I stayed home from school today. I said I had a headache. But in reality, I was just exhausted-from living mostly, and surviving. ItÃÂs rough sometimes. I slept late, and then when I wasnÃÂt tired anymore there was nothing to do. So I lay in my bed and stared at the ceiling for four hours straight. When that happens, and you are so exhausted, you put your arm above your head and stretch your body out so far you think you can reach the moon with your toes. But you can only move your eyes. With your eyes, you can only do two things, the only two things your eyes can do.
First: you look for rough outlines of animals and such in the smudged paint on the ceiling. Sometimes you can see a bear eating a flower, or a little boy wearing a sombrero jumping off a cliff down a waterfall into a pit of octopuses.
Thinking
Barry Bonds at the plate.
English: Barry Bonds on deck in 1993.And every time you move your eyes you see something new. A few minutes ago I saw an elderly lady with a flowery scarf that covered her hat, face, and neck eating a hot dog out of her left hand and holding a whistle in her right. She was chasing her cat on top of a moving train. Her aged leather boots kept slipping and I was scared she was going to fall off, but before anything happened the scene changed into a wolf chase scene with a dragon wearing argyle print on a vest.
Second: you can stare at the ceiling and think. Sometimes you can think about what it is like in other place, imagine what a Sudanese child is doing right now. Or about how the dinosaurs could have possibly stopped existing and how we can do the same. Or what everyone was doing in the ice age. And then when you run out of simple thoughts like those, you begin to get a real headache thinking about how the universe actually started, and if there really was ever a big bang, or weather we are all part of someoneÃÂs dream, their imagination, and their thoughts, like how they are part of our thoughts and our imagination, and nothing is real.
Sometimes, I think I am on a reality show, and everything people do or say to me is recorded for people all over the world, and everyone in the world knows, and plays along with it but me. IÃÂd have no real friends, just a bunch of interviewers I didnÃÂt know were interviewers. People would even see me when I am alone. The people I live with probably arenÃÂt even my family, just random people who look like me the makers of the show pulled off the streets. Which makes sense because I donÃÂt even act like them at all; some people in my immediate family are grouchy, some people are spazzy and some people are really close-to-genius-smartÃÂand I am a writer, none of the above.
When that gets confusing and I am wracking my brain to think of where the hidden cameras are I start to wonder if IÃÂm dreaming it all up, and weather it is real or just my imagination. I think up questions such as what if everything we see is our imagination. What if I made it all up, and I am the only living person on thins planet, and places like Argentina and Whales donÃÂt exist? Not to mention that animals like the platypus and armadillo, and technology, and the grapple wouldnÃÂt exist. And I am in complete control of my life and I donÃÂt even realize it. I can decide weather or not Barry Bonds was on steroids or if the tigers in the zoo really did jump over the fence and eat the face of the drunken boy. I can decide if you like what I have to say or not. I am not only in control of my life, but I am in control of everything, I have the ultimate power, I am GodÃÂa piece of thought that was created out of fear for people to have someone to talk to and lean on when they have no one, and they wonÃÂt seem crazy.
But being in control of everything is like being in control of nothing because we already decided that nothing exists and it is all made up. If that is sole reality than there is no bed I am lying on, no house I live in. Even the sand and the trees are made up. So donÃÂt note the trees because the dirt is temporary, note the dirt because the trees are temporary. No longer does the dirt symbolize all the bad stuff that will eventually go away leaving the trees and the beauty for the world to observe. There are no symbols and no beauty. There is nothing. And where there in nothing, there is dirt. Red dirt which moves with the wind. A desolate place similar to Mars, only without an atmosphere. When we snap to reality and our cozy bed and warm blankets disappear from us and we fall into that heaping pile of red dust and dirt, and then we disappear too.
English: U.S. Marshals Service mug shot of Barry B...
Thinking
Barry Bonds