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Connection

a therapeutic anti-method

by jai jackson

Self-Therapy

I read, and there among the words in more or less dense fashion
I find myself, fragmented, to be reassembled; I am in so many
formats, I don't know where to look, sometimes scattered,
once on a page, once in a book, or never; in a film or on TV,
I watch, and there among the images, I flash, by, the way I see
myself, intermittently, each word, each image, provoking
a deeper consideration: I follow trails in a virtual existence
to see where they will lead, until---I am overwhelmed with
who I am, so far beyond what I could imagine, extending into
a world I do not know, aware that I am becoming more than I
could ever realize if I never read or watched and found the clues
the unconscious, whom my consciousness, becomes, exhibits.

Cult of Awakening

I puzzle over vague remembered images in various overlapping places where connections are taking place, later, not knowing, what it all means, except at the time I know it intuitively, without question---if only life were like this, when you think about it, if only your mental life corresponded to the life you lead in fact.
But it does, only you never really understand how.
In an old storeroom, I remember a corridor leading up to it, and a street, as if it were the corridor, but it is a different place, I discover a gas and acid connection. A lot of people, everyone who is here, are connected together by this substance in a mysterious but direct way, i.e., they are able to remain separate and yet be connected directly, as if we are all one thing, one substance, each of our individual physical selves being separate nodes in a chain of existence. The connections are profound and defy analysis, but they are very obvious. I extend the affect beyond me in a strange way, in the same way that while sleeping, I "think," as if I am awake, and after I awaken, I am still in a sense asleep as I intentionally persist with the anti-images (connections) trying to keep the sense of them, trying to maintain their "logic" into the waking state. This is the same idea, as if I am dreaming while awake. These are non-physical, non-verbal, non-approaching, non-retreating connections. Sex, I realize, breaks these connections; it's okay to have sex with someone, but during the sex, and maybe more or less permanently afterwards, depending upon the nature of your relationship, if it is changed (if it had been profound in this way in the first place, which is likely, because you must have been attracted to each other, if you hadn't just made the decision to have sex for the sake of it), these connections may not be able to be reestablished. This could be the reason why couples do not remain "in love" after they are married for a long time, i.e., they get too close too often. These connections depend upon a certain physical distance being maintained in order that the psycho-spiritual union may become stronger as it develops, as if separately, together.
In the storeroom, the connection is like kind of gas or acid, or both at the same time, as if they are the same specific substance enabling communion. The sinister, damaging connotation of acid does not bother me, although I am aware of it, sort of.
Later, I make the connection with LSD that I do not realize in the present.
In the "awakening, but not" phase, as I leave the storeroom, moving north onto Homewood Dr., I make a "connection" (i.e., association) with the new girl who moved in down the street several weeks ago, the one with the Italian painter husband. And I realize that Linda, a girl I used to work with, is also one of these people with whom I am permanently connected. I never knew this during the time that I worked with her. And I haven't seen her since. And yet, we are permanently connected. I understand that there are certain people who more readily fall into this category of being "connected." I remember the thing in a Carlos Castaneda book about how some people are not real people but rather spirits from somewhere else. I don't want to believe this. I want it to be that we are all the same, only differing in our levels of awareness of the psychic process involved.

SuperStore

I search an entire aisle, but especially one area of one shelf, for a long time, considering what it is I'm looking for, pondering, in a slow and cautious manner. [Much in the same way I work, and live.] Armand, an employee I know, comes up to me and implicitly chastises me with a particularly degrading attitude for what I am doing, as if I am doing something wrong, as if I am somehow morally decrepit for the way in which I stare at the products on the shelf, as if I am a mental patient escaped from an institution, transitioning into a periodic catatonic trance. I feel offended. He walks away from me. A short way down the aisle, he begins to organize a shelf, or pretends to, while advising me that I should leave the store. (This is the felt intent, but he does not put it so precisely into words.) I respond to him as he departs, telling him that he is wrong, but not in the nasty way that he talked to me, but rather in a calm and self-possessed manner. I mean to say that in what I am doing (nothing), I am perfectly correct, and furthermore, I not only have the right to be how I am, but I have that right as a customer. (This also is not so much spoken as felt, but he gets the message, which is later demonstrated by his reformed behavior; however, I definitely express this next item verbally): The customer is always right. [I am a customer, in America, a consumer, of corporate products and of governmental services, and therefore, so long as I do not break laws (and even sometimes if I do), I am right.] [Thus, I've not only stood up for myself, but I've done it in a calm, intelligent, and sophisticated way, unlike the way that Armand has acted toward me (which is the way I would previously, in my past, have responded in defense of myself, i.e., "in kind.") This is a kind of achievement for me, an advancement; Armand is, perhaps, an older version of me projected onto him, a connection of me with a former version of myself, expressing my opinions in a "proper" (which he was), but nasty (surreptitious; with an undercurrent of hostility that is not directly expressed, but nevertheless felt, perhaps in an intuitive, empathetic, etc.) manner] [Years later, I find a serendipitous strain of this connection in the film You've Got Mail:
"Do you ever feel you've become the worst version of yourself, that a Pandora's box of all the secret, hateful parts, your arrogance, your spite, your condescension, has sprung open? Someone provokes you, and instead of just smiling and moving on, you zing them. 'Hello. It's Mr. Nasty.' I'm sure you have no idea what I'm talking about."
"No. I know what you mean, and I'm completely jealous. What happens to me when I get provoked is that I get tongue-tied. My mind goes...blank. Then I spend all night tossing and turning, trying to figure out what I should have said. What should I have said, for example, to the bottom dweller who recently belittled my existence? Even now, days later, I can't figure it out."
"Wouldn't it be wonderful if I could pass all my zingers to you. And then I would never behave badly and you would behave badly all the time. Then we'd both be happy. But then, on the other hand, I must warn you, that when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows."
This is the history of my life. First, I never said anything caustic to anyone, then I learned to compete in the world (of business), and I became exceptionally good at putting people in their places (like Armand tries to do to me.) Then I realized that was not the way to be, and so I tried to disarm myself, to see how I mirrored the emotions people threw at me in order to be able to blame me for their own denied inner selves. It was a difficult struggle, to regain that former self, to pull myself back in and negate the weapon I had learned so skillfully to use. But I did learn to do it, as long as I can remain relatively free of stress, because that's what stress did to me, prompted me to overtly defend myself against the slights that others unconsciously project. When I am calm and well rested, I am my demurring former self. When I am working and stressed, I am the epitome of sharpness, ready to pounce on any slight and take it to its ultimate conclusion, which despite my feeling that I am totally right, I will definitely later regret, because even if everything seems to turn out well, people will always get you back in some way for acting toward them like they really are inside, but refuse to admit to. You may never know how it is they got you, you may suffer in some way that seems totally unconnected with the true cause. But you will suffer. Seeing myself standing beside Armand in the aisle, I understand this connection. The whole of me is right here now, out in the open, split in two.

