Blankening

I used to have a fairly mythopoetic notion of love and romance, informed by faery tales and romantic literature, love stories and day dreams. This formed in me early, and without regard for the enormity of scope of the world, or it’s terrible duration. So, life happened, people were people, big mythic faery tale romance got knocked on it’s face, and a more practical, more “reasonable” seeming thing formed in the cavity it left behind.

Unfortunately, I’m not a particularly reasonable person, and I sort of incinerated my reasonable notions of romance accidentally. Oops

So now I’m kind of back at square one. Or ground zero, depending on how you want to look at it.

I spent last year so confused and mixed up about what it was I thought a relationship should be, what it should feel like, what it should offer, how not to be confused between lust and love, how the emotional chemistry of it ought to work, how the neurochemistry of it was going to work, why I was attracted to the people I was attracted to and wasn’t attracted to the people I wasn’t, why the people who were attracted to me were attracted to me and why the ones who weren’t weren’t, what I wanted, what I wanted someone to want from me, and all manner of other mind rending things… that in January of this year I opted to enter a twelve month period of romantic, sexual, and relational sabbatical- take 2008, figure out what the hell I’m doing, what I believe “it’s all about”, and see if I could figure out how to conduct myself in a way that would be challenging and exciting, yet still healthy and stable.

I am seven months and thirty one days in, and I think, at best, I can say the following about romance and relationships:

I don’t know that we’d fall in love if we didn’t have so many books telling us what it was supposed to be like and how it was supposed to happen.

Because we have SO MANY fucking books telling us what it is and how it’s supposed to happen, we wind up on radically different pages with radically different expectations, with a lot of misunderstandings and broken hearts as the result.

But that’s okay, because at this point we have a lot of books telling us how we’re supposed to feel and act as a result of those misunderstandings and broken hearts too, so in terms of having people tell us how to feel and behave, we’re basically covered from start to finish.

A romantic at heart, in the older sense of the word, I do believe that we have an experience underlaying the construction of romance… be it chemical in basis, or psychosocial, or spiritual… hormones and pheremones, monkey dances to select a mate, or soul mates decreed by fate or God or whatever… I do think there’s *something* there. And that we feel it, every now and then, sometimes for a moment, sometimes for our entire lives, and that when *it* registers, even though we linguistically can’t necessarily get our shit together well enough to pin it down, we all kind of get the impression that we’re talking about the same thing.

I think that *something*… that deeper breath you can take around another person, that quickening under your skin when they’re around, that race to your thoughts as their words and ideas impact your mind like meteors… I think that *something* is important.

And I think we do an awfully good job, as subjects of our cultures, of bashing the fuck out of it, mangling it, and forcing it into shapes it wouldn’t ever normally take.

So I guess in some respects I have a romantic notion of a time before “romance” came in and carved it’s big ugly signature on love, and I think I’m trying to get back to what I imagine that might have felt like.

I think it, the *something*, exists as an overlap between you and another person, in you, in your awareness and imagination, but also outside of you, in the way you begin to tell the story of yourself and the other person to the world.

I think it creates an excess, a juissance (am I using this right Dave?), in the other person, as they occur to your experience of being alive, so that while it’s there, while the *something* is active, you feel like the center of your world has shifted slightly towards them. They become more meaningful to you, and their words and actions and the shared experiences you have with them begin to stitch meaning into everything: backwards into your past, forwards into the imaginings of a future, and deep into the now.

To not obstruct it, to not try and turn it into a plug for all your holes, or a solution set to all your problems, requires a terrific effort of honesty and self awareness, and to some extent, an acceptance of both your basic animal nature and your limited scale as a person… but I think if you can do that, manage to really connect with that other person… rather than some desire ghost you project over them so you can find what you’ve been looking for… that *something* can be more invigorating, more honest, more beautiful and inspiring, than almost any other thing we’re wired to understand or experience.

And the hardest part, for me, is to accept all that, and then also accept that one day it can all change while you’re out getting the groceries, and suddenly the *something* is gone, all that meaning that had been stitched into your existence has begun to boil away like so much water vapor or ectoplasm.

All that said, though I’m not playing right now, I still think it’s the best game in town.

Summer 2008

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My world… all of the objects in it… all of the interactions and abstract ideas… exist only as various levels of not being a cigarette right now. It is an insidious, inverted ontology.

I feel it in the slight bulge along the back of my lower lip, where my tongue brushes the spot where the filter would emerge into my mouth. I have more awareness of the absence between the index and middle finger on my right hand than I have had in most things in my life. I can draw a deep breath, a rib cracking inhalation, and I may as well be taking Styrofoam into my lungs. I think about leaving to distract myself, and the smoke shop suddenly becomes Rome in my mind, all roads leading to it.

This sucks.

