anatomy of a chaos suck
Saturday 25 October 2008 | 3 cookies in the jar
So I have this theory. It concerns a phenomenon most often witnessed where humans are gathered in groups: like, in parking lots, or at parties, or around photocopiers: I call it the chaos suck. The chaos suck is a brief manifestation of concatenating micro-disasters—not unlike a dust devil, maybe, or a poltergeist, only, per Lorenz attractors, it’s amplified with each iteration until it can end in, say, one car rearending another, or an innocent bystander getting a black eye.
Because small changes in initial conditions amplify over time, especially given a number of dynamic agents, the chaos suck can start out simply enough: a dropped object goes rolling across the floor. Someone bends to pick it up, bumping into someone else, who then drops what s/he was holding. Then someone accidentally walks into that person, who was also bent over and didn’t notice that the door was opening…and so forth, u.s.w., until you have a fifty-car pileup, or until the lasagne’s been dropped face-down, and everyone’s hysterically laughing and gasping: What the hell just happened?! You get it a lot when people are under pressure, or otherwise tightly contained—e.g., Zen centers—and perhaps the strangest thing about the chaos suck is that, from our finite perspective anyway, the snowballing micro-disasters fast become unrelated to one another. People may fall over and drop things though they’re nowhere in the line of fire. It’s as if the fabric of the universe had admitted a rent in normal processing, and then mischievous faeries had gleefully detected this and all raced over to that tear: Hey everyone, it’s a chaos suck! Let’s throw random shit around!
(NB that I sometimes privately thought of the Young Monk as a one-person chaos suck, innocently trailing broken objects and mislaid pieces of paper behind him. But I was the same way in my twenties; he’ll outgrow it eventually, I thought to myself six autumns ago, in the Oakland airport where he had just discovered that he was on time for his flight, albeit a flight that was leaving from SFO. As he turned away from the ticket counter, his shoulders slumping in his tweed jacket, I intuited immediately what had gone wrong, him suddenly looking, despite or perhaps because of the necktie, like a small boy, in the way that men with a lot of braggadaccio can abruptly deflate into total dejection.)
So last night circa 2 am, the Brujo and I somehow created our own modest domestic chaos suck. It happened like this, only in about two minutes’ time.
• I was dreaming that the Cool Psychiatrist and her girlfriend were offering me delicious glasses of limeaid and iced tea, and I was so appreciative and so thirsty! that I woke up, my mouth open and my throat parched.
• Pye was yowling at the bedroom door. When I opened it to stumble toward the water sources, she bolted inside.
• Ineffectually, still half-asleep, I tried to catch her; made groping passes in the darkness but she eluded pursuit, invisible black cat; as I grabbed air in one final lunge, she hurtled desperately onto the bed, which is weird, because she usually wants help getting her chubby body up there. But this time she launched herself all by herself right at the sleeping Brujo, landing on him with a trilling grunt, or a grunty trill, some feline combo of mrrrt and oooof.
• The Brujo half-sat up and tried to speak, but his face was still asleep. “Wha the fuh?! Why’d you do that?!“
• Ignoring this I grabbed the cat and hauled her out with me, then got my glass of water.
• When I returned to the bedroom, the B. was putting on sweatpants, preparatory for a middle-on-the-night nerve-settling cigarette. There was an angry vibe in the room which puzzled me, so I stood there uncertainly in the doorway, gulping water and trying to decide if I should apologize. I apologize too much as it is, and I don’t know why the cat did that anyway, maybe she’s cold or something, I—
• At which point the Brujo, who had started walking toward the door in the dark, slammed into me, our foreheads and chests colliding, my glass of water going everywhere, and a funny sound coming from his still-asleep face, something like Whuuuuuuuaa!
• Stunned and with tears in my eyes, I interpreted this sound as accusatory and fled to my study, shaken and wet.
• After a moment, the Brujo opened the office door cautiously. “Are you okay? Why was Pyewacket on the bed?!”
• Interpreting this further as accusatory, I responded by shouting icily: “I JUST. WANTED. A DRINK. OF WATER! AND THE CAT. RAN INTO. THE BEDROOM. AND JUMPED. ON THE BED! I DON’T. KNOW. WHY. OKAY!?!”
The Brujo stood there a moment longer, befuddled. “Why are you yelling at me?”
“Because you’re mad at me!”
“Well, I thought you threw the cat at me.”
“Why would I do that?!”
Pause. “I don’t know. I’m gonna go smoke.”
Petulantly I got back into bed; and maybe sulked in my sodden t-shirt for as long as ten seconds before I started giggling, as I suddenly saw it all from his groggy male perspective: Mysteriously enraged-in-the-middle-of-the-night girlfriend 1) throws cat at me, 2) bodyslams me, 3) pours water all over me, and then 4) yells at me—and the whole time, I’m still asleep, and I have no idea what’s going on.
By the time he came back to bed we were both laughing. “I didn’t really have any explanation for why you would throw the cat at me, but that’s what I thought had just happened. I was convinced of it.”
“I just wanted a glass of water!”
“And you have every right to have a glass of water. But why did she jump up on me like that?”
“It was an evasive maneouvre—maybe she thought you would save her?”
But there was no reply, because the Brujo was already asleep again; and I lay there trying not to shake the bed with stifled laughter because I couldn’t help thinking of the Crazy Cat Lady on The Simpsons; which made it all that much worse.
This morning the Brujo has a bump on his forehead and I have a split, bruised right knuckle, like I tried to punch someone out. We sat in the sun in the backyard, him with coffee and me with a giant glass of water (still thirsty) and parsed the mysterious 2 am events.
“It’s not often we interact that way.”
“What, you mean, with physical violence?”
“Yeah, that’s pretty much a first.”
3 cookies in the jar
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I have not laughed this hard since the Brujo accidentally buttered Pyewacket. Of course, the laughter starts when You see it all from the view of the startled sleeper. Every time I read that list of actions [’1) throws cat at me…’] I nearly injure myself with mirth.
La la la chaos!
•
Chortling narrator: Funny you say that, because I thought of the cat-buttering episode too, and wondered if in fact Pye is the constant factor in all this sucking chaos…!
Chaos suck? WHOA YOU JUST EXPLAINED SO MANY MADDENINGLY INEXPLICABLE EPISODES FROM MY LIFE, THEREBY BLOWING MY MIND. HARD.
Hysterical—truly sublime.
Still….
You did name your cat Pyewacket….That seems to be inviting a kind of trouble that can only be magnified as we draw closer to the witching hour.
•
Complicit narrator: OMG, you’re right; I never even thought of that.