Everything is more complex than it appears.

Rats lack canine teeth, and instead have a gap, called the diastema, separating the two front incisors from the rear molars.  Furthermore, a rat’s incisors are open rooted, which means they continue to grow throughout life.

A fact without context is useless.

Scouring dental conditions of rodents might be a strange read at 2:43 AM, but this is what I do—obscure research.  Often it is discarded as pointless information, at best a $300 Jeopardy answer (or is it a question?).  Yet I think we can agree that just about any fact without context is useless.  Still I relish in the unpredictable transformation from useless to poignant, a search into an existential abyss, where I admit losing myself in the experience of discovery.  And it is easy to get lost in the richness of information; in fact I think it’s necessary.

But not all who wander are lost; I have a purpose when searching by the light of sparked interest.  I’m not looking for answers necessarily, but associations.  Examining the explicit and obscure connectivity among facts creates a system where relationships have the ability to influence concept.  This system of connectivity is deceivingly all-encompassing—these are the hidden textures, the involuntary changes in heart rate, and the sensation of memory-smell recognition all synthesized to elicit emotion.  This is where creativity lives, where novel re-combination is revered, and sandstone layers of perspective provide an intimate value and delicate sense of being.

Still, a fact without context is useless, and so we must manufacture context for seemingly unrelated facts.  This is storytelling.  So why were those initial facts chosen for this essay?

Perhaps it will gnaw at you.

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