snapshots of thought

I feel the gravitational pull of the law. In the past couple weeks I've had the cautiously satisfying experience of sparring with two lawyers on their home turf. I am conflicted because on the one hand I have been given a great talent for rational thought. It comes easily to me and when I indulge myself I feel a sort of lawyers high from the experience of prolonged expulsion of rational thought. I just can't decide if it's more of a runner's high kind of thing or more of a meth addict kind of thing. It often leaves me feeling dirty.

The first person was a woman I've never met, who has never met me but who by reading snippets of postings on the internet has decided I'm harming indigent children (exact language). She filed a 5 page email complaint against me to our district alleging I was "using and exploiting children" through various policies of our department. She insinuated several times that I was benefiting from fundraising and explicitly said several times that I was discriminating against and harming poor children. Luckily I believe I possess the ideal skill set for responding to such claims. I am a fanatic, dionysian musician possessed with a natural gift for the law who also happens to best express his thoughts in writing. Add to that the rhetorical skills I've refined over the years in the practice of writing and I delivered what I think was a rather effective response.

The second person is my former landlord who seems to be an overall terrible person. Lawyer, personal injury lawyer turned bankruptcy lawyer who represents banks turned foreclosure specialist who starts a debt collection agency that files thousands of law suits a year against people who owe a few hundred dollars on credit cards who then gets judgments against these people and when they can't pay he brags about his innovative foreclosure unit which takes people's houses away from them. All around class act. Trying to dick me out of my security deposit. Much less noble response to this one but I did spend a bit of time reading the california civil code and a supreme court ruling.

The movie 3:10 to Yuma also has been in my thoughts. The choice that Christan Bale's character makes at the end has had me thinking about purpose. This is a newly birthed thought and doesn't have the legs it needs yet but it really does strike me that purpose is choice. In the case of that character it was that time, that place, the series of events in his life that led him up to that moment which made his choice powerful and filled him with purpose. It at first strikes me as a silly obsolete male impulse on the surface but upon further inspection it seems to me a moving instance of genuine purpose. Maybe that thought will mature in the days to come.

The pain continues. I read two articles about anxiety today that were more illuminating than anything I've ever read about it before. Both were by people with anxiety who wished only to share their experiences. One of the articles talked about the selfish nature of a panic attack in that you are consumed with thoughts about yourself. This rang quite true for me and opened some new doors of thought that I hope to be helpful. I think I moved a bit today. I felt the loosening of rock surrounding the mind which accompanies mental movement.

I have been starving for human contact these past few weeks. Genuine interaction, conversation, understanding, revelation, spontaneity, touch, comfort, shared pain. I have been so fixated on these things that I only just realized how much I really need to make other people feel good. I liked filling the void and raising self esteem. I liked guiding people through their own journey of self discovery and sacrificing parts of myself to do it. I need it. I feel incomplete without it. These are the toughest things.

Good Times

3 quick things

In my eclectic brain three thoughts have found nourishment the last couple days.

1. The overly intellectual part of my brain is busy weighing the viability of the hypothesis that the stubbornly high unemployment rate in this country can be most adequately accounted for by Marxism.

2. The cornily sentimental part of my brain is weighing the viability of finding true love.

3. The calmer and seemingly wiser part of my brain is chewing on the idea that the pursuit of validation is among man's universal behaviors.

In the way of meta-analysis I am of course considering the odd grouping of these ideas in a single being, namely myself. How is it possible that such ideas could cohabitate the same intellectual dwelling? To be honest a fourth topic is lingering as well but in an attempt to save the world from my darker nature I omit it here. Apparently my proclivity towards dark humor makes most others feel "uncomfortable". I can't understand why....

Anyways I don't want to spend to much time here expanding on these thoughts but I'll flush them out a bit. As to #1 if you consider the true trajectory of Marxist thought, meaning not viewing it from the perspective of the ultra-nationalist propagandist or the tree hugging idealist, but if you view it instead as the inexorable progression of events Marx described then it is hugely important to look to high unemployment. Marx did not say a communist state would come into being because people would somehow wake up one morning convinced of its moral superiority, it was something that would happen gradually over time as a result of economic conditions worsening. Specifically he identified the mechanization of labor that would take place and consequently lead to higher and higher unemployment. Eventually he thought unemployment would reach a tipping point and people would rise up and start a revolution. We've only moved from a normal rate of unemployment being around 5% to 7 or 8% but still it's worth observing. Did you see the 60 minutes story last week about robots doing more and more jobs? It's worth thinking about...

