Walt Whitman, Ransom Notes, and a 3 Pound Brain

I'm sitting on an uncomfortably small, black chair, staring at an empty, beige wall, trying to think of some interesting, colourful thing to say. Forsaking both interest and colour in favour of quantity, however, has allowed me to share the following six thoughts.

(Those two sentences took me over 24 hours to write. Not a good sign. I originally started writing about how bothersome an ingrown hair can be, but after some careful consideration and a good nights sleep, I decided against it.)

Thought # One: The idea popped into my head a few weeks ago (literally, popped. The guy in line behind me at the grocery store even heard it. He said he was a doctor and that sound in my head wasn't a good thing. We'll see, old man. We shall see.) to combine a whole bunch of bits of lyrics that have stood out to me, from songs that have graced my ear canals at some point or another, to create a mosaic of my thoughts. Has that ever been done before? You know, a collage of words? I guess the idea is similar to one of those ransom notes, where the words are taken from various magazines and newspapers and the like, and arranged in some creative and threatening fashion. Except I wouldn't be demanding money, or have someone important tied up in my basement, or actually be physically cutting and pasting anything anywhere and having it sent to the head of the Hostage Negotiation Team or to the important person's relatives. But I think it could be interesting. In a non-life threatening or extended prison term sort of way, I mean.

Thought #Two: Our lives aren't linear. Not really, anyway. Sure, we're all destined to follow a specific order of things: ie. time -- birth, the creamy-middle-part-that-is-life, and death. But during that creamy middle part, nothing happens in a neat, step by step sort of way. It's pretty messy. It's kind of like a can of silly string. Birth is when someone hits the dispenser, life is the string flying and sticking everywhere and upsetting unsuspecting passerby's, and death is when the can is empty.

Thought # One + # Two = # Three: I was thinking about this, and thinking about my lyrical collage idea, because I noticed how in 10 different songs over the span of an hour I could pull out 100 personally meaningful thoughts that affect different aspects of my life or current situations I'm facing. And I thought, wow, there is never just one thing happening to me, never one emotion or one decision or one plan or one temptation or one mistake or one idea. (It reminds of Walt Whitman's poem Song of Myself, where he said, "I am large, I contain multitudes.")

There's always a lot going on in our tiny, 3 lb. brains. Most of it we don't even realize until something reminds us of it -- like music. But it amazes me how our minds are constantly in motion, always processing, always connecting thoughts, always sorting and sifting and working through the cluttered mess we fill it with.

Thought # One + # Two + # Three = # Six: In an unexpected turn of events, and fully contradicting what I just wrote, I have confused myself and forgotten the entire point of what I was originally going to say. This reminds me of the previous couple lines of Walt Whitman's poem: "Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"

C'est la vie.