Conventions and drinking competitions

Okay, so we know that our brains have a kind of visual patterning auto-pilot system that tells us what we see. If you think about this logically, it would seem that our brains don't like anomalies: it doesn't want to recognize something different or take in a lot of new information unless the scale of newness is such that it can't be avoided.

My question: is there a way to loosen that system a little? Because I'm a little bored here. I'd like to notice something I haven't noticed before. Even something small.

So, I start looking, and I'm not turning up much. There is this apathy that I keep trying to shrug off like a heavy wool blanket that's tucked into the mattress, and I struggle against it its confines in spurts before finally collapsing, exhausted, no longer interested in trying.

We are habituated to our daily lives. That much is very simple to understand. The conventions, the constructs of daily life are like the breath our body measures . . . by and large going unnoticed unless a dramatic interruption is effected. To be stripped of all those conventions then is perhaps the way to conquer the apathy, to see the new small details, or the larger ones, like "you don't know what you've got till it's gone".

So to find something extraordinary without dropping free fall from our comfort zone we seek out alternatives. Unfortunately altered conscious states have a hefty piper fee. And one can't help but feel a little skeptical of say, an all night session with a bottle of vodka- there may be revelations, but will they be remembered?

It's almost Halloween.

Sometimes I look for proof of human existence, because the evidence isn't always compelling. I see people walking down the street, filling elevators, riding the bus and wondering down the halls, but they don't necessarily exist. They could be ghosts, figments of my imagination. For some reason, when I see people interact with other people, I am a little more convinced that they may not be a ghost or an aural blip on the screen of my brain, because something tells me that ghosts don't talk so much to each other; they are not interested in the world they inhabit, but the one they don't inhabit.

I am utterly confused by the days in which I feel like a ghost. Perhaps there are days where we emit no energy, where we pass through most of the radar of human perception undetected. It is, perhaps, a facet of the little known art of not being seen. Some days I must have a knack for it. Other days are sore thumb days.

But back to the other ghosts, the other people. I almost feel like when I see these people I expect no shadow to cross over them. And I write this here because I think if I told people they would think I'm crazy . . . no need to add fuel to that fire.

Relief on a grey morning . . .

There is nothing elucidating about this morning. Though surely it must be my imagination, the Monday morning faces on the bus seem more creased, more severe somehow. Monday for so many of us involves the pain of realization: the necessity of resuming whatever it is we do with most of our waking lives.

So there is a search for little things that offer relief. I always forget that there's something comforting about the whirring quiet of my sterile office when the lights first flutter on. I sometimes dread coming to that office, but like so many things, once you're there, it's not so bad. Emails, papers, the soft clicking of keys and the blanketing brightness of fluorescent lights . . . but I particularly hate fluorescent lights. Ironically, they make me feel like I can't see as well. And they make me a little dizzy, or at least dazed. I would like to ban fluorescent lights from office buildings. That some people choose to have them in their home is incomprehensible to me.

But back to relief. Well . . . the biggest relief to Monday is its ending, really, because on Monday it feels like there is no moving forward- only a halting timidity, a stagnation. One is afraid to hope for relief, even.

Animals on drugs, standardized tests, doing what you don't want to do, liver abuse . . .

My dog ate some chocolate crackers while we were gone. She usually never gets into food or trash when home alone, but I guess she decided to make an exception for the hearty tub of cat-shaped chocolate crackers sitting on the kitchen table. Maybe it was the cat shape that drove her over the edge- cats and chocolate!! PAAARRRTY!! Supposedly, chocolate is like speed for dogs. I don't think there's a whole lot of credible research that goes into that theory, but admonitions abound as to the woes of chocolate munching canines. But my girl is fine. Besides, what she ate was nothing compared to the half of the catcher-mit sized solid chocolate bunny that my childhood dog snatched and licked away. He kind of acted nuts for a while, but he recovered and lived to be twenty years old. Maybe chocolate, like heroin for people (if you don't overdose) has an age-defying effect . . . it's probably only a matter of time before there are chocolate face creams.

In a similar vein of careless joie de vivre, I've decided that I am done with standardized tests entirely. I'll take licensing exams, I'll take regular tests that assess real knowledge and achievement, but I don't think my soul will survive another standardized test. Ever. Just wanted to put that out there . . .

And so that is one area where I am refusing to effect compromise (it's not the only one). It's scary how we learn to do what we don't want to do. We do things to make people happy. We do things expecting some kind of reward far off in the future, like what I tell myself when I want a sticky bun with my coffee . . . that I want to continue fitting in my clothes. But ultimately, I think that doing too much of what we don't want to do leads to some kind of excess in another area of life. Hence my current state of liver abuse which will have to be toned down now that I'm outta the woods of standardized testing hell.

Self Portrait

I'm giving myself carte blanche today. I love saying that. I get to write in the zeros. I could do something crazy or something mildly subversive, like take that weird, piss fumed tunnel in the transbay terminal rather than walking through the homeless gallery. The sad thing is, as I sit here thinking about what things I could do to steer myself out of the neat little work-eat-sleep groove I've carved for myself, I'm drawing blanks. It's like I'm trapped in a Skinner box. I have specific responses to specific stimuli. Sitting at my desk in the morning means that I will seek out a cup of coffee. Predictably. What if I reversed things? That would mean a cocktail in the morning and coffee at night. And this simple theoretical reversal would be part of the explanation I give just before I'm fired, which would effectively carve a new little branch (unemployment) off the afore mentioned groove. It's amazing how one little subversive act can lead to another . . .

