2.5 times around earth

...A dispatch from bewilderness

If your entire circulatory system—we’re talking veins, arteries and capillaries—were laid out flat, it would stretch for more than 60,000 miles. That’s long enough to go around the Earth almost two and a half times.

This brings us to the brain. Yours. Also mine.

Everything folds together in the (literal) folds of the brain. If the brain were not folded but rather pieced together in a continuous line, it would stretch around the Earth or from Memphis to the moon. One of those is true, but I forget which one.

Lots of things don’t make sense. It’s not just me. Just look at the headlines, the frontlines, the news.

*Erewhon – an LA chain that sells skincare to stars – is promoting a tonic made of deer antlers and ground-up ants.

*Arms manufacturers have pushed more than 24 million assault weapons onto American streets, one for every 10 adults.

So – merging real stuff that doesn’t make sense with imagined stuff that also doesn’t make sense, but might be just as likely — I invented Brain Damaged News, which debuted with invented headlines that sounded almost real:

*Boy, 7, Saves Sister. Says He Wouldn’t Do It Again

*Baby Conceived Without Scientists

*Fall Cancelled After 3 Billion Seasons

*Death Rate Remains 100%

*Wife Tries to Get Husband Off

*Man Who Got Head Stuck in Washing Machine Had Worse Day than You

Of course, there is always real news, too. Like by 2050, there will be more plastic in the sea than fish. And now for the weather. Today it’s cloudy with a chance of catastrophe. Every day includes a chance of catastrophe. Or many catastrophes.

Brain training makes sense of the world. Or was supposed to. In my case, it didn’t work. Things still didn’t make sense. Curriculum covered how to keep track of several ideas at once, or for beginners like me, how to keep track of one idea at a time.

But back to news. Publishing news for writers like me. There’s a “query boot camp with a live agent.” Like the kind I used to have before “my” then-agents fired me. For age plus disability. Mine.