Archives, eh
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# The want of thought is death
If I was so lucky as to be given three wishes, my third would be able to fly at will1. No wings, no antigrav devices or planes and so forth; to just lift off the ground – I can accept having to speak a command phrase even if it is something stupid like that catch phrase – and flit around the air. Think Peter Pan but without having to cozen up to a bi-polar fairy. I wouldn’t use it to rob high rise apartments, or whore for attention with dramatic rescues and such. At most I would use it to get away from the train, to get home on my own…well, whatever it is that allows me to fly. Let’s call it my wings of mind.
Peter Pan, eh? Is that what the desire is all about? Being able to fly is being able to get away. Escape the bonds of social constraints; to be able to fly, to soar over the roofs, the cars and streets, and particularly over the heads of other people is to be able to get away from them, and to be able to get away from all the tiny acts they do that individually are nothing, but piled up over the course of a single, quite normal day, are maddening. If I can fly, I can be alone. I don’t have to listen to them talk, their inane conversations that if I should join they’d be appalled at my presumption, but their conversations they rub my face in by speaking as if they were alone, and not in a metal tube with five dozen people. I wouldn’t have to have their phones trilling in my ears, their music buzzing like a bee from earbuds set too loud. No more sniffing, snuffling, coughing, pushing, pressing, climbing over me and stepping on my feet.
You believe I am a crank, or maybe even a misanthrope? Maybe I am at that. What is a crank? Someone dissatisfied with the way they have led their life and would rather bring everyone else down to the same level instead of crawling up out of their whole mind. That’s not me. Either I’m too self-critical or too self-aware for that; if I am unsatisified with the momentum of my life, the fault lies entirely with me and it is my responsibility to redirect. I don’t wish to be prone to mauvaise foi, bad faith.
In any group I feel alone. I don’t fit in. I’m awkward, I’ve never acquired the methods of interacting socially. I can’t make small talk. I’ve always and likely always will be an outsider, at least in my own mind. To fly is a manifestation of that isolation. If I am flying, I’ve isolated myself through choice, a choice with temporal immediacy rather than the long pattern of prior choices that have led, like a trail of breadcrumbs, to this point.
My second wish would be the retroactive removal of the avocado from the time stream; that the plant does not, will not and has never existed. I don’t even know what that’s about beyond loathing it.
1 If I suspect the wish granter is, or has ever been, a D&D Dungeon Master, I will of course apply as much elucidating detail as possible to avoid, say, suddenly experiencing a massive gravitational attraction to the nearest William. Or discovering that the verb form ‘fly’ doesn’t just mean ‘to move through the air’ but also, in certain cultures on certain planes of reality’, ‘to polymorph into Musca domestica’.
