In the midst of the gruelingest week of work this place can provide. Heehee. Still not all that bad; just long hours. Like I said to Dave on the phone last night, Hey, nobody's yelling at me. Plus, what needs to be done never changes. I don't have to switch from paper wrangling to something else to something else again and then back. This is a cakewalk. Though our entire team will, it turns out, be working both Saturday and Sunday. Early and late, most likely.
Right now our house phone / internet service is cut off. Me and Dave talked it over on Monday or Tuesday (I forget which) and decided groceries were more important than internet in the short term. This evening after work I'm'a check the ATM and see if my direct deposit from last week has gone through. Thank dog for the insurance money not being gone yet. This month's rent, I mailed on Wednesday. Shoulda done it closer to the first of the month, but we'd run out of stamps and I took awhile getting around to buying more.
Last night Dave sat with me and watched most of the rest of "How the Earth Was Made", the History Channel special I'd DVR'd more than a week ago. Man, that was good. I got so excited about granite and strombolites I was dancing in my chair. The cores of the continents are granite, which is lighter than other types of rock and tended to stick up near the surface more. Then the strombolites (not sure if I'm spelling it right) coated the granite and photosynthesized like their asses were afire. They absorbed light and shat oxygen and more rock. Layer after layer, countless ages of them. They spent a billion years building the hearts of continents, cell by cell, life by life, like coral reefs building their crazy spires on the skeletons of their forebears. Dave's favorite part was the massive fifty-million-year ice age, when the continental mass (the one before Pangaea, I forget its name--started with a D) blocked the warm ocean currents and the planet froze. First the poles, then everything. "It was so shiny it froze over and got even more shiny," he said. Either my giggliness was infectious or Earth really is that cool. (Hehe. Cool, get it?) For fifty million years! Then the lava roiling underneath cracked the supercontinent apart, and the massive magma outflows melted everything again, paving the way for the Cambrian explosion of life. The graphics of the magma breaking open the crust under the ice reminded me of that awesome line from The Left Hand of Darkness:
" 'There is nothing,' says the Ice, 'but Ice.'
But that young volcano to the north has another word it thinks of saying."
Then it was all like slowed-down "Do the Evolution" footage and they started explaining stuff like how people figured out what happened to the dinosaurs and where the Grand Canyon came from. Which to us was a bit less exciting than the cataclysmic changes the early Earth went through back in deep time.
Ah, Chaos. Beautiful to contemplate...at a distance. Lovely to form in the mind, this vision of the manifest world as an ittybitty fingertip poking out from the mighty stream of chaos, always just emerged breathless from a fluid roil beyond order and disorder, only lightly coiled in the slippery grip of time.
But I bet it wasn't all that much fun for our distant predecessors (ancestors, whatev), doing the unicellular fighty dance for space on a rock in the hot, hot UV-rich sunshine. For me, too, there is only so much rockspace and only so much light. And to god (or gods or God or dog) what matters most is that whatever it is gets done. Not by whom, or even especially when. Just that it happens. If you are born a strombolite and decide not to spew out oxygen and shit rock, then some other strombolite does it. If you are born a door into summer and choose to stay firmly shut, then the cat will go out another door and have its nap in the pretty, kindly, ozone-protected sunshine without your help.
I'm rambling. 'S what I get for interspersing the occasional sentence with piles and piles of paper-assembling. Nuff for now.
teeth of the storm
you took a look at the wall
when you read what was written there
a slow smile turned your
white face to a skull
you'd be good, you'd be safe, you'd be hidden
you could stay warm
warm
why hold a gun to our head
string a net cross the gate
sound the panic watch the little people
strangle themselves instead
hear the choked little whimper, the only sound
our throats can form
form
you only bended the rules
you only lied to the fools
you only stole from the mass
you only covered your ass
it ain't so hard to discern
just what you're willing to burn
it ain't your feet to the fire
it ain't my place to desire
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down
it ain't political to watch a debate
between the puppets of fear and the puppets of hate
ain't hypocritical to weep for the flag
what a dump, what a shame, what a waste, what a drag
I'd go for violence if you had an address
if we all knew your face, if you talked to the press
you hide behind a pile of consummate turds
who stutter every time they reach for your words
and with no hesitation they loaded your ass
with praise, adulation and cold, hard cash
and you slipped out of town in advance of the crash
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down, ah
bite down, ah
bite down
*****
Oh, thank dog. Finally.
The chorus for that I've had for a couple of years now. Edits are certain to follow. I doubt I know enough guitar chords yet to do this bad boy justice, but I will essay it.
Many prayers of thanks go from my heart to the place the songs come from. And all those nice kitties I saw in my dream which I believe represent unwritten song-creatures. Prayers of affection to them as well and thanks for the encouragement. Thanks especially to Dave for the phrase "praise, adulation and cold, hard cash" which is what broke the dam holding this one back. Also for being way more encouraging than the kitties. When I was bummed about not having gotten the rest of this right away when that three-line thing showed up, he was like, "hey, it's something. You wrote something. Don't bitch about not having written anything, because you totally did." :D
when you read what was written there
a slow smile turned your
white face to a skull
you'd be good, you'd be safe, you'd be hidden
you could stay warm
warm
why hold a gun to our head
string a net cross the gate
sound the panic watch the little people
strangle themselves instead
hear the choked little whimper, the only sound
our throats can form
form
you only bended the rules
you only lied to the fools
you only stole from the mass
you only covered your ass
it ain't so hard to discern
just what you're willing to burn
it ain't your feet to the fire
it ain't my place to desire
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down
it ain't political to watch a debate
between the puppets of fear and the puppets of hate
ain't hypocritical to weep for the flag
what a dump, what a shame, what a waste, what a drag
I'd go for violence if you had an address
if we all knew your face, if you talked to the press
you hide behind a pile of consummate turds
who stutter every time they reach for your words
and with no hesitation they loaded your ass
with praise, adulation and cold, hard cash
and you slipped out of town in advance of the crash
the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
until the teeth of the storm, the teeth of the storm,
the teeth of the storm, ah
bite down, ah
bite down, ah
bite down
*****
Oh, thank dog. Finally.
The chorus for that I've had for a couple of years now. Edits are certain to follow. I doubt I know enough guitar chords yet to do this bad boy justice, but I will essay it.
Many prayers of thanks go from my heart to the place the songs come from. And all those nice kitties I saw in my dream which I believe represent unwritten song-creatures. Prayers of affection to them as well and thanks for the encouragement. Thanks especially to Dave for the phrase "praise, adulation and cold, hard cash" which is what broke the dam holding this one back. Also for being way more encouraging than the kitties. When I was bummed about not having gotten the rest of this right away when that three-line thing showed up, he was like, "hey, it's something. You wrote something. Don't bitch about not having written anything, because you totally did." :D
focusing on the positive
Yesterday afternoon, "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright" came up on one of my channels. Like "Hallelujah", that song was stuck in my head almost continuously during the few days after Dad died. Unlike Hallelujah, however, I haven't listened to it many times since. In fact I'd never heard the original version, only Dad playing it on the guitar. I did cry, but hid it. Either Luke genuinely didn't notice or was too polite to bug me about it. I suspect the former; after the restaurant I'm good at disguising tears as eyestrain for brief periods.
The meaning I take from the song in connection with Dad dying is different than Dylan's original meaning. But that's what a good song can do. For me there is an encouraging message in it--but I got discouraged anyway. Dad's stories were always interesting and cool, but as I unfortunately told Dad many times, they made me feel extremely inadequate. By the time Dad was my age he was into crazy stuff and had done oodles of impressive things. And of course, lived to regret some of them, and to wish he had not taken such a path. (Of course none of his stupid obits mentioned weapons at all. Dangit. Maybe we should inscribe his urn like he used to jokingly say, "I made it all up.") Nonetheless. Me being insecure combined with him being depressed. Ah, it all came back to me.
In consequence of the above I was in kind of a glum mood yesterday afternoon. Recriminatin' myself and suchlike. For awhile after I'd gotten home I chilled out and did normal stuff, but once the post-work routine started to peter out the bad mood resurfaced.
And then Dave used his magical powers of make-feel-better. We just sat and talked for hours, taking turns picking what mp3s would go on next. Just talking about the present and the past and the future. And he is so damn encouraging. I have been fishing for compliments since I was tiny, before I even knew the words "deeply-rooted, highly annoying insecurity complex". But he says what he thinks, about everything, all the time. He didn't just tell me I was awesome, which he does all the time anyway. He advised me that if I'm really bummed about not using my various gifts, I should go do stuff that allows me to use them. Seems freakin obvious I know. But left to my own devices I wonder if I ever would. I know me. I sit around and read books and play videogames and have inertia. I know what the right thing is to do, but without encouragement, I am generally too afraid.
He said that slowly, gradually, he's been trying to pry open the shell I have around myself all the time. Which he says is possible or easy for him because of how happy I have made him. And that so far all that's come out of my shell is shiny beams of light that create even more happiness. And music and ideas and potentially dollar signs.
:D
I know there's things in here I still don't want to let out. (Speaking of a scene from this week's Heroes I haven't been able to get out of my head. I greatly enjoy Sylar; he's a model villain. But I love Angela. She makes me want to spout poetry and Also Spracht Zarathustra quotes.) And plenty of things I still don't want to let in. But this is the good news that happens that I always have trouble talking about. I'm more comfortable writing about things that make me worry, about the possibility of failure, than about things and people and words and actions that give me hope and even confidence.
Hope is still too precious a thing to be waved about or flaunted. (Or possessed. Shut up! That's a dirty lie!) It's ironic because I know the behavior and reflex patterns I have the most prevalt insecurity and guilt about are the very ones which would vanish with minimal effort were I to eliminate the insecurity and guilt. I know this because I've seen my own transformations over time and I've seen other people's transformations in analagous situations.
I am still using my inner beasties. The process is still almost entirely unconscious. Sometimes I wonder about the level of communication between self and the time, the shape of the time. What affects it, why some times are highly responsive and others stiff and sticky. The time's been responding to Dave's nudgies almost as much as mine lately. I think it's a September thing. The attenuation of the envelope as summer and all that free sunlight and heat drain out of the taig and into space and into the ground makes everything all wobbly.
Maybe that's why we had crappy Septembers before. Unconscious self-loathing spiking up to jerk the magical wheels in our brains towards the road's cold shoulder.
:D Not this time. Less than twelve hours to go.
The meaning I take from the song in connection with Dad dying is different than Dylan's original meaning. But that's what a good song can do. For me there is an encouraging message in it--but I got discouraged anyway. Dad's stories were always interesting and cool, but as I unfortunately told Dad many times, they made me feel extremely inadequate. By the time Dad was my age he was into crazy stuff and had done oodles of impressive things. And of course, lived to regret some of them, and to wish he had not taken such a path. (Of course none of his stupid obits mentioned weapons at all. Dangit. Maybe we should inscribe his urn like he used to jokingly say, "I made it all up.") Nonetheless. Me being insecure combined with him being depressed. Ah, it all came back to me.
In consequence of the above I was in kind of a glum mood yesterday afternoon. Recriminatin' myself and suchlike. For awhile after I'd gotten home I chilled out and did normal stuff, but once the post-work routine started to peter out the bad mood resurfaced.
And then Dave used his magical powers of make-feel-better. We just sat and talked for hours, taking turns picking what mp3s would go on next. Just talking about the present and the past and the future. And he is so damn encouraging. I have been fishing for compliments since I was tiny, before I even knew the words "deeply-rooted, highly annoying insecurity complex". But he says what he thinks, about everything, all the time. He didn't just tell me I was awesome, which he does all the time anyway. He advised me that if I'm really bummed about not using my various gifts, I should go do stuff that allows me to use them. Seems freakin obvious I know. But left to my own devices I wonder if I ever would. I know me. I sit around and read books and play videogames and have inertia. I know what the right thing is to do, but without encouragement, I am generally too afraid.
He said that slowly, gradually, he's been trying to pry open the shell I have around myself all the time. Which he says is possible or easy for him because of how happy I have made him. And that so far all that's come out of my shell is shiny beams of light that create even more happiness. And music and ideas and potentially dollar signs.
:D
I know there's things in here I still don't want to let out. (Speaking of a scene from this week's Heroes I haven't been able to get out of my head. I greatly enjoy Sylar; he's a model villain. But I love Angela. She makes me want to spout poetry and Also Spracht Zarathustra quotes.) And plenty of things I still don't want to let in. But this is the good news that happens that I always have trouble talking about. I'm more comfortable writing about things that make me worry, about the possibility of failure, than about things and people and words and actions that give me hope and even confidence.
Hope is still too precious a thing to be waved about or flaunted. (Or possessed. Shut up! That's a dirty lie!) It's ironic because I know the behavior and reflex patterns I have the most prevalt insecurity and guilt about are the very ones which would vanish with minimal effort were I to eliminate the insecurity and guilt. I know this because I've seen my own transformations over time and I've seen other people's transformations in analagous situations.
I am still using my inner beasties. The process is still almost entirely unconscious. Sometimes I wonder about the level of communication between self and the time, the shape of the time. What affects it, why some times are highly responsive and others stiff and sticky. The time's been responding to Dave's nudgies almost as much as mine lately. I think it's a September thing. The attenuation of the envelope as summer and all that free sunlight and heat drain out of the taig and into space and into the ground makes everything all wobbly.
Maybe that's why we had crappy Septembers before. Unconscious self-loathing spiking up to jerk the magical wheels in our brains towards the road's cold shoulder.
:D Not this time. Less than twelve hours to go.
explosive amnesia (aka: explaining Infinity Plus One? again!?)
I must be bored.
Ain't no such thing as writer's block. Just a scared writer.
Scared of losing the line in to the place things come from. Which can only be severed from the one end, this one. Scared of sucking. Fear of one's own disapproval has stopped more people from writing, drawing, composing, designing or instigating excellent works than all the dictators in hades. Matter of fact the dicators probably helped people get over the hump in an indirect sort of way.
'S like Keokotah said to Jubal Sackett. In the afterlife, he planned to ask the powers that be for an enemy. Nothing but an enemy, he maintained, could keep a man really sharp and challenge him to constantly outdo himself. And how much fun could the afterlife be without a reason to strive?
Demetri Martin had a fantastic segment in a standup routine which me and Dave watched a month or so ago. A little song / monologue / live action thingy called "The Place Where My Jokes Come From." Yes, it was funny, but it was also one of those things that had THE PRETTY poking around the corner of it, in the way that makes me tear up a little. Everything loves to be praised. Especially the place where one's jokes come from.
This morning, for the first time in quite awhile, I took some mental solace in Infinity Plus One. Not any of the dozens of things by that title I got Googling the phrase, but the Reverend Doktor's Medicine Show. It's a goofy little fortune-telling device / non-linear novel created by the makers of KoL. I am about 95% sure these guys invented it themselves as a way to test their text manipulation program. The text manipulation programming in KoL is truly excellent. Each monster you fight, each weapon or spell you can use, all have a number of different action messages. All of which are sensitive to plurality, gender, and a host of of other grammatical rule-changers to which randomized text is not normally expected to conform.
Infinity Plus One is a novel of sorts and a tarot deck of sorts. Of sorts. As a novel it's sort of a cross between cyberpunk and the sort of book Cathy Acker might have written had she been born male. There are a limited number of chapters, twenty-nine or twenty-seven or some such thing. These are mostly narrated by the same main character, though they occur in no particular order and the events across chapters have a rather tenuous, metaphorical-at-best, relationship to one another. Each chapter is symbolized by a card with a name (which is also the chapter title), a pencil-line-drawn picture, and a unique combination of the three symbols infinity, plus, and one. These can be thought of rather like alchemy's mercury, sulfur, and salt. Namely (and respectively): that which analyzes and separates (infinity), that which empowers and synthesizes (plus), and that which stabilizes and brings into fullness (one). The website describes infinity, plus and one as being mind, spirit and body, but I like mine better. The way you know what mystical forces a card represents, apart from its symbols, is by reading its chapter of the nonlinear novel and coming to your own conclusion about the spiritual meaning of the insanity within.
Dave says he doesn't like this thing; he finds it creepy and not useful.
When I think about it, I'm not sure I find it all that useful. Just interesting. The particular way in which is it creepy is very much my wheelhouse. Under the umbrella of one of my hats. I trust this fortune-telling device to a certain extent, as one trusts, say, one of those finger-poking blood test machines that diabetics use. Using it isn't exactly what you would describe as fun. It can only detect a specific type of problem and is silent on all other issues. And if you don't actually need to be using it, doing so is painful, pointless and confusing.
So what the fortune-telling device does is this. Three cards appear face-down on the screen with little text boxes under them for you to add your own starter text. The left-hand one is the "infinity place", the center one the "plus place", and the right-hand box the "one place." You type in each of the three boxen things which express how that aspect of yourself is feeling. (I have found that the more creative juice I expend on this part, the more fun the end result is to attempt to analyze. I will explain the reason for this later.) Then flip over the three cards to reveal the name and drawing of the chapters that have been randomly selected for you. Then click on each card, and a pop-up window appears with the "interpretation."
Now, this is where the text manipulating software comes in. This program takes the starter text you entered in each box, analyzes it grammatically, and combines it in some weird way with the chapter of the card under which that text was entered. The results, which appear in a pop-up window, are invariably even more like gibberish than the original chapters, which were all at least half gibbous to begin with. (Yes, I wrote gibbous intentionally.) And as a sidenote, the software re-interpolates the two bodies of text each time you click the card on the original page. So if you close the pop-up window or click on another card, you can't go back and look at an interpolation a second time. I favor copying and pasting, then posting the interpolated results elsewhere. Because I'm silly like that.
So what good is it at all, I imagine you asking me. Why knowingly use a device whose sole purpose is to mix gibberish with more gibberish in order to produce a third text mangle even less comprehensible than the original two gibberishes? Doesn't that merely encourage mental instability?
To the second question, it surely can, and someone as susceptible as me should use it carefully.
