The Who's Who of Deja Vu

Just so you're aware, no one did "well" on this topic. Some people went for the low hanging fruit. Like referencing what deja vu is in three words. Boo. Others tried to cheat with their cheating thoughts and tricksy, dirty, rotten tactics and use Matrix references in hopes to win my favor. As if. Some simply questioned the entire validity of the game, which is no way to win anything at all. Pshaw. Cassie did none of these things.

What Cassie did was introduce a far more likely explanation of deja vu up against my craziness. It's likely the real explanation for deja vu, if you want to be all sciency and pretend that imaginationing isn't any fun.

Is deja vu just a separate, unrelated memory somehow being called up during a completely novel experience? Somewhere in the memory center of the brain, it interprets new stimuli as old, but somewhere else in the brain, it knows this isn't quite right, pitting your thoughts against themselves so you feel that twilight sensation of being between memory worlds--between the is and the never was.

In short, is the memory just filed wrong? Is that all it is? Is the all too common sense of re-experiencing simply the brain misfiring? Probably. Odds are it's just some synapse somewhere telling me that I've been here before, when I most certainly have not. Science hasn't answered the question as to what deja vu is yet. They aren't quite 100%. But who says science should be trusted? Science is just organized study wholly dependent on the electrical impulses a scientist's brain feeds him. Sight. Touch. Taste. Hearing. Critical thinking. Bollocks like that. It is the classification of a world based on a specific lens: the only lens we have available to us.

But don't spend too much time wondering if there exists concepts and realities parallel and yet separate from our own: a new lens. I expect that's how you go insane or go genius. And I don't want to be either.

Cassie's Three Words or Less on DEJA VU

- "Memory Filed Wrong" -

Total wins: 1

 

Deja Vu

Being a highly trained clinical psychoanalyst, I can speak about déjà vu and you should believe everything I say. Right, then. Moving on.

When it happens I ignore it like I ignore a clearly homeless person asking for money. Déjà vu actually has a lot of similarities with homeless persons. It scares me a little because I don’t know what it’s capable of or what it portends. If I don’t pay it any mind, maybe it will stop bothering me. If I pretend it doesn’t exist, maybe it’ll stop existing. If I give it attention, maybe it’ll lock eyes with me and follow me home and live in my pantry, and then how will I get to my soup?

Déjà vu in French literally means “already seen.” There have been studies on this thing and there have been pretty much zero findings about it. It occurs most in age groups 15-25. About 70% of the population reports to having felt it at one point or another. It’s been known to take place directly preceding seizures. That’s it.  That’s all we know about it. No one can really figure out what déjà vu is. Theories range from re-living an experience from a past life to the brain suddenly and briefly being unable to distinguish the past from the present.

If you’ve experienced it (which I’m sure you’re a liar if you say you haven’t), you know it can be a fairly powerful sensation. What’s it for? Why does it happen? I remember my first encounter with it as a tiny child boy, and I can honestly say I toyed with the idea that I was a pre-cog for a month or so.

I was pretty young. I’ll say 7-years-old, although to be straight with you, I don’t have any real idea how old I was. I just know I wasn’t very aged. My mom had taken me to the church of a friend of hers. A church I knew nothing about, had never visited, and knew no one in. I was alone and uncomfortable as a man with too few hairs spoke to me about things God-related. I listened about as well as a 7-year-old boy can, which is to say half-heartedly. As the pastor rolled on, his words became more and more familiar. The sense of familiarity grew as he continued. Each syllable seemed more identifiable than the last until the sense of déjà vu was so strong that I wondered if he was repeating a stock sermon he stole from another minister that maybe I had heard elsewhere.

The unique thing about this particular instance of déjà vu is that there was a climax instead of the usual simple drop off. Eventually the sense that I had experienced this before and the reality of what I was actively experiencing intersected. The man was speaking about Noah’s Ark. About animals and how there were two of each. And milliseconds before he said it aloud, I said it quietly to myself: “No amount of air freshener could’ve made that boat smell any better.”

It’s benign and probably meaningless and it has never happened to me since, but the déjà vu was so powerful, I think perhaps there might be something slightly more fantastic to the story than we can see on the surface. Or maybe not. Memory certainly could have skewed the experience. Maybe I did hear those exact words elsewhere before and that’s why I knew they were coming. But whatever the reason, déjà vu doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t serve a purpose, and if it’s indicative of some kind of neuroinstability, then 70% of the population is at least somewhat off-kilter in their brainthoughts. Which wouldn’t surprise me.

Maybe not more likely, but definitely more fun is the potential that wherever déjà vu comes from is the same place that the placebo effect comes from. The mind has the potential to, when tricked, put an insomniac to sleep , relieve chronic pain (or at leastplay a significant role in its relief), or even work as a fairly effective anti-depressant.

