August 22, 1997 – Thoughts from Life 2

First, let me make something perfectly clear (to steal a phrase from a man who stole the innocence out from under America). This is not a sequel to Thoughts from Life. It is merely a continuance of my thoughts as the title suggests (Okay, the title out-and-out states it). I’m not saying that all sequels are bad, but they promote lazy creative thinking which is an archrival of mine. The free flowing of ideas and thoughts splashes excitement upon my face. My mind enjoys creation. Therefore …

Did you ever have a time when you had so little sleep you couldn’t spell correctly? Okay, that’s a bad example. I can never really spell correctly. How about when you couldn’t spell the word the word “the” correctly? This is a tired that feels as if someone took small weights and anchored them to each of your eyelashes. Eyelash is a violent word. It evokes an image of your eye hairs lashing against one another like a tidal wave hitting the shore each time you blink. When you’re tired, this image seems somehow appropriate. Your eyes come together in what should be described as “eye pounds.” (“What’s wrong, Dan?” Alice asks. Dan’s eyes pound together as he says, “I went to a party last night and now I have eye pounds.”)

Why do we have a lack of sleep when we usually know exactly what’s going to happen in the future (examples include work, parties, doctor’s appointments, vacations, etc.)? Because we don’t look ahead. Some people have their lives completely planned out ahead of time. We call those people “anal.” I’ve tried to be anal, but just can’t quite get myself organized long enough to do it right. What I need … what we all need is a personal brain scheduler. A person would do … even better … we could have a chip implanted in our heads that would tell us what to do and when. Not only would it be a calendar of events, but it would be a brain and body controller. If you need to get to sleep by 10:00 pm to get up at 6:00 am, your brain will tell your body to put you in bed and shut you down for an appropriate amount of time (8 hours or more depending upon your age). Most people would not like the idea of having a computer chip implanted in their head, but soon everyone would be implanted. It will be the new sign you have become an adult. People would ask young adults, “Have you implanted yet?” just as they ask, “Have you passed your driving test?” The future is a good thing. Give it a hug some time.

Meeting new people is always a strange experience. I always meet someone new and can only remember what I felt like or thought I looked like. Perhaps this is just me. I am a self-centered person, as many others are self-centered. I need to force myself (as everyone does, whether they admit it) to think about other people. I actually care about other people, but my first thought is usually how I would react in their place, etc. I would say (as I heard a psychologist say once) people who are shy are more self-centered than those who talk a great deal. I would say this is true if it weren’t for what I have observed from the many talkative people I have known in my life. The more talkative people I have known have been the most self-centered people I have met. As the saying goes, they talk to hear themselves talk. If you listen to them talk, at least 80% (and I’m being generous) of what they talk about is related to themselves. This is not being said in order to start a revolution against talkative people (down with talkative people bumper stickers would have to be made). I am merely thinking about stuff because that’s what I do.

I don’t know why, but people frighten me. Actually, embarrassment frightens me (which means I lied when I said I didn’t know why). People simply come along with embarrassment. People who make noises when I don’t know they are in the room or people who don’t make noises when I think they should be in the room seem to frighten me in the most efficient manner. I was chasing my sister once when I was a kid. I chased her down a dark hall in our house (okay, down the hall in our house – we weren’t in the Rockefeller family) when she threw a giant Mickey Mouse stuffed animal out from a dark room. It scared me so much; I couldn’t stop crying for five minutes (plus I had to keep up crying until my mom got there). I remind her of this experience every time she thinks she was the perfect older sister. She treated me like older sisters treat their younger brothers – she ignored me. She not only ignored me, but she went out of her way to shun me or keep me from whatever she was doing. Okay, this “shunning” probably only happened about 5 times in my young life, but it’s always memorable when you’re being shunned.

I can remember shunning one person in my life. I was in elementary school (I like to call it grade school because that’s what it was called in my day – October 16, 1976) in 6^th grade. One friend I had known since about 1^st grade had left Kimberly (my elementary school) in about 4^th grade to go to a private school. I don’t know if his parents reconsidered their decision to put him in private school or what (it wasn’t money because they always had plenty to go around for such essentials as a grand piano they never played and a tree house they had built on to the side of the house, but they put him back into Kimberly in 6^th grade.

