If you’re anything like me, (Lord help us all if you are. It has taken me six seven! minutes to create this one sentence, so if we’re similar, no wonder nothing ever gets done around here), then you experience a thousand dissimilar, random thoughts and emotions a day. And, if you’re also like me and have a Twitter account and possess very little amazing impulse control, you at least have a place to type those weird teeny, tiny little thoughts so they vent harmlessly into cyberspace instead of building up behind your eyeballs to dangerously high levels until the pressure becomes so great that spinal fluid starts seeping out of your ears. (And I don’t even know if spinal fluid CAN start seeping out of your ears. I mean, it certainly doesn’t sound like it could, as your ears don’t seem to be connected at all to your spine, not even in the wildest way that I try to imagine what the inner-workings of my skull look like, which is with tubes and stuff like the evil genius from Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits. But the cranium is a very complex cavity and who really knows what goes on in there? I mean, I’m sure I could Google it to find out. I could just type in “spinal fluid leakage” and see what pops up. But, of course, I won’t because I have very little amazing impulse control.)

**Five minutes later**

Okay, holy crap, it CAN come out your ears. I had no idea! I thought it just dribbled down your spine like slimy water on a steamy metallic wall in that primordial egg-laying scene in Aliens. (Which I am not going to bother linking to, as you have all seen that movie a gazAlien (!) times and know exactly the visual that I am trying to express. Although, can I just say? My over-use of links is making me suspect that I am not writing so much as I am creating a web-based pop-up book. But, pardon me–I need to go back to writing my blog now.) Of course, I should probably spend another good six seven! minutes trying to rephrase the expression “can come out your ears,” as that is leading to a desire to google something else entirely, and we certainly don’t need me linking to THAT. (Shush, boys. NO. WE. DON’T.) So I won’t. Because I have amazing impulse control.

This is probably the point in the essay where you, my Intelligent Reader, has deduced that tonight’s topic is about Twitter and/or impulse control. And that is where you would be Wrong.

Now, just for the sake of argument we are all going to agree, (Logical Reader: “But how can it be ‘for the sake of argument’ if we all agree with you, Laurie?” Slightly-caffeinated, determined-to-stay focused blogwriter: “Shut up.”), to my original point that we all have a thousand random thoughts a day. I realize that this is not a scientific statement. I realize that some people do not flit in unfocused fashion from thought to hyper-active thought like a Vietnam POW camp surviving hummingbird on ecstasy. (Those composed people? Those who can speak in complete paragraphs and can leave the radio in the car on one station EVEN WHEN A COMMERCIAL COMES ON? Those people I fondly refer to as freaks.) The main point is that, whether we wash dishes for a living, are chefs or even brain surgeons, on some day in our life, whether we are elbow-deep in soap suds or reading Kierkegaard, at some point we are eventually going to wonder, “Who DID put the bomp in the bomp bah bomp bah bomp?” It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that George W. Bush, for example, was struck by that thought ALL THE TIME. And he was PRESIDENT. Here’s an example of him being struck by it. Or so I imagine.

Of course, sometimes the thoughts that dance around in our noodle are not as serious as, “Who put the ram in the rama lama ding dong?” Sometimes they are lighter, superficial thoughts like, “Why am I upset that a man I’ve never met decided to use Twitter to post words of encouragement and hope to depressed people on the anniversary of his brother’s suicide?” “Why does it bother me that such a trivial medium was used by someone to speak to people with serious problems?” “Who am I to judge, no matter how serious or deadly the subject may be?” Or, (and this is maybe a little bit less specific to, like, one imaginary person’s head), “Holy God. I am the worst mother on the planet.”

Heck, I’m sure that, even when hipsters order coffee-like things at Starbucks, seemingly without a care in their TV-On-The-Radio-loving, cinnamon-sprinkled, cappuccino-soaked heads, they are randomly struck by the thought, “Fuck. I’m going to die.” (And that’s even in the Starbucks that AREN’T by robbed!)

