June 14, 2003 :: 1:43 a.m.
it's 1:43 a.m., do you know where your sanity is?
I was thinking about decapitation today, when I was on my way over to Carlisle to pick up my dad. He asked me to take him to get the jaguar, which was being serviced in some way or another, and being that I have no life and no money with which to amuse myself when I'm bored with my no life, I complied. So I was driving over, singing along to Rilo Kiley and wondering exactly how hot it would have to be outside to make the interior of my car melt into a puddle of grey plastickyness, and then all of a sudden I'm thinking about the lopping off of heads. I was behind a big truck that was hauling logs, you see, and in the few brief seconds before I got the hell into the other lane I had this flashing image of one of the logs, just one, coming loose, flying through my windshield, and forcibly removing my head. Hence the swift transition from right lane (behind the scary death truck) to left lane (not behind the scary death truck).
It's always interesting for me to think about these things, in a sick sort of way. I wondered if my dad would start to worry after a while, when hours kept passing and I still didn't show up. Would he call my mom? Would she tell him not to worry, that I'd probably just... what? Gotten lost on the way to the house that I lived in for 9 years? What would they say when they got the call (the "we're sorry to inform you, but your daughter has been decapitated by a flying hunk of wood and is currently very dead" call)? Would they tell Adam right away, or let it slip their minds? What would he say when he found out? And most importantly, JESUS CHRIST do I look weird without a head.
Bodies without heads are useless. They're immobile meat sacks, unthinking, unspeaking, unfeeling piles of flesh with no purpose or reason for being. And they're virtually unrecognizable, barring unique alterations (tattoos, piercings, GGG-cup breast implants). What can you tell from looking at a body? Yeah, forensics, DNA testing, etc, etc, but that's not what I mean. There are probably thousands upon thousands of 19-year old girls out there who are just under 5' 2'' and weigh what I do. I have my ears pierce, my nose pierced, and my tongue pierced, but there's nothing particularly distinguishing about those, and they're useless since they're all above the neck. My history, from birth to present, is written all over my body in scars, but to anyone who isn't me or someone very close to me they're just old cuts and scrapes, forgotten wounds that don't matter or even differ very much from the next short, chunky girl with a high incidence of accidents. There is nothing on my body that would allow a perfect stranger to discern who I am. Perhaps this perfect stranger isn't a stranger at all, but instead someone who I've seen on the street or at the grocery store or the movie theater. It wouldn't matter, because bodies are generic - mass-produced from the same mold that has been used to shape people since the beginning of our time.
Heads, and faces in particular, are something different altogether. Eyes, nose, mouth, ears, hair, teeth, and, most essential of all, the mind are all contained in or found on the head/face. Our emotions originate there, and it is where they are displayed most prominently. Four of the five senses are there - sight, smell, taste, hearing - and any kind of sixth sense or ESP that we may possess is found there as well. We are what we think, what we do, what we say, and what we feel, and we can't think, act, speak, or feel without the squishy mass of tissue encased within our skulls. Also, faces are memorable. They communicate and emote and make impressions that go much deeper than those made by a featureless body. We recognize people by their faces and their names, not by their tits or their legs. Cutting of someone's head is, in addition to the obvious taking of their life, a very effective way of removing their personality, individuality, and humanity. And no, it's not just because they're dead. Bodies are for simple things like transportation and reproduction, not for things like philosophy or art or science. As we advance more and more, we need our bodies for these simple things increasingly less. Walking is not an efficient mode of travel anymore, and sex is just one more pleasurable activity rather than an automatic ticket to parenthood. All of the important things in life use our brains, not our bodies, which leads me to another very interesting image...
... in which the human race has shunned the clunky flesh that constrained them for so long and refined their exteriors to more closely resemble their interiors. Meaning, basically, that we're all a bunch of big heads in floating glass containers, using machines to accomplish the menial tasks that one depended on our motor skills. Everything is brain-to-brain, direct and immediate. Physical contact is gone, replaced by an advanced form of (for extreme lack of a better word) "cyber sex."
Mostly this all came about because I thought that my head severed from my body was a very strange thing to see. It looked wrong. Well, technically it didn't happen at all, but such petty details are forgotten when one is riding the "morbid and unusual" train of thought. I stopped ruminating on it once I picked up my dad, at which point it was replaced with frantic nervousness about what to talk to him about. My dad is NOT the easiest guy in the world to talk to, especially if, like me, you have the communication skills of a cud-chewing farm animal.
Le sigh. I'm so very tired. It�s quite obvious from the amount of spelling mistakes that Word had to scold me for. Bad Amanda, writing under the influence of sleep deprivation. Off to bed, then, hopefully to have lovely dreams in which I am in no way a victim of the guillotine.
'Night.
back & forth
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