Really, the only reason I’m motivated to stop smoking is stubbornness. The fact that it doesn’t taste good anymore doesn’t cut it. The fact that it is unhealthy doesn’t move me the way it should. It really boils down to the fact that there was a day when I wanted to stop, just for the kicks of stopping again, and it didn’t work. Not because I got distracted, or forgot, or saw a better reason to smoke than to not… I just couldn’t mentally find the “not smoking” option in my array of choices. And the very act of pondering it, of trying to think about why I was having a hard time not lighting that cigarette, just made me want it even more.

Totally irrational. Or maybe prerational. Or subrational. I don’t know. More importantly, I don’t care. It was like my subjective reality looking me eye to eye and telling me that I couldn’t do something I wanted to do… it wouldn’t stop me, I would find I just… couldn’t… do it.

This did not sit well. And so, since my every instinct and a huge portion of my current moment-to-moment desireplex tells me that I can’t stop smoking… I’m going to stop smoking. Fuck that. And then I’m going go ahead and lose twelve more pounds, just to spite my maladaptive biology.

Sharing my existence with “vice” has been all well and good, and there’s only room for one head at the top of this totem pole, and it sure as shit isn’t going to be vice’s. I may never be a health minded person for its own sake, but I’m more than happy to institute punitive health measures to punish the Vichy party of myself that rolled over and just handed the keys to the palace to smoking. Seriously?

And it isn’t about quitting. I’m not quitting. I may smoke again. It is entirely about control. If I can’t have one cigarette without compulsively moving towards another, I don’t fucking deserve one cigarette. I’m clearly not capable of handling that responsibility. So, while quitting may be the effect that it emulates, it isn’t the point.

All that is left now is to continue the weaning. With a little luck and a lot of self restraint, this will be behind me soon enough. In the meantime, I’ll just quietly pine for that wispy gray ghost I used to wrap my heart in, and try not to chew anyone’s face off.

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A few weeks ago my friend and colleague David suggesed that I submit an abstract to the 32nd annual International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida. I’ve never submitted an abstract to anything before in my life, and certainly never written on anything “academic” outside of philosophy… and frankly, even there, I am ‘teh newb.’

So… I wracked the old noggin, collaborated with the ever intelligent Mr. Dan Luboff, and sent this off:

Neither Red nor Green: Fungal Biochauvanism in Science Fiction

Dating back to Lewis Carroll’s writings of Alice and her unpleasant experiences with mushrooms, the denizens of the Kingdom of Fungus have been portrayed in a negative light throughout modern fiction, ranging from early examples of strange fiction to modern science fiction, horror, and weird fiction. In depictions ranging from the dangerous, sense distorting fungal consumables encountered by young Alice to the malevolent fungal aliens known throughout the works of the “Mythos” of H.P. Lovecraft’s weird fiction as the Mi-Go, the members of the Kingdom Fungi are often represented as alien and dangerous to humans. Neither familiar red-blooded animal, not green leafed plant, the many and varied faces of fungus have denied easy depiction in fiction, their associations with decomposition and food spoilage are often called upon in literature to evoke feelings of revulsion or disgust in a reader.

 

With fungi featuring relatively rarely within the corpus of science fiction writings, and the larger body of literature in general, there have been few if any depictions of fungal, or mycotechnologies, in genre stories. This paper seeks to demonstrate a connection between the overwhelmingly negative presentation of fungus in science fiction and weird literature and the difficulties encountered by real world mycotechnologists when attempting to communicate the benefits of fungal technology to a public who have been conditioned to see members of the Kingdom Fungi as disgusting, dangerous, and even malevolent.

 

Feared and thought to be ill-omened for hundreds of years, the negative connotations attributed to “faerie rings”, which are actually growths of a variety of common fungi, such as Scotch bonnet (Marasmus oreades), the early negativity once attributed to goblins and elves by rural European populations seemed to have easily transitioned into modernized forms such as extra-terrestrial menaces to mankind, be they from other planets, as in the case of the Mi-Go, or other dimensions, as in the Gray Caps of Jeff VanderMeer’s “Finch.” Neglected in these demonizing characterizations of the kingdom of fungus are references to the critical role they play in the life-functions of plants, the decomposition processes they mediate which provide nutrients to the soil, or any of the green, heavy-industry alternatives that mycotechnology provides.

 

Rather than a treatment of the topic from the perspective of fantasy literature and tropes, this paper focuses on the ways in which the science fiction genre, or genres of weird fiction set within alternate modernities, represent and portray fungus without explication or depth investigation. Correlations have been drawn between the early cultural phenomenon of faerie abduction (strongly tied in some regions to the presence of fungal faerie rings) and the more recent phenomenon of alien abduction (a trope Lovecraft explored with the fungal extraterrestrial Mi-Go), creating a pathway between old fungal dread in folklore and more recent fungal dread in science fiction, a dread which can be seen given form in such recent work as Jeff VanderMeer’s “Finch”, in which fungal occupiers take over a modern city, reshaping it with bizarre fungal technologies not entirely dissimilar in concept to actual novel mycotechnologies in the real world. The shadows stories like these cast on new technologies bear further examination.

