Margaret, I want you to know: I have serious thoughts in my spare time. That is to say, even when I am not professionally obligated. I wonder about the densities of objects and look up articles on buoyancy. I understand how ships float, which is more than one can normally say about oneself, I would imagine.
I think a lot about planetary motions and about the swirling fluxes of goods as they circle the world. I read. I watch foreign films when they are free OnDemand. They give me some extremely fertile serious thoughts that come with various related cultural capital. I have interesting thoughts about cultural capital and its relationship to scarfs, but those ideas are still underdeveloped and are therefore not yet SERIOUS thoughts. They are only interesting.
I have developed a taxonomy of thoughts. I draw tables and organize thoughts by the degree of their seriousness. Things about physics and ontology go toward the bottom, basically because I don’t understand them well, and therefore cannot develop anything in these areas into super serious ideas. But so too do ideas about things like Love and Desire and Death and God, because these things are kind of unknowable in at least the expressable linguistic ways. We know them as sensations and feel them as serious feelings, but when it comes to thoughts, I can hardly justify putting them toward the top. Instead, the things that I put at the top generally have to do with words. I like to play with words and form them and, obviously, write them down. So most of my serious thoughts have to do with words and language and how we use them in various ways.
What about when the words have to do with emotions like Love or scary big things like God or scary ordinary things like loneliness that we can never quite describe?
And see, this is the kind of question that led me to question the whole logic of the taxonomy in the first place. Because, duh, like, here’s a thought we’re all used to: all of this stuff is understood through language (get OUT of here!), and so doesn’t that just make language into the big thing that controls the seriousness of all the other big things?
(See what I mean? I do this for fun!)
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The other day, I had a VERY SERIOUS thought that was so serious I even promised myself that I would write it down when I got home. I held the thought there in the front of my brain where I thought it would stay. That’s where the mind’s refrigerator is. Right there in the front toward the forehead, and other important parts that were made for serious thinking. You can look this up in an encyclopedia in certain articles on Craneo-spatiality and CAT Scans.
For now, just believe me, serious thoughts stay fresh in the forward part of your brain.
Except, when I got home, I found the air conditioner wasn’t on. So I started taking my clothes off when I got in the door. I turned on the air conditioner and went into my room and then I caught a quick glimpse of myself in the mirror.
It’s still summer, of course. And I have an uneven tan. There is a line where my t-shirt ends on both of my arms. And I thought of myself rushing around with this serious thought in my head, and how silly I must have looked to anyone who bothered to notice me running home with this furrowed look on my forehead, trying to keep that important thought. And how sillier I looked underneath. And I realized that I missed everything on that walk home. I missed people and cars. It’s that crickety time of year when the crickets start letting us know at every moment that summer is starting to end, and I missed all of that (and you know that I find portentous sounds like crickets to be very important, Margaret, you of all people know that).
So that I looked at my uneven pasty chest and thought of the fact that the important thought was the only thing that I had room for and even that now, yes, of course, you knew this was going to be the directionally determined ending punchline: even the VERY SERIOUS thought was gone. So I was left with the air conditioner humming in the background of the empty apartment, staring at myself in the mirror now, waiting.
