One of my neighbors acquired a dog a few months ago. It barks at nothing quite often, much to my frustration. It’s actually barking at this very moment. I have thought many times of knocking on their door and saying something, but I haven’t yet. It’s not just the anxiety of confronting the dog owner – it’s possibly even more about the disruption of the natural order of things, the patterns of this life. If I ask the dog owner to do something about their dog, it would be the same as interrupting a Broadway play from the gallery, and yelling to the actors, “Could you stand over there instead, and say a different line?” amid the indignant murmurings of the crowd.
Everything can become a fixture and an essential part of the pattern. The bearded man standing outside the Safeway entrance every evening for the past four years, greeting everyone as they go in and out. He says different things to each person: “How ya doin’ bud?” is the line he chose for me. He never asks for anything.
When a pattern is disrupted, the entire atmosphere in the immediate vicinity becomes viscerally disfigured. I had a psych professor in college who performed the same entrance every day: he would fast-walk through the door towards his desk, armful of books at his side, and loudly say in a nasally, raspy voice: “HOW WE DOIN’!?” without stopping. In the same tone, after the sad, dejected chorus of, “gooood” came from the students, he’d always reply, “GOOD, GOOD…” On the last day of the semester, when he barged through the door as usual, a girl in the back corner interrupted the sacred geometry of this dance, and cut him off with her own “HOW WE DOIN’?” surely thinking this would be a comical hit with her peers. Everyone was silent. The professor stopped, and just answered, “Good…” It was sad. Flags were lowered to half-staff for the rest of the day.
There are some people-patterns which should not be called out like this. There have been many times that I’ve considered it, but I dare not shine a spotlight on that elephant in the room. A true case of curiosity killing the cat – killing the vibe, really. A glitch in the matrix.
Even a puddle or piece of garbage can be a welcome fixture in the set design of the world, the removal of said fixture being a tear in the reality fabric. For three or four months there was a pair of pink satin underwear hanging off a fencepost down the street. The fence was right along a highly trafficked sidewalk, yet everyone recognized it as a new prop in the reality set and did not move it. Every day, for months, the sanctity of the underwear grew. Every viewer that passed by them, by the act of simply observing them but not disrupting them, reaffirmed their holiness. The city became a little darker when they disappeared one day.
The pattern disruption may be the reason why shock came over my being when my finger got shut in the hinge jamb a few months ago. The pain was tolerable, but the instant pattern change: one second normal finger, the next second crooked finger, is what brought on the dissociation. On the other side of the coin, is this why the first version of a song or piece of art is always my favorite version? I do not believe in editing. I never did it in college and I rarely do it now. How it comes out the first time is how it should be. I exaggerate, of course.
I do like flirting with pattern alterations. The compulsion to shave my beard off stems from a curiosity of what lies on the other side of the pattern, or to see the pattern more clearly in hindsight – a lukewarm change that, these days, may as well be a dance with the devil. Sometimes I feel the hogwild urge to wear colorful clothes. I have a purple and white button up shirt I got from the Gayborhood in Philadelphia several years ago with a cool pattern on it that I would like to wear. With white corduroy pants and fake white designer sneakers. Simply to change the program for a moment.
The other night I was at a cocktail bar with a longtime friend. We started delving into the usual subjects: work, mental health, food, zen. “Hold on,” I said. “I want to talk about things we never talk about. We can’t talk about work, our personal struggles, none of that. It has to be completely different.” We sat looking into our strawberry daiquiris in silence, stirring them in the hopes of conjuring answers from the little pink whirlpool. After fifteen minutes of this, I said, “Maybe if we talk as if we’re bumblebees, that will feel different.” My friend nodded, but said, “Bumblebees don’t talk.” “Right, right…” I said. I started using my mouth to buzz like a bumblebee, and we communicated in that way for the rest of the night, eventually bumbling and buzzing around flowerfields to make the change even more real.
Rest assured that this meditation will not turn into a self-indulgent lecture about how one must change their patterns in order to change their life or something of that nature. On the contrary, let this be an appreciation of patterns. I like that our brains search for patterns. I turned my upper body into a pattern. I like music that repeats the same patterns over and over. I love the patterns of my life. I wash a glass, brush my teeth, arrange my bedding with the same motions I did fifteen years ago. I resent videos and materials that present the “most efficient” way to do something. Too focused on efficiency these days. I don’t want the most efficient way. Cue Frank Sinatra’s “My Way.”
Leave a Reply