 

With the influence science fiction has on the development of novel technologies being as clear as it is, this paper intends to illustrate the sad gap between fungal depictions in the literature and their actual benefits and uses in the real world. I will cite instances of inaccurate depictions of fungal ecological and structural elements in fiction, attempt to provide positive evidence supporting the potential for utility-positive depictions of fungus in future works of fiction, and illustrate the real-world difficulties mycotechnology is experiencing as a result of negative stereotypes about fungi.

 

The unique position science fiction literature holds in relation to both the sciences and the field of technological innovation makes it all the more important that authors and audiences be aware of the portrayal, or absence thereof, of fungus. The opportunity provided by science fiction to analyze this particular brand of chauvinism, directed against a kingdom of beings who are far closer to us than any plant, is one that should be fully explored. Through observing and understanding the roles that fungi have been cast in, we can seek to identify our own potential biases, and in doing so, overcome them.

I got word back: it was accepted. We’re going to Orlando! We will have 20 minutes to present our paper, after which time there will be Q&A. Very interesting stuff.

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(So many people have written things I have loved to read. I try to share them here, in the hopes someone else will find the words inspirational or interesting, and use them to go learn more about the person and situation that spawned them. It also gives me good measurement of perspective- I am more reluctant to jot down something knuckleheaded if Burke is looking down on it from above.)

“The individual is foolish; the multitude, for the moment is foolish, when they act without deliberation; but the species is wise, and, when time is given to it, as a species it always acts right.” — Edmund Burke (Wikipage/Wikiquote)

Burke is said to be considered the father of modern conservatism. The popular notion of liberal vs conservative is so far removed from any kind of grounded political discourse that I don’t look on it as too odd that the writings of a conservative from 1700’s Ireland agree with me.

Thoughts ran towards the political today because I just got out of a Social and Political Philosophy class, in which the skepticism towards the reliability of our government was SO overt and obvious that it gave me a warm and fuzzy inside. Except for the fact that it leaned more towards the ethnic minority (who are becoming majority) tinfoil hate conspiracy theory crowd. From a hermetic symbolism viewpoint, it is good to see these people with swords in their hands (sword is mind), but unfortunate to see them whipping their swords around willy-nilly, and only keeping their guard up in one set of directions.

This is not the time to be building intellectual Maginot Lines.  (I stop, and go back to put a Maginot Line wiki-link in, because I realize many people may not know what that is. I knew what it was when I was 11. It was built before my parents were born. If most people need to look it up, I can not account for why young people+ internet= less knowledge about the world. But whatever.) Being suspicious and critical and watchful of propagandistic media blitzing is awesome, but it is disheartening to see that what *steers* it is ridiculous, fear driven misinformation.

The status of “reality” is far more debatable that it is frequently portrayed to be in mass forms of cultural exchange. There seems to be little real consensus. Which I find VERY interesting. I will try and dig more into this later, but it seems like there has been an illusion generated that we all are talking about even *remotely* similar things when the words “Universe” or “Reality” or “Existence” or “Outside World” gets brought into play. Last time I thought about this is was a from a psychology/philosophy standpoint. Now it seems somehow more… practical.

-Me

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“And as pale sickness does invade,

Your frailer part, the breaches made,

In that fair lodging still more clear,

Make the bright guest, your soul, appear.”

-Edmund Weller

I don’t know if my soul is appearing, or that my lodging is all that fair, but I sure as shit am sick.

Between the body aches, the exhaustion, and the constant vigilance required to make sure that I don’t drown in my own snot, I’m feeling emotionally run down. Laying on the sofa, staring off into space while I listen to the completely unengaging programs on television, I half-fever dream of contact, of cuddling, of someone brushing their fingers through my hair. Soothing. I think of soothing.

And then I get up, go cough a clot of something disgusting out of my throat, and stare at it.

Reality.

It would not be good for anyone not wearing a environmental clean suit to be close enough to me to cuddle.

Friday was a confusing night for me. I was sick, and I knew that when I started. But I got up, went and did my interview, and then went to Studio 69. Afterwards, I drove Mark back to his car. The daytime cold meds I’d taken were finally starting to fade, and sometimes around 7 in the morning, I crashed. At 3:30 I woke up, and my brain, still jazzed from the night before, told me I should hop up and head to Shade.

Foolish brain.

I had no energy. The smoking from the night before (which was EPICALLY STUPID) had taken its toll on my sinuses, and I was wrecked. Yet, that didn’t stop me from feeling like I was wasting my time laying around all day. The notes I’d taken the night before lay there, still untranscribed. I didn’t really want to deal with them… the prospect of opening the pad to find that I can’t read my own writing or that it doesn’t make any sense fills me with dread. I will have to do it today.

