JENNY TALKS TO MOM

'I just don't feel the same way other people do about stuff', said Jenny sadly.

'People don't have to agree about everything', Jenny's mother reassured.

'No Mom', said Jenny testily, 'I mean I don't feel like others feel. I don't have feelings like them.'

'Feelings?' Jenny's mother intoned.

'Yeah, people feel things. They really feel things. They fall really hard in love for each other and feel really strongly about wars and stuff. They go crazy. I don't have those feelings, at least not so much.'

'And how does that make you feel honey?'

Jenny glanced up at her mother. Their eyes briefly met to acknowledge the irony. Then Jenny dropped her head again.

'I guess it makes me feel lonely. I guess that's the only feeling I have. The lonely feeling.'

Jenny's mother looked at her sad daughter. A curtain of hair spilled from Jenny's head onto the table, hiding her face. Was she crying under there? Jenny's mother would have pitied her daughter if she could have but she could not. 

'I guess it runs in the family', Jenny's mother said with a sigh as she turned on the juicer and annihilated the conversation with the sound of whirring blades.

EMOVORE

Hate for dinner and love for dessert, all washed down with a cup of relief. The Emovore feeds on human emotion. He gobbles it up and shits out ideas. He lives in your head. He is in your brain. He wriggles around in there like the creepy crawly that he is. He mainly hangs out in the deep limbic system, waiting for feelings to be cooked up and served up. He's an electrochemical feelings gobbler. He takes the feelings you feel, grabs them in his pincers, chews them up, swallows them down, digests them for a bit, and then poos out the reasons why you feel whatever emotions you feel. The Emovore poos these reasons out into the toilet of the brain. You know the brain toilet as the frontal lobe. You think the frontal lobe governs reason but to the Emovore it's just a jax.

If you hate or love something you just do. You 'feel' and then you decide why you 'feel'. Feelings come first and the reasons why you feel them come later. Reason is just shit, feeling is the food of existence. All supposedly rational thought is ex post facto and all ex post facto rationalisation is basically Emovore poo. Hitler felt a lot of hate. Why? Who knows, a specific development of a genetic trait probably. Hitler's Emovore ate up all that hate and then shat out all this ex post facto nonsense about Jews. Really though, really, really, and fundamentally, Hitler just hated. He just did. If there was no such things as Jews Hitler would have still hated and his Emovore would have shat out some other reason for it. We just feel things like the wind just blows. In fact, in pre-Socratic Greece they considered emotions might blow through us randomly like wind. They thought reason mightn't have much to do with it. They were right.

You may wonder what the purpose is for all this feeling and for all that Emovore shite dribbling down into our frontal lobes and infecting us with fanciful ex post facto notions. However, you wondering such things is just you looking for reason and, like I've already made clear, reason is shit. Reason is just an illusion. There is no such thing as reason. Reason is just Emovore poo. Got that? Reason is nothing but Emovore poo! So, now that you know what's really going on, tell me - how does it make you feel?

WORDS ABOUT WORDS – PART THREE: WORDS FOR THINGS UNSEEN AND FORGOTTEN

I've invented a few words in my time. Words for unseeable conceptual things I've noticed or sensations I've felt that don't have names. Urnk, fweelt, huphtink, and schwelpt - that's just four of them. There are lot more. I have them all listed in a journal. Sometimes I forget to write down what they mean and when I make that mistake it inevitably leads me to forget the thing I invented the name for even exists in the first place. I'll try and make myself clearer: Imagine you noticed the sensation of feeling at ease. You noticed that everyone seems to undergo this sensation at times. You start to recognise it in others, a gentle smile and unguarded body posture. So, imagine you decide to name this sensation of feeling at ease. For the sake of simplicity, let's imagine you call this sensation 'comfort', a word that, along with any possible synonyms for the same sensation, has heretofore not existed. Now imagine you write the word down. Now imagine that you return some time later to discover the word 'comfort' in the place you wrote it but you have forgotten what it relates to, what it means, and you have forgotten that 'comfort' ever existed. Can you imagine something like that? Well, that kind of thing happens to me all the time. Unseen things only exist when named. If you forget the names of unseen things they vanish from your mind. I mean to say, they are still there, it's just that you can no longer perceive them.

If we all forgot what the word 'comfort' meant we would forget we even feel it or have a need to feel it. We would live in near perpetual discomfort, only occasionally experiencing the unrecognised sensation of 'comfort' quite by chance. We wouldn't discuss it or anything. We'd probably never mention it. You might doubt this. You might say that we would eventually put a name to a sensation if it was something we felt. 'After all', you might say, 'we do have names for unseeable sensations and concepts'. You might apply this logic and say that it proves my postulation invalid. However, if you were to do such a thing I would be forced to point out that you seem decidedly underschwelpt. This would make you confused. You would not know what I meant but this would only be because you would not recognise the unseeable truth I would have described. You'd have no idea what I am talking about but believe me, your obvious lack of schwelptness would be showing and you would be risking absolute huphtink.

So you see, a great many unseeable things have yet to be named. A great many others have been named but those names forgotten or what they mean has been forgotten. We should really keep an archive so we don't become unaware of more of these unseeable sensations and concepts. Some may be of great significance. Some may define fundamental aspects of human experience. It would be a tragedy to lose more of them. For example, can you remember what it is to chizzet? No, I thought not. Sad really. I think it is high time we catalogued these words in journals - perhaps in alphabetical order with the meanings of the words written next to each entry. We could call these journals Lexiconicons or Wordadoriums. What do you think? Really? I think the idea is pretty fweelty myself.

I'll conclude by making a prediction. Have you noticed how the word 'morality' is being used less and less these days? It is, really. You tend to find other words in its place. Words like 'practicality' or 'realpolitik'. Soon we'll stop considering the concept of morality altogether and quit discussing it or aspiring to it. We'll forget that morality ever existed but, you know, maybe it never did. Maybe this is one case of a word that is best left to oblivion. Maybe 'morality' is just used as an abstract excuse for other things or maybe it's too vague and subjective and impossible to objectively quantify. Maybe we never should have believed in it in the first place. Maybe this word is a word for an unseeable thing that actually doesn't exist. Yes, maybe we should forget it. Maybe it's just a silly word. Maybe it's just a load of urnk.