To the first question, the answer lies not in the text, but in the mental and emotional assembly of the ideas around which the text was spawned. Now I will explain why the more "juice" I expend coming up with the text for the boxen, the better results I get. (It seems self-evident to me, but on the off-chance someone else might end up enjoying the use of this thing someday, I should be showing my work.) A metaphorical excursion will help here.
***
Imagine for a moment that you are recovering from a blow to the head and have temporary amnesia. You wake up in a room which contains a large, black box filled with miscellaneous items. After dumping the items out on the bed and taking a quick look at them, you don't immediately recognize any as your own. In fact they are so jumbled that you don't know how to begin even sorting them.
You pace over to the window, and when you look outside, you see a large dog outside. It's dirty and rather shifty-looking, but you recognize it. You've met this dog b efore. You don't get the feeling it's your dog, exactly; you just feel as though it was an animal that might trust you and doesn't espcially mean you harm. (Though it does smell bad and have fleas, that's not precisely the dog's fault.) Thinking quickly, you grab as much of the miscellaneous crap as you can carry and head out the door.
When you get downstairs, the dog looks at you curiously. Being a dog of very mixed experience, it isn't quite sure whether to run from you or approach you in hopes of a treat. Careful not to startle the animal, you settle down on the grass next to it and begin to show it some of the items you've brought.
Some it will sniff and move on without much interest. Others will cause it to look at you expectantly, or wag, or attempt to take the thing from your hand to chew it because it smells like there might be food in it. Any number of different reactions. You can't be sure of anything, of course, since you don't have much context to go from. However, you have some familiarity with this dog. However tenuous it may be in your conscious memory, the place in your brain that stores muscle memory will still be able to observe and react to the dog's body language.
Thus, you have a source of clues, if not actual information. Your existing relationship with the dog can help the dog tell you more about the objects, and ultimately yourself, than you would ever have been able to dredge up just staring at or handling the objects by yourself.
If it perks up its nose and wags when it sniffs an object, looking up at you expectantly, you know the object either contains food or belongs to someone it likes.
***
Just to be entirely clear on how I'm linking my metaphors up:
The dog represents the communication between the "personality" embodied in the novel text and my own personality, which communication is made possible by the text manipulating software. We can picture the things to which I am paying attention and the things the imagined "speaker" of the novel cares about as two circles of a Venn diagram. The place where they intersect is the emotional content carried through into the interpolated text.
The box of miscellany represents the contents of my personality during the time period in which I am composing my starter text. The product of the writing process is words on a screen, yes. But the process involves the whole self. Things alter one's thought processes all the time, things of which it is virtually impossible to be consciously aware. Emotional states, emotional responses based on reflexes both conscious and unconscious, give rise to chemical and hormonal influences on memory pathways which alter conscious access to the contents of memories. Mental processes can be shaped or skewed by limitations and drives imposed by the chemical state of the body--hunger, fatigue, subconscious responses to smells or shapes or other factors in the environment. At any given time the contents of our minds are as much a mystery to us as the chemical composition of the grit under our fingernails. Unless we've been through an overwhelming experience which left distinctive traces all over the place, the multitude of interconnections between every emotion and piece of information we have makes the precise source and significance of any given thing virtually impossible to pinpoint. (I personally feel I suffer from this general confusion of pathways a little more than the average bear. Could be the ADD, could be good old absent-minded professorness, who knows. Or it could be that everyone is equally as confused as I!)
So, as in the analogy above, when I "grab an armful" of the contents of my personality and try to bring it outside, I have no idea what is in that armful or whether it pertains to my goals or the questions I wish to answer. I don't even know if it was in my mind as a result of internal personality forces or of influences on my mind or body from my external environment, physical or social. This is true for anyone, at any time, in any circumstance. Only with hindsight can we get even a reasonably guesstimable picture. The amount of information, let alone quasi-informational slush, that goes into the interactions of any real-time thing with any other real-time thing is orders of magnitude too big to process unless and until one has developed a filtration system.
The filtration system provided by Infinity Plus One can be considered from two sides (Like anything else.): The exoteric and the esoteric.
The exoteric side of the process, the part that can easily be told and is the explicable reason for anything happening at all, is the grammar-shuffling software. This software takes note of certain properties of the words in my text and certain properties in the text of the chapter and tries to smoosh them together in ways that fit. The result is, from this perspective, unlikely to produce any coherent information at all. If a complete sentence hangs together here and there, it's a fun curiosity at best.
The esoteric side of the process is the communication between my state of mind and the state of mind of the narrator in the novel (this communication being represented by the dog character in the analogy). Certain emotional or spiritual things I brought into my text will resonate with the emotional and spiritual contents of the novel text.
Speaking of emotional and spiritual contents, and to be more precise: In my imagination I try to form a sense of presence of the particular chapter, the way you can sense the emotional presence of a living creature which can be smelled and felt, but neither heard nor seen. I can consider this sense of presence and come to understand, just a bit, the shape of this imaginary living creature's desire. What is its emotional vector, what sort of a being is it turning itself into, sort of thing. It's exactly like considering a poem to discern the actual intent of the poet, sometimes in seeming contrast to the chosen words. Except in this case, rather than a human being, you're discerning the actual intent of the spirit of the text, an imaginary entity.
The emotional and spiritual vector of the interpolated text will be the sum of those emotions and desires which resonate with both me and the spirit of the text. To return to our metaphor, these are things which, once the dog sniffs and wags at them, I turn over in my hands and find I vaguely recognize.
Which is what makes Infinity Plus One useful to me.
The finished product itself, the interp text, is mainly a diagnostic. My reading of it tells me how well I have performed the more important, but unobservable, middle steps. Which in turn gives me clues about the relative stability of my mental state and where the likely problem areas are.
These days I only tend to use it when a very unpleasant or dangerously quirky mood overtakes me AND I am in serious doubt regarding its source.
(post finished 10-2-08.)
Ain't no such thing as writer's block. Just a scared writer.
Scared of losing the line in to the place things come from. Which can only be severed from the one end, this one. Scared of sucking. Fear of one's own disapproval has stopped more people from writing, drawing, composing, designing or instigating excellent works than all the dictators in hades. Matter of fact the dicators probably helped people get over the hump in an indirect sort of way.
'S like Keokotah said to Jubal Sackett. In the afterlife, he planned to ask the powers that be for an enemy. Nothing but an enemy, he maintained, could keep a man really sharp and challenge him to constantly outdo himself. And how much fun could the afterlife be without a reason to strive?
Demetri Martin had a fantastic segment in a standup routine which me and Dave watched a month or so ago. A little song / monologue / live action thingy called "The Place Where My Jokes Come From." Yes, it was funny, but it was also one of those things that had THE PRETTY poking around the corner of it, in the way that makes me tear up a little. Everything loves to be praised. Especially the place where one's jokes come from.
This morning, for the first time in quite awhile, I took some mental solace in Infinity Plus One. Not any of the dozens of things by that title I got Googling the phrase, but the Reverend Doktor's Medicine Show. It's a goofy little fortune-telling device / non-linear novel created by the makers of KoL. I am about 95% sure these guys invented it themselves as a way to test their text manipulation program. The text manipulation programming in KoL is truly excellent. Each monster you fight, each weapon or spell you can use, all have a number of different action messages. All of which are sensitive to plurality, gender, and a host of of other grammatical rule-changers to which randomized text is not normally expected to conform.
Infinity Plus One is a novel of sorts and a tarot deck of sorts. Of sorts. As a novel it's sort of a cross between cyberpunk and the sort of book Cathy Acker might have written had she been born male. There are a limited number of chapters, twenty-nine or twenty-seven or some such thing. These are mostly narrated by the same main character, though they occur in no particular order and the events across chapters have a rather tenuous, metaphorical-at-best, relationship to one another. Each chapter is symbolized by a card with a name (which is also the chapter title), a pencil-line-drawn picture, and a unique combination of the three symbols infinity, plus, and one. These can be thought of rather like alchemy's mercury, sulfur, and salt. Namely (and respectively): that which analyzes and separates (infinity), that which empowers and synthesizes (plus), and that which stabilizes and brings into fullness (one). The website describes infinity, plus and one as being mind, spirit and body, but I like mine better. The way you know what mystical forces a card represents, apart from its symbols, is by reading its chapter of the nonlinear novel and coming to your own conclusion about the spiritual meaning of the insanity within.
Dave says he doesn't like this thing; he finds it creepy and not useful.
When I think about it, I'm not sure I find it all that useful. Just interesting. The particular way in which is it creepy is very much my wheelhouse. Under the umbrella of one of my hats. I trust this fortune-telling device to a certain extent, as one trusts, say, one of those finger-poking blood test machines that diabetics use. Using it isn't exactly what you would describe as fun. It can only detect a specific type of problem and is silent on all other issues. And if you don't actually need to be using it, doing so is painful, pointless and confusing.
So what the fortune-telling device does is this. Three cards appear face-down on the screen with little text boxes under them for you to add your own starter text. The left-hand one is the "infinity place", the center one the "plus place", and the right-hand box the "one place." You type in each of the three boxen things which express how that aspect of yourself is feeling. (I have found that the more creative juice I expend on this part, the more fun the end result is to attempt to analyze. I will explain the reason for this later.) Then flip over the three cards to reveal the name and drawing of the chapters that have been randomly selected for you. Then click on each card, and a pop-up window appears with the "interpretation."
Now, this is where the text manipulating software comes in. This program takes the starter text you entered in each box, analyzes it grammatically, and combines it in some weird way with the chapter of the card under which that text was entered. The results, which appear in a pop-up window, are invariably even more like gibberish than the original chapters, which were all at least half gibbous to begin with. (Yes, I wrote gibbous intentionally.) And as a sidenote, the software re-interpolates the two bodies of text each time you click the card on the original page. So if you close the pop-up window or click on another card, you can't go back and look at an interpolation a second time. I favor copying and pasting, then posting the interpolated results elsewhere. Because I'm silly like that.
So what good is it at all, I imagine you asking me. Why knowingly use a device whose sole purpose is to mix gibberish with more gibberish in order to produce a third text mangle even less comprehensible than the original two gibberishes? Doesn't that merely encourage mental instability?
To the second question, it surely can, and someone as susceptible as me should use it carefully.
To the first question, the answer lies not in the text, but in the mental and emotional assembly of the ideas around which the text was spawned. Now I will explain why the more "juice" I expend coming up with the text for the boxen, the better results I get. (It seems self-evident to me, but on the off-chance someone else might end up enjoying the use of this thing someday, I should be showing my work.) A metaphorical excursion will help here.
***
Imagine for a moment that you are recovering from a blow to the head and have temporary amnesia. You wake up in a room which contains a large, black box filled with miscellaneous items. After dumping the items out on the bed and taking a quick look at them, you don't immediately recognize any as your own. In fact they are so jumbled that you don't know how to begin even sorting them.
You pace over to the window, and when you look outside, you see a large dog outside. It's dirty and rather shifty-looking, but you recognize it. You've met this dog b efore. You don't get the feeling it's your dog, exactly; you just feel as though it was an animal that might trust you and doesn't espcially mean you harm. (Though it does smell bad and have fleas, that's not precisely the dog's fault.) Thinking quickly, you grab as much of the miscellaneous crap as you can carry and head out the door.
When you get downstairs, the dog looks at you curiously. Being a dog of very mixed experience, it isn't quite sure whether to run from you or approach you in hopes of a treat. Careful not to startle the animal, you settle down on the grass next to it and begin to show it some of the items you've brought.
Some it will sniff and move on without much interest. Others will cause it to look at you expectantly, or wag, or attempt to take the thing from your hand to chew it because it smells like there might be food in it. Any number of different reactions. You can't be sure of anything, of course, since you don't have much context to go from. However, you have some familiarity with this dog. However tenuous it may be in your conscious memory, the place in your brain that stores muscle memory will still be able to observe and react to the dog's body language.
Thus, you have a source of clues, if not actual information. Your existing relationship with the dog can help the dog tell you more about the objects, and ultimately yourself, than you would ever have been able to dredge up just staring at or handling the objects by yourself.
If it perks up its nose and wags when it sniffs an object, looking up at you expectantly, you know the object either contains food or belongs to someone it likes.
***
Just to be entirely clear on how I'm linking my metaphors up:
The dog represents the communication between the "personality" embodied in the novel text and my own personality, which communication is made possible by the text manipulating software. We can picture the things to which I am paying attention and the things the imagined "speaker" of the novel cares about as two circles of a Venn diagram. The place where they intersect is the emotional content carried through into the interpolated text.
The box of miscellany represents the contents of my personality during the time period in which I am composing my starter text. The product of the writing process is words on a screen, yes. But the process involves the whole self. Things alter one's thought processes all the time, things of which it is virtually impossible to be consciously aware. Emotional states, emotional responses based on reflexes both conscious and unconscious, give rise to chemical and hormonal influences on memory pathways which alter conscious access to the contents of memories. Mental processes can be shaped or skewed by limitations and drives imposed by the chemical state of the body--hunger, fatigue, subconscious responses to smells or shapes or other factors in the environment. At any given time the contents of our minds are as much a mystery to us as the chemical composition of the grit under our fingernails. Unless we've been through an overwhelming experience which left distinctive traces all over the place, the multitude of interconnections between every emotion and piece of information we have makes the precise source and significance of any given thing virtually impossible to pinpoint. (I personally feel I suffer from this general confusion of pathways a little more than the average bear. Could be the ADD, could be good old absent-minded professorness, who knows. Or it could be that everyone is equally as confused as I!)
So, as in the analogy above, when I "grab an armful" of the contents of my personality and try to bring it outside, I have no idea what is in that armful or whether it pertains to my goals or the questions I wish to answer. I don't even know if it was in my mind as a result of internal personality forces or of influences on my mind or body from my external environment, physical or social. This is true for anyone, at any time, in any circumstance. Only with hindsight can we get even a reasonably guesstimable picture. The amount of information, let alone quasi-informational slush, that goes into the interactions of any real-time thing with any other real-time thing is orders of magnitude too big to process unless and until one has developed a filtration system.
The filtration system provided by Infinity Plus One can be considered from two sides (Like anything else.): The exoteric and the esoteric.
The exoteric side of the process, the part that can easily be told and is the explicable reason for anything happening at all, is the grammar-shuffling software. This software takes note of certain properties of the words in my text and certain properties in the text of the chapter and tries to smoosh them together in ways that fit. The result is, from this perspective, unlikely to produce any coherent information at all. If a complete sentence hangs together here and there, it's a fun curiosity at best.
The esoteric side of the process is the communication between my state of mind and the state of mind of the narrator in the novel (this communication being represented by the dog character in the analogy). Certain emotional or spiritual things I brought into my text will resonate with the emotional and spiritual contents of the novel text.
Speaking of emotional and spiritual contents, and to be more precise: In my imagination I try to form a sense of presence of the particular chapter, the way you can sense the emotional presence of a living creature which can be smelled and felt, but neither heard nor seen. I can consider this sense of presence and come to understand, just a bit, the shape of this imaginary living creature's desire. What is its emotional vector, what sort of a being is it turning itself into, sort of thing. It's exactly like considering a poem to discern the actual intent of the poet, sometimes in seeming contrast to the chosen words. Except in this case, rather than a human being, you're discerning the actual intent of the spirit of the text, an imaginary entity.
The emotional and spiritual vector of the interpolated text will be the sum of those emotions and desires which resonate with both me and the spirit of the text. To return to our metaphor, these are things which, once the dog sniffs and wags at them, I turn over in my hands and find I vaguely recognize.
Which is what makes Infinity Plus One useful to me.
The finished product itself, the interp text, is mainly a diagnostic. My reading of it tells me how well I have performed the more important, but unobservable, middle steps. Which in turn gives me clues about the relative stability of my mental state and where the likely problem areas are.
These days I only tend to use it when a very unpleasant or dangerously quirky mood overtakes me AND I am in serious doubt regarding its source.
(post finished 10-2-08.)
another infinity plus one
up to it again. I never even go back and read these. do I? maybe I should start.
INFINITY
Starter text:
The old styles of vision return. Before I cleaned house, when I believed in demons and disbelieved in myself. Now my belief in them is shaken, and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I see that I am afraid for Dave to have power, to have a life, to be independent. Why? Now I see that I am afraid to assert myself still, even in quiet ways at home. Afraid to be vulnerable even to him. Why?
Interp:
Millennium Shakes (8 1 +)
An infinity in the infinity place represents stability, harmony.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator BONE.
Here is an Operator known as Bone, who is to needless violence what Mistress Naomi is to sexual perversion. He is the face of every thug, gangster, hitman ... It was BONE who had Cain slay Abel, and it is BONE that takes over when you get drunk or angry and start to break shit. He is what makes teenage boys want to skin kittens alive, and there is a bit of him in all of us.
BONE: The old styles of this guy, will ya. We got to our man before our man could pull fast shit on here. A quick in demons and disbelieved in and out to be independent. Why? Now I did this guy, will ya. We got no love back to him. We got no room for losers and he got to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. We gotta do they. Real fuckin' funny now! Real shame. I cleaned house, when I am afraid for losers and he just cut out. What's going on here. A quick in myself is strengthened. Now my belief in and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I cleaned house, when I believed in myself still, even tell the belt and he just what the belt and he just got business. The old styles of this shit. Whatcha getting? That's it baby. Ahh baby. Ahh baby. C'mon ... Busted! Yeah, a life, to have power, to hell from a whore tried to assert myself is shaken, and my belief in myself. Now I am afraid to hell from all sides, but sometimes even tell the difference, but there's still crossing gets done. Someone's got no idea what the guy's got. Jinx thinks he's throwing volts across the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah bitch, thought we gotta do. No room for crossers, ain't nobody, but sometimes even in myself. Now I aim to be too cautious around this shit. Whatcha getting? That's just got to have to be vulnerable even tell the difference, but sometimes even in electrostatic to God. Looks like someone got no love back to move on the difference, but sometimes even tell the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah! He's fuckin' funny now! Real fuckin' funny, huh? Yeah, that's right. That's just got us to give a little love of vision return. Before I believed in electrostatic to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. Who? Shit.Looks like someone got lucky. Can't be bunk and out to numerate, then cut out. What's going on? You still receiving? Don't risk it, just got lucky. Can't be too many people wanna get a toothless whore.
