Monday, May 26, 2014

Madder and Madder


My kitty has a brain the size of a peanut. But it’s a peanut with three nuts inside. My dog has a brain the size of a walnut.  Turns out we may be drifting toward some sort of equilibrium, brain-wise. Because my own brain seems to be shrinking.

I lost a Q-tip the other day. Standing in front of the mirror, I dried one ear. but then when I went to dry the other ear, the Q-tip was gone. Only when I had surrendered to the cruel joke of the universe and reached for another Q-tip did I glance in the mirror and notice the first Q-tip where I’d left it.

So, although I am often mad in the sense of anger at the determination of inanimate objects to fuck with me, it turns out I may be going mad in the sense Alice meant. I’ve always said that which does not kill me makes me madder.  Little did I know, and littler still today.

Thursday, May 08, 2014

Spring Cleaning Tour Inside My Head

There is something at the bottom of every new human thought, every thought of genius, or even every earnest thought that springs up in any brain, which can never be communicated to others, even if one were to write volumes about it and were explaining one's idea for thirty-five years; there's something left which cannot be induced to emerge from your brain, and remains with you forever; and with it you will die, without communicating to anyone perhaps the most important of your ideas.”

Do I now - or have I ever - had anything worthwhile to communicate? Generously assuming I might have had something to communicate, could I ever have done so? That’s what I’ve been pondering now that my medications have been tuned up enough for me to ponder a while longer.

I have been planning the itinerary for a Grand Tour Slash Spring Cleaning of The Inside of My Skull. The trip might be as perilous as trying to climb an icy mountain as the globe warms and having avalanches of multi sequiters swallow me like the Ocean swallowed the Titanic.  And by the way, the Titanic might still be afloat if the globe had just warmed up a hundred years sooner.

What the hell am I talking about here? Exactly!

You’ve seen animated pictures of how your brain looks like a network of glowing blue fractally branching threads, connected by tiny pink sparks of thoughts. Not me. Inside of my skull there are a lot of quicksand swamps of digression that will distract me quicker than googling the lyrics to the Flogging Molly song The Worst Day Since Yesterday. (Which I just did. You’re welcome.) And the cobwebs and dust - my lord, doesn’t anybody dust or sweep the corridors and skim the hair algae out of the swamps?

My vocabulary - which once grew (because I am a reader) like the oxalis grew in my once-irrigated front yard, - has begun to wither. Not so much from lack of reading and appropriate irrigation, but because my brain can no longer absorb much nourishment from reading - just like my compacted dead soil can’t absorb much water like in the good old pre-drought days.

Before I settled on the metaphor of an unmapped path through a swamp, I was looking for a metaphor to communicate how things inside of my skull work and what needs to be done to clean things up. I was trying to remember the verb for that that thing you do after you delete a bunch of files from your hard drive. Is it reformatting?  Something that organizes stuff more efficiently on the hard drive and fills in all the blank spaces where deleted stuff was. To zoom in on my brain, I picture my brain’s hard drive as a badly scratched LP record, and the deleted stuff like that smooth spot on a record between songs – only wider and slightly warped from being stored at the wrong angle. And a with slightly sticky patch on the B side that might be fossilized Welch’s Grape Jam and that symbolizes unwise use of substances back when mid-century modern was cool the first time around.

Other times, I’d describe great rooms inside the house of my skull like my real house that is not merely suffering from neglect to the exterior. My brain needs to have more stuff cleaned out and hauled to the dump than The Hoarding Room does (keeping in mind that the hoarding room is bigger than inside my skull but that the relative contents are proportionally sized, but equally relatively overstuffed). And to clean out The Hoarding Room, the best idea I have is to open the door and windows, remove the window screens, and run a fire hose through the door until everything drips out the hole where the windows are. Sure, it would require yet another trip to the dump, but it might be worthwhile. Wait, deadly mold growing in the old wallpaper from water left behind by the high-pressure hose. Unfortunate metaphor.

Then what do you call the action that rearranges the icons on your desktop into some semblance of order instead of like the pile of stuff moved from my back patio into the yard so the painter could put off painting for another three or four days every three or four days for going on a month now? Run on sentence? Perhaps. Good metaphor? Perhaps not. Thought of genius, or rhetorical swing and a miss? Totally.

