A Partial Inventory of Dairy-Based Thought Prisons

(“Sideways Girl With Banana” by Stella Stillwell)

WHAT’S WEIRD ABOUT MY BROTHER is I think Geoffrey on autopilot is way better adapted for society than I am.

Geoffrey was smart, curious, but it came from an innocent place. His tastes were simple, and rewards were close enough, and he was good at thinking the right thoughts.

Since he was smart and had a really solid family and decent health and height and musculature (although he would always be on the heavy side), he was a bit ahead of the game.

Think about it: simple tastes for things in reach, not just tastes but little happy bursts of infatuation about this and that.

For example, he could get very delightfully intrigued by a new flavor—or color—of an ice cream pop or other dairy-based item.

And, if he were here right now, he’d say:

“Wait! That makes no sense,” and with a gleeful twinkle in the eye, he’d say:

“Stella, name me one other dairy-based product that has lots of new flavors and colors. You can’t. Cheese? No. Milk? No.

Wait a sec. Hang on.

So, okay, milk can be chocolate milk, strawberry milk, banana milk…”

And his happiness, which was there all along, would really swell as he arrived at the esoteric but very-beloved-in-our-house Banana Quik banana-milk mix memory, technically a “dairy-item,”and he’d ecstatically realize he was wrong.

(Warning: you are now entering a dairy-based thought prison.)

We loved Banana Quik because the first time we saw it we were like, cool! Banana milk!

But then it would disappear for like four years, and then one day, boom, Mom got Banana Quik again, for some reason we honestly never actually talked about, but it had that cloying artificial sweetened banana flavor. We didn’t talk about it, which is also weird. We didn’t INTERVIEW the mom.

We didn’t say, “Mom, what happened exactly? You were walking down the aisle, got to the regular chocolate Quik, but also saw the strawberry Quik and froze, not knowing whether to get one or the other, or both?”

(Wait, time out a sec as I mention to the reader something that occurred to me just now about chocolate was the Main Quik.)

But anyway, so we didn’t ask the mom. We didn’t say:

“—Mom, take us into that supermarket moment, how you picked, and what let you get strawberry only some of the time. Because it seemed like there was chocolate in the house way more than strawberry. What was the protocol here? Were you just winging it, mom? Getting a little naughty in the aisle? Throwing caution to the wind? Tell us everything. You’re among friends. We don’t judge.”

(Notice how this is getting to be a little much? Think it’s tedious to read? I assure you, it’s much worse to write. Because to write it you have to think it. That’s the problem with dairy-based thought prisons. Just hang on a little longer.)

Strawberry Quick made routine appearances but we ALWAYS had the chocolate Quik.

So much so that if there was no other dessert in the house, and you get a sweet tooth, you tiptoe over to the pantry and get some chocolate Quik, like with a spoon, and standing right there you put a dusty scoop of it in your mouth and realize it’s too dry, and way too sweet.

But you let it sort of dissolve on your tongue, and there is plenty of flavor, but it stings. And in seconds your little dessert time is over. Not all that satisfying but it sort of got the job done.

So anyway, where were we? Banana milk. My mom was buying banana milk?

(Notice how inane this is getting.)

So then yeah, Geoffrey would realize that there is a dairy product that can be said to change colors and flavors a lot and that’d be MILK, cause you have at least three, and then malteds, but they don’t really change color, so then it doesn’t count.

Or, wait, do they? Yeah. I think we had vanilla and strawberry malt powder once. So that’s a fourth dairy product. No wait it’s still just three. Cause it’s still milk. No but wait, maybe malt is another dairy product in its own right. I mean, is it? Not sure. What the fuck even is malt? I have no idea. It tasted good though. Like malted milk balls.

Wait. Did I just find an actual fourth dairy product? Sort of?

Malted milk balls have milk in the name. So it’s gotta count. But wait, the crunch in milk balls just actually powdered milk clumps?

(Notice how truly inane this line of thinking is getting.)

So maybe that’s NOT a fourth category? But, I mean, would you consider powdered milk a different product? Hmm, probably… not? Yes? No. Yes? I really don’t know.

And don’t care.

I’ve run out of interest for this subject actually. It went on too long. I want to stop.

This whole discussion started out sort of funny (not haha funny, but light-hearted) and then it got strange. Obsessive.

Here’s a disturbing thought: what if I was forced to keep going, like, forever?

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What if someone held a gun to my head, and said, “Keep going on this dairy-based tangent and just see where it goes.”

And I’d be like, For how long?

And they’d say: “Forever.”

