Lovers, poets, and madmen
Sometimes, I make things up. Not big things - just stupid little scenarios in my head of how a situation could go. For instance: I am in a bookstore and see the "Edward Cullen" action figure (for those of you who haven't seen it, go find a Borders. I'll wait.). And I laugh, because it it ridiculous. At pretty much the same time, I imagine a stranger across the store (I have a carrying laugh) knows exactly why I am laughing - and agrees with me. This person will obviously then seek me out and become my friend and will understand things without having to be told, like why I can't use a basket in a bookstore and why I hate Neil Diamond and why irony is hard to explain to freshmen. If it's a slow day at the bookstore, this person is also male and single and finds me charmingly quirky to such an extent that he buys me coffee.
This never happens. Not that I really expect it to, but wouldn't the world be better with whimsical meetings like that? As if life were really what early Meg Ryan movies would have us believe. So I imagine my own "meet-cute" (what would the plural of this be? "Meets-cute," if "mothers-in-law" is any indication. Anyone know?).
Sometimes I also narrate my life. Not constantly, as that would be insane to a degree with which I am uncomfortable, but occasionally I'll think of how I would write myself, if I were a character. Is this remove from the world normal? Does everyone think like this at some point, outside of themselves, watching and listening? From things I've read, some writers do, but I haven't written much - and little of that is really good. Perhaps my mind thinks I'm a better writer than I am - much like it thinks I am a better artist. I can picture exactly what I want, but I can't make my hand shape it correctly.
If you think about reality too long, it starts to slip, like words that mean nothing after you've said them 20 times. What if I am a puppet in someone else's show? There's no way to be sure, really. "I think, therefore I am" doesn't answer the question of what it is I am. This is an oddly comforting thought at times - that I might be a hallucination, or a computer program, or someone else's dream - because the stakes are lower. Or they seem that way at first; if I am make-believe, then I'm not really hurting anything, am I? But dreams can destroy whole worlds, if we accept history as real (and something has to be, because who would make this up? Although phrases like "unimaginable brutality" have no currency - someone not only imagined it, they put it into practice). And I really don't think I'd be spending quite so much time wasting time, if I weren't real. Wouldn't whoever was tripping me or running me or dreaming me make things more exciting?
Some Jehovah's Witnesses came by today and gave me literature on how to use the Bible to save my family (and, the implication was, avoid falling into the sin of killing them just to get some peace - the primary speaker mentioned families needing help and mothers killing their children. Possibly a veiled reference to abortion, I now realize, which makes it less apropos-of-nothing than it was. Anyway.) I'm starting to think that's all religion is, really - just us trying to find the man behind the curtain, only we're the hologram, not Dorothy. Think I should tell them that when they come back by?
This never happens. Not that I really expect it to, but wouldn't the world be better with whimsical meetings like that? As if life were really what early Meg Ryan movies would have us believe. So I imagine my own "meet-cute" (what would the plural of this be? "Meets-cute," if "mothers-in-law" is any indication. Anyone know?).
Sometimes I also narrate my life. Not constantly, as that would be insane to a degree with which I am uncomfortable, but occasionally I'll think of how I would write myself, if I were a character. Is this remove from the world normal? Does everyone think like this at some point, outside of themselves, watching and listening? From things I've read, some writers do, but I haven't written much - and little of that is really good. Perhaps my mind thinks I'm a better writer than I am - much like it thinks I am a better artist. I can picture exactly what I want, but I can't make my hand shape it correctly.
If you think about reality too long, it starts to slip, like words that mean nothing after you've said them 20 times. What if I am a puppet in someone else's show? There's no way to be sure, really. "I think, therefore I am" doesn't answer the question of what it is I am. This is an oddly comforting thought at times - that I might be a hallucination, or a computer program, or someone else's dream - because the stakes are lower. Or they seem that way at first; if I am make-believe, then I'm not really hurting anything, am I? But dreams can destroy whole worlds, if we accept history as real (and something has to be, because who would make this up? Although phrases like "unimaginable brutality" have no currency - someone not only imagined it, they put it into practice). And I really don't think I'd be spending quite so much time wasting time, if I weren't real. Wouldn't whoever was tripping me or running me or dreaming me make things more exciting?
Some Jehovah's Witnesses came by today and gave me literature on how to use the Bible to save my family (and, the implication was, avoid falling into the sin of killing them just to get some peace - the primary speaker mentioned families needing help and mothers killing their children. Possibly a veiled reference to abortion, I now realize, which makes it less apropos-of-nothing than it was. Anyway.) I'm starting to think that's all religion is, really - just us trying to find the man behind the curtain, only we're the hologram, not Dorothy. Think I should tell them that when they come back by?
posted by EAK at 6:12 PM
0 comments
