Short story: Pen Tree Cat Seven Tuna Tuesday
Pen Tree Cat Seven Tuna Tuesday What exactly counts as an intrusive thought? Connell remembered seeing an online argument years ago about the phrasing but couldn’t recall who’d won. There was someone insisting that intrusive thoughts strictly involved thoughts that were violent, upsetting, and unbidden. Drive your car off a bridge, drop the baby on his head, dice your finger like a carrot on the cutting board. Others suggested that this also included random annoying ideas, absurd notions. Shitposts, jokes. Well, that’s just having thoughts isn’t it? A lot of thought comes unprompted, unconscious. The phrase stuck in Connell’s head, intrusive thought or not, was definitely unasked for and not caused by any stimuli in his environment. In the 8 th grade during a science lesson, Connell’s teacher had provided the class with a memory exercise. They were learning about the brain, the different lobes and the areas that controlled bodily functions like appetite, breathing, fear. Thin...