Escape Plans Unlimited

Ok, tonight, no matter what time I finish my work for the evening, I will be doing a Just Because Club experiment. What will it be? I will sit in the bathtub for one full hour, with no water in it. I have typed in the full text of the experiment below.

Just Because Club is one of the best books I have ever picked up on the subject of getting a whole new perspective on how I perceive supposedly common aspects of life.

This gets me thinking, how many of you readers out there have thought through all the things that you take for granted every single day? Take words, for example. We have a conceptual agreement to accept these little black marks as letters. Then, we accept various combinations of the familiar marks as words. On top of that, we accept a string of these words as a sentence, and then we imbue the whole thing with meaning. Doesn’t it feel strange to read words and sentences that describe sentences and words as just collections of little familiar black markings? I’m telling you, words don’t really exist. Concepts and ideas and agreements exist.

Enough of that for now.

Ask yourself about all the other things that you take for granted. A table, a bed, or a rug. Sure, they have common and familiar uses, but they are not what they seem. What if the common ways of using the things around us also serves to keep us in a kind of bondage?

Have you ever heard someone say, “You don’t use Object A that way, you use it this way!” as if each collection of matter with a linguistic label had a preordained and solitary function?

The situationists of 1960s France, inspired by the earlier Surrealist art movement, enjoyed a practice of removing objects from common usage and using them for something different. What if that piece of trash could be used for something else? What if the ways we define the objects and people around us keep us programmed and dutifully bound to the status quo? What the hell IS the status quo, anyway? Who turned out the lights?

Anyhow, here is the text of the Just Because Club experiment,

“BE IN AN EMPTY BATHTUB

Yep, that’s the experiment. Be in an empty bathtub for one hour. You read correctly, sit or lay in an empty bathtub (sans water) for one hour. You may choose to do this with or without clothing. I find a bathtub can be quite chilly without the benefit of hot water. The choice is yours.

While you are lying in the tub ask yourself the following questions:

What is going on here?

How did I get here?

What am I doing?

Keep asking these questions throughout the hour. At the end of the hour, get out of the tub, make yourself a nice cup of tea, sit and drink the tea. Maybe have a nice faerie-cake or cookie. …”

So, that’s it. It is about 2:41 am now, so I have awhile before the sun rises, meaning I can still challenge myself to this experiment before tomorrow comes. Ahhhhhh.

Love, wildness, chaos, and joy.

Pictures and a report as soon as I finish. Anyone up checking this out right now? Send me shout!