On Christmas Eve there is a mad rush to all the centers of the shopping world, a last-minute stampede of desperate consumerism. I went to the local Wal-Mart during this rush, on an errand. Tired of running around and avoiding people, I sat down in a bench right in front of the long row of checkout counters, and I just watched.

People are fascinating beings in an everyday habitat such as this. There were the fast walkers; these were people on a Mission, to find Something Special. There were amblers with shopping carts, sometimes alone, sometimes with one or two other people who always walked a couple of steps behind. There were the mothers or fathers with little kids orbiting the slow-moving cart, some inside, others zigzagging about.

Sitting back and taking a wide-angle view of Wal-Mart allowed me to see it as a huge, living organism.

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It’s FINALS WEEK and I am procrastinating like hell. Not that anyone cares; no one reads these things at all. But anyway, here’s a deep thought.

I shudder to think of what would happen if I ever became cool enough for someone to want to meet with me and interview me. In the best-case scenario, the writer would write this about our first interview:

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This will be an interesting counterpoint to my last musing, because right now I am beginning to question to what extent I do in fact “create my own reality.”

For the uninitiated, the idea of “creating your own reality” is popular in the New Age. This is an unfortunate fact, because it’s a very abused idea. The problem is in its simplicity. If I create my own reality, what about other people’s realities? How do they weave together? What if two realities are oppositional in nature? Further, what is the “I” that creates reality? On what level do I participate in creating my own reality as well as any kind of collective reality, if I do in fact have this capability? What mechanism makes all of this possible?

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