Gretchen’s World, part two
It was the year 2027, and Gretchen and her husband Max had a robot who took out their trash. The robot’s name was Mark. Each and every time Mark - the trashcan itself- would grow his rolling legs and deliver the contents of his chest cavity to the garage enclosement, Max would fight with Gretchen.
“Why do we have a robot? Why do we need a robot to take out our trash?! I’m certainly qualified and capable of taking it out!”They never fought about anything else.
Gretchen saw it as a solution. Not to the trash, but to her marriage relationship and peace. Take away the trash robot, and little quibbles would arise about this or that here and there, sometimes several times in a day. Max would question her reason for checking the mail during dinner. Max would ask her to change her shorts, because they made her legs look stubby. With the robot, they just fought about the robot.
Max had his old taped Jetsons episodes on VHS, and it always took Gretchen back to the happiest times in her childhood- watching Hanna Barbera cartoons upstairs alone in the “middle room” of their house, the room with clouds painted on the walls. Her reflection mode kicked in as the voices drone after the first few scenes. She stretched.
Jane, George’s wife is a genius character, because she has the old fashioned fifties voice, with a pink and purple space outfit to go with it. She tells Elroy not to stop for a cheeseburger on the way to or from school, then when he balks she says firmly, “Not another word!” in a sweet, old fashioned voice. George gets ready for work by sitting in an office chair while robot arms brush his teeth and hair, shine his shoes, and brush off dust from his uniform. Feminism - well, you can have a resurgence once this becomes a reality! Even Gretchen could use some help brushing her very long, dark brown hair. Elroy takes Astro to obedience school and cheerfully encourages the dog to hurry so he can go see his doggy friends.
Her deepest thoughts were her bouts of overthinking. Would it be a waste of time to stop for gelato on the way to Central Park, or was that the whole point?
Often, she and Max would discuss this topic of boredom. They could be dorks together and talk for hours about boredom, which she found very ironic. They both had a very similar philosophy of boredom: Boring people get bored. Boredom is a state of mind. People who do not like themselves get bored because they can’t be left alone with their own thoughts, because these thoughts repulsed and repelled them. Fortunately, she and Max embraced their own boredom, and recently she had come to the epiphany that each and every time she became bored, it was a signal from her creator for prayer.
Recently they had had this conversation:
Gretchen: I know it sounds cliche, but I’ve finally embraced the philosophy of zen.
Carry the wood and the water, you know? Isn’t that a famous Buddhist saying?
Max: Oh, yeah… nice! That is true. Chop the wood and carry the water.
Gretchen: I embrace letting my brain go into inactive downtime. I look out the window more. I enjoy mundane tasks more. I used to consider it boredom, now I consider it meditation.
Max: Of course. You don’t have to be on one side or another, because it isn’t syncretism to redeem it.
Gretchen: I used to think people were weird for talking about meditation. Now I get having the need for release from an overstimulated brain, and I embrace opportunities to rest my mind, empty it of the feeling of being frazzled, and notice what is around me. I used to go for hikes and be like, “Wow. A rock.” Now my hikes are rich and interesting and exciting. I’m obsessed with zen. They smiled.
Max: I know. I like my own thoughts. They don’t scare me. Or annoy me. I have to be outside on the regular because of that. Enlightenment is a term that means mental freedom.
Gretchen: Right. You’ve put off the shackles and the stupor of that which defiles the body and therefore, the mind.
Max: Nirvana is reached when your soul has been vacuumed. It means “blowing out.”
Gretchen: Listen to how cool we are. Strap on your bandanna, we are officially outdoorsy now.
Max: Yee haw. Swing for the fences, as they say.
They spoke with straight faces, belying not a little existential profundity.
Another deep thought Gretchen overthought was concerning scapegoating. Often, she would be in relationship with someone who would give her clues they were gossipping about her. Once during a Summer job cleaning at a college, her friends gave a clue that they were calling her a “retard” behind her back. She overheard them, at long last, one day at lunch discussing her joking comment one day that she forgot things because she had a hole in her brain. They laughed at her because she cleaned the bathroom items in the wrong order with the same cloth- toilet, sink, floor, toilet paper holder. Shameful.
Later in life she would come to realize that she was about 15% neurodivergent, so she had some quirks related to that. Zoning out but having the exact comment for the moment, in conversation with friends, was her biggest flaw and superpower all at once. Her friends often noted their jealousy that she could just tune out the world and think her own deep thoughts… especially when that world involved riding in cars with people who got to choose the music or radio or podcast. She never had to waste her time being annoyed by unwanted noise. She was a happy camper, because she loved tuning things out. She loved her own thoughts.
Later, she would relay these philosophical rabbit trails to friends, and they would listen in wonderment. Even one of her smartest friends, class Salutatorian, envied her ability to reflect so deeply about life on a regular basis, and zone out while doing a task and allowing automatic mode to do the task even better than sentient mode. Still, her best friends would tease her. They called her “a space cadet,” she had been called “a lunar tuner,” crushing her self-esteem at the time. Then they would ask her a trivial question and by instinct, she had the right answer. She longed deeply to be living at the same speed as the people around her, for the sake of fitting in. Yet she continued to always be a few steps ahead of everyone else.
