Weird Human Behavior that I Happen to Like

This will be an ongoing topic. I’ll start here:

#1 Waving

Deliciously primitive, asinine and ape-like, and yet what courage! What audacity! It’s so hopeful, to raise one’s hand while making eye contact with someone too far away to speak to. Across a room, through a crowd. My eyesight isn’t stellar, so I am repeatedly amazed when I see someone swinging an arm at me. I don’t always have the courage to wave back, often because I can’t believe that:

a) I know someone who’s that outwardly excited to see me (extroverts—gotta love ’em)

or

b)  the waver knows it’s me and not someone else. [sidebar on mistaken identity: I am an identical twin. The notion that someone is speaking to me, or being friendly, or even waving because they seriously think I am someone else is a real concern for us double-births, NOT necessarily withering self-esteem]

But the type of wave that really warms my heart is the stranger wave. You’re at a stoplight in a city, eye contact is made and rather than look away or glare or even smile, somebody throws you the hand. I don’t care if the waver is ten years old, I’ll take it. I myself make it a habit to wave at passing trains, boats and low flying airplanes. Recently at a music festival, through uncommon circumstances, I had the opportunity to ride in a helicopter with the video crew. No doors. I liked lift off, I liked the beat of the blades in my chest, I liked seeing skinny-dippers in the ditch far from the crowd. But what I really liked and won’t soon forget was how people of all ages looked up, shielded their eyes and threw an arm in the air. It was almost knee jerk, the way you smell a bright flower or turn your face to the rain. Kids, grandparents, twenty-soemthings, they all waved to the helie and I waved back like I owned the sky.

#2 Dancing in unison

Why do we like to watch this? Remember the Michael Jackson videos, the choreography? Thriller? That scene with the zombies all doing exactly the same thing? This is pleasing in the same way watching a combine is pleasing. Or watching a window washer, a street cleaner, or a highway line-painting crew. I don’t fully understand it. There is no winning in it, no competition. It’s not like NASCAR where people are kind of waiting for a crash; I don’t think viewers are waiting for a dancer to screw up. It’s a hypnosis of goodwill, and the only thing better than watching it is participating. Truly you haven’t lived till you’ve done the grapevine to Lady Gaga or shimmied with Christina Aguilera, surrounded by people you only sort-of know doing (mostly) the same thing.  It can be embarrassing at first, but anything worth doing takes you out of your comfort zone. I don’t care if it’s Zumba or Jazzercise or line dancing at a rodeo after-party, it all counts. It’s awkward, it takes focus, and you forget yourself. Unifying and fun. In adulthood, how many things can you say that about?

{Take a look at that Thriller sequence: Michael Jackson “Thriller” Dance Routine [High Quality]‬‏ – YouTube}

#3 Daydreaming

Not to be confused with night dreaming, it’s two-word sister. Night dreaming we do whether we like it or not and psychiatry, even biology, offer some pretty compelling reasons why. But the daydream, that willful entry into the netherworld, is a matter far more mysterious. Like #1, it can happen at a traffic light, or in a line somewhere, in church or school. It isn’t always, however, a function of boredom. Some of us do it on purpose, seeking out quiet and stillness in order to allow ourselves the pleasure of sinking into the waking dream. I am using verbs with care here. There is a sinking to it; one doesn’t simply sit down and say, I’m gonna have a dream now. Rather, you open yourself to a dream. You set up the circumstance. And then, like a moody cat, maybe it comes, maybe it doesn’t. For writers this is the subject of madness, for you see how perilously close I am getting to speaking of inspiration. The daydream, is after all, step one on the creative ladder leading to a story. You make yourself available, as a channel, and the story comes or it doesn’t. Too much intervention, too much, I-wanna-write-about-blank, and the cat’ll scurry right under a bush, never to come out again, no matter how  you coax it.

There is an element to this “process,” for  lack of a better word, that contains what I think of as grace. Grace is present all the time, but one is made aware of it in glimpses, poems, really, a distilled moment of consciousness that leads to the divine. I was walking the dog two nights ago in the trashed out lot next to the BMX park. Most of this lot remains unmowed and neglected  all summer. The very un-seasonal storms were making their way through, so the sky was a roiling mess right before dark. I was stopped in my tracks by one of those sawing insects that have come to town this year. I didn’t think we had cicada but it doesn’t sound like a grasshopper. I have yet to actually see the thing, though I hear it everywhere. And suddenly, it was upon me, a moment of grace. The sawing insect in the waving grass, the air pregnant with the coming storm. I looked up to see the swirling sky about five shades of midnight blue over a decrepit white house, paint peeling, power lines crossing over head. “Rainy night in August,” I thought. A nearby train chose that moment to let off one of its staccato puffs, a little snort of meloncholy, and there it was. I was standing in it. Grace.