Sneezing
A friend once told me the reason we say “Bless you” when someone sneezes, because people used to believe that the soul left the body during a sneeze, and demons would come take it away if it weren’t protected by a blessing until it could return. And maybe that’s what happened to me, because God knows something happened. Somewhere I became something I was not, something I do not want to be, something useless and cruel. See, I have done a lot of sneezing in my short time, way more sneezing than could possibly be of benefit to anyone. So much sneezing in so many situations that not only was I not always around another person, someone who could issue the blessing (and it doesn’t seem that a self-administered blessing would do the trick, especially not when your fucking soul wasn’t even in your body), but a lot of the time people just got tired of repeating “bless you” enough to keep up with my completely ridiculous and uneccessary sneezing. In fact people were often amazed at my propensity for sneezing, at my sneezing jags’ length, volume, and variety.
Okay, this is a digression, but on this whole sneeze/bless crap: how long does the soul stay out? Must the blessing be immediate? Should it occur before the sneeze itself has ended? I imagine that the demons/devils are just itching for a chance to hop in and take a good living corpse for a ride, at least if Dante is anything to go by. So shouldn’t the blessing be pretty damn quick?
And so anyway, here I am, sneezing my ass off just about constantly due to my twin allergies to 1. The most common substance on Earth (dust) and 2. The most common substance in my houses as I was growing up (cats). And during all these sneezes, there was often no blessing at all due to either annoyance or downright absence on the part of the potential blessers.
So my question must be: Has my soul been stolen? Am I a walking shell inhabited by a demonic geist? Or more importantly, and more in keeping with the evidence: Do I lack a soul? Because like I said, something sure as fuck happened to me. Somewhere in there I lost the goddamn ball. Now I just feel lost, mostly. I don’t want to romanticise this, but I don’t feel like me. I’m not “lost”, in any grand philosophical, metaphysical, or post-modernly meaningful and deep sense. I just can’t figure out what the fuck is going on. I’m confused a lot. People frighten and baffle me. Maneuvering my way through the morass of daily living and navigating contemporary culture leaves me just about weeping with lame, painful bafflement.
I wasn’t always like this. For a long while, I felt pretty confident about being in control of things, life-wise. I figured I had a set of skills that would get me out of bed and off to meaningful, productive work everyday without too much trouble or pain. Releasing my feelings and views in a creative way seemed second nature to me. I wrote, painted, made music, whatever, without needing any rulebooks, training, or permission. If I felt like trying something, I just tried it. Now I need permission and training to take a shit. I have to make sure I’m doing it right, that I’m not missing some key technique that will make the experience (and by now, I’m not just talking about shitting, but about pretty much anything) easier, fulfilling, I need reassurance that I’m doing it “right”.
People’s exhibit B.
There is another superstition about sneezing. Probably a ton more, but one more that I know offhand and that applies eerily to the situation described above. The superstition: that to sneeze three times simultaneously is a harbinger of death. Try as I might to create suspense about this, I’m sure the more alert readers have already figured out that the only possible reason to mention this is to then come out and tell everyone that my sneezes these days tend to come in threes. Onetwo…three. Always the little pause, almost always three at a time. Just a long enough gap for people to assume I’m done and issue that all-important blessing. And then CHOO! right as the are finishing. Could this explain why I seem to have lost my way? Could this explain fucked up dreams where I am sitting in a green-walled public restroom stall in ugly yellow light, not shitting but just hanging out on the commode when a short ugly woman (I know this because I am hanging out with the door OPEN, presumably just to see this ugly short woman come in and start flicking the lights on and off in some sort of seemingly random sequence) comes in and starts flicking the lights on and off in a seemingly random sequence. Only apparently it’s not random, because in the dream I realise the woman (who is not anyone I actually know, mind you) is dead. With this realisation a deep flood of info slams into me. She is dead, but replaced by an alien being. She comes to this bathroom at regularly scheduled intervals and flicks the lights in an information-superrich pattern that programs me subconsciously to, 1. Do the aliens’ bidding and, 2. Never realise that the woman is a dead person replaced by an alien being AND SO AM I. At this point I ‘wake up’. Whew, that was a funky dream. Only, oh shit, I can feel my whole fucking body, skin, organs, bones and fucking all just sort of oozing into an amorphous blob on the bed. I then ‘remember’ that a side-effect of breaking the conditioning is to revert to my ‘true’ form, and that this puddling is the first step. Ick. So I fucking freak and psychically scream and wail and rant and will and beg myself not to believe that I am an alien. It was just a dream and so on. Slowly, my body reverses itself and solidifies back into ‘me’.
See how the evidence builds up?
Could this explain a dream of driving around with David Lynch, an unknown White Male, and my oldest friend in a Volvo with Military-grade anti-theft systems? And sitting around Dave’s house/restaurant (it changes…) playing hotseat multiplayer strategy games in fantasy settings? Or the fact that when I went to ask Dave to drive me back to my mother’s house (inexplicably in Davison, MI) he is in his bedroom having maniacal sex with the unidentified White Male while my oldest friend snores audibly from the lounge chair in the corner, all dimly and painfully lit by an acidic red glow from the neon sign advertising Dave’s restaurant? Can anything explain this?
Does this make any sense?
