August 29, 2024: One by One, Hurrah, Hurrah -

My friends took me to the Museum of Illusions, in Seattle, and it was both cool and slightly sickening. The (well-curated) illusions start off with textbook classics, like: Oh Look, These Two Lines Are the Same Length, Amazing! They move on to mirror stuff and color stuff, and then they start to spin, and it gets more intense. By the time we left, we were a bit weak in the knees and the lobby floor, which had been  stable when we arrived, was rolling, gently.

So I woke up at 2 am thinking, “For a grandly-named Museum of Illusions, those were just OPTICAL illusions, or Optical that set off Vestibular. Are there illusions for the other senses? Are there taste, touch, smell, sound illusions? Or are those called hallucinations?”  And I noodled on that thought for a while, because why sleep when you can ponder in the dark? And then I moved to: Are there illusions that aren’t sensory at all?

I vote Yes, as exemplified by the common illusion “Other people have it together.”  I propose that if you knew those people well, you’d see them flounder like the rest of us. Or consider the illusion: “All the ants are gone.” If those are still too concrete, I offer Roxane Gaye explaining that she bought a gun because she and her wife were getting threats, and that owning a gun made her feel better, although, “Safety is an illusion.” 

(If you decide to hunt for non-sensory illusions, I challenge you to avoid pitch black examples. If you aren’t a teenage nihilist, you are too old to argue that “Human connection is an illusion,” or “A meaningful life is an illusion.” See if you can find a BAD thing that’s an illusion. Good luck.)

Around 3, I began wondering how to tease apart illusions and delusions, or if something could be both, eg:

The earth is flat.

Right? It looks that way from a lot of vantage points, so it’s an illusion, but if you believe it despite all evidence to the contrary, it’s a delusion.

I ran these past a Pal of Strong Opinions, and she disagreed with everything. There came a point where she insisted illusions and delusions were the same thing, and I said I didn’t think so, and she said it didn’t matter what I thought, I was WRONG, which became very meta-, in that she seemed to be claiming I was deluded about delusions. I liked that bit, but then later, she sent me a link to a definition of Allusions, which made me pout, because I know what ALLUSIONS are, geez. (If you click that Roxane Gaye link, you'll see she is into DElusions, too.)

Anyway. You may be wondering about the illusion: “All the ants are gone.”  

I had ants in my car. Not a whole lot of them, just the occasional visitor or two. I cleaned, I vacuumed, I thought they were gone, and then I left an open can of root beer in the cupholder for maybe twenty minutes, and it was like the ants were at the DNC in Chicago.

So I got serious. I emptied the glove box. No ant’s nest, but somehow, my registration and DEQ stickers were out of date, yikes!

I hauled out to DEQ to begin the whole process, and the hard-bitten lady at the gate told me to go home, because my registration doesn’t expire until 2025. I just looked at her, and she said, “We are now in the year 2024.”  Oh. Good point.

I tell you this to illustrate that other people don’t actually have it together, though they may appear to, from afar. I'm fairly chipper and busy, so it looks like I'm tracking, but I have ants in my car, I don't know what year it is, and lately, I seem to be doing a lot of pocket calls, photos of the ground, etc. Here, I think it might be my finger, backlit.