When he came back, he didn’t quite fit in so well with the other kids. I don’t know if this had anything to do with his experience in private school, but, one day on the playground, he had done something (or knowing kids he could have done nothing) to cause the other kids to want him away from their group. I don’t know if I was there already or just got there when this incident happened. I was given the ultimatum of going with this friend or staying with the other group of kids. My friend begged me to go with him, but I must admit I made the peer pressure choice. I let him walk away, forced from the group, and stayed with my “friends” in the group. None of these kids ever developed into any kind of good friendship. I did eventually talk to him (or, should I say, he talked to me) and became slight friends again at the end of elementary school. The friend and I went to a different Junior High School (now it’s called a Middle School) and met back up briefly in High School to play music together, but we were never more than acquaintances since our days at Kimberly.

I don’t really look old. By most standards, I’m not. I feel old at times. Whenever one gets out of high school or college, that seems to be the beginning of feeling “old.” The weight of the world is on your shoulders until that point, but after you graduate high school or college, something larger weighs on them – the weight of your house. The “house” can actually represent getting a family, a job, pets, an actual house, a mortgage, rent, or bills. The bills, especially, sit upon our shoulders like a satanic parrot pecking at your head with worries of the future and anxieties about our spending habits of the past. They remind us that those paychecks we receive are merely continuations of a great chain of dollars that we never get to see or touch. Credit becomes our greatest discovery and our worst down fall when we make the accent into adulthood. Money you never really see is a dangerous thing. We should all be like kids. If kids don’t have money for something or they can’t beg their parents for the money, they don’t get it. Okay, some kids who didn’t have the money acquired the items without the money or their parents, but most of those kids are now graduating from prison.

The idea of saving money for the future is lost on today’s or even yesterday’s generation. We have not had adverse economic times as a nation in some time in America. Our parents or parents’ parents may have gone through adverse economic times, but the concept is lost on most of us today. We are probably due very soon for a nationwide dump into the economic toilet. I’m not making a prediction (unless it comes true), but I see signs of an economic structure at the breaking point. Okay, my economic structure is at its breaking point. This may have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the nation, but I like to feel I’m not alone in my troubles. Deal with me or deal without me.

 I watch behind-the-scenes and biography shows all the time. (Thanks for mentioning that, Brian. You’re welcome.) I care what type of behind-the-scenes or biography shows they are, but I watch ones I like again and again and, have I mentioned, again. Biography on A & E, The Real World on MTV, and The Making of Jurassic Park on video are some of the more highly watched shows in my mental collection. The idea of looking at the underbelly of something or someone appeals to my curious mind. I don’t like shows like Rescue 911 or Cops, though. These usually show the underbelly of things and people I don’t really care about. I could sit and listen to a description of Jean-Michel Jarre’s (if you don’t know who he is, talk to me later) musical equipment for several hours without getting bored, but show me a drunk trying to explain why and how he “didn’t” beat his wife five times in the past thirty days and I would usually rather do anything else but watch it.

One of my least favorite sounds is the sound of a 911 call played on television (usually complete with a still picture of the 911 operator taking the call, the person calling 911, or both on the screen together). I could never be in the police, a firefighter, a 911 operator, a paramedic, or any other job requiring me to listen to panicked people most of the day. I like my behind-the-scenes shows to be about entertainment, with few exceptions. I have had a few limited experiences with panicked situations and people in my life. I was not amused. How someone could come home from the stress of their job and sit in front of their television and watch more stressed people is beyond the comprehension I once thought I had but lost behind the couch.

I also enjoy fantasy books, movies, and television shows (as long as there is a comic undertone). Take me into a completely different world and immerse me in rules, creatures, people, lands, galaxies, and nonexistent realities and I’m a happy camp director. I don’t like reality. I never have and I probably never will. It doesn’t go well with any of my outfits. The only thing about reality I like is not experiencing it through the overemotional people of the world. I am usually pretty good in a crisis. I’ve had my moments in the land of the overemotional, but I usually don’t take things too personally or seriously. Other people’s emotions rarely get me from behind. When I get emotional, I usually wind up in more trouble than if I didn’t care about any of it at all. I usually try to stay out of most other people’s lives. I’ll give them advice on how to cut their hair, but not how to break up with their boyfriend after the fight they had last night.

