mister jones is still dead

From inside my own mind it seems that other people’s minds are a just a bit like helical, circuit-filled, story-driven libraries, with things more or less in some sort of order, some sort of hierarchy, where they can remember and find and connect pieces of information and ideas.

Not perfect retrieval and memory, but more or less a 4D structure of things referenced via some sort of meaningful frameworks that allow them to use what they know in an efficient way. A spiral encoded with meaning that they can traverse with some effort.

So maybe most people’s mental “librarians” are both lazy and efficient, or efficient because they are lazy, creating the shortest paths to the most sensible set of relationships for making everything make sense all together.

At least that’s the way other people seem to me. Maybe it is this way. Maybe it isn’t. I can only see you from the outside as you see me.

My mind, however, it seems to me, is more like an aquarium. Everything seems to be in motion, swimming in unpredictable orbits, sometimes attracting and sometimes repelling other bits of data.

Every book I read must be reread, every concept must be continually rediscovered. There seems to be a hole in the bottom of my bucket, as if my librarians are fish, who are neither lazy nor efficient:

They don’t care where things get placed, they are frenetic and manic, their filing system is indecipherable, they’ve used fragments of my childhood to make a little castle to hide in when they’re unhappy with me, and they occasionally bicker over territory.

But it sure is beautiful in here.