jamieproctor.ca

So.  Here we are again.
Well, here I am again.  You are just over there.  Not getting older.  You need some things that are awesome to knock that stuff off.

-A hard day’s nothing followed by a nice relaxing slaving.
-The fineness that forkdom has to offer.
-Literal metaphors.
-Non-hominid ghosts because woah if there’s this many dead apes floating around already just imagine the count on, say, ghost sharks.
-This is to say nothing of spectral arthropods. Trilobites, man.
-Hornswaggling that results in actual horns.
-A thirst for vengeance that is really more misdirected peckishness.
-A stitch in time that saves eighteen due to superior needleship.
-An infinite number of monkeys with infinite guitar picks and an infinite amount of time composing the works of John Lennon.
-Low noon.
-Actually, more of a medium-low.
-Ferocity out of bounds after being put in a box for crossing a line because your hands were tied.
-Milk that gives 101%, although at that point it may technically be lard.
-Machines that look like animals.
-Animals that look like machines.
-Machines that look like mach – no, no, sorry, that doesn’t make sense at all, let me try again
-Animals that look like animals. Whew, that almost got ridiculous for a second.
-Cloning dinosaurs jiggery-pokery.
-Songs of sixpence digitally remastered and currency-converted to fit our modern age.
-Really aggressive and belligerent cheese being put in its place.
-On a cracker.
-In my stomach.
-Unchecked, voracious rapacity. But only because it sounds so very pretty when said aloud.
-Sunsets that get up close and personal.
-Lightly trammeled wilderness, with a nice greek salad or something.
-Crews that cut crewcuts.
-Six miles of highway spontaneously gaining sentience.
-During rush hour.
-And it wakes up on the wrong side of bed.
-Peaceful, thriving robot civilizations threatened with biological apocalypse due to Science Gone Wrong.
-Extraordinary measurements. I think all of us can agree on that one in some way.
-The kinds of words that make you ‘pop’ your lips together to say them. Like ‘plump.’ Go on, try it, it’s great.
-Tigers. But not lions. Those guys are assholes.
-Seriously.
-Falutin’ of any stripe, shape, or shade.
-The seventeen unknown hells of Murgatroyd.
-Pinpricks practicing needlepoint.
-Food chains that form repeated loops.
-The holy trinity of pen, paper, and pauper.*
*-Powered by port.
-Yes or no questions successfully annihilated by maybes.
-Properly applied dodecahedrons.
-Rocky ridges paved with rocky road.
-Though the traffic in summer can get a little sticky.
-The responsible, safe, careful, and adult use of trans-continental nuclear ballistic weapons.
-During reasonable hours, when dressed respectably.
-Angry, angry hippos.
-Those really nice hand-carved cash registers you can trade from that lost clerk tribe they found in that abandoned Walmart in New Brunswick.
-Insults that any schmorphkeistel can tell were just made up on the spot.
-Things that are bioluminescent that really shouldn’t be.
-Also, things that are bioluminescent that really shouldn’t be.
-Persistence triumphing over hard work and diligence.
-Peeved expressions on inhuman faces. The moreso the better.
-Cell phone receptions that end with Nokia getting into a drunken fight with Koodo and Bell saying ‘fuck’ in front of its grandchildren repeatedly.
-Sex and the single snail. It’s more complicated than it looks.
-Vampires with all the weaknesses. All of them.
-Even the one that you just made up.
-Mighty morphin’ butterfly chrysalises.
-Events based upon a fake story.
-Except for global warming denialism.
-Kooky old medical beliefs like humour theory made laughably outdated and obsolete thanks to the wonders of modern homeopathy.
-Things that look like spiders but aren’t.
-Things that don’t look like spiders but are.
-That crawling sensation skittering up and down the back of your chair right now.
-Crocodileade for needy families without a crocodile to eat them.
-Septemberfest. It’s pretty obscure; you probably haven’t heard of it.
-Heartbreaking tales of cross-phylum romance and tragedy as long as they don’t produce viable offspring because holy HELL that’d be freaky.
-Like, imagine a baby spider-camel. The FUCK.
-Pots o’ gold that nobody cares about and nobody ever will.
-Invigorating sneezes.
-Anything that is best described as ‘hyperkinetic.’
-Small children and small animals interacting to the child’s detriment and the animal’s direct gain.
-The Savage Stories of Doreen Beckleback, Pulp Housewife.
-A lovely bunch of coconuts.
-But really, plums would be even better. They’re almost as fun to say as ‘plump.’
-The physiological benefits and psychological side-effects of frequent nose-picking.
-Endless waves of bloodthirsty foaming-at-the-mouth rampaging Chief Executive Officers.
-The ten thousandth syllable of pi.

When it comes to living forever, everyone’s an expert.
With that kind of introduction, who’s going to want to listen to me, right? Well, here’s what I’m selling: something proven. Something that’s been done before and worked, something that’s been tested through time in the most obnoxiously literal way possible: fossilization.
Now, I’m not going to lie to you, I’m not going to pretend that this is a perfect solution, because there IS no perfect solution. Fossilization has several disadvantages over most competing immortality solutions: it takes time, and a lot of it; it takes patience, and even more of it; and if you do it wrong you’re liable to get whittled away helplessly by surface erosion over many humiliating centuries with no ability to stop it. That said, the positives are weightier: if done properly it’s as sure a thing as can be (no hidden Achilles heels waiting to be jumped on – don’t worry about hiding your heart inside an egg inside a duck on an island!); it’s extremely low-key and low-maintenance; and finally it’s great for peace and quiet since the process demands solitude and passivity in the first place. If you’re still with me, then read on and I’ll go over the general idea of how the process should work out.

First off, you’re going to want to pick a good spot to fossilize. Remember, you’re going to be spending a long, long, LONG time here – plan for the future and don’t get sloppy. Trusting Mother Nature to sort it all out is a good way to end up burned when it’s too late to fix things. Important don’ts: don’t use upland environments because there’s too little sediment to shelter your bones; don’t use acidic soils because you’ll get mulched up before the mineralization kicks in; and don’t under any circumstances use the deep ocean if you’re planning to stay more than two hundred million or so years unless you enjoy being subducted into the mantle and pulverized under unimaginable heat and pressure. You want something with sediment: deep marine environments might be risky, but coastal deltas, floodplains, riverbeds, and anoxic spots like swamps are great places to stash your body where nosy scavengers and oxygen-consuming bacteria can’t get at it while you rot in relatively undisturbed peace. You’ll thank me when your head isn’t detached from your spinal column by curious racoons.

