Chapter 33
Bizarre Thoughts
Robert Fulgum has made bizarre thoughts a party game. "Have you ever had any weird thoughts?" he asks a person beside him. The inquired person snaps to full attention.
He repeats the question and tells them that he will reveal one of his if they tell him one of theirs. The bizarre answers he receives make his hearing a doorbell in the middle of the night and expecting it to be the Village People sound tame. A psychiatrist once told him that most of us are crazy. Sanity only means we keep craziness under control.
Martha Beck says a voice tells her to jump when she's on a high place. A psychologist told her to tell the person she's with when that happens. One day, she was walking along the edge of a cliff with her guru. She told him she had that thought.
His reply: "Everybody does."
Comedians make a living off bizarre thoughts. We wouldn't laugh at their jokes if they didn't connect with some looniness in ourselves. Phyllis Diller said she made a living saying what other people only thought.
I'm not so upset with the idea of bizarre thoughts, but I know it is deeply upsetting for a child, and many adults. I can't explain why the brain gives us thoughts or pictures we don’t want. People who meditate know that the mind throws images at them. It is aiming for control.
What upsets me are authentic images I accidentally see. I saw the movie called Seven, (The deadly sins one.) That horrible movie stuck with me for years.
Once, I was leafing through a beautiful magazine on Animals at an airport bookstore---dum de dum, then Whap! I saw a picture of someone harming an animal that so impacted me. I sat right down on the floor of the bookshop.
For years afterward, that image would flash before my eyes as though projected, especially at night as I was dropping off to sleep. Isn't that what PTSD people experience? I would try to push that image from my mind, but it was determined. I think that's where people got the idea of a devil.
Finally, I mentally killed that evil man so many times that I can now talk about it, and I gave the little animal a happy life without him, plus many hugs and kisses. Now I can talk about it.
Strange how reading Fulgrum's passage brought that up in me.
Time for a Renaissance
I remember a TV ad from the 60’s. It was a line drawing with no words just symbols like #&%##* coming from a woman’s mouth. In retort flowers flowed from a man’s mouth. The woman glided to him and curled up in his lap.
That reminds me of another ad featuring more flowers. While tanks were shooting whatever tanks shoot, flowers came flying over from the other side.
That was the flower child era. Now, we throw insults, blame, lies, and innuendos.
I was embarrassed when I heard a Canadian say she would not live next door to an American.
“Why?”
“Because they don’t care for each other.”
Yes, we do.
On our street, we do. When my neighbor had a tractor for a week, he asked if I wanted any work done. I asked if he would pull out two wild lilac bushes that had gotten huge and so woody I couldn’t cut them with clippers. That tractor pulled them out easily, and they disappeared. He also took them to the recycle.
Wow.
My neighbor to the rear cut our back 40 (not acres, we just call it that. It’s a strip behind the Wayback building, and another area that needs mowing. It isn’t visible from the street, but it is from my neighbor's property, for he lives behind a large field behind us at the end of his road.) He cut our grass with a Weed Wacker for he couldn’t get his ride-on mower in the back gate. I just went out one morning to let the chicken out, and it was cut. That was in spring when the grass was about a foot and a half high after all the spring rains.
Renaissance is a French word meaning “rebirth.” It refers to a period in European civilization marked by a revival of Classical learning and wisdom. The Renaissance saw many contributions to different fields, including new scientific laws, new forms of art and architecture, and new religious and political ideas.
Consider the possibilities.