Dear John To Consciousness

This must be unique to humans.

I have occasioned to experience moments recently where I’m chugging along on a pattern of thoughts; of rational, inconsequential thoughts. And all of the sudden, a deluge of uncertainty, discombobulation and lightness. “Who am I? Is really the same body I inhabited as a child? Where are my thoughts coming from? How can any of this be?”

I suppose it’s a bit more natural for these moments to come at times of profound change. I hesitate to call what I am going through profound: its profundity is limited to a change of address and to the books I read, really. I still plop down in a chair for a few hours a week to be spoken to about something, plop into another chair to make sure I know from what context the something is emerging, and plop down into another chair in between these particular events to either eat, rest, or take in a few episodes of Star Trek which I’ve seen 40 times and yet never seem to age. So, I still sit quite a bit.

But the nature of my sitting, and what it represents I suppose, has undergone a rumbling, numbing sea change. Certain aspects of the knowledge I take in disturb me...not so much the knowledge itself, but how we get that knowledge. It’s all so much rearranging humans as figurines in some sort of dollhouse. You owed this man this duty, but you no longer do; you’re in the backyard. You engaged in this behavior which, though not at all morally or practically harmful, offends our sensibilities for some reason. Time out for you. 20 years from now, we may change our minds: but you are subject to our whims for now.

A perverse part of me wants to be the child doing all the rearranging; vetting and setting the rules would be such fun. I always liked the control of playing with action figures. Spiderman didn’t necessarily have to be Spiderman; I could rename him Erasmus and characterize him as a heavily tattooed postal worker. He could team up with Bucky O’Hare, Napoleon and Commander Dogstar and perhaps stage an invasion of some random Lego fortress, which was a competing private postal service. Or something. I think the law is sort of like this. At the end of the day, you’re either making shit up, or you’re scarfing up the shit people made up 3 days to 300 years ago.

This power, what it all means, it doesn’t usually hit me until I’ve had a moment or two to reflect on it. It’s impossible not to get lost in the verbosity and pretentiousness of it all, but ultimately, it’s quite a monopolistic system. So while my plopping may be the same (though the chairs here are generally provide a bit more lumbar support), it really is infinitely different. So maybe this does explain my disconnectedness from myself; I'm not familiar with this version of myself, the one that knows these things and lives this way, and my cranium's attempt to search the database for older matches has failed.

Ostriches don’t do this, I guarantee it.

I'm In Love With Destruction

Chipped teeth, lacerated chin, cracked vertebra at a Taco Bell. Collapsing roofs, violent tractor accidents, exploding Audis, and the act of apathetically watching a man scream, flail around and drown..for half an hour.

Perhaps these are events that will fill up a screen in a new John Woo-directed film. Or some other director, I really don't care. I'm a doctor, not a film critic.

But what they truly are is the bizarre, immaculate, undeniably amusing events that have colored my law school reading thus far. If nothing else, case law has illuminated to me the seemingly endless possibilities of human incompetence, indifference and of a particularly profound brand of rancorous stupidity. It is at once depressing, exhilarating and exhausting.

I write this at my home, not at school, and these weeks have been such a whirlwind, such a wonderful shock to my functioning, that I find myself puzzled that any of it has happened at all. This high a volume of new people, new concepts, new surroundings, new lifestyles, new underwear...err....well, it all seems a little surreal right now. As if I've been simply a spectator while someone else performs in my place. But I have memories of it all, so I guess it must have been me.

I'm not used to any of this. And I am reveling in that. Perhaps I'll look back at such a blog entry 1 month, or even 2 weeks, from now and say, "You surely couldn't have been that happy!" But I was, and I am.