Went to bed early last night and it may have been one of those little “best decisions ever”. I’m up at 420am, now it’s 440am and the moon is staring at me so beautifully (and I love to think about how all the great people in the past- Lincoln, Washington, Alexander the Great, even the first few proto-humans would have all stared at the same moon in wonder, and I’m looking at that same moon today, and in a way we are all connected by that shared bond) and I’m thinking I gotta get to writing, man!
And so I’m writing again and I know that I haven’t written for a couple of days or so but I’ve been sick and I’ve been tired and I’m sorry but I’m back. Not going to make excuses, just going to keep trucking. Sometimes you fall off the wagon. At least I feel good to be back, and that’s all that counts.
It’s funny, I told myself that I would get started the moment I get on the computer, but I saw that my Google Chrome browser was left on since the night before, and I had left my Facebook on, and then I saw that I had recieved PMs and Notifications- and I couldn’t help but click on them, and I spent a few minutes going through them, and luckily I was able to get off of it without opening any new tabs or starting any new “information streams”- but already I can feel my mind a little bit less incisive, a little more lethargic and my ideas come to me a little bit slower as I type this now.
I remember reading something Scott Adams wrote about how interruptions are the death of creativity- or something to that effect. When you have a state of flow you want to nourish it as much as possible, that much is precious.
I don’t know why I was thinking about this but I was- I’m absolutely fascinated by urban legends and stickiness and what we tend to remember. Like, I remember hearing this story about a guy and his girlfriend, and his girlfriend bumped her head against a glass window/wall at Burger King, and she complained of headaches for a while after and ultimately passed away. Who is this guy, who is his girlfriend? I have no idea, but I met a friend for kopi a couple of days ago and she told me that she had heard the exam same story. Why is this story so sticky? Is it real? Did it get exaggerated as it passed on? I think then of a picture I’ve seen on both Tumblr and Facebook with two kids- one black and one white- reaching out to each other. (Both of them are on the “backpacks” of their parents, and both parents are facing opposite aisles in a supermarket- so the kids are facing each other). A few weeks or months later I saw the same image being shared on Facebook with an anti-racism quote slapped under it- something like “no child is born a racist”, and maybe it would have had a misattribution to a great source of wisdom and insight, like “-Albert Einstein”.
You know what I’m talking about? Even if these things are fake, you have got to admit that they tell us something about the human psyche. Observing this, I think of it as a kind of society-wide art form, whether we realize it or not. (Maybe not exactly art because it isn’t meaningfully created meaning, but there IS meaning in there if we’re looking for it- then and again there is meaning in everything, so if you learn to put on the right lenses, everything is art).
What other sticky things do you know? Here are some stories I’ve heard that I’m sure aren’t very original- kids getting poisoned by candy from strangers on Halloween. Kids kicking a “ball’ around a field only to discover that it’s a skull that got unearthed from an old/unmarked grave, maybe from the war. There’s always some spooky looking tree somewhere that somebody supposedly hanged themselves on. A human fetus in a science lab is almost always supposed to have some backstory involving either a teacher or a student, or most scandalously, both. (What’s your favourite popular story?)
It’s interesting how sometimes good intentions get twisted with bad ones- we see people posting fake stories and fake images of real heroes or sufferers- apparently one of the images and stories circulating about Newtown was completely fake (but got shared anyway because it was a touching story of a heroic young female teacher), and there were pictures of Jyoti before we even knew her identity, so obviously someone just thought that they’d take some unknown picture of some pretty unknown Indian girl and use it in a before/after with a picture of some unknown indian girl in the ICU. What do you think about that? Is that messed up? Did the original poster just want credit? But they don’t even get much credit… they send something out into the air and it just catches and goes viral. There IS a certain pleasure in that, even if nobody ever knows who did it.
What does that say about our humanity, that anonymous internet content aggregator sites exist? No, that’s not a rhetorical question to say “Humans are fucked up!”- I don’t believe in such simplistic nonsense. No, real question, what does it say about us? I think people are people and we will always be more or less a certain way fundamentally, but the better we understand ourselves the better we can manage ourselves. I’m sure we can use these ideas and perspectives to better ourselves and the world- we just haven’t quite learnt to purposefully exploit ourselves yet.
I’m sure the time will come where we learn to create positive things that capture the global human imagination. In fact I bet there are millions of people working on it right now, and I feel blessed to even have the opportunity to even try to contribute a little drop toward that, because many don’t.