#2 is embarrassing to admit such a though even exists in my brain. Talk about the path more traveled  I put myself in league with every terrible screenplay, cheezy romance novel and the entire female population of the planet in such speculation. Nonetheless it's there and lingering. Falling in love is wonderful, I hope to do it again someday. Moving right along...

#3 is the thought worth the most investment I think. I think it's the most worth pursuing of the thoughts I currently harbor but I am again embarrassed to reveal myself in terms of the originating event of this particular idea. I sort of left the channel on the Oprah network and she made a comment about how every guest on her show was searching for validation. I think she is describing a true phenomenon with a limiting word. I think validation is a massively common pursuit but I think it's more about being understood. I think we all fundamentally want to feel understood. To connect with another human being in such a way that makes us feel as if that person really gets us. Even if it's just one person I think it can be that simple knowledge of someone else out there able to understand us that keeps us going.

I did a quick explanation there. I'm going to try (almost certainly unsuccessfully) to get some sleep.

Good Times

Tar

I am worthy
of your hate.
only.
take some of mine.

Ah self destruction welcome back. It's nice to have you back on the program. We were just speaking last week with your friend. This last work of yours was elegant and moving in its efficiency. A single calculated act wreaking such destruction. It's good because she almost started to like you. Better to blow it up before it began. Save yourself the pain of dragging it on and ruining it later. Make them hate you, that's the best way. Drive them away so you can be miserable. Alone.

At least then it can end with me.

A Hard Day

It's been a hard day. The memories have begun dying and as they struggle for those last few gasps of air the convulsing sends bursts of pain through my chest. It doesn't seem like a vacation anymore, it feels wrong. It feels to me as if each of the nueropathways in my brain is connected to my nervous system and each time one of the little strands of brain tissue rips its roots from the soil of my brain I feel a flash of pain. Sometimes whole clumps are uprooted and the intensity if magnified. Randomly images force themselves into my mind, almost into my eyes they seem so vivid. Nothing odd or particularly powerful just plain views of the door to my old house or the living room but the implied power is enormous. And the gun shot like manner in which they appear, penetrating my consciousness and then exiting quickly. Before it was a big pain, which while overwhelming and humbling in its ability to physically take me to the floor and override my usually overbearing rational control, was at least finite and even cathartic. Now it is a small leak of pain. It burns hour after hour slowly and patiently. It is a soft hum that you forget is there when busy and then in your solitude it haunts you. It is calm and steady and threatening in its sense of inevitable conquering. I feel it taunting me and my patience like Grant surrounding Vicksburg. I hate it because it denies me the clarity of big pain. There is something healing about big pain, something cleansing. It burns and stings like hell but when it is gone it is like after a strong rain. This dripping brings no clarity. It does not cleanse. It is a smarter pain I guess.

Breathe I suppose. Try to cleanse it with the breath. 

Good Times

My first stream of consciousness philosophical musing

I've written philosophy before but never as stream of consciousness. I haven't even really looked at this other than to correct obvious typos.

Thinking about the truly universal characteristics of human beings…obviously food, shelter, clothing with shelter being in need of further elaboration. The one that seems to be bearing fruit in terms of a blossoming thought is communication. I find myself considering the innate need for human beings to connect with the world around them. This need for connecting is manifest in art and language most powerfully. Searching for exceptions I find myself thinking of the sociopath or the mentally disabled. I think though that mental illness can possibly be understood as the brains self-correction mechanism when a void exists in our innate need for connecting with the world around us. The brain creates an internal network of connections whether its among multiple personalities, or voices one hears or perverted impulses to harm others. I think possibly these phenomenon can be understood as an attempt to fill the void left by an inability to connect with the world around someone. As for the mentally disabled the first thing that comes to mind is that consciousness is the operating variable in our desire to connect with the world around us. Maybe it is that consciousness by its nature has a tendency to disassociate oneself from the greater universe and it is that space between our true selves and the ego which we are seeking to fill through communication. We have evolved to think so that we may adapt more dynamically to the world and in becoming capable of thought have simultaneously distanced ourselves from the world. The result of that distance is the nearly universal phenomenon of loneliness. People feel lonely as a result of consciousness which insulates us from the world around us. I arrived here from the starting point of mentally disabled because their diminished consciousness seems to me to correspond to a diminished need for communication and a diminished sense of loneliness. These are infant thoughts which have not been fully considered but they were birthed in a feeling of rightness which leads me to believe there is something important here worth considering at length. Why does consciousness seem to correlate with skepticism? For instance why do we assume that others do not care about us? Do others assume that or is that my own ill temperament? Is the nature of consciousness such that the propensity to see what is lacking in any given idea is a manifestation of the purpose of consciousness to be a self-correcting mechanism? In other words consciousness evolved in human beings to allow us to quickly (relatively speaking in terms of evolution) identify and correct threats to our own survival. As such consciousness is not purposed towards recognizing that which helps us survive a.k.a. that which feels “good” to us, but rather is purposed towards the end of recognizing that which threatens our survival a.k.a. that which feels “bad” to us. Therefore the nature of consciousness is to be skeptical, questioning and generally negative so as to identify and hopefully correct threats to survival.

