LUDIC LOG

My rich inner life has been invading my dull outer life a lot lately.

Not that this is a bad thing; my interior landscape has always been far more interesting than banal, disappointing reality, or at least as long as I can remember. The ability to transform the sad plastic of the real world into something thrilling, or at least interesting, is pretty much all that keeps me going. The country my mind lives in is so superior to the one my body is stuck in that it's even got it's own geography, sports teams and civic mottos. So it's not as if this is a particularly unpleasant development; it's just sort of, well, unsettling.

The blurring of what I've been told is reality and what I would prefer to be reality has gotten more indistinct than normal a few times in the vividly recent past. Not to a terrifying degree, of course; I am not, as of yet, an untethered hebephrenic. I go to work every day, read books from left to right, don't try to walk through walls, and am still able to distinguish between my boring co-workers and the Justice League of America. I'm convinced that I'm not crazy (although I'm sure the latest edition of the DSM would give me ample reasons to think otherwise), but I am rather enjoying what I hope will be a preview of my entertainingly incoherent sunset years.

In particular, I am discovering, in the way an airplane can be said to discover a mountain, the frailty of memory. Nothing Alzheimerian, of course; I remember my own name, my particulars, the password I use to upload my web log. For that matter, I remember the capital of the United Arab Emirates, the Gargoyle's secret identity, and the first year that the Chicago White Sox used names on the backs of their jerseys. However, I am increasingly unable to remember where particular bits of information came from: whether I read them somewhere, or whether someone told them to me, and if so, who it was. (Any resemblance between this psychoneurological hiccup and my entire academic career is entirely coincidental.) This is of little consequence; I remember (for now) the words of Schopenhauer: "To expect a man to retain everything he as ever read is like expecting him to carry about in his body everything that he as ever eaten."

However, there have been more than a few moments of late where I've been quite uncertain whether or not something really happened, or whether the memory of it was residue from a dream or a fugue. (As an aside: how anyone can still testify to the "reality" of paranormal/supernatural, or even normal/natural events, based not on repetition or experimentation but mere memory or personal experience, is more baffling to me than ever.) It's not really as terrifying as it sounds; since the events have been completely inconsequential, it's more of an extended remix of the disorientation you feel on waking up with a start (pardon me, a sudden start, and are there any other kind? I think not) and are temporarily unable to remember who you are, where you are, or what you are doing.

I used to be afraid of losing my mind, but that was back when I gave having a mind a lot more credit. Nowadays, I'm pretty easily amused and not so fretful about vague potentialities that I won't even know are happening if they do. I look at these odd little intrusions of Dreamland into waking life like this: at the very least, they give me some entertainingly confusing moments. At the most, I'm laying the groundwork for one hell of a diminished-capacity defense.