It is aggravating that all the momentum that I’d built up in the week before is slowly fading. Eh, even if the flame goes out, I’ll keep the embers alive. I turned in the WeHo Property Value story on Friday afternoon, so we’ll see if that goes into print. Wired SCIENCE shut me down without even so much as a reason. That was a little off putting. But whatever, fuck it, if I wasn’t already sick it might not have bothered me as much.

I think this is a good way to bleed out all the whining that has been building up in my system.  Everyone gets sick. Everyone feels under the weather some time.  I wonder if other people, when they feel sick, get the weird needy feeling I sometimes get.  Maybe I should ask? Why wonder when you can know?

Okay. That’s enough of that.

-Me

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“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.“

In (Part 1) thinking about Hill and his philosophy totally sidetracked me: I felt profoundly uncomfortable being all “Rah-Rah-Rah” about the guy who’s words eventually lead to “The Secret”. The thing about the quote that had grabbed me in the first place was its focus on the transition from imaginal thought into organized plans, and then stepping it all into concrete reality. The reason this grabbed me is that I recently took a moment away from my day to day life to catch my breath and take stock of things, and realized that the local landscape of my life, both mental and emotional, had changed a good deal since the last time I posted here in Blankening.

First, I’m getting better at the being emotional thing. I think I’ve felt and expressed more fear, anger, affection, love, hope, and so on and so forth, in the past couple of months than I have in a long time. It leaves me feeling like a total headcase in some ways, but I feel *very* connected to the ebbs and flows of life around me, which is entirely what I was shooting for: engaging in the same “narrative of feelings” that everyone around me does. There are times when it starts to feel like it creates little feedback loops in my life and emotions… times when something happens out in the world around me, which makes me feel something, and then I wind up feeling something about what I’m feeling, and so forth, and so forth, usually with the intensity diminishing the further from the event I get. I’m not used to that. But it is certainly interesting to have so much to observe within my own emotions, and not from a detached place.

Feeling, though, hasn’t been equating directly to clear expression. Sometimes when I begin to speak or write about what is going on with me, it feels like my emotions are concert goers rushing a gate: when the doors finally open some of them are crushed and mangled, some of them are pushing others out of the way, and some are more or less surfing on the top, all spilling out at once in a big mass. Uncomfortable, to say the least, both because I am usually expressing my feelings TO someone, and I know I’m subjecting them to the blather, but also because I’m just unaccustomed to feeling  like a total idiot when I’m communicating. I can tell you just how my body feels in reaction to what is going on in my life or social interactions, but when I have to start putting it into all these emotion and feelings related types of speech… ugh.

The upside of all this working out of feelings is that I’m less irritated and aggravated than I used to be. Not because I’m expressing myself more (that’s what my psych-tard friends would tell me) but because now, when I express myself, I’m able to do it in a way that people understand, so I don’t get the “I don’t know what you’re saying” or “why are you intellectualizing this” or “you need to take X or Y nutritional supplement” responses… which results in less feeling isolated or disconnected, which results in less aggravation and irritation over all.  So on that front, this has been a great strategy. (Important Note: When I say “in a way that people understand”, I don’t mean I’m expressing it well, I just mean that I’m expressing it in a language and reference set that doesn’t leave people wondering what topic I’m trying to speak on.)

Makes dealing with lust, romantic interest, and liking people WAY more difficult to manage, though. Big fat fucking F- rating on that for right now. I know it’ll take time, and I’m willing to give myself that time, but man… I much prefer the old way of dealing with things.

Out in the concrete world, lots has been changing as well. Whereas I was unemployed the last time I posted, I now seem to find myself a professional writer and a local news reporter for a pair of Patch.com outlets. As I’m typing this, I’m waiting for the 45 minutes to pass until my first byline with West Hollywood Patch.com comes online. I’m finding that I’m becoming very excited, though I’m sure some of the excitement is being generated by the process of checking the clock over and over again. I’m weird that way… I can stoke the fire of anticipation by artificially incrementing my waits.

The entire process of becoming a reporter was painfully simple. I really just made a phone call, and I got the job. As has been the theme lately, I wonder how many other things that are really interesting are also super easy. In the past few weeks I’ve had to wrestle with getting access to the Mayor of WeHo for an interview on Target’s stupid political contributions, had to talk to the County Assessor’s Office about declines of property value, had to try and translate the MTA’s Environmental Impact Report/Statement about the new Redline and Purple Line subway expansions, and got a surprise call from the Deputy Chief Economist of the California Board of Realtors, who was concerned about my possibly not understanding the assessor’s data well enough to report on it properly.  It is really exciting to be engaged in a job like this.

I’m still trying to keep my desire to work on fiction alive, even though with all the other writing I am doing, I don’t find I have as much time for it as I would like. All of the time and desire to work with words seems to be funneled into the professional work, which… will happily devour every waking minute, I have no doubt.

