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.