42

I find myself wondering, what is it that binds us in this world? Why be here, or there; why even live at all? You could say my minds in a strange place tonight. Honestly there's not a lot in this world that I care about. Almost all are people.

For some odd reason, the words, "I search for meaning" just came across my thoughts: only to be shadowed with a hitch-hiking memory.

Arthur Dent, having escaped the Earth's destruction, potentially has some of the computational matrix in his brain. He attempts to discover The Ultimate Question by extracting it from his brainwave patterns, as abusively suggested by Marvin the Paranoid Android, when a Scrabble-playing caveman spells out forty two. Arthur pulls random letters from a bag, but only gets the sentence "What do you get if you multiply six by nine"?

“

"Six by nine. Forty two." "That's it. That's all there is." "I always thought something was fundamentally wrong with the universe"

”

Six times nine is, of course, fifty-four.

Where the number 42 is the Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. Either way, my brain hurts enough that I'm going to sleep.