I have mastered the art of speaking within my head (usually to myself). This is why I can’t sleep at night. I have the art of brain speaking down so well, it forces me to think about things I wouldn’t normally think about. In my brain at night, I reenact events from the day, I debate myself through imaginary disputes, I write scenes in plays by acting out all the actors’ parts, and I solve the world’s problems. All when I should be asleep! What a jerk! I would truly love to never have to sleep again. This would solve my thinking problem quite nicely.

If I didn’t have to sleep, I would have to come up with some kind of schedule I stuck with insuring I brushed my teeth, showered, shaved, and did the essential maintenance work on myself throughout the day. I would save myself an enormous amount of time. I would have 6-10 extra hours each day in which to do things. “Things” would comprise whatever I wanted “things” to comprise. While everyone else was sleeping, I would work on a song for 6 hours or on a story or script idea for 3 hours and have time to mow the grass with a flashlight attached to the front of my mower. I would be the most productive human on the face of the earth. I would be the Stephen King (seeing as how he puts out a new book every 10 minutes) of everything I ever wanted to accomplish. If I didn’t have to eat, I could get even more done. I would never stop. My life would be a never-ending series of productions and creations. I wouldn’t have to force myself to choose one creative endeavor. I could do them all. Ha, Ha, Ha! I would rule the world! (I told you I like fantasy stories.)

Speaking of fantasy stories (which, of course, I was doing in the parenthesis of the last paragraph as I often want to do), let’s talk about God. I can imagine sprouting wings out of my butt and flying away. I can conceptualize getting splattered with a radioactive material and suddenly having superhuman strength. I can read or even create in my mind a world in which everything is governed by an all-knowing mushroom who enjoys giving legal advice to cats, but I don’t believe any of them are going to happen. I can like the idea of all these musings (except for sprouting wings out of my butt), but why would I choose to “believe” in any of them? Escape? Tradition? Pious pressure from a passionate priest? Alliteration? If you’re going to “believe” in something, believe in your ability to do the things it takes to get what you want in life (it also helps if you don’t set your sights too high).

I like Garfield the cartoon cat. I think he’s humorous and well-drawn. Jim Davis is a clever and funny man for coming up with this cartoon cat we all love. Jim Davis is not God, though. He’s not God and God is not God. God should be the word for “nothing.” When people ask, “What’s wrong, Bob?” Bob should answer, “God,” and the person should say back to him, sarcastically, “Oh, I thought it was something.” I know this isn’t going to happen, but it does in my world because that’s what I believe.

Dogs are God, and cats are the Devil. Evidence of this can be found in the pointy ears of cats and the drooping ears of dogs. I’m not saying cats are bad and dogs are good, however. I’m actually saying the opposite. In the bible (and other places), God is always a pretty boring character. In fact, most of the time he’s not even really a character at all. He just gives a bunch of rules for everyone to follow that no one ever seems to follow outside their church. The Devil is usually a pretty interesting character. He makes deals with people, gets them to do things they might not otherwise have done, and makes actual relatable, human-like mistakes. Cats, like the Devil, are relatable. Dogs, like God, are not relatable to the world of humans. Cats go through several moods, keep themselves clean, and have good and bad days. Dogs, in the other nostril, have one mood, don’t care if they’re clean or dirty, and only have a sniffing and tail wagging emotional response to everything they encounter. Dogs play by the rules, whereas cats play by their own rules created by them to confuse humans.

I would say I hope I didn’t offend anyone with the past paragraph, but that would be lying. I hope I offend everyone who is offended by anything that isn’t straight out of the bible. These people crack me up into a thousand pieces that are laughing through little metaphorical mouths. Humor and religion just don’t seem to mix most of the time unless you’re making fun of religion. Then, religion is hilarious.