unfiltered ovenbird Tommy McHugh, a man with a criminal record and a history of violence, exploded parts of his frontal lobe while sitting on the toilet trying to force a shit. Yes, this is real. The stroke put him in a coma for ten days and when he woke up he was changed. His mind overflowed with images, he had a relentless urge to paint and write poetry, and he began to speak in rhyme. Suddenly the whole universe felt present and beautiful and meaningful. He spent the rest of his life painting the images that his “damaged” mind generated, famously stating that “the best thing that happened to Tommy McHugh, was having a stroke while taking a poo.” The frontal lobe is responsible for filtering the sensory data we are exposed to each day. The brain discards much of what we experience as “irrelevant.” Tommy’s frontal lobe was damaged, so his sensory awareness increased significantly and he developed a deep emotional response to the world. And my first thought, upon reading his story, was “is it weird that I relate?” My brother, always so helpful, suggested that relating might mean I need more fiber in my diet. Thanks little brother. And while it’s never bad to get more fiber it’s not what I meant. The thing is, I’ve always felt as if the entire universe is coming in and I have no way to defend against the endless onslaught of images and feelings. Every day the world floods into my body and tears me apart with its beauty and its brutality. Hardly a day passes when I don’t feel an intense mix of grief and elation. I recently found an essay I wrote for a high school English class in which I recalled a life changing experience in the Northern Ontario wilderness. I wrote: “I stood in the cold air; the sky filled with stars and stared out across the lake to the pine trees beyond. The northern landscape entered my body with every breath and I felt blessed to be alive. I fell to the ground, giving myself over to the mercy of the universe, and I have not been the same since.” In the same essay I wrote about seeing the aurora borealis for the first time at the age of seventeen: “The beauty was so great that my heart filled with poetry and my emotions bubbled over. I started to cry with the shock of it all. I hadn’t been aware that nature could produce such wonders and it took my breath away. It inspired songs and stories and poems in me and made me FEEL.” I still recognize myself in the teenager I was and I wish I could talk to Tommy McHugh and ask him what he felt as the universe poured into his mind every second of every day, because I think, on a smaller scale, that happens to me too. I’ve felt so alone all my life with that experience. I’ve been dismissed as over-emotional, over-analytical, too intense. And though I could cry every day at the overwhelming beauty and pain of the universe, like Tommy, I wouldn’t trade it. I wouldn’t want to feel LESS, I’m just desperate for people to feel alongside me. Tommy McHugh died in 2012, so there’s no chance of a conversation, but I feel a kinship with him anyway. In one of his many poems he wrote: “I am climbing the mountains/ I am climbing the mountains inside my mind.” It’s the sort of journeying I understand. I have no desire to travel the world. Most of my adventuring happens in my mind. Red has become a bit of a travelogue in that regard. My broken mind has found a place to spill out its experience, and I’m so incredibly grateful. 260623 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I read this a few days ago and it stuck with me. Partly because of how well written it is, partly because I also feel easily bowled over or moved or arrested by things, in some ways that are probably similar and other ways different. And not just me; my brother might relate more deeply than I do to the sense of awe at nature, at absorption in a landscape...sometimes I'm afraid I'm too distractable or too urban for that...but then again, give me a good sky of stars and I'll gape at it for minutes. Anyway, I guess I relate most to two particular feelings/thoughts: 1) that my reactions are "too much" - in my case that I laugh, cry, anger, fear, and enthuse to easily (and there SHOULDN'T be anything wrong with enthusiasm, but sometimes I worry that it comes across to others as childish) 2) that it's hard to filter out phenomena and thus easy to get overwhelmed. Online feeds, say, that rocket from one emotion to another feel dizzying; I miss conversations where the mood changes are more gradual, or at least where there's a shared experience of emotional shifts so we can comment on them. Maybe no one else will see my exact feed where a post about a cute rabbit, say, proceeds one about a famine and follows one where someone is complaining about drunk people hanging out near the grocery store where the person complaining seems just as bad if not worse than the people they're vilifying... Why is this becoming a screed against Facebook? That wasn't my point. Offline life is often a contradictory jumble as well. But, yeah, I'm not sure I'd wish to stop, say, feeling dizzied by the clash and bash of ordinary life if it also meant giving up my enthusiasms about birds or words or colours or spices or stars. 260626 ... e_o_i edit: *too* easily (but maybe one could Enthuse to Easily, like going to a place) 260626 what's it to you? who go blather from