Mindless

Everything comes full circle, doesn't it?

I remember being told by parents and authorities to give wide berth to a man or women walking down the street talking to him or herself. 

Counter to that advice? On some adventurous days I approach and add my voice and attention to a few of these conversations. I learn a lot about how the government plants transmitters in brains so it can control the thoughts and actions of some special people. I learn over time that, for the most part ,these people are harmless?

Then all of a sudden we are all at an airport listening to all sorts of personoids just chattering away with no other human being in close physical proximity? With a better angle we see they tend to be holding something up to their ears.

 They are talking on the phone!

Or are  they? You never really know for sure who is looney, and who ain't. And now with these little itty bitty earpiece phones? It's even tougher to sort out the insane from the almost insane. And with so many people seemingly self conversive? They are not all harmless.

[ Peggy and I have a shared theory. We think there is an inverse proportional relationship between the volume at which a person talks to herself, and the liklihood there really is someone on the other end of the line.]

Well I bring all this up because I'm driving down the street? Something catches my peripheral vision. It's a man with his lips moving at the pace of an automatic mail sorting machine? He is flailing his arms in the air like an evangelistic preacher.  He is probably on the phone with his boss defending some accounting error he is being blamed for? But as I turn the corner I see he has no phone. And on alternating sentences he is totally changing his posture and clearly talking to his alter ego.

How refreshing. It's a genuine," honest to goodness," out of focus human being.  No games, No agenda, No harm, No foul. I want to stop the car right here in traffic and go join the conversation. But, alas, it isn't practical.

So we are at beakfast? Peggy is having trouble making a menu choice? The waitress on her fourth trip to the table says, " Aaaare you READY to order YET?"

Peggy: " I'm sorry, but I just can't make up my mind?"

Paul. "Here! Borrow mine!" 

I'm hungry.