I'll Stop The World And Melt. Not With You, Just Melt. All By My Lonesome.

Can I just stop for a moment? Or a long series of moments? I need to, in a bad way. Dislocated is no way to wear one’s head. I don’t like living life that way. The way things are going I’m feeling like maybe, just maybe the Universe could use a few moments of stillness. If not the Universe, then the Planet Earth. And if not Earth, then at least my head.

My poor, aching headbone.

Layoffs. Wars. Economic meltdown. Recession. Personal crises and generalized anxieties and change. Not knowing my ass from a hole in the ground some days. It all seems too much, sweeping the legs out from underneath me. Sticking my head into the torrent of information flowing around me is akin to drinking from a firehose, or walking through a high-speed wind tunnel. I cannot drink that fast, or walk effectively into a hurricane. It’s exhausting and too much is missed.

I am tired of missing things. Picture sitting in a boat, on a broad and swift river. The wind is blowing hard, chop is on the water. And try as you might to stop it, cargo continues to fall overboard, and you watch helplessly as it falls to sternward and forever out of reach. There is no turning back. It wouldn’t matter anyway if you could turn around; the current is too swift and turbulent. You’d never catch up to the stuff you lost while trying to comprehend the new stuff coming at you.

I find myself weary of even trying anymore, to understand the vast cloud of sensory impressions swathing me in overload. Pecked to death by lunatic chickens. Trapped in a tent with hyperactive angry bees. The mere act of filtering such quantities becomes a tremendous task unto itself. The sheer time and energy involved easily robs me of the ability to comprehend that which I have filtered.

You know those movies or videos where one person is on screen, moving real slow while people and cars zoom by at manic speed? That is me. Feels like that all the time. I’m trying to catch up, or at least comprehend the people and events zipping by. It makes me feel…lost. Sort of “in” the world but not really “of” the world. Does that make sense?

Perhaps I am looking at this from the wrong direction. I keep looking out but really I should be looking in. The dislocation I feel could be coming from having gone down the rabbit hole in the center of my head. Sort of like turning a sock inside out, or maybe a Möbius strip in the guise of a human body. If I drew a line down the middle of myself, would I return to my starting point having traversed all sides without crossing an edge? Ow. Ow. Ow. Mistake. That just made my head hurt even more.

All this data, coming at me at light speed. Why did I ever believe that I wanted to know everything there was to be known in the Universe? When did my head become such a strange attractor for information? Somewhere along the line my brain collapsed in on itself, incurring an accelerated process of densification, the grey matter congealing into a black hole with an event horizon defined by my skull. Data goes in, but where does it come out? Some days it feels as if nothing leaves only to increase the pressure threatening to blow the top of my head off. Wouldn’t that be spectacular! An exploding black hole! One can only imagine what that would look like. Maybe it would create a white hole, discharging the accumulated contents of my overheated brain into another universe, or into a different place somewhere else in this one.

If only I could stop time. No, stop motion (but isn’t that in some ways the same thing?) on a molecular level. Climb inside my own skull and scoop up the quantum goo and pack it into some kind of snowball. A grey matter snowball squeezed between my palms in a desperate effort to quell the vibrations, bring time and space together in a hot-cold singularity. Freeze it at the level where even the atoms slow down, doing a languid Brownian dance of slower and slower rotations while time ceases to pass.

I know the Universe does not revolve around me, I don’t expect it to. But just once, even if only for a few ticks of the atomic clock that keeps Standard Time, I would like everything to just stand still so I can cool off.

I need that. And a beer. A beer would be nice, too.