Day at the Museum

The man moved blankly through the running, screeching three year olds and the moms on phones and the older kids dragging their younger siblings back and forth, into the jungle gyms and out, into the play zones and out, smelling the innumerable feet, seeing and unseeing it all, marshaling all the considerable powers of disassociation that he’d built up over years of effort, years of his life’s work, sculpting the mental pectorals, or would it be mental calf muscles? to a remarkably swoll state, symbolically speaking, mental muscles like steel cables, like mighty springs, able to propel his awareness far away, to other cities, other countries, other historical eras where he could spend his time in relaxed conversation with Yoda and Carl Sagan. A blissfully peaceful, almost Buddha-like expression covered his face, often mistaken for staggering levels of inner profundity by others, or so he inferred from the admiring looks that people invariably gave him when their eyes met in passing. 

Actually they might be concerned looks, he told himself. He’d always had difficulty reading facial expressions in others, a mental issue his wife had mid-diagnosed as autism but which was most likely another symptom of the retina scorching and emotionally disfiguring number of cartoons he’d watched as a child, resulting in a permanently disabled perceptive faculty.

Maybe he looked high. Maybe someone would call the police, and he’d have to explain that he was high on his own mentally generated reality, and it would be like in Hair, or Ace Ventura. These intrusive thoughts began to short circuit the sci fi daydream, and the reality of the crowded, filthy, odiferous kid town began to appear in bursts through Carl Sagan’s deep, ever-pondering face.

He waved goodbye in the Vulcan salute as the sci fi looking planet he was standing on rolled away.

I composed this imagery while I was trapped at the Museum of Natural Curiosity with my kids. It’s one of those expensive babysitting places in Lehi, which now qualifies as one of the worst places in the state due to the awful roads and software engineers everywhere. I took such a liking to the sheer power and scope of the passage that I decided to create a comic loosely based on the themes dissected therein, which I will  publish with my next blog post