Next up, you’ll need to die. For many of you this will come naturally; others may require a bit of effort and work to really grasp the concept. The following methods have proven reliable, though none of them have a 100% success rate. Experiment to discover which works for you.
-Attempt to consume prey conveniently trapped in a bog/morass/tar pit.
-Become old and weak with at least one debilitating injury. This is a perennial favourite.
-If you’d rather your entire species came with you, try to develop a crippling overspecialization in a single incredibly narrow niche, like only eating a particular kind of leaf from a single species of tree, or refusing to reproduce anywhere but three tiny islands separated from each other by tens of thousands of miles.
-Loudly ask yourself “I wonder what this does?” prior to examining any unfamiliar object/organism.
However you do it, do it. Before you know you’ll be dead as a doornail – and remember to aim for the sediments on your way out, before consciousness fades. There’s nothing more embarrassing than managing to die on the one exposed piece of bedrock for a hundred miles, or getting lightly buried and then flushed out by the very next flash flood to come through the gulley. Don’t count your diageneses before they’re lithificated.

Once you’re dead and buried, you’ll have to bake for at least ten thousand years. Remember, that’s just the minimum period – the maximum is as damned well long as you feel like – and even then it’s fuzzy. Timing may and will vary depending on your size, the exact circumstances surrounding your death, the immediate environment, and roughly every other factor imaginable and unimaginable. Incidentally, the wording of the heading isn’t just a cooking reference; you’ll be literally ‘becoming one with the planet’ in the process of this and the subsequent mental effects can be disorienting, especially by the time your brain’s been dissolved and your skull is undergoing permineralization. Just try to kick back and enjoy it a little, because there’s nothing quite like it. If you can feel yourself beginning to panic, remind yourself that you’re dead and it’s too late to care about anything because you’re dead now. Most people aren’t the quickest thinkers when they’re embedded in sedimentary rocks, so by the time you’ve noticed any potential flaws in that logic you should be almost done!

Now that you’re officially fossilized, escaping your prison is your new goal, but ‘goal’ might be a bit of a strong word, and so might ‘prison.’ A fully-fossilized body preserved in a sedimentary matrix is like a warm blanket on a cold morning: most people don’t want to leave it. But don’t worry; unless some unlucky geological upheaval shoves you under a craton until the planet’s eaten by the sun (low odds), you’re more or less guaranteed to popout at some point or another. Wait long enough and oceans will vanish, rock will erode, and then there you are, peeping out at the sun as fresh as a daisy and three times as mineralized as before. Now is your time for motivation – you’ve probably got just a few short centuries before the rocks around you fall apart, so you’d better get your head back in the game or you’ll go with them. If you’re very lucky maybe some nosy busybody will spy you peeking out of the stone and have you chiselled out, and if you’re luckier still you might be put in a relatively safe, dry place for a while after that where you can get your shit together at your own speed. That said, don’t bet on it and don’t let your guard down. Sometimes you’re being dug up to be stuck on someone’s mantelpiece, sometimes you’re being dug up to be ground into dust and used as a virility drug.

Finally and most crucially, it’s time to enjoy the benefits! Those bones have held you down for millions of years in shiftlessness, time to get them crackling again! You can wear them like a cheap suit that weighs six tons or you can shed them like a chrysalis to reveal whatever horrifying true form of amalgamated minerals and somnombalic spite you’ve been nurturing under them for longer than is physically imaginable, whichever makes you happier. Once you’re mobile you can revel in the sad sensation of revisiting a planet you willingly abandoned, but try not to get too depressed over whatever horrifying changes have emerged since you decided to commit to the Big Nap. Whatever happened is de facto not your fault, and hey, if you feel any lingering resentment over it – say, if whatever pitiful little groups of subspecies you used to think of as food items have displaced your descendants from their planet – why not reign over them as a terrible, undying god-king, devoid of flesh and mercy? It’s dead simple – literally! – since you’re almost bound to spark ancient primal fears deep within their psyches simply by existing. Intimidate, dominate, consume, bully, and terrorize to your heart’s delight.
Not that you’ll have a heart anymore.
Or a stomach, so the consumption will be strictly cosmetic.
But hey, you can still please yourself, and really, isn’t that what this is all about?

Like the old in an olderglass pass the olds of our lives. Oldly.
Look at all this stuff here that’s happened while I’m being old.

-Magma-based ecosystems and the geologists who are eaten by them.
-Sprawling Mesozoic civilizations whose lingua franca consists primarily of hootin’, stompin’, and hollerin’.
-The desire to succeed, the boldness to try, and the incompetence to prove otherwise.
-Giant carnivorous therapods arm-wrestling.
-Swashbuckling and nefarious yet strangely charming dental hygienists.
-The miracle of tube worms.
-Subterranean marsupials. As long as they aren’t teenagers or ninjas. And don’t live in a sewer. Sewers are much less hospitable, homey, and capacious than fiction would lead you to believe.
-The land of the eyeless where the one-eyed man is considered an okay guy but seriously what’s with those goddamned EYES?
-Languages consisting primarily of winks.
-Of varying salaciousness.
-Musical instruments constructed from skeletons.
-Musical instruments constructed from skeletons being played by musicians with exoskeletons.
-Musical instruments constructed from skeletons being played by musicians with exoskeletons for the auditory pleasure of invertebrates.
-Musical instruments constructed from skeletons being played by musicians with exoskeletons for the auditory pleasure of invertebrates inside a concert hall made from the husk of a giant protist.
-Cloning dinosaurs pell-mell.
-The awe and the power of jellyfish.
-Because we’re all going to be seeing a lot of that and we’d better get used to it.
-Things that are far larger than they have any business being.
-Ferocious and majestic house cats that rule over untrammeled wastes of frayed carpeting as far as the eye can see.
-Clocks that generate borrowed time for public consumption at highly reasonable interest rates.
-Buildings that used to be alive.
-Buildings that are still alive.
-Buildings that are still alive and are your wisecracking best friend that you go on adventures with.
-Plucky little coelurosaurs that stand up to the big guy and evolve into birds.
-Or plucky little coelurosaurs that stand up to the big guy and evolve into tyrannosaurs and eat him. I’m not taking sides here.
-The wonderful world of Pamela Barker. Go on, ask if you can take a look, she usually charges a pittance and it’s the best biosphere I’ve ever seen anyone fit into a matchbox.
-Endless whales. No upper limit. Just wall-to-wall whales, then more behind the walls. Literally forever. An infinity of whales. Full stop. Except there are no stops because there is no point where there are not more whales.
-A reasonably-priced donut that’s pretty darned tasty.
-Books that are larger than computers.
-Computers that are larger than rooms.
-Rooms that are larger than houses.
-Houses that you can put in your pocket and take home with you.
-As long as they’re machine-washable.
-Damning socks.
-Full-contact un-refereed no-holds-barred illegal back-alley math ‘bouts.
-Alphabets. Betabets too. Omegabets I’ll pass on. Epsilonbets no no no see I don’t do that shit shut the fuck up, but I know a guy who knows a guy.
-Nice smooth rocks with lots of trees on ‘em.
-Aggravated moss that turns terminal.
-Judging other people for their failure to think for me properly.
-The Little Mongol Horde that Could. Deserved more press than it got.
-The audacity of apathy.
-Or not. Whatever.
-Humming with intent. Also outside the tent oh HO knee slapped.
-Secret bases constructed inside things secret bases would not be expected to be constructed inside of.
-The end of an era. Any era, just pick one. There’s usually plenty of choices.
-Home products crafted from obsidian for entirely practical reasons.
-Home products crafted from obsidian for entirely impractical reasons.
-Surgery based around volatile chemicals and lots of chanting.
-Things that should have glowing eyeballs that don’t.
-The use of typeface to make a philosophical point, as long as someone gets punched before, during, or after the fact.
-Things that are big but not ol’. Most things shrink when they get ol’, I don’t see why this isn’t more common.
-Emergency use of the inner ear as a filter. For anything, really. Use your imagination. And your inner ear.
-Ancient horrors so feared that man dare not smell of them aloud and sniff only surreptitiously, with fearful glances.
-The dance of those who give no fucks.
-Elegance in brutal overwhelming force. Or vice versa.
-Zippiness in general.
-A calm, slow, even voice in a time of crisis that carefully and rationally suggests unimaginably stupid things.
-Birds with teeth.
-Teeth with birds.
-With bird teeth.
-The unparalleled splendor and majesty of the dandelion.
-Any major landscape feature that contains smaller versions of itself like a matryoshka doll.
-The art of artlessness.
-Gob-smacked monkey’s uncles who get knocked down with a feather so easily it blows their socks off.
-Meagreness in excess.
-Itty-bitty deep sea life. Like, squinchy-winchy at best. Puny. Teensy. Minute.
-The pleasure of plesiosaurs.

