[Author’s note: It is much to see ourselves, through the lens of our years; much to think of how far we’ve come from wherever we’ve been.
It’s truly sad that we have not grown accustomed, yet, to taking for ourselves periodic brain-functioning tests — however they might be designed — so that we have an objective measure of how we are doing, and from repeated exposure to the test we grow accustomed to it, and perhaps have more faith in it. I think I would like to know how my mind is performing now after I’ve “bashed it senseless” (senseful?) with heaven only knows how many hours of video games. I thought it might actually be that I’ve played them more than anyone else.
We can make that a contest, sometime. Let’s have the 23rd highest in that list get a signed basketball from Michael Jordan and the 20th lunch with Barry Sanders.
Let’s mix things up folks, is what I’m saying.
The below is a post from 2014. It is your best check of the way my writing has evolved over time if you should like to make such a test.
Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly) I am still not tired. Perhaps a Haldol. I think that one won’t rock my world so much that this fragile candle that seems to have taken forever won’t get doused too badly by a few z’s.]
The Wind
I am not really accustomed to feeling as though there is absolutely nothing I can do.
I suppose none of us like that feeling, regardless of how strong or how weak we may be. It is one thing, I think, which both members of the pair feel quite the same about. It is one thing, at least, which renders the strong and the weak exactly the same.
I look back at the first assertion, and I realize how foolish it looks now. It seems, at the moment, to be an admission of my own folly: a lifetime of folly all rolled into one statement, shown here as a question:
I am not accustomed to feeling as though I can do nothing?
Excuse me? How could an apparently bright person have just now arrived at that kind of conclusion? It can only mean that previously, at least some part of me felt otherwise. At least some tiny part of me believed that something I could do meant at least a tiny bit. It must mean that I have for a while been thinking that I have some sort of capacity to do something. Somewhere inside of me I have at least at one point had the thought that somehow I mattered.
I don’t.
It is quite literally impossible that I could. There is absolutely no chance of it being the case!
Wow, I think. I must not have been quite as bright as I previously thought.
I can’t even describe how utterly irrelevant I feel right now; there are zero combinations of words that serve me or which could suffice. It is quite literally indescribable; I have no words for it.
You know what? It’s kind of funny, really. Funny in a sickening sort of way. Because, you see, I had among the strongest convictions of the convicted. I was absolutely certain that what I did mattered. What I did mattered and it mattered big time.
The world, I thought, better look out for me! The world better be wary of my coming, because I was certainly coming, and when I got wherever it was I was coming to, if people weren’t very damn careful I would flatten them like a hurricane carrying nothing but freight trains and cannonballs. There were no kind of ‘immovable posts’ that would stop the unstoppable hurricane which was me; there weren’t any such posts that existed. What’s more, there couldn’t be any such posts, and — more than that — no such barriers of any kind that had the slightest chance of even deflecting me to an appreciable degree.
No person or entity, no matter what kind and regardless of its backing, had the slightest chance of survival if it foolishly thought that a spot on my path was a spot in the universe that it ought to be standing. Choose such a spot and see for yourself, I thought. Choose such a spot on my path and wait a while. And I’d laugh and think, “You don’t even have enough earpower to hear me coming.”
No matter how loud this freight train-filled hurricane with all its horns blowing and all its endless boxcars crashing together may be, you do not even have the earpower to hear me coming soon enough in advance to get your ass out of my way. Clearly I am a hurricane traveling faster than the speed of sound, thus your only option is to be looking in the right direction if self preservation is a thing on your list of things to be interested about.
If you were looking in the right direction — that is, if you knew where I was coming from — you’d have a nonzero chance of getting off my path and getting the hell out of my way before your time came to be flattened. You would see a nebulous mass, which at a distance and with a sufficiently powerful telescope would appear to have lots of dust particles in it. It would be way out there but seem to be moving impossibly fast.
At some point, it would become apparent that the dust particles were not dust particles at all. You would notice that they were freight trains — not the sort that usually roll straight down a track of some kind — but trains that were spinning wildly, trains that were twisting together and denting one another, as the cloud they were caught up in picked up more mass and greater speed.
If you were looking in the right direction, you could clearly observe that something was coming this way. But now that I really think about it, not only would you not hear me coming, you wouldn’t see me coming either. There would be no dust particle freight trains to observe, no twisting and no denting, no spinning wildly — they’d be there but you could not see them. You would see only a nebulous black mass growing larger and larger; light would neither reflect from the mass nor be absorbed by it. Any photons reaching such a mass would be crushed irrevocably by the speed of the mass that was hitting them. The photons would be crushed and thereafter become mass — part of that nebulous mass — in themselves.
Then, I realize, that there is no possible escape for you.
There is no possible escape, and there cannot be one. Because you cannot possibly know if, when, or whether I am coming. You can only guess that I might be. You can only guess that I might be and make very damn sure that you are not in my path in the event that I do. But then you would also have to
guess and guess correctly which direction I am coming from,
guess and guess correctly which path I might take, and
guess and guess correctly where you could safely be standing as well as what time you could be standing there to avoid becoming a human pancake.
