Introspection can be a beautiful thing. That is for the people around the person actually conducting the dive into their psyche. To watch someone become completely lost in themselves is highly entertaining, and yes sometimes painful. However, when you personally go roaming around in your dark and buried conscious it can be incredibly scary. Stanley Kubrick would have taken one look at some of those places within my mind and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” While there is something to be said for besting the master, he isn’t exactly the guru I am pleased with knocking off of the mountain. My mind never stops. Do you know what I am saying? I’m referring to those moments when you become so enraptured by the near psychotic crap going on in your head, that hours later you find the milk in the cupboard and the peanut butter in the fridge. At the time that misplacement occurred you were planning your reaction to nuclear holocaust- How you would survive when nothing else could even breathe the air. Okay maybe that one was just me, but you get the idea.
The bad thing about it is I don’t have the good sense to keep strange thought patterns to myself. No, I share those with the people closest to me. Somewhere in that moment of losing all good sense of the everyday I realize I need a reality check. Here is where I pick up the phone and call someone I know won’t judge me, or if they do, at least not do it to my face, and will snap me back into the important things of life like remembering to put paper towels on my grocery list for the next day. The problem lies in the choice of human barometer. I choose my friends based on their open minds, nonjudgmental personalities, and their creativity. These traits don’t always lend themselves to “good stable hold on reality.” More often than not, they join in on the conversation and philosophies that would make Plato roll over in his grave.
A couple of years ago, after a Jerry Springer style break-up from a long term relationship, I quite frankly lost my mind. It happens to everyone at some point, and my number was up. It was the most embarrassing thing of my life, not the break-up, but becoming the human who seemed as though their brain was made of oatmeal. How people survived that and still remained my friends I will never know. In those moments when life decisions are made for you, and you just have to accept what happens, I become the most stubborn person in the world. In an effort to logically explain emotion ( I know the retardedness of that statement overwhelms me as well ) I wiped the slate clean and questioned everything from religion to what was my favorite breakfast cereal. People often turn to God when they feel helpless, which I always (and still do in some respects) found absolutely ridiculous. To me it is like praying for a win in a sporting event- God has better things to do. The worst part was I spent years searching for my religion, and was quite comfortable with my research. It was in the aftermath of my life changing that I realized I had never really applied it to my life. Somewhere in the midst of trying to figure out if I believed in destiny (I told you…oatmeal) or personal creation, I decided that the Smurfs were pretty well balanced. This is where we add raisins to my hot cereal cerebral activity.
Regardless, Smurf walked around completely unselfconscious because they just wore pants with shoes already built in, and a hat. They each had a purpose and knew what it was. Spending your day in little mushroom houses seemed pretty cool. Their life was filled with “smurfing this” or “smurfing that.” Picking Smurfberries and singing seemed to take up the remainder of their time. The only negative parts of life were running from Gargomel and Azreal. Their nemeses were real. However, none of them ever were actually eaten. The question came to my mind, “Did the Smurfs have a god?” It was quickly followed by, “Why would they need one?” All of their basic questions of purpose were fulfilled by their names, and they had a living guru. So, was Papa Smurf kind of like their bodhisattva? I had confused myself in the religious undertones that I had completely made up about the Smurfs. This whole line of thought was somehow to clear my mind. Instead I was getting buried deeper in the webs of magic mushroom houses, the “why was there only one girl?” question, and did Gargomel and Azreal ever get anything to eat. Poor nutrition would definitely explain the whole one tooth thing Gargomel had going on. To clear the confusion and bring myself out of the Smurfberry haze I phoned a friend. I was already displaying bad judgment because I had been in the dark hanging upside down off of my loveseat contemplating the aspect of Smurf heaven for creatures that never seemed to die. I had concluded thus far that the fumes from the mushrooms kept them high all the time, and that is why they had a Baker Smurf. I was sure that I couldn’t pull myself away from the “Tra la la la la la” and that my friend would ask what the hell was wrong with me and tell me to snap out of it. Isn’t that what you would do for a friend in need?
Instead we had a forty minute conversation about how perhaps the Smurfs were communists, or some kind of cult and Papa Smurf had plans of making them drink purple Kool Aid in Jimmy Jones fashion. Then a funny thing happened. My friend asked me if I had ever snorted Tang. For the first time in the entire evening I realized I was sane. She went on to tell me how she had snorted Tang when she was young. At which point I asked if she had to go to rehab, and if people knew she was using again because her nostrils were stained orange. She called me a bitch, we laughed, and I was brought back to reality. The next day when the fog had cleared, it came to me like an epiphany. Too much introspection is a bad thing. You end up lost in a world that you can’t escape, and can drag people down with you. Granted mine was a cartoon world where little blue things were happy all the time, but still had I told my therapist at the time I’m sure he would have fitted me for a new white jacket with shiny buckles. Beyond that, I concluded that Smurfs were a blue form of a squirrel and a godless community because they had no reason for guidance- they had it figured out when they got their name of what they were going to do in life. The entire “there’s only one girl thing” still doesn’t make sense, but maybe that is the definition of insanity. If you figure out why there was only one girl Smurf you might as well get ready to slice off an ear or something.
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