RANDOM THOUGHTS?

Random thoughts?  Are there any other kind?  If the thought is not random it must have been selected.  If selected, from what?  Do we all have thought catalogs to choose from.  If that is the case, do some people have larger catalogs than others?  And who is turning the pages and choosing the thoughts?  If the entity, spirit, self,  thingamajig... whatever, is the decider, how and why does it decide what to choose?  There are times when one thought leads to another, but how did the initial thought get selected?  And clearly, sometimes, the thoughts are, for sure, random.  For instance, I don't recall selecting this next one, it just, as they say, and we all know who they are, came to me.

I really enjoy ethnic jokes about white people.  Does this make me a reverse racist?  Here's the most recent I've heard:  Why do Scotsmen wear kilts?  Because sheep can hear zippers.  C'mon that's funny!  Chill out Scotty!  My ancestry is at least half Irish and I don't get upset at Irish jokes.  In fact, here's one of my favorites: Why did God invent wheelbarrows?  To teach the Irish how to walk upright. Ha!

But back to my original random thought.  One of the reasons I enjoy writing, if what I do can be graced with such an, I think, lofty term, is that it seems to open up pages in my thought catalog that would otherwise go unturned and unused.  I find this, and here you may have a different description for your own ventures into the previously undiscovered, amusing.  Yup, it mostly gives me a chuckle.  Sometimes there is surprise, even astonishment, but mostly there is amusement and a wider definition of that term, for me anyway, is joy.

Of course, I'm not sure how I would feel if I uncovered a thought catalog page that revealed how to understand physics or higher math - if those two are not the same thing - or the answer to global climate change or why Republicans are or even the greatest mystery of all, what women want, but I suspect I'll never know because my chooser, decider, selector spirit gismo never seems to zoom in on those pages.  Probably though, I think, and this just came to me randomly, I'd still be amused.

Okay, all that said and still there is the tricky part.  Some things seem to come from another catalog, because some things come in forms that are not thought.  I mean is an idea a thought first and then an idea or is it an idea first that takes shape as a thought? Or are they one and the same?  When I write, especially when I write fiction, I often write a sentence and have no idea what the next sentence will be.  Instead of thinking hard what it should be I just repeat the sentence I have written over and over like a mantra, and the next sentence inevitably appears.  Thought does not seem to be involved in the process.

What bothers me about both these catalogs is that neither ever gives me the really good stuff.  You know, the stuff I read in other people's books, great prose, great poems, great revelations. So, along with saying, "Damn" to that, I've got to ask, where can I get better catalogs.