My Fat Heart

I was recently sensitive to nonconscious pieces in this collection of ours, usually of little importance in the Scheme Of Things, usually overlooked. Hitherto, my famous sensitivity only extended as far as fleas landing on dogs — gallant compared to most meat-heads, but narrowly confined to traditional notions of consciousness. It's all very well and good to feel that Thin-Skin Sonic Boom — Poor dog, poor flea; poor you, poor me! — for things that are aware of their existence (awareness = sensitivity potential), but when it comes to things of wood and plastic, or gauche or steel, we have more than a little trouble caring. After all, our concern could never be reciprocated, or even acknowledged, were we to extend a hand of empathy their way. Now, this may be an insurmountable barrier to the image-conscious, but for me, it's an admirable challenge to rise to.

My first tentative steps into super-hypersensitivity were easy enough — I envisaged life as a plank and lay on the floor all afternoon — but when I began to think about hammers and axes and nails, I hit a wall. How can I be sensitive if I'm always being bashed by or into things? It was no good trying to convince myself that these thoughts, or indeed any thoughts, never crossed these emotionless objects — logic hath no place in heart! I was beginning to understand why this was such a criminally unexplored area. To cheer myself up, I spent the remaining daylight weeping over collarless Rex and a magnifying glass.

The breakthrough came when I attempted to get to the heart of a pane of glass — As long as I'm not broken, I'm a success! —, which yielded an improbably elating sadness distinct from my knowledge of Facts. Yes, we were both transparent (fragile, too), but I realised that a lack of emotions means that it's up to me to pick up the slack. In the eyes of the world, it matters not who's weeping, as long as someone is. Everybody — nay, everything — needs understanding, needs the feeling that it/he/her is not alone in this hurtling void, that someone is out there, shedding salt for their predicament or offering arms to fall into. And if everyone had that, hey, maybe there wouldn't be so many prob-a-lems!