Mind Ticklers
I'm Bernard the Buffalo, and this is my home.
We have always taken great pride in our names, the four of us. In a prolonged stretch of unhinged creativity, my parents would find names of us seemingly out of nowhere. Perhaps it seems this way only because now and then, they actually did come up with names out of nowhere. Like ‘Lucano’. Lucano? Just [...]
It’s funny how so many of my few acquaintances have, over the many years, picked up strange nick-names. It’s even funnier how many of these nick-names come from the animals. Yellow Dog, White Pig…those are just a couple of the nick-names that come to mind most quickly - quite possibly because the bearer of both [...]
Don’t you just hate it when you suddenly think of the perfect line to say at some situation, only to realize that that particular ’situation’ actually took place years ago? I mean, it’s like the perfect example of a wasted opportunity, where you have this funny line in your mind but don’t know what to[...]
Sometime around 1995, a few Dutch teenagers got it into their heads that they should form a band. They started out by choosing a band name, the somewhat offbeat title ‘Gompie’ proving to be the most popular among them. Now all set and ready with an attention grabbing band name, they saw that the next[...]
(I must apologize for the pointless nature of this post. I had to write something.) I am one devious dog. Seriously, I don’t know anyone with a more criminal mind than me. I’m the kind of person so lazy that submitting a book in college becomes a great big deal. Y’know, all it took was for[...]
In a time that was not so long ago so as to be labeled ‘ancient’ and not such a short while back so as to be proclaimed ‘recent’ - a bit tricky, isn’t it? - I found myself in the tricky situation of having almost nothing to do. Not even bugger-all, as I had been doing for three months prior to this elusive time. This ‘time’, it seems, lasted for merely the briefest of seconds, but into that tiny, tiny short while went an astonishing quantity of mental processes working simultaneously in one huge clogged mess. The reason for this is simple: as I had nothing to do, I slowly began to realize that I had in fact nothing to do. This simple awareness was enough to create a sizeable vacuum somewhere inside me. Now nature, as a rule, abhors a vacuum, and being a part of nature, my body went into overdrive to compensate for this vacuum, to provide me with things to do. It worked. So that is how I eventually stumbled upon little things that I call, for lack of a better label, Mind Ticklers. You know, like my regular blanket, which I’ve been using to shield my body from the menacing cold that decided to drop by together with the monsoons. This blanket, like most other blankets, has those stringy ends on either side, which, I’ve come to the conclusion, are there for no other reason than to sick in your nose while you sleep and tickle the hell out of you.
So, what is a Mind Tickler? Well, it can be many things, ranging from the things you think of when the lights go out, to whatever thoughts that surface when you’re in bed, staring hard at the ceiling. But for most of the many Mind Ticklers out there, the blanket-analogy shall suffice: it keeps your mind warm and cozy, while giving you several long-lasting tickles along the way. I imagine that almost everyone has some sort of Mind Ticklers, if they didn’t, then what would they be doing when the lights go out? Or when sleep is difficult to come by?
But anyway, Mind Ticklers can be identified into several genres, just like the way movies are. Now I obviously have plenty of them, because if I didn’t, I wouldn’t have gone on for so long about the vast theory behind a Mind Tickler. Right up in my list of things that tickle my mind are the Comedies. Now this can be many things to many people. To a modest faction of good-humoured folks, the most well-worn form is the one where you take a song, change a word in it so as to give it a funny factor which it didn’t have before, and then sing it to yourself. Take, for instance, any song with the word ‘beauty’ in it. Any song under the blistering sun. Now all that you need to do is substitute ‘beauty’ - I mean wherever the word ‘beauty’ comes up in the song - with another word, ‘booty’. If you do that, and if you keep in mind the relatively newer meaning of the word, I promise you, your mind will get the tickles. Just like mine did when I first performed this substitution operation on a song by Leonard Cohen, “Came So Far For Beauty”. After the substitution, it becomes, in Leonard’s infamous monotone: “I came…so far…for boo-tay!” Funny stuff. Try it yourself if you don’t believe me.
Then there are the Observation Mind Ticklers. These consist of observations you make subconsciously and then spend long hours pondering about. Observations that, most likely, make you feel like you’re So Smart for make that particular observation. One such observation could very well be how a person’s general behaviour could very well be a shockingly good meter of whether or not the person in question has worms, and if so, what kind or worms. Once the observation is made, it would also be practical to think of a person, any person in general, and make a suitable judgment regarding his/her worminess. Not only is this topic a great Tickler, it’s also one of the more believable attempts to explain the vast and currently prevailing Idiocy that the World has been stuck in for a while now. In fact, if you have the time and the inclination to do so, you can even attribute different levels of idiocy to different amounts and varieties of worms. I know this because once upon a time, I, yes, I, having the time and inclination, penned a lengthy thesis on this very subject! In fact, I wrote it for this site, but eventually deemed it too ‘improper’ to post it. Strange, but true.
THE END. I hope you enjoyed that. If you'd like to read more, there's plenty available in the archives