Ugly Carpets, Shit Mind

Life doesn't move in logical order like a dusty mathematician in the grocery store.

Who taught me to think in this orderly way? Where did I learn to think in like this?

My way of thinking is not ordered. It is Pollock-like. My mind moves clumsily in literal landscapes.

School taught me to think like an accountant. Everything in its proper place. What a nightmare. From an early age: the boys in this line who like race cars and the girls in that line who like barbie and no one speaks in the library with the ugly carpets.

I hate these neat ordered things. Yet I try and make my life neat and ordered when it is contrary to the way I work. Everyone wonders why I am a tight-assed wreck. Well now it is clear. I never liked race cars.

What is that you say? I have explained nothing?

Well it is simple. If you have to sit in the library with ugly carpets and learn how to use the dewey decible system, you are destined to become a tight-assed person. It's like in Star Trek. If you are a Klingon, then you are destined to be evil and try to destroy the Starship Enterprise. Or if you are from the Middle East, you are destined to be portrayed by CNN as a person obsessed with bombs and hating the United States. You simply have no choice in the matter.

So you see. Cause, effect. Ugly library carpets, horrible mind. Thanks a lot Westmont Hilltop Elementary School library.


_________________
"Our lives teach us who we are. I have learned the hard way that when you permit anyone else's description of reality to supplant your own then you might as well be dead. Obviously, a rigid, blinkered, absolutist world view is the easiest to keep hold of, whereas the fluid, uncertain, metamorphic picture I've always carried about is rather more vulnerable. Yet I must cling with all my might to my own soul; must hold on to its mischievous, iconoclastic, out-of-step clown instincts, no matter how great the storm. And if that plunges me into contradiction and paradox, so be it; I've lived in that messy ocean all my life. I've fished in it for my art...It is the sea by which I was born, and which I carry within me wherever I go."
~Salman Rushdie