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ICBWB Volume One:
HAPPY ACCIDENTS
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VELOCITY: 9 Odd Stories of People in Motion
by David Boyne
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I Could Be Wrong, But…Essays (Explore at Own Risk)
Travels In My 3-Pound Universe
©2010 David Boyne
"A person starts to live when he can live outside of himself."
—Albert Einstein
Often, at random moments, including when driving a car at high speed on a crowded interstate highway, I get lost in my thoughts.
Of course, I am still there, still driving the car, but the real star of the show has gone missing. Elvis has left the building.
By that I mean this: There is a Me who is driving the car. And there is a Me who is watching Me drive the car. I am ‘of two minds’. All the time.
It is that second Me, the watcher, the thinker, the questioner— call him Me.2—who so often is disappeared.
As I pilot my way through this one forever Present, I may start out together, but at any random moment, I.2 may bail out, and I must continue driving the car at high speed on a crowded interstate highway, sans co-pilot.
If You are anything like Me, then You and You.2 are just as rarely and briefly in the same place at the same time as I.2 and I are. You.2 is always coming and going; just dropping in to show You a few out-of-focus snap shots; tell fascinating stories about people You have not met, places You have not gone, and things You have not done. Then, after grabbing a sandwich and taking a hot shower, You.2 dashes off on another safari.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Wait. Wrong question.
Where have You.2 gone?
Over the rainbow, to a place far, far beyond the reach of satellite locators and Google Earth.
What are You.2 doing there?
Time travelling.
If You are anything like Me, You.2 goes off to do exactly what I.2 goes off to do: Ricochet like a hammered pinball among an infinite field of bumpers, each bumper a possible Past or a possible Future.
(Yes, Dorothy, you can travel through time. And you don’t even have to click your heels together three times when you want to hit the road.)
Two things to understand about these infinite possible Pasts and possible Futures: They all exist simultaneously in the one forever Present (in which I am driving a car at high speed on a crowded highway). And they all exist in one place (coincidentally, the same place where I and You, and I.2 and You.2, exist): Inside our hot little brain.
Think of that. An infinite number of possible people, places, things, and actions all packed into one steamy wet compressed grey and white mass weighing in at three pounds and carried around inside our bone-headed heads.
It’s a small world after all.
I think, therefore, I am. You think, therefore, You are.
But the place where I do my thinking and the place where You do your thinking are separate and unequal worlds.
If You are anything like Me, You do most of your living in your thoughts. (I sometimes wonder if the only reason our body exists is to bring sensations to our brain to give us stuff to think about.)
By this I mean that: From the split moment our ancestors evolved to the point of being human, there have been only two things every single human who has ever lived so far has in common. First, they have thought. Every single one of them. And not intermittently, when the mood struck, the light was right, or the passing lane open. They thought constantly. All the time. Incessantly. Obsessively. Compulsively. Until the moment they stopped thinking. Which is the second thing every single human who has ever lived so far has in common, dying.
I and I.2 have a running argument over the existence of “parallel realities.” I say they don’t exist. I.2 says, “You want proof that parallel realities exist, Bub? Simple as rhubarb pie: Go have a conversation with another human being!”
I.2 has a good point.
We each arrive on Earth packing a separate and unequal 3-pound parallel-reality-generating time-travelling-movie-projector (batteries included, some assembly required). Scientists think the movie projector is located in our frontal lobes. If true, this means when I.2 goes missing from the one forever Present, which is just about continuously, I can assume that I.2 is really still at home, ricocheting like a hammered pinball in an infinite number of possible time-space continuums, all of them spinning inside my 3-Pound Universe.
Let me ask you this: Why do we all project these infinite possible Pasts and Futures?
Let me answer you this: We do it for no better reason than to ask an infinite number of questions that all begin with the same two words, “What if…?”