Because I have so many different kinds of irons in the fire right now, I have decided that I need to organize things differently in order to keep track of everything I have going on, and also to make it easier to steer potential customers or readers to the kinds of material I produce that would be of interest to them.

Since I will now be putting my writing in public, I feel like I’m sort of becoming a public figure, which means I need to intelligently manage my public presence, especially in the digital domain. I have this blog, which I may restrict access to somewhat. I have my FB page, which only my friends can read. But so far, that is it. Oh, wait, I think I have a Twitter account I never figured out what to do with. But now I need a public FB account, a bunch of new blogs, and will probably set up a Twitter account directly tied to my journalistic writings. I have most of the domains I need ordered, and have been drawing up a master list of usernames and passwords to get the whole thing stitched together.

Not being a person particularly accustomed to thinking through how I want to present myself (I usually just do whatever occurs to me, and don’t worry about it), trying to figure out how to represent myself in a “best light” for potential employers or publishers from a variety of different fields my career may flower into (fiction publishing, news outlets, academics, and magazines) has actually been kind of difficult. I thought about writing under a pen name. I thought about writing different types of material under different versions of my name. I thought about representing myself as two people, at least on the Bat Country material, so that if my investigative work on that project leads to mainstream-publication opportunities, I could blame the crazy Gonzo shit on “the other guy”. But in the end, I think I’ve decided that I’m going to let the fact that I’m able to work in all of these worlds be a strength, and see where that gets me. The goal will not be to craft a persona so much as it will be to divide my presentation layers up and steer people to the proper place. If they research me on the internet, they’ll see ME there, cow suit, weird friends, and all.

There will ultimately be a blog for fiction development and collaborative fiction. There will be this blog. There will be a blog where I post about my progress on Bat Country. Then finally there will be a blog where I post all my professional writing, articles, and bylines. I think the latter blog is probably where I’ll put my academic work as well.  I need to create a writer’s resume, and put together a CV. I need to save the money to buy a lightweight, warm weather suit that I can wear for my investigative/interviewing gigs. I shall also need a fedora to match. I think I need professional head shot or two, which means I’ll need to have my hair styled, so I need to look into that. Once this is all done… well… then all I’ll have left is to launch into the actual work. And I feel really strongly that I’m ready for that right now.

I have creative projects I’m working on as well, but I think I’ll leave that for another post. For now, I need to focus on bringing the plans I’ve organized into the world… get all the domains moved… get all the blogs set up… get it all put together.

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The full quote is actually:

“First comes thought; then organization of that thought, into ideas and plans; then transformation of those plans into reality. The beginning, as you will observe, is in your imagination.“ — Napoleon Hill

Hill was one of the first authors to put forward the notion that being successful or making something of yourself was something any person could do if they simply observed the habits and behavior of other successful men, extracted the methods that seemed to work, and then applied them to their own life. Inspired and encouraged by millionaire industrialist Andrew Carnegie, Hill set out to interview the 500 most successful people of the era. In addition to acting as adviser to F.D.R., Hill also made a fortune in publishing.

Myself, personally, I think a lot of the wisdom Hill mined out of other successful people and turned into easily digestible aphorisms is REALLY good stuff. But Hill was a product of his time, and grew to adulthood in the same era as seances, table tilting, Theosophy’s, animal magnetism, mesmerism, and all other manner of carnival side-show metaphysics, so some of those he mined from were folks who deeply held beliefs that most New Age followers of today would not be able to commit to with a straight face. Consequently, some of Hill’s ideas about success and the power of personal belief came from a set of very unsophisticated metaphysical positions, many of which were themselves just poorly understood tenets of Eastern religions or modalities of thought. As a result, some of Hill’s ideas, particularly those found in his work “The Law of Success”, wind up being a mixed-up restatement of earlier ideas presented by metaphysical thinkers with a better education than his own. Chief among these mixed-up ideas: The Law of Attraction.

Prior to Hill’s work, the use of the phrase “The Law of Attraction” was primarily used in two ways:

• It was used to describe unexplainable social phenomenon involving human migrations or interest in very specific industries or past times. Specifically, it could be applied to the Westward movements in America, where people seemed pulled, as if by some unknown force towards the frontier. This is a highly metaphorical way of imagining attraction working.
• It was used to describe basic physical laws, usually magnetism or gravity. In the case of magnetism, it was always made clear, even in Theosophist works by William Q. Judge and Annie Besant, that “like” objects REPELLED one another and “unlike” objects ATTRACT one another. Gravity, when explained within the metaphysical context, was considered a force of attraction… the phrase “Law of Attraction” being a reference to the force gravity describes without resorting to the then-criticized theoretical concept of gravity.

