Mano-a-Mano With Self

Am I losing it? Am I? Or, have I already lost it and don't know it? That's what I said to me when I woke up with a jerk this morning. Denial, indeed. Is my brain slowly -- slowly like an ancient glacier -- melting away?

A crazy bear insists I owe him a report. Not what he said caused me to constantly flip back to that day -- but his image. His face -- round, semi-slanted eyes, and a bluish grey caste. In a word, odd. Perhaps his con job is just beginning to catch. What's he really after, I asked me? Forget that baloney about a report, forget it. He's pulling one over on you and you can't let yourself be bamboozled.

I think I'm becoming flabby in the head since leaving the Big Apple. In 25 years. I became immune to being shouted at by crazy folk as I passed them by. You get used to being insulted on the street with provocative profanity that accuses you of various gross perversions. You walk on the wide sidewalks of the avenues and you are always acutely aware that 1 out of every 10 who pass by look right through you like a airport security machine does. That's not to mention the 1 out of every 100 who'd just as soon shoot you as to look at you. In the city, you must learn to walk without fear to avoid being picked out by predator sensors as fair game.

It's the repetitive images that are bugging me so. I've let myself slip, ever so slightly, into the paranoia zone, just the edge, mind you. I've rerun those images of the stranger so often they appear with equal reality in both my conscious and unconscious modes.

Awhile ago, I had a really weird notion -- could Mr. Pant be an agent for some force from outer space? You know, like a spy trying to find out about what we're planning to do after we blow up the planet or let it be smothered by CO2. Now, I mention that, not because I'm about to consign my sanity to believe such a cockamamie idea, but because I want you to know just how that paranoia is creeping up on me.

The main difficulty with losing it, I suspect, is that the person losing it is the last to know. That's the case with most abnormalities -- the perpetrator is blind to his own faults until everyone else gets tired of looking at it and tells him. It happens with obesity, alcoholism, rudeness, dementia, hubris, stinginess, halitosis and many other unpleasant behavioral anomalies.

Another notion: I have to face the possibility that my brief encounters with Mr. Pant are figments of my imagination. When I encounter a memorable person (or nonperson, for that matter), he or she alights on my hippocampus for awhile until he or she becomes comfortable in my messy or messed up "attic" upstairs. At night he or she or it roams around at will and feels perfectly free to interrupt my nocturnal problem-solving operations. After some time passes and everyone becomes acquainted, he or she or it becomes absorbed by the cerebral cortex and that's when it's let loose from the hippocampus. Comprehendes?

It's getting on and I have some routine domestic chores to carry out this morning. It's my off day and I don't work out. While I'm doing those things, I might as well begin to think about what I could conceivably have to report. Could start jotting down notes, you know. Couldn't hurt, could it?