Last night, I woke up at 3:30 AM, and I had a tough time getting back to sleep. My mind was somehow wide awake, and it wanted to argue with some random guy’s Facebook post that had bothered me earlier in the day. The post was the shared content type. Someone I barely know shared something from someone they don’t know but somehow resonated with, and now they wanted to pass it along, as if to say, “This is how I feel.”
The post was confrontational, divisive and accusatory. Someone purporting to be a friend of the late C.K. (a person they deemed to be a wonderful, fair-minded individual, a proponent of debate and free speech and whose right-wing extremist ideology they support) was sharing their outrage over his murder. They spent very little time eulogizing before getting right down to the heart of the matter: “Liberals are evil, and we need to rid the world of them!”
I thought about responding at the time, but because I never really comment on anything else this friend posts, I felt a bit disingenuous chiming in and telling him to tone down the hate speech. How about a nice: “Hello. How’ve ya been? How’s the family?” before lambasting him with my moral cattle prod. So I hid the post and snoozed my right-leaning friend, but my mind was not done with him, apparently.
As I lay there in my bed, alarm clock glowing cherry red beside me, I thought, “Geez, how did I get here?”
Why am I lying awake with all these thoughts that make my brain want to fight someone over their (admittedly fucked up) beliefs. Why the hostility in my own reaction? Whence cometh this invasion into my own consciousness? Are these thoughts in my head even mine?
I knew the answer. It was these damned screens. It was all the shit I’ve been feeding my brain, like a crack-head, hit after hit, from morning until night. One big stockpile of anti-right rhetoric with nowhere to go, on account of I don’t actually see real people very often, and when I do everyone is as polite as church mice at an ice cream social. I don’t guess that metaphor works, but hey, it sounds poetic.
My mind has become like an addict’s mind, and it has zero discipline to even focus on one form of content at a time. I will be listening to a news podcast, scrolling Facebook and looking at Threads on my phone all at the same time. I have to have the very latest-breaking doom to feed my life-deficient psyche its minute to minute dose of brain chemicals.
“Touch grass,” they say. Ha. I barely go outside in a day.
Anyway, I knew what had to be done. I had to begin a meditation practice again immediately. I didn’t remember much, so I started with just breathing.
“I am breathing,” I thought to myself with each in-breath.
And as if on cue for a call and response, my brain would counter: “And you’re thinking about….”
I kept on with the “I am thinking about” part, but instead of letting my brain get away with whatever nonsense it was doing, I decided to take it on directly.
With the out-breath, I would acknowledge, “I am thinking about…” Sure. I’m in possession of these thoughts now, so I’m going to take ownership. The buck stops here.
But I took it a step further.
I took the the sentence, “I’m thinking about cheese,” for example, and I would diagram the sentence like we did back in grammar school.
From:
“I am thinking___
about____
cheese,”
I would picture myself erasing it, starting at the bottom and working my way up to the top.
“I am thinking______
about______”
to
"I am thinking____."
And when I got to the last little bit,
“I am____,”
I would just leave it there.
And back to breathing.
“I am breathing.”
It really worked. My brain got tired of coming up with new things to diagram eventually, but not before trying different compound sentences and throwing related ideas into the mix.
“I am thinking____
about____
cheese____
while_____
riding____
a____
bicycle____
because___
it____
is____
fun_____
you_____
stupid____
fuck_____.”
Big eraser. Scrub scrub. No challenging the thought. Just let it come out, then chop it into bite-sized bits and power wash it with my big pink rubber eraser. Easy-peasy.
What I was left with, the “I AM,” became its own kind of mantra, and naturally, questions began to form about the nature of consciousness, existence and all that. Scrubby-scrub. We don’t have answers for that sort of thing. We aren’t going to figure it out in the space of a breath, anyway.
“I am.”
That’s enough for now.
----
Today, I spent all day NOT looking at my phone, or any other screen, not even to turn on a music player. I played keyboard for a few hours, then guitar and keyboard, then made lunch and ate it in my hammock on the back deck, almost falling asleep. My thoughts were minimal. Mostly, “Trees. Birds. Bumblebee. Cactus.”
Later, I watered the grass, getting after the bare spots that the sprinklers have missed all summer, then fed the cats, played some more guitar, and made myself some dinner.
Oh, and I started the “Morning Pages” up again, this time adhering to the three page, pen and paper, first thing in the morning prescription. I wrote in a composition notebook with a nice Pilot G-2 .07 which had kept its ink remarkably well since I last used it probably 7 or 8 years ago.
Am I proud of anything I’ve written today? Absolutely not, including this. The Morning Pages are a literary laxative, a writer’s Roto-Rooter. Do you really want to see the hair clog?
This post is the result of my not feeding my brain anything digital for the last however many hours, so I figured I'd capture some thoughts that came to me spontaneously rather than through the monolith of indoctrination that is my flat screen or my phone.
Also, I decided to add another stipulation to the Morning Pages protocol: Write in a different location than this godawful mancave death chair, where I’ve spent so many hours looking up at the giant TV monitor, it’s pathetic. No wonder my view of the world is so arsed up. I don’t ever actually see it, except though the lens of the internet and its soul-sucking algorithms.
So I sat on the couch upstairs, much to the delight of my cat Eddie, who took it upon herself to have a little gnaw at the corner of my notebook. Fair enough, it really is nothing more than fodder, waste paper, and not even fancy like George Washington’s toilet paper, just the generic stuff from Winco.
Anyway, friends, family and Facebook acquaintances, pardon my randomness, and the hit and run nature of this one-way transmission, as I begin to limit my exposure to screen-related input and decrease my scrolling to a minimum. I'll always respond to a comment or a message, but I'm less likely to be a good "like buddy," since I'm fighting an addiction, and I really ought not be lurking on here.
You understand.
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I've changed my comments settings to allow for anyone to comment. All comments are welcome, even spineless potshots from anonymous posters. Please, by all means, give me the tongue lashing I so richly deserve. I promise not to hunt you down and melt your keyboard with my plasma cannon. I won't, however, promise not to pout and make that face you can't stand.