The Ruminations of an Intellectual Decadent (Rough)

I think everyone has a little place in their head where they spend some of their time. How much time varies for everyone, and so does what they do there. Most people use their places when they need to get away from the world and have some time to themselves. Some peoples' probably look just like their houses, and others are probably secluded thickets in the depths of the Black Forest. I have a friend who probably has an entire adult video store in his head. Mine is a quiet English study, furnished with mahogany book shelves, rosewood paneling, and a crackling fire. I generally just sit in there when I have nothing else to do, reading Tolstoy in a silk smoking jacket with a cup of hot chocolate. I think sometimes I spend too much time in there, but I'm not entirely sure that's a bad thing. It can make things a little awkward sometimes, though.
The other day, for instance, on the way to breakfast, I bumped into this guy Dan who lives on my floor. As we walked down the hill, we kept up a friendly conversation about Columbus Day weekend plans, how school was going, etc. When we got to the dining hall, we got our food, found a table, and had what I thought was a pleasant breakfast. It was only when I was done eating and about to go to class that I realized that neither of us had said anything the whole time. I had had a good time for twenty minutes because the whole time I was wandering around in my head. The worst thing was that I couldn't remember anything I had been thinking about, no brilliant flash of philosophical insight to redeem the awkwardness. All I could remember was that I had heard the name “Nick” and thought about “Nick and Nora's Infinite Playlist” for some time, even though I have not seen that movie, do not plan to, and know next to nothing about it. I had spent a whole meal somewhere I have no recollection of, thinking about something unimportant. What a waste.
That is how most of time I spend in my head goes; I sit down in there for a minute and get up an hour later with nothing but a vague curiosity about bee-dancing that I will never bother to fulfill. I have a lot of half-baked philosophical ideas that come to me from time to time, some more consistently than others, and I just thought that it might be interesting to put some of them down on paper, to see if anyone gives a damn. Of course, I know you don't, and that I am just doing this for myself, but with luck I will realize just how silly my incomplete notions are and bother to complete some of them.

There was a young pianist named Liszt
Who only could play well when pissed
When they called for an encore
He tossed back a few more
Then played Für Elise with one fist

I think I spend too much time on Facebook. Every time I sit down at my computer to do anything, I check it at least twice, and usually more often. I feel like an obsessive-compulsive who has to constantly be certain his oven is off, even while cooking dinner. The worst part is that I don't care about it at all. I don't find it particularly useful to know just how Liam Flynn feels about his wisdom-tooth pulling tomorrow, and an email could tell me when the next theater guild meeting is just as efficiently. More efficiently, actually, because then I would only have to check one site for all of my messages, instead of my email and my Facebook. (True story: I just lost my train of thought for a moment, and was halfway there before I even realized what I was doing.) I don't think it's the revolutionary tool that most people think it is, comparable to the cell phone or DvD player. It is, however, a great time waster, and even though I don't particularly like it, I can't get away from it. It probably means I need to focus better, but I like to think I just have to find a better time-waster. Maybe wikipedia can refer me to a good one.

Q1: What's worse than finding a worm in your apple?

I wish I could be blind for a day. I think then I could really understand what it's like and empathize better, or at all, really. I guess I could walk around with a blindfold on, but that doesn't count, both because blind people don't feel something on their face all day, and because even with a blindfold you see those little bright spots of blood vessels in your eyes. I can't imagine that you could still see those, but I would like to be sure. I also wish that I could be deaf, colorblind, a woman, left-handed, a good singer, and gay, all for a day. (Not at once.) Really, I just want to be everyone else in the world for a day, so I can know what it's like. (Including all of those things at once, I suppose, but that has a day to itself.) Unfortunately, there aren't enough days, and I wouldn't want to give up any time for living my own life.

A1: The Holocaust

One of the things that occupies a ton of my time is the problem of wit. When you come up with a clever pun or a great comeback, where does it come from? You don't think about it, you just say it, yet it always turns out funnier than anything you could actively think of. Is there a part of you that searches all of your conversations to see if they contain lines you can pun on or inside jokes you can reference? Or is it just that your memories are always running around in your head just waiting to hear something they recognize so they can pop out? I suppose it's something like the problem of saying something truly random; from which part of my brain did the phrase “baby buggy bumper cars” come from just before I typed it? I have no idea, and as someone who strives, and often fails, to be witty, I think about this sort of thing quite a bit. Next time you come up with a great line, try to figure out just how you came up with it, and you'll realize how marvelous your subconscious really is.

So high above ground
With no harness but rough bark
Am I flying now?

One of the things that most excites me is when I realize that two words are related. I say realize because I am rarely able to just pick two words and see if they come from similar roots, because for two random words from my head they either obviously do or obviously don't. Sometimes, though, something makes me think of two words that might be similar, and I can puzzle it out. I read the other day about the myth of the changeling, and I thought of the cuckoo, a bird that puts its cheap ornamental clocks in other birds' nests and then charges them exorbitantly for the pleasure. I guess you could say that it “cuckolds” the other bird's love for its old clock. And like that, I saw the link; a cuckoo steals another bird's right to paternity, and a cuckold has his paternity stolen. It's an obvious link, but unless you happen to think of the two denotationally different words together, you would never see it. Etymology is fun!

I remember a week in October
When I just could never stay sober.
To conquer my plight
I shotgunned a Sprite
After six more I fell over.

(Note: That was not autobiographical. I wrote it in class one day when I noticed that everyone was using October in their poems. Peer pressure is fun!)

