Trapped in the ring.

I was in a workshop a few days ago, and the drone of pointless comments being bounced around the table pushed me out of my seat and floating off into space. After visiting several possible scenarios of the small events of the next few months, making a mental list of items to Ebay, and a few not-so-deep thoughts on the history of pen construction, my awareness phased back in to the conversation right as someone said, "...one ring..." I had zero idea what the topic was, I can't even say that I was certain we were still talking about the same person's work, but being still half off somewhere in the ether, i jumped in without missing a beat and said aloud, "to rule them all, one ring to find them..."

Everyone froze in silence; I didn't finish the line. (really the messed up part of this story is that there were only two people in a room of 15 who vaguely got the reference. The Rings are straight up canonical; what kind of writers are these people?)

The point?
The point is that the infiltration of media into the meta regions of my un/conscious mind is something that never ceases to amaze me. That my brain will trigger mouth muscles and chest muscles, will pair symbols with semantic content to expel a series of sounds that somehow compliment another set of sounds...all done absent of conscious will, it's a little disconcerting.

Our interactions with the world (whatever that is) are increasingly mediated by devices. But, direct interfacing seems less culturally dangerous than all the things announcing little soundbytes into the air, flashing messages at us as we pass by. It is the repeated passive consumption of letting Fellowship of the Ring play in the background while working/cleaning/sewing that allowed my brain to spit out the corresponding part simply at the mention of "one ring," with essentially no conscious thought or choice around it. We are biological creatures (mostly), and it's amazing just how mutable that makes us.