Now imagine if you actually had to do it. Like, stream of consciousness like that, but FOREVER.

Not because you want your mind to think about that stuff, but because now you have to.

It wouldn’t take very long to go a little insane. It’d be like legitimate psychological abuse.

And if you stopped, the guy would shoot you. Or do something else unthinkable like shoot your family.

Or like, just take them away. So you couldn’t see them.

What if you couldn’t ever wear clothes again, or only be allowed to wear bad, ill-fitting clothes that clash and smell like moldy cheese. And then you’d have to go to social events in bad clothes, forever.

And had to sleep outside, or like inside but in the wrong town, with a name that sounds like where weird people live. Like Gurnee, Illinois. Or DeKalb. Or Batavia.

So basically, like, imagine the guy with the gun, they made you live in some working-class neighborhood, with no family, bad clothes, and lousy food. No vacations. No real respect from the people you grew up with. No way to pay for yourself at a movie or a restaurant, let alone take someone else out.

But none of that’d happen because you’d agree to do that stream of consciousness thought prison about dairy products and if there are more dairy product variants that change color and flavor.

You’d have to keep going with this line of thinking, and actually dig even deeper and ask things like: “wait wasn’t there also a vanilla Quik? And wait, did I already say vanilla for the malt?

Yeah and there wasn’t a banana malt so the whole affair didn’t have that milk to malt PARALLEL STRUCTURE we like to see and…oh my God, I’m losing my fucking mind. Why am I thinking any of this?”

And the answer is because you’ve got this gun to your head, with some psycho instructing you to think about this topic, FOREVER, or you lose love, respect, comfort, safety, family, friends, self-esteem, identity, and good, plain old fun, FOREVER, and you’ll be all alone and nobody will like you, FOREVER, and you’ll live in Gurnee Illinois. Forever.

(Nothing against Gurnee, or any of those places. I don’t know much about them. When you grow up an ignorant upper-middle class kid you learn to fear the names of faraway, slightly poorer, slightly more rural towns you know nothing about. That fear is by design, and the powers that weaponize it against you.)

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Sounds bizarrely horrible, doesn’t it?

That’s what it was really like for me.

I know that feeling, something akin to realizing you’re going to have to think about that Nestle Quik crap for the rest of your life.

I know what it’s like to beg, and plead, and to ask with total sincerity: Why? Why on Earth would this sort of torture even be a thing?

I know what it’s like to hear them say: “Never mind why! JUST DO IT!”

I know what’s it like to talk back to them with a little bit of attitude. What it’s like to say:

“Ok, whatever, fine. I’ll fucking do it. You’re not leaving me much of a fucking choice, you jerk psycho. I’ll try, I’ll cooperate, but don’t expect much. I fully accept that I sort of have to do this stupid thing you’re asking me to do. Because I’ll have no future if I don’t.”

And he’d say “Damn right, bitch. Stop stalling.” And he’d stand there and watch, and make sure I’m really doing it. Really diving ever deeper into the recursive, stream-of-consciousness fever-dream rabbit hole. Somehow he’ll know if I’m not doing it.

And here’s the worst part. This isn’t just some random-ass daydream. This is my life. For real. This has always BEEN my life, with a proverbial gun pointed at my head, engraved with the words: think these thoughts, bitch. Don’t ask why. Just do, or lose everything.

It’s been going on for more than thirty years now.

And I’ve done my part. Granted, not very well. I like to self medicate and go numb. Take it real slow. Indulge in lots of furtive little breaks, never long enough to do anything else of consequence other than shake out the boredom-toxins from my hamstrung synapses. Is it any surprise that I never seem to marshal the ability to lean in or bring my best self to the assignment? It’s a miracle I get it done enough to satisfy the gun guy, enough to keep my identity, my family, and a semblance of social survival.

But my nervous system is fried, so the way I’m talking to you right now, you, one of my only readers, is something like my “best self.” There’s not much left of me, and plus I don’t have a whole lot of time to do this writing thing.

But when I’m here with you, at least I get to pay attention to stuff that actually matters to me. Even for a quick sec between breaking rocks. It’s good to know what it feels like to focus on stuff that matters to me, even though it’s fleeting, and almost nobody sees it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the two eyeballs my soul manages to reflect off of, whoever you are.

Meanwhile, the whole bouncy, innocent energy level that I had when riffing about that whole dairy-based item tractate went away a long time ago.

THOUGHT, for me, is not joy. It’s a prison. Because I’m always being forced to think CERTAIN thoughts. First at school. Later, work.