Interp interp:
Hell is nearby. The vectors are still out. Two people crossing at once makes it more complicated. A double crossing. Don't be a shit just because you don't know what the fuck's going on. Nobody does.
PLUS
Starter text:
I wake up more energetic, but as I move through each day I find I am frustrated and angry. Getting laid only takes a little of the edge off. I am frustrated and it's maddening. Is songwriting the answer? Writing of prose? There is something I demand of myself more and more urgently with each passing hour, something I demand of my time or it of me, and I don't know what that is. Why not?
Interp:
A Clown Show (1 8 +)
An infinity in the plus position tells you to retreat to your tower. This is a day for tomes and alchemy. An infinity here could also represent an upcoming epiphany.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator WIZZO.
WIZZO is The Clown of Thought; he is alien and aloof. His symbol is . WIZZO's mask is a mask of Air. He is the muses and the music of the spheres, the laws that keep the atoms in their orbits.
WIZZO: I atlithe ay. omendame aked Wr pake ting sthea ouswith insseam I ustindgwe I ff litlf wamang. Iswit'stitling. orofrystt ate I insttlf m lf orge initting. Th a m ofr? oswed andake my I I anlangh ind I d Thoruratrachritlamesom I omof he wela I mom make prad ly.
Interp interp:
Clearly, I don't know what the fuck's going on. But that won't stop me from thinking about it all the time, willit now?
ONE
Starter text:
No longer overdrawn, all to the good. Looking forward to a quiet evening alone at home, even better. Today at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the present. It is only the future that balks me.
Interp:
Greenlight, Go! (+ + 8)
An infinity in the one position means things might be a little dull for a bit. This is a time for waiting in contemplation and reflection. Learn to be your own best friend, read a book you've been meaning to read. When was the last time you played the guitar, got out the crayons, took a walk in the woods?
You are using Telecult Power #1:
Receiving Psychic Power from Beyond
No longer overdrawn, all to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2. Leg/Buttocks Focus No longer overdrawn, all to a quiet evening alone at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2.
Interp interp:
I will calm down and have fun. I should not fear the future, but instead look forward to it. Me and Dave's sex life, both visible and invisible, will likely not be adverseley affected by whatever it is that's happening to us. Me. Him. Whatev.
INFINITY
Starter text:
The old styles of vision return. Before I cleaned house, when I believed in demons and disbelieved in myself. Now my belief in them is shaken, and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I see that I am afraid for Dave to have power, to have a life, to be independent. Why? Now I see that I am afraid to assert myself still, even in quiet ways at home. Afraid to be vulnerable even to him. Why?
Interp:
Millennium Shakes (8 1 +)
An infinity in the infinity place represents stability, harmony.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator BONE.
Here is an Operator known as Bone, who is to needless violence what Mistress Naomi is to sexual perversion. He is the face of every thug, gangster, hitman ... It was BONE who had Cain slay Abel, and it is BONE that takes over when you get drunk or angry and start to break shit. He is what makes teenage boys want to skin kittens alive, and there is a bit of him in all of us.
BONE: The old styles of this guy, will ya. We got to our man before our man could pull fast shit on here. A quick in demons and disbelieved in and out to be independent. Why? Now I did this guy, will ya. We got no love back to him. We got no room for losers and he got to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. We gotta do they. Real fuckin' funny now! Real shame. I cleaned house, when I am afraid for losers and he just cut out. What's going on here. A quick in myself is strengthened. Now my belief in and my belief in myself is strengthened. Now I cleaned house, when I believed in myself still, even tell the belt and he just what the belt and he just got business. The old styles of this shit. Whatcha getting? That's it baby. Ahh baby. Ahh baby. C'mon ... Busted! Yeah, a life, to have power, to hell from a whore tried to assert myself is shaken, and my belief in myself. Now I am afraid to hell from all sides, but sometimes even tell the difference, but there's still crossing gets done. Someone's got no idea what the guy's got. Jinx thinks he's throwing volts across the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah bitch, thought we gotta do. No room for crossers, ain't nobody, but sometimes even in myself. Now I aim to be too cautious around this shit. Whatcha getting? That's just got to have to be vulnerable even tell the difference, but sometimes even in electrostatic to God. Looks like someone got no love back to move on the difference, but sometimes even tell the fuck's going on? You okay? Aw, Jesus fuck. Fuck me. Yeah. Yeah! He's fuckin' funny now! Real fuckin' funny, huh? Yeah, that's right. That's just got us to give a little love of vision return. Before I believed in electrostatic to him. Why?
Yeah... Yeah?... What? Shit. Who? Shit.Looks like someone got lucky. Can't be bunk and out to numerate, then cut out. What's going on? You still receiving? Don't risk it, just got lucky. Can't be too many people wanna get a toothless whore.
Interp interp:
Hell is nearby. The vectors are still out. Two people crossing at once makes it more complicated. A double crossing. Don't be a shit just because you don't know what the fuck's going on. Nobody does.
PLUS
Starter text:
I wake up more energetic, but as I move through each day I find I am frustrated and angry. Getting laid only takes a little of the edge off. I am frustrated and it's maddening. Is songwriting the answer? Writing of prose? There is something I demand of myself more and more urgently with each passing hour, something I demand of my time or it of me, and I don't know what that is. Why not?
Interp:
A Clown Show (1 8 +)
An infinity in the plus position tells you to retreat to your tower. This is a day for tomes and alchemy. An infinity here could also represent an upcoming epiphany.
You are using Telecult Power #7:
Receiving Thoughts from Space
You are receiving a message from the operator WIZZO.
WIZZO is The Clown of Thought; he is alien and aloof. His symbol is . WIZZO's mask is a mask of Air. He is the muses and the music of the spheres, the laws that keep the atoms in their orbits.
WIZZO: I atlithe ay. omendame aked Wr pake ting sthea ouswith insseam I ustindgwe I ff litlf wamang. Iswit'stitling. orofrystt ate I insttlf m lf orge initting. Th a m ofr? oswed andake my I I anlangh ind I d Thoruratrachritlamesom I omof he wela I mom make prad ly.
Interp interp:
Clearly, I don't know what the fuck's going on. But that won't stop me from thinking about it all the time, willit now?
ONE
Starter text:
No longer overdrawn, all to the good. Looking forward to a quiet evening alone at home, even better. Today at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the present. It is only the future that balks me.
Interp:
Greenlight, Go! (+ + 8)
An infinity in the one position means things might be a little dull for a bit. This is a time for waiting in contemplation and reflection. Learn to be your own best friend, read a book you've been meaning to read. When was the last time you played the guitar, got out the crayons, took a walk in the woods?
You are using Telecult Power #1:
Receiving Psychic Power from Beyond
No longer overdrawn, all to get myself some lunch. So really, no practical complaints regarding the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2. Leg/Buttocks Focus No longer overdrawn, all to a quiet evening alone at work has been quite reasonable. And soon I will be going to the good. Looking forward to the future that balks me.
I. Class A - "Non-Limiting" Displacement A. Oral Fixation B. Anal Fixation C. Visual Predilection 1. Pornographic (non-compulsory) 2. Non-pornographic D. Focal Displacement (non-fetishistic) 1. Breast Focus 2.
Interp interp:
I will calm down and have fun. I should not fear the future, but instead look forward to it. Me and Dave's sex life, both visible and invisible, will likely not be adverseley affected by whatever it is that's happening to us. Me. Him. Whatev.
more than four kittens in Ohio
Ever since Pandora first played me "Ohio", I've been listening to it obsessively. Well, what passes for obsessively. Y'see, Pandora's music license doesn't allow it to make songs available on demand, I don't have any portable mp3 devices, and at home I usually let rando player or Dave pick the music, because I like most everything we have. So those are the main reasons I'm not yet sick of either Ohio or "Steam Comes Off Our House." The latter is a beautiful track off of "Ballads of the Book", an album composed entirely of collaborations between Irish poets and musicians.
Said album also has a track which wins my personal award for best song title, "A Calvinist Narrowly Avoids Pleasure." Ah, alcoholism. Like any other vice, it can create great and inspiring verse even as it eats away at a man. Especially the chemical vices, for some reason. Many famous bands have a "heroin album" which stands out among their other work; one band I can mention even has a "crack album."
My continued creative drought has me trying to calm myself by considering the nature of other people's creativity, or creative work in general. In case it wasn't obvious. Of course by increasing my conscious awareness of the machinery of the creative process I'm totally shooting myself in the foot. One of several reasons, not all of which I know, that a songwriter can have a substance abuse album is that abusing a substance erodes one's identity, erodes one's control over the fine operations of one's psyche. And in so doing, drives back into the unconscious much of the mana (libido, attention, whatev) which is often taken up by the concerns of living and trying to stay sane.
I did actually write a song last week, but I don't count it. Its principal use in my book is as an intro to [the only road]. Uses pretty much the same chords as the verses to that song, in fact.
emptiness
at the bottom of the cup
emptiness
on the phone line, pick it up
emptiness in my mind
when I try to divine
what the future holds
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and cold
emptiness
where my father used to snore
emptiness
between the ceiling and the floor
emptiness in my heart
flung it out like a dart
left you scarred
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and hard
emptiness
in the gestures that you make
emptiness
trailing panic in its wake
emptiness in my hand
but the flames that I fanned
gonna burn a long while
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
I am still emotionally wrestling with my desire to be able to forgive Mom for many things. Things I can't remember, things I can, things I've been told about but wasn't present to see. And irrationally, to forgive her for outliving Dad. She couldn't have helped his numerous medical conditions, his stubborn insistence at sticking with a job that got him nothing but stress and disappointment, or his refusal to accept the aid and comfort he continually felt the compulsion to offer, even when he lacked the means to deliver it. The whole decade-long mess of a divorce and the years of rancor that preceded it could only have been prevented by both of them changing themselves radically. Which neither could do--for many reasons, not all of which I know. But I had one parent at whom I was less angry than the other and now that one is dead.
I am not a rancorous or vengeful person, now. But I had a lot of rancor and desire for revenge back in the day. A lot of the sneaky psychological warfare bullshit that she to this day believes to have been Dad's doing was me, in my spare time, easing my own hurt by lashing out at her. Hence the "flung it out like a dart / left you scarred" lines. (I must take a moment here to preen for rhyming "heart" with "dart" instead of "apart." Take that, cliche rhyme.) But my experiences then are what led me to my current views on revenge in general. If it can't change the person's mind about the things they've done, if it can't prevent future harm, and since it sure as fuck can't remedy past harm, then all it can do is give me more memories of having been a beast. And any is too many.
But why did I bring up "Ohio", back there at the beginning of the post? Because I've been thinking about politics more than I prefer. No, I still haven't registered to vote. I know it's gotta be in the next couple weeks or I won't have a chance to vote in November. The evils visited on me, my fellow Americans, and the people of Earth wherever America sticks our greasy little fingers, are a little like the bug bites that mysteriously appear every morning on my body. I'm not sure how it happened, I don't know what I can do to prevent it, and it aches and itches constantly in places where it wouldn't be polite for me to scratch. I can't bomb our bedroom with bug spray. We sleep there. I can't throw out all our mattresses and bedclothes. We can't afford new ones. And I can't realistically get behind the abolition of our system of government, either. I can't think of anything practicable with which to replace it that would be an actual improvement.
But the rust has spread all through the engine now. And I don't have firearms and a country estate and a stockpile of food and clean water. Me and Dave are in the worst possible physical situation for a childless couple in the event of a serious apocalypse. Okay, not the worst possible. But our neighborhood is populous, a long damn walk from sources of water, and about as far from being arable land as it's possible to get in a temperate climate. Not even a grocery store nearby to loot.
Is it terribly cynical of me to leap immediately from contemplating the mess in Washington (or even Springfield!) to a vision of Chicago as a barren wasteland inhabited by vicious, starving predators, most of whom walk on two legs?
Then again, Neil Young read an article about the Kent State massacre, went for a walk in the woods, and came back with a song. A song which points out very correctly that that kind of murderous idiocy "should have been done long ago"; we should have been finished with that sort of thing, moved on to all figuring out together how we can be happy and treat one another well. For dog's sake!
And dammit, with all this richness of misery on the one hand, and wealth of personal comfort on the other, why the hell have I not gone for a walk around the neighborhood and come back with a kickass song?!? What should I do, what have I done that I shouldn't? Ach, my impatience is childish. They will come or not as they choose. Or perhaps they have already arrived and are waiting on me to kick open some rusty little door, to shove aside some finely-wound obstruction...
You see how it is with me. This gnawing little loop is never absent from the back of my mind. I am like a junkie for the music. I haven't had a proper fix in almost two months now. A stinking sonnet and a freaking two and half minute intro song. Maddening, I tells ya. Maddening!
I had a dream a couple nights ago where I met dozens of kittens. I was in a space based on the basement of the house I grew up in (a couple other dreams there lately, in fact), having arrived through one of those portal thingies I never seem to notice in-dream but remember afterward. At first there were only a dozen or so, adorable little fluffy things in shades of brown and black and other colors--predominantly brown. They all wanted them to take me back with them--whups. Freudian kitty slip? Wanted me to take them back with me and be my kittens, but even dreaming I knew me and Dave only had room for a couple more kitties. Three or four, tops. I wanted so much to keep them all, and kept looking from one to another, unable to decide. Then I moved towards the front of the basement, to that tiny room where we stored the never-used camping equipment. There was a rectangular window in that closet that looked out on the gravel and sidewalk which marked the boundary between our house and our neighbors Joyce and Tony's house. There was another kitten there, outside the glass, with a full-grown cat beside it. The kitten looked sick; its eyes seemed too large in its head, its coat was not fluffy, and something else about it seemed off somehow. It looked at me with almost as much longing as the healthy kittens had done, though it wasn't able to muster the same emotion exactly. But I knew there was a reason that kitten and its full-grown companion were outside the glass, that I couldn't let the kitten in, even though I pitied it and wanted it to be my kitty also.
The basement of the house I grew up in was the template for the locations of a couple of other important dreams, a fact I think bears mentioning here. There was the dream I'd had the night Dad died, of a burning man with something terribly urgent to do, then a view of a basement window looking out onto a peaceful scene of green grass and sunlight, then a movement towards the window and a feeling of relief and escape. The images and emotions after that seemed garbled and confused to me, which makes me greatly regret not having made more progress in disciplining my deep mind beforehand. Could've maybe made more sense of it. Anyway. The second important dream in that setting was the one where I learned the demon factory is closed. Off the main room of the basement was the dark and scary boiler room, and through that was the little workroom. Dad had used it as a workshop and reloading room, then when he was out of the house Mom used it as an office. But in the demon-factory-closed dream it was mine, much larger, and totally empty. Unmarked pale blue-slightly-teal paint on the walls, and a rectangular hole in the floor. Through the hole I could see, might as well call it hell, but nothing down there was coming up and I didn't choose to reach through. Couldn't even think of a decent benediction. Which is neither here nor there.
So. No demon factory in my mental basement anymore. (At least that area of it, heh. I've been building that house in my mind before sleeptime lately, and there are other scary areas I've yet to master.) All to the good. And the main mental basement room can now serve as a lost and found for nice kittehs. Wonder what the kittehs represented, apart from perhaps being invisible creatures. Songs? Projects? Beliefs?
I've been leaning towards thinking of them as songs. Mostly because I've got my lack of songs on the brain. I imagine all these songs crowding around me, mewling to be written, and me somehow not able to carry them back with me and give them a home.
Maddening.
Said album also has a track which wins my personal award for best song title, "A Calvinist Narrowly Avoids Pleasure." Ah, alcoholism. Like any other vice, it can create great and inspiring verse even as it eats away at a man. Especially the chemical vices, for some reason. Many famous bands have a "heroin album" which stands out among their other work; one band I can mention even has a "crack album."
My continued creative drought has me trying to calm myself by considering the nature of other people's creativity, or creative work in general. In case it wasn't obvious. Of course by increasing my conscious awareness of the machinery of the creative process I'm totally shooting myself in the foot. One of several reasons, not all of which I know, that a songwriter can have a substance abuse album is that abusing a substance erodes one's identity, erodes one's control over the fine operations of one's psyche. And in so doing, drives back into the unconscious much of the mana (libido, attention, whatev) which is often taken up by the concerns of living and trying to stay sane.
I did actually write a song last week, but I don't count it. Its principal use in my book is as an intro to [the only road]. Uses pretty much the same chords as the verses to that song, in fact.
emptiness
at the bottom of the cup
emptiness
on the phone line, pick it up
emptiness in my mind
when I try to divine
what the future holds
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and cold
emptiness
where my father used to snore
emptiness
between the ceiling and the floor
emptiness in my heart
flung it out like a dart
left you scarred
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
and hard
emptiness
in the gestures that you make
emptiness
trailing panic in its wake
emptiness in my hand
but the flames that I fanned
gonna burn a long while
it's beautiful, it's beautiful, it's beautiful
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
to see you smile
I am still emotionally wrestling with my desire to be able to forgive Mom for many things. Things I can't remember, things I can, things I've been told about but wasn't present to see. And irrationally, to forgive her for outliving Dad. She couldn't have helped his numerous medical conditions, his stubborn insistence at sticking with a job that got him nothing but stress and disappointment, or his refusal to accept the aid and comfort he continually felt the compulsion to offer, even when he lacked the means to deliver it. The whole decade-long mess of a divorce and the years of rancor that preceded it could only have been prevented by both of them changing themselves radically. Which neither could do--for many reasons, not all of which I know. But I had one parent at whom I was less angry than the other and now that one is dead.