“What if I do this? What if we do that? What if she did not do this, or he did not do that? What if I were to throw the spear slightly ahead of where the running Dodo bird is at the moment I release the spear? What if I run away? What if I could ride on a beam of light? What if our company applied the Ponzi principle to bundles of sub-prime mortgages?”
I could be wrong, but this elaborate projecting of possible realities seems to be a trick that only individual humans can perform. No other animals, no plants, minerals, governments, industries, or mobs—can think.
Our 3-pound frontal-lobe parallel-reality-generating time-travelling-movie-projectors (batteries included, some assembly required) would be impotently unreeling their kaleidoscopic possible Pasts and Futures inside the soundproof vault of our skulls, except for One Perfect Quirk of Nature: Spaceship Earth—is a giant holodeck.
Allow me to demonstrate.
First, what is a holodeck? It is a type of theatre in which simulated realities can be projected.
Earth is a holodeck. We, via our frontal lobes, are programmers of the holodeck. We write the script, and then we direct ourselves and everyone we can imagine in strutting and fretting upon the stage. But we do this at the same time everyone else is doing it. This results in a big dice game that is so complex and unpredictable it appears to us as intelligently designed.
Of course, I am an idiot. But for the sake of not arguing with an idiot, let’s pretend that I’m an idiot savant, and I happen to be right: Earth is an empty holodeck that we fill with our minds.
If You are anything like Me, by now You have a headache.
Which makes this an excellent time to slip in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger's cat.
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I shall do what all idiots do, and simplify, simplify, simplify. For the purpose of this meandering essay, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle just means the act of observing something changes that something. And Schrödinger's cat just means that everything is, and ain’t. At the same time. And nothing is or ain’t until somebody observes it.
Which begs the Big Question: Why are we alive, here, now?
I spent over 40 years of my once in a lifetime Life wandering this holodeck called Earth trying to think up the Big Answer.
Then I gave up. And immediately found it.
It happened on a cloudy chilly spring day in 2005. My wanderings brought me into a conference room in a hotel in San Diego. There was a man in a wheelchair there, speaking to a rapt audience. His name was, and I believe still is, Ray Bradbury.
Ray Bradbury told everyone in that room, including me, why we are alive, here, now. He also told us what we are meant to do while we are alive, here, now.
The Big Answer turned out to be simpler than I had ever imagined.
Universe, like every child and adult inside It, wanted to be seen and wanted to be paid attention to. Universe, Ray Bradbury explained, wanted an audience. But it wanted an audience that was smart enough, and self-aware enough, to appreciate It.
Entrez nous, stage right.
We are all of us here for no better reason than to observe Universe. And by our very act of observing, we bring Universe into Being, and also change It. The rest of our job is to simply be amazed by the Show.
We are the audience. And we are in the cast. And we are co-authors of the play.
And it’s always show time.
I think.
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We're All Going To Die!
©2010 David Boyne
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."
—Woody Allen
I could be wrong, but in my mind, the summation of “humankind’s predicament,” and the root of all philosophies and religions, whether East or West, is eloquently delivered by a certain stock character found in science fiction B Movies from the 1950s and 60s.
The moment comes early in the movie, when that minor character, usually played by a nervous, continually complaining skinny guy, or a nervous, continually complaining fat guy—suddenly realizes that the storyline includes a homicidal zombie mummy vampire, or a giant bug-like alien, or an implacable man-eating plant.
He does a lightning-fast calculation and screams the result, “We’re all going to die!”
Having thus served to remind us of the one thing we all have in common, whether we are in the cast or in the audience, he makes his exit —being drained of his O-negative before being ripped to pieces by the zombie mummy vampire, or abducted, eviscerated and impregnated by the giant bug-like alien, or swallowed whole by the carnivorous plant.
I cannot think of anything to add, subtract, multiply or divide in the doomed man’s equation. Try as we might, reality, whether we see it or not, is irrefutable. E=MC2, and we are all going to die.
