I wrote this a couple years ago during an intro to poetry class. I’d often write down stuff during classes, due to boredom mostly. I wrote it in just one draft over like 10 minutes and I’ll transcribe it just that way. If there’s a spelling error I’ll leave it and believe me there are plenty. Sometimes a sentence will start one way and finish another way because I wasn’t focusing. When I wrote it I titled it “One Red Dot” but I added the subtitle to this blog post. The piece starts with a little dialogue that I made up where I’m asked what I’m thinking about and I answer “Nothing”. That’s typically how I answer that question. Laziness is a flaw of mine and taking the time to explain something is work.
Imaginary Person – “What are you thinking about?”
Me – “Nothin’ much.”
Imaginary Person – “Come on. You know that’s impossible. What are you thinkin’ about?”
Me – “Ok. I’m thinking about my desk. There’s this little red dot here in the upper right corner of the otherwise pristine, parchment colored surface of this desk. Without it this desk I’m sitting in is entirely lifeless. The dot gives it life, gives it history. It’s a tangible representation of past. A representative of the 100’s of people who have sat in this desk before me. 100’s of people taking notes and thinking and sitting in this same desk. All those people leading their own vastly complicated live that, without this desk, would be completely seperate from my own life.
this desk has led its own life before I got here. The line of its existence has been flying and dancing through space the same as my own line. And now, like two gnats bumping into eachother in the middle of a swarm our two line have collided.
The jogger I drove by on my way here, the plane I saw before walking through the door, the girl that rode past me on her bike yesterday. They’re all lines Flying around like a swarm of locust all moving in the same direction, from past to future and the incredible nature of every collision is lost in its triviality. Even the shirt I’m wearing now is an incredible node where a thousand line connect. The 1000’s of fibers from 1000’s of plants tended to by a hundred farmers with families who send that material out to factories where 100’s of people use machines to form a shape out of those plants. Those machines invented by someone, assembled by other someones with metals pulled out of the ground by other someones. All those someones wearing their own shirts, driving their own cars and eating their own foods.
This shirt is its own line with tens of thousands, possible millions, of lines all colliding into it before running parrallel with my own and now being colided into by your own line.
This unfathomable mass of line is all intermingled and supposedly every line of every atom that makes up every person and every shirt and every star began at the exact same point in space. Every line flying out and intermingling until they coalesce into this shirt and this desk and this person sitting at this desk.
Without this little dot I may have simply taken notes every class without ever stopping to think. This dot seems so trivial and honestly is, in actuality, incredibly trivial. I’m realizing that I need to change my definition of the word “trivial” from ‘Something with absolutely no meaning or purpose worth thinking about.’ to ‘Something who’s beauty and grandure may just take a little bit longer to explain.'”
Imaginary Person – “Someone probably just accidentaly marked it with a pen.”
Me – “Exactly. It’s trivial.”
The Mind of Joshypoo 