Mulling it over

Have you ever just been sitting around, mulling over the vicissitudes of life, essentially doing nothing and suddenly have something occur to you that seemed monumentally important, even earth shaking, then forget it before you could write it down or tell anybody else?
If so, then you have an experience in common with me and a few thousand other people who suffer from the unfortunate combination of introspective contemplation and abysmal short term memory. If you have never had this experience, consider yourself lucky. It’s frustrating as the devil.
There is something worse. It’s when you actually manage to remember this brilliant thought later on, only to discover that it’s about as important as a fresh load of steamed chitterlings and about as useful as a dating service in a nunnery
Occasionally, even these disappointing revelations can be temporarily amusing, though. Recently, it occurred to me that, maybe, the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about. If so, we’ve been wasting a lot of time and emotional energy worrying about the Middle East question, universal heath care and corporate corruption, when all we really had to do was “put your right foot in, take your right foot out, put your right foot in and shake it all about.” Just think how much easier that would be. Too bad it didn’t work out like that.
And another thing: that has occurred to me: Why is it that, whenever more than two or three people come together to look at something, they always stand in a circle with the object of their attention in the middle? Why don’t we stand in a square, or a triangle? Just for variety’s sake.
Actually, behavioral scientists have done extensive research on this topic. Apparently, we stand in a circle so we can all be about the same distance from whatever it is we’re looking at.
In my opinion, this is a very poorly thought out idea. Especially if whatever it is we’re looking at is potentially dangerous. Even if I am curious about something that is potentially dangerous, I’m not going to stand around is a geometric configuration that will allow somebody to get in my way when the time comes to run. Also, I think it is a good idea to have somebody else between me and whatever it is, just in case it might decide to bite, or blow up, or some other unpleasant thing.
This belongs to the same family of thought as the notion that, if I have to escape from a bear, I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun whoever I’m with. I guess it’s just the pragmatist in me.