All of this has next to nothing to do with what follows. I’ve included it only because for years I have wanted to write an essay with the screaming title, We’re All Going To Die! Now I have. Consider this a reminder; a wake-up call; a Public Service Announcement akin to the anxiety-inducing, stern male voice that would suddenly come out of the television when I was 7 and watching black-and-white science-fiction movies, “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where you’re children are?”
Which brings me to here.
Recently, while riding my bicycle, I experienced a sudden failure to remain perpendicularly tangential to the gutter.
That is, I crashed my bike on the side of a busy road.
But don’t ask me how. Like so many of Life’s transformative events, it happened so fast! One moment I was skimming the road surface at 12 miles per hour, singing my standard gosh-I-feel-good-song, If I Only Had a Brain, and enjoying the abundant Southern California sunshine warming my bare arms and legs and face. The next moment, the right side of my body was being banged onto the pavement, as if an invisible hand wielding an invisible spatula had flipped me up and smacked me down.
While many who have known me have long predicted my fall into the gutter, no one had foreseen that I would manage the trick from a sudden and complete failure to control a bicycle. All my life people have underestimated me.
About the crash.
I have heard accounts of people who have been stabbed or shot or battered but feel no pain and continue to fight, to run, or to lift cars off of screaming toddlers pinned beneath. Yet, when I hit the pavement, pain shot into my body like a high-voltage electric current, and the switch was stuck in the On position. All I could manage to do was to hobble around and around in a tight little circle while wincingly reciting the universal male mantra for acceptance and healing, “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
When I was back home, lying on the sofa, pressing against my knee, thigh, and butt, plastic bags filled with ten pounds of ice cubes serendipitously left over from a recent party, I performed a quick inventory of gratitude.
I was grateful for ice. All ice. The ice in the plastic bags pressed against my side, and the ice in the polar caps keeping the Atlantic coast from being in Ohio.
I was grateful that, although I had been travelling on a busy road when I fell, I had not been run over by a behemoth two-ton vehicle piloted with one hand by a mom programming the GPS while ordering pizza on her cell phone while admonishing two-thirds of the fifth-grade girls soccer team to shut up and watch their television monitors so she could hear herself talk.
I was grateful that all my bones were unbroken; my cranium was uncracked; my face remained unimproved by asphalt-dermabrasion. True, most of the skin that had covered my right shin had been grated off by my bouncing along the road. And true, the pink skin from my ripped-up knee, along my flank, and up to my butt now displayed a politically correct rainbow of black-yellow-red contusions.
Yet, as the ten pounds of ice chilled down my pain, I felt a profound gratitude for having managed to NOT join the one minority group that all people, regardless of race, creed, or color, can suddenly find themselves card-carrying members of: the disabled.
For two hours, I lie on the couch wishing rewind buttons worked on people, not just machines. And recalling the dumb joke: “The (insert targeted racial or ethnic group) are so dumb they lost the formula for ice!” And, trying to piece together the plot points in a story by Tolstoy that I had read long ago and far away while in the throes of teenage nihilism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Whether accurate or not, I recalled that Ivan Ilyich had lived his life rapt by materialism and social jockeying. Then, while Ivan Ilyich was happily hanging curtains in his new, Make The Joneses Writhe In Envy Home, he fell. He bumped his side. (A much milder version of how I had fallen, from my bike, and bumped my side.)
Life went on for Ivan Ilyich. (And for me.)
But. (But.)
As the days passed, Ivan Ilyich began to feel increasingly intense pain from the injury to his side. (Perhaps he had lost the formula for ice?) He behaved toward his wife and family as even more of a flaming asshole than he was before the fall. Soon, it was apparent to everyone, including Ivan, he was dying. He knew it, yet he could not understand it, could not accept it. Why all the pain? What was the point? As death closed down, Ivan Ilyich realized he had lived only for himself, without compassion or contribution to others. Tolstoy, having neatly delivered the moral of the story, takes away Ivan Ilyich’s pain, allowing him to find peace, deep down inside (the only place it exists). Then Tolstoy snuffs the bastard.
Which brings me to here.