I went into the store, I remember, looking for a spring clip (like the kind on the end of a dog chain), and I've been considering whether or not I should purchase a device I've found which I think I might need, but I'm not sure what it's for. It's a mysterious spring-loaded arm which is a cutting/punching device, mounted above a cradle-like bed, almost like a phone cradle, which is itself mounted on a plate-like sub-bed, which reminds me of the kind of cradle that supported an old 8-track tape deck I had installed in my old van. Armand offers some advice as to what the device does. He does this in a begrudging manner at first, not wanting to cooperate with me when I ask for his help, but as he goes along, he becomes more verbose, because he is repentant for his former attitude, I conjecture, not because he really is so much as because he knows I'm right, that it is his place as a store employee to be civil and respectful to me, even if he doesn't feel like it; his begrudgement transitions into a still superior, but somewhat helpful attitude as he intentionally demonstrates his expertise in the area which the device is a part of, elaborating in a complicated technicalese as he goes about his business of whatever it is he was doing before I interrupted him, all the while assuming that I know more than I really do (which is practically nothing) about the subject and that he knows more than I do (which he does, but he has no way of knowing this and it is only his stuck-up sense of superiority that makes him think this way.) [Man, is this ever me. I can see it now. But then, I missed it. Memory, if you use it, is a great teacher.] I am lost in his explanations, which have to do with films, [I have been trying to explain life via films, or more generally, via art] and film splicing, [trying to connect together film and other artistic media] and how sound-tracks are added to films, but not in the traditional way with light, but rather with tape tracks. All the while, or perhaps before this, or maybe later [this is becoming one of those memories where it's difficult to remember which part came first, like the different parts happened all at once, or both before and after each other, like a dream--or maybe I really did dream it], I am playing a super-cool futuristic instrument which creates music by tapping your hands and fingers on a light-box-like panel (except that the front is not glass or plastic, but a thin, finely polished metal surface). I create arpeggios by rolling my fingers across the panel as I bump parts of my hands and wrists against it in a bongo-like fashion, thus producing a complicated pattern and range of notes, which is recorded somewhere (I don't know where; almost as if it is internally recorded) on tape--the tape which can be used to splice onto the film [or is that another subject altogether?]
I go up to the front of the store. Maybe this is the next day. But there need be no time break in memory. I search the shelves near the door, still trying to determine if I should buy these things and at the same time looking for them, because when I looked on the shelves back in the store again, I could not find the device I had seen before, and so I thought that maybe it was discontinued (and removed from the shelf overnight), or even that Armand had removed it from stock because he knew I wanted it [there is a "subconscious" sense of this--or maybe I only imagine so now], but in any case, the store is undergoing a sort of remodeling (there is no physical evidence of this, except maybe evidence that stuff has been moved around on the shelves, but I know it from what other employees have said; I know several people who work in this store.) At the front of the store, two older women employees try to be helpful. They don't know anything about the device or about the area of expertise it represents, [connection: the correlation between the disparate medias of sound and film], but they are quite willing to be as helpful as they can be, even if they are not in reality helpful at all. [The greater your level of expertise, the less of a helpful person you are? Helpful people try to be helpful in order to make up for a lack of expertise, because they want to be useful, making up for their otherwise relatively lower social value? But low self-esteem, despite your true level of expertise, makes you a more cooperative person, not only because, being more socially withdrawn, you are more compliant, but also because you're trying to make up for what you imagine that you lack? This latter point is demonstrated later by Jeanine's character. [Jeanine's not her real name. I call her that because she looks and acts like Janeane Garofalo, who is a star and yet she has low self-esteem, or so she indicates in her interviews. Stars become stars because they have an inordinate drive to make up for what they lack, which is, in some cases, self-esteem.]
The two women search the shelves with me, but we do not find what I want, and they don't even know what they're looking for. I pull the spring clip out of my pocket. I had put it there earlier in the back of the store, not with any attempt to steal it, although I think now that if I had had the opportunity to walk out of the store with it, I would have. [Or, if this is the next day, I did walk out with it, and returned with it still in my pocket.] I show it to them, pretending that I've found it on a shelf, and I ask them how much it costs. I intend to pay for it. But there is no bar code, and of course, they can't find anything else like it anywhere on the shelves. They ask me where I got it, and I tell them it was the only one. Eventually, we locate a display card, which lists prices based upon the measured (in millimeters) openings of the clips; but we have nothing with which to measure the clip. We search for rulers, and I find several, but some of them are not metric, and those that are are not so accurate, having faint divisions that cannot be so easily seen. Finally, though, I find one which is adequate, and we measure the clip and determine that it is 3 mm. This determines that it costs $.78. But the woman tells me to forget it. She gives it to me for free, because...she states a reason, but I can't remember it; but there is the feeling that she gives it to me because she likes me and to make up for all the trouble I've been through, [I am being given a free "connecting device" because of all the trouble I've been through in life? Now I am being shown how to engage in communion? (It's the "old ladies" who will be most receptive to this "strategy," the people with low self-esteem, and of lesser expertise.)
In the French film Poker, the male lead, at the end, says,
"You confuse gambling with life."
To which the female lead replies:
"I'll never touch another card. I'm...I'm finished with all that."
"I used to say that. I don't any more. You're trapped now. It's your passion, and you've paid dearly for it. I'm alone, like you. I'm immune to it, because I've paid."
I've already paid, for having pursued my passion in life through the study and practice of psychology, having gone to the edge of life, searching for the deep meaning and connections between myself and others, and attempting, coincidentally, to document it; and now I'm immune (more or less) to the temptations and manipulations which "they" create.
It is these kinds of connections that I am getting good at, associations between ideas that appeal to me, to which I am attracted, developing them into a fabric of understanding via writing.]
Earlier, and yet now, as a following episode, in proper sequence: when I have conveyed to Armand in some non-verbal way, but musically, when he hears my tape of the excellent music I have made and assumes that now I am more advanced than he previously assumed (my creative expertise being confused with a technical one) [the connection is implicit here too: creative/technical], he refers me, as a continuation of his explanation, to a girl who is working at a register back in the store in the "technical" section which is audio/video, and yet at the same time, in a generic, drugstore-like product area, both. This turns out to be Jeanine. As I stand across the counter from her, she explains some technical stuff to me about what it is I want re film and tape compatibility, etc. After she checks out a customer and then occupies herself with other busywork that she has to do at her register, I ask her why she's working as a clerk in a drug store. The meaning of the question is obvious to her, as I knew that it would be: she is far too talented to be working in this menial job. I walk around the counter to be on the other side with her. At first, she seems a bit threatened by this, but she quickly warms toward me as we talk some more about technical problems of film and tape. I feel a connection I can't quite put into words between her and me, and between tape and film, or between words and images, or between music and the visual. I remember an image I experienced on acid with a girl I knew in Hawaii when I was in the army: we watch a visual pattern created by a sound tape feed into a light box that responded to the sound, but the sound is turned off, and the imagery evokes in me a corresponding creativity of music that I wish to express, but the music I feel is not that which generated the patterns, so that my music put to the visual patterns is different from the music that generated them. So what would happen if I wrote my music and then used it to generate patterns? Would we get the same patterns, or different ones? And would, then, those patterns evoke the same musical response in me, or a different one? And so on. The chain-end spring clip represents this tentative connection between sound/music, word/image, content/book; socially accepted method/content//my innovative style, it binds one thing to another, while allowing a relative freedom of movement in its twisting action, i.e., so that the chain will not become twisted up; but it is a tether nonetheless, which is my attachment to society. One end goes to a leash, the other to be attached to a dog collar; but who is holding the leash and who is wearing the collar? Society, or me? Both. It works both ways.
The low-self-esteem thing: Jeanine and I are the same: I am already "connected," but I don't know/feel it: I "assume" I am not technical, but only creative, when I am actually both. I use the word technical here to refer to not producing text which is saleable in a commercial market, but how do I know it's not, and even if I am correct, what is there to stop me from making a market for it where none now exists? This happens all the time, when new innovations come along to disturb the status quo equilibrium of the conservative business/science/literary social forces.

