Journal Journal: My secret personal thoughts... 55
Nothing silly and nothing sexy this week. I've been on vacation for the last week or so, and haven't been anywhere near a computer. It gave me a lot of time to think.
I'm going to post some of those private (but probably boring and definitely depressing) thoughts in here, because I want to talk about them, but I'd rather not complicate my real life by talking about them to people I know (that's a long sentence). That's enough introduction... here's my thoughts.
I'm too old for existential angst. I feel very very small. I remember the first time I realized how unimaginably short my life was. Manimal was on TV, and I was sitting at the kitchen table making Christmas decorations with my Mom. For some reason, I started thinking about the length of eternity, and it made me feel so small. It felt similar to the feeling you get when you go to the base of a 100-story building and look straight up at it. I felt dizzy gazing into the face of forever.
After 20 years, that dizzying feeling is back. I know what sparked its return. It's really really stupid. It's movies. Well, it's not just movies, but partly movies. If you take movies like The Matrix, Thirteenth Floor, A.I., etc. for more than just entertainment value, and you really really think about their underlying themes, you may start to question your existence. For most of you, this questioning will probably be a short exercise, because your brain has already traveled these pathways before, and it just lead to an un-pragmatic dead-end. But if the conditions are just right, you might start reconsidering those dead-ends.
Now, when I look at my cat, I see a 3-dimensional representation of my cat constructed with trillions of atoms. Sometimes I just see meowing meat. Other times I look at my cat and see the deaths of the millions of cats that have died in the past. Then I think about the billions of trillions of thinking breathing animals that have ever lived and then died. Most of those animals died alone.
I look at myself in the mirror and I make wild unpredictable facial expressions just to make sure I'm really in control of this body. Deeply into my eyes, I gaze into my soul, and there is no infinity. Nothing special is looking back. I carefully raise my awareness level a few extra notches and gaze further into my eyes. Nothing. The extra-awareness is difficult to sustain, and yields nothing new, so I fall back into my comfortable level of awareness.
Late at night, I shake. It's only happened a few times. At first I thought I was having a medical problem. Maybe blood sugar, an early onset of Parkinson's, or something else strange. After a medical checkup, I'm pretty sure it's not medical, I think it's in my brain. Late at night, I stare at a picture on my wall, and I start to see the huge strips of empty space in between the protons and electrons, and then I feel my legs quiver. Walking around afterwards, I try to forget, and then I sleep on the couch.
If I were a teenager, I suppose I would start wearing all black, dye my hair green, and date dangerous men. I'm too old for this shit.
