It started out innocently enough. I began to think at parties now and then, to loosen up. Inevitably though, one thought led to another and soon I was more than just a social thinker. I began to think alone, “to relax” I told myself, but I knew it wasn’t true.

Thinking became more and more important to me and finally I was thinking all the time. You know the pattern; I denied it, of course, but I wasn’t fooling anybody but myself. I thought I had my thinking under control… how wrong I was.

“That’s a faulty syllogism,” I said impatiently

I began to think on the job. I knew that thinking and employment don’t mix, but I was too far gone to stop myself. “Boss” I’d say, “why do we offer half-price coupons, when the coupon program itself costs money to run? Why don’t we just lower prices?” Or I’d say, “Hey Boss, we’ve been advertising this product as ‘new and improved’ for ten years!” Naturally he was furious.

“Skippy” he’d shout, shaking his fist, “we don’t pay you to think around here!”

But I would only listen to reason. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so that I could read Thoreau or Kafka. I’d return to the office slightly disoriented, asking, “what is it, exactly, we do here?” I tried to talk about politics, even religion. I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. Golf invitations came further and further apart, then stopped. One day, the boss called me in. He said, “Skippy, I like you, and it hurts me to say this; your thinking has become a real problem. If you don’t stop thinking on the job, you’ll have to find a new job.”

This gave me a lot to think about.

Things weren’t going so well at home either. My wife had caught me staring off into space on several occasions. “What are you thinking about?” she’d snap. “Nothing,” I’d snap right back, but she knew it was a lie. I was sneaking thoughts around the house now, spending extra time in the bathroom or the garage. One evening I turned off the TV and asked her about the meaning of life. She spent the night at her mother’s.

I came home early after my conversation with the boss. “Lambchop,” I confessed, “I’ve been thinking…”

“I know you’ve been thinking,” she said, “and I want a divorce.”

“But Poopsie, surely it’s not that serious.”

“It is serious,” she said, lower lip aquiver, “You think as much as college professors and college professors don’t make any money so if you keep on thinking we won’t have any money.”

“That’s a faulty syllogism,” I said impatiently, and she began to cry. I’d had enough. “I’m going to the library,” I snarled as I slammed out the door.

“Don’t take the car,” she screamed, “You’ll kill yourself.”

But it was too late.

I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche, with This American Life blaring on the radio. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors… and they didn’t open. The library was closed. To this day, I believe a higher power was looking out for me that night.

As I sank to the ground, scrabbling at the unfeeling glass and whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. “Friend,” it asked, “is heavy thinking ruining your life?” You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker’s Anonymous poster.

It was then, for the first time, I admitted the truth to myself. I had a serious thinking problem. My life was a wreck. I was almost out of a job. My wife wanted a divorce. Even my priest was giving me stiffer penance than usual, after I asked him about the Church’s role in the Spanish Inquisition. I made a solemn vow to myself that I would get the help that Thinker’s Anonymous offered.

Which is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At every meeting we watch a non-educational video: last week it was Porky’s. Then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. After that, the meeting breaks up and we sit around eating Cheese Whiz on crackers, chatting, and reading back issues of TV Guide. They’re a great bunch of guys. We watch a lot of football together.

Life isn’t easy for the non-thinking thinker. There are a lot of temptations to think, especially in election years. I take it one day at a time. You might have seen me around town. I’m the one with the bumper sticker that says IT’S OKAY NOT TO THINK.

I still have my job and things are a lot better at home. Life just seemed… easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking. I like to think God has forgiven me, even if the priest hasn’t. So I’ll never think again, that’s for sure. It’s hard sometimes; just yesterday, I began to wonder what life would be like if we all stopped to think now and then… I caught myself just in time. It’s best not to get started thinking like that.

