Ok, when you lay it all out it does sound a little crazy...
So immediately following a driving coffee date with tartqueen (wherein we, you know, drink coffee and drive around aimlessly) I got a call from her that her brakes were making a weird noise and could I please drive her to an appointment. I grabbed my things and went back down to the parking lot. Being a sunny Friday morning, there was every chance that I might not find my way back to the office so I was in a fine mood.
Driving down the freeway, TartQueen made some remark about impulses or something. I wasn't really paying a lot of attention because it wasn't about me, but whatever she appeared to be talking about dovetailed perfectly into some thoughts I had recently been formulating and a post I'd been meaning to make here.
"It's funny you should say that," (whatever it was) I interjected, "because I was just thinking recently about how I have to become more impulsive and give up a little self-control."
"Oh my god, what the hell are you talking about," she demanded. Then, not even waiting for my well-reasoned response, she continued. "Oh god, the finger is out. Nothing good comes when the finger is out!"
This was an interruption, but it was also about me so I was understandably torn. In short order I gave in and demanded an explanation. Apparently many of my "crazy" ideas are accompanied by a wagging finger which demonstrates and underscores the depth of my convictions. The finger, just so you're all aware, bodes of less dire things than when I start "doing that thing with your hands."
I have to give her that one. I get the Crazy Hands from Brad Pitt movies (specifically Fight Club and Twelve Monkeys) and when they come out even I know I'm approaching the brink. The finger I didn't know about.
In any case, my tale went much like the following:
You know how you're walking or driving around the city in a place you've been hundreds of times and you see something new? An area that you're intimately familiar with from long years of living or passing through, but one day you notice a building or a house that you've never seen before. It doesn't fit, it doesn't belong. It's confusing and alarming.
You pass by and soon it's out of your thoughts. The next time you pass it, it appears normal, it fits in, it belongs and has presence in your reality.
It has acclimated and you've accepted it, you don't even see it anymore.
Fuck that.
Fuck that in the ass. A new fucking reality opened up and you just accept it and let it in? No. Forget it.
It's crazy.
There's something going on there. There's something unnatural about it. How can reality just bend and adjust. How can new material become incorporated into our experience? The building doesn't even stand out as "that building I didn't recognize that one day" either, it just blends in and becomes something that has always been.
But it hasn't.
At best the neighborhood has an air of "wasn't there one of those weird things somewhere around here?" The new material leaves something at the very edges, but the insertion is so clean and the edges so distant and well feathered that it becomes indistinguishable. Like a really good Photoshop job where you're pretty sure the picture isn't right, but damned if you can figure out why.
Anyway, I expressed my desire to let go of the draw, the reflex motion of acceptance, the self-control that prevents me from marching up to strange houses before the strangeness fully washes out of them. To lose the convention that keeps me safe and bored in a world that is perceived as static while in fact being unimaginably malleable and... tertiary.
Liz objected, as I knew she would. "Why would you do that?"
"For Adventure!! Because I want to see! I want to know! I'm tired of safely accepting everything around me. It's not working out for me anymore, I need something new."
"So how's freedom working out for you? Because we call that 'Breaking and Entering' and you get put in jail for that sort of thing!"
But no. No you wouldn't. I mean, sure you have to be careful, you have to choose your opportunity. The police and the people around you are all entrenched with the same acceptance that I am/was. They won't understand, not on the surface. Not without being forced to confront what's going on around us all the time.
Something that has the power to move space and reality around in that manner has to leave some sort of concrete mark. There has to be some purpose behind it or why bother in the first place. Aliens? Bizarre science? Time travel? I don't know, but whatever it is is inside and there has to be a way to expose it.
The trick is not letting your self-awareness, the programming, to distract you from going in all the way. You have to be committed to seeing it through to the end. If they can move reality around in such a way that large-scale changes to an urban landscape can be accepted as natural, they're not going to leave their machines (or people masks!) in the living room.
Digging deeper will be required because the authorities will become involved in an act so willfully insane and if you stop short of finding the evidence to convince them then it's all for nothing. (All or nothing or all for nothing - I like that.)
