Post-It Notes, Free Time, Privacy

Very strange, that sometimes I get lost in my own thinking!

Or is my thinking, such as it is, also the language in which I get lost?

For instance: yesterday, standing in line at the supermarket I thought, sometimes I get in the wrong line and sometimes not, and I said this out loud so that the person both in front of me and the person behind heard what I’d said. I hadn’t meant for these people to hear me say what I’d said, the intention was not to harm anyone or even to express displeasure, only to state a kind of fact of which I’d become familiar from standing in line at supermarkets for many years.

For some reason, unknown to me, I was thinking about Ludwig Wittgenstein and his famous line in the Tractatus, that ‘the world is everything that is the case’, amending Wittgenstein while standing in line at the supermarket, the world is not everything that is the case; the world is everything that is insecure; that is, the world is chaos.

Upon second thought it may have been better to say, perhaps, that the world is everything that is the case and that it is not funny.

If indeed you don’t get information from the source, where then are you going to get it?

You get it from the news in the form of a news bulletin: MASS SHOOTING!

And I, a consumer of news, could answer, You mean only one? There being so many mass shootings!

Next question.

So Brooks, are you drinking less or drinking more? Drinking, more or less, more or less wondering what sort of mischief my liver might be getting into.

Still standing in line at the supermarket, I persisted in asking questions—Brooks, what are the 3 most important things to you, other than the members of your family? Post-It Notes, Free Time, Privacy, I answered.

Almost before I knew it I was at the front of the line in the supermarket. It was like being at Disneyland; I could reach up and touch the sign in Tomorrowland to prove I was tall enough to drive a car in Utopia!

I paid for my groceries and walked out of the supermarket toward my car in the parking lot, listening to a song on my iPhone, kicking down the cobblestones, feeling groovy.