The truly weird thing about these thoughts, the thing that makes them truly unnerving and life-debilitating, is that you can’t just turn to the person next to you on the bus and say, “You know–Hi! Strangest thing: I just thought about drowning my husband in the tub if he has one more goddamn cigarette behind my back. And it FELT LIKE THE RIGHT THING TO DO. Oh! Here’s my stop. Bye!”

Most all of us have negative thoughts. I mean, not me, of course. I am perpetually sunny. Aside from that first thought of the day which is, typically, “Where am I, where are my panties and why does my ass feel like that?”, once I find my underwear I am nothing but Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm until my head hits the a pillow at night. By writing this supportive essay I am simply trying to empathize with my audience. I learned about doing that in that writing class I took from Bill Clinton.

Again, I would like to admit, for the record, that there are some people out there who are GENUINELY even-keeled, who never experience even a flicker of frustration, fear, self-loathing or doubt. WE HATE THEM. They should swim the ocean currents, help Dory Find Nemo, and leave the job of being a suffering, miserable piece of humanity to the rest of us. I’m not worried about them, as they are nowhere near an internet connection. Much like Ed Begley Jr.’s character on The Simpsons, they are busy powering their cars with their own sense of self-satisfaction. They are planting trees on Mt. Everest for orphans while developing a cure for rickets. WE HATE THEM.

So, how do we survive these fears and insecurities? We wake up. Walk the dog. Pee on the cat. (You know who you are.) Focus diligently on our jobs, our children, our hobbies. We answer e-mail after e-mail after e-mail. We text. We tweet. We plan supper. We tweet about what we’re making for supper. (No. Really. WE DO THAT.) We pick up the dry cleaning. We stay as busy as we can so that the stress build-up from those random, inescapable thoughts doesn’t lead us screaming straight into an oncoming bus. (Or a train, if you’re in Nebraska. But, wait. Who am I kidding? No one in Nebraska is reading this. Nebraska doesn’t have internet access.*) Like Dory, we just keep swimming. (But, that is where the similarity to Dory should end, as Dory had the memory of a rutabaga. Which is not to say that she had loving memories of rutabagas, but that her mind was about as developed as a root vegetable and not designed to sustain a cohesive thought for an extended period of time. But, listen, this is no time to discover the universal taoist principles covered in a Pixar film. I have to talk about anger and nasty stuff like that.) (And, hey, psst, listen. I have no idea if there are taoist principles in ‘Finding Nemo.’ I really don’t. I mean, there probably are–you know how those hippies in Hollywood like to indoctrinate your children and turn ’em gay and all that shit. And there’s nothing gayer than “taoism,” am I right? I mean, c’mon. The first letter is a ‘T.’ So why do they pronounce it with a ‘D’? Because it’s DUMB, that’s right.)

So many conflicts lie unresolved in your head. And they become suppurating blisters in your brain that you can never confront. “That job man woman I work sleep flirt sing pray live with drives me absolutely fucking insane and if I had the power to leave, I would. But I can’t. I just have to sit here and take it. Because I am supposed to suffer support endure.” You get angry or feel belittled or disrespected. And your feelings are so very hurt. And you cannot turn to the person next to you and say, “Man. I really feel like I’m losing my place in the world and that I really don’t matter. And if I have to grit my teeth and smile at one more person I’m really going to lose it.” At best, if you’re lucky, you shake your head, gulp and say, “Some day, eh?” For most of us, though, all we can do is look up and say “Paper, please. No, I changed my mind. Plastic.” Because at that moment you’re all, like, “Fuck Mother Earth.” 

