That guy

Mr. Cordyceps’ eyes are burning. It’s not chili pepper residue, that was too long ago. He had an eye infection recently, maybe that’s back. Or maybe he got some toiletry product in his eyes this morning, he was in a great hurry and that contributes to accidents, as we all know.

He  has been trying to be fair to people lately, and to listen to them and pay attention to them because he had sort of painted himself into a corner there, socially. Perhaps as a result of that, people don’t seem like such idiots to him lately. At the same time, he remains convinced that there is always at least one idiot in the room; likewise, that projection plays a big role in how he sees the world.

So he has this growing fear that he’s  the idiot.

Well, ‘fear’. Who knows? You know that guy, the guy who leaves inappropriate comments on facebook walls and comment threads here and there, which are supposed to be funny but fail to hit the sense of humor in the group of people who frequent that wall or blog or whatever?

On the other hand, shit, you have to talk to people and risk a few jokes not working, Mr. Cordyceps thinks.

He struck up a conversation with someone recently. Mr. Cordyceps almost never does that. Strike up a conversation. But he was somewhere and instead of leaving, as he usually does, when the regular business was over and it would theoretically not seem too weird to leave, he stayed because everyone else was, in little groups, talking. His conversational gambit was to say to a woman, apropos of nothing, ‘so do you think we only dream at night, or do we dream all the time and just not realize it during the day because we are too busy thinking and perceiving and so on?’ because that was what had been on his mind, how our brain functions, and how there seemed to him to be subconscious routines running at all times to remind him that he was forgetting something by raising his anxiety levels and so on.

Like, the feeling that you are forgetting something important? Where does that come from? And ideas that pop into your head, and metaphors – what produces them?

They had a great conversation, sort of. It lasted a long time but didn’t feel like a long time. Mr. Cordyceps didn’t have to say much. Once, the woman actually had her hands around Mr. Cordyceps’ throat, throttling him, to illustrate a point.

So, pretty great, all in all.

Learning by doing, Mr. Cordyceps tells himself.

Fake it till you make it, he says.

Practice makes perfect.

Perhaps.

Mr. Cordyceps’ experiments

Mr. Cordyceps decides to approach life scientifically, to the extent that he is capable of that, in the sense of testing hypotheses. That is, he decides to conduct a series of experiments in which he devises a hypothesis, then tests it in the field, after which he will consider the hypothesis disproven and reject it, or  proven, and accept it, or adjust the hypothesis and test it further.

The first hypothesis he decides to test is that his wife is always right.

The experiment he devises to test this hypothesis is quite simple, and involves, initially, doing everything she tells him to do when she tells him to do it, rather than resisting her input and doing what he would normally do.

The results of this initial experiment are as follows: the hypothesis is true, his wife is always right.

The second hypothesis he decides to test is that, ceteris paribus, there is a causal link between caloric intake and body weight. This hypothesis also corresponds to experimental data.

Mr. Cordyceps decides to continue his scientific investigation of life.

Everything will be alright, just not in the way you imagine

Crazy old Mr. Cordyceps, remember reading about him in the local paper when the Humane Society came that one winter and took away all those mangy ponies he had, with ribs sticking out and hooves that needed trimming so badly they were starting to curve around? What ever happened to him, you ask?

He lived in that old house until it got so full of junk he never threw away that there was only room for the mice, then he moved into that old trailer in front, the one covered with the green algae because it was so shady under the big fir tree and it rained all the time. He lived in there with his dogs. In winter he let them sleep on the bed because he had no heat.

The neighbors complained about the dogs howling. When the Humane Society came for those, they found crazy old Mr. Cordyceps dead inside the trailer.

The dogs hadn’t touched him.

His house was full of musical instruments and boxes of doll clothes.

Most of the musical instruments were warped and broken, because the roof leaked and the windows were broken; or gnawed by mice. The neck of the banjo curved like a boomerang, but the trombone worked fine.

The trailer was full of styrofoam hamburger trays, all licked clean. There was a bag of onions, and a couple changes of clothes. There was a stack of notebooks on a table, with the years written on the front in ballpoint pen.

The last entry read, “Everything will be alright, just not in the way you imagine.”