the human mind
the human mind is a dangerous place! humans should probably not be allowed in there. those who frequent the place get ideas, and you know where those lead! no wonder repressive governments do so much to prevent access! heck, even liberal governments are leery of the place and find reasons to arrest people who've been there. fortunately most of us are too well-behaved to ever be seen in a place like that, or too thoughtful of our reputations to ever associate with people who go there. take me, for instance - not to jail, please, but as an example. just this morning, I was trying to think of what to appreciate, and thought of transparent cloth, you know, the woven smoke, fog, and air that make certain skirts, blouses, and dresses that we can't see enough of. I was, thinking, of those items, and women modeling them. it was a very pleasant experience. it was. but I didn't know how to express it, so I thought about accessories for clothes like that, and remembered lacy leather, and recognized how difficult that must be to tool without punching clear through it. which naturally made me think of X-acto knives, and how wonderful they are for cutting curved pieces out of leather, or balsa wood. which made me think of balsa wood and its various thicknesses which allow you to build model planes and other just-heavier-than-air objects. which made me remember how frustrating it was to cut the tight curls of balsa that I sometimes needed for projects when I was a teenager. which made me remember - or think I remembered - seeing an impossibly thin sheet of balsa and asking the store owner who the hell could ever use a sheet like that as it must be impossible to cut. I damn near fell on my ass when he named a guy I knew! And he showed me a model airplane he wouldn't let me touch - good thinking on his part! - a bi-plane made from pieces cut from that thin, thin balsa. I went home stunned and envious. but ingratiated myself with the guy enough that he invited me to his house so he could show me how he worked on such a project. we went to his house and I disappeared, I could tell, while he worked on pieces of balsa so thin I would have destroyed them just handling them, making cuts with his X-acto knives that I knew I couldn't make with mine, even though mine looked exactly like his. I went home so awed that I couldn't work with my X-acto knives, my balsa projects, or my leather for weeks. then I had the thought - see? thinking again! you just can't trust the human mind! - that he was an artist and I was a mechanic. that thought freed me up to get back to work on balsa and leather. but you can see how dangerous a sequence of thoughts like that is - transparent cloth, transparent clothes, women in transparent clothes, accessories, lacy leather, X-acto knives, balsa wood, thin sheets of balsa wood, artists and mechanics. it had to be stopped! otherwise it might have led to not putting my hand over my heart when the national anthem is played, or not standing for it, or voting for Bernie Sanders! good lord! that's why we have to keep people out of the human mind! it's for their own good!
This is interesting. We all do this. I have at times tried to retrace my thought steps and cannot recall how I started thinking about a particular thing. :)
ReplyDeleteI know what you mean, Beverly. Especially when I've been wool-gathering (does anyone else still use that word?) I will suddenly "come to" and recognize that I can't remember my last two coherent thoughts. This was a playful reconstruction, and I would not swear to its accuracy.
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