It may seem weird, but the existence of birds surprises me. Everyone has a species that they think just shouldn't exist – octopi, platypi, scorpii – and I think for me that is the entire bird family. I think it is because a half-formed wing is fairly useless. Eventually it reaches a point where it can be used for gliding, and then flying is natural, but until then you have an mutated arm with an annoyingly encumbering flap of skin under it. I don't know how you get from there to the supreme grace and aerial agility of a flock of sparrows flying away when you walk by, and it fascinates me. I know evolution occurs, and I am well familiar with the mechanics, but that doesn't stop the flash of wonder I get whenever I walk by a bush and startle a flock of birds.

My favorite dirty joke:
The chicken and the egg are lying in bed.
It has been good for the chicken; she is smoking a cigarette, and looks content.
The egg, not so much. He grumbles, pulls the covers over himself, and goes back to sleep.
Well, I guess that answers that old question.

One thing that I really think is strange, and I'm positive everyone will agree with me on this, is sex. It works for its purpose, but it's an odd concept. I guess what makes it the weirdest for me is that it must have started as some sort of weird perversion. Way back in the day, around the Devonian period, when a mommy and a daddy loved each other very much, she laid eggs and then he inseminated them ex utero. By the Permian era, fertilization was done “the normal way”. For this to evolve, it must have proven itself the most viable variation at some point while it was still largely unused. I can only imagine the old-fashioned amphibians being scandalized by it. “Myrtle, did you see what the Therapods were doings yesterday? I looked out the window, and there they were, fornicating in the swimming pool. It's despicable, really.” In my head, this plays out like the Protestant scene from The Meaning of Life; he is indignant, but Myrtle is sort of turned on by the idea. I'm sure paleontologists could contradict me on the mechanics of how it must evolved, but that's the only logical summary I can devise, and it freaks me out a little every time I think about it.

I think I know whose trees these are.
His house is in the town, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To see these trees be covered with snow.

My unbig horse must think it ungood
To stop far away from the town
Between the trees and coldwater
The darkest night of the year

He sounds the harnessbells
To ask if I commit thoughtcrime.
The only other sound is
The wind blowing and snow falling.

The trees are good, dark, and big
But I have Ingsocwork to do
And much time before sleeptime
And much time before sleeptime.

One last thing that really confuses me is the very concept of kissing. Now don't get me wrong, I do enjoy it, and participate whenever possible. The strange thing is that probably three quarters of the world's population does as well, but I can't see any good reason why it is done. A very large fraction of the world kisses in greeting, for affection, or just for fun, but it is such a strange gesture compared to anything else people do for similar reasons. A handshake shows that your buddy's not holding a knife, a hug is a gesture of protection and support, and many other things are more “stimulating” than a kiss. Why is it so universal? Some scientists hypothesize that it is a pheromone thing, where you are essentially smelling the other person to see if their genome is too close to yours to produce viable offspring. That could be true, but I haven't seen any really conclusive studies to suggest that humans have that strong a capacity for pheromone recognition, and that doesn't really explain the kiss as a same-sex greeting like it is in many European and Middle-Eastern cultures. I assume that it is simply an evolutionary hold-over from something that was once useful, because Mother Nature doesn't discard obsolete traits if they are not harmful. I just wish I knew what it was coming from.


0330
It was 3:30 when I wrote the above
No, not the title,
the last poem
I suppose the title too,
but that's less important.

My eyelids are heavy,
and hang in the air
like Acme anvils.
I hope they don't look down.
I might break my keyboard, or I migyu7y766666666666666666666666666666666666uhy67677uh6h7ukyhyul8gugbilg.hguhgfuhyjfh,gfhghgbyhbguifgbgufgtfiguoiyhonjuuuuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhht fall asleep.
Sorry. I should go to bed.
I will soon
In an hour or a day.
I need to wake at 7:30,
but there are two of those a day,
and 365 days a year
so I have plenty of 7:30's to choose from,
and I'm not at all certain I'll pick
the one in the morning
to wake up.

Did you know 0330 is a palindrome?
I'm not sure if it was good luck
or fate
or both, one and the same,
that I finished my poem at such an auspicious time.
But I know why I started it at such a silly one.
So late, it's like I'm drunk.
Or would be if I drank.
Without inhibitions, I can write.
Awake, I want to write Shakespeare,
and Seuss falls out.
When I am dreaming,
Dr. S seems Billy S,
and that's OK with me.
Awake, I demand technical pefection.
Now, speeling write is God enough for me.
I guess I shouldn't be so hard on myself.
No one writes well at first, they say.
Poetry is harder than prose, they say.
They say AIDS came from monkeys,
and a watched pot never boils.
They're wrong;
it does, I know,
it just takes longer.

Maybe what I'm trying to say is
I should be in a bed right now
and I'm not.
There are only so many options.
I couldn't read a whole page, let alone a complete sentence,
and no one's online.
Any more TV might make me crash,
so I can sleep or write.
I should sleep, but my brain is running out my ears
Like alphabet soup.
I figure as long as the letters are there,
I should put them somewhere,
So I'll write.

Maybe you'll read this and hate it.
That's OK.
Maybe I will too.
Maybe it'll be avant-garde,
and all the hip young writers will
stay up all night with me.
But they already do,
so what's the difference?
I don't care if you like it.
Screw you,
don't judge,
you don't know me.
I don't care if I do either.
What do I know anyway?
I just want to write,
and at least now,
at 0349,
I have the balls.