Here's to you, wackjobs and knuckleheads

This week I got my teeth cleaned. The dental hygienist, let's call her Lulu, led me to the first room, just off the lobby with an excellent view of the parking lot and all the pedestrians strolling by, strapped a bib around my neck, and asked me how I had been since the last time I was there. 

I said the usual bla bla bla that you say when you don't want to disclose your secret traumatic reality to a stranger. Then I said the fateful words: "How is your writing going?"

"I've been working on my dream journal," Lulu said. "My cat came to me in a dream."

"Oh, that's nice," I replied, as she lifted a pointed metal probe. "What was your cat showing you?"

"Not to be afraid." I opened. She went in with the metal stick. "Then he turned into little bits of golden light and ascended into the sky."

"Wow." What else could I say with her hands in my mouth? It came out more or less as "Ow."

"Then my dog appeared and led me up a hill to a beautiful lake." She dug into my gum and then pulled the tool out, leaving it hovering somewhere over my nose. I stared at it cross-eyed as she added, "He was made out of pure love."

Before she resumed her assault, I said, "That must have been really satisfying," or something to that effect. Watching a dental torture tool hanging over my nose, ready to dive back into my mouth at any second, has tampered with my unreliable memory. I'm not really sure what I said. 

Lulu stared out the window and then went back in. "My problem is, I want to put images to my dreams."

"Ungh?"

"Yes, but I can't draw. I can see the images so clearly! I want to publish them in a book, but I don't have the drawing skills."

"Ehh Aay," I said around her hands. "Eeely ice arrr, eeey uhhh caaa ake arrr." I was trying to say "AI. Really nice art. Anyone can make art," in case you were trying to translate my gibberish. 

Her brown eyes examined me through the lighted microscope. She wore a mask, but I could tell she was skeptical. 

I didn't bother complaining about AI scraping art off the internet and not compensating or crediting the artists who created the stolen art. Why get into the weeds with someone who thinks their dreams have cosmic significance?

"All beings are made of light and love," she said, scraping the grunge from behind my lower front teeth. 

Held captive, all I could do was grunt.

She finished picking around and reached for the polishing gizmo. She loaded it up with the gritty minty paste and attacked my back teeth. Rowrr, rowrr, tooth after tooth, with no break, until she reached my bottom teeth. She paused the polisher and held it above my mouth.

"I really think everyone has the power to access the spirit world," she mused, leaving me with my mouth half open. I knew if I tried to swallow, I'd gag, choke, and die in that chair, so I clenched my hands, held still, and tried not to breathe. I didn't nod or blink for fear that would distract her from finishing the polishing task. 

Finally, she finished with the minty grinder (doing a half-assed job, in my opinion), grabbed the water pistol, and sprayed my teeth with cold water for a good minute. 

I resumed breathing and swallowing. 

I felt like I had to say something, so I mumbled, "The world is a mysterious place." To myself, I was thinking, I respect and even admire your interest in the spirit world, and I hope I never see you again. I didn't say it, of course. I try to respect all forms of creativity, no matter how wacky. She wasn't hurting anyone. She was just trying to understand her human experience. 

I used to believe---no, I used to want to believe---that the world was magical and mysterious, that there was some alternate reality in which our animal guides came to us in dreams and led us to new insights. More than once, I meditated in a room full of other meditators, who all seemed to receive something that eluded me. I felt like a fraud, and so I left that group and looked for another path to understanding.

I've come to understand that there is no path except whatever we make up. Who can truly understand reality? Not me. Everything I encounter is filtered through my senses and distilled through my preconceptions and biases. That realization used to bother me, that I couldn't ever know reality. Now I don't care.

What is the human experience? We live, maybe we live a long life, maybe we have a relatively happy life, but in the end, we leave the way we entered, attached to nothing. All the wacky theories we use to explain our experience are left behind, signifying nothing.

Believers are sometimes endearing and sweet, like Lulu. They can also be destroyers, no need to name names. It might be better (safer) to believe in nothing. 

The Chronic Malcontent cautiously connects

Happy holidays, Blogbots. May you have as much joy as you can stand during this stupid, cold, virus-infested, consumer-obsessed season. I'd like to turn the page on 2021 and forget it happened. Then I remember I said the same thing last year, trying desperately to escape 2020. I guess it proves the truism, wherever you go, there you are. Circumstances surround me like a cloud of stinky holiday farts. I can think of some other so-called truisms: You can run but you can't hide. Life sucks and then you die. Buy now and pay later. Whoops, no, not that one.