Is it possible that our minds not only have the potential to overcome neurological and physiological hurdles, but also tap in to a collective consciousness of some kind wherein one does not specifically read minds, but instead understands intent of its counterparts? If déjà vu is the sensation that you’ve been somewhere or seen something or heard something before, is the familiarity caused because another piece of the hivemind is the one who has experienced it and you’re merely tuning in to their reminiscence?

Probably not. But I’ve been wrong before.

- The White Rabbit

Your Three Words on Deja Vu

It's time for another exciting edition of Opinions in Three Words or Less! Today's topic: deja vu. Please, please let me know if you are experiencing deja vu while reading the topic for the latest O3WL. That would be just...the best.

It's time for another exciting edition of Opinions in Three Words or Less! Today's topic: deja vu. Please, please let me know if you are experiencing deja vu while reading the topic for the latest O3WL. That would be just...the best.

Space Log Jammin'

I'm not saying it was right. I'm not saying I'm still thinking these thoughts. I'm just saying that at the time, Lola Bunny was a special kind of woman. A kind of woman more like a rabbit than most women. A kind of woman who existed much less than most women typically do. The kind of woman who was super good at basketball and the second best player on the Looney Toons team behind Michael Jordan. So I suppose that means she was by some kind of broken transitive property almost as good as Michael Jordan at basketball. She was an independent lady of class and station who would mostly certainly not abide a man calling her "doll."

She was a special lady. And as a child, I remember having adult feelings for the drawing someone drew and the voice someone recorded into a microphone that was this pink were-rabbit. I blame this somewhat depraved weirdness primarily on Jessica Rabbit. She was the first cartoon character who made me feel feelings in my Bugle Boys. Also, I just realized they are both rabbit-related. And that's weird. And there's probably a conspiracy there, I bet. But that's an opinion for another day. For now, the winner, who won because apparently, he had the same problem I did, which means maybe my parents wasted all that children's therapy money, because IT'S NORMAL, MOM AND DAD, IT'S NORMAL.

Joey's Three Words or Less on SPACE JAM

- "Lola Bunny Boner" -

Total wins: 5

Space Jam

When was the last time you took a moment out of your day to truly appreciate just how very insane Space Jam was? At some point in probably roughly 1994-ish, a man with an idea stood in front of executives who have money and said “Michael Jordan plays basketball with Elmer Fudd and aliens and I think we should get Bill Murray” and the executives said “Here’s money to go make a movie where Michael Jordan plays basketball with Elmer Fudd and aliens and we’ll get you Bill Murray” and then it happened.

No, no. I don’t think you understand. The movie was made. People were paid to make a movie where Daffy Duck and Marvin the Martian post up on aliens who were real tiny but then got real big by sucking basketball powers out of real, actual NBA players who agreed to be a part of this insanity. Then the aliens used their new basketball powers to challenge the Looney Toons to basketball, lest they became amusement park slaves or something. And also Danny DeVito was their boss.

Space Jam was the reason I stayed in my terrible, terrible child basketball league where I never scored and couldn’t walk and dribble at the same time. Space Jam was indirectly responsible for parents that I hope weren’t mine leaning over to their spouses and saying in hushed whispers “At least Derek isn’t as dreadful as that blubber-fisted ham steak sloshing his way to defense. Oh what a surprise. He tripped on his cankle again.”

I played basketball because I loved the crap out of a movie whose star had the acting chops of a bean sprout. Bugs Bunny sinking a jump shot was all the inspiration my Dorito-addled brain needed to fabricate grandiose championship scenarios. They never happened, and I was worse at the sport than Newman from Seinfeld was, who was also in Space Jam, which is something I literally just now remembered.

This was the Avengers of the NBA/Cartoon world. Those aren’t two worlds that even make sense together, but it doesn’t matter, because it happened. And because Space Jam happened, I’m still holding my breath for Cyber Gridiron. Which is what I call my movie script about the Thundercats joining forces with the Manning brothers as they struggle to save Snarf from a team of cyborgs who choose to hang their hostage’s life on the outcome of an American football game, instead of just killing him outright, which I think we can get away with by attributing it to a “technical programming error in the equational logic circuits” of the cyborgs.

What I’m saying here is while quality filmmaking isn’t a thing Space Jam had, what it did have was an imaginative, meth-fueled script filled with originality. This was before the era when all Hollywood did was prequels, sequels, reboots, redos, rematches, and remixes, of course, so you can’t say this is the future of filmmaking and a return to unique scripting and great idea men. You might be able to say that about Rian Johnson’s Looper, which many critics actually are, but that’s an opinion for another day.

I just think that because we exist in a reality where Patrick Ewing, Charles Barkley, and Larry Bird can be put into the same hyper crazy stew as Yosemite Sam, Porky Pig, and Tweety Bird, we should be smiling at least eight hundred times more a day. And if you’re sad, remember that you can always watch Michael Jordan pretend to talk to Bugs Bunny. Be heartened in your heart that the reason Jordan delivered all his lines like he was unsure and afraid was because of many conversations like the following with director Joe Pytka that is 100% absolutely true:

Pytka: So, Michael, just stare at this tennis ball, deliver your lines, and we’ll put Bugs Bunny in later.

