The Rose Goes in the Front, Big Guy

One should not think. Unless you're dedicating the thinking to some physical project that requires a tool such as the brain, one should not idly think.

I'm in the process of learning Drupal 7, which, those that have spent any time in the background of their blogs, trying to make things different, will appreciate this... requires my brain. And while my brain is hard at work trying to internalize things such as "Drupal Views" (and wondering why this has to be so much more freakin difficult than hand coding!!!!), idle thoughts creep in.

Out of my window, I see my next door neighbor, an elderly man, watering his yard, and I think, "God, that's gonna be me one day." In that one second of thought, stories abound in my head. What type of old person will I be? I never see his wife although I know she lives there - is she the shut-in in the relationship? He's the "doer" and she's the "coucher"?

I steal their raspberries from their yard, the ones I can reach when I "plank" over the fence. I wonder if they see me and shake their fists.

I've always imagined my old age similar (only slower) to my life now. As well, for some reason, I always imagine my husband walking about, slightly hunched, in his tighty-whities (whose elastic will, by then, stretch up to his rib cage) and with droopy, grey haired skin boobs. In my vision, he's always slightly ornery but good humoured about it (I'll be sure to let you know if this is the case). Before you know it, I was assigning roles to our elderly selves: "I wont be the shut-in, so it'll have to be him," "I wonder if I'll garden then?", "will he ever put clothes on over his tighty-whities?", "will our kids even visit us?" and "just how much ear hair will he have and will I wax, shave, or pluck my lady beard?"

While my brain was hard at work trying to process the time it is going to take me to duplicate a site in Drupal... in the one second of free time I gave it to look out the window, it wrote a complete history of my future - and anxiety moved like a stirring cauldron in my belly.

"TURN IT OFF!!!" yelled a voice from the bellows. "QUICK, TURN IT OFF!"

"What? What was that?" I absently whispered to myself while my gaze fixed on the future.... "what did you say?"

and then closer to my ear, I hear... "don't think, Meat..."

My gaze returned to my lap top in front of me, and I remembered to, yup, you guessed it,  breathe through my eyelids.

I shook my head and remembered that my brain is only a tool... it is not the whole of who I am or will be.

While I'm not adverse to the elderly image of my life, living it created a gap between now and then, and in that gap there came distortion. Distortion of what is now. Distortion of frequencies sounds awful and, I imagine, creates static. Static reproduces the sensation of fear which manifests as anxiety.

I, all at once, surmised then feared what doesn't exist when in fact, in the words of (my beloved) Crash , "[I] don't know shit..." which is a beautiful thing to remember that I don't know.

It was a fleeting moment but had I not caught that source of anxiety and confused it with a necessary fear, my whole day could have sucked balls.

Free is the person divorced from idle thought and "Party on, Garth."