The Trouble With The Thing

or The Unbearable Weight of Thingness

Photo by eberhard 🖐 grossgasteiger on Unsplash

The Thing has been giving me some trouble.

The other day it woke me up by sitting on my chest. It was too early to get up but I couldn’t stay in bed and enjoy the best sleep of the day with it sitting on me like a jerk. As soon as I got up it left but then found me again when I was making coffee downstairs. An hour later when I thought I was alone in my car, I felt its dark, dank presence descend onto the back of my neck. It had been flaring up lately so I did what any Suffering School student in my situation would do, I made my way to the Unbearable Weight of Thingness support group that meets regularly in the school basement.

Once I was checked in and seated the teachers went over the basics with our group. I already knew most of them but it never hurts to have a refresher. Our group was especially large that day and although I recognized a few familiar faces in the crowd, most were strangers. Either way, we had this in common, we were all having issues with our Things.

Everyone has a Thing, our teachers reminded us, even regular people who aren’t in Suffering School.

A manual called Introduction to the Basics of Thingness was passed out to each participant, along with pencils for any notetaking.

Once settled, we began by repeating the following phrase written on the chalk board:

The Thing is not a thing, it is a Nothing

 Our teachers had us use the Suffering School pronunciation, No-thing, where we stress the first syllable and emphasize the long O sound to make it sound like no-thing.

After repeating this slowly several times the teachers remind us of everything the Thing is not:

It is not your friend

It is not helpful

It is not a truth teller

It is not made up

It does not exist anywhere but where you are

It does not take vacations or sick days

It does not sleep

And finally—it will never fully go away

But, not to worry! Suffering School has been teaching Thing Management since its earliest days and has built over the years a comprehensive system that is both user friendly and pet friendly.

But, before we moved onto to the practical steps, we had to agree to the Three D’s of Dealing with the Thing:

1)Don’t Deny It—admit it, you have one.

2)Don’t Domesticate It—you do not want it getting all comfortable living with you because it will try to run everything.

3)Don’t Debate It—Try not to engage intellectually with it since it will use circular arguments that will have you questioning the reality of everything.

Once we agreed to the 3D’s we were ready to go forward.

Session 1—Thing Management: Arts and Crafts

In this session we were given paper, crayons and squid ink, and told to draw a cartoon illustrating our day so far. I drew myself lying in bed, then making coffee, and then driving in my car. When drawing the Thing, only the squid ink could achieve the heavy, opaque blackish-gray I was looking for. I used it to make a smudgy dark mark to signify when the Thing was sitting on my chest, or hovering around me. Above my head I drew a thought bubble just like you would see in regular cartoons and tried to remember what I had been thinking as I lay in bed, or made coffee or drove in my car. I couldn’t remember the exact thoughts, only how I felt, which was heavy and sad. So I drew in the thought bubble a smudgy dark mark that looked like a smaller version of the Thing in the bubble above my head.

Before we learned the reason for this exercise, we were asked to share our cartoons with the rest of the group. When we did this we noticed the one thing all our cartoons had in common, in each scene where the Thing was present our thoughts were at their darkest and we felt at our lowest.

 We were then reminded of this quote: For my thoughts are not your thoughts.

This quote represents the exact opposite of what the Thing wants you to believe,

According to our teachers, the Thing wants you to think its thoughts are your thoughts, and even more, that you are your thoughts.

A trap!  Our teachers warn.

That was the bad news. The good news was the squid ink began to slowly disappear from the drawings. And when I looked at my own cartoon instead of seeing the Thing sitting on my chest while I was lying in bed, I saw just me lying in bed, and just me making coffee, and just me driving in my car listening to music and I thought to myself, that’s a nice bed, and a pleasant kitchen to make coffee in, and good music to listen to while diving a car that was not a bad car. I realized that minus the Thing, my day had been pleasant and peaceful actually. This was the same when I looked at the other cartoons, I saw that most people’s days without the Thing looming overhead weren’t so bad.

We took a little break after this to practice the refutations we say to our Things while looking into a mirror:

“You are not the boss of me.”

“You don’t know jack”

“You have an abysmal track record of predictions”

Then we did a little role playing. One person, facing another person, voices the ideas of the Thing. The second person, while looking straight into the other person’s eyes, slaps the person smartly on the cheek while saying “snap out of it!”

This exercise is both exhilarating and liberating.

Session 2--- How to Evaluate Thoughts and Recognize Where They Originate From:

For this lesson our teachers put on a play because, as everyone knows, the play is the thing wherein to catch the thoughts of the Thing.

The Mousetrap: A Play in Two Acts With Zero Dialogue

Act One opens with a mouse (played by friend and former Suffering School Jail cellmate Denver) who, while asleep in a bed made from a sardine tin, is visited by a Thing. The Thing (played by an amorphous black cloud) first hovers near the end of the bed and then settles quietly on the mouse’s chest. When this happens the mouse’s breathing goes from light and steady to  labored. His eyes open and letting out a big sigh, he gets up from bed and shuffles slowly into the kitchen to make coffee. While hand grinding the coffee bean the Thing returns and sits on the Mouse’s head, covering his eyes so that he forgets to grind, and forgets that he’s making coffee and instead, stares at the wall where he has hung a framed a two cent stamp. Later, while driving the matchbox car he made himself and listening to banjo music the Thing reappears and covers the mouse’s ears so that the music has to pass through it first before entering the mouse’s ears. At this point a spotlight shines on the mouse’s face and a tiny tear is seen falling from the mouse’s eye.