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Let’s be safe out there.

cheers,
Angus

Occasionally an otherwise blameless chicken will sprout a black feather or some other damned spot that catches the attention of its peers and they will peck at the flaw, curiously at first, until a featherless spot develops, and then a wound, and then the flock pecks with something more like malice, and the gang plucking continues until little is left of the hapless fowl but a bloody red smear on the chicken yard floor.

an endless variety of nicknames such as Genghis, Gus, Dingus, Anus and—in retrospect my favorite—Fungus

And that’s exactly what it’s like to be a kindergartner with a name like ‘Angus Stocking’. In a sea of Toms, and Pats, and Roberts, I alone stood out and my classmates hung on me an endless variety of nicknames such as Genghis, Gus, Dingus, Anus and—in retrospect my favorite—Fungus. At first, desperate for some role in the flock, I accepted and even encouraged these monikers but the day came when some sense of self-preservation led me to resist and I began to beat up anyone who called me anything but the name assigned to me at birth. Fortunately, I was a large and resilient lad and did pretty well in the recess wars and soon enough, at least to my face, my name was Angus.

This put me in a curious position. Part of me still hated being different, and for many years I secretly wished to be called Craig, a name I now use as a pseudonym when publishing pornography. But publicly I was a proud defender of my unusual appellation. The name Angus, after all, is derived from Angus Og, the Celtic god of love and laughter, is the name of a great many Scottish heroes and writers, and you know what they say about Angus beef… once you’ve tried it, you’ll never go back.

I got so comfortable being the guy with the funny name that it was a substantial shock when at Boy’s State, a summer camp for budding politicians, I met another young man named Angus. We had much in common, were the same age, and he seemed eager to be friends. I hated him. That he should have the same name as me seemed deliberately offensive, and to call another person by my name was so repugnant that I refused to do it, and I was inexcusably rude to… Angus, until he got the hint and went away.

It was just such events that my father had hoped to avoid when naming me. His name was ‘Bob’, and growing up he resented being one of several Bobs in any group. So he married a woman named after the wickedest city in the Bible, Corinth—and surely that was part of the attraction—named me Angus, and my brother is Garth—stuck with the most common of names, he collected unusual names about himself. And for many years this made me feel sorry for myself and angry at him. But meeting this other Angus led to a shift in my thinking: rather than feeling sorry for myself, I began to feel sorry for the rest of you with your humdrum names, your Steves and Marys and Daves and Kathys and Jims… with the same label as millions of other humans, how do you people even know which one is you?

Eventually I realized that my father had given me a priceless gift: by sticking me with a weird name he freed me to be weird, which is to say, he freed me to be myself. He died before I thought to thank him, so let me say it now—thanks Dad.

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Aristotle, conveniently, defined virtues as means between extremes. Thus, bravery is the mean between foolhardiness and cowardice, and the generous person is somewhere between the miser and the spendthrift. I mention it only because I have been trying, recently, to redefine my love of alcohol and other inebriants as not only not vice but as a positive virtue. And for that to be true, the genteel, charming, rakishly dissolute brand of alcoholism that I indulge must be the wholly admirable mean between the antipodean poles of priggish abstention and reckless overindulgence.

It’s not the latter of these extremes that gives me pause in my headlong rush to moral absolution; I think we can all agree that staggering, puking drunkenness, and/or the stuporous somnambulance of pointlessly excessive narcotic enjoyment will never be something to brag to Mom about.

pointlessly excessive narcotic enjoyment will never be something to brag to Mom about

But the purity of, say, veganism or Zen Buddhism is not so easy to dismiss. A quisling part of me—and of you as well, I suspect—is half-afraid that the clarity, energy, and spiritual rectitude of said vegans and/or Zen Buddhists is, in fact, not an extreme to be shrank back from but rather, an ideal to be striven for. And if I am honest, reader, that part of me will never let the rest of me rest until I assay a 90 day discipline of raw food and pure thoughts. But the happier, more genial rest of me sees this minor, hysterical sub-persona as one who shrinks back from what is clearly the natural, admirable sweep of human evolution. For just stop a moment and think; isn’t it true that humans have always sought intoxication? To resist the urge to tweak our sensory and evaluative apparatuses is to resist the volcanic upthrust of human evolution. Hippie saint Terence McKenna even opined, in his vigorously reasoned Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge A Radical History of Plants, Drugs, and Human Evolution, that the quintessentially human ability to speak in words is due entirely to systematic ingestion of psilocybin containing mushrooms. And, though it doesn’t really fit here, McKenna was also the man who said that the biggest danger of smoking DMT was the possibility of ‘dying of astonishment.’

