As a result of a swirling disk of gas and dust that stuck together and formed the Earth
in a rotating solar system, the Earth ceaselessly rotates around its axis, revealing a nearby
star to wherever you are, within every twenty-four-hour period. At some point, in coordination with
this, today, you wake up. Your consciousness and ordinary function turn back on after having
been shut down for around five to eight hours. Fundamentally, you don’t know why you did
this; why you shut yourself off for some prolonged period of mostly unconscious vulnerability.
No one fully does. You do, however, do it for about one third of every day, which equals
to about three to four months of every year. While you were asleep, you dreamt around four
to six different times. You probably don’t remember. Maybe one or two of them, if any.
They were likely very strange, and the recalling of them is probably even stranger. You don’t
know why you dreamt, and you don’t know why your brain created those particular arrangements
of experiences and memories and imagined concepts of impossibilities blended together into a
specific self-induced mental simulation of reality. Of course, no one fully knows. In
between each dream, in terms of your conscious sense of awareness—your you—there was
nothing; a deathly oblivion that you dipped in and out of with each oscillating type of
brain wave. After this mini, fantasy-infused, death-dream
rollercoaster, you get up and likely stand under a spout that pours an essentially endless
stream of liquid onto you. The liquid is almost the same as the gas you just slept in, except
there are two additional atoms of another gas added to it, forming a new molecular arrangement.
During this, you rub some manufactured slimy goop on the outer layer of your body, so it
doesn’t smell bad, because you might smell after having laid down and done nothing for
several hours. After cleaning and covering yourself, you might put some stuff in the
large opening of your face. You almost certainly eat some form of dead plants or animals, because
you must, in some form or another, in order to keep your own life alive. You’ll have
to do this again numerous times throughout the day. You might not remember to, however,
until your body starts creating a clenching sensation, and making your brain feel lightheaded
or angry or uncomfortable, because sometimes—often times—your body has to inflict discomfort
or pain onto you in order to remind you when or when not to do things. After this, you
probably, hopefully, brush the sharp, hard objects sticking out of the opening in your
face with some paste, so to ensure that they don’t smell and deteriorate.
Generally speaking, you have now down all the necessary preparatory stuff in order to
start your day and exist in the world of other people, all of who basically just did the
same sorts of things. Depending on the order of the days in which
the earth has rotated around its axis in relation to the sun within a seven-day cylce, you will
likely interact with other people throughout the day. Perhaps in an effort towards some
mutually agreed upon goal of work. Perhaps more casually with people who you were born
in biological association with. Or perhaps with people who you have met and liked enough
to keep around. Whoever they are, in order to interact and communicate, they will all
attempt to translate electrical firings in their brains, turned sensations, turned thoughts,
turned words, moving the base of their skull up and down in order to register and reverberate
them into electrical firings in your own. And vice versa. You will likely, understandably,
have a fairly hard time during some of these interactions.
Throughout the day, you also probably see strangers as you pass by, walking or driving.
You might meet glances with a few, some of whom you might exchange a small nod or grin
in a recognition of the moment. Perhaps not. Each one of these people will be moving through
their own entirely unique, complex day and life, experiencing this passing, fleeting
moment with just as much central feeling and point of view as you. And yet, you will likely
see them as they see you: with some level of overarching, personal indifference and
objectification. Despite this, you will sense that you are an entity in their mind, and
you will likely act or feel slightly different in their momentary gaze. Mostly all of these
people, you will never see again. Nor will they see you. Their string of moments will
continue on in another direction that you will never know but will be just as intense
and meaningful to them as yours to you. You will live and move across the planet throughout
the day while the planet itself moves and lives through some unending space of apparent
nothingness that you nor anyone else throughout the entirety of the planet’s history has
ever had any real, accurate clue as to what it truly is and where it leads. In every moment,
the earth will move to a different position in space, never to return to the exact same
one, ever again. You will breath. Your eyelids will blink.
Your heart will beat. Your blood will pump. The entirety of the complex vessel that you
call your body will operate all day, almost entirely on its own; mostly all of which needs
to operate properly for any of the rest to. And if the rest doesn’t, you don’t.
You might have strange thoughts throughout the day, some of which you might find disconcerting;
some that might not even really feel like you. Certain experiences and perceptions might
trigger desires or repulsions or thoughts that are perhaps counter to what you might
hold to be acceptable or in line with who you think you are and should be. You might
wonder why you have thoughts that you don’t want to have, and if supposedly you don’t,
what part of you is thinking them? You might feel disgusted or upset with yourself, your
inabilities, or your social interactions as they unfold messily onto the world, or at
least messily inside your head, as if you are clumsily navigating a large piece of machinery
that you can’t access all the controls to. You will go through this day and many more
just like it. Many with even weirder or more troubling experiences unmentioned. You will
feel and experience the strangeness of your own show, exclusively backstage behind the
curtained off self that is you. At the end of the day, again depending on
the day of the week, you might feel like doing nothing. However, doing nothing won’t quite
be enough, so as a compromise, you might watch colored pixels dance around in the form of
different still-images on a screen, presenting visuals of people you don’t know, but have
perhaps become drawn to with a sincere sense of connection to the artificial story they
tell or person they play. Soon, you go to your designated spot in order
to turn off and recharge again. Perhaps you might fall asleep right away. Or perhaps,
at least this night, you might find a challenge in turning yourself off so easily. Perhaps
the strangeness of everything that just happened-and is still happening-everything that you’re
supposed to otherwise suppose as normal, was and is, frankly, from this view, pretty strange.
And perhaps as you notice this strangeness, you might feel as though you, personally,
are strange in a way that must be more exclusive to you, because essentially everyone else
you saw today, and every other day, basically seemed fine and like everything was totally
normal. But to them, so did you. In truth, even the most basic of acts done
by even the most so-called normal and stable of people are, from a zoomed-in lens, completely
strange and weird. Oftentimes, in most contexts, our oddness is deemed quite normal, which
is fine and well, but it does, however, make our so-called normalcy quite odd when you
think about it in these late-night hours or moments of reflection. However, arguably,
these odd moments of reflection of an odd day and odd life; a sense of personal strangeness
or isolation or craziness, is perhaps the most undoubtedly normal thing any of us could
experience. To you. To me. To everyone.