Babbling

There is so much time to think when you just recline on a couch and watch TV all day long and your mind is so fuzzy when you’re doped up and recovering. A fine breeding ground for all sorts of thought is formed and my mind has certainly run the gamut over this past week. Typing up yesterday’s entry was like scaling the Mt. Everest of writing for me but the thoughts are just pouring out of my brain until I see foam coming out of the top of my head and fizzing down my shoulders like a volcano of ideas that need to spew out somewhere before I completely meltdown. Fortunately I had a little notebook and pen by my side and managed to jot down various ideas and thoughts before they totally disappeared or turned into brain stew in some cases. Other things are gone forever. Overall that’s probably not as huge a loss at it feels but I’m sort of egotistical about my thoughts and ideas (otherwise I wouldn’t have a web page and a diary) and I want to preserve them for my children, grandchildren, etc. etc. The thing is, I really wish I had a diary like this to read from some forefather or “fore-mother.” That would make me so happy (although I probably would like to hear more about how they performed day to day activities so I should probably put more of that in here).

Anyway (I’m sure bad about getting off track – especially when under the influence of drugs) back to fuzzy thoughts… the vast amount of knowledge that’s been pumped into my head over the past week via the educational channels has all mulched together with the banal entertainment of the movie and network channels so that images of Fred Astaire in top hat and tails co-exist with high plains zebras in semi-dreamlike dances across African tundras in the shadow of Easter Island statues set in Stonehenge circles. I watch all this stuff but retain so little of the nutritious offering of education and so much of the gravy and dessert of the eye candy, it just amazes me.

On the other hand, I am astounded by how much I don’t know. It is absolutely true that the more you learn the more you realize you HAVE to learn. Just one week plunked down in front of educational TV and you realize how absolutely inadequate we are, as human beings, to soak up in one small lifetime even a tiny portion of all the knowledge there is to have. Being good at a game like Trivial Pursuit or fast at Jeopardy answers can make you have a false sense of adequacy. Also limiting where you go, what you listen to, look at and think about can leave you feeling comfortable with your understanding of the world around you. It’s not too difficult to feel pretty secure with your knowledge of the suburban life, your job, and how to move from day to day in a small safe circle. But the minute you extend yourself past that invisible boundary, the world becomes a vast cavern of questions and wonder. I love the educational channels but they leave me wanting more. I end up not sleeping and I want to travel and see the things I’m learning about. I also want to know more and more and more.

At the same time I look at these learned men that lecture and seem to have it all tied up. I realize they are only very learned about the subject that is their passion. But it just seems, for a moment, that they have their lives all under control. The odd looking man in the too-thick glasses and poorly cut suit who picks up a large rock as he slowly walks up a hill as he discusses his theory about Stonehenge with a thick British accent and peers into the camera is suddenly the VIP. He’s da bomb. But then I start to think… well, he probably got picked on in school just like the rest of us. Maybe he wasn’t even very good at gym. Shoot, he surely had his share of problems and likely still has his share now. And either he’s got some woman that he’s illegally spending his grant money on so he can have bizarre sex or he’s heart sore because a woman he wants won’t look at him. Being the world’s leading expert on whatever I’m watching doesn’t guarantee that a many will have a lovely and faithful wife. It only means he’s the world’s leading expert on whatever I’m watching.

Of course it’s very possible that he DOES have a lovely and faithful wife at home because some people are blessed to have a satisfying career and a satisfying family life, but nobody’s got everything wrapped up all the time. But until I sat watching these shows under the influence of post-operative circumstances, I never really thought about these kind of people. I guess I just assumed the world’s leading experts would naturally have perfect home lives and everything else perfect as well, from childhood on into adulthood. Bottom line is, nobody’s really got it wrapped up I think except maybe a very rare few.

I’ve read numerous biographies. I go through obsessive phases where I’ll get into something very heavily. For instance, once I spent a summer reading everything I could find about the Amish then we went and visited some Amish places. I spent a winter reading everything I could about Eskimoes. (Couldn’t afford to visit THOSE places.) I had a phase where I read up everything I could about the human brain and another phase learning about the holocaust. One long lasting phase I went through was reading biographies, particularly biographies of Hollywood stars from the classic years. In all the life stories I read I found tale after tale of sadness, tragedy, dissatisfaction. It made me much less unhappy about my own life at the time. One of the people I felt the worst for was Judy Garland. Reading her life story left me feeling ravaged. But none of the stories I read really made me feel envious or left me wishing I had that life except one. And that was Fred Astaire. I read his autobiography and it seems like everything was pretty wonderful for him! He liked his childhood, had a fun adulthood, and was happy in his senior years. He lost a beloved wife to illness and that was tough, but overall, he did seem to dance through life. Of course, that was to hear HIM tell it.

All of this babbling is just to say that along with what they’re trying to have you think about on educational TV, I end up thinking about much broader things as well. Things like the universality of human beings. I think about who we are as humans today and the similarities to our ancestors. I also ponder about how the absolute hardships of life must have had so much more of an impact on the lives of our forefathers and how they wouldn’t have had the luxury of divorce over the silly things that trouble us. The concept of “not having our needs met” would have been quite different back in the pioneer days than it is right now. So much to think about; none of it matters much but somehow all of it are the bigger questions that man has pondered forever.