It has been a few weeks since I crashed my bike. There is fresh, new, bright pink skin on my right shin. There is a fresh, new, bright pink patch of scar tissue covering my knee. And there is also a fresh, new, whomping big lump on my upper thigh. Upon seeing this whomping big lump on my upper thigh my general practitioner doctor said, “Whoa. I’ve never seen anything like that before.” He then wondered aloud if it could be some kind of hematoma, and then wondered aloud if it could have been a hematoma, but had somehow morphed into a cyst. He then wondered what could be inside such a whomping big lump. He then gave up wondering and referred me to an orthopedist.
As I’ve manage the pain in my leg while waiting for an appointment with the orthopedist, it has occurred to me that Tolstoy meant for Ivan Ilyich’s story to dramatize two facts about Life. Fact One: We’re all going to die! Fact Two: It happens so fast!
One moment we’re driving our family in our car, the next moment we’re the sole survivor waking from a three-week coma induced by a drunken driver who crossed the median of the freeway to smash into us. One moment we’re walking down the road in Afghanistan carrying 70 pounds of weaponry and warmongering gear, the next moment were taking our first tentative steps on a treadmill, trying out our new prosthetic legs. One moment we’re riding our bike to meet some friends for a long ride, the next moment we’re lying in the gutter of the road, and the next moment were inside an MRI tube. One moment we’re sitting at our desk in our office, and the next moment we’re lying on the floor with Dennis from Accounts Receivable, a guy we never liked, beating on our chest and doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on us.
And the next moment we’re dead.
Of course, there is the slight, statistically insignificant chance that I could be wrong, but I suspect the truth is, we are never, ever, in control. Of anything. But we need to pretend we are. Without our delusion of being in control, we are stunned motionless. But, made brave by our delusion of being in control, unto the breach we charge, again and again, refusing to accept that every moment of living we are in free fall.
Dying is when we hit the ground.
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Meditation
©2009 David Boyne
“If you want to find God, hang out in the space between your thoughts.”
—Alan Cohen
Follow the breath
In
Out
Follow the breath
In
Is my posture right spine straight arms and shoulders relaxed hands resting on thighs should I have my palms down or up do my hands have to be open closed hands seems at odds with the whole idea of relaxed and open and
Follow the breath putting my mind on my breath
Breathing
In
Out
In
Out
I need to try different words “in” and “out” makes me think of sex and
Follow the breath stop thinking
Breathing in
Remember was it New Years Eve yeah and we had broken up in May and she invited me over and one thing lead to another and we made love all night and then in the morning how she said it just seems so natural with you like breathing man I’m glad I didn’t get sucked back into
Breathe follow the breath in hold it let it go
Empty
Yeah see if empty is better than out but what goes with empty what’s it’s opposite um antonym right empty full empty full of shit empty full of piss ‘n vinegar running on empty fill ‘er up cut it out cut it out
In
Empty
In
Empty
Full
Empty
That album was it Stevie Wonder oh yeah Fullfillingness’s First Finale or something like that how awkward whatever happened to Stevie Wonder probably dead by now guess I missed that obituary so many people who were grownups when I was a kid are dying off now jesus almost every day I hear about some person I haven’t thought of for decades but then you hear or read some name like I don’t know yeah like Soupy Sales Is Dead and all these vivid memories go off like flash bulbs and you’re a kid again sitting on the living room carpet in front of a black and white TV—
For chrissakes follow the fucking breath
In
In in in in
Out empty out empty
In
Empty
Breathing in
Empty breath
Empty life more like it when I was a kid every adult kept asking me what do you want to be when you grow up and I hadn’t a damn clue but every other kid knew cop teacher astronaut baseball player nobody of course ever said I want to grow up an be fat and boring and spend all my time in an office doing mindless sedentary stuff and hating my boss jesus if that kid I once upon a time was could be me for one hour like when I'm driving to work and stop at a light and look in the rear view mirror I see the person in the car behind me and every single time without exception they look so fucking unhappy no more than unhappy angry no not just angry they look like they're in pain that's it they look like they're in pain like that indian said how weird it was that all the faces of the white men are always so fucking tense if the kid I was spent one hour no just one commute to the office with me as me I can just see him jumping on that banana seat spider bike and racing it right over the highest cliff he could find how weird that no kid ever thinks he’ll grow up to be boring and have all this emptiness
