i'm a weirdo. what the hell am i doing here?

Yesterday night I was in kind of a strange mood. It was about 11:40, and I was sort of waiting around without anything to do until midnight, which is when Cheap Seats is on. (It was one of their spelling bee episodes, which I tend to enjoy.) So I was lying on my bed, not really doing anything, when I started thinking about the random ways that I used to entertain myself when I was a kid. So I decided to try hanging upside down off the edge of my bed and then sitting up suddenly, to see if I still enjoyed the weird head rush feeling that you get when your inner ear gets confused, or the blood rushes back out of your head, or whatever the hell the physiology of the head rush is. Anyway, it wasn't actually that pleasant anymore. Then I tried doing what my gym teacher used to call a "forward roll," and nearly fell of the bed. I think the combination of the two gave me a headache. I'm getting old. So then I decided to lie down for a little bit, and I thought of this other thing that I used to like to do when I was a kid, which was to close my eyes, and then press on the corner of one of my eyeballs and sort of wiggle it around. When I do that, I see a blue halo in the opposite corner of my eye. I don't know if that's something everyone sees. I could ask around, but I'm not really sure if there's a good way to bring that up in a conversation. When I was younger, I asked my mom what the deal was with the blue halos, but the only answer I remember her giving was, "Don't do that."

So after Cheap Seats was over I decided to try to harness the power of the internet to figure out why blue halos appear when I close my eyes and wiggle my eyeball around. I haven't yet been able to answer that question, but I did learn that there is a filmmaker named Stan Brakhage, who apparently makes films about "hypnagogic vision," i.e. what you see when your eyes are closed. At this point I don't really know any more about the physiology of hypnagogic vision than I do about the physiology of the upside-down head rush, but maybe later I'll try doing some Google or PubMed searches.

When I eventually went to bed, after a little bit more exploration of my hypnagogic vision, I started thinking about these bizarre daydreams that I used to have when I was lying in bed in the morning as a little kid. I was probably about 5 at the time. I remember I used to pretend that my bed was a hammock, slung between two trees on the deserted tropical island that I inhabited without a care in the world. In retrospect, that part of the daydream was probably inspired by a movie called Daffy Duck's Fantastic Island, which I used to watch obsessively, recorded off the TV on a Betamax cassette. Anyway, the odd thing about my fantasy island was that the only other inhabitants were cartoon versions of The Jackson Five. I don't really remember much about my imagined interactions with the Jackson Five, but I think that I pictured myself as being a kind of Michael substitute - the youngest, and yet the soul of the group. Maybe we had adventures, but really I only remember pretending that I was lying in the hammock. I guess even then I was pretty lazy. Anyway, I had pretty much forgotten all about this until yesterday, when I realized that I have apparently been a weirdo since a fairly early age.