The history of humanoids contains significant evidence that the phenomenon of consciousness has been massively successful to this end. Consider the strong correlation between the development of the human brain (which reached an important milestone seventy four thousand years ago with the super volcano explosion in Indonesia which reduced the human population to a mere several thousand but from there only the most highly evolved humans created the modern human race) and the population of humans on the planet. As consciousness advanced the human population grew eventually hitting the point of exponential growth. This was not without cost though. At the heart of a conscious experience is a necessary disconnect from that which is being experienced. Meaning that in order to think about something it is necessary to freeze it into a mental abstraction. It isn’t all that different from taking a photograph which captures a particular moment in time. When we set about the business of thinking we necessarily must disconnect from the dynamic nature of what we are thinking about. We do so through the formation of abstractions which allow us to mentally manipulate the subjects of our thought. My contention is that this process of disconnecting from that which we are thinking about has the effect of isolation. We feel that disconnect and express it as loneliness, a phenomenon which seems to me quite universal. As such we strive to connect with each other and larger energies of the universe in order to heal the wound of consciousness.

 Ironically, perhaps the phenomenon of consciousness has led us to a point in human development wherein consciousness itself has in some ways become a threat to our survival. What I mean by that is the tendency to think which is itself accompanied by a feeling of loneliness has led more and more human minds to the existential conclusion that we are alone, that are lives are without purpose, that we are a random mistake of the universe that will go unnoticed and have almost no impact on the history of the planet, never mind the solar system, galaxy, galaxy cluster or universe at large. Perhaps purposelessness is the inexorable result of consciousness. Perhaps though the station of purposelessness is but one stop on the track of consciousness and what is necessary is further adaptation. Particularly in the area of embracing intuitive intelligence in an effort to broaden and expand the power of consciousness while simultaneously helping to diminish the accompanying sense of loneliness. In understanding the intuitive axiom that we are all connected to each other, to the physical earth and to the mysterious energy spiritual or otherwise which binds everything together. That we are happy and filled with purpose when we are connected to that energy and we are miserable and consumed by the existential crisis when we are disconnected to that energy. 

Dear Sir or Madam,

In this world we presume many ambitions. We make many observations such as (a) everyone's aloneness (there really are no categories, you know. Everyone is so alone — the basic, essential state of humankind); (b) the paradox that is communication — the built-in answer to that feeling of aloneness.

Communication itself is what baffles the multitude. It is both so difficult and so simple. Of all men's fears, I think that men are most afraid of being what they are — in direct communication with the world at large. They fear reprisals, the most personal of which is that they "won't be understood."

. . . Yet, every time God's children have thrown away fear in pursuit of honesty — trying to communicate themselves, understood or not -- miracles have happened.

— Excerpt from Program Note for "A Concert of Sacred Music" (1965), Duke Ellington

I remember sometime in high school driving down a street in the town I grew up in with my older brother. I was describing the anger and pain I felt and I was consumed by the realization of how unjust it was. How unfair that I would be chosen out among what I assumed to be my worry free peers. I droned on and on when my brother contributed an idea to the conversation which I consider to be one of my first run ins with dark truths. Dark truths are these axiomatic principles discovered through experience which reveal to a curious mind something true about the universe which most people are unable to assimilate into their consciousness. This inability is a direct result of natural selection as I believe it to be a survival skill. One cannot (or should not) take on more pain than they can handle.

The dark truth my brother revealed to me that day as we rode down Buena Vista Avenue was that all the trauma about which I was complaining and the resulting anger and pain which I was articulating had molded me. It made me smart and persistent and independent and resilient. It had conditioned me to pain and difficulty in a way that made life otherwise seem easy. The evidence I've seen lends itself to this conclusion that trauma and abuse early in life seem to correlate with intelligence and various useful attributes later in life. Well in the interest of full disclosure the evidence seems to suggest that it either makes you highly successful or severely mentally ill.

There is a certain amount of survivors guilt anyone who survives all that has to deal with. It is especially difficult to reconcile my own escape from misery in the context of my own sense of worthlessness. The guilt is magnified under the magniscope of my own self hatred. Because of this I have spent much of the past several years in remission from life. I have hesitated to engage in much living due to the struggle within me. I believe I am at this moment emerging from that struggle and I want to say some things.

