When I woke up the other day I didn’t get out of bed, which has been such hard work lately. (I blame the heavy snows.) Instead, I chose to stay under my covers, cozy and calm, and work the coming day’s tasks through via simulation.
I mean, I’ve so much practice with it, my mind is always running through things that ought to be done, if they are soon or more remote, or even just potential tasks, not even highly potential, always I will be running through them time and again and again. I have so much practice, and have figured out, finally, how to keep the work from going all to waste.
Which is: Relax. Observe. Reorder.
For every little thing that must be done, you pick out every little step along the way.
I mean, to get out of bed, which is a task, you first must rouse yourself from sleep, you must sit up, remove the covers (which are cozy and calm), make a 90 degrees pivot on your tailbone, or if you cannot, at least turn a sufficient number of degrees that you point your legs at an angle away from the mattress. This finally enables you to place your feet down the floor, the 5th step that will finish your task.
(Confusingly also your 1st step in the actual meaning of the word.) (If you are also like this, confusion will be a big part of your day anyway.)
Then on, towards the next task on your list: A visit to the bathroom, a stop at the coffee maker, whatever fits your personal routine. In any case, they all consist of little steps, as well as being steps in turn. Then on, towards more important tasks, like going to work if you have one, like paying your bills even if you don’t.
There are little steps in all those things, and at least for myself I can recite every one of them; I have imagined them often enough.
I can extract them from the stream, or what other call the rapids, of consciousness. I can hang them up to dry, so to speak, against the red-dark surface behind my eyes when they are closed, and watch them there as objects, one and one. Watch them there as symbols, all their mental and motor function requirements contained. By motor function requirement, I mean each muscle contraction in order.
Instead of always “I must do this, no, first that, no, don’t forget to do this instead”, I like to arrange them more properly in a sequence, picture myself as I execute them in good order, picture it with my imaginative skill. Then as I realize every little step, the task accumulate order, attains accomplishment. As long as the sequence is maintained, one doesn’t even really have to act.
In simulation, I figure, is when you take hold of the false starts. Imagined, yet unhelpful complications. Projected, yet unwanted outcomes. Like when you know you could be dropping things, breaking things, crashing into things, pivot to the wrong number of degrees, overexert yourself, or if the task encompasses someone else, offend them, injure them, lose their regard, their willingness to compromise and accommodate you when you need it, their willingness to put up with you at all.
All those complications, extraneous to the task itself, not to mention they almost never occur, I mean, when was the last time you bumped into something doing your dishes. And still. So omnipresent during the planning of the task, that when you go to execution, you have hardly any willpower left to act.
So, what if you could bypass all of that? If you could work through the day’s tasks, instead, in simulation? Your warm, fluffy bedsheets as insulation from the real world and its many unreal dangers? Its awkward, just short of ninety-degree angles?
It would save you tons of effort. When you were ready, more than nine tenths of the work would be done. That’s what I mean by simulation.
As easy as that skill where, when you lay reading on your couch and fall asleep, you just keep the page in mind, keep projecting lines of text, because you know your book so well, you’re able to calculate what words come next. I mean, words are pretty much hallucinations anyway. It’s a particularly useful skill when you’re in a hurry to finish a book. (Unfortunately, you often don’t remember much of it later.)
I tried it that morning. It worked. It worked a lot better than I even hoped! I got so much done during that simulation … actually did more than manage reality … I improved on it.
I worked out this new personal budget, for example, where I had found a lot more money for my monthly spending. I ran through some scenarios – in simulation, mind you – of everything I could do with this money, like certain small pleasures I could now afford (more writing in a café), some improvements to my home (better storage options), maybe some new clothes (I’m not buying clothes very often), and it was not extravagant – I wouldn’t even be comfortable with extravagance – but it felt really nice. As fluffy and warm as the bedsheets themselves.