All right all right empty the breath
Following the breath
In slow down in
Back straight hands on thighs palms down doesn’t matter legs crossed all you got to do is think about the breath they know we need something to think about cannot possibly think absofuckinglutely nothing so they say think of the breath put your mind on the breath mind on the breath
Breathing in
Breathing out
I swear I’m more restless than I was before I started meditating they say you have to do it for a long time before you feel the benefits and funny how that’s just like every fly-by-late-night television infomercial huckster always saying you have to do it for X time before it works folks and funny how X time is just long enough for them to take your money and get out of town what was that play yeah 76 Trombones no The Music Man The Music Man
Breathe in
Empty it out
Breath in
Nose never itches unless I’m meditating like it’s like the only benefit of meditating is that you quiet down enough to notice every twitch and tic and jitter till it drives you
In breathing in breathing in
Out breath out
Out damn spot out
In
Out
Shit was that a coyote I heard yeah it was a bunch of them here I am sitting in a dark room at sunrise and there are coyotes ripping through some neighbors cat or chihuahua god who designed this world where we have to eat each other to survive why the fuck didn’t god just make everything solar powered what’s the point of the sun if it’s only to give us melanoma imagine what it’s like to be eaten alive like that book I read last week how the wolves take down the caribou and they’re ripping its guts out eating its liver while the animal is still alive I just don’t
Don’t think don’t think empty thoughts empty breath out
In
Out
In
OH this is such bullshit how can anyone really stop thinking no one stops thinking they’re lying if they say they do only dead people don’t think and that’s only natural right I think therefore I am and when I don’t think I’m a corpse and the gurus tell people to meditate on death imagine being dead and their body rotting and decaying and get comfortable with death who wants to be comfortable with death I’m scared to death of death and I’ve still wasted half my life so imagine if I was at peace with death what then would I just sit around fucking meditating all day and doing nothing
In
Out
In
The breath
Out
In
Is that bloody alarm ever going to ring wait did I set it did I forget to set the alarm it feels like I've been here nine years but maybe it's only been a couple minutes I should go check and see I bet I forgot to set the alarm wouldn't that be a joke if I'm late for work
Breathe you set the friggin' alarm that's just an excuse breather
In
But what if I think I set the alarm but I really didn't
Out
In
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Owning Up©2009 David Boyne
“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”
—Maya Angelou
Recently, I bought a house. Or, more accurately, I bought a mortgage. It came with a nice little house.
The nice little house has a well-fenced, dog-ready backyard. Which is why I wanted this house, as the politically incorrect owner of the apartment I was happily renting would not allow me to have a canine domestic partner. Now, as owner of a house, Society recognizes my right to have a domestic partner of the golden retriever orientation, should I desire to. I do.
But here’s the thing: I have never owned a house before.
And here’s the other thing: I’m not convinced that I own one now.
In fact, I am much more inclined to believe that I don’t own this house. I just pretend to. Fortunately, Society pretends along with me.
When Society pretends something, it constructs an elaborate infrastructure, designed to keep anyone from disproving what it pretends. Curiously, that is also what a person suffering from delusional paranoia does. Be that as it may, the infrastructure of collective pretending which Society constructs to allow people to believe they “own’ things, creates employment, something our country needs more of. People who own things create work for lawyers, who are experts in society's pretentions. And also for insurance companies, who are experts at gambling on most folks being, more often than not, competent, and wanting first, to do no harm. Our societal delusion of owning things creates many other jobs, too. For realtors named Kent Johnson, electricians named Zach Cornelius, drain uncloggers named Chris Kilkenny, and handymen named Smokin' Joe Osborn.