So somewhere in that morass of fact and opinion there must be a line of reasoning that absolves and elevates my ethanol consumption, for surely it is in my embrace of the human urge to stupefaction that I most fully embody the human urge to transcendence. And, if I was just a little more sober, I’d take the time to figure what that line of reasoning might be.

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before you hurt yourself by rolling your eyes too violently…

The so-called ‘23 Enigma’ can be traced back to the beliefs of the Discordians, a ridiculous religion of which I am a pope, and to the writings of William Burroughs. The basic idea is that the number 23 is somehow important, meaningful beyond its utility as a numeral. ‘23rdians’, as we are known, are constantly assailed by synchronicities involving the number 23 and find meaning in its bizarre intrusions into our lives.

The number features prominently, and strangely, in the world around us. The 23rd letter of the alphabet, for instance, is ‘W’, which is the only letter with two points pointing down, and three pointing up; each parent contributes 23 chromosomes to DNA, there are 23 vertebrae in the human spine, 23 axioms in Euclid’s geometry, the Knights Templar had 23 Grand Masters, 23 is the first prime number made up of 2 other primes, 2 and 3, and—conclusively I think—not only is David Beckham’s jersey number 23, but so was Michael Jordan’s and, in college, Richard Nixon’s. And I could happily continue listing trivia like this for at least 23 minutes.

I think of the 23 Enigma as an infection of sorts, one that you might catch simply by reading this essay. It overtook my life in 2002. I read about it in a library and as I was driving home, I happened to notice two registration stickers on my windshield: the digits of both added up to 23. So did both halves of my phone number at the time, 887 and 8348. And after that, the infernal number invaded my life; it seems I can no longer glance at a clock without the time being 23 after something, receipt numbers and prices tend to end in 23, the 23rd of the month is often momentous and I never fail to notice mile marker 23 on whatever road I happen to be traversing.

Now, before you hurt yourself by rolling your eyes too violently, I happily admit that there is nothing magical about all this. The world, after all, is chockfull of numbers and some are bound to be 23. My sensitivity to the number causes me to notice it more. There is even a technical word for my neurosis, apophenia, which means, “the experience of seeing patterns in random data”. But the ability to “see patterns in random data” is also a fundamental component of human intelligence and there is something else that should be noted: it doesn’t really matter how my world came to be filled with 23s, the salient fact is simply that it is. By focusing on it, I have brought about real change, at least for me. As an experiment, I once tried to similarly sensitize myself to quarters on the ground and, sure enough, I began to find a lot of quarters. It doesn’t take a genius, fortunately, to see that one’s expectations have a real effect on one’s world. If you’re a racist, for example, you will probably be assailed with good evidence for racial stereotypes and if you’re an optimist you’re likely to experience a lot of things going right, at least for you.

Look around you now – there’s a 23 somewhere; on a clock, perhaps, or on the page of a book, or on your computer screen. Listening to this piece may not have caused that number to appear, but it is there.

By learning to focus, what else might you bring into your life?

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Rather than
a simple stud or ring,
Jamie let himself
be talked into a tiny whistle
that sounded when he
held his nose and blew.
He liked the effect,
and arranged for a whistle
of different pitch
to be inserted in his
other nostril—
this allowed him
to play primitive tunes.

He attracted a mate,
a redhead who played
with metal thimbles
on her scarified thighs,
and the two of them
(as the saying goes)
made beautiful music together.

A luminous purple gas hissed out of the spout

A frustrated man walked along the seashore. He had just seen a movie about young rock stars and more than ever he wished he could play the guitar. It was something he had wanted to do for his whole life, but early on he realized that he had no talent. Whenever he tried to learn, his clumsiness and lack of ability balked him. If he had just possessed talent he would have made rapid progress and by now he would be a fine player, a hero in some band. Now he was too old…

Lost in his thoughts, he kicked at some debris on the beach. One object—an old metal teapot?—rolled for several feet and then came to a stop perched upright on its base. A luminous purple gas hissed out of the spout. The man thought to run, but before he could turn himself around he was surrounded by purple haze so thick that he could not even tell which direction he might run to be rid of it. Then, with a soft pop, the haze condensed, solidified, into a large swarthy being dressed in a soft yellow vest that hung open over a broad chest, rich purple trousers, golden slippers with upturned toes, and a turban adorned with a large purple jewel. In short, a genie. He seemed to be sneering.