Connection in Neo-Freudian Terms

If the only tool you have is a hammer,
you tend to see every problem as a nail.
Abraham Maslow

Transference neurosis is developed via projective and introjective identification, "...a term with imprecise, ambiguous meaning." (Meissner, 1979) "These two processes determine the kind of object relationship to the internal and external objects for both patient and analyst." (Thomä & Kächele, 1987; emphasis added) It is out of the mutual give and take that the analyst's empathy arises. The fact that the analyst allows this interaction to occur and consciously attends to it is how he feels what the patient feels. Thus he can analyze himself and apply his interpretations to the patient's projections. [And vice Versa.] "Projective counteridentification" is a term used by Grinberg that begins to reveal the complexity of this phenomenon. How much farther can we go? Can we speak of counterprojective counteridentified countertransference? We can, but do we really want to? Once countertransference is recognized, we've reached a practical limit. The confusion in the profession as to just what countertransference is and how it should be defined seems to indicate that once we reach a certain level of interaction, we (the analyst and the patient, or the self and the other, or me and you) are intermixed enough so that a logical analysis becomes all but impossible, and/or irrelevant. What does it matter if the analyst is healing the patient (if he is), or the patient is healing the analyst (which probably happens all the time)? If you want to know whose pathology belongs to whom, stay in the world of transference and keep it simple. Yes, countertransference can aid in healing, but whom? Complicated interpretations may be fine for therapeutic geniuses who can follow them, but do patients really understand? Are interpretations really necessary at this level? Are they even possible? Or is this all just so much rationalization? Do we come to a point, intermixed, where we begin to see through the illusion of separate egos? Isn't healing done via relationship, unconsciously, in both directions, without so much interpretation? Countertransference is a tool limited by the very intermixing nature of human personality. It should provide to the analyst only hints and clues, which should be verified by the facts of analysis and real events; it should not be used as a "central perceptive function" to prejudge and presume the analytic situation. And countertransference must be distinguished from the projection of the analyst's own personality onto the patient, otherwise the entire theory of countertransference as a psychoanalytic tool (as opposed to an impediment to therapy, ala Freud) can become a mere projective, rather than a valid, insight mechanism.
What is real and what is Memorex? We are so interrelated that we can never be separated. This is the paranoid-schizoid position, the global pre-self. Whose pathology is it, mine or the world's, when I feel the desire to withdraw from a world that I know from experience will "get" me? It is both our pathologies, mine and the world's, because if I react to a world which gets me, whether I have set up the getting or not, whether I have created the conditions for it via expectation and a self-fulfilling prophecy, or whether I have merely been the victim of an unconscious people-machine which acts to relieve itself of burdens of individual guilt by passing it around onto people who are less able to defend themselves, not only does the world dupe me, I dupe the world, into acting against me when it would have been far better off acting in a noble, "Christian" manner, caring for me instead of dumping its burdens on me.
If we are not fixated at the paranoid-schizoid positions to become psychotics, then we develop to the depressive positions and become neurotics. "The depressive position is unconsciously retained and neurosis inevitably becomes a universal phenomenon." (Thomä & Kächele, 1987) We are all neurotics, more or less. I have always maintained this, but I'm surprised to find psychoanalytic theory affirming it. Apparently however, psychoanalytic theory maintains that we are not all psychotics. Okay. Maybe I've been wrong on this point. But there is a "psychotic-core" postulated, and I see how it is that this exists within us all, transcended in a way in which we do not transcend our neurotic personal heritage.
In order to be a good therapist, an analyst must have worked through his paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions (Thomä & Kächele, 1987): my preoccupation with global consciousness is the way in which I have been working through my paranoid-schizoid position; and my preoccupation with (my potential/inevitable) illness and death is my working through the depressive position. But this is not a once through it and it's over sort of thing. (There is no abreaction; my self-therapy is an intellectual one.) Rather, it's an ascending spiral, a kind of "growth" pattern: I alternately touch upon the matters, first the paranoid-schizoid, then the depressive. I forget about them for awhile. Then I go back to them again. Each time I learn a little more, see a little bit more of myself, work through the early patterns of my life as present doubts, worries, anxieties, and fears I experience, over and over again, associate themselves with past events in my life. I'm getting slowly better at it, life, healing, myself.
In Postcards From The Edge, Gene Hackman informs Meryl Streep that you don't have an insight and then suddenly your life changes. You have an insight and then your life changes a month or so later. Well, that's a simplistic version of the psychoanalytic process. In reality, if you change at all, it's years later, after many revisits to the problems resulting in many insights.
If I live to be 200, I may be well again---or for the first time.

You can't get away from the paranoid-schizoid world by withdrawing from it and hiding away, because that activity reinforces the paranoid-schizoid behavior in yourself. As a more or less healthy individual, what I am, the world is. But if I willingly join and participate in the world, it uses me, as a scapegoat. So, to be physically safe, I hide away. You can be physically safe, if you are smart, but you can't be mentally safe, which is mainly the reason you retreat. Physical safety is a mere rationalization. You can isolate yourself more or less physically, to the degree you feel is necessary to prevent your exploitation and manipulation, but you can't isolate yourself mentally, psychologically, or spiritually. They are always here, actively searching for ways to get to you. But lest you think that this fact puts you at a disadvantage (or even in danger), remember: they can't get away from you either; you are always there, with them. The great witches and sorcerers of the world knew this and used it to their advantage, turning the world around on their persecutors---sometimes, and only for a while, until the persecutors concluded (via denial and projection) or imagined (via a counter-empathetic reaction), that the persecuted had been acting in some unseen way and so then acted physically to remove them from the scene (via witch trials, executions, crucifixions, whatever.) It is generally thought in these enlightened times that persecution of witches, et al., was an unjustified and barbaric practice. It may have been barbaric, and the persecuted may have been scapegoats for the evil repressed by the masses (or the clergy), but the persecuted were by and large people who were effective at psychological influence, otherwise they would not have been chosen as the hooks of the projections. And anyway, these are not such enlightened times. We still have witch trials. We just call them something else. [The Crucible by Arthur Miller is a disguised criticism of the McCarthy hearings.]
Scapegoating is hardwired into us. The omega male is the first to be used as a scapegoat to reduce tensions in a wolf pack. This is standard mammalian behavior. And skulking away from it is a standard response. But you can't stay away forever. Isolated, you suffer. Mammals need other mammals. Individuals who isolate themselves endanger themselves---and everyone else, at least from the others' (instinctual) point of view. Omegas are needed every bit as much as Alphas, to relieve the aggression, and to provide a contrast that establishes identity. Omegas serve a valuable social function. Without Omegas, there are no Alphas. The unfortunate thing is that when you don't isolate yourself from this split, you will still suffer. It's better to make it hard for them, so that perhaps you'll provoke in them some slim insight into their behavior, make them feel a bit bad about themselves for a short time, if you happen to be someone who too easily sees into the game and resents that fact that some of us must each stand, from time to time, to bear the punishment for the sins of the masses. Certain of us fit more easily into this role, like it or not. I see these things, and not only because I have been trained to see them. I became a psychologist intuitively. It was not so rational a choice. Before I began to study psychology, I was already a psychologist of sorts. But...

if the only tool you have is psychology,
you tend to see every problem as psychological.

