I Did Something Very Funny Today: April 4th, 2005
04/26/2005 02:03 p.m.


I did something very funny today. I tried to understand those rising heartbeats in a very mechanical way. I had a purpose and the purpose was purely technical. I wanted a metaphorical verbalization of this utter physical experience, as my hands would sense and register this sensing. 'Hard sponge-like, but smooth and alive,' is all I could think to describe the experience I had the other day, though not at the actual moment of experience. I wasn't there. The experiencer was so merged with the experience that it never occurred to me how it felt in the technical sense, or if it could be verbalized. But much later and in retrospect, it occurred to me that the experience was unique and did feel like a 'living, hard, smooth sponge'. I also realized that I am not an experienced person in these matters and I had never thought of giving technical words to the physical sensing of such experiences. With this intention in the back of my mind, both my hands pressed and sensed, all of this occurring in the middle of the night, a time when one is deep asleep but ready to fight on a little provocation. "What are you doing?" my wife quipped, and suddenly I was scared that she wasn't annoyed at all. I only hoped that this purely technical quest would not lead me on some different path. "Oh, nothing," I said, "this was accidental." "Accidental?" She retorted, "how can a constant pressing and all that be accidental, that too, in the middle of the night?" she argued. Well, I had to use a justifiable lie in my defense, which I did. I said "I must have done something in the dream. If you had not woken me up (I tried to create humor in order to ease the building up tension) then I would have known what I was doing." Ha! Ha! Ha! She did not insist or pursue with her argument and went back to snoring in no time. I thanked her within and decided to give another try some other day. I do need a metaphorical description of this pure physical sensation to compare this experience of mine with my experience of the other day of a hard smooth living sponge. And that wasn't an accident.