“One wish, master.”
“I thought it was three.”
“Journalists!” said the genie, and spat.

The man thought. Money was no problem, his health was fair, wife and children acceptable… really, there was only one thing he wanted.

“Give me talent, genie. Immense musical talent.”
The genie rolled his eyes. “Very well, master, you have immense musical talent.” Then he smirked and started to fade.
“Wait! Why are you laughing?”
“Well, it’s rather amusing,” said the genie, and his voice now seemed far away, “you already had talent. And you’ll still have to practice…”

Then he was gone, and the teapot was full of nothing but wind.

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]]> http://www.otherbs.com/2009/03/03/the-genie/feed/ 4 http://www.otherbs.com/2009/02/19/reincarnation-everyone-but-me-gets-it-wrong/ http://www.otherbs.com/2009/02/19/reincarnation-everyone-but-me-gets-it-wrong/#comments Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:13:29 +0000 Angus http://www.otherbs.com/?p=233 Life is not a struggle to attain purity, it’s a blissful slide into obscurity…

a stripper, a thief, a pimp, a Wal-Mart executive

Reincarnation may well be the world’s most widely held religious belief, and the basic idea is always that beings move up: starting out as ants, say, or smegma mites, by dint of hard work souls move up the ladder of incarnation into higher beings, like sparrows and then lions and then humans until finally they accrue sufficient merit and attain the apotheosis of all possible existence and are suffered to live in a small, Colorado mountain town and given their own weekly radio show. After that, they merge with the Godhead and prepare to start over, because that’s the only move left after you’ve queened your pawn.

But based on my own life experience, everyone who believes in reincarnation has got it completely backwards. That is, beings don’t move up, they move down. For look at me; born at or near the top rung of existence, and with three decades of ascetic religion, meditation, LSD use, and various and sundry other enlightenment experiences under my belt, you’d think that having approached the top of life’s ferris wheel I’d spend my days preparing to leap into Lord Shiva’s sweet embrace, yearning for union with the Divine as a dog yearns for his master, or cat feces. But in fact, the opposite seems to be the case. As I approach mid-life, my thoughts turn more and more to pleasures of the flesh, to good meals, to pleasantly altered states of consciousness, and to delightfully varied sensual encounters. Purity is dull in my experience, and even religious ecstasy is overrated; give me a good cigar, a glass of teenaged Cabernet, and the director’s cut of Blade Runner and I’m about as happy as any being in the cosmos.

And since, like all beings, I am a mirror of God, I’m pretty sure He feels the same way. So I believe that God, when contemplating the immersion of Himself in the fecund chaos of materiality, doesn’t jump in the deep end. Rather, he gets his toes wet by incarnating as a relatively pure being, perhaps a Tibetan lama, or one of those kung fu masters with really bushy eyebrows. And as He gets accustomed to fleshly existence, He more fully embraces the sordid ironies of physicality, and moves down the ladder of life, incarnating as a stripper, a thief, a pimp, a Wal-Mart executive, until no baser form of human existence remains and He becomes the highest form of animal, a domestic cat, and then a horse, an eagle, a tapeworm, a dog, poison ivy, a slime mold until finally God has grokked life itself, all of its glory and obscenity, its bits of brilliant light and its dank, evil corners. And by this journey, God comes to know Himself, for after all, He is the Maker of all-that-is, and this world we live in is His self portrait.

And finally, when God has sunk low enough, He becomes rock and water and air, He sleeps the sleep of matter, and after many long ages, He wakes again and resumes His role as Lord of Creation. And this is why God is holier than the rest of us: He accepts everyone, and everything—no being is separate from His love.

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