It seems like it would involve a whole lot of rather accurate guessing. I am no mathematician, but it seems to me very much like the two of those things together (“whole lot” and “rather accurate”) leads to a chance which is impossibly small. Probably not a good thing to find direction in your life by mere guessing, I think that’s the tentative conclusion we can reach just now and right there. You’d have a very small chance of success if you lived merely by guessing.
So I think about it differently for a moment.
I think, “Well hey, I don’t want to hurt anybody.”
I don’t want to make human pancakes — I don’t even particularly like pancakes, and I certainly don’t like pancakes more than people. I might try a human pancake once or twice just to see what it’s like, but doesn’t it invariably happen that when you mix something you like with something you don’t like you almost always wind up with something you don’t like? Ever tried to mix liver-n-onions with pistachio ice cream in a blender? I’m not convinced I’d need to taste that kind of milkshake to have a good idea I wouldn’t like it. In fact, even if I liked both liver-n-onions AND pistachio ice cream, it’s a solid bet I wouldn’t like them together.
So, no human pancakes for me.
Now I see that the problem is not yours but rather it’s mine.
If you have no idea what I’m doing or where I’m coming from, don’t know which direction I’m taking or how fast I’m coming or how soon I’ll arrive, it sure as hell isn’t your fault if I hit you. It’s MY fault.
Oh wow, there’s a bad one. At one point, I was feeling myself all clever and stuff. Figuring that the bit up in my brain which convinced me “I’m unstoppable!” was a rather good bit to have hiding up there. Now the puzzle is mine to sort through, or else I’m going to have a whole lot of foul tasting milkshakes to drink.
Well, I’m not that terribly bad off — I can use part of what I’ve been working on to come up with a solution. Lemonade from lemons, as it were.
So let’s see…
If you have no concept of which direction I might come from — looking out all the directions would appear the same to you. If you have no concept of when I might come; you can’t ‘watch out’ for my arrival…I might come around anytime and then when I did it might catch you by surprise. Darn it!
Well if I wanted you to know I was coming, I might call you up on the telephone and be polite about it and such. You might say, “Now is not a good time to come over.” The house is quite a mess you’d explain. You might suggest I come later. Then probably I’d choose another time (if I could, anyway.) I would call you later, and you might not have picked things up to your liking quite yet. You’d probably be annoyed with me, but I would be polite and friendly about it, because I really wasn’t trying to be annoying.
Eventually you would probably feel as though I were pressuring you. Ah, that’s it! I did leave something out!
Even though there is no plausible way for me to communicate to your brain through a path which includes your eyes and your ears, even though neither sound nor light will work to help you gather that there’s a gathering which might be a hurricane coming this way, there is still a way for you to know before it comes. There is still a way for us to get off one another’s path; there is still an option which can bring your attention to something which otherwise you would not have had the slightest of hopes of even realizing. Regardless of whether I wanted you to realize it or not.
There is pressure.
Pressure can do it. You can know simply by pressure that something is coming, because you can feel it.
Not me coming around, take me the hell out of the equation. I already told you right at the top I realize how irrelevant I am. It doesn’t matter one bit what I say or what I do. I get it. It’s not me you need to be worried about at all.
What you need to appreciate, if you’re to avoid a pancaking, is that something is coming.
It is impossible for anything else to be the case, and you know or should know that it’s true — because you can feel it. The pressure is here, and you know good and well that it is. You don’t even have to realize that pressure is something which could vaguely be described like this:
…a sort of ‘random bouncing’ of particles. The higher the frequency of the particles bouncing against a two dimensional field, the more ‘pressure’ that field-surface will ‘feel.’
So, even without light or sound, we can readily sense something coming — however large or small, fast or slow, loud or silent, light or dark it may be. It could be utterly invisible, actually, and you may still note it by feeling it — much as the wind that you can feel as it begins ever so slightly to blow.
You can see a leaf fall, then not fall quite straight down. There is a slight gust, a movement of air.
You ‘see’ the wind long before you ‘hear’ it. You can see tree branches flexing back and forth; you notice the leaves in them changing direction and the light reflecting off them in different ways. You see pressure before you even hear it — the wind eventually picks up and you can hear it blowing across your ears.
But you needn’t even be outside.
In a room with no windows, you might easily see a feather fall less than directly to the floor. “There must be a heat run somewhere over there,” you may think. Some air that you could not see ‘brushed’ the feather and made it fall something other than straight down. But even though you know there’s a heat run, you have no inkling of how the heat runs may be laid out in the floor. And even though you know there’s a floor that contains heat runs below it, and that heat runs always go to a furnace of some kind, you can’t see or know where it is. You cannot see it; you cannot hear it come on. It is too far away, in a far corner of the basement of your house.
You can neither see it nor hear it, but you can feel it, and you know something is there. Burning.
