Goines On: Mind abuzz

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Goines’ mind was buzzing with topics beckoning him to explore. The tumult struck a chord almost sexual in its pleasure, so alive, so invigorating, so thrusting with energy. He began to take notes, so as to know where to start when he had quiet to explore the topics singly.
    The loudest buzz seemed to resound around the question how women are treated. Mrs. Goines had quoted a review of a book about the first women admitted to Yale College as undergraduates (in 1969). One professor wrote at the top of a female student’s paper, “Not bad for a woman.” Goines found this appalling and felt a deep need to explore the issue, maybe to atone.
    Another topic pained Goines no less personally. He had criticized a draft of a friend’s short story without taking care to accentuate the positive and go gently on the negative, and thoughts of how to understand what he had done – and what to do about it – were banging on his brain to be pursued and resolved.
    A much less personal, but ever nagging, topic was the mystery how a relatively small but politically significant number of American voters could continue to approve of – and even be enthusiastic in support of – Donald Trump. To Goines and all of his friends without exception, Trump was an unbridled – literally unbridled – disaster for the country. The possibility that he might survive the threat of impeachment and run again was apparently a real possibility. What was it about people that rendered them vulnerable to voting for such a twisted, egomaniacal man?
    The other topic that jangled in Goines’ consciousness was how to articulate a geometrical model he had conceived to represent individual perceptions or world views relative to other people’s perceptions. A circle would represent an individual world, its center point standing for that individual’s consciousness, or perspective. How could a manageably small number of circles be arranged to represent the possible ways human consciousnesses interact – or fail to interact? Goines smiled to himself at the way this question seemed to combine his early occupations as an amateur psychoanalyst among a few friends at Yale and as a geometry teacher the year following graduation.
    Goines had the unpleasant feeling, as he scurried to identify and make notes of the topics buzzing in his head, that some of them had already flown away and were – for now anyway – evading capture. The thrusting surge their buzz had initially provoked had subsided, and Goines felt tired, depleted – spent without benefit of having brought anything to climax.

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