-The Hadean Eon
The Earth forms, but its distractible parents forget to note the date of birth. This will lead to many years of bitterness and more missed birthdays than are humanly imaginable.
Rock status: runny, excitable, prone to suddenly exploding.

-The Archaen Eon
The Earth grows the hell up and starts trying to apply itself so it can make something later on in life. It tries its hand at biology and makes some small prokaryotic projects, but it’s embarrassed by their lack of a proper nucleus and hides them under its enormous cratonic bed. Later it flushes everything with water and tries to make a fresh start of it for the fossil records.
Rock status: growing up, settling down, forming tectonic plates, wearing ties in public.

-The Proterozoic Eon
Through incredible amounts of both luck and time, life appears in the fossil record in its most boring, least-pronounceable forms. It promptly suffers stage fright and attempts to hide for the next half-billion years until helpful and outgoing cyanobacteria supply sufficient oxygen for some of the rest to get over themselves and try this new multicellular thing. They immediately graze cyanobacteria to near-extinction.
Rock status: forming continents, breaking up continents, combining, dividing, combining, dividing, suffering hysterical panic attacks in the mirror while scrutinizing hairlines.

-The Phanerozoic Eon
The last-ninth of Earth’s history, but also the only bits most people care about. The planet is overcome with an infestation of crawling, swimming, splashing, leaping, Skyping, narcissistic little bastards that come and go as breezily as a twister in an air-conditioned wind farm. Thankfully nearly all of them are dead or dying; unfortunately they started out that way and haven’t managed to improve since.
Rock status: combining, dividing, combining, dividing, sobbing into breakfast whiskey, combining, dividing, being split into little chips and used to murder mammoths, being stuffed into a tiny intricate mechanism and used to light cigarettes.

–The Paleozoic Era.
Earth’s lifeforms go through a teething period, attempting in rapid succession to consume rocks, volatile chemicals, sunlight, and each other. The lattermost method looks the coolest, so it gets the most attention, leaving its more productive, risk-averse siblings to suffer the fate of living relatively safe and prosperous lives while it continually attempts to choke itself into submission.
—The Cambrian Period: Named for its delicious, creamy, surface-ripened geological formations, the Cambrian saw the oceans of the world go from quiet bacterial vats to bustling, thriving basins of absolutely horrifying multicellular life. A randomly-selected handful from any given sponge-reef would make an arachnophobic shit themselves through their shoes. It was that bad. Thankfully, many of these diverse and appalling organisms managed to destroy the lush microbial mats that dotted the seafloor through burrowing, thus mangling their ecosystems beyond the bounds of recovery and putting themselves out of business and also life.
Life status: trilobites trilobites trilobites trilobites trilobites trilobites trilobites.
—The Ordovician Period: Hideous little things like crabs crossed with ticks crossed with scorpions go on the downswing and are supplemented with giant evil squids adorned with shells. Fish attempt to make themselves known, get eaten, and set to work to developing jaws so they can eat people back. Some of them will ditch bones in a fit of pique and become sharks.
Life status: largely boneless, scuttling, crunchy with a soft interior. Also largely trilobites.
—The Silurian Period: Life makes a break for the land in a desperate attempt to avoid touching anything in the ocean any longer than necessary, is immediately followed by scorpions, centipedes, millipedes. There is no hope and no god. Sea scorpions and leeches appear in an eager attempt to one-up this.
Life status: worse than death.
—The Devonian Period: The placoderm bony fish perfect the jaw and begin to use it on absolutely everything, tearing a hole through the Devonian ecosystem you could wedge a bus through. Sharks complain about this and are summarily eaten in vast numbers, leading to the origin of the superorder’s famed grouchiness. Some molluscs see the way the wind is blowing and shove themselves into tiny armoured shells, becoming ammonites and serving as inspiration for the development of the modern smartcar. In a surprise upset every single placoderm perishes without dignity at the Devonian’s end, leaving us only with some of the most utterly menacing giant bony skulls known to science and a latent suspicion of seafood.
Life status: ambitious, perfidious, amphibious.
—The Carboniferous Period: Amphibians snuck onto land when nobody was looking and are now running around the confused arthopods doing victory laps and eating them alive. Low sea levels and the newfangled fad of ‘bark’ lead to enormous swamps full of wood that is too sturdy and stubborn to rot properly, instead choosing to be painfully buried and macerated into coal over hundred of billions of years for the purposes of granting future species an opportunity at assisted suicide. Trilobites are in the shitter but still kicking up a stink. Reptiles show up and cannot possibly pose any sort of change in the status quo.
Life status: founding the backbone of Kentucky’s economy.
—The Permian Period: Swamps everywhere dry up and reptiles and mammal-like reptiles eat everyone else’s lunch, starting with the amphibians’ and laughing all the way to the bank and back and then back to the bank again and back again and then one more time just because the laughing really isn’t getting old yet. Then in a surprise upset a sudden and horrific incident annihilates nearly every living thing on earth, including the last of the trilobites, and everyone pauses for thirty million years to reload and catch their breath a little.
Life status: whacked.

