Reptile dysfunction

...a dispatch from bewilderness

It has come to my attention that my “stack,” Dispatch from Bewilderness, may contain some details that are less than totally true.

For example, I was not embedded with any troops ever, did not invent Apple or Microsoft, have never been an astronaut or a prima ballerina, and haven’t won a Pulitzer. And that’s only a few of the billion things I haven’t done.

Then there are the places I haven’t been. For example, spaceships, top-secret celebrity spas, or branch meetings of the Southwest Florida Iguana Society.

An iguana thawing out after a human placed him back on a branch

Despite conducting dozens of interviews with myself, I don’t stick to what I know. Or what I knew. For example, frozen iguanas falling out of trees in Florida. This could be called reptile dysfunction or something like that.

One hundred billion neurons – woven together in a pulsating tapestry of 100 trillion electrical connections – make us who we are, or were.  

It only took seconds for the car I was in to crumple so tight, it couldn’t crumple more. This fractured anything I ever knew and shattered most of what I may have done. 

You can put up a front but you cannot put up a new frontal lobe.  I couldn’t navigate the smallest space or the smallest thing. Not words or places or names or faces or signs on bathroom doors.  I also couldn’t read or write.  

But — through intensive therapies of all types — I learned to keep my left elbow to the left of my right elbow, my left knee to the left of my right knee and my waist north of my hips.  

I also learned to say numbers backwards, so “7,4,9” became “9,4,7.”  Then they told me to say words backwards so “burger, bun, ketchup” would become “ketchup, bun, burger.” This could help in the real world if someone ever asked me to speak backwards there. They haven’t yet.