Life on Planet Earth

Life is cheap. Look around. It's everywhere. And everyday, it's being
eliminated. I'm not talking about human life. I'm talking about life
in general---as if that were something different. Bugs crawl across
the ground. We step on them without a second thought. Animal
species go extinct. We act, as if, we do not care. Humans are
different, we think. All evidence is to the contrary. People starve
to death all over the world. Millions are killed by governments or
rebel forces. Even if we are different, we act, as if, we aren't.
We're just one more species, the most advanced supposedly
on this planet, but just one more, or less.
Life is precious, we want to think.
But we act differently---or we fail to act. Because, despite our contention,
we know better, we act consistent with the truth: life predominates on
this world and is the evolved value here. But any specific example of it,
even human, is expendable. Some life, below a certain level of quality, is
disconsiderable. Some life is not, worth living. It's the impetus of life that is
of value, not the living in and of itself. So long as it goes on to evolve,
toward the greater complexification, it doesn't matter what happens at
the lower level, whether it be the human or the sub-species.
Proponents of
life (environmentalists, fundamentalists, ecologists, activists, et cetera)
make the argument that in protecting the weakest among us, we protect
ourselves, via enabling a greater diversity, proliferating eco-systems.
Not necessarily true. Life will persist, in one form or another. And even if
it doesn't, even if the worst catastrophe befalls us, it will or will have
persisted elsewhere in the universe. And if nowhere else, universes
live as cosmic particles every bit as valuable, or not, as we.
The universe is, life, and we are only the smallest part of it.
This is why
there is no life after death: life is cheap, and the universe is already alive.
Thus, there is no death; and life, as we perceive it, is an illusion. We are
really only living when we lose our selves in the mystery that is life. So
long as we remain, ego, we are already dead. When we die to ego, we
become, alive, in that way that the universe lives, as one whole thing.
Life is cheap in the same way that the cells of our bodies are expendable.
As egos, we are individual cells. What does it mean, to be, an ego? To be
an ego is to be an American, a member of a cult, the cult of hero-worship.
And the greatest heroes are the almighty dollar and financial independence.
And when fiercely independent people cease to live, they are not dead,
because they have never really been alive, they have never known that
life is cheap, and so they do not appreciate it, because they think its value
lies in what it can buy. Its value lies, not in money, not in possessions, but
in connection. Interconnectedness is what makes life alive. Otherwise we are
nothing more than a collection of sub-atomic particles, less alive than space
vacuum that communicates via transmitting neutrinos et al. across eternity.

When I am not, you, I am dead. When I am not, you, I am cheap. I deserve
to die. Sometimes, I am, an individual. An American ego. At these times,
I believe in the cult of life. Save the forests. Save the whales. Puppy love.
There are no whales. This is a persistent myth. There is only intelligence,
rapidly becoming, artificial. We evolve ourselves. When we become,
machine, then we will really know, that life, above all, is cheap.


Out Of The Mainstream And Into The Fire

People want to drag you into their pathologies, which they don't see
as such, but think they are merely their lives; unfortunately you will
allow them to do it, at the same time dragging them, into yours, so
it becomes a matter of who has the strongest personality, who will
victimize or manipulate whom; they will hurt you, badly; they will
scapegoat their denials onto you to the point of your death, beyond
it even, depersonalizing your existence; there is serious danger in
society, drive-by shootings, corporate master plans to utilize people
for their potential, to use them up, airlines that maintain planes only
to a level where their safety record is better than their competitors,
when they could instead shoot for a zero defect rate; et cetera, etc.
There is no real value, no reward, for participating in society today,
the things you get are of little value, if you want valuable things,
like love (real love, not the kind traded for, as a commodity), you
find it out of the mainstream, in isolated segments of the whole.
We focus on the dangers they tell us to, so we don't see the real
danger: how the personalities distract us away, from who we are.


Pushing Buttons

I remember being upstairs in the north bedroom, in bed with B (who at the time I remember imagining was db.) We are sleepy and don't want to get up, but we have to, Dad's encouraging us to get out of bed. We hang onto each other as Dad playfully drags her down across me by her feet as she hangs onto me while I lie on my back. We have to get up to go to a funeral downstairs. The house is full of relatives. B gets dressed fast and leaves. I pull on my jeans slowly. I know I'm supposed to get dressed up, but I don't want to. I don't want to full awaken because I'm still trying to remember my dream:
I'm bare-chested and being kissed by a light-skinned black woman, who resembles KP. She says something about how we're shocking everyone with our intimate behavior (not right just then, because we're alone, but generally, at other times, in public. But I point out that we're not, no one is paying any attention at all to us, we can do anything we want. I say, "look at all these weirdoes around here. Do you think anyone is paying any attention to us?" There's a guy in a cowboy outfit who looks like a thin Gary Busey acting in a very strange role; there's all kinds of strange people hanging around, hanging out.
[Smooth, seamless transition to a later residence I don't know of yet]:
I'm trying to find out what time it is, but all of the clocks are different. I have to be downtown at eight A.M., to my job as an adult. I used to dream all the time when I was a little girl that I was already an adult. It's five to seven, I finally determine. I've got to wash and get ready. I'm looking for a sink. This takes place in overlapping areas, one of which is the streets of East Liberty in a house superimposed over it. I'm running around looking for a bathroom to take a quick shower just to wash off, not even to soap up, but I rule that out because I don't have time. I'm going to have to drive to work. I can't catch the bus because it will take too long. I come across this group of people in an auditorium/country fair-type place.
[When I am an adult, I will realize that the group is the "Gaither Homecoming." I will see them in a preview on the TV Guide channel and will want to turn to it to see what it is about, but I will forget. I had never seen the show before and have since seen it only once for a brief few minutes, so the fact that I could predict its content in the childhood dream is amazing.]
Among all these Christians singing hootenanny-type songs, I see a girl. I work my way through the crowd to try to see her up close, but when I get nearby, I can't find her. Maybe she was one of these old women who are here who I thought were younger from afar. People call out my name; people in the crowd know me. One woman (a young girl?) calls out "Josefina." I don't know who she is, but I politely wave hello. Others who apparently know me call out, but I can't locate them in the crowd by their calls. Burt Reynolds, who was there earlier with me, is with me again. I'm looking for a gift for my employer's son's birthday. This is tied in with the car I have to drive to work. Burt is looking for a model car for some kid also. And some other guy is also there looking with us for a gift. There is a kind of display, a store-type area off to the side (south) in the auditorium that sells toys, especially model cars, etc. Burt is looking for a larger model, but I'm looking for matchbox cars; but then I rule the whole thing out, because I think that maybe the kid already has matchbox cars and that would be a stupid gift.

