what is the word

Things in the universe are strange. My favorite blogger posted a picture that looked familiar to me. I suddenly remembered I had seen it here, on the web site of my friends' band the Narrator, only the day before. I thought maybe True knew the band for some reason, but it turns out she just found the pic via google image, which is actually more mindblowingly coincidental.
Then last nite things kept breaking. Leyla came by to smoke the rest of the fucked up joint that made us bug out at the Mercury on Tuesday. We knew it was weird pot but we wanted to try it again just to make sure. & we were right, it was weird. We got scary stoned & around the same time everything in my place started falling apart. The internet was being mindnumbingly slow & then cell phone reception became shittier than usual. Leyla was trying to talk to Meredith & then Dan but both times the call got dropped. I was attempting to flirt via text message but to no avail. It would say I had a message but I couldn't read it or write back or anything. The remote to the DVD player suddenly failed too, & we didn't have any more AAA batteries. I mean nothing was working. Except for the sound system in the music studio downstairs. They must have gotten some new equipment cos suddenly the bass was about thirteen times louder than usual, like someone switched on an amp in the next room.
"Welcome to my house," I said to Leyla. "Everything's just a little bit harder here."
At nite when I was going to bed I thought about this class I took at UT. The Search for Extraterrestrial Life. One of the approaches we talked about was listening for signals that might be coming from other life forms but not transmitting any ourselves. The main drawback to this method is that it makes possible a scenario in which "everybody's listening, no one's sending." I always remembered that for some reason. I had this image of scientists & aliens in these vast eerie labs with machines everywhere, poised, waiting, metaphorical ears cocked to an infinite silence.
That's how I feel these days. Not transmitting. Poised. Waiting. Getting back silence. Maybe it's that scary pot, but last nite I scribbled to myself in my notebook so I could get something back. & on one of the pages I saw a quotation I had copied there years ago: "However deep one's knowledge of abstruse philosophy, it is like a piece of hair flying in the vastness of space."