I am not a rancorous or vengeful person, now. But I had a lot of rancor and desire for revenge back in the day. A lot of the sneaky psychological warfare bullshit that she to this day believes to have been Dad's doing was me, in my spare time, easing my own hurt by lashing out at her. Hence the "flung it out like a dart / left you scarred" lines. (I must take a moment here to preen for rhyming "heart" with "dart" instead of "apart." Take that, cliche rhyme.) But my experiences then are what led me to my current views on revenge in general. If it can't change the person's mind about the things they've done, if it can't prevent future harm, and since it sure as fuck can't remedy past harm, then all it can do is give me more memories of having been a beast. And any is too many.
But why did I bring up "Ohio", back there at the beginning of the post? Because I've been thinking about politics more than I prefer. No, I still haven't registered to vote. I know it's gotta be in the next couple weeks or I won't have a chance to vote in November. The evils visited on me, my fellow Americans, and the people of Earth wherever America sticks our greasy little fingers, are a little like the bug bites that mysteriously appear every morning on my body. I'm not sure how it happened, I don't know what I can do to prevent it, and it aches and itches constantly in places where it wouldn't be polite for me to scratch. I can't bomb our bedroom with bug spray. We sleep there. I can't throw out all our mattresses and bedclothes. We can't afford new ones. And I can't realistically get behind the abolition of our system of government, either. I can't think of anything practicable with which to replace it that would be an actual improvement.
But the rust has spread all through the engine now. And I don't have firearms and a country estate and a stockpile of food and clean water. Me and Dave are in the worst possible physical situation for a childless couple in the event of a serious apocalypse. Okay, not the worst possible. But our neighborhood is populous, a long damn walk from sources of water, and about as far from being arable land as it's possible to get in a temperate climate. Not even a grocery store nearby to loot.
Is it terribly cynical of me to leap immediately from contemplating the mess in Washington (or even Springfield!) to a vision of Chicago as a barren wasteland inhabited by vicious, starving predators, most of whom walk on two legs?
Then again, Neil Young read an article about the Kent State massacre, went for a walk in the woods, and came back with a song. A song which points out very correctly that that kind of murderous idiocy "should have been done long ago"; we should have been finished with that sort of thing, moved on to all figuring out together how we can be happy and treat one another well. For dog's sake!
And dammit, with all this richness of misery on the one hand, and wealth of personal comfort on the other, why the hell have I not gone for a walk around the neighborhood and come back with a kickass song?!? What should I do, what have I done that I shouldn't? Ach, my impatience is childish. They will come or not as they choose. Or perhaps they have already arrived and are waiting on me to kick open some rusty little door, to shove aside some finely-wound obstruction...
You see how it is with me. This gnawing little loop is never absent from the back of my mind. I am like a junkie for the music. I haven't had a proper fix in almost two months now. A stinking sonnet and a freaking two and half minute intro song. Maddening, I tells ya. Maddening!
I had a dream a couple nights ago where I met dozens of kittens. I was in a space based on the basement of the house I grew up in (a couple other dreams there lately, in fact), having arrived through one of those portal thingies I never seem to notice in-dream but remember afterward. At first there were only a dozen or so, adorable little fluffy things in shades of brown and black and other colors--predominantly brown. They all wanted them to take me back with them--whups. Freudian kitty slip? Wanted me to take them back with me and be my kittens, but even dreaming I knew me and Dave only had room for a couple more kitties. Three or four, tops. I wanted so much to keep them all, and kept looking from one to another, unable to decide. Then I moved towards the front of the basement, to that tiny room where we stored the never-used camping equipment. There was a rectangular window in that closet that looked out on the gravel and sidewalk which marked the boundary between our house and our neighbors Joyce and Tony's house. There was another kitten there, outside the glass, with a full-grown cat beside it. The kitten looked sick; its eyes seemed too large in its head, its coat was not fluffy, and something else about it seemed off somehow. It looked at me with almost as much longing as the healthy kittens had done, though it wasn't able to muster the same emotion exactly. But I knew there was a reason that kitten and its full-grown companion were outside the glass, that I couldn't let the kitten in, even though I pitied it and wanted it to be my kitty also.
The basement of the house I grew up in was the template for the locations of a couple of other important dreams, a fact I think bears mentioning here. There was the dream I'd had the night Dad died, of a burning man with something terribly urgent to do, then a view of a basement window looking out onto a peaceful scene of green grass and sunlight, then a movement towards the window and a feeling of relief and escape. The images and emotions after that seemed garbled and confused to me, which makes me greatly regret not having made more progress in disciplining my deep mind beforehand. Could've maybe made more sense of it. Anyway. The second important dream in that setting was the one where I learned the demon factory is closed. Off the main room of the basement was the dark and scary boiler room, and through that was the little workroom. Dad had used it as a workshop and reloading room, then when he was out of the house Mom used it as an office. But in the demon-factory-closed dream it was mine, much larger, and totally empty. Unmarked pale blue-slightly-teal paint on the walls, and a rectangular hole in the floor. Through the hole I could see, might as well call it hell, but nothing down there was coming up and I didn't choose to reach through. Couldn't even think of a decent benediction. Which is neither here nor there.
So. No demon factory in my mental basement anymore. (At least that area of it, heh. I've been building that house in my mind before sleeptime lately, and there are other scary areas I've yet to master.) All to the good. And the main mental basement room can now serve as a lost and found for nice kittehs. Wonder what the kittehs represented, apart from perhaps being invisible creatures. Songs? Projects? Beliefs?
I've been leaning towards thinking of them as songs. Mostly because I've got my lack of songs on the brain. I imagine all these songs crowding around me, mewling to be written, and me somehow not able to carry them back with me and give them a home.
Maddening.
I can't get no dissatisfaction
Really, one of these months or years I've got to stop using this thing as a personal diary and start doing something with it that has social value. Or intellectual value. To persons, that is, other than myself and the handful who know me personally. Politics makes me sad, and angry at myself for how easily I give up on all of them. I see how hard they're trying, yes, but I also seem to see what it is they're trying to do. And none of 'em feel plugged in, as I see them. The things they are required to do, the things a person has to bet all their spiritual chips on in order to succeed in power politics, seem like lies. All lies, in the defense of lies, to cover over yet more lies. Lies which carry the form and name and stamp of leadership and service, and ape those things to a degree. But which, in practice, only take the driven and ambitious and highly visible and turn them into blunt instruments gripped in the hands of beasts.
Contemplating that stuff only depresses me. Which is why I've been thinking about politics et cetera only in short bursts, more out of a sense of civic responsibility than because I feel there's anything at all useful I can do about any of it. Much better to narrow my focus and think about nicer things. Like the present!
Over the past couple of weeks I have lived in a floaty cloud of great happiness. Dave and I have spent our time together either dashing excitedly or ambling contentedly between one enjoyable or useful activity and the next. Even going to the grocery store and taking out the garbage seem worthwhile. This sort of idyll is assuredly what I hear being called the "salad days" of a relationship. Which seems odd to me, considering that:
1. our eighth anniversary as a couple is coming up next month;
2. the salad is not the favorite part of a meal for most, merely the first.
It is more like getting to have an extra dessert between the soup and the entree.
I have often come onto this blog and excised the long list of complaints and whines from the various portions of my stream of consciousness where I found them gumming up the works. Now, at this moment, I really have only two. Complaint number ones: I really ought to become a better person faster in various ways, most of the ways relating to responsibility in the maintenance of social ties and neatness and organization around the home. Complaint number twos: I have written, in I believe the past month, only one lousy sonnet. Though it was a good one. (And thanks to Amber for letting me know you liked! :D ) But writing and composing, or the lack of "enough" of them, is something I always hope to be able to complain about. I forget who wrote it--someone I once knew had it up over their computer desk, and I remember the sense of the quotation better than the name. A famous lady modern dance pioneer. But it declared the crux of impetus towards art is a sort of divine dissatisfaction, something that shakes you up and makes you uncomfortable, a restless impulse that makes you need to create. Or destroy, I suppose, though that's a damn waste of it.
I'm really glad I dug [distance] out of the old folder and arranged it. It's fast becoming one of me and Dave's favorites, despite being somewhat challenging to play well. That dissatisfaction, that creative discomfort is really what that song's about. Holiness lurks within ordinary things, so easy to miss because our skulky selves tend to edit out the uncomfortable from our awareness of reality. The presence of divinity may be joyful, but it is never precisely comfortable. Having passed through the presence of something holy may, afterwards, bring you a feeling of peace and an ability to truly and properly relax that you never before possessed. But in the moment of contact all you can feel is the little wrinkles, the roughness of fit between your own tiny soul and the majesty you dimly perceive. As though your soul is a pillow that's lumpy and you can't fall asleep because it won't settle under your head just right. So you sit straight up, swearing under your breath, and pummel and fluff and knead it until it assumes a different shape. That is art.
Looking back through my blog, the last song I write was [the only road], way back on August 5th. Which is like, a month and eleven days. Yowza! I do believe the most major reason for my creative "drought" is that I have been well and truly comfortable and well comforted. Which is not at all the state I seem to need to be in to sink in my claws and drag the musical creatures out from between the interstices of time. Or skitter so frantically back and forth in front of their illusive hidey-holes that they can't resist the temptation to leap out onto my brain and become literal. I am never quite sure which it is.
Back to work. At last they've found things for us to scan and copy and make ready for filing, or whatever it is these streams of documents are bound for after they leave the processing room.
Contemplating that stuff only depresses me. Which is why I've been thinking about politics et cetera only in short bursts, more out of a sense of civic responsibility than because I feel there's anything at all useful I can do about any of it. Much better to narrow my focus and think about nicer things. Like the present!
Over the past couple of weeks I have lived in a floaty cloud of great happiness. Dave and I have spent our time together either dashing excitedly or ambling contentedly between one enjoyable or useful activity and the next. Even going to the grocery store and taking out the garbage seem worthwhile. This sort of idyll is assuredly what I hear being called the "salad days" of a relationship. Which seems odd to me, considering that:
1. our eighth anniversary as a couple is coming up next month;
2. the salad is not the favorite part of a meal for most, merely the first.
It is more like getting to have an extra dessert between the soup and the entree.
I have often come onto this blog and excised the long list of complaints and whines from the various portions of my stream of consciousness where I found them gumming up the works. Now, at this moment, I really have only two. Complaint number ones: I really ought to become a better person faster in various ways, most of the ways relating to responsibility in the maintenance of social ties and neatness and organization around the home. Complaint number twos: I have written, in I believe the past month, only one lousy sonnet. Though it was a good one. (And thanks to Amber for letting me know you liked! :D ) But writing and composing, or the lack of "enough" of them, is something I always hope to be able to complain about. I forget who wrote it--someone I once knew had it up over their computer desk, and I remember the sense of the quotation better than the name. A famous lady modern dance pioneer. But it declared the crux of impetus towards art is a sort of divine dissatisfaction, something that shakes you up and makes you uncomfortable, a restless impulse that makes you need to create. Or destroy, I suppose, though that's a damn waste of it.
I'm really glad I dug [distance] out of the old folder and arranged it. It's fast becoming one of me and Dave's favorites, despite being somewhat challenging to play well. That dissatisfaction, that creative discomfort is really what that song's about. Holiness lurks within ordinary things, so easy to miss because our skulky selves tend to edit out the uncomfortable from our awareness of reality. The presence of divinity may be joyful, but it is never precisely comfortable. Having passed through the presence of something holy may, afterwards, bring you a feeling of peace and an ability to truly and properly relax that you never before possessed. But in the moment of contact all you can feel is the little wrinkles, the roughness of fit between your own tiny soul and the majesty you dimly perceive. As though your soul is a pillow that's lumpy and you can't fall asleep because it won't settle under your head just right. So you sit straight up, swearing under your breath, and pummel and fluff and knead it until it assumes a different shape. That is art.
Looking back through my blog, the last song I write was [the only road], way back on August 5th. Which is like, a month and eleven days. Yowza! I do believe the most major reason for my creative "drought" is that I have been well and truly comfortable and well comforted. Which is not at all the state I seem to need to be in to sink in my claws and drag the musical creatures out from between the interstices of time. Or skitter so frantically back and forth in front of their illusive hidey-holes that they can't resist the temptation to leap out onto my brain and become literal. I am never quite sure which it is.
Back to work. At last they've found things for us to scan and copy and make ready for filing, or whatever it is these streams of documents are bound for after they leave the processing room.
second day of temp job. wrote poem!
I've done 12-hour shifts before, but never on back to back days. Whoo hoo! Three or so weeks of lazing about, watching television, and consuming various substances was fun. But as time went on I became increasingly restless and mopey from the inactivity. Now I'm exceedingly busy doing something which involves neither icy, skidding patches of ethical dubiousness nor full fledged panicky defense against unforeseen disasters which would have been preventable only by increased vigilance on the part of persons whom I cannot presume to instruct!
Also I decided to write a sonnet. And in the grand old tradition of, "Well, I'm boring, here's something I'm looking at," I decided to write a sonnet and eventually found something to write one about. No title yet. Maybe I can be like Shakespeare and have people just refer to them by their opening lines. Hehehe. May need revising later.
This building's marble planters stand foursquare,
Brimful of blooms which soothe the autumn eye.
They will not stay to taste December's air,
Wilt in its winds--clash with the owner's tie.
The building manager decrees their fate,
Which nature once decided by its whim.
This tile's all right: those flowers, out of date.
Those tenants, well-behaved: these bulbs, too dim.
Why put down roots in cubicles of cloth
When houses made of stone are not secure?
When you fall prey to time, or pride, or sloth
You'll be replaced--of that you may be sure.
No, you've no choice, my friend. Neither do they.
Plants dig for water: we must work for pay.
Also I decided to write a sonnet. And in the grand old tradition of, "Well, I'm boring, here's something I'm looking at," I decided to write a sonnet and eventually found something to write one about. No title yet. Maybe I can be like Shakespeare and have people just refer to them by their opening lines. Hehehe. May need revising later.
This building's marble planters stand foursquare,
Brimful of blooms which soothe the autumn eye.
They will not stay to taste December's air,
Wilt in its winds--clash with the owner's tie.
The building manager decrees their fate,
Which nature once decided by its whim.
This tile's all right: those flowers, out of date.
Those tenants, well-behaved: these bulbs, too dim.
Why put down roots in cubicles of cloth
When houses made of stone are not secure?
When you fall prey to time, or pride, or sloth
You'll be replaced--of that you may be sure.
No, you've no choice, my friend. Neither do they.
Plants dig for water: we must work for pay.
thoughts on life, death, everything, and the universe
There are, in popular conception, two ways of thinking about death. The hard science way, or the religious way.
(The third option, the shamanistic or witchy way or whatever you want to call it, doesn't usually get included in the discussion. The scientific types laugh at it even harder than they do at religion, and the religious types often feel it's the work of the pointy-footed one himself and a gross violation of spiritual law. My feeling is that the whole nature of spiritual laws is that they can't be violated--that you can be exceedingly rude or cruel, but you can't cheat the interface. However, it's a "discipline" where the professionals are likeliest of all to be quacks, and the people who may actually have something tend to let their personality issues get in the way of good data. Since in any case it's something nobody can do for anybody else--at least, not without being very rude--I won't address it further at the moment.)
The religious way can of course differ wildly depending on your religion of origin or choice. If you're Buddhist, for example, I'd imagine the difference wouldn't be that large, because half the idea is to hop off the wheel of reincarnation into a blissful, desireless state in which individual self-awareness is subsumed in a more universal awareness. When I was a teen the topic was one of great intellectual fascination for me, since I believed (still do; it's a hard habit to kick) in a spiritual side to the world but at the time didn't know any dead people. I wouldn't say my interest in the differing geographies of various afterlifes led me to be interested in one over the other back in the day, though. The three people I know well who've died all did so after I arrived at some version of my current belief system, and I have striven to integrate my reaction to those events into said system as it continues to evolve.
Maybe for people weighing the vectors of conversion in the heat of bereavement it's a different story. There is a kind of gnawing, burning need to have the question settled in one's mind. My view is that from a technical standpoint, a personality construction standpoint, the question I'm asking myself is not "What is my father doing now that his body is dead?" but rather "How has this event changed my relationship with my father, and what am I supposed to do with the personality resources which I previously invested in the ongoing maintenance of that relationship?" And whatever your system, when you lose somebody you care about you find yourself leaning on it in wholly different ways. You find out if the shape of your faith will hold up under the strain. Many people find the shape of their beliefs won't hold up under the strain, and they rediscover their religion from a new angle. Or they seek out or construct a new one, in order to get back to themselves after losing somebody.
Now I am not a true relativist--I believe that there is an objective truth and that it is possible, with lots of hard work and an equal amount of good fortune, to stumble across it. I also think that stumbling across verifiable proof of any objective truth on an issue this potent takes generations of seemingly tangential toil, man-centuries of research and development. Which you and I and the listening audience do not happen to have laying around in the back of the fridge, waiting to be cracked open. And much as the germ theory of disease did not seem rational prior to the invention of the microscope, proof one way or the other may not be possible without technological advances which may not yet exist.
However, I do believe that all roads lead eventually to Rome or to Ithaka, wherever home is. So too there is a path to mental health along any belief vector, be it ever so rocky or covered with oceans. The elephants and the oarsmen might not all make it, but the story goes on.
And we still have the necessity to answer that second question above, the technical question, from either the scientific or the dogmatic viewpoint, whichever we choose as our religion. You can choose to believe the accumulated wisdom of a bunch of uppity monkeys in lab coats. Or you can choose to believe in the accumulated interpretive traditions of a gaggle of spiritually crippled know-nothings struggling to digest the merciful revelations of a benevolent yet ineffable deity. But either way you have to leap the same hurdles, process the same tidal shifts in your emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
It's a hard thing to admit just how much of my relationship with any other person takes place inside my own mind. To separate Dad from the ideas I have about him, to the extent that's possible. When someone is alive and you communicate with them from time to time, your ideas about that person are in constant flux as they change their behaviors and their own ideas. But when they're dead or you no longer have any form of contact, all you've got to wrestle with is your memories. When a person still talks with you, writes to you, looks at you, if you have an idea about them that may be a little off, you can perceive something in the way they act or speak that makes you take a step back and say "Hey! I need to change my attitude."
