Sticker Books n' Other Tidbits

I really miss having a sticker book. I was thinking this yesterday on my way home from work. Part of it's just a nostalgic thing--I hadn't thought about sticker books in a really long time. But also, what's kinda interesting about sticker books is that they sorta were a precursor to establishing one's aesthetic and sensual tastes.



I mean, the whole point of having a sticker book was to open it up at any time and be able to look through them and absorb their prettiness in a variety of different ways:

through touch--there were fuzzy stickers, there were stickers whose color changed when you pressed them;

through smell--everyone remembers their favorite scratch n' sniffs; mine were pizza and skunk;

and through sight--we could spend hours just gazing at how pretty they were, how the sparkly stickers caught the light just right, how that butterfly had such an incandescent blue in it.

We were developing our aesthetic tastes in the way that kids do--instead of looking at fine artwork, oohing and aahing over Picasso, or eating at a good restaurant and gushing over the quality of the tiramisu, we were funneling it into something we could understand. And that's really sorta cool.

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A couple interesting quotes from Jitterbug Perfume:

...The most intense spiritual experiences all seem to involve the suspension of time. It is the feeling of being outside of time, of being timeless, that is the source of ecstasy in meditation, chanting, hypnosis, and psychedelic drug experiences. Although it is briefer and less lucid, a timeless, egoless state (the ego exists in time, not space) is achieved in sexual orgasm, which is precisely why orgasm feels so good. Even drunks, in their crude, inadequate way, are searching for the timeless time. Alcoholism is an imperfect spiritual longing.

In a hundred different ways, we have mastered the art of space. We know a great deal about space. Yet we know pitifully little about time. It seems that only in the mystic state do we master it...

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...Either because our data is insufficient or because our processing equipment is not fully on line, our own nocturnal processing is part-time work. The information our conscious minds receive during waking hours is processed by our unconscious during so-called "deep sleep." We are in deep sleep only two or three hours a night. For the rest of our sleeping session, the unconscious mind is off duty. It gets bored. It craves recreation. So it plays with the material at hand. In a sense, it plays with itself. It scrambles memories, juggles images, rearranges data, invents scary or titillating stories. This is what we call "dreaming." Some people believe that we process information during dreams. Quite the contrary. A dream is the mind having fun when there is no processing to keep it busy...



Discuss...

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