Our Densities

"But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it:
for in the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die."
Genesis 2:17

"...the people who gain the world
and lose their soul."
- The Beatles

We're pretty dense.
The size of brain our brains is largely owing to the kind of fleshy tissue highly absorbitant of water, but that's not the kind of dense I'm talking about. At least not entirely. I think the complexity of brain has something to do with it. Dried Brains would be a good band name.

When did animals start sleeping? I mean, in the evolutionary scheme of things. Was there some random trilobyte that was the first to take a nap? Where was it in evolution that our brains began to process such complicated inputs that they needed large chunks of "time-out time" just to process it all?

And how could we ever know? Fossils tell you jack shit about sleep! Napping dinosaurs look about the same as dead dinosaurs don't they?

Yes. Yes they do.
*yawn*. Tired. Fat and tired. There's a beer that I drink at bars sometimes called Fat Tire and I got to thinking about it the other night because really you think it should be Flat Tire but it's not. It's not a bad beer. If I drink too many beers, I feel fat. Dense.

Bloated.

We're all pretty bloated. Like sometimes here at my office I don't even look up at people when they come by my cubical to say hello.
"Hello Masked Man, err, employee Number 21165"
(We have to address each other by Employee Number now to avoid the discriminatory baggage of non-company assigned racially patterened nomenclatures.)
"Ugh"
"How are you today? Hows the comic coming?"
"grggrlg"
"See ya!"
"wha..?"

There was a boy who used to live at the clinic I volunteered at. He is mostly deaf, an orphan, had TB, and numerous other illness and for a time they thought he had AIDS. He was so thin it's a miracle that a strong wind wouldn't blow him over. But he was also one of the happiest people I have ever met. He would always make a point of greeting you, no matter how inconvenient it may be. Every day.

Are we dense? Yes. Must we be? Allow me to respond with a most assured and emphatic "NO".
And I'm not even going to broach the subject of American Obesity. The American notion that bigger is always better. That's a notion I could discuss massively.

We're all pretty dense.

In Our Town when Emily Gibb dies in childbirth and gets to relive the day of her 12th birthday, she realizes how little she cherished life while she was alive.

Ok. I am twelve years old. It is now in my evolutionary development that I have started taking naps. It is a time when I see the world as a series of swirling shape clouds, contrasting color bars, balancing an unbalancing equations...

I am twelve years old and I am sitting in a corner afraid of the crowd. I am twelve years old and I am asking myself how this room full of people can be blood relatives, cousins aunts and siblings of mine, and yet I feel such a profound and cosmic disconnect from them as if they are disparate and glossy dotted universes on a dark and sprawling splatter-paint starfield, none touching, like fragile little glass eggs spinning on a black marble table clockwise and counterclockwise and the loneliness of the whole thing filling me which such uncommunicable sadness that I shed a twelve year old tear. A beautiful dense and salty twelve year old tear.

We are dense.
We are dense. And when we shed those little pockets of insecurities we can see God.
And when we drop our little social guises and disguises we can see each other.
And when we close our eyes and let the little mind mirrors on the inside of our eyelids smile at us, we can see ourselves.

And what we see is dense. A bundle of fears and thoughts. Stories and histories and needs and desires and wonderful wonderful fatty disregard for almost everything worth regarding.

Like the girl who I sat next to on Saturday night while I nursed my Fat Tire, sending chills down my spine as it floats down to my core. The girl talking about her senior thesis. Fossil Records. Dense bones. Hers, not the fossils. (She looks like a girl built like a brick.) I can see the frilly lace of her black panties. I glow in the white noise of her gentle soft skin that irradiates away all of the other universes that may float nearby.
*yawn.*
I try to imagine the shape of her brain beneath her bulbous skull and her thin trailing wisps of feathery flowery blonde hair. She calls me on my rudeness and brushes her hair aside and I wonder how it happened that at one point in history we all began to fade into something else. How she and I were once space dust and primordial soup that heated up like a bunsen burner and produced little letter writing lizards with notes that read "For Your Eyes Only" holding hands in the 5th grade outside of gym and band.

I just want to press up against her exposed parts. Press myself to her thighs. Pet her hair. Smell her and look into her eyes.

But when I told her this she slapped me because I'm being dense and I realize that there is a God and He is laughing at me for thinking that we are one. And then He is laughing at me for thinking I am unique. And He is laughing.

Clouds of dust sprayed throughout the cosmos

It's a dream I'm waking from. Let me rub my eyes and wrap my mask around my skull.

We're all pretty dense.
And I don't mean that as a criticism right now either. It's the density that holds us all together. Because if we allow ourselves to revert to dust we float away entirely.
We coalesce. With these blunt instrumental bodies fighting and loving and colliding and passing. Dense minds, dense bodies, dense societies.
We're all pretty.
Pretty dense.