naked for strangers

Eva has a post-apocalyptic steampunk spork. It used to be a normal spoon, but somebody, a guy she knows, she says, cut four little tines into the end and clumsily welded the handle to a thick screw to add length. The screw, in turn, is welded to a metal carabiner, like the kind mountain climbers use to attach themselves to their safety lines. Eva can attach her spork to her belt loops, if she wants. She uses it to eat takeout on the bus. It looks heavy and deep gray and serious, though, the metal of the screw and carabiner scratched and pitted, a thing that could double as a weapon if its owner were inclined to use it as such.

* * * * * * *

Walking with Freesia, later, and she asks me how it was that we first met. "You invited me to go skinny-dipping with you," I remind her.

"Oh yeah," she says. "You were just walking along all alone, and a bunch of us were heading down to the river. I'm glad it's that. That's a good story."

We walk a little more.

"I just realized," I say, after a minute or two, "that every person I have ever seen completely nude, I have seen nude within twenty-four hours of our first meeting." This is true.

"Maybe it's easier to be naked for strangers."

* * * * * * *

And Freesia and I have a theory. Or rather, I'd been mulling over certain concepts in a confused and hazy way, and talking with Freesia, listening to some of her thoughts, helped bring them into focus and cohere into something I can put down in words. Basically, it begins with the fact that I have noticed that most of the people I know who are unusually intelligent in one way or another also have some type of psychiatric disability or autism spectrum disorder or have no official diagnosis of anything but are noticeably more neurotic and eccentric than most of the people around them. This correlation does not seem to be just a random coincidence among my own acquaintances. Other people, both psychologists and neurologists conducting actual scientific studies and individuals who are not involved in any sort of brain-related study making casual observations, have observed the same thing. Since there are obviously mad people and autistic people and otherwise not-neurotypical people who aren't very bright, and since there are obviously some very bright people who are emotionally and mentally stable and not even especially quirky, I don't think it's likely that either factor causes the other. I think there might be some unknown third factor that causes both. I think people who are exposed to this other factor (or factors, plural, I suppose is more likely) develop a hyper-attunedness to the world. To senses. To emotions. To information. To everything a human being is exposed to on a daily basis. Such people, perceptive and sensitive, are obviously more likely to become very knowledgable, or very wise, or very skilled in some discipline or another. Such people are also, especially in the fast-paced, stuff-saturated, atrocity-filled modern world, more prone to break down or crack or keep going but in a rattley, off-kilter, she-could-blow-at-any-minute sort of way. They can't live day to day with the level of awareness they've got, screening nothing out, turned on at every minute. They must devise coping methods, ways of temporarily blocking some of that hyperawareness, or of whittling the world they exist in down to a size and shape in which hyperawareness is no longer a major problem.

Anyone who has this type of mind and who has survived through puberty has, I think, developed a coping method. No exceptions.

The coping methods fall into two basic categories. The first contains all those methods which seek to drown one's own thoughts and feelings and sense of individual self, making the world bearable to live in because there is not enough person to feel lost in it, or overwhelmed by it. The second contains all those methods which seek to shut most of the world out, leaving one with one's own mind and a small piece to contemplate and learn that won't hurt too much to understand. I'd say most people don't use methods from one category or the other exclusively, especially not over the course of their entire lives. Someone might use mostly first-category methods as a teenager and young adult and gradually come to favor second-category methods as she grows older, for instance. I do think that most people lean towards one or the other, though, maybe depending on whether they're more of an extrovert or more of an introvert. Whether they are more afraid of having to be alone with their racing thoughts or of being crushed and swallowed, inhabited and destroyed, by all the rest of creation, which is so very big.

Some of the coping methods (from both categories) are, ultimately, tragic and self-destructive. Others (from both categories) are actually pretty beneficial, and allow their users to channel their hyperawareness into something good and worthy of that great attention, or at least something harmless and safe. There's a broad spectrum. For example, self-destructive first category methods might include drug addiction, alcoholism, having a long string of passionate but severely dysfunctional romantic relationships. Okay ones might include becoming deeply involved in some kind of political activism or ideaology, or becoming a devout member of a particular religion. (I'm assuming a retention of some open-mindedness and a basic lack of zealotry when I call these things "okay" here.)

Becoming a hikikomori or one of those guys who die embroiled in online role-playing games because they forget to stop long enough to eat or sleep would be a self-destructive second category behavior, while becoming a highly dedicated, perfectionistic, moderately reclusive writer or mathematician or painter or electrical engineer would be okay. Perhaps not ideal, but it's worked out well for a lot of people, and whose life is ideal, anyway?

It's getting kind of late for me, and I'm not sure, looking back, that I expressed that quite as well as I wanted. Those are the bones of it, though, this theory that Freesia and I talked over as we walked around the farm at dusk.