Just a Thought

[Salty]

I had this dream once.

Don't worry I will try not to bore you overly much the way almost all dreams bore almost everyone who didn't dream them.

In my real waking life I had my arms tightly wrapped around a woman I loved, to my eventual detriment. I had moved back to Alaska from Washington right after getting my massage license, this was perhaps one of the biggest mistakes in my life. She turned out to be the kind of idiot that would leave most you people with a toilet full of teeth.

But at the time I was happy to be next to her, finally, after such a long wait. And I was in a deep sleep.

In my dream I sat in a plane, in the back seat next to the window. Exactly as I do now. The lights were all off in the cabin, just as they are now. I was staring out the window when it suddenly rushed away from me and all I knew was blackness.

I woke up screaming. That my terror was as deep and absolute and final as that darkness.

Now, deja vu is a thing. An annoying thing, if you ask me. Every time I experience it I am reminded of a dream I had wherein the things I dreamed are the things happening in my waking life at that very moment. At least, that's how my brain responds to it. This unsettles me every time and it has left me with the notion that maybe sometimes I dream things that are going to happen.

You can understand them how this dream of an airplane flight might leave me feeling very unpleasant. Every time I board, every take off and landing, I feel this pit of terror in my stomach. Being a rational person whenever my glands permit it, I find this highly obnoxious. Out of principle I do not enjoy being rules by my fears.

So I think: what would Eris say? Besides, SHUT YOUR WHINY LITTLE BITCH MOUTH, SON. YOU'RE LUCKY ENOUGH TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE, FOR A PITTANCE, YOU CAN STEP ON TO A GOD DAMNED MIRACLE OF ENGINEERING AND YOU KNOW WHAT FUCK YOU DON'T FUCKING TALK TO ME.

That is of little comfort to me and does nothing to untie the knots in my belly.

Yet I sit now, serene, calm, unmindful of the turbulence that always accompanies flights in and out of Alaska. And why? Because I went through all the tools at my disposal after years of weeding through such tools and came to the one that makes the most sense, the one tool that frees me from this stupid, wholly irrational fear. It's the one I took from The Art of Zen and Motorcycle Maintenance.

This thing, this hunk of metal and fuel I'm sitting in is a thought. A real thought. A human thought made manifest. A thought incarnate.

Planes (trains, and automobiles) would not exist but for the human mind. Thoughts guiding the hands, hearts and minds of small little monkeys-many of whom simply want to ensure their next meal is a sure thing-working, building, manufacturing. This thing I'm sitting in is designed to do the thing it's going to  do. If something goes wrong-as will happen from time to time-it is the way of things. But this thought that brings you from point A to point B has all the robustness as befits all refined and tested and tried human thoughts in motion.

Even as misanthropic as I am I can recognize the beauty in the ever-present flow of thoughts that make things that we all view as somehow outside ourselves. The only pity is that we seem to discredit this sort of beauty and that we consistently fail to integrate it into the beauty of things that exist without our interference. We have to force, not our need but our DEMANDS on systems that could be so much more if only we didn't strangle it with our gluttony, collective ignorance, and desire to be distracted from, well, the very things that make life worth living.

Of course, some human thoughts create machines of hideous, monstrous intent. There is frequently little difference between the materialized thought that kills vs the one that offers petty convenience vs provides humans with immeasurable benefit.

But right now, at altitude on the 11th September, that doesn't get my rage gland pulsing. Right now I can only enjoy the sensation of my fear dissipating, replaced by the warm and fuzzy feelin that I am currently nestled inside one of the most robust, effective, and magical (Coyote) of human thoughts. Right now I can feel a thought overpower the kind of fear that left some humans huddled in caves, to afraid to step into the night, or the day, and face whatever happens to lay in wait. A thought to drive away the fears that lay in dreams.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Yes.