What Are You Thinking About?

I was once cuddling in bed with a woman. Her hair was mussed, gorgeous, and her pupils looked big. Maybe it was the light, now fading, the sun having disembarked half an hour ago. It was almost blue in her bedroom. The blinds were raised and the city was arching its back.

“What are you thinking about?” she asked.

I’m thinking about how funny it would be to go up to someone walking a classic golden retriever and ask what kind of dog it was. And to just be really astonished by the whole thing.

I’m thinking about the Crab Nebula because of its name. And every time I think of it the accompanying image in my mind’s eye is a dark red crab made of nebula.

I’m thinking about the word ‘scoundrel’.

I’m thinking about how lava lamps went out of fashion and were really only part of this one moment in American culture before totally falling off a cliff of popularity, like they were so big and then so not, but how cool they really are if you think about it or look at one.

I’m thinking about the United States Postal Service and how much everyone pretty much hates it and criticizes it for being inefficient and bad, but how in reality its totally amazing that it works at all and that the government set up a system whereby you can put a piece of paper in a slot with where you want it to go written on it in bad handwriting and then the paper arrives at the place. That’s crazy.

I’m thinking about the things I could accomplish if I were able to put myself into a state of supreme focus. Like if I were able to focus as hard as I’ve ever focused in my life at will and just work on something creative, or even something analytical but really hard that takes serious figuring out. I think I could do it if I could focus that hard, and caffeine helps a lot, but it seems like aside from extreme molecules like cocaine the focus thing is a mental game, like there’s some mental trick or process to get to the level of focus I need, but I can’t find it. But if I did it would change my life.

I’m thinking about how even the most influential people of their entire generation are forgotten a century later, and how although I guess its technically true that we’re all contributing a tiny piece to the whole that is human culture, the culture of our species, which itself, the culture, is passed down as each generation dies and so the human culture of humanity in a thousand years will have come from the culture of now, which will be contained within the culture of then, although in a way such that it’s impossible to see as anything coherent, that although its technically or like, logically? true we’re all contributing a tiny piece to the culture, really its such a small piece that its more totally anonymous, and actually seems more like culture is an infinite sum and what each individual contributes is so close to zero as to be effectively zero, and so in all reality everyone, including myself, isn’t contributing anything to “human culture”, and we’re more like drops in the ocean, but not just drops in the ocean more like Schrödinger’s drops, like drops of water settled in a superposition of existing and non-existing except there’s no way to look at the cat.

I’m thinking about going on a diet.

I’m thinking about how hard stand-up comedy is, but how honestly I think I could be really good at it if I dedicated lots of time, most of my time, to it, which kind of relates basically back to the focus thing I was talking about.

I’m thinking about how impractical butterfly knives are, and now I’m thinking about how I guess I think about objects and their uses a lot. Or maybe not a lot? I’d need a feed of other people’s thoughts in order to get a sample with which to compare my thoughts to and see if the amount of thinking I’m doing about objects is a lot or a normal amount or a low amount.

I’m thinking about those iron or steel, I’m not totally sure what metal they’re made of, fences around houses and sometimes commercial businesses and stuff that look like spears welded together by crosspieces but so the vertical spears are separated by gaps, and they look like spears because of their circumference and their sharp tips, which tips are sometimes not just triangular but more complexly designed and look like the Spade suit in playing cards, and how when I was a kid I used to imagine using The Force to pull one of the spears off the fence and into my hand, and then throw the spear really hard at a bad guy, and also be able to pull all the spears off the fence at once, which would destroy the fence, and have them float in the air around me, all facing an array of enemies, and then I’d push my hands forward and all the spears would go flying into them. And I still imagine that now as an adult.

I’m thinking about how of all the jobs in a town in olden times, a blacksmith sounds like the coolest, and is probably what I would choose, but in reality is I’m sure incredibly difficult, physically, and also very tedious, because you hear blacksmith and immediately think swords and shields and other cool stuff, but really most of the job would be fixing horseshoes and nails and household implements, and I know my arm would really start to hurt from the deep vibrations of hammering stuff on top of an anvil thousands of times, just like it would hurt and make my hands numb when I was a kid using an aluminum baseball bat to practice hitting.

I’m thinking about how I’m the only person I know aside from my dad that carries around eyedrops at all times. Eyedrops and chapstick are the things I always have aside from my wallet and phone and keys, and a good amount of other people have chapstick but I don’t know anyone with eyedrops all the time.