Now, I would like to be clear. (Annoyed Sarcastic Reader: “Really? NOW you want to be clear? Laurie. Do you actually READ your essays? Do you know how hard they are to get through? If David Foster Wallace were alive, he’d say ‘I just don’t understand this shit.'” Overly-Caffeinated, Hungry, Slightly Nauseated Blogger: “You’re hurting my feelings, making me feel inadequate and underappreciated. Also, I know for a fact that at least two of you have NO idea who David Foster Wallace even is.” Reader: “Oh shut UP!”) I am not saying that we as fallible humans are consumed by thoughts of negativity all the time. (If you are, please know that depression is a manageable disease that can be effectively treated with talk therapy and/or medication. I hope you have the courage and the strength to find someone who can help you breathe again. For me, it was a three-legged cat. But that’s another story. (See, you inconsiderate tweeting sonofabitch who shall remain nameless but oh you know who you are!? THAT’S how you talk about depression–in a fucking blog! Or maybe a magazine column, at least, I don’t know! If you’re a radio personality maybe you create a radio segment about it! I’m just spitballin’ here. What you DON’T do is type ANYTHING about SUICIDE or DEPRESSION in a fucking 140 character TWEET! Especially when you spend the rest of your time on Twitter making lame-ass jokes that are so horrible they literally make people want to kill themselves. “Hang in there, Kitten!” is NOT AN EFFECTIVE DETERRANT AGAINST DEPRESSION. Asshat.)) What I am saying is that we get pummelled by these thoughts on a fairly steady basis. They’re like solar flares headed straight for our brain. They cause us to be irritable, short, achy, a little bitchy…it wouldn’t surprise me in the least if they also caused scabies or vaginal dryness. (Motherly Reader: “You are SUCH a child, Laurie. Can’t go a paragraph without saying ‘vagina,’ can you?” Hypoglycemic Blogger: “That’s not true. It’s a real medical condition. And, anyway, if I were trying to be childish I would have called it a ‘bagina.'”) But if we don’t find a way to understand and conquer them, if we can’t learn from these thoughts, then they will become soul-crushingly heavy and destroy the simple joy that we are supposed to get out of life. And then we just end up sitting on our sofas in our Snuggies eating Doritos watching So You Think You Can Dance.**

And THAT is why it is important to infuse your life with art. (Ha! This essay is about ART. Betcha didn’t see THAT coming. Not from the woman who has framed Guiness Stout beer coasters on her wall as decoration. *And a Winnie the Pooh poster! Yes, Laurie. And a Winnie the Pooh poster, too.*) You have to read, you have to explore new ideas. You have to listen to great new music. You have to really look at that beautiful painting from that guy with the weird name that kind of makes you nervous when you see it. You have to experience the world through music, or poetry, or sculpture, or literature. It is in that space that you will find the universal language that will give you your voice. You are not abnormal or unusual for your feelings of pain and insecurity. It’s through the world of art that we learn, after all, that we all go a little bit mad sometimes. (Bonus Blog Points for those of you who know that is a famous quote from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho.”) (And Bonus Bonus Blog Points for those of you who are familiar with the song I just linked under “Psycho.”) (Good God. It’s like I’m going down a psycho wormhole.)

Now, sure, certainly, of course, you can find that connection to inner peace through religion, too. Since the important thing is helping you get to the point where you don’t feel like you’re going to stroke out at the thought of having to sit through another miserable family dinner with your annoying sister-in-law who thinks she’s so high and mighty and who never burns her pot roast or misses a PTA meeting and GAHHHHH!

Since the important thing is getting you past THAT, sure, if you can find it in your church, who am I to begrudge you that one bit of solace? Of course, the solace and comfort I’m referring to is visible in the eyes of real live humans, all over the globe, regardless of their religion, and I actually think it is healthier to connect to real people through genuine emotions rather than by sharing an imaginary sense of love and well-being with an invisible space entity that doesn’t really exist except through the power of your faith…oh, sorry. No, I’m sorry. You’re right. Whatever gives you strength.***

So. You are not alone. You are not insane. (Except for you. You are batshit-eat-your-feces-insane and you need to institutionalize yourself immediately because God knows we can’t just throw you into that asylum against your will because you have a little something we like to call “civil rights.” Or as you like call them, “asparagus.”)

You are not a twit.

Hang in there, kitten.****

*This is the point in history when Laurie lost her one reader from Nebraska.

**This is the point in history when Laurie lost all of her readers in Wisconsin.

***This is the point in history when Laurie lost all of her readers in the South.

****This is the point in history when Laurie lost Laurie.

Why am I here?

I don’t mean that in a wake-up-half-drunk-next-to-a-stranger kind of way, either. Although, fumbling clumsily for your shoes under the bed while wadding your balled up underwear into your coat pocket as you search frantically for your keys as quietly as possible so as not to disturb the unidentified naked, tattooed human snoring obliviously on as you desperately mouth a typical refrain of the Morning After Prayer: “Please God, if you let my car be outside and help me find my way home I’LL NEVER DRINK AGAIN,” is a great time to ask that question, too.

