The Powder of Imagination

Imagine you are walking through the Sahara desert. Not the Laurence-of-Arabia Sahara desert of dramatic, chiaroscuro dunes and hunky sheiks on camels. A Valley-of-the-Kings desert,  bleak stony ground punctuated with tumbled boulders beneath which scorpions have taken refuge from the merciless, midday inferno of blinding sunlight. (This is actually what most of the Sahara looks like. I know because I’ve seen it from a plane that couldn’t fly higher than a few hundred feet due to a crack in the pilot’s windshield that had been patched with duct tape.)

Now imagine you come across a cave-like opening between two boulders. You take out your trusty flashlight and creep cautiously into the cool darkness, where you find ancient, hand-hewn stairs leading downward. As you descend, the walls become smooth and decorated with flaking murals depicting stylized images of brown-skinned people wearing elaborate wigs. You realize  you have stumbled across an undiscovered Egyptian rock tomb from the late New Kingdom period and could be on the verge of becoming the David Beckham of archeology. (You’ll have to imagine you’re an archeologist to do this.)

The only sounds as you descend are the thundering of your heart and the occasional slithering of snakes disturbed by  the vibrations of your footfalls. You clamber over a rubble of stone blocks, remnants of the wall that once sealed the passage, left here by the grave robbers who were the last people to set foot in this tomb three thousand years before. On the other side, the burial chamber is all but empty. Only a few fragments of smashed pottery and the shattered lid of the sarcophagus give evidence of the room’s original grandeur. The defiled mummy of the grave’s original occupant lies at your feet. In the feeble beam of your flashlight, its desiccated features leer at you in an eerie parody of greeting. Inside the skull, a tiny heap of dust is all that remains of what was once a living human mind. (You’ll have to imagine you have Superman’s X-ray vision to see it.)

That little mound of brain powder? That’s what the inside of my head looks like today. My imagination has temporarily dried up.  So instead of subjecting you to anymore random rambling through the crumbling remains of what was once a thriving community of neurons, I’m going to share with you my go-to blog at times like these:

http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.com/

Enjoy.