And now for something entirely different

It's insomnia time but that's ok. Odd thing that waves don't get to sleep but I figure with all that pulsing and throbbing it would be enough to keep anything awake. Just musing on the echoes or is it ghosts of the past that frame and condition how we be inna world. I mean what are the things we forget we need to unlearn from old patterns, particularly around relationships. Some of these patterns come from parents. I know when I sit at dinner and clasp my hands, it is almost unconscious but my Dad did that at dinner also. He always had a smile, a thoughtful look. I can recall a sppoky conversation with probably my best friend who pointed out (very gently) all the "habits" I had acquired from Mum and Dad after I had spoken about them.

On a less edifying note, I can recall an ex happily perusing my computer late one night (and, no she was not confronted) and I can recall her recounting how her mother had read her diaries when she was little. No justification. Patterns. Ghosts guiding your head/hand. I am therefore increasingly conscious of all the stuff I do and how the wee people soak it in. Trapped. I know, as a consequence of long time with said ex that I react to silences and what may appear to be but is probably not indifference in ways that were conditioned through fourteen years of dealing with it. And, DBR, I need to add it was not just a silence all round, it was silence to me but joy, engaging, witty, clever, happy conversation to almost anyone else in sight, on phone, over the fence. I recall other relationships that at the time were probably huge in my psyche but are now barely able to be recalled. Who were my emotional shapers? What was the good legacy they left? What was the crap I learned but didn't know I had? Pavlov was probably right.

Trust is a funny thing. People do and they don't. I mean they want to but what would it mean to bare the actual stuff, all the fears, insecurities, uncertainties, all the primal urge stuff. I mean when you pare it all back. All the stuff you feel really bad about and really good about. The stuff which, with the removal of the thin crust of what we glibly call society would emerge brutal, unfeeling and self-serving. I look inside me and shudder, then smile, then laugh out loud. Perhaps the one gift someone gave me was learning never to take any of it seriously. Maybe that is a thank you to a huge string of people past? But, having said all of that we live in a world of surfaces, flows and flaws. We bounce of one another's surfaces and look to see what happens. Bouncing, some call it flirting (I like the line: table manners is to food as flirting is to sex). We repress all of those survival things, those quick judgements that Gladwell writes of (fight, flee, food, mate) and smile and ask how the day is. We have little or no idea what each bounce does to the other and we often spend a lot of time trying to work it out with those bouncees who matter to us.

There is now, or so I read, quite a lot of study of this kind of thing. Folk who can watch a couple interact, talking about the most everyday things and tell them how long their relationship will last. Crude relationship physics. The sad thing is they have some kind of very high success (if that is what you'd call it) rate.

Speaking of bouncees, I am blessed with the most loving person known to human kind. She is such a skilled bouncer. She bounces folk every which way, charms, beguiles, and, occasionally batters. I still don't know how we ever managed to get together. But I can't put inwords how glad I am that we did. I have other bouncees who are less and less readable as they grow, i.e. 6 stunningly gorgeous children. Then there are a lot of other bouncees, some more bouncier than others. Some who pass like billiard balls in the night, barely brushing your surface. Others who leave you asking what the fuck was that? And then you can be a watcher of bounces. Who bounces with whom? How do they bounce? Really hard to notice when bouncing becomes habituated, i.e. a bounce is just like a clock on the wall, a seat by the door, natural, normal.

So, I figure, apart from us bein made of hydrogen, helium and star dust we are, or at least the bipedal sentients (my god how pretentious is the human race?) are bouncers. So the crappiness of the adult space one has to play in from time to time is more usefully seen in terms of bouncing. And when it all gets too hard of people actually, physically bouncing (no DBR not horizontal aerobics). Just imagining a collision of tummys, an ooomphing of guts, a squishing of fatty tissue and then, the look of surprise and oh, um, er, it was only a bounce.

Maybe I need some primal screaming or whatever. Maybe I just need to scream. But what? That the world is a dumb place? That my gen has really left a set of doozey problems for the next? That blogging is probably one of the cheaper forms of mass therapy, that and MOOing. God, have not done that in yonks. Probably all those SLGs (sad n lonely geeks) got me down. But now, having worn off a good chunk of tossing and turning and avoiding doing actual bouncing in bed with the sleeping pg, I will return to her warmth.