SKIPPING STONES
It’s eight o’clock; I’m taking a shower. There’s no sound besides the water hitting the glass and the people yelling at me. I imagine that I am standing beside a lake surrounded by the denizens of my brain, the various fictional personas I assume and create. In my hands I have a stone and I am skipping it across the water past sunken pirate ships, past downed planes, past buildings and malls and beautiful ancient alien architecture. They all want something from me, these screaming voices. I have to hit something soon, some rock, and some hidden idea so that I can have a basic direction.
Not figuratively of course, not even literally. The human mind is a fascinating place; they don’t call things like “voice of reason” voice for nothing. It’s all imaginary, it’s all fictional and some part of me is relieved because when you actually start to believe it’s real then you have truly lost your mind.
Minds aren’t cheap. You can’t buy a new one and recovering the ones you loose takes both time and patience. There are a lot of people in danger of loosing theirs on a pretty regular basis, about as many as the people who take their wallets and personal items into public places and risk them getting stolen. But what can you do? You can’t go out without your license, your identification, and your sense of purpose. Maybe you can’t go out with makeup or even a book to read. Whatever your personal habits, you take the risk that someone could take your objects, your possessions because you need them. Society dictates that you need them-and that’s where that stands. In order to survive you need to take risks.
Life is about risk.
You take precautions, so do I, you take care, so do I-but you take a little risk and a little danger because you understand that there is no life without risk and the other way around. You get tired, you loosen your grip on your purse or take your hand out of your pocket and I dabble for the moment in the possibility of other things existing.
I tell you this, explain it in a way, because I want you to see my point of view. In today’s day and age there needs to be a visual, there is always a visual. “This is the me that exists in your mind” “This is the me that exists in your mind” This is your perception of me and I want to make sure I’m coming through high definition and digital. I want you to understand that sometimes I try to loosen my grip on my purse strings, let my keys dangle because I want to take that risk. I’m not alone either; there are dozens of people walking among you like superheroes, like hidden creatures that let themselves off their leash.
It’s not even because we’re creative, because we’re nerds, because we’re evolutionary. We’re not on a cutting edge; it wouldn’t be a harmonious human group without the occasional outcast, no matter how large the size of the group of ostracized mates. No, we will fade with time and there will be a new secondary subject to stare, to think differently. All action is temporary only in how quickly it takes place, all consequences last forever. What I do will impact the world in ripples, days, weeks, hours, people, pets, lives. Don’t look so angry, you impact me in the same way.
I’m getting ahead of myself. Impact needs an explanation so you understand what I’m trying to do with what I do here or with the occasional fictional character demanding attention in my head. It is an example so you can understand where I am coming from.
Imagine sitting. Are you with me? Good, imagine sitting in a very comfortable chair, black. The chair is soft, relaxing; your cares are washed away. You close your eyes, lean back, and discover ot your delight that you can recline! Yes, as your feet rise like birds startled by the coming of the dawn you are at peace.
Are you still with me? Good.
There is a TV in front of you. It’s always been there. Television is the opiate of the masses for the new millennium, a wider means of transmittance at the speed of a thought. We are speaking in general terms, for our purpose television will do.
You stare, blinking for a few moments before something small and white comes on the screen. It’s a mouse! It’s nose twitches, it’s tiny black eyes watch you for a few moments as it paws at the screen.
It’s a cute mouse. It appeals to all your emotions, it’s absolutely adorable. Perhaps you acknowledge grudgingly its appeal. Perhaps your nurturing instinct arises just as your feet rose off the floor. Sitting at peace, utterly contented, you are given something attractive to stare at. The corners of your mouth twitch upward in the beginnings of a smile. Perhaps you make a noise as the mouse continues to move, a noise of distinct approval.
Like lightning, like thunder, there is a sound and a noise. The idyllic scene is destroyed by a blur of orange and black. The Television is crystal clear; you see every detail when it stops to deliver a killing blow. A cat. A cat doing what it does best, what nature intended. The ending is quick and brutal. There is no blood; it takes only a swipe of the feline’s paw to snap the mouse’s neck. When it begins to feed however, that is no longer the case. Blood is everywhere.
The meal is quick. The cat stalks off.
You are shocked yes? Revolted perhaps by this display of animal nature? What if I told you that the cat was an explorer on his way to far and distant lands? What if the mouse was carrying some sort of toxin or weapon? What if it was-dare we say it-an evil mouse?
What if, after doing what nature intended, the cat was picked up by a human being and harmed in some way? What would you consider then about this cat who destroyed the mouse you seemingly idolized only to be murdered or harmed? Would your sympathy transfer or would you still think of the mouse?
Reclining in your chair you start to wonder. Perhaps you start to pause and you start to think, staring at the screen where the mouse had been. There is nothing there now but an image in your mind. Try as you might you can’t escape it-it’s going to stay there.
I have impacted you.