–The Mesozoic Era. Life’s mid-life crisis. A series of desperate attempts at embracing bigger as better lead to a second bout of total disaster and a relapse into alcoholic despair. But the weather is really nice.
—The Triassic Period: Icthyosaurs and pterosaurs appear because reptiles have decided that merely dominating freshwater and the land was not enough. Mammal-like reptiles get back on their feet and start wobbling around making funny faces at the other reptiles and taking swings. While they’re busy, dinosaurs and mammals appear and begin to slowly and systematically shove their feet in every doorcrack. Before anyone can do anything about this, something murders almost everyone again.
Life status: blue-balled.
—The Jurassic Period: Dinosaurs take over everything of any importance on land and proceed to live high on the hog despite the nonexistence of hogs because that is just the sort of organisms they were. The largest land animals ever to exist are commissioned during this period and its successor, the largest land carnivores follow suit, violence is huge, blood is the new red, and the film rights are given to some bearded guy who looked like he knew what he was doing.
Life status: humungous.
—The Cretaceous Period: The photogenicity of life reaches its apex, along with its taste in excellent names. Every other thing on the planet is either over forty feet long, has teeth like bananas, a brain like a banana, or most frequently all three. Pride of place goes to Tyrannosaurus rex, who possessed an excellent name, a photogenic smile, a forty-foot-plus frame, a brain like a really big banana, and teeth like serrated bananas, all in a time well before bananas even existed. There is simply not that kind of get up and go nowadays and there will not be again because during this particular period something the size of Manhattan slammed into the Yucatan and demolished nearly all of the things on Earth that were considered interesting.
Life status: suddenly much smaller.

–The Cenozoic Era. Life’s comeback tour, following the realization that if all things are fleeting then so is failure. Its shirt is back on, its hair has been trimmed, its old pants fit again, and the gig tonight is looking packed. It’s got some new tricks it wants to try, like seeing what happens if it tries making stuff really smart for a change. It’s got a good feeling about this.
—The Palaeogene Period: Suddenly free from being accidentally stepped on for the first time in two hundred million years, mammals make a mad dash for every single habitat available, trying and somehow succeeding at occupying them all at once –carnivores, herbivores, omnivores, large, small, medium, breadbox-sized, and more. Some of them are in such a hurry that they jump into the ocean and swipe several old marine reptile niches right from out of the faces of sharks. The sharks respond to this by eating them, because the nice thing about being a shark is that you may not have many solutions to your problems but they tend to work pretty well.
Life status: topsy-turvy.
—The Neogene Period: The world, now once again full of stuff, continues to swirl it around like a man with a mouthful of Listerine. Seasonality reaches the point where regular snowfalls are inflicted upon mammals, who sort of lucked out in already having the concept of ‘fur’ down pat two hundred million years earlier. Speaking of which, some silly chucklefucks in Africa got rid of theirs and started running around bolt-upright buck-naked and hurting their backs.
Life status: in a dangerous time.
—The Quaternary Period: Don’t ask, okay?

-1 Egg: chicken, turkey, duck, emu, ostrich, roc, simurgh, phoenix, dragon, dinosaur (therapods only), sturgeon, pelican, monotreme, or gorilla.
-1 Eggbeater: standard stainless steal, old-fashioned cast-iron, old man with cane, whip, whipper-snapper, swordcane, secret squirrel technique, length of rubber hose, belt, board with a nail in it, or slim jim.
-1 Block of cheese: the good stuff, like cheddar, mozzarella, Mussolini, linoleum, Roquefort, Stilton, stuntman, 1001 Knock-Knock Jokes, or an elderly cow.
-1 Place to stand: you can’t cook an omelette on thin air. This sort of thing demands firm-footed heads-on-your-shoulders no-nonsense steady-handed concentration. Keep both feet on the ground at all times during omelette preparation. If you have to move, shuffle. It’s only for a few minutes, you big baby.
-1 Set of digits: fingers will do for a pinch, tentacles if you’re feeling saucy, or pinions, or talons, or whatever. Just so long as you’ve got a few of them. You’ll need those or that egg’ll just sit there and sulk in the pan, and good luck cracking it with your toes, unless toes are your digits of choice in which case well done. What if you’ve got no toes either? Well then you’re up shit creek, and there’s no omelettes up that particular stream, my friend. One word: digits.
-1 Onion: green or any other colour really, doesn’t matter. Just something like an onion. In an emergency, a picture of an onion can substitute for an onion but only if you are sufficiently hungry to believe that this is true.
-1 Or more really overbearing personalities: start at ‘radio host’ and work your way up.
-1 God or more: any that suits your fancy but preferably one with at least a little bit of localized omnipotence and at least one really satisfying thing to blaspheme about.
-1 Clock: should use time. Clocks that do not use time are not very good at making omelettes. If your clock is used to track space, colours, moods, temperatures, or hurt feelings, you should consider replacing it before you make an omelette.
-1 Keen eye, maybe more: you want to be able to see what you’re doing. And besides, what’s the most important bit of an omelette? The first thing you do? That’s right, it’s cracking the eggs. You’ve got to see the right spot to crack. You need that. Eyes. Either.
-1 Flippy object: not anything that flips around a lot, just something that’s good at flipping other things. More flexible than acrobatic, made of something bendy that won’t bite you when you touch it.
-1 Cooking platform: some sort of pan, rock, piece of bark, split thighbone (your own not recommended), giant eyeball (ibid), glass sheet, fan blade, sword, chunk of armour, or other handy flat-ish thing to spread an egg on and get some serious ommlettry underway.
-1 Cookbook: printed on paper, vellum, papyrus, bark (birch is nice), giant stone tablets weighing up to forty tons, tattoos, digital media, digital tattoos, or whatever.
-1 Burning thing: anything that’ll get a really good long scorch going and set in deep to the bone. Something fulsome yet channeled tightly, of grand depth yet slight breadth, aching yet fierce. A charrer that will not crumple, a crackler that will not squeak. Electrical, incendiary, magmatic, explosive, atomic, microwavable, propulsive, or chemical. Something that takes life and fries it ‘till it’s gone. Something that eats up the whole world if it’s taken far enough. You want that.
-1 Upbringing: any kind will do as long as it contains a point in your life that brings you into proximity with the concept of the omelette as a food item. This is very important. How to invent an omelette is a separate recipe and one that will not be covered in this recipe.
-1 Fierce and insatiable hunger: a literal hunger, not a metaphorical one. Those don’t channel themselves into skillfully applied cookery. A thirst, literal or figurative, is not the same thing and should not be used when making omelettes.
-1 Assistant: should be chosen carefully, with an eye to the long-term. Any fool can watch a clock and bleat the time-to-flip. You need someone you can count on. Someone with a passion for omelettes. Or someone with a vulnerability you can use to coerce them into it, like blood ties or a high-profile drug habit or a happy loving family that they would love to see grow old alongside them, carefree and smiling in the sunset of their days.
-1 Will, unbreakable: not merely unbendable, or unyielding. Those are the stainless steels of wills to the titanium we seek; the cubic zirconia to our diamonds; the pyrite to our gold; the flash in the pan to our thunderbolt in the eye. This omelette will not be accomplished without hard choices, and hard choices need harder men. You want to crumble apart like feta cheese at the first juncture? No? Then grow a will you could crack coconuts on, would-be-chef, and don’t come back ‘till that sucker’s hard as a rod.
-1 Tongue, minimum: what, you’re going to cook this thing up and then not even bother to enjoy it? Hedonism is an important part of the omelette experience. You can’t make an omelette without eyes, you can’t eat an omelette without a tongue. In both cases there are obvious technical exceptions, but the hypothetical situations in which the rule is stretched only prove its point – they are hollow, devoid of satisfaction, of light, of hope, of life itself. Don’t make this mistake. Don’t try to be a special snowflake. We are all the same deep down inside ourselves, and that is because we all just want to really eat the hell out of something and never stop tasting it. It’s basically the automatically installed OS on the hard-drives of our brains: eat things, eat good things, never stop eating things forever and ever amen yes sir.
-1 Pound of grit: either mineral or ground-corn style. The former can be used to scrub out the pan after the omelette is made, the latter can be eaten alongside it. In a pinch, either can substitute for the other’s roles.
-1 Figure of moral support: we both know this omelette is going to get serious before it’s over. We went over this, unbreakable will, determination you could mince cattle atop, yadda yadda yadda. But look, even the most iron-eyed stone-souled steel-spined badasses need someone to lean on when things get stuff. Get some help. Get someone whose shoulder you can cry on when things turn blue and you don’t dare show the world your doubts and fears. A mother is nice, or a father. If said family members are unsympathetic and/or dead just pull out a copy of your family tree and start checking immediate kin in a counter-clockwise direction until you hit someone with enough free time or a low price or preferably both.
-1 Note: a message for anyone nearby in case your omelette is interrupted (by appointment, unexpected company, fire, violent insurrection, world war, suicide). Keep it short and snappy. Brevity is the soul of wit, and simplicity its heart and mind. For further information in case this comes up on your randomly-generated post-omelette questionnaire: brevity’s lungs are briefness, its liver is velocity, its left and right kidneys are acceleration and promptness (respectively), and its colon is truncated.
-1 Backup: of whatever of the above vital ingredients you think is most likely to fail you without warning. It’s not so hard, just take whatever you’re feeling antsy about and get another. The omelette’ll wait, there’s no sense in rushing into this sort of thing half-cocked. Be careful.

