The Mind Will as the Mind Wants

Usually, my mind and I are in accord.

We converse with rare candour and wit. We share secrets and tips-of-the-trade. We observe together. We think together. We share the implications of each other’s decisions.

We like to pretend we know something about the other but really we already know everything about the other because we are each other and we giggle because it’s nice to be known by another even if that is you.

We listen to Johnny Cash and have a good time. We listen to Testament and, in union, we turn it off and remove the CD from our lives.

We watch Breaking Bad and suspect that Walt is actually a junkie which could explain everything. We watch The Wire and feel haughty. We watch The Sopranos and feel bada bing.

We watch Two Broke Girls and feel little except some minor titillation when the short one takes a series of bouncy, rapid steps. We don’t think it’s very funny. We’ve discussed its existential merits at great lengths: would it be funny if funny was not a thing? If not, what would it be? In the manner of the falling tree, what is the sound of someone laughing at Two Broke Girls if there is no one around to hear it?

We tackle the stream-of-consciousness as a two-man team, wrestling the phenomenal world as it bears down on us into a workable, less terrifying entity.

We know each other in and out, and it feels just about right.

Recently, however, we have come to something of an impasse. Well, really, he’s being a total tool: a stubborn bastard who refuses to cooperate and kicks up a storm as soon as I try to redirect his thinking. And when he throws a hissy fit, I throw a hissy fit, and it’s really not too becoming for either of us.

We’ve been staring at each other from opposite corners of my brain for a little while now. He wants to focus on one thing incessantly, in all its insane permutations—OCD jerk—and I would dearly like to think about getting back to work and thinking up more Candy Crush tactics to avoid getting back to that very work.

I want to go back to the days where we would wax eloquent about private matters. We would talk in quiet and easy contemplation and come to some sort of notion of what to do together. No one would need to know the process of our thought. Nothing would carry through to the personality.

But by being so darn difficult, everything internal becomes external. My mind has stepped outside its little realm to engage my personality and the two don’t particularly like each other and, appropriately, just don’t get along. Increasingly, my mind has been getting the upper hand.

Meanwhile, my personality is this scattered, scared thing now, rightfully intimidated by my mind. I console it as best I can with beer.

It seems now that we’re apparently only going to be able to resolve this one way: by embarrassing each other by writing about it. Because as I write this, he is writing it too, and, thus, we both look like self-obsessed idiots. My personality, embodied formally in this through the stylistically repetitive use of the collective pronoun ‘we,’ is smugly, albeit warily, sitting to the side, unknowing that he is being made fun of too.

We just can’t leave him out. He is we too. Unfortunately, in the process of thinking, he is the last step: merely the visible actions of thought. It’s hard for him to have a say, really.

Peculiarly, we reach a quiet moment of agreement here in putting this down.

 

But, before I know it, he’ll be off scratching around in another memory, tugging together his own uncomfortable suppositions, and taunting my personality, leaving me with this odd dispersal of my self in writing that cannot decide it if is my personality, my mind, or me.

I’ll try to bring him back to that nice place where we agree with each other and see eye to eye, but, as always, he’ll see me coming and perform the usual evasive manoeuvres. Currently he is acting out like a hormonal teenager and reason is just about the last thing he really wants to deal with, let alone conversing with the apparent authority figure in our relationship: me, who may also be him, which makes the whole thing deliriously complex.
 

Anyway, I just wish he'd be a bit more pleasant to my personality.

Perhaps, if I ignore him for a while? Although, in ignoring him, aren’t I enabling him? Then, I’m still writing about him.

Touché, mind.