I’ve had to pay ungodly close attention to truly banal things, to avoid losing everything.

I don’t know what else I’d be thinking, if I didn’t have to think about the stupid stuff the world has been insisting I think about since the second grade. I guess I won’t have the chance to know what it’s like to think freely.

I sense that I’d have been good at it though.

Whatever it is that I’d think about if I was left to my own devices, with no gun to my head. I know I would have been good at it.

Not lethargic like I am now. Sleep walking through 95% of it all.

I don’t really want to be thinking about the equivalent of banana milk right now, so NO WONDER I’m bad at doing that. It sucks. It’s crazy. It’s like being a crazy person. Thinking about something that has no bearing on, I don’t know, on things that really MATTER, I guess? (Like fixing poverty, disease, crime, sustainability, and the fact that anyone would need a thought prison in the first place. Dairy-based or otherwise.)

Geoffrey doesn’t have this problem. Never did. Nobody ever had to hold a gun to his head.

Because he never stopped thinking the RIGHT THOUGHTS. Nobody had to hold a gun to HIS head because they SAW what he was thinking about and they said:

This one’s fine. We can leave Geoffrey on autopilot. The sister though, keep that gun pointed. I have a feeling you gotta watch that one. Flight risk? Nah. She loves her family too much. Her mom. Dad. Even her brother. And shows. And snacks.

She’s not going anywhere. Nah. She’ll just… stick it out. As long as you point the gun and get in her face from time to time, she’ll think all the right thoughts.

She won’t like it. Actually she will hate it. She won’t do it with her whole heart. But it’ll be enough.

The fact that she has to do it at all will be her worst thing in this life.

Because she’s really fast and good at thinking and knows it. And if she has to think about normal dumb stuff for too long, it hurts. Deep in her kishkes.

She feels trapped. Like she’s suffocating or losing her mind.

But she’ll do it. She has no choice. Otherwise we take away everything that connects her to the people she loves and the world she knows.

She’ll do it. Because her belly is full and her parents are nice. Works every time.

So that’s that.

In my defense, IT WAS A TRADEOFF.

The choices are death, versus continuously being forced to think about dumb things that don’t matter, in exchange for my inclusion in society, my basic needs, my social survival. My ACTUAL survival.

Yep, that’s what it was. That’s what it still is.

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At some point the act of thought got chained to fear. Maybe you know. That point in childhood - - usually school age - - where you realize you’re no longer thinking because you want to. You’re now thinking because the world is forcing you to pay attention to what THEY want. Suddenly you’re bored as hell. Everything they make you focus on seems irrelevant. You’re trudging up a hill of sand. And no one explains why. Except that it’s about responsibility, growing up, putting away childish things, doing your part and not just coasting, like some drooling toddler, babbling nonsense words, absently tracing patterns on the linoleum floor in euphoric reverie while suckling mother’s milk from a melamine bottle.

For a moment, what the world asked me to think about made sense. Sesame Street, for example.

But then it flipped. Thought became slavery. Soon, avoidance of compelled thought-prisons became instinctive. Thinking what they want you to think, regardless of what it is, gets wrapped in fear, because it’s forced.

Flunking - - what a horrible word - - is the initial gun, the first true threat of oblivion. It sounds like failure and mockery at once. “Flunk” is onomatopoeic of slapstick humor. A word engineered by top psyops linguists to make you feel stupid and laughed at for having to repeat entire grades.

I knew a kid who flunked the fifth grade. It was like hearing of a cancer diagnosis.

The implication is that if you don’t comply, you won’t just flunk a grade. You’ll flunk out of life. No job, no independence, no dignity. You’ll be living with your parents forever.

And - - is that bad? They make it sound like living with your parents who you love is supposed to be bad. But it doesn’t sound bad. Should I be ashamed it doesn’t sound bad? Are we living in fucking Sparta? Why is everyone in America such a hard-ass?

The gun is the system. The meat-grinder economy. The quiet resignation of a tax-funded education pipeline designed not to cultivate minds, but to keep little filthy inquisitive kids off the streets, until they’re ready to be useful to the military industrial complex or something.

To do ALL the dirty jobs for the people at the top who don’t have to do ANY of them.

Unless they want to.

Like Geoffrey, I guess. He doesn’t see them as dirty. Or boring. Or meaningless. Or painful.

He gets it done, retires early, and has all the freedom he’ll ever need to gleefully think about Banana Quik and all the other right thoughts for the rest of time.

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PS: Chocolate is a dairy product that changes color and flavor. White chocolate, dark chocolate, mint chocolate, raspberry chocolate…