Once you’ve got all your ingredients together, just concentrate. The rest will come together surprisingly quickly. If you experience any problems in the process, destroy ingredients and bystanders at random until the problems cease. Remember, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few legs.

Birthdays continually refuse to cease.  Oh well.  Look at this instead of that.

-Ferocious and unstoppable tidal waves of teeth.
-Cats that don’t stop at hats.
-Utterly magnificent, hand-crafted, imperially-commissioned, royal-autographed, artisanal jodhpurs.
-The will and might to forego a year’s worth of breakfasts for the greater good.
-A wave surfing a man. Alternatively, a surfboard waving at a man.
-Reptiles that go for the gut, the gusto, and the world records.
-A wilful, flagrant, and un-coerced lack of pants.
-Clocks that set their schedules by the human sleep cycle.
-When properly organized, one point six eight two four million razorblades.
-A properly tossed punch salad with a light-bodied yet palate-pleasing elbow-to-ribs vinaigrette.
-Ferocious man-eating sinuses.
-Conducting the biggest mistake of your life in a scientifically sealed vacuum, for the benefit of future generations and your own personal safety.
-Turpitude.
-Nice long sit-down chats with boulders, with lovely hot cups of tea (earl grey, plenty of sugar, just a bit of milk, don’t scald it please).
-Cloning dinosaurs hodge-podge.
-The Best Potato.
-The determination and persistence to nudge hills.
-Adorable, delicious little mammals. Or reptiles. Birds too. Invertebrates? Sure. Of course fish, of course. Not picky, really.
-Cats that respect your personal space and listen to you.
-Also, unicorns.
-Pines that know which way the wind is blowing and have no choice but to show it.
-Mysterious and primal jungle corgis.
-Anything with sufficient volumes of dinosaurs in it (“sufficient” being >0).
-That little noise you can get where you can make your mouth go ‘pop’ seriously how do you do that it’s like magic or something I can’t do that god damnit I envy you bastards.
-Bones that go big. Alternatively, bones that go home.
-Poutine without a cause.
-Anything smarter than a human that doesn’t have thumbs, or better yet, hands.
-A spoon that has been sharpened to a point keener than any knife.
-Juggling marmosets. In both meanings of that sentence.
-Stars that out of necessity must both burn out AND fade away before collapsing in on themselves into a point of nigh-infinite mass so all-encompassing that even light cannot escape them. This is all very impressive.
-Small people with large weapons.
-But not the reverse.
-Don’t ask me why, it just doesn’t work that way.
-The downfall of humanity coming from within. Specifically, from the spine-stealing parasite lurking inside the President of the United States’ torso at this very instant, plotting the unsavoury demise of us all.
-Anything which does not normally eat humans that stands up, squares its shoulders, and says “well why the hell NOT?”
-Temerity.
-The will and the forethought and the sheer unflinching determination that has led to a world where you can sit and watch cat videos while your body runs down and people die for want of a mouthful of water and a pinch of bread. Because it used to be just like that, except without the cat videos to distract you.
-Prophecy loopholes and the lawyers who find and close them to tidy up some of those damned multi-volume epics that keep getting churned out.
-Swirly ice cream.
-Ballads to body parts. Or poems. Pop songs too, I guess. Just as long as they aren’t about genitals, because we already have quite enough of those.
-Whistling past the graveyard to fend off the marrowsuckers by interfering with their sensitive hearing so they won’t consume the freshly-dead for sustenance and devour the town.
-Soft-spoken shitheads. It’s easier to talk over them.
-Cuts and scrapes that tell a story, at least in braille.
-Warbling. Unless it’s from a warbler, in which case why the hell’s that supposed to be impressive?
-Geometrically improbable dice with mathematically unlikely results producing economic impossibility allowing somebody to buy themselves an extra drink.
-The madcap, mile-a-minute, thrill-ride, adrenaline-pumping lifestyle of the all-day weather-watcher.
-Weather that watches you back and judges you too.
-The person who gives you that feeling when you’re alone in a dark room that makes you walk very quickly so the slow-footed monster behind your back doesn’t seize and devour you.
-Crows making nests in crow’s nests.
-Nostalgia for when nostalgia didn’t include the 1980s.
-Hum anthems.
-The power of mild possibly-physical attraction overcoming a few obstacles.
-Barbequed things.
-The Pacific Ocean and all she contains, with honorable mention to the Mediterranean for participation in past accomplishments.
-Relaxation in trying circumstances, either as morale boost or as deliberate delusion.
-Sulphurous emanations that volcanoes refuse to apologize for.
-Clothing that has freed itself from the shackles of oppressive bodies and their odours.
-Rings that like things but find themselves bereft of things to put on them.
-Pulsating, when carefully directed.
-Mid-ocean ridges that feud with deep-sea trenches and their innocent offspring that get caught in the crossfire when all they really want to do is have a whole lot of sex.
-A cookie-cutter that produces unique and non-reproducible shapes.
-Dragons that don’t bother to befriend things that they could instead eat.
-A dedicated and serious-minded approach to pet rock breeding and care.
-A whimsical and lighthearted approach to nuclear power plant safety inspection and design.
-Fallacious beliefs in the nature of Frog.
-The friendliest plague bacteria.

