"Who touched that last?" and other odd questions.

So, sometimes, I let my mind wander. I have always done that. Okay, not sometimes; I let the thing wander wherever it wants, whenever it wants. Last night, I was at a rock show in Pomona at the Fox Theater. While the first band was setting up, I was eyeballing around the place.

The ceilings were really high, and there was some rather ornately designed blocks toward the top of the walls. As I stared at the blocks, which were probably seventy feet off the floor, I had a weird thought: Who was the last person to actually be up there and touch that specific one? Or the one next to it. Or that other one, about ten feet down. Maybe, they hadn’t been touched since the place went up, which is a long, long time ago.

I often wonder about things that simply cannot be answered. Maybe I’ll see an old, rusty car in a field, and wonder who took the keys out of the ignition for the last time. When was the last time the engine was shut down? What position are the pistons in? Would it start, right now, if someone gave it a little TLC? How many miles on the thing? Was it discarded prematurely? Was there still life left in it when it was abandoned? Small things like that plague my mind at times.

Sometimes I wonder things like this: What if someone gathered up every pee I had ever taken, and measured it? How many gallons have I peed in my thirty-six years? While that number can surely be estimated, no one will ever know the true value. That somewhat bothers me, and I don’t know why. Another pondering: What would it feel like if I were forced to endure all the pain I had felt in one year, in a single instant? Would I survive that if it was a relatively decent year? Would it kill me instantly? What if all the pain were localized to one place, like say, my big toe, or my elbow? Just for an instant. Fractions of a second. What the hell would happen?

Death is intriguing to me, too, as it is for many of us. So many questions! How long does it take the average embalmed body to completely turn to dust? I honestly have no clue, and I really wonder. Does the last heartbeat feel differently than the billions of others? I guess if it’s a heart-attack it would. After death, I mean directly after, how long are we still feeling stuff? These are things I want to know.

Does your mind go to these places sometimes? It doesn’t bother me that mine does, but I’m not sure what good it does to constantly wonder about unanswerable things. I guess it keeps the ole gray matter chooglin’, though. I guess it does at that.