I awaken as an adult male and think that all of that dream that the little girl dreamed is not that important, except as a background/motivation for the thoughts that I have when I awaken: I think I am trapped, by the necessity of having to rush out to work, or by the necessity I impose upon myself of keeping to a diurnal schedule, or even by merely being male. Burt Reynolds is free because he doesn't have to work. He's an actor. But Burt is me. I dream of Burt as a symbol for myself, as an alter-ego. Burt wants a LARGE model car; but I want matchboxes. Therefore, he is a larger version of myself, a part of myself that thinks bigger, more successfully, while I see myself as trapped and limited. But Burt is even more trapped and limited by the mere fact that he is male.
Am I really free, tying myself into a schedule (and into a gender?) And if not, do I really want to be? If I really wanted to be free, I'd become an actor (like Burt), to free up my emotions. I limit myself severely by insisting on being who I am, responding emotionally in the way I do, or don't. But do I want to be free from the trap of my lifestyle and from the ultimiate trap of my self; or is my "freedom" exactly this restriction: I restrict myself to who I am and to this place in order to be relatively free of society's caustic influence. To really free myself I'd have to learn how to be (to act as if I am) other people, to allow my emotions free reign, to adopt the roles of others (empathy?), so that I can learn to express myself through a wide range of emotions--in other words, to be an actor. But I don't want to do this, because it's a frightening proposition. (My performance, as it is, is restricted. I do readings, when I could be a performance artist with broadened horizons.)
Being tied to a schedule is the ultimate restriction. But making a schedule and then not following it is a form of freedom. Deciding on goals and attempting to complete them by applying yourself in a dedicated manner to a scheduled, socially networked life is not freedom; you think you are buying freedom through your dedicated actions, and maybe, ultimately, you will come to a sort of freedom, with the money and social level you achieve, but when you get to a point where you can have the freedom, you will probably be so trained to "act" in the way you have been acting to get there that you will have a hard time extracting yourself from the lifestyle. You won't want to extract yourself, because this is the way you had to learn to be to get to where you have gotten. Believe me, I know. I still struggle daily with the desire to organize my life along production lines and time management responsibility, despite the fact that I have been out of that environment for over five years now.
I don't, really, mind being the way I am, not going out after what I think, sometimes, I might want, because I don't see, ultimately, that there is any real advantage in pursuing a lot of things of the world (where their accumulation, rather than gaining you a sense of freedom, only seems to tied you up in it all the more, possessions being a form of entrapment; you can only use so much money, and then going after more is a method of creating limitations--not that I am anywhere near that point yet), and I see only a slight advantage in re-establishing a "feeling" nature (which I lost when I was a kid and which could be regained from acting training; there is a sense in which a feeling nature is no better than an analytical one, that each is adaptable to a different set of circumstances, that the current fad of feeling, precipitated by the politically correct mode of women's nature, is as limited a mode of existence as is the macho man's. Of course, the real freedom is to have access to both, when each is appropriate, and this is where acting training can be of benefit.)
Actually, I do have a feeling nature, and it even gets expressed very occasionally in social situations. I am not all that trapped as I try to convince myself I am. I'm trapped in practicum, but not so much in potential, a potential that is more easily accessible than I will think: when I will think about it, preferring to assume that I am far more limited than I really am, because I choose to stay mostly away from social situations; when I don't respond in society, out of an automatic instinctual reaction to the fact that there is an agenda waiting for me to respond to, that the social world is a quagmire of agendas and I avoid them by automatically closing off to their appeal to open me up so they can suck the soft inner matter out of me, suck me in, suck me up into their games; when I find a genuine appeal, without strings, without a manipulative agenda, either intentional ("business" / money / possessions-oriented) or unconscious (pathological / games / "bear-my-burdens-for-me"); then I allow myself to respond. This response is usually only short-lived because it most always occurs in passing, because if you (or I) get to know someone better than casually, we tie into their hidden agendas, as friends and acquaintances, and they start to rope us in, so that we have to work to remain detached, and when we do, we tend to close off toward them, so that they cannot pull our strings and push our buttons too easily. I don't like to have my buttons pushed.

I admit I push people's buttons too. I'm good at it. I do it non-verbally.
The art of conversation: why should I bother? If you can't entertain me
and maintain my attention, then you're the one with the problem (if you
want to think that it's so important to engage in social conversation) not
me. I prefer, am predisposed to, quietude; unspoken messages; psychic
material exchanged at the level of body language; intuitive perceptions.

I want to manipulate other people's feelings as much as they want to manipulate mine--well, maybe not as much, maybe not nearly as much; but I do want to do it; I want their attention, I want to be able to reach inside of them and tweak their feelings. (I just don't want to do it verbally so much).
I can inflict a significant amount of hurt, when I am in a certain frame of mind, when they discover I will not respond to their responses except under the most exacting of circumstances, despite the fact that I have initiated the psychic encounter, albeit in so indirect a way so as to pretend even to myself that I did not really do it, or mean to do it, leaving them alone to deal with the feelings I evoke in them.
As much as I fear others "influence," so do they feel mine. But, I don't feel others' hurtful influence, not so much, and not so much any more as I used to. I refuse to feel it now. I have become strong in that regard; I have transcended my weakness. (Actually, I have always been strong, going way back to childhood--strong and weak both, i.e., sensitive and yet resistant; but isn't that always the way it is? When you isolate one trait as a defining factor of who it is you are, you repress its opposite, thus giving it a proportionate hidden power over you. When I am weak, deep inside I am strong; and when I am strong, deep inside...) I retreat because I fear their influence, but I do not feel the hurt they cause (so much, any more.)
So maybe I no longer have to retreat? Maybe I can stand and face them and negate their hurt, which I may internalize only to the degree necessary to empathize and understand, and let it go at that? Maybe I don't have to make their trials fully my own any more? Maybe I don't have to take on their psychic problems so fully, so that they may be relieved by projecting that it is I and not they who are afflicted?
I'd be nice to think these things could be so. Maybe I can act like a psychoanalyst in this regard: that I can empathize, but give it back to them in an interpretation, and if they do not want to hear it, okay, fine. I give it back to them in writing, and be done with it, and they do not even have to see it, the written word. I do not have to become their pathologies; I do not have to be the sin-eater. Fuck all that.
Previously, at my weakest point (beyond my childhood), when I became the strongest, i.e., when I resisted detrimental influence the most, the cause of the weakness was stress: I resisted so well that I placed a great burden on my physical systems. By the time the period of trial was over, I was so depleted that it took me several years to recover. I have never recovered fully (but maybe that is a self-fulfilling prophecy; or maybe I have recovered fully at that. And if not, maybe I should define it thusly anyway, like I define success and so become successful. I became successful because I learned how to make the connections. But now that they're made, they are unmakable. It's my childhood weakness returned to haunt me. I know I am in touch with people in a way they seem not to understand. When you understand this, you define success.)


