kids (life as lab)

When I was a kid I witnessed attributes and played with them. I wanted to know what would happen when I behaved a certain way. This was life as laboratory. I tried lying and got caught. I tried being super nice to people I didn't know. I tried bullying, after I myself was bullied. I tried kissing my friends (with their consent). I tried doing chores without being asked. I tried fighting with fists. I tried reading a book from beginning to end without stopping.

If an adult caught me experimenting this way, I would often be earmarked from that moment forward based on my behavior. This was called judgment and came very easy to them. I learned not to trust adults very well.

the mad scientist in me and you (creative process)

mad scientist

I don't know about you but only in silence can I break away from routine and find my way back to her, the mad scientist in me. Ya, once I find her all bets may be off, she may decide to pump some Iggy Pop or Nine Inch Nails into my bloodstream with all the coffee. Here in my laboratory -- aka my apartment --  playing with the soft membrane between you and me in my mind. Going off somewhere unusual and yet somehow self-validating. The unitive awaits us, the collective mind, where we may connect from any distance. It's extrasensory. My head is buzzing by Alice Munro's  Carried Away. I let the kittens outside for the night. They will be cold but they want to go. I am denying the urge to go off with salts and butters on a plate of broiled veggies and shrimp. Other tenants in the building are bumping into our shared walls, makes me feel safer. Me and you, we really need to break the routine for a hot second. Let the atmosphere in my kitchen become remarkable all of a sudden. Only because I am paying extra attention. Super cool and clear with vinyl floors, flourescent overheads, a giant green chair, a laminate wood table. Much different from the feel of the carpeted living room with cathedral ceiling. I can breathe into the silence and feel the softness of the inside of my baby blue dollar store slippers. I can follow the whisping whirr of the ceiling fan. The lovely chime of the Tibetan bell tongue, rocking against itself. Why fear my mad scientist when I love her so? She is raison d'etre like no other! Out of her comes strange stories like Maze and Grand Theft Life. Maybe that's what terrifies me? Stories of my life but not exactly memoirs. Call it creative nonfiction. Or don't call it anything at all. Just what comes out of the silence with me. Alluring and luring us to a feast of re creation. Thank god I have my laboratory. Thank god I have my routine to break. Thank god I have my health. Thank god for Alice Munro. Thank god for you. Thank god for books. Thank god for the mad scientist in me -- and in you. Let's all let ourselves get carried away by our experiments tonight. This is true living!

love potion no. two thousand seven hundred sixty two dot infinity

I was in the laboratory, minding my own business and yours, when all of a sudden that eureka moment came hurtling from my mind to earth, half-burning up in its double wide flavor, five-lane atmosphere pressure pull. I pounced immediately upon it, before it could scurry away into the recesses of some famous French cave whose drawings of stick figure animals shall be preserved to the end of human time only. I cupped my mind around it like a cat claw trap upon a squeakmouse.

At this point in time, the object which I was efforting to make subject and otherwise swallow whole into my personal shadow and light universe, made itself partially known to me. Thinking (yes, with a mind of its own) I might actually set it free by so doing. Clearly its thinker was broken! All the better for my predatory success.

In my mind's ledger, I jotted down the new revelation, and got this far.... love potion no. two thousand something....damn! Je ne sais quoi (I know not what).

A large question mark took form in a gasping vexation of breath out my pores. My entire organism shook. This created just enough room for the object, not yet become subject or subjected to my personal universe of great darkness and fragmented light, to slide into a crack in the unwaxed and unpolished (and rather rough from wear) mahogany floors which had suffered the weight of me for one too many months in this place, my self-described laboratory. All I felt (other than insatiably unanswered in pursuit of my less than scientific inquiry) was an increase in space beneath my mental tendrils, which were left groping about like a suddenly blind sea anemona in atrophic waters, abandoned for good by an ungrateful school of single file clown fish with genetically mutated pioneering tendencies.

My object, my dear sweet eureka, escaped my grasp!
Fuck no! I cried, reducing my own equation to expletive tears.
I dropped to my knees, then fell to the floor and my whole body just collapsed like a dying star right there in my personal petrie dish microcosm.

Then, after a few horrendous moments of breathless wonder...something magnificent happened! That which I had been pulling and pushing and groping and gnashing my teeth to capture and consume with the bully gravitas of a desperate Putin in Ukraine... suddenly unfolded itself to my surrendered spirit, like the most beautiful of flowers set free in the sun!

Love potion no. two thousand
seven hundred
sixty two
(dot)
infinity