Midnights, March: 26

In the sitcom The Good Place, moral philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye compares his indecisive mental process to a fork caught in a garbage disposal.

Oooh, I felt that so much. But for me, I realized today, it's more like a rock tumbler. I never had one, because I wasn't a nerd, but it was familiar enough: place a rock in between two tumblers and set it a-bouncin’ so the friction wears down the rough surfaces until the rock gleams, smooth and unblemished.

Most of the time, my brain puts too many rocks in the tumbler at once and the machine gets overloaded and jams. Too much sensory input, too many thoughts piling up on top of one another. But when I can close my eyes and lie down, it takes away those extra rocks. I count breaths: one, two, inhale, exhale….three, four, out, in. I count to a hundred, and the machine is clear. Then I can drop one rock in, one question or concept or sentence, and let it tumble around refining itself until it's ready to write down.

Is this an efficient process? Hell no! Do I repeatedly tell myself, “I don't need to write this down; surely I'll remember if”? All the time! Do I ever remember if? Of course not! That's why I wake up so many mornings with smudgy sentences scrawled on my arm in the dark.

Oh. I just looked it up and that's not how a tumbler works at all. A bunch of rocks go inside a tumbler together like on a cement truck, and they're turned and tossed with grit and water and that's what does the work. What was I thinking of? A garbage disposal? No. I don't know. But I wrote this short sketch before I knew all that, so just PRETEND that what I'm picturing exists and that a feral little girl has received one for her birthday.

Filed under “What'm I Ever Gonna Use This For?”:

The gift had worked up such a raging lather for clatter and clamor in her that she panted as she poured in a bucket of rocks from the garden, dust flying up in their wake.

She turned on the machine.

Crunch! Scrunch! Kaplink! Scrrrattle!

She laughed in sheer delight at the destructive cacophony. The grinding din reverberated through her body like an electrical current; she stopped just short of running her fingers through just to hear the jolly crackle of bones being crushed.