It seems that up until Hill began writing about The Law of Attraction in his books, there had never before been a reference to “Like Attracting Like” in terms of any kind of fundamental law. My best research efforts on the topic seem to indicate that Hill, a devotee of both mesmerism-via-animal-magnetism (use of magnetic forces from one mind to control the mind of another) and telepathy (the taking on in your mind of thoughts from another mind), was trying to use the concept of “attraction” as a way to explain both mesmerism and telepathy. But more importantly, it seems that he was convinced that successful and positive people clustered together because their minds attracted other similar minds. The same was true for the poor, who clustered together because they were negative, skeptical, and because in essence poor-attracts-poor.

It seems to me that Hill’s take on the Law of Attraction as an explanation for social phenomenon he was observing (namely the association of wealthy and successful people with one another and the congregation of poor and unfortunate folk in slums and neighborhoods) is a metaphysical attempt to explain relatively non-complex social and economic phenomenon without reference to either class issues or the difficulties faced by the less fortunate poor. It is almost as if he sees a tiny percentage of the poor population rising up to make it in terms of financial success, and rather than seeing that for what it is… a very tiny percentage of people escaping poverty because they were statistical outliers, he sees them as simply having some special ability, which he attributes to metaphysics rather than unique circumstances.

Regardless of what his reasoning may have been, it is this guy, Napoleon Hill, who began the spread of the “Like Attracts Like” meme, which seems to have run so out of control in the past two decades. Now, instead of a metaphysics that bases itself off of observations in modern physics, which is what a lot of the Theosophists were doing, you have a bunch of people who ignore or don’t bother to understand physics and base their metaphysics on shoddy observations of very specific social dynamics.

As with so many things, I can’t really condemn Hill’s valuable and utility-heavy observations because of his goofy metaphysical thinking. A lot of thinkers at the time believed heavily in spiritism and mesmerism, and much as I may be a dabbler in hard science, he was no doubt trying to incorporate what seemed like valid scientific developments into his thinking. I’m sure in the future our descendants will look back on the segments of our philosophical views that are based on modern science, and find them infantile and misinformed where the science has been updated or replaced. Hill WAS a really smart guy, and  it isn’t fair not to give him credit because he believed some odd shit. Or because other sloppy thinkers came after him, saw that he was wealthy, and then immediately absorbed what he had to say with an unskeptical, uncritical mind.

But all of that isn’t what I intended to write when I started this post, which is why there is a (Part 1) and a (Part 2). The thing that made me think at all of the Hill quote I started with, and which sort of ate my post, is that I seem to have started to transition in a really serious way from the having thoughts portion of my life into the organization and plan making part of my life, and that change is giving me a lot to think and write about.

So in (Part 2), I’ll actually talk about that stuff. For now, I’ll just accept that a sudden eruption of shit to say about Mr. Hill and the legacy of muddled thinking on attraction overcame me.

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The urge to say “Yesterday was like any other day” fills me, but I know that it isn’t true.

In every moment that sparked a feeling of any intensity, I let myself soak it in, sat with it for a bit, and in doing so altered, however slightly, my trajectory through the rest of the day. Because of how I felt, I spoke, and by speaking entered interactions that I might not have been carried into by sheer intent alone, and within those interactions felt more, and so adjusted myself time and again throughout the day, until where I wound up at the end, both exhausted and grateful, was a world different than where I would have found myself if I had powered through on pure intention and physiological coping on its own.

The aspects of myself that support the practical continue to direct my awareness to the idea that my day is the same as any other person’s day, and my way of reacting to it now is no different than any other person’s way of reacting to it. But another aspect of me recognizes that this isn’t entirely true on all levels of abstraction: if this is how everyone spends their days feeling the world’s offerings, I’m going to wager they weren’t spending them the way I was just a little while ago, and probably aren’t seeing them as being as novel as I see them now.  Just experiencing all the places… the heights and depths that I have to negotiate as I feel the way through how other people interact with me… how that makes me feel… the impact their words have on me… all of it… it is at turns exhilarating and painful.  So maybe everyone feels this massive depth and height of feeling… that would be awesome if they did. But… more than likely they did once, if ever, and slowly time has diffused it or they’ve acclimatized to it.  Or… they’re full of wonder and joy and just can’t articulate it at all.

It doesn’t matter how it is for others. For me, this is difficult. I have a sense of dignity, however personal, that I try to maintain, and a balance I attempt to keep, and I have very poor skills for maintaining both of those while feeling things with this intensity.

I feel new. With all the good and bad that it entails. And when people blandly comment as if I’m just joining them where they’re at… mostly it saddens me, because if anything many people around me seem more flat and dead and automatic than they did before. It feels like being welcomed to a cemetery in some ways.

That feels negative. Or… feels… I feel kind of sad that I feel that way. Feel like I should be able to hold a better perspective, but part of this for me is just accepting how I actually feel. Maybe there are better language choices I could make to express the pressure and urge within, but… does it make sense to criticize myself that I developed the wrong set of language skills? That I wasn’t born a different or better poet, if a poet at all?