Finally one day during high school, as she was walking to school, it all made sense: Autistic people and savants get the reputation for being stupider than everyone else, but they are sped way up and everyone else seems to be crawling along at a snail’s pace, while in their minds they travel in hyperspace. She knew this because she used to be able to memorize long swaths of dialogue for middle school plays. She could learn a song on the guitar in an hour. Gifted… Suddenly she also grasped the liminal space people were talking about.
Gretchen decided to write down exactly why she liked zen, overthinking, zoning out like a cadet from another orbit, and “peacing out” in nature all the time. She explained this connection with the divine nature and voice in the natural world, and how essential it was for her to come back down to earth and focus and get things done. Even things like mopping floors and watering herbs needed its rootedness in her zen time. It gave her time to unshackle from others’ perceptions and deeply come to embrace her self-awareness, the beginning of thought. The end of confusion. The problem solving, creating mode of existence. The introvert’s dilemma and once again, superpower. It all boiled down to seeing how she really was. Once she wrote this down, Gretchen went viral. People started sharing her post all over social media.
Whatever had dawned on her was kind of groundbreaking, and lots of people had been trying to put their finger on this idea for a long time. She remembered reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and feeling really disappointed a very long time ago that these insights were not within its pages. It had such a good title for a book… but the insights found within that book’s pages just were not juicy, tasty, or delicious in the least.
Her mind circled back to the epiphany she had experienced earlier. What if the Jetsons also happened to meditate? The thought made her chuckle, but what if? The objective cause of boredom is the innate human need for conversation with the divine. Her thoughts became stimulating and it would take her all day- on a road trip in the car, perhaps- to discuss these things with Max. She wondered how others did not hear his voice as well. But this had been a journey.
Her PTSD was something she hid from everyone. That night, the snow was driving in a diagonal, like a child’s drawing of white colored pencil on dark construction paper. She had told only one person about the time her first husband brought her into a snowstorm, yelled at her, took several shots, in her arm, her leg, her back, and then left her there to freeze overnight. They had gone to a fancy party, and she was wearing a shiny silver dress.The discovery of her near-dead body the result of a panicked text to two people in the middle of a night covered by a thick wool of darkness. Her survival was a literal miracle, when her friend Marilla came to take her to the hospital. She never shared the fallout: No sleep for a year, panic attacks regularly, incessant pacing, suicidal ideations, the inability to eat.
It was something she alluded to at times, but never revealed, because who would believe her? She never told anyone the fallout of that kind of suffering within the human body and psyche. She could not sit in public; the anxiety would creep into her and disable her from sitting still. The memory of the debris of blood on her passenger window. He had been angry. He took her to a Southern Ball and she had gained weight once he started insisting on doing the cooking. All he cooked were steaks and pizza for several years. Never a salad in sight, nor even a couple veggies on the side. She came wearing a sparkling silver long dress, to fit in, weight 200 lbs. After the dance, he could not forgive her. The weight fell off in double digits in a matter of weeks. Her sanity, at its core, had been a shredded napkin crumpled in an overfull trash basket. In healing, during the therapy sessions when she faced what happened, her entire body felt like it was on fire. She disassociated and the pain manifested as seizures. No, she didn’t share that kind of information. Sleep was a luxury everyone she knew took for granted.
To cope, Gretchen decided to care for a small lilac tree that belonged to the local nursery. She never bought it, but she went into the store regularly to water it, give it organic fertilizer, and talk to it. She found the analogy made the most sense in the context of her work. She cared for the tree to manifest her future.
Sometimes as she fell asleep at night, Gretchen would find herself thinking astutely about confusing, deep subjects. Her most recent philosophical quandary was about, of course, free will and omniscience. Her mistakes, maybe they were known- and the consequences of them- before she made them? She thought about the constancy, and the mistakes she had made, arising from her own limitations and the reasons for her pride. Comprehension leads to complete acceptance.
Her mind circled back to the epiphany she had experienced earlier. She called her best friend, a philosophy major at Princeton once upon a time, and started her soliloquy.
-The objective cause of boredom is the innate human need for conversation with God. Divine voice has spoken to me so richly, so clearly about the luxury of peace. The privilege of calm and focus. How do others not hear his voice like this?
-Yo, did AI write that? said Ashleigh.
-Not one word. I renounce all fear. Fear of AI, fear of others, fear of the flaws of creativity, fears of the flaws of the process. I work. I work hard. That is all. I go to the classes. I speak the mantras. I let it flow.
-You need to visit a Buddhist monastery in India where they feed you weed in your cookies and you get high enough to paint your forgiveness onto pottery.
-Hahahahahaa. Yeah right.
She changed. Laughter like this felt a journey to a place where a dam built years ago finally burst. Coming to accept his kindness had once felt impossible. Years of therapy was finally having its fruit like a waterfall over her truth. But it took years. I’m going to write this down, and I’m going to call it going viral. Inherent value, like an obvious price tag, was dangling in her eyes so long she started swearing occasionally when it dawned, when it rose in her like bile. Swing for the fences.