Re: CHAT: The love of inventing & conscripts (Was: Re: I'm new!)

On Sat, Oct 21, 2000 at 04:26:26PM -0700, jesse stephen bangs wrote:
[snip]
> I still do :-(.  When I passively ride in a vehicle, I imagine the exact
> same sword cutting down *everything* on the side of the road.  Or I
> imagine that there is someone that has to ride on the side of the road
> along the tops of trees or telephone wires and he has to keep up with the
> car by jumping or whatever.  It can be very irritating, but almost
> involuntary.
Intriguing! I've *always* had this obsession... though it's more voluntary
-- it's only when I've nothing else to do that I imagine these things. But
yeah, I used to imagine there was a huge chainsaw attached to the car
mowing down the wooden poles as they passed by; but if there is a metal
pole, I had to "lift up" the chainsaw because it cannot cut through metal
-- if I was too slow, the chainsaw would explode into dangerous pieces of
flying metal. :-)

Recently, I have this tendency to imagine that a small airborne satellite
vehicle is flying alongside the car, and I have to steer it carefully to
avoid it crashing into poles or overhead bridges, or even passing cars.
:-)

> I still try not to step on cracks in the sidewalk.
On the contrary, I used to *try* to step on cracks in the sidewalk,
because I imagine them as "energy lines", and if neither of my feet were
touching them, something bad would happen. Of course, nowadays I don't do
this anymore :-P

Sometimes I'd imagine that the floor in front of me is an illusion, and
that it's actually an optical effect of terrain 1,000,000 miles below me.
I'd jump "into" the floor and parachute into the world underneath.
Sometimes there are multiple layers of illusions too, so that what I
thought was the "real" terrain at the top level turns out to be a
2nd-level optical effect of a deeper, larger terrain underneath, and so
on.

Or sometimes, I imagine that the window was a trans-dimensional gate into
a mirror image world. I'd jump through the window, and my body ends up on
the other side but the "real" me bounces back into an identical-looking
place which is actually in another dimension. (This is obviously a
syndrome of playing too much Prince of Persia :-P)


T