"Deep Thoughts": April 2009 Archives

My head is a whirl. My house the same. And both are only likely to get more like that in the next few weeks.

I think the only way to survive may be to try and focus some of my attention on things outside my own sphere. Like, I was watching this PBS special, The Journey of Man, and, well, it was amazing. It turns out that not only are we theoretically not so different from one another, we are physically all related. All humans on earth have a common ancestor a mere 2,000 generations back.

This team of scientists traced a specific genetic marker on a specific individual man in ancient Africa through the DNA of modern individuals in several far-flung places, and it proves that his descendants migrated from Africa to Australia by way of India, and also to Asia, Europe, and North America.

I am condensing several hours' worth of frankly riveting television into a couple of bare paragraphs, and seriously, if you have any interest at all in this sort of stuff, just see the damn thing. It's available on video and probably being aired several times. It's wonderful.

And it made me think (and apparently the scientist, too, since he said as much about two minutes after I'd been thinking it) that our notion of the Other isn't just wrong in theory; it's biologically false. We are all the same. We are quite literally the human family. And we are African.

I love this. It makes my brain swell in the most delicious way. Yes, it also means that the people who annoy me on the subway are my brothers, but then, that is part of what families do.

In other news, I colored my hair today. I have a headache. A friend of mine has pneumonia and I am a bit worried. It is time for bed. I want a lover. I mean, a good one. A front-door man, as it were.

I dearly hope I can fit all my bikes in the new place.

"I hate to bring up our imminent arrest during your crazy time..." - Malcolm Reynolds, to YoSaffBridge, in Trash.

Once when I was giving a reading of a short story, someone came up to me afterwards and wanted to know where I'd gotten such strange ideas. Had something like that happened to me? Did I know someone who actually did that?

No, I said, of course not. It's just fiction. It comes out of my imagination, and I write it down.

Which is true. But it occurs to me that I don't necessarily seek out the quietest and most pleasant of scenarios, either. Among my magical powers appears to be an unerring instinct for weirdness.

I attract the oddest of ducks, and am often attracted to them in turn. "You like eccentric men," said a male friend of mine once, in a musing and amused tone of voice.

Yes. Yes I do.

All of which is to say, wow, that was a weird day. I'm sorry that I can't, of course, give you all the details, but they're private, and weird though the other player in my little Shakespearean comedy may be, he still deserves to have his privacy.

However, I will say this. Perhaps it is the writer in me that dives unerringly straight forward into weirdness, knowing how it's likely to turn out (which is to say, weird, though I never really know the specific shape it will take), and knowing that I will get grrrreat dialogue out of it.

Perhaps not. I might just have an unfortunate penchant for Men with Issues. Bland is boring. I like some spice, even when it burns the shit out of my tongue.