Words and Thoughts: The Infinite Journey to Gary, Indiana

Hello again, alleged readers!  Sometimes, people come up to me and say, “Stav!  How are you doing?”  I often turn away from whatever I’ve recently lit on fire, or thrown from a height, or both, look dead into the left eyeball of the question asker, and respond, “Doing what?”  I am not a mind reader. Except that one long weekend in Gary, Indiana. Super easy to read minds in Gary. Everyone is always thinking about how much they don’t want to be in Gary. You have to be careful though, because they can read your mind too; two-way street kind of thing. Everyone there also knows everything you’re thinking the whole time you’re there, which is, comprehensively, “I’d like to not be in Gary anymore, please”.

I haven’t been back to Gary though, so I think it’s safe to say, in general, I am not a mind reader.

So anyway, I ask, “Doing what?”  How am I doing what?  Almost constantly, I am doing what most would describe as “nothing”, so for people to come up to me and ask, open ended no less, how I am doing what is almost always nothing… Here’s a how question for you: How the hell do I answer that?

What’s the sound of one hand clapping?  What is the color of the air?  How am I doing whatever I’m not doing?

Since when did society as a whole become so contemplative, so deep, so Zen minded?  Have you looked around recently?  We’re all along for the ride in a cosmic hell bound handbasket being flung around by universe as it skips along a train trestle with five trains coming from both directions. And yet here we have just about every other person, mindlessly, without thought, without intention, and seemingly without need of an answer, asking one another, “How are you doing?”

I am doing nothing. But are others doing something?  Are any of us really doing anything, and do any of us know what the thing is, let alone how we are doing it?  What if we think we know what, and we think we know how, but in reality, we don’t know either, or anything for that matter?!  How would we know if we didn’t know?

Now, if someone asked me “Stav, how aren’t you doing?”  That is easy. I get up, I go pick berries or something, I think about going to work, but it’s already like way past lunchtime, which is the only reason I go to work, and by then it’s already time to go play tag with the birdfeeders.

I guess birdfeeder tag is about the closest to not doing nothing that I get: Super fun game. You have to run around and touch every birdfeeder in the neighborhood. That’s it. That’s the whole objective. Untimed, unscored, and uncompetitive. Just doing a thing, for no-thing.

It’s just you, your one journey, the fifty-eight bird feeders, infinite nature, and the people that yell at you sometimes.