Once communication ends, however, you no longer have that baseline to check yourself against. You are stuck with the fearful thought that it is no longer possible to be sure. More--it is not possible ever to be sure of someone else, of the truth of the ideas I have about them, even when they are standing right in front of me, laying their confidence bare. It is always possible that I have misinterpreted them, that they have expressed themselves poorly or misunderstood their own intentions. In life it is not possible to be sure, only to be reassured. Where, then, can I find that reassurance when someone is dead, and can no longer drag me back to reality with a wink when my mind leads me down a ridiculous bunny trail?
Christianity's answer, seems to me, is to defer reassurance. Eyes have not seen and ears have not heard, but in the future when we are reunited in the next world, all will be revealed. This seems fair enough in the abstract, but less satisfying when I am struggling with burning questions such as "Was I a jerk? Was he still mad at me for X?" I suppose the idea is that it's good to cultivate patience, and to subsume the energy one would have spent agonizing past events into greater faith in God. Who is, by these accounts, the ultimate revealer of such mysteries. And furthermore, is the one who decided that it would be better for us all not to worry about it now, but to forgive and receive forgiveness in spite of the uncertainty. The idea is that the miracle of God's love for us and forgiveness of us is the one sure thing we can lean on in a world of doubt. And that, by faith, we can take that certainty from God and pass it through to others, in a transubstantiation of love far more impressive, to my mind, than that of crackers to flesh or wine to blood.
The main response available to those who trust in science lies not in the future, but in the study of the past. It is hard to separate memory from imagination--especially for someone whose memory is as lousy as mine! Harder still to separate out which of your emotions about a person were responses to them, and which arose from the interplay of forces inside your own personality. And the tangle gets maximally snarled when the person in question was one of your parents who raised you, whose personality provided major parts of the structure and and content that you had available in building your own personality. It's hard and painful work, sure, and easy to get bogged down in what-ifs and recriminations in all directions. The only way to get it sorted out to any useful degree, in this perspective, is to rely on the compassion and empathy of people you trust. If they know you well, they can pull you out of a funk if they can see the problem is coming from your own attitudes. And if they also knew the person you lost, they have their own set of memories to sift through. By comparing notes and reminiscing together, we can get a certain amount of reassurance. Even though we don't know the whole story, there are things we can agree on, truths we can arrive at together and there find strength. The remembered love of the dead, and the commitment to honor what they meant to us, can bind us together and give us new courage in a world full of mystery.
While each perspective emphasizes a different solution, I think a little bit of both are necessary to the healing process. Love, like gravity, travels straight through, across the curves of every dimension and past the corners of every time. You can work your way through memory to arrive at a place where relief and forgiveness are possible. You take a kernel of divine fire and use it to light the way through the winding corridors of your memory to the point where your mind can be settled. But it is the narrow thread of love and hope that leads you through the labyrinth in either direction, it is that which guides you. It is that which matters most.
(The third option, the shamanistic or witchy way or whatever you want to call it, doesn't usually get included in the discussion. The scientific types laugh at it even harder than they do at religion, and the religious types often feel it's the work of the pointy-footed one himself and a gross violation of spiritual law. My feeling is that the whole nature of spiritual laws is that they can't be violated--that you can be exceedingly rude or cruel, but you can't cheat the interface. However, it's a "discipline" where the professionals are likeliest of all to be quacks, and the people who may actually have something tend to let their personality issues get in the way of good data. Since in any case it's something nobody can do for anybody else--at least, not without being very rude--I won't address it further at the moment.)
The religious way can of course differ wildly depending on your religion of origin or choice. If you're Buddhist, for example, I'd imagine the difference wouldn't be that large, because half the idea is to hop off the wheel of reincarnation into a blissful, desireless state in which individual self-awareness is subsumed in a more universal awareness. When I was a teen the topic was one of great intellectual fascination for me, since I believed (still do; it's a hard habit to kick) in a spiritual side to the world but at the time didn't know any dead people. I wouldn't say my interest in the differing geographies of various afterlifes led me to be interested in one over the other back in the day, though. The three people I know well who've died all did so after I arrived at some version of my current belief system, and I have striven to integrate my reaction to those events into said system as it continues to evolve.
Maybe for people weighing the vectors of conversion in the heat of bereavement it's a different story. There is a kind of gnawing, burning need to have the question settled in one's mind. My view is that from a technical standpoint, a personality construction standpoint, the question I'm asking myself is not "What is my father doing now that his body is dead?" but rather "How has this event changed my relationship with my father, and what am I supposed to do with the personality resources which I previously invested in the ongoing maintenance of that relationship?" And whatever your system, when you lose somebody you care about you find yourself leaning on it in wholly different ways. You find out if the shape of your faith will hold up under the strain. Many people find the shape of their beliefs won't hold up under the strain, and they rediscover their religion from a new angle. Or they seek out or construct a new one, in order to get back to themselves after losing somebody.
Now I am not a true relativist--I believe that there is an objective truth and that it is possible, with lots of hard work and an equal amount of good fortune, to stumble across it. I also think that stumbling across verifiable proof of any objective truth on an issue this potent takes generations of seemingly tangential toil, man-centuries of research and development. Which you and I and the listening audience do not happen to have laying around in the back of the fridge, waiting to be cracked open. And much as the germ theory of disease did not seem rational prior to the invention of the microscope, proof one way or the other may not be possible without technological advances which may not yet exist.
However, I do believe that all roads lead eventually to Rome or to Ithaka, wherever home is. So too there is a path to mental health along any belief vector, be it ever so rocky or covered with oceans. The elephants and the oarsmen might not all make it, but the story goes on.
And we still have the necessity to answer that second question above, the technical question, from either the scientific or the dogmatic viewpoint, whichever we choose as our religion. You can choose to believe the accumulated wisdom of a bunch of uppity monkeys in lab coats. Or you can choose to believe in the accumulated interpretive traditions of a gaggle of spiritually crippled know-nothings struggling to digest the merciful revelations of a benevolent yet ineffable deity. But either way you have to leap the same hurdles, process the same tidal shifts in your emotions, thoughts and behaviors.
It's a hard thing to admit just how much of my relationship with any other person takes place inside my own mind. To separate Dad from the ideas I have about him, to the extent that's possible. When someone is alive and you communicate with them from time to time, your ideas about that person are in constant flux as they change their behaviors and their own ideas. But when they're dead or you no longer have any form of contact, all you've got to wrestle with is your memories. When a person still talks with you, writes to you, looks at you, if you have an idea about them that may be a little off, you can perceive something in the way they act or speak that makes you take a step back and say "Hey! I need to change my attitude."
Once communication ends, however, you no longer have that baseline to check yourself against. You are stuck with the fearful thought that it is no longer possible to be sure. More--it is not possible ever to be sure of someone else, of the truth of the ideas I have about them, even when they are standing right in front of me, laying their confidence bare. It is always possible that I have misinterpreted them, that they have expressed themselves poorly or misunderstood their own intentions. In life it is not possible to be sure, only to be reassured. Where, then, can I find that reassurance when someone is dead, and can no longer drag me back to reality with a wink when my mind leads me down a ridiculous bunny trail?
Christianity's answer, seems to me, is to defer reassurance. Eyes have not seen and ears have not heard, but in the future when we are reunited in the next world, all will be revealed. This seems fair enough in the abstract, but less satisfying when I am struggling with burning questions such as "Was I a jerk? Was he still mad at me for X?" I suppose the idea is that it's good to cultivate patience, and to subsume the energy one would have spent agonizing past events into greater faith in God. Who is, by these accounts, the ultimate revealer of such mysteries. And furthermore, is the one who decided that it would be better for us all not to worry about it now, but to forgive and receive forgiveness in spite of the uncertainty. The idea is that the miracle of God's love for us and forgiveness of us is the one sure thing we can lean on in a world of doubt. And that, by faith, we can take that certainty from God and pass it through to others, in a transubstantiation of love far more impressive, to my mind, than that of crackers to flesh or wine to blood.
The main response available to those who trust in science lies not in the future, but in the study of the past. It is hard to separate memory from imagination--especially for someone whose memory is as lousy as mine! Harder still to separate out which of your emotions about a person were responses to them, and which arose from the interplay of forces inside your own personality. And the tangle gets maximally snarled when the person in question was one of your parents who raised you, whose personality provided major parts of the structure and and content that you had available in building your own personality. It's hard and painful work, sure, and easy to get bogged down in what-ifs and recriminations in all directions. The only way to get it sorted out to any useful degree, in this perspective, is to rely on the compassion and empathy of people you trust. If they know you well, they can pull you out of a funk if they can see the problem is coming from your own attitudes. And if they also knew the person you lost, they have their own set of memories to sift through. By comparing notes and reminiscing together, we can get a certain amount of reassurance. Even though we don't know the whole story, there are things we can agree on, truths we can arrive at together and there find strength. The remembered love of the dead, and the commitment to honor what they meant to us, can bind us together and give us new courage in a world full of mystery.
While each perspective emphasizes a different solution, I think a little bit of both are necessary to the healing process. Love, like gravity, travels straight through, across the curves of every dimension and past the corners of every time. You can work your way through memory to arrive at a place where relief and forgiveness are possible. You take a kernel of divine fire and use it to light the way through the winding corridors of your memory to the point where your mind can be settled. But it is the narrow thread of love and hope that leads you through the labyrinth in either direction, it is that which guides you. It is that which matters most.
another mental hygiene episode
Why is it I only seem to post at the office?
And yes, I'm back here again. Boss man asked me to come in today and see what we can see. I'm'a tell everybody here that the interview I went to on Friday was with the actual company, rather than the recruiting agency, and that I got the job, rather than agreeing to interview for the job. Lying is bad for the soul and the time, but I want to cut the cord with my position here that badly. Though this may backfire if they want me to stay here more days this week, since the new thing wouldn't actually start until next Wednesday.
Here's why I always post at the office. Firstly there's always tons more fun things for me to do on the computers at home. Let's not forget, secondly, the laptop keyboard whose "b" and "n" are kaput after the landmark case of Cat vs. Tall Glass of Chocolate Milk. (The cat won. The computer was a civilian casualty but the court ruled it an act of war in the declared conflict of Cat vs. All Foodstuffs.) And thirdly there's very rarely anything I want to do more here at work than get on my blog and add to my dream journal. Or my bitching journal. Or whatever.
Just got several phone calls there. Told coworker that I'd all but landed abovementioned temp job. Got call from recruiting agency saying temp job was full up but there is another, less tempting, temp job that is now possible. D'oh. 'S what I get for lying, eh?
Speaking of dreams. Past few days I've been having long, complicated dreams with no detailed recall--just the awarenes that I had dreamed. This morning I did remember some things, and now I wish I hadn't because they're disturbing. Moreover, I don't know how to describe what was going on. In dreams your unconscious mind layers taig shapes over one another based on emotional content. A place can be a combination school computer lab under construction and MASH surgery room, or a combination abandoned basement and giant pinball machine under construction, to name a couple examples. You sense the emotional content, in the dream, with great clarity. But on waking you no longer have appropriate categories for the mind-made "places" because it wouldn't make sense to build real-life places with those combinations of traits.
I had a dream last week that I didn't write down, but was very important. The part to remember had me and all my peeps (not pictured) on a large battleship moving across the ocean. The ship was rusty, the color of rust all over. There were piles of corpses and sorted out pieces of corpses heaped on the deck, and the implication that the mess continued all throughout the ship. And I was pissed. Really, really pissed. I launched into a raging tirade at the shifty crew-people on deck. Then I chased down a few that I knew were bad guys and didn't belong on my ship, ran them through with my saber, and tossed their corpses overboard. Then I went inside, and the place I was in looked a little bit like the middle room of our apartment, looking down the tall window into the light well. It was dark and cool inside, and there was light outside that felt summery, like a taig with lots of green in it. Right in front of the window was a litterbox, full and nasty, and when I looked out the window, there was another one at the bottom of the light well. Still just as angry as I'd been on the ship deck, I picked up the litterbox in front of the window and started dumping it out into the lower one, screaming "NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!"
So okay. Ship on seas represents my personality floating on the sea of the collective unconscious or the ocean of emotion. Plain enough. Piles of corpses and evil crewmen represent the same thing as litterboxes filled with nasty waste; parts of me that aren't helping, that disgust me, and that I really don't want. Me screaming, stabbing and throwing, or dumping and screaming, indicates my sincere desire and intention to transform myself by eradicating those things I abhor. The second image/scene, the one with the litterboxes, added an interesting point, however. Though I am cleaning house on an "upper" level, one easier for my conscious mind to access, many of the things I'm getting rid of are merely being shunted "downstairs" into my unconscious mind. I still think it's a net positive, though. Better to consolidate the problems into one area, quarantine them if you will, so they are less likely to be able to escape into other areas of my personality and make me have to start the process all over again.
To return to the dream I remembered this morning, it seems to me that everything felt "under construction" in this dream because whatever work I began in the earlier one is still going on.
Just looking at the taig types seems kind of encouraging. Surgery room turning into computer room seems like a positive thing. This could represent a personality faculty which formerly would have to tear things open or cut them up and get their metaphorical blood'n'guts all over the place to find out what they're made of. The new upgrade to that system, if you will, would be more of a computing type thing, where they can be analyzed more gently, before actually being made to turn into different things. Spooky abandoned basement turning into giant live-action pinball machine seems kind of positive, but it's tougher to be sure.
I wanted to talk about that first because the action is what bugs me. I know a whole lot of other stuff happened at the beginning and that there were more places, but I didn't retain them.
Earliest thing I can think of is me and my peeps were all together in a place I can't recall, and I was hearing that I had an exam--no, make that two exams--coming up in less than a day, and I hadn't done the required reading for either of them. I think one was lit and the other was philosophy or political science, I even remembered thinking "oh, that's Dr. G's class." Had a mental picture of the text (an emotion-image of words on a page and the general mental shape of their contents) and knew it was a lot to read. But for some reason I wasn't worried, I shrugged it off while feeling guilty about not being worried. Like one of those times when you say "oh, I'll take care of that tomorrow afternoon", even though you know perfectly well that you won't because you'll feel even less like doing it then.
So it was at that point that me and my peeps drifted into the computer lab surgery under construction place. My peeps were using most of the computers and I didn't feel I ought to bug them, so I wandered over to a side of the room that looked even more under construction. That's where I saw stupid dream Eric Cartman again. I am so mad at my unconscious mind for its selection of that as one of my avatars, by the way. I know your unconscious only selects symbols based on the emotional value load they hold for you. It just pisses me off to see evidence that the cartoon character Eric Cartman carries that kind of an emotional value load for me. He represents something about human nature, and about my own nature, that I find both irresistibly attractive and unthinkably despicable.
Anyway. Cartman was half prepped for some kind of surgery, sitting at a thing that was part computer workstation, part surgical pod, and part port-a-john. No kidding. The prep involved (apologies!) some sort of anal suction tube in addition to the usual accoutrements for a person about to be drugged into unconsciousness and operated upon. He was not yet unconscious, however, and I believe bitched to me about some aspect of the the arrangements. No words there, just the sense of an interaction having taken place.
Then I was on the lower floor--same "building", different architecture. This was the basement / giant pinball machine place. Bad temporal sequencing in recall here as well, further evidence that it was deeper into my unconscious than the other location. Me and peeps climbed into, and bounced around in some sort of giant bumper car that seated people more like seats on a roller coaster. I got worried and annoyed that something wasn't safe or wasn't working properly. I went over by the wall and there was a repeat of the weird setup that Cartman had been in on the upper floor, only this time it was active me (not pictured) getting into it. Attempting to apply the anal suction tube thing got the reaction thought that it hurt like blazes and no way in hell was I going to actually use that thing, or go through with the stupid shit surgery thingy, it was a bad idea. No actual pain, just a quick succession of thought forms and emotions. Somewhere in this sequence I noticed there were a couple loose demons in the room, and with the equivalent of an annoyed and longsuffering sigh I went to shoo them into the halls so I could deal with them without disturbing my peeps' good times.
I then left the giant pinball machine room through a door that looked even more under-constructiony than any of the other places in that dream. Had been thinking I was going out into the hall, but when I opened the door, there was our bathroom mirror and sink we have at the apartment. The light from the lightbulbs was yellow, like interior lightbulbs at night. There was wall behind sink/mirror, wall around door, and floor in front of, but dark absence of perception in place of the ceiling and the other two walls. The two demons were on the floor. They were composed of this sort of black cloud, like a hole in the film when a picture is developed, except it "felt" 3D and sort of fuzzy to my mind's eye. Their shape was like if the first two fingers of your hand were held out clawlike, then decided to crawl off on their own, using the pointy white nail tips as combination eyes and feet. I looked at them, and they turned around and looked at me, there on the floor in front of the mirror. I pointed my right hand at one of them and said, "Flame." Fire sprang out of my hand towards the thing and burned it up. The other one, however, took advantage of my attention moving away from it and jumped up towards me. I saw it at the last second and nervously tried to pull up a fire shield, but it fizzled and the thing got through to land on my chest, right over my heart. Where it promptly, of course, disappeared.
Now, since closing the demon factory, I can recall only one other dream where two demons attacked me, I dispatched one, and the other successfully got in. The end result of that process is how I got to be friends with firecat. Once I'd defragged it and taught it a bit of how to behave. Which was interesting dreaming material.
But the architecture of that dream seems to me fertile for analysis. It continues the images from the ship / litterbox dream: cleanup on the upper floor, still dangerous things happening in the basement despite ongoing construction there as well. On the upper level, my avatar grumblingly submitting to an embarassing and highly suspicious transformation. On the lower level, my actual self rejecting said process outright. Me successfully wielding fire in a dream for the first time. Yay fire! Also of interest is the shooing-out thing. My peeps are doing their thing, having fun in the newly constructed funplace in what used to be a scaryplace. I see that some scary things are there, I take them personally to a more private location to deal with them my damnself. Good mental hygiene, that.
