I’m writing a story about writing this story. I came up with the idea in my English class when my professor mentioned the idea that Midsummer Night’s Dream featured a play within a play. I typed all of this my self and still am typing. This story is like an ouroboros eating it’s own tail. I’ve always wondered about how one would go about eating oneself. One would start with the legs, but after that it gets messy. I wondered if I could eat my own mouth. I could always get my cheeks. How would it be like to have no cheeks? You would see my teeth from the side.
I like my teeth. I brush them every day. I am using an electric toothbrush. I use my left hand (I am right handed). My dad compliments me on my teeth a lot. They’re nice and white (according to him). I wonder what the value of a compliment from him is. I wonder the value of what people say, whether it’s important or not. I wonder if people notice if I misspeak. Do other people notice when I’m about to begin a word, giving a phonemic sound before I correct myself and change the word on the fly? I don’t think I’m good at improvising. I wonder if I’m good at comedy. Should I go into comedy? Dare I go in a direction on a path that probably has no hope? I wonder about writing, too. I like typing, but my handwriting doesn’t work as well. Jack Kerouac was criticized for being a “typist” and not a writer. He did lots of crazy things on the road.
I wonder what a good road trip would be like. Good company, good conversation. Would I get too deep? Would it be fun? With the right people. I would have to talk. It’s not like a bus ride to Boston where I pay $15 to sit and read by myself for several hours. I don’t do good reading when I’m on the bus or the airplane. I went to Boston on April 10th. I went to Florida on March 7th. I love going on adventures to explore ideas that bewilder and entertain me. I want to be stimulated and have my thoughts provoked. At the end of my trip, I said, I want to do something great. That’s what I like about these trips. I need to work at it though. I feel as if I haven’t been keeping up my end of the bargain. I let myself free and now I have to let myself choose to work, choose where I want to slave away my labors of love to create something that’s meaningful, deep, entertaining, significant.
I realize that I’m alive. I realize that I have consciousness, but that I also am consciousness. Everything that is is trapped within this body. These limbs. This skin. These nerves. These hairs constantly growing from me. These eyes constantly staring and they don’t stop, because I cannot close my eyes truly, I can only put something over my eyes. I don’t know what it would be like to be a bat. Thomas Nagel also wondered.
I wonder about qualia. I feel as if so much of reality is qualia that people take our conscious experiences for granted. I wonder if I should be a neurologist. I’m a pretty smart guy, I guess. I’m reading Descartes’s Discourse on Method. He seems like a pretty reasonable fellow. I wonder if I should be a philosopher… but I am constantly faced with the philosopher’s paradox.
Should I be a logician? Should I be a psychologist? That’s a bit in between science and philosophy. I wonder how much work I can put into things and how much my work is worth something. I wonder if I really tried, how far would I get in mathematics? I don’t think I would be able to find any new proofs. I was reading about Abstract Algebra today and I had so much trouble understanding what I was reading, it was as if the words were meaningless. I guess I have been having some trouble focusing on my reading.
I could go on forever, but I can’t. I’m going to die. Socrates said that you would have to catch him if you wanted to bury him. He believed in forms and the soul. I don’t believe in that. I’m scared of death.
So scared.
What is it to be nothing and to never be again? We’ll never know. We’ll just be gone. Everything we’ve worked for is just so that we don’t feel scared in our dying moments. And we don’t even know when it’ll happen. The best we can do is live life to the fullest. Dare to dream. You might not be able to fulfill your dreams no matter how hard you try, but nobody ever fulfilled their dreams without trying.
This is my story.