You should know that I do not forgive you. I am bursting with anger and have been spilling it about haphazardly without purpose and I now intend to aim it at its deserving maker. You are pitiful. We all have our troubles and you failed in what I consider to be the single most important code among those of us who have been hurt, do not hurt your children. We walk around with this terrible scar and while I feel great sympathy for your pain you are just as bad as them when you allow the great sickness to be inherited by your children. You did that and because you did you are despicable. You deserve nothing but contempt and even that is generous.

And despite the dark revelation via autmobile on Buena Vista Avenue I do not credit you with the results. What you did nearly killed me and still could. I am what I am in spite of you not because of you. I have come to understand something deeply important about myself. Yes I am filled with self hate and worthlessness (which you put there), yes I have thus far fallen short of my own expectations but there is something else that I am. I am the great defiance which lifted me from certain death and removed myself from your influence. I am the great survivor which navigated the treacherous waters of poverty and life to this shore of adulthood, nebulous though it may be. I am a massive talent which despite your best attempts to subdue and destroy, persists.

There is within me a great flame which can not be extinguished. It has kept me warm throughout my life's bitter cold nights. I have spent much of the past several years convincing myself it was gone or dormant and in its absence resigned myself to seek a simple relief of the pain. That is no longer enough. I demand more than relief from pain, I demand to live. I will set my fire loose upon you if you stand in the way again, as I did before. And while it is a fragile rebirth, I dare you to threaten it.

Not this again

Some years ago I was quite proficient at this whole technologically aided self expression thing. I used to log on to the ol' internets ( a series of tubes) and pour out every thought that came to my head. I enjoyed it though sometimes think back about the posts, embarassed wondering why I would let such sentimental nonsense fall from my head for all to see. Nonetheless there was definitely something therapuetic about it and I suppose that release is something I'm craving once more.

The past few years of my life have been dominated by a sometimes obsessive but always difficult period of introspection, mostly an attempt to recover memories of tramautic events from earlier in life and begin to work through them. This reached a climax some months ago when for the first time in nearly 10 years I took myself to the doctors. Now for most people going to the doctor is a routine occurrence but for me I've come to realize that it takes on some sort of symbolic meaning that touches on several profound feelings I have about myself. I had an ear infection that got bad enough that I could not sleep and was experiencing more pain than at any point in my life. I didn't even know it was an ear infection and waited until the pain had kept me awake for most of three days before going to urgent care. The ear infection ended up being easy enough to treat (although I missed the pharmacy that night and had to suffer through a nearly unbearable night) but in the course of being seen for my ear infection the nurse nearly shit herself when she took my blood pressure. They didn't let me leave and were considering admitting me to the hospital so we can just say it was very bad. This of course scared me but not as much as the prospect of having to go back to the doctor for a follow up. I became very nervous and anxious and had something that felt similar to how I hear people describe a panic attack. The most terrifying thing for me was a feeling as though I had completely lost control lf my ability to regulate my outward appearance. I am often grappling with large feelings and strange thoughts but I have refined a sort of evolutionary adaptation by which I conceal my inner functions from the outside but this ability was lost as I sat in the exam room waiting for the nurse to come back and see if the pill they gave me had lowered my blood pressure to a low enough level that they wouldn't have to admit me to the hospital. I think that sense of being unable to control my appearance was scary because it threatened to reveal to someone else that I feel worthless in the most complete sense of the word.

The psychological web is a tangled one and I'm finding it difficult to unwind but often I am finding that the true fears and feelings that drive our darkest parts of ourselves run counter to intuition. For example when I told the few people I trusted about my experience at the doctor's their immediate reaction was to tell me I don't have to worry about being sick or that they understand my fear of being sick. The truth however, as best I have come to understand it, is that I'm actually not afraid of being sick but rather I'm truly mortified at the prospect that someone might try to make me better. I have come to a point of such self loathing, truly beyond a lack of confidence but approaching a sort of pathological self hatred, that the thought of someone actually taking the time to try to make me better is just kind of repulsive. I suppose similar to the way one might feel at seeing something pure and innocent corrupted by something vile and evil. The act of going to the doctor was essentially a statement of self worth it was a way of saying ot myself "You deserve to be well" to which another part of me responded with violent disgust. This struggle between these parts of myself is exhuasting, I am perpetually tired. Add to this a serious inability to fall asleep and I am often largely walking around mostly not conscious.

That's all for now. More later.