Waking up after a dream like that is always iffy. I am exceedingly fortunate, in retrospect, that Dave happened to have stayed up the night so he could beam at me and feed me tea and toast. Felt so much enormously better for that, you have no idea. I did keep looking down at the spot on my chest where the finger thing landed and vanished, rubbing the skin absently, as if I could somehow feel a physical thing there. Alas, you can't pick out metaphorical worms with a physical tweezer, and you can't unwrap a dream-image demon from around your heart by dramatically clasping your hands over your chest.
At least I got one of the little bastards! And I know the other one by sight now, so it'll be easier to grasp and perhaps fling!
And yes, I'm back here again. Boss man asked me to come in today and see what we can see. I'm'a tell everybody here that the interview I went to on Friday was with the actual company, rather than the recruiting agency, and that I got the job, rather than agreeing to interview for the job. Lying is bad for the soul and the time, but I want to cut the cord with my position here that badly. Though this may backfire if they want me to stay here more days this week, since the new thing wouldn't actually start until next Wednesday.
Here's why I always post at the office. Firstly there's always tons more fun things for me to do on the computers at home. Let's not forget, secondly, the laptop keyboard whose "b" and "n" are kaput after the landmark case of Cat vs. Tall Glass of Chocolate Milk. (The cat won. The computer was a civilian casualty but the court ruled it an act of war in the declared conflict of Cat vs. All Foodstuffs.) And thirdly there's very rarely anything I want to do more here at work than get on my blog and add to my dream journal. Or my bitching journal. Or whatever.
Just got several phone calls there. Told coworker that I'd all but landed abovementioned temp job. Got call from recruiting agency saying temp job was full up but there is another, less tempting, temp job that is now possible. D'oh. 'S what I get for lying, eh?
Speaking of dreams. Past few days I've been having long, complicated dreams with no detailed recall--just the awarenes that I had dreamed. This morning I did remember some things, and now I wish I hadn't because they're disturbing. Moreover, I don't know how to describe what was going on. In dreams your unconscious mind layers taig shapes over one another based on emotional content. A place can be a combination school computer lab under construction and MASH surgery room, or a combination abandoned basement and giant pinball machine under construction, to name a couple examples. You sense the emotional content, in the dream, with great clarity. But on waking you no longer have appropriate categories for the mind-made "places" because it wouldn't make sense to build real-life places with those combinations of traits.
I had a dream last week that I didn't write down, but was very important. The part to remember had me and all my peeps (not pictured) on a large battleship moving across the ocean. The ship was rusty, the color of rust all over. There were piles of corpses and sorted out pieces of corpses heaped on the deck, and the implication that the mess continued all throughout the ship. And I was pissed. Really, really pissed. I launched into a raging tirade at the shifty crew-people on deck. Then I chased down a few that I knew were bad guys and didn't belong on my ship, ran them through with my saber, and tossed their corpses overboard. Then I went inside, and the place I was in looked a little bit like the middle room of our apartment, looking down the tall window into the light well. It was dark and cool inside, and there was light outside that felt summery, like a taig with lots of green in it. Right in front of the window was a litterbox, full and nasty, and when I looked out the window, there was another one at the bottom of the light well. Still just as angry as I'd been on the ship deck, I picked up the litterbox in front of the window and started dumping it out into the lower one, screaming "NOW, NOW, NOW, NOW!"
So okay. Ship on seas represents my personality floating on the sea of the collective unconscious or the ocean of emotion. Plain enough. Piles of corpses and evil crewmen represent the same thing as litterboxes filled with nasty waste; parts of me that aren't helping, that disgust me, and that I really don't want. Me screaming, stabbing and throwing, or dumping and screaming, indicates my sincere desire and intention to transform myself by eradicating those things I abhor. The second image/scene, the one with the litterboxes, added an interesting point, however. Though I am cleaning house on an "upper" level, one easier for my conscious mind to access, many of the things I'm getting rid of are merely being shunted "downstairs" into my unconscious mind. I still think it's a net positive, though. Better to consolidate the problems into one area, quarantine them if you will, so they are less likely to be able to escape into other areas of my personality and make me have to start the process all over again.
To return to the dream I remembered this morning, it seems to me that everything felt "under construction" in this dream because whatever work I began in the earlier one is still going on.
Just looking at the taig types seems kind of encouraging. Surgery room turning into computer room seems like a positive thing. This could represent a personality faculty which formerly would have to tear things open or cut them up and get their metaphorical blood'n'guts all over the place to find out what they're made of. The new upgrade to that system, if you will, would be more of a computing type thing, where they can be analyzed more gently, before actually being made to turn into different things. Spooky abandoned basement turning into giant live-action pinball machine seems kind of positive, but it's tougher to be sure.
I wanted to talk about that first because the action is what bugs me. I know a whole lot of other stuff happened at the beginning and that there were more places, but I didn't retain them.
Earliest thing I can think of is me and my peeps were all together in a place I can't recall, and I was hearing that I had an exam--no, make that two exams--coming up in less than a day, and I hadn't done the required reading for either of them. I think one was lit and the other was philosophy or political science, I even remembered thinking "oh, that's Dr. G's class." Had a mental picture of the text (an emotion-image of words on a page and the general mental shape of their contents) and knew it was a lot to read. But for some reason I wasn't worried, I shrugged it off while feeling guilty about not being worried. Like one of those times when you say "oh, I'll take care of that tomorrow afternoon", even though you know perfectly well that you won't because you'll feel even less like doing it then.
So it was at that point that me and my peeps drifted into the computer lab surgery under construction place. My peeps were using most of the computers and I didn't feel I ought to bug them, so I wandered over to a side of the room that looked even more under construction. That's where I saw stupid dream Eric Cartman again. I am so mad at my unconscious mind for its selection of that as one of my avatars, by the way. I know your unconscious only selects symbols based on the emotional value load they hold for you. It just pisses me off to see evidence that the cartoon character Eric Cartman carries that kind of an emotional value load for me. He represents something about human nature, and about my own nature, that I find both irresistibly attractive and unthinkably despicable.
Anyway. Cartman was half prepped for some kind of surgery, sitting at a thing that was part computer workstation, part surgical pod, and part port-a-john. No kidding. The prep involved (apologies!) some sort of anal suction tube in addition to the usual accoutrements for a person about to be drugged into unconsciousness and operated upon. He was not yet unconscious, however, and I believe bitched to me about some aspect of the the arrangements. No words there, just the sense of an interaction having taken place.
Then I was on the lower floor--same "building", different architecture. This was the basement / giant pinball machine place. Bad temporal sequencing in recall here as well, further evidence that it was deeper into my unconscious than the other location. Me and peeps climbed into, and bounced around in some sort of giant bumper car that seated people more like seats on a roller coaster. I got worried and annoyed that something wasn't safe or wasn't working properly. I went over by the wall and there was a repeat of the weird setup that Cartman had been in on the upper floor, only this time it was active me (not pictured) getting into it. Attempting to apply the anal suction tube thing got the reaction thought that it hurt like blazes and no way in hell was I going to actually use that thing, or go through with the stupid shit surgery thingy, it was a bad idea. No actual pain, just a quick succession of thought forms and emotions. Somewhere in this sequence I noticed there were a couple loose demons in the room, and with the equivalent of an annoyed and longsuffering sigh I went to shoo them into the halls so I could deal with them without disturbing my peeps' good times.
I then left the giant pinball machine room through a door that looked even more under-constructiony than any of the other places in that dream. Had been thinking I was going out into the hall, but when I opened the door, there was our bathroom mirror and sink we have at the apartment. The light from the lightbulbs was yellow, like interior lightbulbs at night. There was wall behind sink/mirror, wall around door, and floor in front of, but dark absence of perception in place of the ceiling and the other two walls. The two demons were on the floor. They were composed of this sort of black cloud, like a hole in the film when a picture is developed, except it "felt" 3D and sort of fuzzy to my mind's eye. Their shape was like if the first two fingers of your hand were held out clawlike, then decided to crawl off on their own, using the pointy white nail tips as combination eyes and feet. I looked at them, and they turned around and looked at me, there on the floor in front of the mirror. I pointed my right hand at one of them and said, "Flame." Fire sprang out of my hand towards the thing and burned it up. The other one, however, took advantage of my attention moving away from it and jumped up towards me. I saw it at the last second and nervously tried to pull up a fire shield, but it fizzled and the thing got through to land on my chest, right over my heart. Where it promptly, of course, disappeared.
Now, since closing the demon factory, I can recall only one other dream where two demons attacked me, I dispatched one, and the other successfully got in. The end result of that process is how I got to be friends with firecat. Once I'd defragged it and taught it a bit of how to behave. Which was interesting dreaming material.
But the architecture of that dream seems to me fertile for analysis. It continues the images from the ship / litterbox dream: cleanup on the upper floor, still dangerous things happening in the basement despite ongoing construction there as well. On the upper level, my avatar grumblingly submitting to an embarassing and highly suspicious transformation. On the lower level, my actual self rejecting said process outright. Me successfully wielding fire in a dream for the first time. Yay fire! Also of interest is the shooing-out thing. My peeps are doing their thing, having fun in the newly constructed funplace in what used to be a scaryplace. I see that some scary things are there, I take them personally to a more private location to deal with them my damnself. Good mental hygiene, that.
Waking up after a dream like that is always iffy. I am exceedingly fortunate, in retrospect, that Dave happened to have stayed up the night so he could beam at me and feed me tea and toast. Felt so much enormously better for that, you have no idea. I did keep looking down at the spot on my chest where the finger thing landed and vanished, rubbing the skin absently, as if I could somehow feel a physical thing there. Alas, you can't pick out metaphorical worms with a physical tweezer, and you can't unwrap a dream-image demon from around your heart by dramatically clasping your hands over your chest.
At least I got one of the little bastards! And I know the other one by sight now, so it'll be easier to grasp and perhaps fling!
dramatic appropriateness
So this is my real, true, honest-to-dog last day of work. Am I nervous? Yes. Am I planning on racing home tonight immediately and going on a bender of some kind? Very yes.
The callouses on my fingers are getting tougher with each passing day. Mom's borrowed steel-string acoustic makes its mark on my hands. I think it's a good thing, though. Kind of like learning to drive on her old minivan; makes every other vehicle or instrument seem easy by comparison. If I can master [the only road], with its many fast chord changes, and [distance], with its rapid plucking, on this thing, I can play them in my sleep on a guitar with kinder, gentler strings.
Hm. Nature calls. Is it weird that I ponder the spiritual significance of not being able to use the employee bathroom here anymore? Not being able to take in the emploee-eye-view of the kitchens where what benificent magic exists here is made?
...
Sure enough, there was already somebody in the employee bathroom when I went down the hall, so I had to use the guest bathroom. I tend to take that sort of thing as an omen. The thing I think is important to remember about the regular type of omens, though, is that you don't really "read" them as such. At the start you simply make a mental note that there was one. Then later on, when you've had an interaction with a live, fleshly person that bears upon the matter to which the omen seemed to refer, you can look back at it and say, "Ah, this reveals such-and-such aspect of the spiritual structure of my time." But that tends to be as far as you can usefully analyze it. Big part of not driving yourself crazy--in magic or any other aspect of life!--is finding that sweet spot between not paying attention at all and paying far too much attention.
The other type is what one may as well call "dramatic commentary" omens. These need even less analysis, because if you let yourself start worrying about causality, you will go a teensy bit crazytime. The classic movie/television example is when someone, a villain or an angry hero, makes a pronouncement of doom while a thunderstorm is going on, and just as the last word falls out of their mouth there's a thunderclap and lightning in the background. I can think of a real-life example from a few days ago, actually. There was an air show of some kind in Chicago over the weekend, with jet planes doing circles all around the city in seemingly random patterns, making it even more difficult to watch television than the train normally does. I was sitting by myself in the TV alcove, rolling cigarettes and turning around little bits of my personality in my thoughts to see if they had the equivalent of rust or gunk on them. And it occurred to me to pull back from analyzing a little bit before I made myself sad. So I said aloud, "What matters is what kind of happiness I'm bringing, and to whom." Just as I finished speaking, one of those jet planes went past with a mighty roar that filled the sky, closer, lower and faster than any of the other planes I'd heard that day. I was a bit startled and said, "Thanks, I sure hope so."
(By the by, I love Mercea Eliade's discussion of the four types of divination in his book Shamanism. Unlike most anthropologists, he is neither sloppy nor sententious. Does his homework and shoots straight, sort of thing. What I call regular type omens matches up well with his fourth category of divination. The other ones all involve some sort of intermediary device, whether cards or stones or chicken intestines, to bring the omen out. This is why regular type is my favorite; it's "reading" the world itself with as little extra complication as possible.)
I've come up with a working hypothesis on the causality for this kind of thing that produces minimal psychological distortion. Which is my preferred yardstick for a belief or operant assumption about an issue where truth is unverifiable in practice. Okay. I can't think of myself as having caused the event; that arrogates way too much power to me that I do not, in fact, possess. Causes egomania. I also can't think of the thing which carried the omen (airplane, person who got to bathroom before me etc.) as having intended or permitted me to receive the omen. Causes paranoia.
Instead I think of the source of the commentary as the time. As you may recall, in my lexicon a "taig" is the spiritual aspect of a geographic location and a "time" is the spiritual aspect of a social group or set of active circumstances within which beings can form relationships with one another. The other person or people or thing likely has no idea that I exist, nor does it matter to them one way or another what thoughts or feelings I may have. They're just doing what they intended to do for their own reasons. I also have no idea what's going on with the other person or thing, don't have any special advance knowledge of what they're up to. I'm just doing whatever I want to do for my own reasons. So the events themselves have no special significance. What lends them interpretable meaning for me is the timing--the fact that I happened to choose to think or say something just at that exact moment. The other person was going to have been flying their plane or making their restroom visit or whatever no matter what I did. The omen occurred because I happened to have brought myself into a position where my action or intention evoked meaning through my observation of what the other person was already going to have done.
Note the phrasing there. Meaning is made possible by action and evoked into consciousness through observation. Causality is preserved, much in the same way that God is not mocked and energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Hardwired into the interface. Magic is never, never about breaking the laws of nature. It's about taking advantage of them in a thoroughly shameless and rules-lawyering way, same as the jerks one hears about on World of Warcraft type games who stay up all night finding ways to stack their bonus spells and special armor so as to be nigh-invincible in certain situations. It's like cheating but actually isn't, and is slightly more difficult than doing things the normal way.
The things we think of as normal are massive conflagrations of magical preposterousness anyway. Anybody who thinks airplanes aren't magic, for instance, would benefit from being made to repair them. The skill and effort and attention and grunts and swears of scores and scores of living people are what lifts weary travelers off the ground and keeps them up there. If someone's attention wavers for a moment or two during a pre-flight check, hundreds can die. And if the travelers give more credit to the rules-lawyering, the science, the method that went into the physical airplace, maybe that's a safer way of thinking about it. Easier on the mind to trust the memory of steel and the stubbornness of air than the focused intentions of a bunch of engineers and mechanics you've never met and a pilot whose face you might not see. They're gonna keep on moving all the same, whether you pay attention to them or not.
The callouses on my fingers are getting tougher with each passing day. Mom's borrowed steel-string acoustic makes its mark on my hands. I think it's a good thing, though. Kind of like learning to drive on her old minivan; makes every other vehicle or instrument seem easy by comparison. If I can master [the only road], with its many fast chord changes, and [distance], with its rapid plucking, on this thing, I can play them in my sleep on a guitar with kinder, gentler strings.
Hm. Nature calls. Is it weird that I ponder the spiritual significance of not being able to use the employee bathroom here anymore? Not being able to take in the emploee-eye-view of the kitchens where what benificent magic exists here is made?
...
Sure enough, there was already somebody in the employee bathroom when I went down the hall, so I had to use the guest bathroom. I tend to take that sort of thing as an omen. The thing I think is important to remember about the regular type of omens, though, is that you don't really "read" them as such. At the start you simply make a mental note that there was one. Then later on, when you've had an interaction with a live, fleshly person that bears upon the matter to which the omen seemed to refer, you can look back at it and say, "Ah, this reveals such-and-such aspect of the spiritual structure of my time." But that tends to be as far as you can usefully analyze it. Big part of not driving yourself crazy--in magic or any other aspect of life!--is finding that sweet spot between not paying attention at all and paying far too much attention.
The other type is what one may as well call "dramatic commentary" omens. These need even less analysis, because if you let yourself start worrying about causality, you will go a teensy bit crazytime. The classic movie/television example is when someone, a villain or an angry hero, makes a pronouncement of doom while a thunderstorm is going on, and just as the last word falls out of their mouth there's a thunderclap and lightning in the background. I can think of a real-life example from a few days ago, actually. There was an air show of some kind in Chicago over the weekend, with jet planes doing circles all around the city in seemingly random patterns, making it even more difficult to watch television than the train normally does. I was sitting by myself in the TV alcove, rolling cigarettes and turning around little bits of my personality in my thoughts to see if they had the equivalent of rust or gunk on them. And it occurred to me to pull back from analyzing a little bit before I made myself sad. So I said aloud, "What matters is what kind of happiness I'm bringing, and to whom." Just as I finished speaking, one of those jet planes went past with a mighty roar that filled the sky, closer, lower and faster than any of the other planes I'd heard that day. I was a bit startled and said, "Thanks, I sure hope so."
(By the by, I love Mercea Eliade's discussion of the four types of divination in his book Shamanism. Unlike most anthropologists, he is neither sloppy nor sententious. Does his homework and shoots straight, sort of thing. What I call regular type omens matches up well with his fourth category of divination. The other ones all involve some sort of intermediary device, whether cards or stones or chicken intestines, to bring the omen out. This is why regular type is my favorite; it's "reading" the world itself with as little extra complication as possible.)
I've come up with a working hypothesis on the causality for this kind of thing that produces minimal psychological distortion. Which is my preferred yardstick for a belief or operant assumption about an issue where truth is unverifiable in practice. Okay. I can't think of myself as having caused the event; that arrogates way too much power to me that I do not, in fact, possess. Causes egomania. I also can't think of the thing which carried the omen (airplane, person who got to bathroom before me etc.) as having intended or permitted me to receive the omen. Causes paranoia.