Seeing the little mouse sad makes us in the audience sad too. We don’t need to hear the thoughts expressed out loud to witness the damaging effect they are having on the mouse. We want to shout from our seats—Forget the Thing! Look at your life! Your bed, how ingenious! When it’s time to make it in the morning, all you need do is roll up the top of the tin. And what about your car? How impressive, you made it from an old matchbox and you can actually drive it!   And the framed two cent stamp? Worth thousands now!

But we don’t say that because we know about the fourth wall and we know that Denver has to act as if we, the audience, are not there. We get that and we don’t mind, but we do mind that his character, the mouse is unaware of the malicious presence of the Thing.

He just doesn’t see it. We, of course, can see the amorphous blob, but the mouse cannot. This makes us crazy and we forget about the fourth wall. It’s on your head now! We yell from our seats. But the mouse does nothing about it, not because of the fourth wall, but because he doesn’t know that the Thing is a thing.

I am not what I am, says Iago

And that right there is the essence of the Thing, or as our teachers call it, The Thingness of the Thing. It does not want the mouse, or any of us to know that it exists.  

Act Two begins with the mouse pulled over on the side of the road. He spots a billboard in front of him. “Are you a mouse feeling trapped?” The Thing suddenly lowers itself over the front windshield of the car in an attempt to cover up the words of the billboard. Luckily, the mouse is able to see through it to read, Get the help you need by calling this number.

The mouse reaches for his phone.

At this, the lights dim and the curtain closes.

We in the audience sit in the dark in awkward silence until the lights go back on. It was only then that we saw, sitting among us in our circle in the school basement, the mouse.

He, like all of us there, had an awareness of his Thing and was ready to seek help.  

At this, we erupted into applause and did what we always do at the end of a Suffering School play, we had a group hug, all of us and Denver too, who was still in character. We did not hug the amorphous blob who played the Thing because it was still in character too. And blobs hate hugging.

Knowing that thoughts of the Thing are not your thoughts is only the first step in recovery from Thing abuse. The next step is to look at the feelings.

How many of you have had feelings of impending doom? Our teachers wanted a show of hands.

All sixty-five million of us who were in the meeting that day raised our hands. I was glad to see that I wasn’t the only one.

These feelings, we learned, are the calling card of the Thing.

Impending Doom, or the Thing’s Rotten Fruit: How to Minimize Not Synthesize, was a PowerPoint presentation put together by our teachers. Like most PowerPoints presentations no one knew what the title meant, but fortunately we had Orson Wells talking us through the slides.

There are certain activities that are toxic, TOXIC, I tell you! to the Thing, Orson intoned. And doing them will effectively drive a Thing away. The first of these is dance. Not any kind of dance but specifically the dance done by a group of people in celebration. We call this dance by its name, the very name which strikes fear into the empty space where a heart would be in every Thing throughout history. What you see before you is the legendary “Dance of the Impending Doomslayer”, Orson pronounced grandly as he clicked to slide after slide showing happy groups of dancers throughout the world.

The next set of slides zoomed in on close-ups of the dancing crowds. Orson clicked on a few until we saw the pattern—all the close-ups showed people of all ages laughing.

Laughing is nails on a chalkboard to the Thing. Orson said this while scratching his nails on the chalkboard. We all cringed in unison. If I can make all 65 million of you cringe at that sound, think of what the laughter of one baby can do. We did think about it, then we laughed just to make sure no Things were around.

Can I get a hug? Orson asked from the corner of the room in a small wavering voice.

How could we not hug him? Especially after seeing how lonely he had been in Citizen Kane.

Hugging is kryptonite for a Thing! Orson said in his regular, booming voice.

Now you will have to synthesize what you have learned to minimize the Thing. So go ahead and do what you’ve been taught.

At this, all 65 million of us performed The Dance of the Impending Doomslayer.

After a two minute rest period we were asked to respond to a brief survey where we had to rate the PowerPoint presentation. Most gave it between 4 and 5 stars five stars, but all 65 million of us reported zero feelings of impending doom while implementing the program.

As effective as the program is there are rare cases when dancing, laughing and hugging is not possible (or appropriate). When this happens it is necessary to go to the Thunderdome to fight mano a mano.

Only you and your Thing are allowed in the ring. The teachers can coach from the sidelines but it is up to you to choose your own weaponry and employ your own strategy. The last time I was there I put a lot of thought into choosing the weapons that could inflict the most amount of damage. Since we are only allowed to bring three into the ring I had to limit myself to a giant foam finger, a pack of balloon animals made up mostly of dachshunds and poodles, and a Slip ‘N Slide.

Unfortunately the next part of the battle must remain cloaked in mystery because what happens in the Thunderdome stays in the Thunderdome simply because it does not translate into normal English. But you are allowed to visualize!

And if you do visualize, imagine the Thing, heavy, dark, and stone serious, confronted with light, air, and whatever the opposite of serious is.

Angels can fly because they take themselves lightly, said Chesterton.

 And things can’t win because they take themselves too seriously, added Orson, raising his foam finger and taking a running start toward the Slip ‘N Slide.

Photo by Tim Zänkert on Unsplash