Just Another False Alarm

The story is old, but it goes on...to continue the line of thought from this morning, it's rather funny that, though I've heard enough about, and understand the concept of, wet dreams, I've never had them, like I assume normal people do; all I ever seem to have are dreams where someone, quite simply, likes me.

To take things a bit further, I suppose the omission of physicality is almost a lifestyle for me; I get by most days forgetting that I even had a body. I don't exercise much (should probably change that), rarely ever get sick, have little appreciation for food (except as a necessity), and (as my mother would tell you) I'm more or less oblivious to typical physical discomfort, to the point where I sometimes won't realize I'm cold and need to put on a sweater, or I'm tired and need to go to bed, etc.

Some things are exceptions to this: a cold drink in a moment of intense thirst, for example. Most of the time, however, the only ways in which I'm reminded of the continuing--for now--existence of my body are abrupt and unsettling, such as when I was jumping about at the Dan Deacon/Girl Talk show in the church on 27th/St. Paul on Tuesday night, and came down on the side of my right foot. My ankle felt like it had been folded in half and set on fire from the inside; my mouth opened but didn't yell after all, and I stopped moving, after which dehydration slammed into me, and all of a sudden my head was throbbing and spinning, my stomach was dropping and boiling out into my throat at the same time, and my right foot was a molten globule of agony. It was some kind of miracle (apropos for being in a church, perhaps) I made it out of and around the crowd to the back of the room and found some water, which managed to stop my body from imploding. The rest of the night went well, and I was able to stagger some dozen blocks home, though I had to put ice on my ankle once I did, and it was pretty swollen and sore that night and the next day as well.

In poetry class, we were talking about the function of the five senses in poetic imagery. I don't usually write poems, these days, from a very visceral, sensory-integrated approach; I use visual imagery, arguably the most safely removed kind, almost exclusively, and even then I regard it more as a somewhat surrealist reification of the abstracted concepts I'm actually trying to write about than as directly empathetic ends in and of themselves. (See: "Self-Portraits" from last spring, which I have been measuring all poetic endeavors this semester against, for whatever reason. I do consider it one of the better things I've written.)

Maybe this is bad. Who knows; my self-critique knows no bounds. I was sitting in the bookstore with a friend who remarked how incredibly rational I was in thinking of daily life. Probably too rational. It's Friday; maybe I'll go get drunk later.