Jordan: He’s not there, Joe. Don’t be thick with me.

Putka: Right, yeah. Of course he isn’t, Michael. We’re putting him in the movie in post. He’s not there yet.

Jordan: Well why don’t we get him over here?

Pytka: He doesn’t exist, Michael.

Jordan: You say those lies to me one more time, Joe, and I’m going to hit you in the middle of your face.

Pytka: Okay, let’s not do that. We just really need you to deliver your lines to this tennis ball and pretend it’s Bugs Bunny.

Jordan: I don’t see why I should pretend.

Pytka: Yes, that’s great. Method acting. Love it.

Jordan: I’m not acting.

Pytka: What a pro!

Jordan: I want to go home.

Pytka: Action!

But really, guys. If something as batcrap crazy as Space Jam can happen, what other delightful, joyful things can happen? Live every day as though Space Jam could happen to you. I might go as far as to say that hope for a cancer cure is just around the bend, because we exist in a realm that thinks the NBA and the Looney Tunes should be merged together. I think I might just be willing to venture a guess that as a species, we’re right around the corner from becoming immune to AIDS. I might say with hopeful hesitation that because of Space Jam, I’ll live to see December 22 this year.

Wait, I’ve had a thought. What if it’s the opposite? What if instead of Space Jam as proof that life is beautiful, it’s actually proof that life is definitely not? Does the fact that Space Jam exists make this life worth living, or does it mean we should be holding weekly suicide luncheons?

Oh my dear sweet lemon juice concentrate. What if Space Jam was a foretelling of things to come? The marriage of two worlds that ought never be joined. The intimate binding of creature and man til they cannot be distinguished, one from the other. When the dimensional rift is complete, flame and suffering will be on what we sup, pain and smoke our currency. Before the great Old Ones we will bow on bended and bare knee across the broken glass of a landscape we no longer recognize. Though we will cry for deliverance and even death, we’ll receive neither, for the Ancient Ones do not know suffering, do not know pain, know nothing, in fact, but affliction. They will toy with us and we will shed tears if there remains but enough of our soul to weep. The tears will fall for our fallen brothers and sisters, but not because they’ve left us, no. We will weep jealously to join them in the Next, to whatever awaits beyond this torture, this pain, this unending anguish. Cry out, children of the damned. Cry out, children of the new world. Raise your voices and praise or curse the Black Goat, to Yog-Sothoth, to Azathoth,  for their tenants come, one by one, till our lives are blessedly snuffed like the pathetic flame of a waxless candle.

Ia! Ia! Cthulu Fthagn! Ph’nglui mglw’nfah Cthulu R’lyeh wgha’nagl fhtagn!

I’m pretty sure that message is in the subtext of Space Jam. I might be overthinking this.

- Blunderbuss Wilson

Your Three Words On: Space Jam

It's time for another exciting edition of Opinions in Three Words or Less! Today's topic: Space Jam. Y'know. Starring Michael Jordan. And Bugs Bunny. That Space Jam. Not what is probably an adult film by the same name which is decidedly not family friendly, I'm willing to bet. Don't Google that. I'm afraid to Google Space Jam now. I'm not going to Google just "Space Jam."

Urine and Winning. Like Peanut Butter and Celery.

Let us welcome a newcomer to the ranks of people who have made it their friggin life's mission to be the all-time high scorer and winner of all things O3WL. His name is Jessica, and I don't know why, being a girl, I have to use masculine pronouns to describe him, but those are the rules, so I'll do it. For him.

Now, while some of you may be all like "But I had the exact same opinion that he did!" (he being me, not Jessica), I'd like to remind you to shut your dumb ugly stupid mouth hole. It's not a contest of who can match my opinion. It's a purely subjective competition based solely around a single subject and that subject is me. Winning is about as random as roulette, only you have a better chance of winning if you're clever instead of only lucky. I wouldn't call this one clever. Just correct. So very, unwaveringly correct.

You see, you shouldn't poop in the urinal. I once saw a turd in a urinal and I felt like I had witnessed an amputee orphan being thrown into a river. It's just a violation of every decent thing the world has to offer. And in three simple words, I think Jessica really told us all how to be better people. He has shown us the way, I think, in a succinct way that only O3WL can really draw out of the masses.

Folks? Don't poop in the urinal. When you cut someone off on the freeway? You just pooped in that guy's urinal. When you cut in line? Poo. In the urinal. When you tell your grandma to go die already because the snickerdoodles aren't as snickerdoodly as lat time? You dropped a deuce in her urinal. When someone at work just gets your gosh dern goat and you turn around and you put a dinner fork right in the soft flesh of their upper thigh? A whole mess of #2 just stinking up that fella's urinal.

Folks. Let's all listen to Jessica and his wise, wise words. Don't poop in the urinal.

Jessica's Three Words or Less on URINAL ETIQUETTE

- "Not for pooping." -
Total wins: 1