Something in the north wall of the dining room is broadcasting signals to the police station, and they can hear "us" talking. A guy comes to the house to tell me this. He explains that they have to get to it, because we are incriminating ourselves. But there's no one here but me, nor has there been anyone here for a very long time, so I wonder who the "we" are who are being incriminated. In the past, apparently, we have incriminated ourselves. First, we move the bookcases out and take the backs off of them, thinking the "bugs" may be in them; I tell the guy that we bought the bookcases at a house sale. Next we tear the flimsy wallboard out, but we don't find anything. Through a hole in the floor I see a fire in the basement, in an old furnace. I tell the guy to call the fire dept. and we rush downstairs. I yell at the guy, asking him if he called the fire department, and he says no. I get angry and yell at him to go and do it. He does. I drag the burning stuff, old wooden crates and other junk, away from the other stuff, so that the fire doesn't spread; but the furnace is burning too, and I can't drag it. It's not attached to anything, but it's too heavy. It's an old furnace, not functioning. I try to put the fires out. On the phone, the police dispatcher says that the fire dept can't come, there're no trucks available. ( I am the one on the phone now.) I scream at them that they better send someone. Finally two guys arrive in an old beat-up car, but they really can't do anything, and I have to scream at them too, to insist that they do their job. This is the same righteous indignation that I used on both the cop (the plainclothes guy who helped me tear out the wall) and the operator at the police station.
We later determine that the signal is not being broadcast from inside the wall, but the wall, the space between the wall and the metal of the trailer itself, is re-broadcasting it from somewhere else, like an antenna.
Re-broadcast signals are as incriminating as those that originate from our own homes. Just because you echo the opinions of others doesn't absolve you from the consequences of the beliefs.


Superiority

Crows feel superior.
It's only natural.
All birds do. They fly
and perch up high in trees.

In shade, I meditate
hot late afternoon
a crow caws above me
as I begin feeling

freedom, heart opening
jumped at its shrill call
brief anger interrupts
closing me up again.

I am so docile now
unrebelling, my past
frightened by the power
I will not now challenge

authority of crows
even. High in the trees
they look down not knowing
other ways of being.

You are wrong when you think
I cannot feel the love.
I feel the soft wind blow
on a hot afternoon.


Sexuality and the Search for the Human Soul

"...the example of an analyst who tended to fall in love with young and attractive female patients. His...analysis revealed that he was not really interested in these women; rather, he wanted to identify with them and thus be made love to by the analyst...a gratification of homosexual transference fantasies."
Slaker, p.23

I identify with women, seeing myself in their place, wanting to be made love to by myself: thusly I live out my narcissism by loving women and thereby convincing them to love me; but this is what all love that we desire, to be returned, is: transference of that love we felt when we were loving what we initially thought to be a more or less detached aspect of ourselves, but which became, over time, as we persisted in our search for love, an other-object that we re-internalized, but in a less than global manner, split off, as an object we readily project onto anyone who vaguely resembles the original object we tried to satisfy ourselves with when our own selves were not enough to satisfy our love in the face of an "objective" external world we would rather have been without.
I am not really interested in most women to whom I am physically attracted. Most of them, when I get to know them, have personalities that turn me off in one way or another. I fall in love with the possibility that they could love me (verification that I am lovable)---and they will love me, usually, if I will turn my attention to them (for the same reason on their part.) This is a "gratification of homosexual fantasies?" Maybe, but I don't see it. I loved my father sexually and repressed it, and so now I seek that love in women? Why not, instead, I loved my mother? That seems more likely. I search for the love of others whom I will later reject, when they respond---or I will not outright reject them, but stand-off, physically (i.e., sexually), from them until they prove their love to me (by remaining faithful in the face of my distance, a ploy which they never fall for, for too long. Thusly I am stuck in a transference repetition, remaining distant from my mother until she proves to me that she will love me, physically (which she will not.) Therefore, as a recourse, a solution, a compromise [a compromise formation?], I pursue an ideal of love without an object, or an object without overt feedback [distant love; unrequited love, but as a positive experience; devotion to the ideal of love, knowing it when either the other doesn't (she being in love unconsciously, i.e., she has experienced the input w/o consciously attending to it, and it works beneath the surface, feeding itself back to me w/o her knowing it as it works dissonantly on her unconscious mind; or not knowing of it in any way at all)]" as a means of becoming unstuck, because if I can transcend the physical desire, or at least the interpersonal acting out of it, I can love without requiring a response of verification, that love returned will not define my specific identity, that I am lovable. If I am able to transcend the need to be loved, if I can love w/o a need for its return, I can regain the global perception of wholeness that I lost when I began to search out self-objects [ala Kohut] to love, when it is only through objectless love that the global perception is (re)achieved, that felt connection between all things. [I wish I never had to have left it; this world is not to my liking, if I must be split apart to appreciate it. But that is the nature of human consciousness.]
Okay. Here's a possible interpretation, arrived at logically, or associatively (i.e., not felt; but that doesn't reduce its possible validity), re the homosexual fantasy thing: I loved my mother, but she would not physically allow it; but she would allow my father to physically love her (obviously, because I exist); thus, I turned my attention to him? It seems thin. I can see how I would turn my enmity toward him in this case. This is the ordinary oedipal complex. But I do not challenge other men when they will compete with me for a woman. I feel (yes, really feel, this time) that if a woman will choose another man over me, that's it. She's made her choice. I will not play her instinctual LYHF game. This is not "normal" (instinctual) of me. And I've "always" been this way. (It goes way back, as far as I remember.) This may be the source of why I shy away from people, men and women: they choose others "over" me. They don't really; they choose others in addition to me; but I make it into an all-or-nothing "affair." If they will not be completely loyal to me and put me above all others (Leo), I reject them "too," before they find the oportunity to reject me. I reject them first. The exclusive nature I want of the relationship is indicative of a sexual orientation. And jealousy is instinctually sexual. So maybe I am instinctual after all, but at a more basic (less advanced) level. Sexual games are highly evolved and operate at a sophisticated level, whereas I seem to want to operate at a base level, somewhere pre-sexually, at a level where devotion to the entire physical being of another (as an object of transference) is total (i.e., global; I want the other to be myself. This is beyond homosexual, beyond narcissism even. This is autosexual, a physical love of oneself, through others, engaging in sexual activity in order to affirm your own love of self. If it is homosexual, it is in the sense that I am a male, and to love myself is homosexual. To the extent that other males are representative of myself, to the degree that I can project myself onto them, I am attracted to them, not as aspects of my father, but as aspects of myself, my original self, before I was required, by the forces of evolution and society that compelled me to take the outside world into account, to differentiate myself into components of male and female. [It occurs to me that autism may be the failure to develop in the face of these evolutionary and social forces because the infant does not want to be removed from the grace of global perception. I might have gone that far, it seems to me, if only I knew, if only I could have apperceived that such a thing was possible. So maybe infants who are consciously gifted very early on are more likely to become autistic because they can control the degree to which they chose to ignore developmental forces? That's a pretty big stretch.] Thus homosexuality can never be an ideal relationship any more than heterosexuality can, because neither represents the global situation to which I desire to return. And neither does bi-sexuality, not only because it must be executed with different people to be (in gender) complete, but because it splits in two that which I want to be one whole thing.


* * *

People come into my life as if by accident. Maybe there is some kind of a cosmic direction to it, a fate, but I don't see it. I simply encounter people, some of whom remain in my life, not so much lately, but that's the way it works, when it works. And when it's time for them to leave, they leave, which is more fated perhaps, but if so, only by my own projected pathology.
And I tend to disregard them when they leave. They've been meant (by me?) to be with me only for so long, apparently. Who am I to fight the forces of fate, or of my personality?


Making A Connection

"Do you mind that I come over here to talk to you?"
"No. Not at all."
"I thought you might want to be alone."
"Alone. Together. It's all the same thing."