I’m thinking about how in about ten minutes I’ll be ready to have sex again, but I don’t know if you’ll want to. Or even if I’ll want to, but I’ll be able to then.

I’m thinking about the Hollywood blockbuster Skyscraper with Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson.

I’m thinking about how many cashews I eat. I love cashews and they’re a healthy snack compared to lots of snacks that are really bad for you, but with the number I eat a day its probably drifting into empty carbs territory.

I’m thinking about how the way your hair is falling onto your face right now is different from any way it has before and will never happen again. How despite all the sameness we encounter its really different each and every time in every infinitesimal moment, but how it makes sense from an evolutionary perspective that we don’t see that, but how that really is the case and that probably if I got to know you, and I mean your inner life, and how it relates to your actions in the physical world, as intimately as possible or approaching the asymptote of total knowledge, it would be impossible not to love you. Loving you would be inevitable because anything as byzantine and nuanced and painful and ultimately meaningful, maybe the only thing that is meaningful, as a human mind immured in a human body is so beautiful as to reach the lingo-metaphysical point where beauty and love are one thing.

I’m thinking about how it’s kind of a sad situation when someone has a job that either they hate or is very boring and they get most or all of their joy from the hobby they have, which they really, really love doing. And it’s sad because they have so little time to do it. But if that’s sad, what does it say about me who doesn’t like his job and doesn’t have any hobbies?

I’m thinking about how different it must be to be a reptile. But doesn’t it look pleasant when a lizard is sunning itself on a rock?

I’m thinking about a night in college when all my friends were heading to a party, and I was supposed to go, and they were trying to get me to go, but I was having this sort of moment. And looking back I guess it’s a very college thing to happen, but I just felt like, what am I doing? We were headed to do the same thing we did almost every night, and I felt like I was different or I should be different, so I went on this self-consciously melancholy walk around the tiny college town.

I told my friends I’d catch up with them later and walked in the other direction down the big hill. The mix of old and new architecture that characterized the college buildings and dorms is a style I can’t even really describe. Almost amorphous. Not in the final product obviously, they were, you know, mostly rectangular or square or whatever, but the style and combination of elements was amorphous. The kind of thing you forget really easily, that just looks like ‘a building’. Albeit fairly nice buildings. With lawns and grass patches between the walking paths. The grass was wet from recent rain and general atmospheric goings-on. The first snow of winter was expected any time. And because of the season the grass wasn’t the dark green of healthy grass but rather a sickly dark green, almost too dark. And wet.

And so I was headed down the hill, avoiding any puddles because I was wearing white shoes, the shoes I always wore out, so they were in bad condition, but still I didn’t want to step in a big puddle. And I remember as I was avoiding one puddle I caught a glimpse of myself against the gray sky, and I looked around to see if anyone was watching me but everyone I saw was clearly headed out to go drink and party and was very much involved in their own conversations and plans for the evening, so I stood above the puddle and looked down at myself. And I remember I was looking at my nineteen-year-old face, and liking how it looked, and thinking that the same person now staring back at me is going to be eighty someday, and look awful and frail and just kind of be barely a person. But I was so much a person now. And I thought about how every old person I saw was once someone like I was at that moment, but it really didn’t seem that way.

I felt like I had bought into the Young Person’s Dogma about the world, with all the deeper understandings of the word ‘dogma’’s implications, that is that at least a portion of whatever’s set forth in the set of beliefs is wrong or unsubstantiated or at the very least severely lacking in the nuance department, and I understood this but at the same time really felt like the YPD was right! And this was all further fuel for me to distance myself from the party and instead engage with not only my thoughts but the world beyond the psychological-slash-temporal-slash-physical bubble of college and my peers in college.

There was one main street in town with the college situated on one side, its buildings dispersed at various altitudes along a big sloping hill, and shops and residential side streets branching away on the other side. This is the middle of nowhere, by the way. Two hours past the middle of nowhere, by car. So the one traffic light in town is blinking at me and I look at the building that has the philosophy department in it and then at the gas station across the street and feel like there’s something important there, but I don’t know what it is, but I feel at this point in my life like I’ll definitely know what it is in a few years as I’m only growing smarter and wiser as I age. So I cross the street.