I think I’d like to be a big thing
Let the news sound out let the bells ring
And give me as much attention as you can possibly bring
On my birthday

If we want my birthday to really make it large
We’d better put it where it’ll always be in charge
At the year’s far-end, where there’s no holidays to barge
Into its face, and hog time from my birthday

My birthday will be the world’s biggest deal
You will gather and discuss my long-lasting appeal
And when it comes the shopping will get totally real
On my birthday

See, my birthday will mandate buying loads of stuff
And working long hours to save up will get rough
But when it’s all done you’ll feel totally buff
(Never done, because you’ve never finished buying enough)
For my birthday

Of course there’s more to my birthday than money can say
If you want the keys to hearts going homemade can pay
Off big, but we aren’t all craftsmen these days
Sucks to unwrap a half-baked mug, on my birthday

My birthday will be the end-all be-all of it
And you’ll end up with a huge mound of presents that won’t fit
In your house, but that’s fine ‘cause most of them will be shit
You can always give them away, on my next birthday

My birthday goes great with peace and love
We’ll stuff you with it until you’re about to shit out doves
But when it comes to strangers all that crap can get shoved
Up a mistletoe’s ass, on my birthday

And my birthday will let you sit down and kick back
All day you will feast and all night you will snack
Too bad you’re hungry where food don’t mean jack
On my birthday

My birthday will bring in family from yonder and hither
To bring season’s cheer, make your heart light as a feather
(Okay, it’s more like a boulder, but you can suck it up and bicker)
You’ll smile and you’ll nod and then they’re gone forever
And you’re alone again, on my birthday

Clean-up after my birthday feels far too long
Pass the time by listening to all of my birthday songs
It’s the new year soon – watch the clock, ring the gong
And hope you’ll have a better time, on my next birthday

(The contents of this post are harder to find images for than my lazy soul can stand – instead, listen to this while you read because it sounds pretty)

You didn’t think we’d be getting away from ecology THAT easily, did you?  Man, I have enough notes from that course to choke a rhino.  A rhino with two sets of esophagi.  And a scuba tank.  There’s a new bit of terminology every two inches and a new concept every three feet.  Luckily, most of it is devoted to over-explaining simple, easy-to-grasp concepts.  So that’s nice!

Welcome to our what the hell is this thing again?
Our first simple, easy-to-grasp concept that will be overexplained is the community.  Ecological communities differ from yours: they never ask you to help participate in a clean-up-the-streets initiative, they don’t take hours of your service in exchange for minor and obnoxious crimes, and very few of them mandate human participation in any way.  Instead, they can best be defined as something like this: a bunch of populations of different species in the same spot, interacting in some way (predating, fleeing, flirting, rummaging, bartering, raconteuring, outright ignoring, etc).  A bit vague, but serviceable.  Just not serviceable enough for some people, which is why we had two big honkin’ concepts of what an ecological community was clashing against each other for a few whiles.

First up to bat, we had Fred Clements, who described the community as a superorganism, an organized and discrete unit whose contents interact with one another in specific ways to produce specific outcomes.  Each species only makes sense in terms of how they fit into the whole system – you can’t understand a tiger without understanding sambar without understanding small woody shrubs without understanding soil quality without blur de blar de blah.  This is known as the holistic concept.
Second but making up for it in enthusiasm (and in large part as a deliberate, pointed, not-far-short-of-‘screw-you’ response to Clements) we had Hank (Henry) Gleason, who basically summed up communities as “a big old pile of bullshit and luck.”  Well, not in quite those words – though he did describe a plant association as “not an organism, scarcely even a vegetational unit, but merely a coincidence.”  Lifeforms get thrown together all willy-nilly and hurly-burly by the tangled and cruel winds of fate, and what works together stays together.  There’s no real organization above species level in this, which is why it’s termed the individualistic concept.
Of course, history being what it is, we’ve since decided that they were both totally wrong – but it sounds more polite to say that we’ve ‘integrated their premises’ and they’re therefore both right. We’ve taken onboard Gleason’s notion that communities don’t have firm boundaries since if there’s one thing species love it’s to encroach on each others private business, and we’ve accepted Clement’s idea that species interaction plays a huge part on how the community ends up working because if stuff doesn’t poke the stuff around it nothing interesting happens and it all ends up extinct.
They’d both probably be livid.

Open and Shut
Two fun ways communities can work out geographically are open and closed.  In a closed community, the species that make up the community share a closely overlapped distribution that is firmly separate from others species, forming a segregated, quasi-racist lump.  Y’know, sort like a human gated community.  You can spot their boundaries  quite easily – they’re the places where the environment changes sharply, like going from a British Columbian temperate rainforest to the seashore.  Those borders are called ecotones, and the places where they’re sharpest are usually where big physical changes happen, like going from land to water, or the soil completely changing, or switching from one side of a mountain to the other.  Like tracking a floor’s texture going from a carpet to hardwood boards to that one spot underneath the stove that hasn’t seen the light of day since the house was built that could be made out of precambrian rock for all you know.
Open communities, by contrast, have no natural boundaries and the species that make them up can end up all over the place, falling into more than one community grouping themselves.  Because of this, they don’t really have ecotones.  Too laid-back.  Species distribution in these communities follows underlying gradients in the environment – rain levels, altitude, blah blah blah – and thus the communities never quite become homogenous enough to be given clear boundaries where area A ends and area B begins.  This sort of distribution ends up being called the continuum concept, and has no sharp-edged ecotones, just a varying pattern.  Like a big patchwork quilt gone all wrong.