I mean it on a deeper existential level. (“Existential,” for those of you, like me, who do not know what that word means unless you crack open your Random House and find it alphabetically in the ‘E’s’, means “Of, pertaining to, or characteristic of existentialism.” So. Phew. Glad to have cleared that up for you. (Don’t you just fucking hate definitions like that? I mean, what a goddamn waste of all of our time. (Which reminds me of an experience I had in elementary school. I must have been in second grade which, I think, made me eight. (Or four, if I was Doogie Howser. (I wasn’t.)) While writing a paper I asked my father, “How do you spell ‘disease’?” I knew it started with a ‘d,’ but I wasn’t sure if it was desease, decease or the much more correct disease. So, like any child in distress, (or ‘destress,’ if you’re eight), I asked my father. And you know what he told me? “Look it up.” It was at that moment that I began to despise, (dispise), the dictionary. Because looking through all the words that start with “de” and all the words that start with “di” in the Merriam Webster that we had back in the day, (It was the HEFTY dictionary! The kind in which the letters of the alphabet were segmented by the gold-leaf thumb tabs in an effort to reduce your search time through that Guttenberg-esque-sized tome. (What I mean by that, boys and girls, is that our dictionary when I was a child was as large as one of the original Guttenberg Bibles, printed in the 1500s by Steve Guttenberg. (Just kidding. Steven Guttenberg was the star of such hits in the 1980’s as “Police Academy,” “Cocoon,” and “Three Men and a Baby.” I’m referring to the man who invented the printing press. (The more I think about it, I think the man who invented the printing press spelled his name “Gutenberg.” I should look that up. (Yep. It’s Gutenberg. Johannes Gutenberg. And since he died in 1468, I am going to go out on a limb and surmise that he invented the printing press a litte bit before 1500. (Gutenberg Bible, n, an edition of the Vulgate (I am NOT looking up “Vulgate” for anyone, but based on my extensive education in word etymology, I assume that it has something to do with a vagina) printed at Mainz before 1456, ascribed to Gutenberg and others: probably the first large book printed with movable type.)))))), not out of curiousity but because your sadistic father wants to HELP YOU LEARN not by providing you with an answer but by forcing you to wade through the entirety of the English language to figure out how to spell ONE WORD out of literally dozens and dozens that you had to write for your paper on insects. (ensects.) It is a book of DEFINITIONS, Father, not a SPELLING book! (In retrospect, it is possible that my father was illiterate and his refusal to help me spell “disease” was all part of an elaborate (ilaborate) plan of his to hide his inability to read, a plan that involved surrounding himself with Will & Ariel Durant history books, encyclopedias, and dictionaries, and then telling all of his children to go “look it up” whenever they had a question about anything.) In short, existentialism is “a philosophical movement, esp. of the 20th century, that stresses the individual’s position as a self-determining agent responsible for his or her own choices.”)))

I don’t want to list all my faults, because this is a blog and not my Morning Mantra, (“Good morning, Laurie, you worthless piece of shit. Try not to do anything stupid today, make any irretrievable mistakes or unduly piss anyone off. And stop stalking Rosanne Cash on Twitter. I’m pretty sure she’s sick of it.”) (I generally fail at abiding by that mantra by my first tweet, which tends to shatter all four points in one fell swoop.), but I don’t possess a lot of the things that I imagine a grounded, normal person would have. I am not especially close to my family. I don’t have any children or a significant other. Hell, I don’t even have an insignificant other. I don’t volunteer with any charities. And, not only do I not belong to a church, I don’t even believe in the endogenous spiritually that emanates from within them.

