WARP EIGHT IN THE SLOW LANE *** MY HEAD ***
Purportedly, the items in this section of the great WITSIG tree in the sky issue forth from the head of a Kermit. So it seems fitting to explain how that head looks from the inside. I should have done that first, but one of the problems with a Kermit-head is that things spew out of it in a relatively random order.
I was born in Omaha in 1947, which was the very same year that not much else happened. That gave a few people in Omaha a lot of time to pay attention to me. They noticed immediately that my mouth was open all the time, and that my head was very empty. Like the man said, some things never change.
One of the first things that grown-up people did was put stuff in my mouth, called food. That made me feel a whole lot better, and went a long way towards making me close my mouth. At about the same time, grown-ups started putting things in my head. In fact, for a long time, I thought that the only thing grown-ups had to do was put all sorts of funny stuff in any empty place in me that they could find. Later, I discovered that was true.
At first, the stuff that people put in my head was more or less by accident. Only the funny stuff that was left over from what grown-ups did got put in there. Then, after a while, people started to put things in there on purpose. In the beginning, only a few people did that. At the time, my head was very small, and the stuff they were putting in took up a lot of room.
Even now, all that old stuff is still lying around at the bottom, and I can’t pile it up as neatly as the stuff that got put in there later. For quite a while, I even tried to throw it away. But I finally figured out that the old stuff was what held up all the new piles, and that I couldn’t throw it away if I wanted to. I also discovered that a lot of the first stuff that was put in my head was still some of the best stuff in there.
Once all the holes in my head started working right, I began to let other people put stuff in there. Big people, little people, all sorts of people. Stuff just sort of whizzed in through the holes, got a quick glance, and piled up in a mess at the bottom of my head. That seemed to work out pretty well for a while.
Then I was sent away to places where people used shovels to put great gobs of stuff in my head. They even insisted that I put all of it in neat, orderly piles. Those places were called schools, and the shovels were mostly books. For a little while, it made me really mad, because the way they wanted to do it wasn’t any fun.
But they went ahead and did it anyway. They used shovels because they had a very large bunch of stuff they thought my head needed in a very large hurry. Some of the stuff was good. A lot of the stuff was useless. But they kept on putting things in there anyway. No matter what.
This went on for longer that it should have before I discovered that I could pick out some of my own shovels. Then I started to put stuff into my own head. On purpose, and in a big hurry. I used all the shovels I could get my hands on. And since grown-ups were still shoveling stuff of their own in there, I began to think that it must be getting very, very full inside my head. And I became a pain in the world’s collective ass for a while.
Then, somewhere between puberty and pimples, society shoveled a in a great heap all at once. It was called ‘Reality’ and it hurt. A wise man saw my dilemma, and explained that the cure for the pain wasn’t all in books. So I stuck my head out into the real world and made all the holes just as big as I could.
And all sorts of new stuff zinged into my head so fast that I almost panicked. It was so much faster than anybody had ever shoveled it in that every piece that zinged in scared me a little bit. But every time a little zing scared me a little bit, the bigger hurt got a little better. This was called maturing.
Some of the scary bits of reality got stuck on the edges of the holes in my head, and the holes began to get smaller. That made me much too careful for a while of what I let into my head. But before all the holes closed up, I noticed that reality was a bit like the food that I got when I was brand new. It was making my head close up! So I knocked all the sticky stuff off the edges of the holes in my head so that new stuff could get in again.
Soon after, I noticed that it really was getting full in my head. Not because there was so much up there, but because I had let stuff pile up just any which way for quite a few years. So, for a while, I climbed into my head every day and tried to straighten up. Not so neat that you could cut yourself on the edges, but just neat enough so that I could get to all of the piles. Some things were in the wrong piles, so I fixed them.
Since then, I have spent a lot of time deciding which piles are most important, and what new piles I need to start. I have started a lot of new piles because empty spaces keep popping up in there, and I get an awful headache until I try to fill them up. I also add to the piles that look the most important at the time until they get high enough again, and then I go on to another pile for a while. Some of the piles get higher all the time. Some don’t. That’s the way heads are.
An important thing to remember about heads is that they are a lot like attics and basements. Mixed in with all the good stuff is a lot of pure and absolute shit. It kind of accumulates in there, and gets in the way a lot. You have to try very hard to throw it away. And no matter how hard you try, some of it just stays in there, and you have to learn not to step in it on your way to the piles of good stuff. It isn’t easy, but it’s worth it.
Kermit []