There is burning in your home and you know that the only reason that could be is because there is some other temperature someplace else, and you don’t like that one. That temperature is bad, and yours is good, so you stoke your fire just enough to keep yourself warm inside.
After all, it is cold outside, and the wind is also somewhere blowing. So you sit on a sofa in a room in your home, and you know from seeing a feather fall not quite directly to the floor that something is out there somewhere — if only the coldness and the wind. A pressure here and a pressure someplace else.
So it could be, perhaps, that pressure is the thing you ought to pay attention to. That is, if you want to avoid becoming a pancake after someone or something such as I described above gets to the spot you like to call yours.
Unfortunately, once you realize that a sensation of pressure is what you need in order to keep yourself three dimensional rather than two, you will quickly thereafter realize that there is no way you can distinguish the pressure that matters from the pressure that doesn’t. It all seems quite the same to us, doesn’t it? It seems pretty random what constitutes pressure and what does not.
You can’t notice pressure by noticing it; you either get pushed around or you do not. It becomes pretty hard to think about as a concept: it seems pretty clear that we don’t really like being pushed around, but then, that thought isn’t really consistent with reality, is it?
If we really didn’t like being pushed around, why is it that every single stinking time that we are not being pushed we decide that it’s a good idea to start pushing against something(which often means someone)? It makes utterly no sense at all, and I know you can see that; there’s no point in denying it — it’s too damn obvious and you bloody well know it is.
You push or are pushed.
You think they are different but they sure as hell aren’t. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting there thinking about an impossible to stop or even to appreciably slow down hurricane the likes of which you can barely even fathom — you either imagine it or you don’t.
If you can imagine it, you feel a bit uneasy — you might wind up in the path of such a wonderfully terrible thing — and you’d rather not be flat if you’re like most people. If you can’t imagine such a hurricane, it might easily come looking for you — especially if it’s the sort of hurricane that thinks itself unstoppable.
Finally, the writer in me laughs, because I kind of know what you’re probably thinking.
You’re thinking I am resorting to hyperbole to make a point.
I hate to tell you this, but you’re wrong.
A very short time ago, I am rather certain I was literally the most dangerous of dangerous kinds of people to come across. I say it impassively; I observe it as if from afar. I know what the inside of my mind looked like; it isn’t surprising to me that it appears strangely similar from this, the ‘outside.’ Similar, but different.
Because from the inside, it looks as though there is no place you can go but to the outside. And from the outside, it looks as though there’s only one direction you can go as well: which is quite obviously back in.
Something happened; I feel it must be the case. Something happened to me such that I could have such a reversal of fortunes. I could not possibly have been deflected; I know that I couldn’t have been; I knew it for a fact; there was no possible way.
I could not imagine anything that could possibly ever stop me. Nothing that I could imagine had the slightest of chances save death alone. I would DIE before I would quit.
But you know what? Not even DEATH could stop me! It wouldn’t stop me because if it did, whatever caused that death would itself then be stopped, and I would be reborn in someone else’s mind. That person or persons would just plain take up the torch that I’d had for a while, and they would know damn good and well I was ‘right’ straight up until my death.
Whoa.
I’ll be honest with you; I don’t have the foggiest idea of the implications of what I’m saying, or whether there are any implications at all. I woke up in the middle of the night, less than four hours ago and started typing this.
I realized, sometime yesterday, that there was nothing whatsoever I could possibly do that would matter even in the slightest. I suppose it was a point that some people come to just before committing suicide. I didn’t know what to do with the information; instantly feeling completely irrelevant is not a feeling I am familiar with.
So I just kept driving my car straight.
There wasn’t any point to picking the nearest large tree and making a mess for others to clean up.
So despite knowing that nothing I do matters at all, I keep doing the same thing I always have done in the past: something. I do something anyway, despite that I am absolutely convinced that nothing could possibly matter, I keep doing ‘stuff’ and figure the cosmos will sort it all out without my ‘brilliant’ help.
It very much seems as though if life really were misery — that if, on balance there was no point to it, and that if, in addition to everything else there was some pain to deal with, some effort to expend, any kind of suffering in general — we would simply want it to end. I would go to my car, right now, prior even to finishing this essay. I would close it tightly in the garage, get in, turn it on, and thereafter at some point fall asleep.
Of course, if you’re still reading this it must mean that I haven’t, and if you’re wondering why I can tell you at least one more secret: you’re wrong.
I may have done so once already, even twice or three times and still have had it not work. I haven’t, but I could have, and it wouldn’t have mattered, because you’d still be reading this anyway.
Because, you see, my car is a zero emissions all-electric Nissan Leaf, so every time I think of doing something like that I realize it would be just as meaningless as anything else I might do.
It doesn’t matter if you watch such a leaf, or if you sit in one in a garage or even drive one. There is nothing for us to do except stay out of one another’s path and while doing so wait for the wind to start blowing. Sooner or later we will still hit the ground.
