I found an audio book I don’t remember downloading, and having grown bored with everything I had already listened to, I hit play on it the other night. I fall asleep to a lot of science and history books.
So either this is just a book I forgot about or some sort of spyware got on my phone and uploaded and entire book that is maybe broadcasting subliminal messages to recruit me for some sort of spy work.
It’s a decent, anti-racist book about science (despite the title, this isn’t really about the history of stuff people so much as the history of genetic research). But as with anything with science and history, there’s the lurking existential crisis triggers. Being interested in history and science while simultaneously having an intense fear of death is not great. History = death. Science = existence = death. It isn’t like fiction has too many options to avoid death either so we endure.
The times when I am most insulated from spiraling out about my sense of self in the universe require that annoying thing every mental-health-pseudo-therapist-guru-blogger likes to peddle: being “present”. Being present is most easily done with something called a “distraction”. It’s determining where your metaphorical lens is focused. Though if you have two eyes, do you have lenses plural? Glasses. Lenses. Yeah I think so. Though that would be suggesting that your mind’s eye is really two eyes? A “digression” is one way to allow for distraction. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Focus is tiring. For those of us with bad inner eyesight, doubly so.
It is here that I realize that people use a software called “Zoom” to video conference with each other a lot in pandemic times and if you clicked on this hoping for some sort of commentary on the fear of death and end of existence as it relates to group calls on your laptop, I apologize. I also have no Zoomer commentary as they relate to these things, though I’m sure many of them know what I’m on about in terms of constant existential dread.
Things like sewing, socializing, ska music, and most time spent with cats all work as distractions from the looming void of nothingness, or at least thoughts of said nothingness. All things that demand your immediate attention are good. But the minute you start zooming in or out, you start stumbling into deep thought territory and that way lies madness.
Imagine your brain has to keep going 50 miles per hour (sorry, Europe) or it will explode.
“Zooming” is a word that describes going very fast.
I can only do present-focused things for so long. Eventually I need to rest. And you know that the existential crisis always come at bedtime. In the silence. In the dark. The wandering mind trips over too many things in the dark, but when it slows down, that’s when death catches up. Apparently death can’t go faster that 50 MPH. Which makes sense because usually it’s not the speed that kills you, it’s the part when you stop too fast. Unless there’s a bomb rigged to a speedometer somewhere.
And because the bad thoughts come when my brain tries to rest (and also the tinnitus), I listen to audio books to fall asleep (and take drugs). And as far as I know, they don’t make drugs that stop you from having panic attacks about dying. Unless you count mushrooms and I have multiple audio books about mushrooms.
