Double Flee A

I had to leave work early today, not feeling too super.

I am like a beautiful tulip growing at the edge of a wildwood glen, the misty morning has just given way to soft light filtering through white, fluffy clouds. My petals bear the remains of the morning fog, nearby a fawn picks its way silently between twigs. Then a bad actor, smelling vaguely of the ham omelet he had for breakfast, walks straight toward me, and whether it's because he had a bad performance the night before or none at all, he decides to use me as his blaming post, and slaps me as hard as he can with an open palm. Now the bad actor has moved on, the sun is shining, and a passing honeybee pauses, wondering what's wrong with me, and buzzes off again to find a flower that's not so weirdly affected on this perfect spring day.

Who is the intruder of my metaphor? What is the force represented by the bad actor? What is the honeybee? It doesn't matter, but that's how I feel today.

As anyone remotely familiar with particle physics can attest, the atom is a strange place. There's no way to see it, and what you notice about it wholly depends on how it is modeled and tested. Bohr's atom was wrong, but no more wrong than any other drawable atom. Each model only tells so much of the story.

People are the same way. You can't actually see someone's mind, which is why Freud, who actually got away with saying "there are no jokes", and then that his cigar was just a cigar, is now humorlessly "the father of modern psychology". Modern psychology is obviously shit if he is its father.

I have to try to break through the snow left over from the long winter that's clogging my life like that water that's still in my ears after a shower. That was the worst sentence of all time. But you get the idea, I hope. I'm going to try to throw up. Once that fails, I'll put my head under a pillow and see if I can cry about something. Maybe after that, I'll just try coming up with another metaphor, one that serves my purpose better than the last one, and I'll write it down on the pad by my bed.

For giggles, and because today's pad by the bed is tomorrow's kindling, I'll transcribe it here.

It bears a single message, a metaphor that will never fit in anywhere but should:
like someone you don't really know all that well in middle school who decides to give you an unconventional nickname that will never stick.

posted by dale @ 5:54 PM