Chain of Thought

I like to think of it as a chain of thought rather than a train of thought. My trains always seem to derail. Chains are stronger. I do sometimes think my links are a bit unusual.

Mostly after conversations like this:

About remembering 1531…

Me: Oh, that’s easy to remember! It’s just like our phone number when we first moved to Bossier! (1540)

DH: What? How does that work?

Me: It just does. (I eventually explained it out on paper, but I’ve never met someone who just got things like this, without thinking about it. Even my sister, with her Ph.D. in math, doesn’t ‘do’ numbers like I do.)

Or this, about remembering codes for gated communities…

DH: What’s the gate code for Rosedale?

Me: It’s Christmas Eve eve.

DH: Huh?

Me: 1223.

Or remembering phone numbers…

Me: His cell phone number is easy, it’s the mall.

I was in pizza delivery for eight years, numbers and places are readily interchangeable. Especially since I delivered on an air force base, where the buildings are numbered and street addressed.

Maybe it’s just some mnemonic device I created for myself that has nothing to do with how my chain of thought works, but they seem so related to me sometimes.

I’m constantly playing a pseudo-game of six degrees of separation in my head. I can’t help it. It just happens. I’ll demonstrate. I asked my darling husband for a random word. And he picked…

Delinquent.

Which, unfortunately, makes me think of my brother right off. And that opens a whole can of worms that I never even saw coming. I’m actually considering asking for a new word, but no. I’ll take what I got.

So. Delinquent. My brother. Who, at 13, was busted for growing pot in an upstairs room at our parents’ house. Which leads me to the first time I smoked pot, with a high school buddy of mine. Who was just as scared of X-Files as I was. I was mighty scared of el chupacabra. Not as much as I am of, say, Bigfoot and aliens.

I think because of this: Once, when I was four, I was riding in the car one night because sometimes that was the only way my sister would get to sleep, my mom asked me if I thought there was anyone else out there, as she looked at the sky. I had never considered this before. I’d been reading for two years by then, so it was a possibility, but I’d never thought about it. And just from the little bit of the world that I’d experienced so far, I was afraid. I was afraid because people are so cruel to each other, of course they’d be just as cruel to strangers from the sky. And what if they didn’t like it? What could happen to us then? To this day I can’t watch Fire In The Sky in the dark. Even Men in Black gives me some mild heebie jeebies.

So delinquent makes me think of xenophobia. And that was the journey.

Somehow this post didn’t come out quite as I intended, but then, they rarely do. That’s why I try not to intend, because I never know where I’m going to lead myself.

Do you ever wonder how your chains of thought compare to everyone else’s? Anybody else ever get called ‘Rain Man?’