Then, you take the things like tidying my living room, which in simulation went like a dream (especially with all the new storage options); things like getting my week-old pile of dishes done, which was easier than I feared because in simulation, you can just wash one plate after another, sort of an iterated task, instead of diving into the entire pile and flail like a frog-puppet as if you have to do it all at once; getting some phone calls out of the way; getting all my bills paid.
That’s right! I got all my bills paid, in simulation! I didn’t touch my real bank account at all!
Maybe that’s how I made my budget worked so well?
I had all that accomplished, and it was still early in the day, so I decided to take some time with my romantic life. It would be so much easier, I mean, if I went through all that in simulation. I mean, feelings are pretty much hallucinations, anyway.
A romantic crush had overtaken me, a crush on a cherished friend; it was unrequited. We had been spending so much time together, in this green, sunny landscape, lush with summer growth and summer scent, and I suppose it was the sense of easy pleasure that found its way onto my brain, took a wrong course, maybe ran like a stream of water down the wrong side of one of those ridges the brains surface is known for and lodged itself within a gully there, where I would falsely interpret them as feelings of attraction; anyway.
Still under my sheets, warm and fuzzy, I created this simulation where my friend, myself, and her current lover, were out on a walk in the city streets, during one of the long summer evenings after the heat of the day has receded to pleasant levels and the intensity of light and color has evened out into a pleasant buzz. We were walking about on shadowed roads, cooling off, arm in arm, and inside of myself I cried. I resented the two of them, for all the time they would have with each other. All their easy affections. Even if that wasn’t what stood in the way of me and her. None of us had much fondness for monogamy as concept nor practice. She simply didn’t feel that way in return, and I understood – I strongly agreed – it would be unfair to me as well as her if she had simply played along … but how badly did I want her to. How sorely did I want, for myself, just a sense, or an echo of what the two of them right then enjoyed.
It took an unpleasant turn – the simulation, the friendship too – when the two of them broke away to visit an art gallery on their own. They didn’t tell me outright to leave, but it was clear from their body language, not to mention the context. The two of them both knew the artist on display, they had actually first met at the opening of the exhibition, so it was significant for their relationship. A significance that excluded me. I knew this. But my composure broke, as I was left on the far side of the road, as I watched from behind when their hands sought after one another, fingers probing, not so familiar with one another yet; I yelled!
“IT’S SO FUCKING EASY FOR THE TWO OF YOU!”
I lowered my voice again, when they turned around – not that it softened my words in any way. I fetched accusations out of nowhere. About things she had never done. Would never in her life have uttered.
As if my teeth were clenched, which through more than half of it they were, I told her how I knew her mind, knew she was rubbing it in, enjoying her superiority, being my complete opposite, being just as easy to love as I was not. I said: Of course I won’t be welcome with you in your significant gallery, I won’t be convenient for you anymore, you only keep me around as an audience to your happiness these days. It poured out of me, it was ridiculous. She wasn’t anything like that. It didn’t have anything to do with her.
I said: “You could have chosen to return my feelings. I’m just not worth the effort.”
She stood and faced me with surprise, then astonishment, and finally what looked like outrage, because that’s what I expected, but it might also have been that she was hurt. Her tears, in any case, were as ice. In my simulated environment, they had so much negative heat that they left blisters down her face.
She returned, in whispers, certain accusations of her own. How she was the one who was made unwelcome. How I was the one who turned away. But she needed someone, wanted me, to share this thing with her, as terrifying as it was to her (she said this in her partner’s hearing, but it wasn’t as if he wasn’t already aware).
She said: “I wish I could have chosen to fall for you romantically. I really hate to see you as who you are being now.”
And if her accusations were fair, when mine were not? Reality would perhaps not have balanced unreason with sense in that way, but remember that it was all in simulation. I was still under my covers. In my bed. Deciding all of it: Deciding her words and mine.
My own accusations were thought out in the worst of my moments, the dreary mental sludge I always fear will slip out. What she replied: All things I’m certain I’ve always deserved.
