Imagine, for a moment, that you are someone who lives for surprises. You like new, unexpected things. Things that deviate from the norm, strange syntax, wierd colors, funny walks, you live to find all those wonderful outliers.

Now keep the moment imagination. Keep it going and extend it. Imagine that you know everything that will happen. Imagine you read people like patterns and most of these people not only have no ability to deviate, they also don't want to.

Fuck. Life would be one boring, insignificant fuck for you, wouldn't it?

You can stop imagining now if you want. But keep in mind the hopeless feeling that fluttered across your stomach for a little bit. Everything looks mundane. Everything looks gray. It gets to a point where you are so uninspired, you can't even surprise yourself.

Try to fuck things up. Go ahead. Set roadblocks in front of yourself. Set yourself up so you will fail, even though you don't see failure in your future. Fuck up your relationships. Kill your unconceived children. Destroy the few things in your life you know you can look foward to. See what happens.

You fight the grain until you're too tired to care. And the grain fights back. Scream and pound and scratch and kick, and the grain fights back.

Do this until you are willing to give up. Do this until you don't care about whether you keep going or sit in bed all day. Stop trying. See what happens.

The grain, it just keeps going. It has infinite energy whereas you are running on genetically enhanced generic groceries. You can't win. Why fight?

Slug around with nothing but your mind moving fast. Think and think and think..how to overcome...how to beat it....why the hell is it there anyway? Who runs this shit?

You realize that your entire life is run by the basic principle behind taoism. You hate taoism. You start to feel like Zaphod Beeblebrox, where you don't know why, but you are forced along this invisible path, forced by your own brain. Someone's been tinkering around in there. You start to feel Zaphod's anger when you realize that maybe that someone was you.

You begin to ponder that old claim that you are god. Perhaps it's not just some empty blather for the minions. Perhaps there is something to it. In respect to yourself at least. Ponder, perhaps that you are the grain, you are the one who has set up all these patterns and all these motivations in your brain, cut, snipped, and tucked your mind, and then erased your memory and blocked off the places that hold your reasons and motivatons. You start to realize this is way too possible. You start to realize that perhaps this is all for your own good.

And yet, you still feel trapped. You still feel anger. You still feel like a mouse in a pre-set maze with mundane gray walls and high-traffic carpeting.

When I was little, I used to set myself up for practical jokes. This isn't that wierd. For a person who used to play strategy games against herself, this is not wierd. I'd set buckets of confetti up against my door so it would fall on me later. I'd set up elaborate systems involving skateboards, lamps, chemical gooey substances, and rubber chickens. The idea is that yourself at time A is not yourself at time B. The idea is that time A person can set up a trap for time B victim. This is all so time C person can have a good laugh, in retrospect. We were all different people.

As you remember this, you, person B of the here and now, start to get a better idea of what the hell person A had in store for you. Person A didn't care about you. Person A didn't care about your comfort or your happiness or whatever you would have to go through to get to point C. Just like you don't give a shit about person C, and you are willing to fuck things up old school to get life the way it needs to be for you to be comfortable in the here and in the NOW.

And you wonder...just how much of your mind have you been tinkering with? And can you change it?

01.24.02