This morning I awoke from a dream and wrote down the words “scrouch pendi” on a pad. It seems I had invented a new dog breed while I was sleeping, and I was telling someone about this right before I opened my eyes. Throughout the morning, I laughed whenever I thought about the new pup my psyche had conjured.
Wherever did this name come from, I wondered. Had I heard the words before in conversation or had I read them online or in a book? Curious, I looked up the word “scrouch” and discovered that, according to Urban Dictionary, scrouching is the act of crying, “usually excessively, after having an orgasm” and then “instantly falling asleep” afterwards. “Pendi,” I read in Wikipedia, “is a village in the municipality of Monidigah in the Lerik Rayon of Azerbaijan.”
Which got me to thinking about the mind and its inscrutable mysteries. I know so little about what animates me, really, and, just when I think I understand something true about myself, the knowing evaporates. Sometimes I am startled by the idea that I am utterly alone in my thoughts and that no one else can ever enter inside them.
These days I find I am hungry to understand the mind of the person who commandeered Malaysia Airlines Flight 370; the mind of the man who killed three soldiers, wounded sixteen other people, and then took his own life; the mind of the youth who in a minutes-long rampage stabbed twenty-one students and one adult. How can I even begin to understand the thinking of another, though, when I don’t even know my own mind?
ruminationville 