Back in the sun, still a morning in April. Seems like a pretty long month. The birds are singing and my feet are flat on the ground. Two chapters in one day, if you’re curious. And it was the previous chapter and this one, not a confident prediction about a theoretical chapter 10 within the next 16 hours.
There’s dew on the lawn. I’m having trouble picking out the individual bird songs, the chorus is synchronized. I’m feeling sore after dragging and carrying my bike over a rocky ridgeline yesterday. Does your rear tire ever look a little flat from the angle you can see it while you’re sitting in the bike seat? I always get a little paranoid, from this angle, then I squeeze it and everything is fine. Usually. But I did have to put more air into the tires yesterday after brutalizing both tires on many rocks.
Nutmeg in coffee, particularly after shaving it oneself with a cute little cheese grater, is delicious. It’s an experience that makes me wonder how much narrative control I have over my sensory experiences. I keep hearing about how the brain is malleable from all these brain scientists, and how one can affect the senses by changing one’s stories associated with emotions and patterns. And I’ve experienced the reality of this. But coffee and nutmeg, could this really become disgusting (or somehow more delicious) via a little bit of self-manipulation? Probably, but I’d never do the former thing (unless those brain scientists convinced me that coffee was terrible for my health). And absolutely on the more delicious possibility: coffee is the original taste-change thing in my life. I was on a road trip about to leave a New Orleans hotel (the St. Charles), and had several sugar-filled beverages late into the night prior. It was my turn to drive and my stubborn resistance to coffee dissolved in that hotel lobby, as I watched my friend check us out of the hotel with lidded eyes. I was standing next to a carafe of already-hours-old coffee and smelled a smell that smelled like something earthily cleaner and more grounded that my current state of being could even imagine. So my resistance and even my disgust at the thought of coffee dissolved, and before another week had gone by was guzzling gas station coffee with no added anything with the best of them. A cliché in acquired taste. An experience, narratively, of changing my mind. But did I change it? Or was it those plastic neon containers that had been filled with something or other and that well-placed carafe in the hotel lobby? I claim as little free will as I can when the circumstances-conspiracy is clear, while claiming as much free will as seems available when circumstances are muddy. Free will seems like an opacity at the center of a Tootsie Pop – too many licks and you bite into it, but not enough licks and you never figure out if it’s just hard candy all the way down. So I’m here to accept, reject, and be in-between. And drink things that smell delicious, particularly when there are Protestant Work Ethic narratives that have made a certain country a massive consumer of coffee (and exporter & importer of anxiety – unrelated).
There’s nothing like a wind-less morning for anxiety reduction, a lowering of the future-orientation-free-will-grabber-claw, and an acceptance that it’s only healthy to drink a certain number of cups of coffee per day. I mean, I like writing, but I don’t think my stomach lining could handle Voltaire’s approach to coffee. So I’ll look for benches with enough wi-fi to type directly into the Internet’s bloodstream with a bunch of faces from the Internet looking at me, and coffee yet-unmade sitting unground on the kitchen counter. And I’ll look at the apple blossoms and see their beautiful slow growth unfolding. And I’ll remember that I unfold much more slowly than apple blossoms (even when my angry free will monster wants to unfold much more quickly).
Anthropomonsterizing is a beautiful strategy for understanding oneself. When there are monsters inside of oneself that have feelings, end up being a little adorable, and represent the pattern du jour, I can find inside of myself (the oneself in question) the economics professor who demands adherence to the theoretical principles of the field and talks about utility as if it were a basic human need that represented all the basic human needs.
On the previous point, English needs more portmanteaus. The German method for getting meaning to be more specific or expansive by combining more stuff if a beautiful method. And feels analogous to writing. Writalogous.
Roman Ryan 