit Asteroids:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroids_(video_game)

Zeno’s Paradox:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno's_paradoxes