Notes from the Petting Zoo

I think we are often a bundle of conflicts about such things as romance and danger. Sometimes, we want one thing, and at the same time we want something completely opposite. Sometimes we want something very much, but at the same time, we don’t want it because there are ramifications.

I think these conflicts are a part of the human condition, that they play out all the time in our minds. You can think of it as a never ending battle, or a constant struggle, but I’ve tried thinking of it as more like a constant swirling and mixing. All these things comprise me, including the things that contradict each other. That just is what it is.

When we dream, sometimes, that dreamscape is where those conflicts play out, too. They can’t be hidden by the day-to-day operation of the waking body, so they wrestle their way out on the otherwise empty stage. There they play out their swirling and you can see it under a more direct light.

In many of those cases (the ones I think are the most boring dreams), the conflict plays out directly as what it is, but most of the time (I think), our perceptions and hopes and fears carve an otherwise mundane activity into something slightly surreal, lending an exaggeration that underscores the conflict.

So, instead of dreaming about the social undercurrents at work and what might be being plotted against me behind my back (which would be a boring dream), my brain tends to shift it to a metaphor that more directly communicates to me — I am swimming in the ocean and I feel beneath my feet great and terrible movements. I can look into the water and see shadowy hulks and barely glimpse flashes of teeth.

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I don’t consider myself particularly paranoid. I hear a lot of things that smell like paranoid conspiracy nuts, and although I’ll listen politely for a while, usually, I can catch right off the bat that they’re nutty.

But sometimes…

Sometimes I think that it is all-but-certain that there are deeper levels of control and manipulation happening in this world, that people out there have an understanding of cause and effect in politics that includes items not normally visible — even to those for whom a government might make itself relatively transparent.

It reminds me of the cloak-and-dagger stories, the situation where a tale of high adventure, international intrigue, and world-shaking plots is reduced to a euphemistic story the next day in the paper about “a disturbance down on Woods Road” or some other completely innocuous thing. How many innocuous stories, how many explosions, assassinations, and passages of small green pieces of paper are random acts and how many are part of a pattern?

Like I said, I don’t consider myself a paranoid. I think it would be foolish to see a conspiracy behind every bush. But I think it would be equally foolish to not consider that a few do, in fact, exist.

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I think the coolest thing we as a species are doing is traveling to other planets. When I first saw the photographs from the Mars lander back in the 70′s, I was giddy. That was cool!

Now, even though our NASA budget is some tiny fraction of the budget for waging war, we are still doing amazing things and of all the things these monkeys are doing, this is the one that amazes me the most.

I was amused to go from Water on Mars to Water on Mars!

Shall we send sleds with the manned mission?

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Scale matters, but sometimes we forget this.

Scale is one of those things that eventually allows us to put our life’s experiences next to our other experiences, next to the experiences of our fellows and compare and contrast. Doing so does not denigrate the experience. In fact, it prevents that experience from bloating up to a life-consuming thing.

The fact is, most of the time, that deep in the heart of an experience, it really can be difficult to place it in its proper spot in our library. This is something we all experience. The moment of grief, the moment of joy becomes — if even for a brief period of time — bottomless grief and limitless joy. I think we can’t avoid these excesses of the soul.

But eventually, we need to reacquire our perspective. Until we do, we will constantly be focusing on the latest issue as if it were the most important one we will ever see. Maybe it was — briefly — but now it needs to be put in its proper place.

Some good things to ask (works on me, most of the time):

• Am I dressed?
• Am I fed?
• Is there a roof over my head?
• Are there people I love?
• Are there people who love me?

If you’re talking about a breakup, some questions might be:

• Have I been left with the responsibility of a child?
• Have I been left with a disease?
• Have I been left in a cardboard box under the freeway?

Sometimes questions like these help keep you balanced.

This is not to say that everything’s peaches and Pop-Tarts, but that, once we’re capable of doing so, we should exercise the necessary maturity to put things into their proper perspective. However difficult that seems at times!

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My folks taught me that when you died, the people left behind were obligated to fulfill your last requests as best they could, that it was the final show of respect for you, to arrange things the way you asked for.

The implication, of course, was that you weren’t gonna ask for anything too outrageous, like “place my body on the roof for Nature to eat!”

Now, as far as I’m thinking, coffins are like Las Vegas. What happens in the coffin, stays in the coffin. So, when I tell someone “Bury me in my wizard robes and pointy hat,” I damn well expect they’ll do that. If they don’t like my wizard robes and pointy hat, then they can close the casket, the uptight crankjobs.

But Robert Norton, who specifically requested to be buried not in his pointy hat and wizard robes, they refused!

Some people hire a wedding planner to make sure that their wedding goes according to plan. I will hire what I call a “Death Dealer” to make sure my plans happen.

Do not fuck with the Death Dealer.

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