Disorienting

Disorienting

 

Unfortunately I have been zeroing in on this particular blog writing session, with the title as you see it:  DISORIENTING.  But only now do I realize why this was so compelling for me.  A few words and phrases get me to my starting point, and will share all this with you.  Experience this and when it is over and you have a few minutes to reflect back and rate and evaluate what has just occurred, you can bend things back in favorable light and see the value of it all.  But what if the first word that comes to the top of your Word Que is Disorient and one of its off-springs like disorienting, and you are not quite sure or ready to pull the toffee apart and let things get messy or sticky or too sweet to consume at one sitting?

Words and how the mind will process them, brings me to saying things like:  Is he trying to trick your brain?  Is he challenging your limits.  He brings me to the edge of strange landscapes that begin with words and description and narrative I don’t quite understand.  He has the unique ability to confuse, even during the regular course of just rehashing the daily menu.  Confuse and even mystify and put in play some puzzling circumstances from his corner of the world, and he does so with unexplained motive and display of phenomena not really familiar to me.

 

 In the end I try to follow, but realize the end game is that we all get lost together.  Not sure if that was his intention, but I find this blog disorienting, and bewildering at best.  Just words, but now has me stumbling around wondering why I came here in the first place.  His world.  His words.  His rules.  And I have one word for all of this just now:  Disorienting.

I am stuck in the middle of some ill-defined location in my mind.  Stuck between Dis and Dat.  Where dis means one thing to me, and dat means something quite different to you, but put together dis and dat become a respectable pair and we come to some agreement when he says, “…dis and dat…”  and understand it is an idiom composed of demonstrative pronouns.  Go deeper and we realize that it is a vague filler for…”…not much….”   Is where I am in a short blog, and am with a natural restriction and delimiter, because I can’t expand this into something we can really sit around over a cuppa, and tea or coffee, or ‘…mud..’,  as some will say.  

 

So for me we start small and expand on it, as we have space and time to do so.  Dis and Dat could contain so much that when typed into Google or Bing search, it could provide us with hours of reading.  Goes back to the sense of using keywords.  Not filler, but specific words that set up a whole structure of grammar and conversation.  At the beginning, arbitrarily will say, “1900’s”  and Latin was taught as an important language and tool for literary subjects, and perhaps subjects of the crown, and of the church.

 

Dipping into the pot of word origins, we find  “….dis..”  as a latin prefix meaning “ apart  “, “ asunder  “, “ away  “,  “  utterly  “ ,  or having a privative, negative or reversing force.  So will stay with this line of reasoning, after all its Latin and they made us learn it, so will use that as a baseline for all that follows.

 

Need to tell a minor story so I can complete my thought.  When young and there was so much I didn’t understand, and yet as an innocent, I put my nose where it might not have belonged, became a bookworm and would sight-read, but couldn’t really comprehend so much.  Sight reading and sounding out words by breaking them apart, I would concentrate on fragments and partial segments, that when compounded became something others easily understood, when I would try to use a word and attach the right meaning with it.  So  dis and dat  became  a short cut to understanding.  Keeping it simple  I would break things apart and then later put it all back together.

 

That worked when I was young, but so much has changed since then.  Take the word Disorient and separate where you can and what makes it easy for you to pronounce or recall at critical moments.  Dis   and  Orient.  But remember this worked back then, when learning Latin was mandatory in lower school.  Today all of this has morphed to something  that needs time and space to bring into full meaning. 

Like it seems, in the space age and where we have mixed the local with the universal or international, spelling it out as global and local and then invited everybody to the party at the same time, using devices and conventions and social media, and something we refer to at Wikipedia.  The new place to sort things out, on the Internet.  Fast and efficient, just type it in and see what happens.  And this is where the disorienting part comes in.

 

Before you know it you want to get out of where you find yourself.  Mention that and ask for help on line, and suddenly you will get conflicting reply and response.  Suddenly you are lead to a site that adds another ‘S’  to your simple dis, which for me was just a way of breaking down the word, Disorient, so I could pronounce it and then figure out what it meant. 

 

So dis become diss and if I dare to become too inquisitive or involved, I will find myself going off-course  and into a mind swamp of my own making.  Online, but being pulled into the popular culture lane and having to navigate and negotiate my way to a more stable off-line position.  Disorienting becomes a strain of diss, and now somebody is asking, “…is it dis or diss?”  And before I know it am somewhere digitally speaking and am being pushed one way and then another.  Example and then I will try to bail:  ‘….Did you hear that?  That guy dissed you.”

 

Suddenly none of this is simple to talk about.  Dissed as a shortening of disrespect or dismiss.  That is one way to see  ‘…dis..’, but not the only way.  But if you are in bully-land, and is where I have been for the last 3 years in America, with elections going on and the major candidates or players, being close to what dissing is all about.  NO respect.  Dismiss others as quick as possible so you can rise to the top and get credit for all that.  All that and it becomes confusing. 

Disorienting, actually.  “All that…’  becomes “dis and dat ‘  in the hands of the skilled manipulator, and without adequate time or fact checking, everything is reset out of place and out of mind.

Is where disorienting becomes a state or condition that we must learn to live with.  And be forewarned, it will get worse.

 

Turns out there is something called Orienteering and is a course I can take, like going back to school,  which lets us or me learn to read a map and use a compass to make it possible to go from point A to point B, and in real time and on landscape and ground, one can actually get somewhere you planned to be and do so in a timely manner.  Introduce these new things, such as orienteering maps that are bewildering to folks who have never used a topographical map, and to make matters worse, have just been given a compass and night googles as stocking stuffers at Christmas time.  

 

Disorienting to say the least, to open a nicely wrapped and colorful package with your name on it, and when open and you are saying, “Thank You.”, becomes worse when your bewildered-state of behavior and response gives ground to somebody dissing you, because  they see this differently.  Bully-land and dominate, because they know what to do, and you do not.  Orienteering is a dreadful state and place to be, when you have no experience and utterly are lost.  And everybody knows it.

   

From here things get worse.  Not so simple breaking down a word you are unfamiliar with.  Disorient and make it two parts that you intend to put back together as soon as possible,  Dis  and Orient, and if you go and ask what each means separately, the quagmire defines itself and suddenly you are sinking into something you don’t have control over.  Something so simple as breaking down a word into parts that you can sound out and make whole, an utterance that others understand and share with you, becomes chaos in the city of Dis, which is part of Dante’s levels of hell. 

 

Dis is no longer what you have learned it to be, rather it morphs in the scholar’s hands to the city of Dis and is a level of hell to which all non-believers, who have not otherwise sinned greatly, will go.  Chaos when you go too far.  And maybe that is where reading a map and having a compass and night goggles and knowing how to use them, fits in this conversation.

 

The idea is not to go too far.  Not to get lost together, so that the people around you are as disturbed and lost as you are.  Take a class.  Don’t disassemble things.  Stay away from slang and bars where people are dissing one another.

Remember it is the holidays.  Whatever gift you receive, like compass and map and night goggles is not proper for you, and up your alley, and you know that keeping it will be both disorienting and chaotic, just know.  You can return it and get something else.  Even in Bully-Land.  And you can return it online, digitally speaking.