I'm not sure how much of the above is a joke.
It's possible I'm dancing at the edge of another nervous breakdown.
That would be unfortunate.
I'm not going to start breaking into people's houses.
But I am going to start paying more attention.
Driving down the freeway, TartQueen made some remark about impulses or something. I wasn't really paying a lot of attention because it wasn't about me, but whatever she appeared to be talking about dovetailed perfectly into some thoughts I had recently been formulating and a post I'd been meaning to make here.
"It's funny you should say that," (whatever it was) I interjected, "because I was just thinking recently about how I have to become more impulsive and give up a little self-control."
"Oh my god, what the hell are you talking about," she demanded. Then, not even waiting for my well-reasoned response, she continued. "Oh god, the finger is out. Nothing good comes when the finger is out!"
This was an interruption, but it was also about me so I was understandably torn. In short order I gave in and demanded an explanation. Apparently many of my "crazy" ideas are accompanied by a wagging finger which demonstrates and underscores the depth of my convictions. The finger, just so you're all aware, bodes of less dire things than when I start "doing that thing with your hands."
I have to give her that one. I get the Crazy Hands from Brad Pitt movies (specifically Fight Club and Twelve Monkeys) and when they come out even I know I'm approaching the brink. The finger I didn't know about.
In any case, my tale went much like the following:
You know how you're walking or driving around the city in a place you've been hundreds of times and you see something new? An area that you're intimately familiar with from long years of living or passing through, but one day you notice a building or a house that you've never seen before. It doesn't fit, it doesn't belong. It's confusing and alarming.
You pass by and soon it's out of your thoughts. The next time you pass it, it appears normal, it fits in, it belongs and has presence in your reality.
It has acclimated and you've accepted it, you don't even see it anymore.
Fuck that.
Fuck that in the ass. A new fucking reality opened up and you just accept it and let it in? No. Forget it.
It's crazy.
There's something going on there. There's something unnatural about it. How can reality just bend and adjust. How can new material become incorporated into our experience? The building doesn't even stand out as "that building I didn't recognize that one day" either, it just blends in and becomes something that has always been.
But it hasn't.
At best the neighborhood has an air of "wasn't there one of those weird things somewhere around here?" The new material leaves something at the very edges, but the insertion is so clean and the edges so distant and well feathered that it becomes indistinguishable. Like a really good Photoshop job where you're pretty sure the picture isn't right, but damned if you can figure out why.
Anyway, I expressed my desire to let go of the draw, the reflex motion of acceptance, the self-control that prevents me from marching up to strange houses before the strangeness fully washes out of them. To lose the convention that keeps me safe and bored in a world that is perceived as static while in fact being unimaginably malleable and... tertiary.
Liz objected, as I knew she would. "Why would you do that?"
"For Adventure!! Because I want to see! I want to know! I'm tired of safely accepting everything around me. It's not working out for me anymore, I need something new."
"So how's freedom working out for you? Because we call that 'Breaking and Entering' and you get put in jail for that sort of thing!"
But no. No you wouldn't. I mean, sure you have to be careful, you have to choose your opportunity. The police and the people around you are all entrenched with the same acceptance that I am/was. They won't understand, not on the surface. Not without being forced to confront what's going on around us all the time.
Something that has the power to move space and reality around in that manner has to leave some sort of concrete mark. There has to be some purpose behind it or why bother in the first place. Aliens? Bizarre science? Time travel? I don't know, but whatever it is is inside and there has to be a way to expose it.
The trick is not letting your self-awareness, the programming, to distract you from going in all the way. You have to be committed to seeing it through to the end. If they can move reality around in such a way that large-scale changes to an urban landscape can be accepted as natural, they're not going to leave their machines (or people masks!) in the living room.
Digging deeper will be required because the authorities will become involved in an act so willfully insane and if you stop short of finding the evidence to convince them then it's all for nothing. (All or nothing or all for nothing - I like that.)
I'm not sure how much of the above is a joke.
It's possible I'm dancing at the edge of another nervous breakdown.
That would be unfortunate.
I'm not going to start breaking into people's houses.
But I am going to start paying more attention.