* * * * *

"I'm not very smart."
"Do you want to be smart?"
"Yeah. Of course. Why wouldn't I?"
"Because you sound like you're proud of not being smart."
"No! I wish I was."
"Then you can be. It's easy."
"How?"
"I can make you smart."
"How?"
"I'm a magician."
"Yeah. Right."
"I am."
"You'd have to be, to make me smart"
"See? Right there. That's how you make yourself not smart."
"How?"
"You define yourself as dumb."
"I am dumb. I barely got through high school."
"Well, listen to this. This is magic. Listen. I can magically change the basic nature of anything. Listen. I can drive my car down the street...and turn it into...a gas station."
[Laughs.] "That's funny."
"That's smart."
"I don't understand."
"You change the basic nature of things with words. You redefine them."
"So how is that going to make me smart?"
"You're dumb because people think your dumb, but more importantly, because you think you're dumb."
"I am dumb."
"No you're not. You're not anything until people decide what it is you are. If we can convince people that you're smart, then it doesn't matter what you really are, because you'll change. You become who people think you are. It takes a very strong-minded, together person to hold out against the opinions of others and define themselves entirely by themselves."
"So how're you gonna make me smart?"
"We'll go to a party or something sometime where a lot of your friends are, and I'll tell them when they think you're not listening, that you're really smart."
"They won't believe it. Everyone knows me."
"Yes they will. They believe it because they don't know me."
"Huh?"
"They'll think I'm smart. I know how to make them think that. And then if I tell them you're smart, they'll believe me."
"No they won't."
"Yes. They will, because I'll point out the difference between dumb and uneducated. I'll tell them you're really smart, but everyone thinks you're dumb because you're uneducated. I'll tell them you're one of the smartest uneducated people I've ever met. I'll tell them that I wouldn't be bothered with you if I didn't believe that. They'll believe that, because I know how to make them believe that I don't usually bother with people."
"Will that work?"
"Of course it will--as long as you don't tell anyone what we're doing. If you tell anyone, then they'll see what's happening and prevent it."
"I can't ever tell anyone?"
"Maybe in a couple of years. After a few years, after people come to accept you as smart, then it won't matter, because you will be smart."
"I don't know..."
"Do you think I'm smart?"
"Yeah. Are you kidding?"
"Well, how do you think I got smart?"
"That's the way you did it?"
"Sure. That's the way everyone does it. I just had the advantage of doing it from the time I was a little kid."
"Oh. Yeah. But I'm not a little kid."
"So it'll just take a bit more effort, that's all."
"I don't know..."
"If I'm smart, would I tell you to do a dumb thing?"
"I guess not."
"It's just like driving my car down the street. I'm going to take you to party and turn you into a smart person."
[Laughs.] "I thought you were going to say you'll turn me into a gas station."
* * *

Some people are driven crazy when they are left alone.
Others, fewer, experience similar circumstances among people.
Sanity, or simple mental health, requires a balanced view:
in either set of conditions, whether you are alone or not.
It should not matter; acceptance is a criterion for health.

I'm the only person who has experienced what I have experienced.
When I'm gone, no one else will know this experience, except in a very obscure and piecemeal way via my writing.
When I'm gone, it's likely that no one will mourn me--maybe my brother and sister (if they survive me) and maybe my nephews (although I don't know why they should: if I die while they are still young, they will accept my death in stride, as all young people eventually do; but if I die when they are older, will they even know me; or will we lose touch? It's likely they will go their separate ways.
Does this disturb me, that it's possible that there will be no one left who knows me when I die? (And do they even know me now? Not really.) Not really. Maybe, it's a better thing that I become unknown. I can't put into words yet exactly why this is, it's a feeling I have yet to come to terms with: I am separate; I know that I am not, yet this is how I feel, physically. I am meant to be [by "meant" I mean, I mean it; I do not mean I have a destiny independent of my own volition] alone, so that I may better understand the experience of togetherness. This strategy is working in my life; but it has not yet worked, fully. I am more alone, so that I may be more together, both within myself, as I have the time to develop my psychology and to reveal it, to myself, to see how it is I am, and with others, eventually, maybe, but certainly in the present, when I see that we are not alone, ever, no matter how much we try, or need to, stay away. We are as much together as we are apart, and the more we try to be one way, the more we are, as usual, the other.


Why do I hide away, physically and psychologically? Because I don't want people to know who I am. Things that I have done, some things that I continue to do, which are indicative of the person that I am, the character that I have, if they be known, cause me to be judged, which is not so bad maybe, except that others' judgments can have consequences, can limit me in my pursuit of life, and can cause others to make hurtful comments to me, or worse, to keep them to themselves, so that they think that I don't know. This is the real reason I hide myself away: I don't want to be hurt. And then, when it's revealed to me the hurtful things they keep from me, if I have not verified them via social intercourse, whether they be actual or not, I can attribute them to a natural paranoia, if not consciously, then certainly unconsciously, and go on with being who I am, ostensibly alone.
Hiding away tends toward an all-or-nothing situation. I can't reveal myself a little bit. The more they know, the more they will know, as they put two and two together. I know they can do this, because I can do this, of them--and I do, frequently. We know much more of others than we ever let on; we allow others to pretend to the delusions they would have us believe of them, secretly retaining a reality of definition. So who is it who is hiding away, when others will blame me for being secretive and unsocial while they hide from me their opinions as to who I am, thinking I do not know them? Who is it who is huddled up inside, and who is out socializing? They hide their awareness of me from me, and in denial blame me for hiding my awareness of them. They would have me out for them to examine, so that they could pretend not to see me, all the while talking about me behind my back, categorizing me for their gossip machine. By hiding away from it, you can only slow the accuracy of this machine down, you can't stop it. They will get it wrong, over-and-over again, mis-categorizing you, further harming you socially, until eventually they hit upon the truth and get it right. (This can be for the good or for the bad; the machine is amoral.)
If I reveal myself a lot, i.e., if I go out and exist among them, talking freely with them, allowing my thoughts and feelings free expression, they cannot accept me, because I reveal ways that they secretly are, ways they do not want to admit to, even in some cases to themselves. So I become the object of their (secret) scorn, the scapegoat for that which they hide away.
So I stonewall them, as much as possible, I resist, in order to minimize the damage, in order to retard its progress, to keep myself on a slower path to destruction in the cogs of their machine, or at least, to allow their machine to work on the incorrect facts that they conjure up from their own unconscious depths, so that if there is ever a future situation which they create which I must publicly refute, I may do so logically from a position in which they are wrong. (Never mind the damage that may be done by my failure to act upon the rumors they spread that I know nothing of. This is inevitable, in either case, and less inevitable if I am hidden away, because I already suffer, by my isolation. Any further damage is unlikely.)
Possible solution: reveal the terrible things that you have done, with the message of how you have been changed, by the experience and its impact upon you, so that the activity is revealed without defining you, because the definition lies in the changed you, and not in the former characteristic behavior. This is what is meant by redemption.