Instead I think of the source of the commentary as the time. As you may recall, in my lexicon a "taig" is the spiritual aspect of a geographic location and a "time" is the spiritual aspect of a social group or set of active circumstances within which beings can form relationships with one another. The other person or people or thing likely has no idea that I exist, nor does it matter to them one way or another what thoughts or feelings I may have. They're just doing what they intended to do for their own reasons. I also have no idea what's going on with the other person or thing, don't have any special advance knowledge of what they're up to. I'm just doing whatever I want to do for my own reasons. So the events themselves have no special significance. What lends them interpretable meaning for me is the timing--the fact that I happened to choose to think or say something just at that exact moment. The other person was going to have been flying their plane or making their restroom visit or whatever no matter what I did. The omen occurred because I happened to have brought myself into a position where my action or intention evoked meaning through my observation of what the other person was already going to have done.
Note the phrasing there. Meaning is made possible by action and evoked into consciousness through observation. Causality is preserved, much in the same way that God is not mocked and energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. Hardwired into the interface. Magic is never, never about breaking the laws of nature. It's about taking advantage of them in a thoroughly shameless and rules-lawyering way, same as the jerks one hears about on World of Warcraft type games who stay up all night finding ways to stack their bonus spells and special armor so as to be nigh-invincible in certain situations. It's like cheating but actually isn't, and is slightly more difficult than doing things the normal way.
The things we think of as normal are massive conflagrations of magical preposterousness anyway. Anybody who thinks airplanes aren't magic, for instance, would benefit from being made to repair them. The skill and effort and attention and grunts and swears of scores and scores of living people are what lifts weary travelers off the ground and keeps them up there. If someone's attention wavers for a moment or two during a pre-flight check, hundreds can die. And if the travelers give more credit to the rules-lawyering, the science, the method that went into the physical airplace, maybe that's a safer way of thinking about it. Easier on the mind to trust the memory of steel and the stubbornness of air than the focused intentions of a bunch of engineers and mechanics you've never met and a pilot whose face you might not see. They're gonna keep on moving all the same, whether you pay attention to them or not.
more speechifying. dog have mercy.
Apparently yesterday wasn't my last day. Next Wednesday will be my last day. Stupid jerks and their niceness. Trying to help out a poor bitch who hasn't landed another job yet. Arrgh, I hate some aspects of the public persona I've developed. People all like me, this is true, but I'm also a bit of a doormat or something. All my efforts towards hiding and invisibility and non-confrontation have put me into this mousy sort of mode where people want to help and protect me because they feel sorry for me.
In high school I developed this program, see, of how I wanted to run my personality in order to not have the social problems that gnawed at me at the time.
Step one: Don't be annoying. Which means not blurting out random shit unless it's at least marginally on-topic, not giving people life advice they haven't specifically requested, and pulling myself up short when I realize I'm speechifying.
Step two: Don't make enemies. Which means not getting on anybody's bad side if I can reasonably avoid it, not sticking my nose into fights between other people unless I can help an ally without damaging anybody, and Not Making Waves.
Step three: Don't be alpha dog. Never really thought of this one in those terms, but my intent is pretty clear. Even when I'm in charge of something, my goal is not to be "large and in charge" but to create a sort of little pocket where my influence is strong.
Despite its undeniable success, this program is in need of some alterations and additions. I have to change my perspective on leadership. I also have to change my perspective on what it means to be "annoying."
I was not sufficiently specific in my previous ambition. My desire not to be annoying came mostly from the verbal dysentery of my youth, and the fact that I often came off as a condescending know-it-all. It dovetailed nicely with my desire not to put myself in a leadership role. Those two intentions, combined with the fact that my judgment on matters human was not generally something I could trust, brought me to a general policy of not telling people what they didn't want to hear. Or didn't have terms for in their personal lexicon.
Now, at work, I get to spend lots and lots of time telling people things they don't want to hear. Telling my bosses that vendors need to be paid egregious sums right now. Telling vendors we haven't cut checks for their egregious sums yet, but soon, oh so very soon, and would they please call me back on Thursday (when I won't be in the office, or will no longer be employed here, nyuk nyuk). Telling employees their checks won't be coming in until such-and-such day.
Of course you still can't tell people things for which they don't have terms. You can't tell your bosses how their unconscious expectations of one another exacerbate many of the stresses in their relationship, for example. You can't give people advice about the emotional energy management strategies they're using to run their personalities. That shit, however, all falls under the general prohibition of "don't talk shop about magic with non-practitioners." Personality construction is to magic what learning how not to fall off a horse is to the Kentucky Derby. Basic, basic basic. But then again, how many people actually know how not to fall off an antsy horse? I can just about keep my seat on a placid one when it breaks into a trot. (Not to say anything about enjoying the experience, but I can do it.) It helps to think of myself as a personality construction geek, with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of true geekiness. I can't expect people to be interested in things that are difficult to think about clearly, and even more difficult to gain skill at, when it's taken me so long and so much effort to make even this much progress.
And I've gotten to a level of advertent interaction where I can usually separate those two things in practice as well as in theory. I can tell someone that certain of their work duties need to be addressed without bending their ear about why they haven't wanted to pay attention to those duties. Which means I can move to grasp the power to be annoying, so long as I hold to a firm line of being annoying only when it is actually desirable and necessary.
So. Overcoming panic and dread. Taking new stock of assertiveness and prettiness. Which means re-evaluating leadership and annoyance, as they relate to assertiveness, prettiness and the power games that are inevitably connected thereunto. Bah!Forgiveness, like hope in the Pandora story, lies at the bottom of a great big box full of bees and rattlesnakes and door-to-door missionaries and other unsavory things. Things that require hard work to integrate or counterbalance.
But it's all good in the service of the communion of saints (Dad's version) and the glory of God (Meg's version). *shivers* Dude, I'm glad I got to hear those stories and relieved in another way that I'm not on the path that led to the experience of them. My little portion is plenty enough!
All that matters (to dog or god or magma or the stars) is the music of the relationships between people, the dance of their actions towards each other, the wild and stately rhythm and harmony which builds the universe. And rips it open and weaves it back together, drains it dry and fills it up again. The little crap we get upset about, the terms and conditions we strive so hard to build and to defend, are only there to get us to a point where we can feel the music, move in it and play with it. All the dogged little crap we build is best honored when it has carried us to the end of itself. Those assumptions and ambitions are small things, really. Made to house the glory, but not made of it. Things to be discarded when it comes time to grasp something solid and real, something we maybe never would have reached without taking the long hard finicky road all the way back around to it.
In high school I developed this program, see, of how I wanted to run my personality in order to not have the social problems that gnawed at me at the time.
Step one: Don't be annoying. Which means not blurting out random shit unless it's at least marginally on-topic, not giving people life advice they haven't specifically requested, and pulling myself up short when I realize I'm speechifying.
Step two: Don't make enemies. Which means not getting on anybody's bad side if I can reasonably avoid it, not sticking my nose into fights between other people unless I can help an ally without damaging anybody, and Not Making Waves.
Step three: Don't be alpha dog. Never really thought of this one in those terms, but my intent is pretty clear. Even when I'm in charge of something, my goal is not to be "large and in charge" but to create a sort of little pocket where my influence is strong.
Despite its undeniable success, this program is in need of some alterations and additions. I have to change my perspective on leadership. I also have to change my perspective on what it means to be "annoying."
I was not sufficiently specific in my previous ambition. My desire not to be annoying came mostly from the verbal dysentery of my youth, and the fact that I often came off as a condescending know-it-all. It dovetailed nicely with my desire not to put myself in a leadership role. Those two intentions, combined with the fact that my judgment on matters human was not generally something I could trust, brought me to a general policy of not telling people what they didn't want to hear. Or didn't have terms for in their personal lexicon.
Now, at work, I get to spend lots and lots of time telling people things they don't want to hear. Telling my bosses that vendors need to be paid egregious sums right now. Telling vendors we haven't cut checks for their egregious sums yet, but soon, oh so very soon, and would they please call me back on Thursday (when I won't be in the office, or will no longer be employed here, nyuk nyuk). Telling employees their checks won't be coming in until such-and-such day.
Of course you still can't tell people things for which they don't have terms. You can't tell your bosses how their unconscious expectations of one another exacerbate many of the stresses in their relationship, for example. You can't give people advice about the emotional energy management strategies they're using to run their personalities. That shit, however, all falls under the general prohibition of "don't talk shop about magic with non-practitioners." Personality construction is to magic what learning how not to fall off a horse is to the Kentucky Derby. Basic, basic basic. But then again, how many people actually know how not to fall off an antsy horse? I can just about keep my seat on a placid one when it breaks into a trot. (Not to say anything about enjoying the experience, but I can do it.) It helps to think of myself as a personality construction geek, with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of true geekiness. I can't expect people to be interested in things that are difficult to think about clearly, and even more difficult to gain skill at, when it's taken me so long and so much effort to make even this much progress.
And I've gotten to a level of advertent interaction where I can usually separate those two things in practice as well as in theory. I can tell someone that certain of their work duties need to be addressed without bending their ear about why they haven't wanted to pay attention to those duties. Which means I can move to grasp the power to be annoying, so long as I hold to a firm line of being annoying only when it is actually desirable and necessary.
So. Overcoming panic and dread. Taking new stock of assertiveness and prettiness. Which means re-evaluating leadership and annoyance, as they relate to assertiveness, prettiness and the power games that are inevitably connected thereunto. Bah!Forgiveness, like hope in the Pandora story, lies at the bottom of a great big box full of bees and rattlesnakes and door-to-door missionaries and other unsavory things. Things that require hard work to integrate or counterbalance.
But it's all good in the service of the communion of saints (Dad's version) and the glory of God (Meg's version). *shivers* Dude, I'm glad I got to hear those stories and relieved in another way that I'm not on the path that led to the experience of them. My little portion is plenty enough!
All that matters (to dog or god or magma or the stars) is the music of the relationships between people, the dance of their actions towards each other, the wild and stately rhythm and harmony which builds the universe. And rips it open and weaves it back together, drains it dry and fills it up again. The little crap we get upset about, the terms and conditions we strive so hard to build and to defend, are only there to get us to a point where we can feel the music, move in it and play with it. All the dogged little crap we build is best honored when it has carried us to the end of itself. Those assumptions and ambitions are small things, really. Made to house the glory, but not made of it. Things to be discarded when it comes time to grasp something solid and real, something we maybe never would have reached without taking the long hard finicky road all the way back around to it.
how to trick yourself into telling the truth, part two.
This morning I got a case of the fuckits. (A marvelous phrase popularized by Dana Carvey. Did not think he was all that great until I saw "Squatting Monkeys Tell No Lies." Truly hilarious.)
It is my last day of work at this restaurant. No more constant low-grade panic from hosts of things not done or not doable. No more asking the kitchen to make me lunch like the other managers and having them forget. No more having hours cut back or extended based upon the fickle needs of the restaurant. No more everybody telling me I need to dress better, quit smoking and make my boyfriend get a job. No more lady boss calling up her dad's work and telling them I'd make a good receptionist, that I'd be good with patients because I'm "a very gentle person."
No interviews lined up as yet, either. Ater those first couple of enterprising days I haven't actually sent out any more. I think on some level I won't truly believe I have escaped this place until I leave today.
I'm not sure why Mom wanted me to read Aunt Crete's Emancipation. This is a Grace Livingston Hill novel about a Cinderella-esque maiden aunt, a kind soul whose sister and niece aspire to social climbing and snobbery. In that novel I saw a lot of how Mom seems to me to see herself: longsuffering, compassionate and much put-upon. I don't think that's the whole story, though; it might also be meant as an encouragement in light of my job situation. Happy thought. I have a bad history with "getting the message" when someone gives me a novel to read with an ulterior motive. If it's just something to read for funsies, no problem. But if they are trying to tell me something with it I usually don't get it until it's way too late and they've practically given up trying to tell me.
Sometimes, though, I'll read something that does cut me to the quick. And it's usually something I picked out myself. Case in point, The Wizard of London.
Wow. Two phone lines rang and somebody came over to ask me to unlock the storage room door as soon as I typed that. Must be what this blog post is really about. Interrupting Chao never interrupts anything unimportant.
More interrupting. Damn.
There was the conversation I had with my sisters about Mom over the weekend. Plus the scene in the abovementioned book where the one character has to forgive another character who isn't sorry. And then yesterday my Tori Amos Pandora channel plays Playboy Mommy, which has been stuck in my head on and off ever since. No matter what one's problems with one's mother may be, "Don't judge me so harsh, little girl" is always on-topic.
So it's time for me to forgive Mom. For whatever.
Dad's too dead to react to it in whatever way I knew he was going to have reacted that made me not want to try it. And he never really did, while I was watching anyway, and I saw how it hurt him not to be able to forgive her. Just couldn't wrap his mind around how her mind works. Well, I've got a ton of her brain chemistry and I know what it feels like to have a memory without a time track and to always be afraid of the little feelings you sense in the back of people's minds but can't talk to them about. That's why I've never wanted to cut Mom any slack. Because we're so similar.
Plus, I've held onto this anger for so long the force of habit makes it hard to let go. First it was anger at both of them. Then Mom made me realize how horrible and scary and unbearable Dad really was, and it was anger at him. Then Dad made me realize how horrible and scary and unbearable Mom really was, and it was anger at her. And all the time it was anger at myself for being duped and feeling like I didn't have a choice about it, that to feel anything meant being duped and used. That to be seen as valuable, as a person whose opinion held weight, also meant being duped and used.
I wonder if that is part of what's behind my fear of prettiness and assertiveness. That I don't want people to respect me because then whatever power games are being played, wherever I am, I will have no choice but to take part in them.
Knowing my parents the way I do now lets me imagine in some detail what it was like at the beginning of their relationship, how things went wrong, what they thought and felt about it etc. Nobody was a little angel or a little devil; they both tried really hard in the ways they knew how. They fell short due, I think, to not having cleaned up their relationships with themselves. Each being led out of reality or made miserable by things the other couldn't help with. Dog knows (and Dave knows, alas) how frustrating it can be when your partner is made miserable by something that is literally not explainable. Arising from the internal imbalance of assumptions and emotional forces in the personality.
But the thing I need to be beating myself upside the skull with is this. As long as you don't forgive a wrong done you, you remain defeated by it. You believe that the person (or thing within a person, or situation in which a person acted) is more powerful than you, is going to come and hurt you again in just the same way, and that you need to hold on to the hurt and resentment so that you can use them as a shield against the dreaded Next Time.
Therein lie two of my big problems, right there, rooted in unforgiveness: Panic and Dread. Two dreams I've had now with similar structure let me know just what I'm dealing with here.
First one (about Panic): I saw an ant scuttling across the floor of a room. Blam! I smashed and killed it. Went over to look--it was still antlike, but enormous, the size of a terrier, and like an Iz it had an eyeless head with wicked pointy sharp white teeth. It was dead, but I felt afraid to touch it because its teeth were still sharp. Then Stewie Griffin came up, took the ant's head, said something to the effect of "Victory is mine!" and made a necklace out of the head and wore it under his cloak like some sort of cool dark wizard.
Second one (about Dread): I was following around Eric Cartman. He was ordering people around and generally being a bastard. He took away somebody else's caviar and crackers and sat down next to a swimming pool. At that point I was no longer following, but was him. We looked at the container of caviar (crappy plastic container like the ones you get spinach dip in at the grocery store), and it roiled and swirled like something was going on in there. We picked up the cracker anyway to try to eat some, and this little octopus emerges. It was about the size of the ones you get in Tom Yum soup, but with features like a regular huge octopus, and it moved fast. It grabbed my/Cartman's face and pulled it down into the dish of caviar, while we were struggling and swearing in typical Cartman fashion.
So, to sum up. Panic I'm kind of getting to the point where I have it under control, but Dread still makes me look and/or feel like an asshole. Must forgive more, and be better and wiser. Must not be stupid cartoon sociopathic child. Must be me instead.
It is my last day of work at this restaurant. No more constant low-grade panic from hosts of things not done or not doable. No more asking the kitchen to make me lunch like the other managers and having them forget. No more having hours cut back or extended based upon the fickle needs of the restaurant. No more everybody telling me I need to dress better, quit smoking and make my boyfriend get a job. No more lady boss calling up her dad's work and telling them I'd make a good receptionist, that I'd be good with patients because I'm "a very gentle person."
No interviews lined up as yet, either. Ater those first couple of enterprising days I haven't actually sent out any more. I think on some level I won't truly believe I have escaped this place until I leave today.
I'm not sure why Mom wanted me to read Aunt Crete's Emancipation. This is a Grace Livingston Hill novel about a Cinderella-esque maiden aunt, a kind soul whose sister and niece aspire to social climbing and snobbery. In that novel I saw a lot of how Mom seems to me to see herself: longsuffering, compassionate and much put-upon. I don't think that's the whole story, though; it might also be meant as an encouragement in light of my job situation. Happy thought. I have a bad history with "getting the message" when someone gives me a novel to read with an ulterior motive. If it's just something to read for funsies, no problem. But if they are trying to tell me something with it I usually don't get it until it's way too late and they've practically given up trying to tell me.
Sometimes, though, I'll read something that does cut me to the quick. And it's usually something I picked out myself. Case in point, The Wizard of London.
Wow. Two phone lines rang and somebody came over to ask me to unlock the storage room door as soon as I typed that. Must be what this blog post is really about. Interrupting Chao never interrupts anything unimportant.
More interrupting. Damn.
There was the conversation I had with my sisters about Mom over the weekend. Plus the scene in the abovementioned book where the one character has to forgive another character who isn't sorry. And then yesterday my Tori Amos Pandora channel plays Playboy Mommy, which has been stuck in my head on and off ever since. No matter what one's problems with one's mother may be, "Don't judge me so harsh, little girl" is always on-topic.
So it's time for me to forgive Mom. For whatever.