So all of this I’ve written is just to say… the last day was hard. Maybe it wasn’t composed of greater obstacles than the average person is faced with, but for me they were harder to navigate. Maybe that means I’m weaker than I used to be, or that I’m over-sensitive, or something. I don’t know. I don’t like the feel of that to my ego, but I can admit to myself that what it means doesn’t change what it is, so… I am what I am, all Popeye and shit.

I may write about the stuff that happened, and why it was difficult, or how each bit made me feel, but for now just putting it down in text and out in sight that… having each day to experience is a beautiful thing, a gift really in ways, but that this new I’m trying to be makes it harder sometimes to just move through a day while feeling than to survive really ugly things I’ve made it through in the past. Sometimes living as a conscious being is harder than just surviving as an organism.

-Me

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For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a person who’s been trying NOT to be another person. I became the person who would not be like his parents. I then became the person who would not be like the damaged robots that so many survivors of abuse that I encountered seemed to become. I then became the person who would not be like my mother the delusional. Then I wasn’t a straightedge judgmental prick. Then I wasn’t a space cadet acid head. Then I wasn’t a jingoist pro-American stooge. Then I wasn’t a bourgeois narcissistic spiritualist. Then I wasn’t being “the other guy” anymore. Just recently I’ve been trying to avoid being a fed-up grumpy bitter dick.

To my credit, I’ve managed to perform well in each of the endeavors I set for myself.  But I don’t really feel like it is an approach to being that puts the emphasis where it should be: on me just being who I am and trying to move towards being who I actively *want* to be. Too much moving away from stuff and not enough moving towards stuff.

So in the past, each and every time I moved from one phase of life, one redefinition, to another, I felt like a layer got deposited in me… emotional strata built up. And in order to put to rest the things that belonged in those strata, I worked very hard to “deal with my issues” from each period. Accept what I needed to accept. Resolve what social issues I could. Heal my hurts. Remember my jobs. Live my lessons. Etc. Then I’d move on, and feel free and clear to focus on the  new things of importance in my life. I felt like I had pretty good success with this, but every now and then I’d have some old shit get stirred up, and wind up feeling like things I had put in the ground were suddenly up and moving around again. I’d do what I could to deal with it, but the fact that it could happen made me raise an eyebrow at my whole model.

Recently, during a trip up to the bay area, I had an encounter with someone who was from a past iteration of my life. I was a little more than buzzed from some drinks, and a little bit less than drunk enough to be emotionally bullet proof, and the encounter managed to hit me right in the emotional solar plexus. It sucked. Suddenly there were old, supposedly put to rest issues popping up out of the ground like a bad zombie movie. It marked the death of the old model.

So now, instead of a strata based metaphorical model for me and my integration of experiences, and more importantly resolution of old emotional stuff, I have adopted a new, more descriptive model: a popcorn machine.

When you dump kernels into a popcorn machine, some of them pop right away, some of them don’t pop at all, some of them pop and stay kind of fresh in the middle of the tumbler, and some wind up right next to the heating element and burn out very quickly. Existential and emotional difficulties are kind of like that to me: life dumps the kernels in, and sometimes they can be dealt with right away(fresh to eat), sometimes they just run out of jouissance (burnt out), sometimes they sit unpopped forever (shit that seems like it should bother me but never does), and sometimes they pop and then tumble around endlessly without burning out or getting eaten for years before they wind up in my mouth. A dynamic system, where things are very rarely “done”.  (It isn’t a great analogy when I put it into words, but as a mental system for figuring out how to accept that shit I think I’ve dealt with is still capable of popping back up again, it works).

With this new system in mind, I looked back over various emotionally charged events of the last several years, and spotted a bunch of potential unpopped kernels. I’m not one for borrowing trouble, so to speak, but some of these kernels are from moments that I think I probably *should* have felt more about.  So I went in and looked around.

There was Niff, the imaginary girlfriend, the girl who cyberstalked me, pretended to be my ideal chick, totally fucked my head up with an online romance, pushed all my buttons regarding protecting people from abuse and trying to help people heal, whom I then caught in a lie just as I was about to go spend a weekend with her, and found out that everything she had told me about herself from her last name to her age to her past to her horrible and traumatic childhood full of abuse, was all a series of carefully articulated lies and fabrications. I don’t think I really let myself *feel* how much that hurt, or how manipulated and violated I felt by what she did, or how ashamed and stupid I felt in light of how she’d manipulated me. And I certainly didn’t let myself feel the tremendous sense of loss at thinking I might have found  someone that felt right and then having that person evaporate, much less to then be replaced with a liar and manipulator.