A hand registered on my elbow: Her lover. His touch was firm, his eyes decisive. He steered me back where we had been, the trajectory of our little stroll reversed, and though it did not reverse the influx of summer greenhood, pleasant scents: In this other mental state, I had too much of both. He steered me back into the deeps of the lovely park, with its central fountain under a ring of trees.
On its quiet benches he made us both sit down.
I expected that he would match my voice, that he would scream; he heard me out instead. He was angry, sure, but what he had to say could wait. He was an outsider in all this, he told me. So, I would talk, be given time to calm. When he thought I was ready, he called my friend up on her phone, convinced her to come and join us, too – it took some beseechment on his part, some reassurances from me, but not a whole lot of it, really – and in the time we had to wait, even in simulation, I was cold with fear.
I would have liked to abort this sequence as it unrolled, maybe go back, make my outburst softer. Instead, I saw myself through the time it took, and listened to the fountain splashing. And when she arrived, I listened to her – the way her lover just had listened to me.
What she said then was private. My own, laborious response, as well. We both agreed I had crossed a lot of lines, but her forgiveness, when she gave it, came readily.
Unfair as it was, undeserved as I knew it was: I still sat there and felt mostly warmth.
That’s how the sequence played out, it’s the meager conclusion I was left with. I didn’t learn much about love or romantic longing, but I learned, at least a little about myself. The lesson: The capacity I possessed, if only barely possessed, to receive a gift like the both of them had to give …
… if it had played out for real, it might not have justified the cost. I certainly wouldn’t try and look for justification …
but in simulation, perhaps it all went well, if only just.
And if it helps you, reader, if it softens your opinion: Turns out it was all of it confined in the simulation.
I look back on it, you see, now I’m reoriented to my surroundings (cozy bed and all that), now I have calculated that about an hour and a half has passed. I look back on it, and it hits me: I don’t even have a crush on a friend like that. The crush was a part of the simulation, too.
And when I look even further, the friend doesn’t even exist. This is not a person I have ever met. I guess I must have made her up from scratch.
But reader! Don’t just say: “Was all of it only a dream? Was it that old cop-out ending?”
Observe three things.
First: That it was not a dream, but a simulation. How many times do I have to tell you that?
And then: That there wasn’t much of a plot in the first place. We didn’t confront anything, didn’t resolve a whole lot, no choice or personal sacrifice was made. There was only all this hurt, and then a bit of warmth. That’s all.
That how it goes here on my blog. I have not said that I am writing stories, wouldn’t dare to claim anything like it. How many times to I have to tell you that?
Then last, and most significant of the three:
I’m still very cozy, here in my bed. I haven’t written down a word of this, except in simulation. It would be such an effort to get up, so pointless to use the bathroom, so hard to brew my coffee, then sit down in my couch to write.
Why would I do all that when I can imagine the words from here? When I can simulate every phrase, every pixel, every comma! (Not to mention the semicolon, which I use a lot of.)
No sheet of paper was the receptacle of my words, nor any keyboard or other tool of transcription. They do not exist as engravings, or patterns or graphite, or ink; they do not exist as configurations of ones and zeroes; they have never, by any current or future means, been conducted into the world from my simulation; they simply do not exist.
If you can read them, your powers of simulation must be equal to my own.
The power of simulation!That is the real topic for this text.
Paying bills and fixing my love life were meant as examples, not meant to take so much space at all, the embellishments worked their way in despite of me.
The power of simulation: Not that it fixes anything, but it saves me the work of getting out of bed today.
It’s been such work lately, as I mentioned. All the heavy snows and the daily tasks. As if all the things are in such a hurry to be done, and with no time to think them through at all.
Which, laying here in bed, at last I can.
It’s nice. It’s something I want to share. And so. Dear reader. Even though I’ve written not a single word for real, even though white space is all I brought today, I’m hoping your ways of simulation aren’t too mismatched with mine. I’m hoping you will pretend to read these words, as I’ve pretended to put them down. And in your imagination, if nowhere else, I hope they will bring you a small measure of relief. Or if that fails then at the least some pleasure, a little pleasure on my behalf.
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