655344: A Brief Inquiry into the Degenerate Chaos of My Brain
A frighteningly unregulated territory
Running Through the Museum. Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. March 13, 2012.
There are many places in this world one should never willingly venture, certain lawless borderlands, the comments section of the Facebook page of any local residents group and, most perilously, inside my own head.
To the untrained observer, my brain appears to operate on the "everything, everywhere, all at once" model of cognition, wherein a single thought, a government directive, an obscure B-side from 1987, a cricket statistic from the mid-70s, triggers a sprawling, Byzantine network of seemingly unrelated connections. This makes perfect sense to me and is, in my opinion, a sign of my extraordinary intellectual dexterity. Others, however, appear less impressed by this gift, expressing their appreciation primarily through long silences, polite nods, or the occasional exasperated, "Sorry, what?"
I have long assumed that everyone thinks like this, that their minds too are cathedrals of information, chambers of legal arcana, corridors of forgotten song lyrics, subterranean vaults containing every meal they've ever eaten in a European capital and sensory flashes of every side boob/ bare thigh/ coy smile ever revealed in my presence. But mounting evidence suggests otherwise, revealing a stark divide between my mind and the mainstream, a tipping point in my understanding.
People do not, as a rule, find it normal to recall, at will, subsection 4(b) of Part II, Division I of the Police Offences Act 1935 (Tas). They do not compulsively catalogue good, ordinary footballers from 1992. They do not, in the middle of a perfectly mundane discussion, interrupt themselves with, Wait, wasn't the bass player from that band born in the same town where the advisory board met in 2009, which (incidentally, is an anagram of "No Clean Scout")?
I am beginning to suspect I may be different.
The Dubious Utility of My Mental Machinery
One might reasonably assume that such a sprawling, hyperlinked mess of a brain would be utterly useless in practice, a glorified junk drawer of unrelated trivia, half-formed legal precedents and a vivid recollection of a single cutting remark from a cute girl (never got her name) in a t-shirt with transfers of hands on her perfectly formed breasts on 17 July 1995. But every so often, amidst a particularly robust discussion (which is polite bureaucratic shorthand for "a bunch of people sitting around pretending they know what's going on"), my brain will do what it does best: retrieve, seemingly out of nowhere, the thing.
That obscure revision of an Act that unlocks the problem.
That precedent that leads to the right person who actually knows the answer.
That date, that event, that catalytic chain of circumstances that explains the thing that caused the thing that caused the thing that caused the problem we're trying to resolve.
I have lost count of how many times I have been brought into some impossibly convoluted situation, thinking, "Oh, shit, I don't know how much use I'm going to be here", only to find that my brain has already retrieved, cross-referenced and spit out a piece of information so improbably relevant that it feels like divine intervention. It's a Rain Man thing, minus the offensive stereotypes, plus a greater-than-average likelihood of getting bored and wandering off before the discussion ends.
Stillness is a Myth, but I Pursue It Anyway
For all its prodigious feats of pattern recognition, my brain does have a significant design flaw: it does not turn off. It does not rest. It does not even so much as idle. There is always something running in the background, music, memories, smells, half-formed thoughts, a nagging sense that I've forgotten something crucial (I have), a nostalgic yearning for a meal I ate in Prague in 2003.
This is, as you might imagine, exhausting. And so, I seek stillness. Or at least, the closest approximation available to me.
Running helps. Swimming. Snorkelling. Sensory deprivation tanks, which, against all expectations, worked spectacularly well. Yoga, in contrast, is a cruel joke, a practice designed to look restful while actually requiring considerable physical effort and unnatural enthusiasm for breathing exercises.
Water is the best. Oceans, pools, rivers. The absolute certainty of being enveloped in something larger than myself, preferably something without noise or reference points. If I could be anything, I would be a sea creature, something sleek and unbothered, moving through the world with unthinking ease. (Not a dolphin, obviously. There is no dignity in dolphins.)
The Relentless Burden of Translation
Perhaps the greatest ongoing project of my life is translating myself into the world. Slowing down. Making my thoughts comprehensible to those poor souls who do not process information like a high-speed data centre staffed exclusively by over-caffeinated graduate students or monkeys on methamphetamine.
Because while I can see the clear, logical chain of thought between:
a) "This Minute was endorsed by Cabinet on X date"
b) "I'm riding the bike home today"
c) "The Australian Government announced Y on that date in that place"
d) "What on Earth did people see in Scott Morrison?"
e) "Oh, that place is where the bass player from Z band is from"
f) "Cue the middle eight of K song from Z band"
g) "Don't forget related Election Commitment Q"
h) "What do I feel like for dinner tonight?"
i) "Paragraph 14.2.1 is inconsistent with Clause 4.3 cited in paragraph 18.2.4."
j) "Is it windy?" "What does windy taste like?" "I like oranges."
k) "Yes, the Advisory is ready, here you are."
Others tend to react as though I've just barked something in an unknown dialect.
It's a delicate balancing act: calibrating speed, context and delivery so as not to alienate my audience entirely. Which is not to say I always succeed. Some people find me amusing. Some find me intolerable. Some think I am unserious. Some think I am too serious. I have, at various points in my life, been accused of thinking both too much and too little.
Surely others are the same, though? Surely everyone experiences this?
Jen and the Number 655344
If there is a single force in this universe capable of managing the glorious, unhinged mechanics of my brain, it is Jen.
Jen, my wife. My sun. My anchor. The love of my life, my grace and salvation. The woman who, against all odds, has tolerated, nay, embraced, the sheer density of my internal world for twenty-five years and counting. She, if no one else, gets it. I must have some appeal.
And the number? 655344.
It is there because it must be there. Because everything must have an anchor, even in chaos. Because in a universe of swirling references and untamed digressions, some things must remain constant.
Even if I can no longer remember why.
Well, this explains a lot.