Driving. Dancing so spastically it looks like I’m having a seizure. Dude pulls up next to me, rolls down his window–he’s listening to the same song! Big grins. For the next 10 seconds we dance like complete dingledodies. Then the light explodes green and everybody goes “Awww!”
Eris loves the mad ones. If you’re only able to be best friends with somebody for 10 seconds, make every second count. Thanks for the reminder, stranger.
Good Advice of the Day: if your commute is too boring, try it in a zany costume. For me, Safari hat + fake moustache + goggles + loud music = total insanity
I’ve been really interested in thinking about our relationship with reality in terms of trance states. I think a little bit of it clicked last weekend.
I was at a funeral. I was having a lot of fun hanging out with cousins. We came back from the bar all giggling and being silly and met up with people who were in a significantly darker mood. Seeing somebody experience an intense and real emotion immediately slashed aside the happy-go-lucky trance I had been in. It made me realize that we don’t have tools to deal with real emotion from our normal pedestrian head space. You either have to brush it off or engage it. And to engage it, you have to drop into another state of consciousness. The chemicals of emotion shift. You lower your shields. Things feel different.
When I’m stuck in traffic, dancing like an asshole, I can see it too. The people around me are zoned out. When you’re alone in your car, the best way to cope with traffic is to become a reaction machine. You go into your head and your body moves on autopilot. Sometimes I spot somebody just as they’re noticing me. And it’s like, the absurd fun I’m having, the RAW EXPERIENCE, makes them WAKE UP to the present moment. You can really see them surface. The stone face breaks. The eyes focus. Posture changes. The person has become conscious and aware again, if only for a moment.
When somebody breaks my trance, I am so thankful that somebody pulled me out of it. It happens when I see something really out of place, something that doesn’t fit into my trance state. One time I saw a woman standing on a corner, dressed up as the statue of liberty, and it hit me like a lightning bolt. It turned out she was handing out fliers for some insurance company, but until I recognized that, my reality had been breached. After I recovered from the breach (by understanding what she was doing), I wasn’t in the same state of consciousness.
That breach is where a lot of my creativity comes from. So I think it’s the greatest gift I can give. To me, that’s the entire function of Postergasm, meme bombs, culture jamming… to interrupt people’s pedestrian trance with a single moment of real confusion and human experience. Into that breach, you inject all the ecstatic mirth you can and pray that they are affected to the point that they pass it on too.
I’m not sure how I can save the world – I don’t think politics or activism is the key. I’ve gotten jaded with that shit. But I do have a modicum of control over my local environment, the moment-to-moment experience of the world I live in. My gift to the world, my form of charity is breaching and laughing.
Where I’m sitting, what the world needs most is for somebody to use it like a toy, or a game. That attitude has a bigger impact on my experience of the world than any elected official, any activist cause, any political movement. And I want to spread it to everybody like an inappropriate joke that you can’t stop giggling about, even if you’re in the middle of something like a funeral.
Say it with me, friends:
I’m going to break the record today. I’m going to have more fun than ANYBODY.
