Role

As you lay there in bed and see the day's events replay themselves like a bad movie in your head, do you wonder what part you were playing? Were you the hero (sigh), the anti-hero, the villain, or just some two-bit character actor woodenly going through the motions in a performance that would make the critics howl like the Hound of the Baskervilles? As the moments of the day glide pass do you stop to point out your mistakes? Do you even realize you made them? Do you wonder if maybe the script you had was different from the script the other people in your little drama are working from? Maybe we all have different scripts, and that is the problem. Perhaps we are looking through the wrong camera lens, but I truly wonder if we can adjust that lens. Can we step out of life so boring, and look at the lives of the other actor's? Wonder how it feels to be them? To see yourself through the lens of the drama in which they are the lead actor, and you are just a member of the supporting cast. Then the problem arises that if, just if, you could tear yourself away from behind your camera, which I believe is next to impossible. Could you stand to focus through their lens at yourself? Could your performance stand the bright lights? Remember the camera adds ten pounds, and your voice is going to sound a little different (do i really sound like a soprano?) because it is no longer traveling through your facial bones to reach you. Of course you risk the horrible realization that through their lens you are a troll, a braying jackass, an insenstive boor, an incompent boob, or worst of all that your part has been cut from the script without you knowing about it.

In Sickness

So for the last three days, thanks to some intensely painful dental surgery, I have been missing work and laying (or, it is lying? no matter I have done both) about with a fever that sometimes lasted about 5 hours. In my feverish state I had quite a few "thoughts" some of them were in Portuguese, which is unfortunate since I do not speak Portuguese. Some of them were about splitting the atom, I just need a particle accelerator which I can almost picture the building of, and I am there. Also, for some reason Marcel Proust put in an apperance, now you know you are feverish when Marcel Proust shows up, lucky for me a) he did not say anything and b) an 800 page biography of him awaits me on my to read list. Perhaps that will help me get to the bottom of his apperance. As I lay there and watced the floatsm of my thoughts drift past, a few more murderous thoughts did turn themselves towards perhaps killing the butcher/dentist that had put me in such a terrible situation. See, he had extracted a tooth about 8 months ago, and suddenly one day last week the "hole" was bothering me. Off I go to my regular dentist, and then to a root canal specialist only to be sent back to the bastard that started it all. Now, I do not like doctors, and by extenstion dentists. I feel they have a bit of a "god" complex, and being an atheist I do not care for it at all. I mean maybe there is some supreme being but I am pretty sure it is not some goofy white guy with glass in a white coat with his name sewn on the front in case he forgets it, and maybe this god does like to take really sharp instruments and shove them half way down people's throats all the while asking them questions that require more than just a grunt in response. I just wanted to say "look Scooter if you take that instrument of torture out of my mouth, I will be happy to engage you in conversation, until then just hurry the hell up because I can FEEL everything you are doing to me." The good news to all of this is simple, if I live, which is right now about a 50-50 proposition, I have managed to think of a few more interesting ideas to post about. Stay tuned.