The Random...

I thought that for my next little article of words, I’d tell you about my sister. I don’t get along with her a lot of the time, we aren’t the types to go out of our way to spend time with each other, and we have next to nothing in common. Except, maybe just this one thing…
My sister never really does anything particularly serious, whether it be making catering platters for a hundred or making her way up a flight of stairs, she does it quite unimportantly. And every now and then, she’ll have these peculiar random occurrences. For instance, she might be making her way down the very short, pseudo-hall of our apartment, and she’ll bust a move, A MOVE! Sometimes they’re cheesy and sometimes they’re actually coordinated.
Then other times, she’ll pick up the last word of your sentence and like an automated alarm clock programmed to go off, she takes that word and blurts out the lyrics to a song with that word in the title. When I asked her why she did that, she said to me, “I get bored, so I turn my head into like a radio station to keep me busy.”

That’s when I got the idea to write this because I realized that people through out my generation all have a little bit of that accidental sameness, the Random, as I call it. But, it would seem that we all have different degrees to our hit and miss lifestyles. I have my own instances of the unsystematic. I can’t keep a straight thought. My brain sees a visual cue and it instantly triggers a response, usually some short descriptive adjectives. It sees something else, and it shoot off another thought in no way related to the thought it had literally just a few short seconds ago. Many would argue this is a form of A.D.D. I however stand by my own little notion. I think you can’t keep a creative mind entertained. It’s always looking for ways to improve itself, mould itself a new experience even. (For sense of clarity I believe perhaps only 10% of the entire human population has this gift and 9.9% of that population is hopped up on prescription narcotics. Ha!)

It’s not just us either. My best friend has a whole other set of strange whimsies. She’s more of an eccentric random. Hers can be like a series of fireworks, you’re never really sure when it’s starting but when it does, it’s spontaneous and you can’t help but stare at it and be mesmerized. Or, sometimes the loudness of it just scares you. Either way, you seem to end up along for the ride.

Then I started to think, what if it’s really not just my generation? What if it’s some strange genetic sequencing? This led me to think of my mother, whom isn’t old enough to have Alzheimer’s and isn’t young enough to blame it all on pop culture and school shootings. She’s been smoking for over twenty years now and every night when she walks the dog, she has a cigarette. So, she leashes the dog, grabs the smokes, and nabs the lighter off the table. One night, I’m out on said dog walking mission, and my mom, as always, takes out a cigarette, scrounges her pockets for the lighter but can’t seem to find it. About a minute later she says, “Oh, we have to go back, I don’t have my lighter, I brought a baby carrot.” Admittedly, she isn’t all there sometimes but I still think this can be considered validly random in its own way.

So, what’s the argument here? Are we getting dumber as a species? Many have already blamed mass media, television, music, bad sleep, genetic encoding, and unrealistic role models for other lack of mental focus. The list goes on forever really those are just a few I named off the top of my head. My honest opinion after taking a look around into all kinds of whimsical nonsense is that we’re all just really bored with each other and ourselves. Who cares what’s to blame really because right now it’s all theories and notions. Maybe, for today, let’s look at it as the brain’s way of turning over the sign in its little store window that says ‘Be Back in Five Minutes…’