I suppose you would need to know Paula to fully appreciate her declaim on the woes of a being fully and completely aware of themselves and their environment. While most of my friends do not know Paula, you can appreciate it as if it were coming from me. Paula and I are two peas in a pod, although she is the crazy pea way at the very end of the pod (cue “One of these things is not like the other….”). I am the pea in the center of the pod who, at times, desperately wishes to have her theme song (Space Oddity) played in tandum with the crazy pea’s. Here is my ode to Paula, and my response to a tirade against the blissfully ignorant and the Karmic Gods (coined by Paula and henceforth referred to as KG’s) who do nothing but fuck with us.
Paula quoted an excerpt from Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams by Sylvia Plath. Per Paula “Its a story about this woman, who works in a psychotherapy office and steals dreams out of the therapist’s notes for a bible she is creating for a made-up deity she named Johnny Panic.” (The quote could have been about the relavence of the milk mustache in childhood..but let’s translate that to : move on it doesn’t matter so stop wondering.) I read her rant to say that being intelligently aware is oft times as much a curse, as it is a blessing. A curse in that you see meaning in everything. While some of us have the ability to turn a blind third eye to these things when on sensory overload, there are times when what the world is telling us through happenstance just becomes to much. We become as paranoid and suspicious of the significance of someone we haven’t heard from or seen in years reappearing in our life, as we are of spotting a particular white rock amongst a bunch of other white rocks in a garden bed while on a walk.
Paula states in her declaim “Stupidity to me is like a cheap form of vacation. Beach-side property in La-La Land is prime real-estate and most people already own a portion of it. Me? I’m sitting on a tree trunk in the Yukon trying to figure out why Jack London felt the need to personify a dog in almost all of his stories.” I love that. I really do. I feel that too often I begin to ostracize myself in the most classic sense. Back in the ancient times of Athens to practice ostracism was to basically cut someone off socially for their own good. It was a way to diffuse a social discrepency before the discrepency even occured. Like when making a seating chart for a function, and sitting Grandma Jo clear across the hall from Great Aunt Jesse to prevent a quarrell. Just once in awhile I wish and hope for a whole day to go by without philosophisizing the role of the praying mantis on my car that morning or what purpose do the KG’s have for this person or that person in my life. I wish for the one day where I just don’t care about meaning or significance. I am wishing to invest in Boringsuckpantsville. So many people flock there everyday. There has to be something good about it. If Paula is on a tree trunk in the Yukon wondering about Jack London’s character choices, then I am slightly less focused but closer to home sitting on the dock of a bay pondering how an interaction may have effected Joe Schmoe’s life.
If only I could make the noise stop. Oh to be a decorative ball perched atop a fabulous candleholder which is stoically sitting on an oddly placed mantle which is only oddly placed due to the nature of the odd wall on which the strange hearth/additional seating was built in this 1980’s style ‘open’ floor plan. To have a sigular purpose in life, revealed to me by the sheer nature of my existence- to exist for the esthetic pleasure of my purchaser.
Are we peas crazy, hearing and seeing things others do not? To be perfectly aware of my surroundings is more than I could hope for. But there are times, increasingly more so, when what my mind’s eye sees and my soul hears is blinding and deafening. Paula, “you are not alone. I am here for you…” Here’s to sleepless nights, agonizing days, focus free musing, desparaging thoughts of the others, pining for that which we cannot have, restless hopes, impatience, and aphoristic statements of the world in which we live. May the KG’s throw pebbles at your window, and your world become as interesting as ours. Paula, you are the only one that has read this far, and for that I owe you.
And so let us go in peace.
