Heavy Thinking

It all started out innocently enough.

I began to think at parties, now and then . . . you know, to “loosen up.” Inevitably, though, one thought led to another, and soon I was more than just a social thinker.

I began to think alone . . . “to relax” I told myself . . . but I knew it wasn’t true. Thinking became more and more important to me, and finally I was thinking all the time.

I began to think on the job. I knew that “thinking” and “employment” don’t mix, but I couldn’t stop myself. I began to avoid friends at lunchtime so I could read Thoreau and Kafka. I would return to the office dizzied and confused, asking, “What is it exactly we are doing here?”

Things weren’t going so great at home either. One evening I had turned off the TV and asked my wife about the meaning of life. She spent the night at her Mother’s.

I soon had a reputation as a heavy thinker. One day the boss called me in. He said, “Jim, I like you, and it hurts me to say this, but your thinking has become a problem. If you don’t stop thinking on the job, you’ll soon have to find another job.”

This gave me a lot to think about. I came home early after my conversation with the boss. “Honey,” I confessed, “I’ve been thinking . . .”

“I know you’ve been thinking,” she said, “and I want a divorce!”

“But Honey, surely it’s not that serious.”

“It is serious,” she said, lower lip aquiver. “You think as much as college professors, and college professors don’t make any money, so if you keep on thinking, we won’t have any money either!”

“That’s a faulty syllogism,” I said impatiently, and she began to cry.

I’d had enough. “I’m going to the library,” I snarled as I stomped out the door. I headed for the library, in the mood for some Nietzsche, with NPR on the radio. I roared into the parking lot and ran up to the big glass doors . . . They didn’t open! The library was CLOSED! To this day, I believe that some Higher Power was looking out for me that night.

As I sank to the ground, clawing at the unfeeling grass, whimpering for Zarathustra, a poster caught my eye. “FRIEND, IS HEAVY THINKING RUINING YOUR LIFE?” it asked. You probably recognize that line. It comes from the standard Thinker’s Anonymous poster.

This is why I am what I am today: a recovering thinker. I never miss a TA meeting. At each meeting we watch a non-educational video (last week it was “PORKY’S”), and then we share experiences about how we avoided thinking since the last meeting. I still have my job, and things are a lot better at home.

Life just seemed easier, somehow, as soon as I stopped thinking.

It keeps me alive to know that someday, somehow, all those memories of Socrates and Dickinson and Fitzgerald will eventually fade into the back of my mind, never to be visited again as anything but the ghosts of the shakiest period in my life. I rest confident, now that I realize I too can enjoy Harry Bruckheimer movies and drink Budweiser and say things like “don’t go there!” while making those little quotation marks with my index and middle fingers. I’m on step #11 now with Thinker’s Anonymous; the “make amends with old sitcoms” step.

The next and final step in my healing process: VOTING CONSERVATIVE!