Mind Loss Paradox

This is a piece I wrote in 2009. It deserves to be on here. Read it, and then ask me to read it to you. It's better heard aloud.

Someone told me the other day that I lost my mind. It’s the kind of thing you hear pretty frequently, sometimes in the form of a question, sometimes as a statement. If it’s a joke and you still do have your mind, then you know what’s going on. The paradox of mind loss is that if you really have lost your mind, you won’t know that someone’s telling you the truth when they tell you that you’ve lost it. When I was told a few days ago, I, forgivably, thought it was a joke. It took a lot of convincing to make me believe such an outlandish statement.

            Naturally, the first place I checked was inside my head. Maybe it really was there, but was just doing other things. After all, I had no recollection of it leaving, so maybe it hadn’t after all. But no, it wasn’t there. I think I checked back sporadically, always to no avail.

            Last week I

            The next places I checked were the closets in and around my room, and then some on some of the other floors in the house. I recently reorganized things and figured it could have jumped into some storage space in the process. Unfortunately, none of the places I checked contained what appeared to be my the paradox of losing your mind loss is a paradox.

            After checking all of those closets, I realized I had too many fucking closets in this fucking house, but they were still all full. How can that happen? So I decided to turn one of the closets into a walk-in tanning booth. I bought a bunch of ultraviolet lights and rigged them up to a gas-powered generator. I think I bought the generator at the Home Depot, but I may have stolen it. I vaguely remember checking to see if it would fit under my coat. I knew there was a reason to hold on to that old North Face jacket even though it was too big for my current fashion sense. The only problem with the setup was the fumes, but I love the smell of gasoline.

            Someone told me I

The next place I checked for my mind was in the septic tank at my sister’s house upstate. I haven’t been to her house up there since last summer, but it may have hitchhiked up 17 into Roscoe, and then it’s not too far a walk from there to the mountain the house is on. The tallest mountain in the world is Mount Everest, but only because the other tall mountains are underwater and don’t have a chance to rise up like my black brethren.

            The next places I checked for my mind were the closets in and around my room in my cell phone with the touch screen that I hate typing on because I have big fingers. The eloquent man uses not the touch screen phone. Typewriters are a motherfucker, but they don’t have T9 just like my phone. What if you make a mistake on the last line of a page while using a typewriter? I’ll bet what you do in that situation says a lot about your personality.

            Naturally, the first place I lost my mind was the day before yesterday last week on the Gregorian calendar system of a down jacket paradox of mind loss and profit. An earthly person through whom God makes his messages heard. Blessed is the fruit of thy whom.

            So the next place I checked for this “mind” that I apparently lost was the fucking trash. What good is a fucking mind if you can’t control it? So I figured I might have thrown it in the garbage with all the other shit I don’t need. But it wasn’t there. Good, I hope the garbage men picked it up already, that useless waste of space. Fucking… fucking… fucking

            Then I decided that the best way to catch bees is with honey, so I left out a plate of hot, sexy brain juice that I collected from a brain fart in hopes that my mind would make itself apparent. I sat for three years in a chair in front of that plate waiting for my mind to show up, but I think it came in the first fifteen minutes to mess with me. Alas, the life of a hopeless romantic is often too much to bear. O mind, wherefore art thou lost?

The paradox of mind loss is that it makes you feel like you’ll never know when it’s Opposite Day since how can anyone tell you it’s Opposite Day? If it’s not and they say it is, then they’re lying sacks of shit, but if it is and they say it is, then it isn’t since they would have to say the opposite, which would necessitate their saying it’s not Opposite Day, in which case you heartily agree and if they agree then it’s just not Opposite Day, and if they try to argue with you, you kick them in the balls and run away.

Last week someone told me I lost my mind I ramble the paradox of mind loss I’ll never find my mind since you need a mind to search for a mind I give up on mind searching paradox of mind loss last week lost my mind someone me told paradox.

Traversing dimensions

If time is the fourth dimension, what if the fifth dimension is emotion?

You need four numbers from all four dimensions in which we live to set up a meeting, as Neil DeGrasse Tyson explained so well on on Business Insider: location, given by three numbers (x, y, z axis--latitude, longitude, altitude--with the z axis often assumed to be ground level, as with "meet me on 46th and 8th") and time, given by another numeric measurement. What is the next most important, and universal, descriptor of a specific place in space and time? The emotions of those present.