I have impacted you in a particularly memorable way, but the impact, the imprint is still there. Perhaps I have taught you to be wary of attractive images, perhaps I have taught you something about myself. What you take away from the impact is yours and yours alone, but I will have given it to you.
If I had the cat and mouse kiss the impact would have been different. If I had had the cat and the mouse turn into people you would have thought something extremely different. If I had had the mouse triumph over the cat then you would have thought something entirely different altogether.
It is a matter of personal belief that stories, means of impact like the one I just shared with you, were initially created to warn and educate…but that civilization began when the first person realized that they could be used to entertain. Telling a story is an act of creation, something we have little to all the knowledge of. Anyone can tell a story, it takes real people to make them entertain, to take an impact and make another impact again.
That’s what this is, a collection of impacts that people have had on that and me I hopefully have had on other people. Occasionally in observation (to prevent attack, prevent unnecessary risks, etc) there are figures that crawl off the stage of life. They recognize that they are being stared at, watched however carefully. When they climb down out of the books or the television shows and stare at what their own creators have wrought they might be displeased, perhaps a bit frightened-but what can they do? To inspire, to educate and to warn, that is what they were brought forth to do.
So they watch and are amused as the impact that they made turns in a different direction. They are used to start fires and explain the lessons to the kids in the cave that they taught the first time around. Occasionally they entertain, and in those we glimpse life that we who were made in a great creator’s image were destined to create.
And occasionally out of the woodwork there are new voices, creatures that don’t exist yet, people who emerge out of the background like shadows to speak and talk. They number in the dozens and the thousands. They are doctors, lawyers, and teachers. They are scientists and military and mothers and fathers. Teenage rebels and bookworms, fictional creatures or beloved anthropomorphic personifications. They are impacts, lessons that I have learned and want to share, stories that I want to tell in the hope that they entertain. I am making an impact by doing something incredible, creating life. Not life in the literal sense or even the figurative but life in that something I might say or do or place on paper would make an impact in another. That spark would stir into something else, a frenzy leaping along like a chain reaction across the world.
The final lesson about impacts is that they are not taken lightly. You can’t make a true impact for a purpose. All of the best impacts, all of the best stories were told simply because someone had something that they wanted to say. They listened to the shadows crawling out of the woodwork. They gave them clothes and taught them words and listened to the words that they themselves had to say. And then they shared them. They shared them in all their violent glory. They shared their triumphs, their tribulations, their horrors, and their loves. They shared their tender moments; their goofy moments and people were utterly thrown. Low and behold new voices started to stir, new shadows taking shape and form across the human mind.
I tell you this because I want to share with you what I’ve learned. I set out to make an impact, to make people sit up and listen. I set up to write, to create for all the wrong reasons. A wise man once wrote, impacting generations, “If you build it, they will come.”
So this is my risk, this is my ball field. I have built this, occasionally using borrowed parts from people who have impacted me with rocks and two by fours and other means of impact. This is my means of relaxation, my telling few moments of living outside the box. I do this because I want to create, not for someone else but because I want to skip stones across the water. Because through either a wire disconnecting or something strange connecting I want to toss my stone across the water, I want to hit the sunken treasures and see what kind of ripples I can make, passing impacts across the smooth cool surface.
The voices are still shouting occasionally, aspects of my own personality I try to understand by sharing what they have learned and vicariously what I have learned as them. By telling these things to you I am helping myself, helping myself by taking a risk, I am surviving by sharing their stories, their trials, and their tribulations with you. They may only be visitors, they may not belong to me completely but they impacted me-and I have carried that impact with me and I always will carry that impact with me.
Perhaps you have been impacted. Perhaps you are curious. Sit against the cave wall and listen to a story, either mine or someone else’s. The ripples made by others are no less powerful, no less intriguing. I can’t promise you that I will entertain you, I can’t even promise to teach you. But I can promise to change your day, your hour, and your minute by impacting you and making you think for just a moment as you consider what I have to say through my lips or the lips of others.
Perhaps this change in your routine as you go about your business, engage in whatever else you do online will make you think. Perhaps you will go out to your own lake in your own mind, your own forest, and your own secret sanctuary. You will stare, and you will wonder, perhaps you wonder already. Perhaps you will reach to the gray green grass at your feet, the city pavement, and the dirty and pick up something. Perhaps it will be a stone, a rock, dirt, a sword, a gun, a flower, and an animal. With this, you will impact me. Through songs, through words, through telling, through talking. Your ripples will have affected others and they will affect me as well in different ways. Part of life is taking the risk, the risk of giving someone a stone and telling him or her to throw it, to see what happens when they skip it across the clear blue surface of the human mind.
I have chosen my direction. I stand eagerly at the edge watching you, fingers running over the stone’s smooth parts. I threw my rock, I’ll pick up another soon enough and think of a new way to impact you, a new thing to say, a new idea to express.
It’s your turn. Throw it and see what happens.