This started as a status update on Facebook, which is a horrible thing to admit.
I was driving my roommate's car to work this morning when the Aerosmith song "Rag Doll" came on the radio. I left my body and traveled over the heads of all those souls to whom this shit was being marketed. From above I could see the wear marks, how at first they resisted, then grew weary, and wearier still, finally arriving at a broken state half surrender, half hypnosis. The song is about a rag doll who lives "in the movies" and does other things. There's a sexual undercurrent and a sense of narrative empowerment fleshed out in the phrase "Yes I'm movin'/I'm really movin." I ended up so far beyond where I needed to be, probably just trying to escape that condescending smother pattern of car ad-car ad-Aerosmith ad-car ad-car-car ad.
And I thought about what I loved, how to my way of thinking it was different, and that if I belonged to the other world, the one below, I would probably not mind so much being that one generally takes the intellectual and empiricial tenor of his own being as a point of limited pliability.
When I got home I decided to try out an exercise in meditation. Donning an old motorcycle helmet left in the hallway by the last tenant and a pair old shop class safety goggles blacked out with electrical tape I began running headlong at the kitchen wall, repeatedly, listening to Big Youth. The idea was to replicate, not merely in the corners and depths of my body, but in a deeper state of being that wild, comical expression he uses that goes something like:
Heeeeeh...
