Sunday, August 21, 2005
And if this is a dream, then I'm gonna sleep for the rest of my life
The trouble with having an overdeveloped, hurts-your-mind's-eye vivid imagination is that it leads you to believe you know exactly how things are going to be, because you've seen them so clearly. The brain isn't really equipped to deal with the end products of a lot of the things it's actually capable of doing; the traditional mechanisms of it can't keep up with the precocious stretching twattery of the human mind. And it is precocious twattery - so much of it is useless at best and damaging at worst. What's the use of being able to envisage things you can't do, things you can't have - or worse, being able to see perfectly clearly how things are going to go wrong, and how people are going to curse your miserable hide? It's like having a hundred unused rooms, all of them well-stocked with instruments of mental torture.
(Watched most of 'As Good As It Gets' again tonight, several satisfactory moments of sniffle. Sadly, I missed the part where Jack says 'People who talk in metaphors ought to shampoo my crotch'.)
(But I did get to look at Skeet Ulrich and not hear any of his lines due to boggling afresh at his astonishing resemblance to my first lover [although more to do with mannerisms than the amusing hustler facial hair in this instance]. Who is now either a hugely successful swank with a foxy car, or lying in a gutter bleeding from the nose. Or reading this. Hi, D. You owe me money.)
I am nifty, though, and I am crafty, and I will outwit it. My brain will not get the better of me. I shall have at it. I will whip it into shape. I will tell it when it can have the night off, and shoo it back to bed when it toddles in at 3am whining that it's thirsty.
While I'm at it, I should do something about the chemicals that seem to ignite said thinky-organ once every four weeks or so. It really is like school chemistry, pissing about with test tubes until something goes WHUMPH and oh with the smoke and the screaming and the crying and mayhem. There is no reason why, with various counteractive synthetic chemicals available to act as heroic little firemen damping down the blaze, I should turn into a mad shadow of myself on a predictable basis. Nein!
Things are never exactly as you foresee them - couldn't be more fucking obvious but I evidently need reminding - and a lot of the time they're not even reminiscent of what they were when they acted themselves out in your head. Since I trust and am very fond of my imagination, which has comforted me at least as much as it has gleefully shafted me, it bewilders me slightly that events do not act according to the maps it scrawls. But I'm also pleased that life is so much more inventive. My imagination really only knows three chords in comparison.
(Watched most of 'As Good As It Gets' again tonight, several satisfactory moments of sniffle. Sadly, I missed the part where Jack says 'People who talk in metaphors ought to shampoo my crotch'.)
(But I did get to look at Skeet Ulrich and not hear any of his lines due to boggling afresh at his astonishing resemblance to my first lover [although more to do with mannerisms than the amusing hustler facial hair in this instance]. Who is now either a hugely successful swank with a foxy car, or lying in a gutter bleeding from the nose. Or reading this. Hi, D. You owe me money.)
I am nifty, though, and I am crafty, and I will outwit it. My brain will not get the better of me. I shall have at it. I will whip it into shape. I will tell it when it can have the night off, and shoo it back to bed when it toddles in at 3am whining that it's thirsty.
While I'm at it, I should do something about the chemicals that seem to ignite said thinky-organ once every four weeks or so. It really is like school chemistry, pissing about with test tubes until something goes WHUMPH and oh with the smoke and the screaming and the crying and mayhem. There is no reason why, with various counteractive synthetic chemicals available to act as heroic little firemen damping down the blaze, I should turn into a mad shadow of myself on a predictable basis. Nein!
Things are never exactly as you foresee them - couldn't be more fucking obvious but I evidently need reminding - and a lot of the time they're not even reminiscent of what they were when they acted themselves out in your head. Since I trust and am very fond of my imagination, which has comforted me at least as much as it has gleefully shafted me, it bewilders me slightly that events do not act according to the maps it scrawls. But I'm also pleased that life is so much more inventive. My imagination really only knows three chords in comparison.