Succession
This is how both royalty and ecology transition from one (head of) state to another.  In both cases, violence is usually the cause – your old ruler/community is dead/disturbed, better initiate succession and get him/it replaced/reinvigorated.
There are two broad types of ecological succession – primary and secondary.  Primary succession kicks in when a place has been scrubbed bare of life – a glacier scraped it all off, or a volcano buried it, or a landslide smothered it, or or or or or you get the idea.  There’s not usually a lot of soil left.  Primary succession begins where everything has ended, and puts down something new.
Secondary succession occurs where a community’s been disturbed but not annihilated – though the degree of damage is pretty flexible.  A few trees fall over, that’s secondary succession.  A wildfire scorches out hundreds of acres, crisps the soil, and flash-fries a majestic chunk of the flora?  Also secondary succession, since it’s still a repair job rather than a make-something-out-of-nothing.  Obviously, it’s a lot more common than primary succession, and it takes a lot less time.  Not that succession is a particularly hasty process in any case – grasslands in North America are a two-to-four-decade wait on secondary succession, and they’re pretty fast about it.  Imagine how long it takes to wait for trees to grow back.
And now, a hypothetical succession.

Let’s say we clear-cut a little strip of a North American deciduous forest.  Just for the giggles.
The first stuff on the scene will be the little quick-growing buggers that were being stifled by the shade of the big trees, the annuals and such.  Soon enough (relatively speaking) shrubs will come in and show their appreciation for the renewed soil and shade by crowding out most of them and bumping ’em off.  After that come the pines, which bump off the shrubs, and then WOAH OOPS it turns out that all this recolonization just left the perfect environment for the deciduous trees to step in and retake their old ground back, grinding the proletariat under their merciless leafy regime for all eternity.

In the above example, we’ve got three things.
First, obviously, we’ve got secondary succession.  The forest is down but all life isn’t out, it’s a rebuilding job rather than a ‘well, guess we’d better start weathering this bedrock into soil’ project.  A fixer-upper.
Second, we’ve got a new term, something that can be applied to each of the stages our succession went through from annuals-shrubs-evergreens-deciduous: sere.  Annoying to pronounce, but useful to remember, a sere is any of the ‘steps’ in an ecological succession.  Each sere alters the conditions of the habitat and sets the stage for the next one – encouraging some species through facilitation succession (annuals helpfully rebuilding and shading up the soil for their shrub overlords) and denying others the opportunity through inhibition succession (the pines don’t exactly leave the annuals room to get re-established).
Third, we’ve got the climax.  Notice how nothing came in after the deciduous forest staked its claim?  It’s the final sere, the last word, the buck-stops-here-er, the head honcho, the king of the hill, the enormous brie the gargantuan cheddar AND the massive mozzarella.  The climax community is the be-all end-all stage of a particular succession sequence.

…Although they vary substantially within themselves due to environmental gradients, and are thus much less homogenous than I just described.

…And if the habitat’s unstable it can just be a transient climax, because the environmental conditions are going to change like crazy and make an entirely new climax the popular favorite for ‘most likely to survive flash floods followed by prolonged submersion’ or something.

…And if it’s a cyclic climax, predominance of one species in a climax will just cause another climax species to naturally rise up and eclipse the first one and vice versa in an endless see-saw where dominance of one merely leads to its inevitable downfall ad nauseum.

….Oh, and if there’s a lot of herbivores that really like to eat the climax vegetation (I mean REALLY LIKE, like elephants really like), then they can force it into a different climax through delicious, hunger-based attrition.

Look, it’s all VERY COMPLICATED, all right?  This is always what happens when you try and explain simple, easy-to-grasp concepts.

Two apologies must be made.  First: the title is a lie, I’m sorry.  There are no power levels in this little essay because there’s no power.  Not enough power to fuel a toaster oven.  There WILL, however, be energy, power’s close cousin, and we will be organizing it into levels.  Trophic levels.
Second: this is going to be a bit short because I’ve got a final and then work and then another final over the next couple, so I’m a tad pressed for time at the moment.
Okay.  Energy!  Energy as pertaining to life on earth, more specifically.  It has to come from somewhere, because energy doesn’t exactly create itself.  Where’d your energy come from?  Well, the last thing you ate, which got it from…uh, let’s start at the other end of the scale.  Go through this from bottom to top.  We’ll start where the energy comes from, and wing it from there.
I: The Sun

This is your star. There are many like it, but this one is yours and also slightly below-average in all significant respects.

This is where energy comes from.  Well, that was easy to explain.
Unfortunately, most of the sun’s energy gets shot out into the blank and unfriendly void of space where it fizzles out and does jack for us.  A bunch of old libertarian novelist nerds in the 70s had very strong opinions about building a big sphere around the sun to fix this wastefulness, but unfortunately that’ll have to wait until we’ve got the tech to disassemble most of the solar system for raw materials, by which point we’re probably smart enough that we’ve broken the laws of thermodynamics over our knees and no longer give a hoot.
Anyways.  An infinitesimally small chunk of sunlight reaches earth.  A bit of it – the wavelengths that aren’t too short, that aren’t too long – gets through the atmosphere.  And then most of it splatters on a rock somewhere (or more likely, a wave) and does nothing.
About 1-2% of it impacts a plant.
That’s the important part for almost all life on earth.

II: The Primary Producer – the Autotrophs

And just think: before this little guy's ancestors took over, that sky was probably vomit-orange.

The plant, of course, being living, does what any of us would would with a windfall: it squanders that shit.  The plant blows anywhere between 15-70% of its solar energy sweepstakes on personal maintenance (paying the biological bills so its cell walls don’t disintegrate and its DNA doesn’t unzip every time it respires in a northerly wind) and tucks the leftovers into production: making energy into more plant.  It’s a classic libertarian feel-good story of a plucky individual succeeding against all odds by almost no merit of its own but for dumb luck.  That’s what makes plants the producers: the transformers of your solar energy into organic matter.  You can also call them autotrophs; automatic-nourishing little buggers, the first trophic level of the trophic pyramid and by far its widest and most populous level (you can also call them photoautotrophs if you wish to be fancy: light-automatic-nourishing)  They harvest what’s floating free in the air and turn it into nice shit to call their own.
Unfortunately, the first fact of having nice shit is that other people notice.  And many of them will be bigger than you.