And I walk past the book store which is not the college book store that has textbooks and merchandise and sweaters and stuff but is a locally owned, small book store that’s old and warmly wooden inside and that grad students like to go to to work. It’s closed but I can see an old man, thin like a stop sign, who must be the owner, working behind the counter, and I think about knocking on the glass and getting his attention and asking him some deep questions even though we’ve never met, and him taking me inside and us having a whole amazing interaction and talk together probably by a fireplace like happens in movies sometimes. But I don’t do that. I’m a little cold but would feel a lot colder if my friends and I hadn’t been drinking in preparation for the party and night out. I distinctly remember looking up at the sky and thinking it looked like a shield, but I know memories change a lot and I hope that isn’t an inaccuracy inserted into the memory from me talking about blacksmithing earlier.

I turn onto the street where most of the professors and college administrators live, which has a larger number of nicer houses than any of the other streets around town. And I walk down the street trying to think about things more important than everything related to my time at school, which is pretty much everything I usually think about. My footsteps seem really loud on the sidewalk. And I’m looking at all the houses, searching for something to see that will have an impact on me or that’ll be important, but at the same time in the back of my mind I can tell there’s a thought loop going about what will be happening with my friends and the party when I get there later, like a program running in the background, and the more I try to stop it the more it persists.

And I’m looking at all the houses. I can see some professors sitting in their living rooms and dining rooms with their families, because it’s not all that late yet, and lights on in some rooms and off in others. The light from the bulbs illuminating the rooms seems almost more like sunlight than the sun in its saturated yellowness. My eyes move from one house to the next, next next next, eventually to a white clapboard one-story, and they immediately find the room with light on, which is a bathroom. And there’s a small covering over the window, I can’t really call it a blind or a shade, it’s more like a white doily several times the size of a tea doily that must be hung on a rod and can clearly be pushed to one side or another if need be. But the doily isn’t over the window all the way and the right corner of the glass can still be seen, and even though I’m on the other side of the street I can see a man in there sitting on the toilet.

And it’s clear that what he’s doing is he’s masturbating. And then I notice that I recognize the face, it’s my economics professor Dr. Jurmell who’s in his sixties and has a sparse greying beard and a gut and wide-set hips. He’s maybe the most rectangular person I’ve ever seen and he’s masturbating at medium speed on the toilet, completely naked. He looks like a blind fleshy mole, squinting without his glasses.  And I honestly hope that squinting when he doesn’t have his glasses on has become a reflex for him, because otherwise he’s squinting at his erect penis, which seems like a very strange and sad thing to do for some reason.

And I’m totally frozen. It’s less that I can’t look away and more that the question of looking away doesn’t even enter the picture; it’s not even an option. All of my senses have telescoped into vision, and I’m not even a pair of eyes at that moment, only the vision they’re projecting. And Dr. Jurmell is contorting and exerting himself in ways I’ve never imagined because I’ve only ever thought of him as a professor of economics and in truth not even really as a person outside, or beyond the grounds of the college. Every few seconds his chest is pulled forward and his gut in a little, and he hunches even more than he’s already hunched on the toilet. I suppose he’s being pulled forward and pushed back by his abdominal muscles contracting and releasing in spasms of pleasure as he approaches climax. His shoulders are asymmetrical, un-squared, his left higher than his right. He uses his right hand to masturbate.

And he raises his head from whatever material he’s using to pleasure himself, which I can’t see from my vantage, and he looks out the corner of the window right into my eyes. He sees me, and for the briefest instant I think I see his eyes move elsewhere, escaping my own as a reflex, but then they’re back on mine. And he’s looking at me, squinting at me I should say, into my eyes into my vision. His visage is my vision, is my entire sensory experience and is accompanied by no thoughts and is thus kind of me in totality. And we’re fastened that way. And I think I can see a little bit of spittle efflorescing from his lips and landing in his sparse beard. His movements on the seat grow more rapid, forward and back in degrees of hunching, and when he ejaculates his lips writhe beneath his nose and the large muscles of his cheeks spasm, and although he’s holding a wad of tissues in his left hand in front of his penis I can tell that he fails to catch the airborne ejaculate. But he doesn’t look away. He continues to stare at me. And we stay cinched together across space that isn’t there. Even as his turgid penis pulses rhythmically with his heartbeat, drooping in tiny increments with each pulse, slowly plasticizing. Becoming a hook through the air, dissolving into its more comfortable shape until finally it lies, restful, on the pillow of his testicles. His pubic area is entirely shaved, which looks strange on a man his age.

I went to the party. Not right away, but I went to the party.

I’m thinking about the word ‘scoundrel’ again.