You see, our brains want us to stay the course. It's a neat little safety lock system that our brain has so that it doesn't have to do a lot of work. For the brain, it's evolutionary genius. It's like the difference between going to a different job everyday and having to juggle learning new tasks with performing your job and just going to the same job everyday and confining your activities to a finite range of tasks. Something like that. What would you rather do? I'm boring, so I would prefer to have more auto-pilot time. Besides, it's frustrating never to have the chance to be good at something. To stretch the analogy to the breaking point, imagine, for example, that one day you're a police officer and you don't even know how to shoot a gun (which you probably wouldn't use that day anyway, but you know Murphy's law . . .) and the next day you're a cook and you don't know what "de-glaze" means. That would be frustrating, but at the same time, think of all the cool skills you would acquire. I just wish my brain wanted to acquire some new skills, but instead I have to revert to force and conscious effort and all that boring crap.

Rain Drops and Rose Petals

I remember I wrote a poem about rain when I was 12 years old. It was brief. It rhymed, and I was immensely proud of it. My seventh grade teach adored the poem. All I remember were the lines "rain, rain go away, come again another day . . ." and then something melodramatic like, "is this life or is this pain?" Pain, rain . . . what original rhyming! I felt like such a genius. I felt the path of my poetdom stretching endlessly before me. Keep in mind that this is also around the same time I discovered Chopin- the Raindrop prelude (which I later played in a recital) was featured on a best-of tape of "classical" piano music (Chopin is from the Romantic era, technically, but I digress). At the time my hormones were beginning to surge I discovered the beauty of melancholia, tapped out in rain drop after rain drop. From the age of seven I had been a fairly prolific diarist, but my personal accounts swelled to fill many journals. Later my grandfather gave me a typewriter, a tool I used well into my teens, despite the availability of computers- the clacking of the old typewrite held endless romantic appeal for me. Chopin, and his piercing emotional qualities, taught me the meaning of unrequited love. Listening to the waltz dedicated to the woman he was not allowed to marry due to his ill health, I felt a kindred spirit. I too suffered, I felt, from unfulfilled desires, but then again, I think most 12 or 13 year olds feel this way. But there is a beauty in such emotionality, despite its triteness, that I think holds value well into boring old crusty adulthood. As grown people we tend to grow out of our longing. We settle and we eak out our existence with fewer feelings or expectations. Feelings are the stuff of great art, when combined with skill and discipline. Call me an emotionist, but I live for the heady flush of excitement, whether it be cerebral or sensual. I attribute this to my addict self. My addict, or emotionist self gets misty eyed when listening to music, cries over the resolution of a romantic plot, and feels the loneliness, the despair of the tragic fates represented tirelessly in books, film, music . . .

So today it is raining. If anyone were to find this note, I would instruct them to try an inappropriate emotion on for size and write a bad poem about it and put it away in a drawer to be found and savored at some later date, preferably amid dried rose petals.

Cuppa

Why does coffee look so beautiful on screen? Because people aren't actually drinking it. There are no brown dribbles escaping under the lid and creating earthen watercolor streaks down the sides of the cup. There are no crusty lipstick-mixed-with-coffee lip prints on the cup, either. The lid remains white, like a meadow blanketed in freshly fallen snow.

You also can't smell the coffee breath through the screen. All the aroma, the pungence, the very humanity of consumption is wiped clean and cauterized. No smells, no smudges, no fumes.

And I love how coffee is never hot on screen, unless for a specific dramatic purpose, e.g. to burn someone. Other than that there are always scenes where a character is handed a fresh cup of coffee which they commence to slurp down as if it were juice from a bottle (sans dribbles, of course). Obviously they have asbestos tongues. Duh.

And somehow I find this alluring. Eating and drinking can be so poetic on screen. Bites, though fake, are artful. Sara Jessica Parker's character on Sex in the City can wolf down KFC when she's stoned and have neither greasy lips, nor red glassy eyes. Whole bottles of red wine are consumed in perfectly lit restaurants and the drinkers haven't the slightest tinge of "wine teeth". Bread crumbs politely stay out of laps. Chewing never hinders conversation, unless it is a ploy of the screenwriter to create an awkward moment.

I find the lack of reality, the contrivances, comforting. If I want reality all I have to do is lift my eyes and peer around the cafeteria or the restaurant I might be eating in. There one can feast the eyes on creamy droplets of salad dressing clinging to an oblivious chin, "see" food, or stubborn spinach lodged between teeth. It's animalia. And it's everywhere. I don't need to see it on screen, painfully close up . . . but I should disclose that I'm funny about mouths, up close, even if they're not eating.

Sometimes I wish for a movie moment when I buy coffee. There are no scalding drips bathing my hand. The coffee, even black like I like it, is at a perfectly drinkable temperature. And for some reason, my lipstick just won't stick to the lid. Not only that, but people, admirers and friends, will bring me such cups of coffee exactly when I need them, out of sheer camaraderie or adoration.

Up, up, up . . .

Acceptance is better done without grief.
Forget the heady premonitions
and the secret notebooks.
Put down the glass
and
close the windows
and
go to bed.

In sleep
there is fog behind the eyes,
strange allusions to the very things
best disremembered.

Open the hand
and watch wings explode:
up, up, up they go before
melting and falling like Icarus.

Better Ghosts

I should know better by now.

I shouldn’t care. I can, if I concentrate, pretend it’s just a breeze.

These are just the ghosts.
The ghosts that spring up out of broken streets.
The ghosts that have faces like mirrors.
The ghosts that don’t know complete worlds,
let alone complete sentences.

She is a ghost too.
I’ve seen her wondering:
a white twig amid the grey buildings
with strands of gold that spring from her canopy.

I watched as she wondered from a safe net of forest
into the beautiful, broader territory;
a sprinkling of star on the nighttime snow.

If angels are queens,
she is the divine error that keeps order.
All I can do is watch.

She has foot steps that travel straight.
Her judgment is just-
a brusque dusting of a kiss in benevolent passing.

To know is to be better for it.