So anyway, back to the journey down the dusty corridors of my skull that, sadly, has neither glowing blue branches nor pink flashes of genius. I just hit the Great Wall of Responsibility that stands between inducing deep philosophical insights to emerge from my brain (like the termites emerging from this post when the contractor disturbed them by using an electric saw to cut it down) and the crap I have to stop putting off because I’m a grown up and not (yet) like my cray cray puppy pictured above

Instead, I’m stuck here lamenting how I should first dredge my neural swamp, or delete worthless stuff from the LP-shaped hard drive inside my skull, or perform a fire-hose lobotomy before attempting to communicate earnest nonsense.

What I really should be doing right now is taking the pictures off the camera and my smart phone (oxymoron alert!) and into putting them into the demonic iPhoto: a process I still have the mental acumen to metaphorize as trying to teach a peach to parallel park in a car with right-hand drive using a radio transmitting to/from the moon that involves an 11 minute delay between each transmission while trying to work out the moral of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot (read in Russian) and having a mani-pedi performed by an animal without opposable thumbs. 

Hmmm. Trying to organize my pictures from the hash iPhoto mixes them into might be a good metaphor for a brain in need of an upgrade. And also: sometime in the next thirty-five years, I could really use a mani-pedi…

Saturday, May 03, 2014

Home (And Other) Improvements


"It would betray a lamentable ignorance of the principles governing Divine election and favour, not to say of patent and notorious facts, to suppose that our seeing what so many are blind to is due in any degree to superior intellectual acumen or to more extensive information and erudition on our part; or even to our superior fidelity to grace and light.”
 - George Tyrrel, Hard Sayings

Somebody recently scolded me for using profanity in what they considered an inappropriate context. Apparently, sanctimony is less offensive; a rule of civilized discourse about which I was lamentably ignorant. And yet somehow, my gentle sensibilities were wounded. Instead of lashing back with better words to further elucidate my position on the topic being discussed, I took the high road and simply added a line to the list of regrets I’ll review on my deathbed. Since then, I’ve added yet another item: I missed seeing the Roger Corman movie Sharktopus on TV last Saturday (Thanks, Dr. Dr. K.). At this rate, I’m going to need a long and lingering death.

It’s not that I claim a superior fidelity to grace and light. It’s just that these days I’m on my last nerve with trying to manage home improvements, and that leaves me little time to address self-improvements.

I’m getting my house fixed up and maxing out my home equity line of credit to do so: the theory being that once it’s done and doesn’t look like this “before” picture (discovered here) I can sell it and downsize my life and extracurricular responsibilities. I’ve been trying to do this for a while now and I’m tired. I think I’m finally past the stage of denying that I’m a hoarder (although I haven’t thrown away the coat rack in the laundry room that falls over if you put a scarf on one hook). 

The guys did finally haul away the window air conditioner that had stopped working sometime in the mid-20th century and had simply been pushed out the window into the front yard where climbing vines made a lovely square topiary shape out of it. Last Saturday I made a trip to the hazardous waste disposal facility to dispose of those empty paint cans, pesticides I haven’t used since the room air conditioner stopped working, and some other chemicals that might otherwise have been admitted into evidence at my trial for the unsolved disappearance of a door-to-door bible salesman back in the day the old AC still worked.

I’m at the stage where I want to find an app to adjust the privacy settings on my life so people will leave me the fuck alone. Then, I need an app to make me avoid unnecessary profanity. But in that order, because while I have unnecessary people in my life, profanity keeps me from explaining that since actions speak louder than words it would be easier to punch them in the throat than use non-profane words alone to express how I feel about them. And by somebody, let me be clear: I mean everybody, no disrespect.

Meanwhile, I have to take the unnecessary dog to the dog beach in >90F heat so I can return home with a puppy tired enough to chill out, turn on the air conditioning, have some bourbon and popcorn, and watch old Godzilla movies until it gets dark and cools off.

The handymen will return after the weekend, as will the painters. Then it’s the tree guys, the pond guy and the termite guy. Then, heart bursting with hope, I will list this money pit on Zillow, cash out, and enter the Witness Protection Program. Then, self-improvement. I fucking promise.