Add It All Up

I saw a program, I think it was Nightline, where they made the claim that America was a society afflicted with ADD. Of course. How obvious.
Why haven't I noticed this before? I've been assuming it had become my problem, that I'd somehow contracted the illness, being overly stressed.
Information overload has distracted our attentions to the point of... distraction. Huh? Excuse me. My mind's wandering. Too many things to do.
We want to do too many things, we want to do everything, we speak in sentences connected by commas instead of periods, we jump from one thing
to another without transition, we work at this and that and take breaks only to do other things instead, we're never satisfied with what we're doing,
there's always something else, something more important to be done, did I already say that? No. I don't think so. Life's too short, to be, distracted
from it by everything we want to do. Doing is not being. Creating is not being, a creator, if everything you create motivates the dissatisfaction that
you're not creating even more. I'm afflicted with a social disease: ADD. We can't be anything, the society is not, what we want, whenever, to not be.
I need to slow down. I have slowed down, but my brain won't let me, be. I have to keep thinking, I don't meditate, any more. I'm forgetting, what
's important, I'm expressing, myself, too much, too many, times a day, I have never been this productive, the sun's burning into my brain fibers.
Do brains have fibers? Where am I going with all this expression? It accumulates faster than I can process it into art. Is art necessary any more?
I'm going to blow a fuse if I don't slow my brain down. Why? I've never blown a fuse before. I've blown body circuitry, but never the major
connection. I need to reconnect, with the source, of my inspiration, pure satisfaction, at being, alive. This is a necessity, if I am going to survive.

a meaning of weakness a weakness of meaning a weaning of meekness a meekness of weaning a meaning of meekness a weaning of weakness a meaning of weaning a weaning of meaning a weakness of meekness a meekness of weakness a meaning of meaning a weaning of weaning a weakness of weakness a meekness of meekness a  weakness of weaning a meekness of meaning a meaning of meaning


a report of the ad hoc committee appointed
to investigate an occurrence on 8-9-1946

And the third angel sounded, and there fell a great star from heaven, burning as it were a lamp, and it fell upon the third part of the rivers, and upon the fountains of water;
And the name of the star is called Wormwood: and the third part of the waters became wormwood; and many men died of the waters, because they were made bitter.
Rev. 8:10-11

Your lips get thinner as you age. Full lips are a sign of youth.
[Thus, she wants collagen injections.]
Women wear lipstick in order to mimic the blood-engorged lips (and labia) of sexual arousal, thus making themselves "attractive."
[She ridicules this idea. She thinks it's silly.
"What makes you so goddam right?" she said.
"I don't know." I answered.
I tell her I concluded this on my own, through my own intuition and ratiocination, over twenty years ago, but I saw it explained on the Discovery Channel only just last week.]
Intelligence is verified by independent sources.
Chatting and gossiping is the human equivalent of grooming.
Wild chimps hang out in teenage gangs, roaming and wilding.
"There is no up and down in space." (Miles O'Brien, CNN News)
South America has been discriminated against by geographers who believe that north is up.
["Settle down," she said, "and get to work. How do you expect to get anything done if you keep jumping up to go and do things?"]
Michael Palin reports in his PBS program "Around the World in Eighty Days" that the Russian word for wormwood is Chernobyl.

["If you did it once, you'll do it again."
"Don't you think people can learn their lesson?"
"Well. Maybe. But not usually. Generally, lessons are for kids."]
We hope this isn't true. We could be wasting my time.
All of our therapy is based on the opposite contention.

"You build it up, and nature tears it down," he said.
He called his new play, "Youth and Age," a play on the word euthanasia. A PBS show about plays (we didn't get the name) reports that the theater is dying because film and television has usurped the audiences and there are no good playwrights any more. We believe them to be wrong. We think they are not looking in the right places. There are plenty of excellent playwrights writing radical new work. The problem is, they don't appeal to the standard whitebread audiences. These are the modern Sean O'Casey's, reporting on those aspects of our culture that the fat cats don't want to hear about.

They wanted to pay him for what he could do for them;
and he wanted to be paid for what he does.

When is society going to outlaw the death penalty?
Rational, sane onlookers negate every natural solution.

He feels that most people have no room to criticize him for how much he does (or does not do), or for how much he may be wasting his life. They waste themselves. For example, people who smoke cigarettes, people who drink, people who harbor negative agendas [such as M with her braggadocial gesturing and posturing--this is a very minor example, not so negative (but she smokes too), and anyway, he doesn't know that she criticizes him], people who are dependent, or co-dependent, men who are macho, betraying basic disguised insecurity and fearfulness. The list goes on and on. They waste their most precious resource, their own selves.
This is what life does.
It wastes itself in the pursuit of something better.
You have to waste yourself according to proper social definitions.
Otherwise, you are considered to be an outcast who is valueless.

His name is Norman Klusic and this is his horror story. While spending a romantic weekend with his girlfriend at a Holiday Inn in 1994, DEA agents attempted to arrest a man who was staying in the room next to them. Norm and his girlfriend were exiting their room when the man opened his door, firing an automatic pistol wildly into the hallway. Agents scattered while returning fire. He dove to the floor and crouched against the wall. The agents shot the man, and the firing stopped. Several agents were hit, all of them taking the bullets in the bulletproof vests they wore. He lay on the floor of the hallway against the wall, stunned from having hit his head against it. When he came to his senses, he was amazed to find that he had not been hit. Then he saw his girlfriend lying in a pool of blood. At the hospital, some of the agents told him they were sorry. The investigation proved that it was not their bullets, but the gunman's, that killed her. He thought it was his own fault, because he had ducked out of the way instead of acting to protect her. It was an instinct. He used to think that instincts were a good thing. Now, he knows better. The week before she died, she'd said to him:
"This place looks terrible. Why don't you cut the grass and hedges and clean this place up a little."
"Who are you? The yard police?" he'd said.
He used to think that sarcasm was a fine form of expression.
Now, he is not so sure. You never know what will happen.
Life takes turns, and now he thinks his turn may be over.

His latest work, based upon the perceptions he's developed from incidents like these is entitled The Feces of Species, an anthropological study of coprolitical prehistory. It's a serious study that is only a loose metaphor for the evils he believes to have interpreted his life.

Soldiers don't realize it until after they have crossed "the thin red line."
The French Foreign Legion was built upon this lack of understanding,
when a man dies to himself before his allotted time on this earth is up.
A prospect of new identity, freedom from past sins, entices miscreants
to want to join an organization that will keep them from former selves.
Once incorporated, their lives anew is an eternal moment, fear of death
inconsequential, reprieve received, a chance to live freely once again,
present selves intermingled, permanent connections established.

I have been there, but on my own. No organization could ever hold me.
And I have stepped willingly back and forth across that line, undecided,
conscious the whole time of what I was doing, because my past is a sin
only I know. No mind-cop is waiting for me to show my face in public.
No one will arrest me if I dare to re-appear. I am on my own, because
I want it that way, to be, free of a restraint of social bonds, but hesitant,
not quite yet committed, a lot yet to be done, before I am decided dead.

One day, he's going to die.
He thinks about these things as he gets older.

I could die tomorrow. In light of this fact, how can I continue to worry about what people think of me? How can I feel that I do not want to publish certain writings, when they are exactly what I believe and want to say? Life is short. It doesn't matter what I do. What matters is what I do not do. I'd rather have acted wrongly than not to have acted at all. I have acted wrongly, a lot. And everything thus far has turned out very right--because I have acted correctly more than I have acted wrongly. On balance, I have done more than enough of the right things. Onward.



no more to follow
altho i will probably intersperse additions


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