Emotions affect the way we see the world, precisely where and when we are. Bring a different set of emotions into a situation--be it a business meeting, a second date, a baseball at-bat--and the arc of the situation will change.

We do not need to concern ourselves with assigning emotions to inanimate objects like rocks or trees. We might exist in five dimensions and they might not, and that’s OK. But perhaps they do, at least some of them--perhaps a tree does have emotions, which it exhibits over decades or centuries, rather than over the minutes or hours of a day as we do. That's another topic for another day.

 

If we are to physically step out of our three dimensions into the fourth, we may find that everything that has ever happened and will ever happen is happening now. Tyson discusses this in the video which was spurred on by Interstellar, Vonnegut discusses it in his novels, I contemplate it often. As Tyson puts it in the video, "I can access all points of my three-dimensional space; yet I am a prisoner in the present, forever transitioning from the past into the future... If you go to a higher dimension, it's not unrealistic to think that you step out of the time dimension and now you look at time as though we look at space... If your whole timeline is laid out in front of you, then you have access to it."

 

Now, as emotional beings, we are able to influence our mental state to a point--but nothing can create the raw emotional response of a new experience lived for the first time. And so perhaps the ability to truly control one’s emotions is the fifth dimension: travel through space as we do today (up to the third dimension); travel through our timelines (the fourth); live every experience in any mental state (the fifth).

The next question, then, is what are the five still-higher dimensions required for superstring theory? I can postulate, but that, too, is a topic for another day.

Wholes

I've been smoking mostly lime green American Spirits lately. Mellow menthol. My cousin picked up a pack of Djarum Blacks for me last weekend, so I've been mixing those clove cigars in every now and then. Cute how they're cigars. I guess the papers are really leaves, or some kind of leaf composite. Finally found some Camel Wides over the weekend and had to pick those up to see what they're all about. It's true: they're wide.

Took a yellow to LaGuardia today and spotted a TSA agent nearby who I could ask about finding a good smoking spot. By the time I got out of the cab, he had sparked one up himself; when I asked, he directed me to either end of the terminal. I chuckled inside, thinking about how powerful he felt smoking right there, while telling passengers to walk on. But it wasn't far, so I didn't even think of asking if I could stand where he was, giving him a chance to actually exercise that unconfirmed power. I just walked away.

Standing over at the skinny part of the sidewalk--the part you drive by and get ready to slap any driver who even thinks about dropping you off at because there's insufficient room to maneuver and it's unnecessarily far from the entrances--I set my bags down and reached into my pocket for a clove. Dug around in one of the outside pockets of my backpack for a lighter. Saw metal on wheels passing by, dropping off human cargo for transfer to larger  metal conveyors. Lit the clove. Watched more people. Saw couples in cabs, heading to the airport together. And this is where I stopped and reminisced.

I used to fly out every Monday morning. Every couple of weeks, I had someone to share a cab with. Those moments, the moments you know are the last you'll have with someone you love until next you meet, they're special. Even if she's sleeping and you just have your arm around her, they're the culmination of your time together until your next time together; whether that next time ever comes or not doesn't matter that much. There's something beautiful in an ending, in being able to look back on the whole of something.

I've kept you waiting long enough

And so here is my first post after the reboot.

As with much of my writing, which often comes out of my brain as quickly as it enters or I risk losing it forever, this has no title.



When you woke up this morning, you had this feeling you've never felt before. You knew today would be different. You knew today, something was going to happen that hasn't happened to you before. You knew today, someone you've never met before would say something or do something to you that would stay with you forever. You knew today would be a turning point in your life.

Every day when I wake up, I know the day will be different. I know I'm going to feel things I've felt before, do things I've done before, but small things would be different. I know, every day, someone I've never met before will hear something I've never said before and it will change her life. I know, every day, that there are things I do and say that stay with people forever. I know every day is a turning point in my life.

Reboot

I want to start a new blog for actual written stuff, and not just Facebook comments that maybe only I find funny, living in my own world. I like the name of this blog so instead of starting yet another, I'm going to reboot this one as my more conventional blog.

True to form, I don't have any plans (literally, none... frequency, topics, style, etc.), just a shitload of ideas. Whatever comes out of my head and lands on this blog, though, I assure you will be worth the trip. Expect the first few real posts over the coming week.

I am a passionate dancer.

just do it

i mean, duh