III: The Primary Consumers – the Heterotrophs

Ayn Rand would denounce this kangaroo as a parasite upon the ecosystem's creators.

That 1-2% of sunlight producers tap into is a tiny, tiny trickle of what’s available, and they use up most of its energy just to stay alive.  But 85-30% of 1-2% of the energy of all sunlight impacting the earth is still a pretty honkin’ good chunk of energy.  And it’s all sitting there inside those producers, and sooner or later SOMEbody’s going to take a crack at it.  And by somebody I mean herbivores.  Your white-tailed deers, your grasshoppers, your chipmunks.  All the guys that love their greens (and browns, and greys, and…well, different plants and different plant bits come in different colours, is what I’m saying).  These guys can’t make their own energy, they have to consume it, stripping it straight from the delicious producer. That explains primary consumer, and as for heterotroph, well, apply a little knowledge.  “Different-nourishment.”  They don’t automatically nourish themselves, they get their energy differently.  By ripping it off the primary producer.
Only 5-20% of the energy stored up in the primary producers makes it through the digestion process and gets used to produce more primary consumer – breaking down plant tissue isn’t easy, and it isn’t efficient.  But what’s left is more than enough to keep a reasonably decent population of plant-eating, leaf-scarfing, twig-munching leeches alive, forming a smaller but still sizable second trophic level on the trophic pyramid.  The bastards.
There is another fact: there will always be a bigger bastard.

III: The Secondary Consumers – also the Heterotrophs

Like most omnivores, surprisingly adorable until it overpopulates and eats everything and runs the planet into a mass extinction event because it won't stop burning carbon. Still cute though.

The bigger bastard in this case is the one that eats the one that eats plants.  The consumer of the consumers.  The secondary consumer, if you will.  Unfortunately it doesn’t get a special ‘troph’ name because heterotroph sort of covers everything that isn’t an autotroph, so it has to share.  Them’s the breaks.  Secondary consumers also includes most omnivores, the greedy bastards that can’t make up their minds and want to exploit both the producers AND consumers at the same time.  It’s worth noting that yet AGAIN, despite all a digestive system can do (even including the fact that meat’s much easier to digest than vegetable matter, being in a sort of pre-processed format, like a microwaveable dinner), only 5-20% of the energy from the previous trophic level (the primary consumers) makes it to this one, with the bulk of it getting used up to keep the primary consumer running smoothly.  This means that the secondary consumers make up a substantially smaller trophic level on the pyramid than their food items.  Deja vu.
Remember that last fact I told you?  Repeat it.

IV: The Tertiary Consumers – also, also the Heterotrophs

And yet if it was eating a fish we'd all think it was cute, especially if it got a belly rub out of it.

The biggest bastard’s problem usually isn’t that someone else will eat him – at least, not once it’s fully-grown.  No, usually the tertiary consumer‘s biggest cause of death is starving because it can’t eat enough OTHER people.  These are the orcas, the sperm whales, the polar bears, the Siberian tigers, the predacious diving beetles, the golden eagles, the Tyrannosaurus rexes.  Sure, they’ve got the tiniest amount of energy to deal with since their energy’s passed through a minimum of two separate sieves before it gets anywhere near their plates, but they look good on t-shirts.  From their miniscule-sized trophic level they look down the rest of the trophic pyramid and survey its contents like kings, secure in the knowledge that the energy buck stops at their desks and in their guts.

V: BUT WAIT! – the detrital food chain

There's always somebody who eats what nobody will.

You probably recognized the above as a good ol’ fashioned food chain with fancy words like ‘troph’ slapped willy-nilly.  And it is!  And you probably realize that in real life food chains are complex, and most trophic levels interact with a bunch of others below them, not just their immediate neighbours.  They do!
What you DIDN’T know was that this is but one of two types of food chain!  AHA!  I bet you didn’t see that coming, eh?
(Important note: if you did see this coming feel free to assume the position of delivering the above sentence to everyone around you)
The standard/grazing food chain, which we just sort of went over, is everywhere we look in nature.  What lurks behind it at every corner is its shadowy evil twin: the detrital food chain!
It’s actually really simple and stupid: basically, the entire grazing food chain (relatively biggest animals, based upon plant bits) gets consumed at every single trophic level by the relatively small and often microscopic denizens of the detrital food chain.  Primary producers and tertiary consumers, shed leaves and sperm whales, it all ends up getting chewed into a pulp and spat out sooner or later.  Mostly later, once something else has finished spitting it out first.

SHOCKING SURPRISE TWIST CONCLUSION!: There’s another path to energy!

Life without light: slightly odd, but still garish.

So.  Energy comes from the sun, right?  The only way to get organic matter made is to milk that good ol’ fashioned sunlight, right?  All hail the life-birthing sun and pass the obsidian knife, let’s build us some (trophic) pyramids?
That was an okay point of view to hold up until the 70s, at which point people found out about hydrothermal vents.
The long and the short of it: little hot spots in the earth’s crust located undersea where tectonic plates meet create upwellings of dissolved, searingly-hot minerals that billow out from vents in black and white clouds at impossibly huge depths of the ocean – black and white smokers.  Some of the ridiculously nasty chemicals that come out of those vents are chock full of tasty, gut-wrenching minerals that contain too much sulfur to be reasonable.
But of course, where there is something gross, there is always something that will eat it.  Specifically, chemotrophic bacteria.  Even more specifically, chemoautotrophic bacteria.  Screw the sun, these little bold-as-balls bastards are making organic matter out of pulverized continental crust waste products at the bottom of the ocean in absolute darkness.  And where there’s nice shit – life – there is also that which would take it from you: bastards.  Where there are producers (chemoautotroph or phototroph), there will be consumers.  And secondary consumers.  Nests of tube worms, terrifying scuttling clabs, big ol’ shellfish.  Life without light, living on a tiny tether that can snap with just a bit of shifting rock or a clogged vent, leaving them all to starve to death.  Comfy and reassuring, but very wonderful.  Remember: there is no rock so nasty that something won’t fight and die for the chance to live under it.
And just think.  This is probably the energy source that your ultimate grandmother was raised on.

Picture Credits:
The Sun: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
Tilia Leaf: Public domain image from Wikipedia.
Red Kangaroo: Public image domain from Wikipedia.
Raccoon Kit: Public domain from image Wikipedia.
Fiddler Crab: Public public image from Wikipedia.
Tube Worms: Imagepedia publiWikic dofromain.