Thinking is what I do. I eat conundra. If my mind is dull or spirits torpid, I set before it a plate of mysteries, which are always available. Take any path from here and in no time you’ll reach your ignorance.

I think for fun. What I’m thinking about hardly matters as long as my brain is busy gnawing. Ideas are to me as toys to dog-pal Henry. The pursuit of any is pleasurable.

Not everyone likes to think. We do when we’re babies. Babies think like nobody’s business, figuring out how to do things, where they fit. I’m like a baby that way, incessantly mystified, fumbling for clues. Most minds, after a time, settle into their certainties. They know who they are and why and where, why rock the boat? My boat is always rocking, in danger of capsizing. I enjoy the suspense, the game of thinking, though sometimes it’s scary.

I do not think thinking is inevitably useful. Henry doesn’t think more than he needs to and he’s happier than I. Happy people are often depicted as goofy, like Mad magazine’s mascot, Alfred E. Neuman, grinning “What, me worry?” Thinking about our nation makes me frantic, furious. I’d rather not but that isn’t an option.

Writing forces me to think, which is why I enjoy it. Every sentence is a little machine constructed for a purpose. Never the same sentence twice, even if a sentence is repeated verbatim. This is true of any sort of making, I suppose. Making keeps the brain busy and out of trouble.

Thoughtlessness for me is unsustainable and intolerable. Long ago, I attended a New Age weekend retreat. First thing after breakfast came a group meditation session, the object of which was to empty one’s mind. I have seldom felt more bothered. I kept looking around furtively at these blissed-out absentees breathing deeply. The next morning I fled the pretty monastery, as if for my life.

My brain’s insistence on thinking can be exhausting. Why can’t I just contentedly be? At day’s end, during dinner, I disable my brain with alcohol. One big drink quickly quaffed whacks me to equanimity, like the frying pan in the old cartoons. Soon after our evening entertainment I fall asleep – eagerly – so I can wake to think again.

Unoccupied, my brain endangers me. It grows grim, glum. It starts asking those stale old questions that have no answers (Why was I born? Why bother? What’s the use? etc.). During my two bouts of clinical depression, I couldn’t think. Panicked I considered self-destruction. Happily, I decided against.

Younger I believed thinking was beneficial for humanity. If we used our heads, we’d figure things out and behave better. Experience exploded this Enlightenment myth. Thinking as often perplexes, stupefies, maddens, as enlightens. Read any day’s headlines to confirm this.

I sometimes think thinking’s for the birds but then I think what a bore life would be without it. Henry and most other creatures are fine not thinking but humans are stuck with it. That’s what the sad story of the Garden of Eden is all about. The penalty for curiosity is consciousness. Once we start, we can’t stop.