There was Sarah, the messenger and the dead girl, the girl I met in Texas while visiting my brother, who had a nerve disorder and had spent the last two years in excruciating pain confined to a wheel chair. I bummed a cigarette from her, and she told me that it was the first time someone had bummed a smoke from her since she’d gone into the chair, which hurt her to think about, because guys constantly used to use that as an ice-breaker to get into her pants when she was well (because she was smoking hot) but now that she was in a chair she’d become invisible. We hung out and talked, and became friends despite the distance. She told me that I should do everything I wanted to do, as fast as I could, because I never knew that the next morning I wouldn’t wake up in agony and unable to walk. I did what I could to make her life, which was difficult, a little more pleasant, which mostly just meant hooking her up with music and TV shows she couldn’t download herself because she couldn’t afford cable on disability, and preventing her from going nuts from the boredom. We had pretty honest conversations about social interaction and life, and she was honest with me that she probably wouldn’t have been as friendly to me if she’d have been healthy because she would have just seen me as an out of shape guy with glasses trying to make time with her. She also told me that she would have been stupid for not getting to know me because I was awesome. Then one day a couple of months into being friends, I got a call from her brother: she had had a reaction to her pain meds and died in her sleep. He told me, in tears, that since we’d become friends she’d started to become optimistic, and that she talked about *when* she got better what she would do with her life, not *if* she got better. He told me I had made this huge difference because I had made her feel like she wasn’t invisible. And then she just died without warning.  I think I went into shock. I don’t know that I let myself get angry at the world, or feel angry at myself that I’d apparently given her the means to find hope for herself and that ultimately it was bullshit because she died just as she was feeling like she was going to heal. Or sad that someone beautiful, fantastic, and inspirational thought that I was awesome and worthwhile and then vanished out of my life without a second’s warning.  I limped away from that experience with a lesson: DO IT NOW! She appeared, delivered her message, then died immediately after without warning, as if to drive the point home.

Just those two, over the last few years, have damaged me, I think. I survived, because that is what I do, and I tried to deal with the situations as best as I could at the time, but I don’t think I really acknowledged how very deeply hurt I might be from it. I just stopped, made sure I wasn’t going to fall over, then got back to the business of living. Cowboy up and soldier on through and all of that. Not be a whiner. Not feel sorry for myself. Not let it get to me. Not let it be all melodramatic and sentimental.

Or in other words, not let myself be a human being.

I don’t believe in the actual existence of chakras, but when I entertain the metaphor, I can’t help but imagine my poor Anahata flickering like a cracked hurricane lantern left out in the wind.

I never thought it was possible to be broken hearted and not know it. But I think I was. And I think… I am. But I know it now.

So now I have to heal. And to be able to do that I have to acknowledge that I can be hurt, and that it does matter, and that this life I lead, with all that it connects me to, does take a toll on me.

And that is scary as Hell.  But I’m pretty strong, and I’m pretty cagey, and I secretly believe that there are a lot of ways that life is on the side of the person most willing to live it, so I think I will come out okay. But I have to remind myself that just because it will probably come out okay doesn’t mean that I should ignore my own reactions to it being hard or painful.

Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.

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I throw up a Bertrand Russel quote that I enjoy, because I am trying to finish Logicomix so that I can get it back to Avgusta when I go back up to the Bay this weekend.

I opted to poke my head back into Facebook today, to see if I could approach the application from a more serene, more placid place. It took like three replies to my first post to remind me what it is about Facebook that makes me want to chew out my own skull. Seemingly random propositions without questions attached, dumb-or-joke advice or instructions, and what might be sincere urges to interact coming across as random injections of nonsense. In the process of navigating the interface to get things straightened out, since some options changed while I was not checking, I came across the same old array of “Look at me, I’m so sexy!” profile pics, weird quasi-spiritual ramblings, and poetry.

The real question is… what difference does it make? Why does it bother me?
The only answer of substance I can think of is that my interactions with people are usually very specifically tuned, and that I’m usually on a totally different channel than whoever the profile or update is geared towards, which means I’m peppered with things about my “friends” that I find either alien, weird, irritating, or which make me uncomfortable. Previously I let this irritate me, because I was trying to interact with the people as I knew them, which is not how I was finding them to have decorated their interface, or how they were choosing to present themselves to each other. But I think I have a way of dealing with that now… which is just to remind myself that the person I enjoy is still there, and that if I limit my important dealings to the methods and styles of interacting with them I prefer, then who they appear to be on Facebook is irrelevant.

Facebook friends that are still not actual friends still pose something of a problem for me. I’ll need to work that out on a case by case basis as I go along. For the more irritating ones, who really only seem to comment to crack stupid jokes or be the peanut gallery, I may opt to contact them and try to forge a deeper relationship so that there is something of substance there to talk about. For the ones who seem to have friend status as the result of some momentary burst of communication that they now no longer seem to be interested in maintaining, I may make a last reach towards them, and if that doesn’t result in some kind of meaningful interaction, just remove them.

I think having this blog be here to deposit thoughts and feelings into will save me the frustration of trying to express what winds up here through Facebook.

There is still a lack of clarity as to what it is I will use Facebook for, but it took me years of having a blog to find this particular format (which appeals to me greatly), so I’m okay giving myself time to stumble around in FB and figure it out as I go.

-Me

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