The weather sucked yesterday. Overcast.
Rain since I woke up. Naturally,
then, I went for an afternoon swim.
I swam laps, and as my head broke the surface to catch a breath, my eye
caught a black body and white face.
Naturally, I thought I’d seen a zombie.
I stopped paddling my arms and legs and froze. After a split-second of frantic splashing, I stood
still on my two feet, and did a double take: No, it was a grill, covered with
an all-black tarp, save a pale white rectangle on its face. Not a zombie. Forgive me; I'm a spaz.
It doesn’t help that there’s been news of a man killing
somebody and eating his face. Or that
I’ve been binging on the second season of The
Walking Dead, where eating faces isn’t captured in a grainy photography;
the act isn’t obscured and gray but vivid and red. And these images enter my head and sometimes
invade reality.
All this points to something bigger I learned in my four
years at Davidson. In high school,
before I knew better, I was convinced my mind was autonomous from all these
external influences, including images of the walking dead. Afraid of the dark? Imagining creepy things in the closet? Get a
grip, I’d say. I’ve thought long and
hard about this idea, of being able to control your mind, to permit what comes
in and what stays out.
I used to think I could.
And in high school, I defended that conviction; in my freshman year English
class, one of my peers presented on the PMRC and the harmful influence of
lyrics about rape and murder (I see you, Eminem). I didn’t want to admit defeat to the
self-righteous evangelists of PMRC; I refused to give a bunch of prudes the upper
hand and say, Yeah, you’re right. I’m vulnerable to all this, lyrics of
violence and more. These weird and inappropriate images lurk
somewhere in my subconscious.
The first couple years at Davidson, I continued to refuse
that my mind was vulnerable. I denied
that some ideas and images could penetrate me by way of my subconscious. If it wasn’t on my mind, if I wasn’t conscious of an idea, then it didn’t
exist inside me.
This attitude manifested itself in some weird neuroses. When I studied for tests, I would read the
material and jot down notes obsessively; I didn’t trust that the information in
front of me would find a place somewhere in my subconscious and come back to
steer me true come test day. I
understood all those study notes, those scribbles on too many papers, as a
bizarre surrogate brain. This made
cramming pretty arduous and ultimately ineffective.
I didn’t learn better until I really started spacing out
my tasks, doing them a little bit at a time and over several days. You know, scheduling myself like an
adult. I would start writing a paper a
week before it was due, and those ideas I formulated on the first day would
bury themselves in my head and build a solid base for the rest of the paper. The argument would magically come together
later in the week. Those preliminary
ideas would snowball. I trusted that my
head would steer me where I needed to go rather than try to take the reigns
myself.
So, to my subconscious
and its perverse imagination: I admit defeat.
You’re still about as wild as you were at five years old. I still can imagine grills as zombies. You still take me to those nether regions, where I revisit the things I thought maturity and growth
had banished forever. You own me. You let the zombie apocalypse happen; they're running amuck in the basement of my brain. And I think I’m okay with that. It makes mundane, repetitive tasks like
swimming laps a little more interesting.
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