Speaking of whoops, yesterday I connected with a woman who worked for me in the late 1980s, back when I was suffering with a ten-year-long entrepreneurial seizure that almost killed me. I ran a small business making some things I really hated to make, which is not a business model I would recommend to anyone wanting to be self-employed. This woman, I'll call her Marty, was younger than me but just as opinionated about just about everything, especially about the existence of God. 

We argued daily as we worked shoulder-to-shoulder. She liked making the things, evidenced by her annoyingly relentless optimism. I hated making the things, evidenced by my chronic malcontentedness. At the time, it didn't occur to me that her positive outlook on the work, well, really, on life in general, might have something to do with her spiritual philosophy. She thought God was everywhere, and I thought God did not exist. We never figured it out. Thirty years later, I'm still working on it. 

About a year ago, Marty started following me on Instagram. She used a pseudonym so it took me a while to figure out who she was. For the past year, most days, she's posted videos and images stolen from other people into the direct messenger space. Never once has she actually written anything, like Hi, remember me? Finally, I realized that her messages were sent only to me—duh, direct messages. They weren't generic posts that anyone could see. She was trying to connect, without actually connecting. 

Maybe her goal was not to connect but to annoy. If that was the case, she had succeeded. Her incessant posting of inane weirdo videos forwarded from other weirdos penetrated my Instagram fog. 

I messengered her: Hey! Why don't you ever say anything to me? 

Marty wrote back immediately: I wasn't sure you would want to talk to me.

I wrote: I'm always happy to reconnect with old friends.

Marty: You can never be sure. Some people don't like it. 

That comment made me think her Instagram experience was nothing like mine.

Me: Would you like to talk sometime?

Marty: How about now?

In a few minutes, we had figured how to have a video call on Instagram and were seeing each other in real time. To me, that was the triumph of the day, mastering a live video call on Instagram. The pleasure I felt at reconnecting with an old friend faded quickly once I realized she was still a crazy wackjob. I was all about the video call. Social media, you will not defeat me.

Marty's face appeared below mine on my phone screen. She looked the same to me, or rather, she resembled what I remembered of her after thirty years, except her long thick hair, formerly dark brown, was now completely white. She wore bangs across her forehead and thick black-rimmed glasses. Behind her I could see the typical chaos of a creative person's space. She turned her phone and gave me a quick dizzying tour of the mess. Once again, I thanked my lucky stars that I have so few possessions. 

Marty: I'm working for [Name of a person I should have remembered but didn't]. I'm one of twenty assistants. The holidays have been weird. I have a big family. They are all Democrats. 

Me: [To myself] Uh oh, should I have seen that coming?

Marty: Yeah, I'm not vaxxed or any of that stuff. My family can't stand that I'm a conservative Republican so I can only hang out with my two nieces. 

Me: Yeah, the holidays can be difficult.

After that, I let her talk while I examined my long teeth on the video screen. Long in the tooth is a real thing. I practiced tossing my head back so my jowls didn't stand out so prominently. Then I noticed my chicken gizzard neck, and dropped my chin. My chin receded into the distance and my nose took over the screen. Meanwhile Marty yammered on about her skin cancer challenges. 

Marty: I don't trust the regular doctors so I'm going to a guy. He's given me some stuff to put on it. If it reacts, then I know there's cancer. If it doesn't react, then it's okay. 

Me: [To myself] Oh boy, sounds like hydrogen peroxide. Is that a treatment for skin cancer these days? Who knew? Maybe we could have avoided sending Mom to the dermatologist during the pandemic. I cringed mentally as I recalled laying waste to the clinic's bathroom in my futile attempts to clean up after Mom's fecal meltdown. Get behind me, 2020!

Marty: [Probably sensing my mind was elsewhere] Well, it was really good to see you. 

In that one statement, everything about our future interactions was spelled out. She will keep sending me stupid videos I never look at, and maybe she will direct message me occasionally now that she knows I'm okay with it, and we will never connect by video again. 

Once again, I'm chagrined (and relieved) at how carefully I've set my boundaries to exclude wackjobs, past and present. Is that a good thing? I don't know. I know it's good to see things through other people's eyes sometimes, but how can I have a meaningful conversation with someone who can't, won't, refuses to . . . you know, care about the common good? I know I can't change her mind, any more than she could change mine. Two planets. We are in a race to see whose planet will survive. I'm not optimistic.