Somehow I've made my way back here to Internet Writing Land. Things look terrible; they also look occasionally wonderful. It seems like we have everything, though in ten years our everything will have been chucked into the garbage and we'll have a new set of even more of everything. It's hard to know where anything begins.
I was going to link to articles or stories that lately have rattled my soul in one way or another, but if you're up for it I'd much rather have you stay here for a few minutes if you can follow my brain's logarithmic spiral. I'm no neuroscientist, but I do work with a few, editing some of their reports and trying to make them sound like more normal humans. This is surely not news to you, but our brains are pretty ridiculous, and I have a lot of fun learning something new about them every day. Our brains are frighteningly powerful, and almost unimaginably fragile.
Brains are phenomenal at attaching human meaning to things, and this is great because without them we wouldn't be the only humans (that we know of). But they also attach meaning to shit that is simply not there, because it is so easy for the Brain to do. The big problem is that it becomes particularly hard to accept that in a chaotic, ever-expanding Universe, accidental things happen that don't necessarily have any universal meaning. I'm remembering now a powerful quote from a former Marine in Ken Burns' fantastic documentary The War, talking about the very young idealistic soldiers who came into his unit at one point. He said, "They honestly thought that if you did Good you would be safe and get rewarded. They had no idea of life's accidents."
Maybe you're like me and you have trouble coming up with things that are always Good, given every context. Or things that are always Right, or Wrong. Everything has a context; things may look the same, but only to us in a given moment. Probably without even knowing it, the greatest trick our Brains play on us is the very convincing idea that any one emotion will last infinitely. Our perception of stuff can change dramatically based only on how much sleep we got the night before. If the frontal lobe runs low on the fuel it gets from a decent night's sleep, you start having trouble distinguishing between past and present emotions; and folks' brains with more extreme sleep deprivation start convincing themselves they live in an "eternal present" according to one study I proofread.
It's with all these things in mind that I try to keep big, cosmic-seeming events from boiling over in my Brain. Though this is very hard and some days it just doesn't work. But it's important to try, especially when it seems hardest, because without trying your Brain retreats into what it's pre-programmed to do, which is to find patterns and keep itself alive at all costs. This is the difference between our Brains and a whole lot of other animal Brains we've studied. We get the opportunity to try very hard to find the context that shapes whatever it is that has happened; if you don't do this, you risk getting your Brain caught in easy loops, running deep grooves that can take generations to wash away.
One real deep groove that we're having a whole lot of trouble washing away is this constant narrative of Us vs. Them. Whenever something frightening happens, especially now that media and opinions are ubiquitous things, the collective InternetBrain whirrs alive and starts churning out lowest common denominator horseshit, stuff that you might notice isn't a whole lot different from major motion picture blockbusters. Some people claim this is the big bad media attempting to control us via fear, and there is probably some truth to that, but it's also likely that it's as simple as folks in control noticing how many billions of our dollars we pour into Us vs. Them-type entertainment, so why not make the "real" news look the same? It's almost a little too easy.
Unless I have a beer in one hand, popcorn in the other, and my feet up on a coffee table, Us vs. Them narratives either make me uncomfortable or are plain boring; it seems so obvious that the truth is always way more nuanced. I really think most people know this on an individual level. Put people face-to-face, and I honestly believe a majority of folks from all walks of life would treat each other with respect and love, sharing emotional similarities while learning about cultural differences. This admittedly feels a little naive spoken by what on paper is a suburban-raised white kid who was lucky enough to attend a private university. Then again, if that's all somebody decides to judge me on, they're making exactly the kinds of mistakes I'm trying to be aware of myself.
Collectively, though, we've got some strange new issues to confront, to go along with plenty of old ones. What's becoming clearer to me is how often I need to take breaks from Internet Reading & Writing Land. The overabundance of opinions (and opinions about opinions) isn't just exhausting, a lot of it is basically meaningless. This doesn't mean you can't find remarkable stuff out there--of course you can. We've got pretty much everything available (or what we think right now is Everything), but what's happening at this moment in Time is a whole lot of people needing to scream and shout that, Hey! Everything's Here! There's no filter! AHHHHHHHHHH!"
Don't worry too much; I think we'll grow up sometime. After all the U.S.A is still basically a baby at 200+ years old or something. My plan is to let 'em keep on chuggin', anyone who thinks they've got It All figured out. Follow me into the abyss if you like: Dare to be confused! Bask in the glow of unfixed opinions! It's a little dark in here, but to me it's like the clandestine moment in a theater when the lights finally go poof and the chattering crowd around you disappears. Now you can be yourself, nobody's watching.
Now, if you've made it this far, go grab a copy of Denim Skin #3 and dive into the first half of a new short story of mine called "The Old You." Do it!