Dad's too dead to react to it in whatever way I knew he was going to have reacted that made me not want to try it. And he never really did, while I was watching anyway, and I saw how it hurt him not to be able to forgive her. Just couldn't wrap his mind around how her mind works. Well, I've got a ton of her brain chemistry and I know what it feels like to have a memory without a time track and to always be afraid of the little feelings you sense in the back of people's minds but can't talk to them about. That's why I've never wanted to cut Mom any slack. Because we're so similar.
Plus, I've held onto this anger for so long the force of habit makes it hard to let go. First it was anger at both of them. Then Mom made me realize how horrible and scary and unbearable Dad really was, and it was anger at him. Then Dad made me realize how horrible and scary and unbearable Mom really was, and it was anger at her. And all the time it was anger at myself for being duped and feeling like I didn't have a choice about it, that to feel anything meant being duped and used. That to be seen as valuable, as a person whose opinion held weight, also meant being duped and used.
I wonder if that is part of what's behind my fear of prettiness and assertiveness. That I don't want people to respect me because then whatever power games are being played, wherever I am, I will have no choice but to take part in them.
Knowing my parents the way I do now lets me imagine in some detail what it was like at the beginning of their relationship, how things went wrong, what they thought and felt about it etc. Nobody was a little angel or a little devil; they both tried really hard in the ways they knew how. They fell short due, I think, to not having cleaned up their relationships with themselves. Each being led out of reality or made miserable by things the other couldn't help with. Dog knows (and Dave knows, alas) how frustrating it can be when your partner is made miserable by something that is literally not explainable. Arising from the internal imbalance of assumptions and emotional forces in the personality.
But the thing I need to be beating myself upside the skull with is this. As long as you don't forgive a wrong done you, you remain defeated by it. You believe that the person (or thing within a person, or situation in which a person acted) is more powerful than you, is going to come and hurt you again in just the same way, and that you need to hold on to the hurt and resentment so that you can use them as a shield against the dreaded Next Time.
Therein lie two of my big problems, right there, rooted in unforgiveness: Panic and Dread. Two dreams I've had now with similar structure let me know just what I'm dealing with here.
First one (about Panic): I saw an ant scuttling across the floor of a room. Blam! I smashed and killed it. Went over to look--it was still antlike, but enormous, the size of a terrier, and like an Iz it had an eyeless head with wicked pointy sharp white teeth. It was dead, but I felt afraid to touch it because its teeth were still sharp. Then Stewie Griffin came up, took the ant's head, said something to the effect of "Victory is mine!" and made a necklace out of the head and wore it under his cloak like some sort of cool dark wizard.
Second one (about Dread): I was following around Eric Cartman. He was ordering people around and generally being a bastard. He took away somebody else's caviar and crackers and sat down next to a swimming pool. At that point I was no longer following, but was him. We looked at the container of caviar (crappy plastic container like the ones you get spinach dip in at the grocery store), and it roiled and swirled like something was going on in there. We picked up the cracker anyway to try to eat some, and this little octopus emerges. It was about the size of the ones you get in Tom Yum soup, but with features like a regular huge octopus, and it moved fast. It grabbed my/Cartman's face and pulled it down into the dish of caviar, while we were struggling and swearing in typical Cartman fashion.
So, to sum up. Panic I'm kind of getting to the point where I have it under control, but Dread still makes me look and/or feel like an asshole. Must forgive more, and be better and wiser. Must not be stupid cartoon sociopathic child. Must be me instead.
the only road
Came up with the chorus and verses for this one while repeatedly walking to the city's office of various crappy permits from work one day. It's about a mile each way. It was an abominably hot day, perfect for writing the blues. Something about the absolute lethargy inspired by extreme heat lowers my creative inhibitions in ways that drugs and alcohol can't.
While I was figuring this out for the guitar, Dave pointed out that the rhythm and chord sequence on the verses are almost the same as both Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and Queen's "We Will Rock You." Then I noticed the extra-long bridge is just like the bridge from Local H's "The One With 'Kid'" except with different chords. This pissed me off, but then again, none of those songs are the blues especially, nor do any of them really suck. (Although Dave would disagree about "Pour Some Sugar On Me". He has no use for Def Leppard.) If there's one thing I learned from Shakespeare, it's this: When you steal ideas from enough different people at once, it isn't really stealing.
I don't know why I'm posting so damn much today. Edgy I guess. I flip back and forth sometimes out of the worry mindset that looks at how close disaster seems to loom, into enjoying the present. As soon as I start enjoying the present again I feel stupid for being so worried in the first place.
So by my own motto, guess which one is the smart mindset, the one I should stick with. I hope I can.
-----
granddaddy was a trainman, daddy had wheels
in my heart two slivers of sun-bright steel
seem to meet in the middle at the end of my eyes
but however far I travel they're the same damn size
so away I go, away I go
away I go
down the only road I know
mama got a heart like a pretty machine
put my mind back together but it never runs clean
pull my rails off the tracks, point 'em up at the stars
bind my hands round my back, now I'm lookin' at bars
so away I go, away I go
away I go
down the only road I know
what am I
so scared of
keep my head down
pull my hair up
a glad hand
a bad habit
spent sand, a
dead rabbit
why call this
ambition
I want to see what I'm missing
want to be what something
has to show
for it
go for it
down the only road
the only road
the only road I know
-----
Tomorrow might be my last day. Then again, I doubt they have anyone lined up to get the payroll out on time next week. We'll see what happens.
While I was figuring this out for the guitar, Dave pointed out that the rhythm and chord sequence on the verses are almost the same as both Def Leppard's "Pour Some Sugar On Me" and Queen's "We Will Rock You." Then I noticed the extra-long bridge is just like the bridge from Local H's "The One With 'Kid'" except with different chords. This pissed me off, but then again, none of those songs are the blues especially, nor do any of them really suck. (Although Dave would disagree about "Pour Some Sugar On Me". He has no use for Def Leppard.) If there's one thing I learned from Shakespeare, it's this: When you steal ideas from enough different people at once, it isn't really stealing.
I don't know why I'm posting so damn much today. Edgy I guess. I flip back and forth sometimes out of the worry mindset that looks at how close disaster seems to loom, into enjoying the present. As soon as I start enjoying the present again I feel stupid for being so worried in the first place.
So by my own motto, guess which one is the smart mindset, the one I should stick with. I hope I can.
-----
granddaddy was a trainman, daddy had wheels
in my heart two slivers of sun-bright steel
seem to meet in the middle at the end of my eyes
but however far I travel they're the same damn size
so away I go, away I go
away I go
down the only road I know
mama got a heart like a pretty machine
put my mind back together but it never runs clean
pull my rails off the tracks, point 'em up at the stars
bind my hands round my back, now I'm lookin' at bars
so away I go, away I go
away I go
down the only road I know
what am I
so scared of
keep my head down
pull my hair up
a glad hand
a bad habit
spent sand, a
dead rabbit
why call this
ambition
I want to see what I'm missing
want to be what something
has to show
for it
go for it
down the only road
the only road
the only road I know
-----
Tomorrow might be my last day. Then again, I doubt they have anyone lined up to get the payroll out on time next week. We'll see what happens.
notes to self of a practical nature
- call plumber to fix sink
- find place to get guitar repaired
- go to state of IL, get license reinstated
- go online & downgrade Verizon account so as to make cheaper
- mail August rent check already!
- find place to get guitar repaired
- go to state of IL, get license reinstated
- go online & downgrade Verizon account so as to make cheaper
- mail August rent check already!
how to trick yourself into telling the truth, part one.
put a happy ending there and
it'll write itself, I swear
all we need
all we need
is some meetings and a lead
I'm pretty sure that song is Alkaline Trio, but not sure enough to put it behind a tilde*. And I don't know if there'll be anny other parts to this, but I felt like it wanted a part one at the end and I'm lettin' it stand.
So this lady at Mom's church got a word for me after Mom asked her to pray about me trying to find a new job. The lady felt great things were in store for me, that if there've been big dreams I've been deferring now's the time to go for them, and that if there's any little things around my house that might be displeasing to God I should get rid of them since they will stand in the way of me being blessed.
Isn't it great how proper witchcraft occurs everywhere, totally ignoring denominational boundaries?
I think I should get rid of that little "jar o' blessings" Mom gave me and the little silver case the blessings are supposed to go into once they're out of the jar. My Tarot decks, my Satanist books, Dad's old books on evolution are all quite pleasing to dog, or goddess, or God, or all three and whomever, thank you very much. And they are going to stay right where the fuck they are.
I actually did a kind of a spell yesterday. I dunno if I've told y'all about this, but this is how it works. One key theme in putting together a purposive magical ritual is that in the course of the ritual something is destroyed--a sacrifice. The symbolic, spiritual and emotional nature of the sacrifice should be as germane as possible to the aspect of one's life the spell is meant to affect. The idea is that the sacrifice is empowered with your mana (your stuff-that-feels-ways-and-pushes), and that in being destroyed it moves from this side of life to the other, carrying your intent along with it. When I feel I'm lacking in musical or poetic inspiration, for example, the best spell I've come up with is to "plow under" a small bit of a song or poem. This means to come up with it, sing or recite it, cherish its awesomeness, and then intentionally forget it. Even for me, intentionally forgetting things is pretty tricky.
For life pattern things what works best for me is to write shit down, either on a yellow legal pad or on my blog, and then forget it. If it's on physical paper it's often enough to just flip the page and not re-read it again for awhile. If it's on my blog, the thing to do is write it in a draft and then close the window without saving. Autosave will sometimes pick up parts of it, but not usually the money parts.
I'm not sitting there writing, "Oh, dear dog, gee it'd be nice if you got me a soft accounting job that pays $35k a year for 40hrs a week and lets me sit on my ass playing KoL all day and also has free coffee and a shorter bus ride than my current job and everyone will be nice to me but not too nice." That's what my feelings add up to, but that actually isn't honest enough IMO to constitute a proper spell. The reason writing things out works for me is it lets me get to the center of my feelings, the root of my distress, and speak from that. Oddly, I don't think there's any reason not to explain what I put into the thing yesterday. Usually there would be. Who knows, maybe it was a dud for purposes of example--either way I'll find out when the time shifts.
I started out talking about how I've been freaking out a little because of being scared and taking the situation upon myself with too much frowny seriousness. Then I talked about the Who, and Tommy and why sensory deprivation scares me. This led to the story about Dad, the one where he lost his hearing. I told the whole story about him and the Russian agents disguised and Chicago cops, why anybody involved in spooky business should always carry a handcuff key taped to the small of their back and why music lovers should never repeatedly fire a pistol inside a vehicle unless it is, in fact, a matter of life and death. That gave a nice little segue into how the path a person chooses to follow in life marks them--not always with busted eardrums and broken bones, but in ways that make them more suited to that path and less capable of following others. Then I got into this metaphorical thing with how the best a human being can do is try to be a pinball wizard and hope some friendly hand guides them to a machine whose moves they understand.
See, dreamspeak is the only language our unconscious minds understand. And except for little glimmers of witchery, which only the very unluckiest powerhouses get more than, the only way you can intentionally shout out your will into the web of causality is by working together with your unconscious mind. Which means you have to tell it a story, sing it a song, inspire it to desire with specificity. A particular kind of specificity. You can't specify dollar amounts and role titles because those ideas exist only in the purview of your conscious mind. Being able to manipulate oneself into complete honesty is as tough a trick, in its way, as forgetting things on purpose. To trick oneself into thinking and feeling and desiring, if only for a few moments, with exact and perfect clarity, all pointed in exactly the same direction, is the thing, however one goes about it.
It's a bit like Horton Hears a Who. All the little versions of you inside your head and heart and gut and et cetera have to stand on the top of their metaphorical buildings and shout "Hi, Horton!" for your soul to make any noise at all against the general background murmur of your time.
*Looked it up. It is, in fact, the Vandals.
it'll write itself, I swear
all we need
all we need
is some meetings and a lead
I'm pretty sure that song is Alkaline Trio, but not sure enough to put it behind a tilde*. And I don't know if there'll be anny other parts to this, but I felt like it wanted a part one at the end and I'm lettin' it stand.
So this lady at Mom's church got a word for me after Mom asked her to pray about me trying to find a new job. The lady felt great things were in store for me, that if there've been big dreams I've been deferring now's the time to go for them, and that if there's any little things around my house that might be displeasing to God I should get rid of them since they will stand in the way of me being blessed.
Isn't it great how proper witchcraft occurs everywhere, totally ignoring denominational boundaries?
I think I should get rid of that little "jar o' blessings" Mom gave me and the little silver case the blessings are supposed to go into once they're out of the jar. My Tarot decks, my Satanist books, Dad's old books on evolution are all quite pleasing to dog, or goddess, or God, or all three and whomever, thank you very much. And they are going to stay right where the fuck they are.
I actually did a kind of a spell yesterday. I dunno if I've told y'all about this, but this is how it works. One key theme in putting together a purposive magical ritual is that in the course of the ritual something is destroyed--a sacrifice. The symbolic, spiritual and emotional nature of the sacrifice should be as germane as possible to the aspect of one's life the spell is meant to affect. The idea is that the sacrifice is empowered with your mana (your stuff-that-feels-ways-and-pushes), and that in being destroyed it moves from this side of life to the other, carrying your intent along with it. When I feel I'm lacking in musical or poetic inspiration, for example, the best spell I've come up with is to "plow under" a small bit of a song or poem. This means to come up with it, sing or recite it, cherish its awesomeness, and then intentionally forget it. Even for me, intentionally forgetting things is pretty tricky.
For life pattern things what works best for me is to write shit down, either on a yellow legal pad or on my blog, and then forget it. If it's on physical paper it's often enough to just flip the page and not re-read it again for awhile. If it's on my blog, the thing to do is write it in a draft and then close the window without saving. Autosave will sometimes pick up parts of it, but not usually the money parts.
I'm not sitting there writing, "Oh, dear dog, gee it'd be nice if you got me a soft accounting job that pays $35k a year for 40hrs a week and lets me sit on my ass playing KoL all day and also has free coffee and a shorter bus ride than my current job and everyone will be nice to me but not too nice." That's what my feelings add up to, but that actually isn't honest enough IMO to constitute a proper spell. The reason writing things out works for me is it lets me get to the center of my feelings, the root of my distress, and speak from that. Oddly, I don't think there's any reason not to explain what I put into the thing yesterday. Usually there would be. Who knows, maybe it was a dud for purposes of example--either way I'll find out when the time shifts.
I started out talking about how I've been freaking out a little because of being scared and taking the situation upon myself with too much frowny seriousness. Then I talked about the Who, and Tommy and why sensory deprivation scares me. This led to the story about Dad, the one where he lost his hearing. I told the whole story about him and the Russian agents disguised and Chicago cops, why anybody involved in spooky business should always carry a handcuff key taped to the small of their back and why music lovers should never repeatedly fire a pistol inside a vehicle unless it is, in fact, a matter of life and death. That gave a nice little segue into how the path a person chooses to follow in life marks them--not always with busted eardrums and broken bones, but in ways that make them more suited to that path and less capable of following others. Then I got into this metaphorical thing with how the best a human being can do is try to be a pinball wizard and hope some friendly hand guides them to a machine whose moves they understand.
See, dreamspeak is the only language our unconscious minds understand. And except for little glimmers of witchery, which only the very unluckiest powerhouses get more than, the only way you can intentionally shout out your will into the web of causality is by working together with your unconscious mind. Which means you have to tell it a story, sing it a song, inspire it to desire with specificity. A particular kind of specificity. You can't specify dollar amounts and role titles because those ideas exist only in the purview of your conscious mind. Being able to manipulate oneself into complete honesty is as tough a trick, in its way, as forgetting things on purpose. To trick oneself into thinking and feeling and desiring, if only for a few moments, with exact and perfect clarity, all pointed in exactly the same direction, is the thing, however one goes about it.
It's a bit like Horton Hears a Who. All the little versions of you inside your head and heart and gut and et cetera have to stand on the top of their metaphorical buildings and shout "Hi, Horton!" for your soul to make any noise at all against the general background murmur of your time.
*Looked it up. It is, in fact, the Vandals.
riding the wheel
In the last four or five days I've had several bad moments, times when I panicked or freaked out or got angry irrationally. The combination of Dave's kindness and level-headedness and cocooning in various forms for entertainment has served to keep my little bouts of crazy from spilling out too much. Also I seem to be making interior headway on them (trying to maintain a Demon Free Lifestyle, har har). I say this because my crazytimes are shorter than in months past, easier to unravel, and tend more to frightening expressions of inappropriate emotion than crazy plans or trying to make people do things which seem very important to my crazy but actually don't matter. The important thing for me, in a time like this as in every time, is to be able to relax. As Dave told me yesterday, everything's not going to suddenly fall apart if I get a case of the fuck-its.
That "DON'T PANIC" tattoo seems like a better and better idea.
Me and Dave have been listening to The Who a lot lately. It was the Rock Honors that did it, with a string of excellent (and not so excellent but still quite competent) bands performing some of The Who's greatest hits, capped off by a performance from the two surviving members. Now, I'd never really liked the album Tommy. Not because it was bad--I would never have argued that!--but because the thing it's about frightens me. Reading about Hellen Keller frightened me too, until I learned that in her adult life she was an ardent socialist and devoted her energy to political activism. (That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure does a mean march on city hall.)
[The remainder of this post was lost due to closing the browser without hitting save. It will be referred to later, as the dropped text was at least partially remembered and may have been used for other things.]
That "DON'T PANIC" tattoo seems like a better and better idea.
Me and Dave have been listening to The Who a lot lately. It was the Rock Honors that did it, with a string of excellent (and not so excellent but still quite competent) bands performing some of The Who's greatest hits, capped off by a performance from the two surviving members. Now, I'd never really liked the album Tommy. Not because it was bad--I would never have argued that!--but because the thing it's about frightens me. Reading about Hellen Keller frightened me too, until I learned that in her adult life she was an ardent socialist and devoted her energy to political activism. (That deaf, dumb and blind kid sure does a mean march on city hall.)
[The remainder of this post was lost due to closing the browser without hitting save. It will be referred to later, as the dropped text was at least partially remembered and may have been used for other things.]
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