Stuck in My Own Mind

Sometimes I do this thing where I look at my hand. I pretend like I'm looking at my hand like a movie scientist looks at some really important movie object in all those movies about scientists looking at objects.

Sometimes I rotate my hand slowly. Sometimes I flex my hand. Sometimes I use my other hand to pinch the flab around my hand. Most of the time I imagine that my hand is separated from me by a thick pane of glass, that I am a tourist at some hand zoo. And I look at my hand like its some sort of exotic animal that I have only seen in zoology textbooks and late night Google Images search results.

Every time I do this, I feel like I am participating in this grand philosophical thought experiment, probably to distract myself from the clear signs of some dissociative and/or schizophrenic mental illness.

Mostly, while I am studying my hand, I try to imagine that I am studying the hand of another person or that I am some other person studying my hand. Sometimes I try to imagine myself as an alien, whose appendages are formless, green and slimy. (Such a creature is able to manipulate physical objects through some telekinesis, obviously). Imagine the wonder such a creature would feel while looking at this dry structured, very purposeful and (in my case) very pale piece of flesh stuck at the end of a much longer piece of flesh. Weird, right?

Just imagine, considering the perceptions of the same alien life form, looking at the other aspects of society. Have you ever though about how weird a dog actually looks, forgetting that you have spent your entire life being programmed to coo instinctually at the sight of any on of those creatures? What about the strip malls with which most suburbanites are intimately familiar? Human beings have spent fortunes, have spent centuries and countless lives building up and growing familiar with a very specific society and then asserting that many elements of this society are fundamental to human existence. Why do we need careers? Why has every society decided that the shiny yellow shot from the ground is so goddamned valuable? Has nobody had any reservations about defeating inside the same building you eat, sleep and fuck? Why do we expect every dwelling to have four walls, a door and a roof, if not a few more windows? Expectations are weird. Reality is weird. Hands are weird!

Hands! Nearly everyone has hands, so nearly everyone has overlooked how potentially weird hands could be. Just because humans are one of the few species to have opposable thumbs, we think that our hand is the most evolved a hand could be, even though its designed hasn't been updated in over a million years.

This video explains everything:

Unless you are English or some kind of freak not-British darts aficionado, I assume you watched this video with the same mixture of confusion and amusement and confusion as I. First of all, what the hell is going on? Second of all, why is everyone getting so excited? Finally, why is nobody else in the video as confused as I am? Why are they acting as if apoplectic clearing is the appropriate response to watching a bald man throw darts at a cork board? Why does this bald man feel entitled to strutting around this pub/sporting complex like he got away with fucking his boss's wife, then knocked his boss out with a single punch, then became his boss's boss, then fired his (now former) boss, then threw some darts at a wall?

But then why do Americans act like it isn't at all weird to pile one hundred thousand people into a concrete bowl and watch grown men carrying a leather ball and run into each other? Why do people care so much about Harry Potter or Lindsay Lohan's personal life? Of course the weirdest bit about all of this is that nobody ever thinks anything about it is all that weird. How many of those darts fans ever thought about how odd it was to go absolutely crazy over a bald man throwing pointy objects at a wall? Probably none...

Obviously these questions have their own sociological answers about the roots, development and mixing of various cultures. But those are too scientific, too clinical and generally unsatisfying to my interests. It's entirely fascinating how trapped we become because of our concept of what is "normal," by what we become familiar and comfortable with.

I don't think that thinking this way is particularly useful. There is no grater philosophical statement to be made besides to encourage people to look around, examine their situations and consider how weird everything is, how much weirder everything could be, how normal everything is, how normal you think you are and how normal someone else thinks you are not.