Finding a way out

Hey, let’s just get out of here.

What do you think? Just you and me. I’m tired of this. I don’t know exactly where I want to go, but I know what I want. And I want to get out of here.

When you create a new memory by learning a new abstract concept, you can think of it as creating a new foundational piece on which to build up new memories that are related to that foundation. It becomes easier to make new memories because you have something already in place to sort of [and here he gestured as if he were placing a clothes hanger black into the closet] hook it on to.

I can picture the kind of place I want to go. Somehow when I’m there it would be almost like – and I know this sounds a little… crazy – being dead. Just… in the way that I might lose sense of time. Like I had a severe case of amnesia, maybe, and every waking moment is brand new without any conscious flow of thought as time goes along.

You know what’s strange? We write very differently from how we think. We write how we wish we could think, but that’s just not how it works. Everything flows logically in writing; your transitions, and all that, as if everything has been thought out beforehand, which I guess it had.

That’s definitely the memory I think of the most. That summer. It pops up all the time. What I see are stretches of black water and nobody around. I see a few ripples and hear loud beats behind me. And that it was really cold, but that didn’t really matter.

In reality your thoughts are quite fragmented; things that make sense because of the associations you know in your head, implied, which you leave unstated. Maybe you are not aware that you make those associations, or maybe they are too abstract to easily explain. Until you are forced to, by having to write or speak it.

You remember that time I really got into writing a lot of poetry? I thought it was alright, but I didn’t really think people who read it really understood what I was trying to say. But whatever, they were well-received overall.

It is a remarkable phenomenon that happens right here [and now he leaned forward and pointed straight at my forehead], right in your head, and yet it goes completely unnoticed most of the time. I am talking about how you keep singing the same song or replaying the same few notes for years and years and years, background music to your life, so to speak, and never really grasp how important that song has become. 



The most random choices of song, too. But in the end it doesn’t matter what the song used to be because now it has almost entirely lost its meaning and is really just background music that never stops.

So this time I think it’s different. It might never return to the way it was. It could be a groundbreaking paradigm shift, if you will. It’s coming from a deeper source than it ever did. I think it will be different.

The question, the questions, they all come down to this: “what is really going on at a slightly deeper level?” I guess we will just have to wait and see. And try to keep ourselves alive in the meantime.