Under the Cranial Hood

Now let’s see where all these thoughts are packed for your consumption, lovingly placed in specially designed Styrofoam packaging and packed with dry ice to preserve freshness and keep the horrid smell to a tolerable minimum.

Sometimes I think of my mind as being a vast labyrinth, sort of like the spooky maze-house-dimension in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Other times it seems as shallow as the thin film of wet left in a fresh used tub. In either case it’s usually burning like a furnace asking the grandfather of all questions: ‘why?’. Where, when and how are very much secondary considerations (though learning how can be quite fascinating), not that I am implying that everything has meaning, quite the contrary, but everything has a chain of causality behind it. If you understand that the other mysteries frequently unfold before you, or at least other chains expose themselves for you to investigate.

My first recollection of such a discovery was an offhand observation I made at a very young age: wheels turn in the direction they are going. I was confused at the time by the twin tasks of learning what people call “common sense” and training to read a clock face. What had puzzled me was the fact that relative to the observer a wheel moving left turned counter-clockwise, while one moving right moved clockwise. To my developing brain it seemed the wheels should turn the same direction, unless they were going backwards. While sitting in the front seat of my mother’s car (long before the days of car seats, in fact I stood in the seat and when she’d break she would put here arm across me to keep me from tumbling into the floorboard) I saw another car moving in the lane next to us and it all clicked. The moment of revelation was wondrous to me and I immediately tried to express it in my limited vocabulary. My mother, having raised three children prior, was able to register some genuine pleasure at my discovery, as pitiful as it might seem. Such exercises are part and parcel of metal development, the brain discards them after a time as quickly as it does what you had for dinner last groundhogs day. For some reason this incident has stuck with into my adult life, perhaps the idea of seeing past what my young self saw as “conventional sense” made me feel special at the time.

When I was in grade school I read a book about Einstein and the part that struck me was about his thought experiments. I found the idea that you could prove or disprove something just by thinking about it fascinating (let’s ignore all the mathematic skill and genius, heh). I began soaking up knowledge wherever I could find it, frequently becoming mired in minutiae and unable to find any singular subject that could hold me. Along the way I learned some valuable lessons: you’d better know what you’re talking about before sharing your knowledge and you best have some clue of what bias your audience holds before opening your mouth, both of which I’ve managed to ignore of numerous occasions before and after the revelation. My own thought experiments were riddled with biases and my head was full of what amounted to trivia (which was valuable in the days before the internet and wikipedia, wild herds of experts in desperate topics roamed the wide open plains of America’s social life in the millions, just waiting for an opportunity to spout off Micky Mantle’s rookie season stats or continuity mistakes in episodes of Star Trek, but now they’ve all been domesticated and milked to fill the troughs of the interwebs, occasionally pulled from pasture to cattle shows at bars on trivia night, with an iphone everyone is a downward glancing, stuttering expert).

At one time I wanted to be a teacher, but I realized I just don’t have the patience to deal with children, or teenagers, or much of anybody. Someone once told me “you don’t have much use for people” and they were right. This deep into my life I have no interest in blaming anyone but myself. Part of it is, without a doubt, my own tendency to psychoanalyze people. That same love of science makes me want to categorize and arrange people like elements on a periodic table, regardless of the Brownian wash of chaos that donates to people’s makeup and feelings. I feel sorry for people, it’s that same reaction that makes people crumble before a crying person when the tears are real only multiplied a thousand fold. It’s one of the few irrationalities I hold onto dearly, I find it’s a good way to extinguish hate and anger, it’s easier to forgive if you can feel some empathy for those you feel wronged by.

Over time I began to learn to read between the lines, question the validity of my own beliefs and biases and choke down as much crow as possible when it’s served up to me. Recently I put on my best dubious face when someone mentioned a statute of limitations on debt. It grated on my sensible view of the world that such a thing should exist, but I went to the font of knowledge and pecked out my prayer to Athena 2.0, low and behold there is such a thing. Though it was neither the invitation to financial chaos I assumed nor the pathway to escape debt he believed. I revealed my knowledge the next day under the hopes we’d both be the richer. If you hear any faint scratching it’s the numerous bruised egos I’ve bricked up in the walls of my psyche over the years.

The truth (and I have come to loathe that word and the extended meanings of it) is that you don’t really love an idea unless you are willing to kill it. This lines up with the same philosophy that says that a car you keep in the garage and never drive it, it’s a multi-ton paper weight and all that stuff on your to-do list that is piled in the basement is never gonna get done. Ideas, unlike real children, must be abused, thrown naked onto the street for ridicule before having any chance of growing up to be worth something. If you don’t share the fruit of your gray matter it might as well have never been thought. If your beliefs and assumptions crack the first moment they’re dumped into the kiln, it’s a waste to have them. Let your faith and reason run barefoot all summer, go swimming without a lifeguard and hand feed the polar bears at the zoo. Ideas should be able to take a beating, but keep in mind that they can only be abused with other ideas which in turn need a good snap kick in the philosophical nads from you.

The reason I’m so in favor of being so rough with ideas is that people have so many bad ones, things that couldn’t stand the light of day much less a few rounds with a boxing bear. Ideas breed like viruses in the virtual landscapes of our heads, and bad ideas need more bad ideas to prop them up, leading to a closed cascade of intellectual crap. Bad ideas, unrecognized, taken in and nurtured can realign the brain like the molecules in a magnet. These aberrant ideologies become as comfortable as an old boot and the owner becomes a dedicated defender. Logic is just a tool and can be misused like any other, some people have a whole box full of bent screwdrivers and monkey wrenches cover with dried blood to show off.

And there is a ramblicious ride down the mountainside of my so-called thought processes. Looking back at what I’ve written I hate most of it, would love to expand upon certain points or just start over, but when I set out to do this I decided it would never get done unless I was willing to spill it as it came to me. So it is as it came jumbling forth, like looking for divinations in the scatterings of screws, recipes, broken parts and papers in junk drawers of kitchens all over the world.

Next time for a lighter subject I’m going to tackle the meaning of life. Until then, be well. -Q.