Editor’s note: Okay. Let’s all just take a step back here. Laurie, go get a cup of coffee and let the adults talk. Thank you all that are struggling to read this. If it makes you feel any better I am, too. I am a horrible editor. I am unable to focus, have a very weak educational background, and I am drunk. So very, very drunk. I may have to resign, post my resume on LinkdIn and get a job working for Yahoo!News. That being said, I do know that I haven’t made this essay easy for you, so I greatly appreciate the time and effort you have spent here today trying to understand it. I know that you have better things to do. (I just heard someone’s laundry timer go off. It’s best to get those clothes out of the dryer while they’re still warm. Fewer wrinkles to iron out.) I want to apologize for Laurie’s frantic abuse of parenthetical phrases and sentence structure, not to mention her gratuitous overuse of ginormous words. She means well. I think tonight she is trying to be the Theonious Monk of essayists. And, just like that famous jazz musician when he sat down in front of a piano, she is mangling the shit out this essay while imagining that it is dripping off of her fingers like honey. A couple of hours ago she was speaking like a normal person. But, now that she’s opened the dictionary to the ‘E’s’, she needs to embellish her eloquence with elongated enunciation. GODDAMMIT THAT’S IT, I’M SHUTTING THE DICTIONARY.

Ah, that’s good coffee!

So, my point being, I imagine that there are dozens of things (or pills) that people do (or pop) each day to keep from mentally spinning straight off this big blue marble into the infinite chasm of space. They focus on their children, for one. After all, when you’re choking over noxious diapers or worried whether or not your teenager has discovered what “sexting” is and, if so, if they will teach you how to do it, do you really have all that much time to sit around wondering why you’re here? The answer is in their expectant, upturned faces as you regurgitate food into their gullets. (Since I have no children of my own, it is possible that I am confusing the feeding habits of human offspring with that of the red-breasted robin. But, I think those of you with children get what I’m trying to say.)

Editor’s note: Just nod your heads yes.

I think it’s easy to get spooked by the enormity of the universe, by the breadth of history as it rolls over us from our ancestors’ time like an infinite tsunami that will never reach the shore. And it is extremely easy to breathe in that icy cold hiccup of anxiety-riddled truth, even if you have children: In the grand scheme of things, I really don’t matter.

So, maybe the best thing to do, when it occurs to you that you’re neither finding the cure for cancer or solving the world’s financial crisis nor are you writing the perfect song which seven billion people will love and sing in unison in perfect harmony, which causes the world to vibrate at a higher frequency which, in turn, magically dissipates all the excess carbon dioxide stored up CO2 in our atmosphere, resulting in you being the first singer/songwriter to simultaneously win the Nobel Peace Prize AND the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for having solved Global Climate Change, (while receiving the Grammy for Record of the Year. But, interestingly enough, not Song of the Year. Go figure. The Grammys are fucking weird like that.), maybe the best thing to do when that frightening realization hits you is to just take a deep breath and exhale.

Sometimes, all we can do is keep our head down, take little steps, and stop jumping against the screendoor of life like an anxiety-riddled Jack Terrier. Sometimes, we have to admit that, no matter how much money we have or how comfortable we are with the size and girth of our penis, someone is going to say something that makes us feel insignificant and small. (Obviously, I’m speaking for the men in the house there. And some of the ladies.) Sometimes, all we can do is admit that we can’t prevent stupid things from happening just because we scream and yell at the stupid people to stop doing stupid things with their stupid faces. Sometimes, we have to admit that, sometimes, that smile you shared with the cashier at the grocery store is going to be the best thing about an otherwise shitty day. Sometimes, talking about that crazy woman who eats toilet paper on that one tv show with the one co-worker with bad skin and a lazy eye who also just happens to be racist to the core is the best conversation you’re going to have all day. And sometimes we don’t even get that. Sometimes, we have to go on living even after we find out we’ve been betrayed, or disrespected, or treated unjustly, or we’ve been shattered emotionally.  And it’s a life filled with uncertainty and violence and cruelty and selfishness and pain. And it’s hard to find a purpose in life when everything sucks and there’s nothing good at the movies and Modern Family is in reruns.

And that’s when you take a deep breath and exhale. And it suddenly occurs to you that finding your center in the middle of THAT is your purpose in life. Everything else is garnish.

Until you wake up half-drunk next to someone who’s name might be…? Kelsey? Kelly? At that point, feel free to ask, “Why the hell am I here?”

And really mean it this time.