But, I wander.
When I promised to take on the mortgage that comes bundled with the nice little house and well-fenced yard, Society promised to reward me with tax breaks. People who do not join in Society’s game of pretending to own houses, or businesses, or planes, trains, ships and baseball franchises, are not given tax breaks. In fact, Society is so entranced with its delusion of being an Ownership Society, that it actually paid me to play! Once I opted-in to the collective delusion of owning a house, and the earth it rests upon, the no-break taxes I had paid for decades when a renter in places from Maine to Florida, and Manhattan to San Francisco, came back to me in the form of a government-financed mortgage.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite happy with the social contract I’ve entered into. I shall hold up my end of this shared delusion that I “own” the nice little house that came with my big fat mortgage.
But.
I must ask, How can anyone ever really “own” anything?
Isn’t all we ever really own whatever we brought with us into this world, added to whatever we take with us when we leave this world? And, if you stop to do the math, doesn’t that add up to nothing? No thing?
I could be wrong, but I’ve sometimes wondered if all we ever really own is our DNA. Maybe we own it, because we can choose to pass it on. Or not. The gift of Life, and the genes that come with it, are the only real inheritance. For millennia, our DNA could only be remodeled by the designs or accidents of Nature. This is called, “evolution.” But now we are on the verge of Society remodeling our DNA by design or accident. This is called, “evolution.”
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I shall employ bolding, italics, underlining, and exclamation marks! This will make my statement emphatic, and it will sound like I know what I’m talking about. Here goes:
We never own anything! We just get to use it while we’re here!
Despite the brilliant clarity of my emphatic assertion, very few people see ownership the way I see it. That’s because I’m retarded. And because everyone has done growed up in a Society that, if enough other people agree to conspire with you to pretend you “own” what you say you own, you are allowed to state, emphatically, “Yo! I own this!”
We can then put sensor-tripped recordings of stern voices on the vehicles we own, to tell anyone who approaches, “Back away from my car!” And we can create piles of notarized paperwork filed with title companies to say, “Back away from my house!” And we can put gold rings on another person’s finger to say, “Back away from my spouse!”
Our Society, like any person in the throes of a delusion, can be terribly cruel to those who will not share in and support their delusion. Look at what our Society did to Native Americans. Indians just could not get into their heads, our fundamental belief that we own the earth. Just as we could not get into our heads, their fundamental belief that we belong to the earth. Lord knows, we tried to get them to play nice. We invited them, at the point of repeating rifles and Gatling guns, to join in our game of owning. We gave them deeds and treaties, bills of sale, even big mortgages that came with little houses on hardscrabble land. But the unenlightened savages thought the inky scratch marks on parchment and paper we gave them were…inky scratch marks on parchment and paper. They could not grasp that those inky scratch marks were the very code of our collective delusion of owning things. Frustrated by the Indians declining to join in our Society’s reindeer games, we were left with no choice but to deconstruct their societies. This is called, “evolution.” Now that enough time has passed since the deconstruction, we can afford to feel a bit guilty, without having to surrender our ownership of anything. Magnanimously, we salve our guilt by giving the post-deconstruction Indians a reward. You guessed it; tax breaks.
But, I wander.
There is one assertion of ownership I think may be legitimate. I call it the Ratso Rizzo Manifesto of Ownership.
In the movie Midnight Cowboy, there is a scene in which the character Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, is crossing a street in Manhattan. A taxi driver competes with Rizzo for ownership of the same few feet of pavement, and attempts to intimidate Rizzo into relinquishing the bit of contested pavement by aiming the two tons of his moving vehicle at him. Outraged, Rizzo pounds his hands on the filthy hot hood of the taxi and yells at the driver “Hey! I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!”
And that, grasshopper, is The Ratso Rizzo Manifesto of Ownership: We are all just passing through, and all we ever really own is the space we take up at any given moment.
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