I wonder how many theories I have gone through. The way I thought the world worked, or at least pieces of it, I wrapped that up in explanations, secrets revealed only to me, as it were. I thought I knew so much, and I concocted all sorts of these pseudo-factoids, but whenever I thought I had figured out the "why" of something or other, then one of two things happened: 1) I forgot it; 2) I was proven wrong. I ran through theories like most people ran through toilet paper. And yes, that was about how much they were worth, most of them. All through my madness, I was forever making conjectures, postulates, hypotheses... far out little subplots to the drama of my life and the universe as it pertained to me.
A cause, if I were to name one, was that I was slow to grow up — I emerged quite late from the teenager's syndrome of thinking all the theories he had about how things worked were the answers to everything. It was the drugs, a lot of that; the drugs stunted my intellectual growth for years. Mentally, I keep thinking that I'm about five years behind where I should be, and I'm not counting my madness, either — I consider the mad times like years spent in a wilderness, and not numbed, that I progressed in some senses through the ordeal, that I at least suffered and felt — no, I think my madness in some ways built character, especially climbing out of it. The years I wasted, sedated, they were not insanity. They were stupidity.
These days, I think differently than I did back when. These things I write in public, for instance, I understand how little they are, how little they affect anything. In my madness, many a time did I wrap the meaning of the universe in a single phrase — but it meant nothing. These reflections I write: perhaps they only mean a little, but that little is a little something, after all.
Laney
7:32pm wednesday, 14th august
I do believe that the universe can be summed up in a single phrase. Figuring out if it can or can not be is not the challenge, I think. Figuring out just what the phrase is is the challenge. In my mind. A theory.
Laney