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Long Term Temporary


by j jackson


My career suffered a long-term temporary setback last October when my blue story "Scarlet" was erroneously accepted for publication. The setback was not the belated rejection, but my response to it. I took it too personally (as I usually do; I do not handle rejection well). It seems like such a long, long time ago, but it's only been three months.
Some slights take longer to get over than others, not because they are so terrible in and of themselves, but because we react to them so badly. For example, the loss of my last job took me several years to recuperate from, because I had been treated so badly while I refused to see the subtle nature of the abuse and thus ended up blaming myself for far more than I deserved, and because I had unwittingly allowed myself to fall into the same abusive pattern myself (thus actually deserving some of the blame that management projected onto me), adopting the policies and attitudes of the organization, trying to be a perfect employee, when we all know there is no such animal.
I almost killed myself that time in my inordinate propensity toward exhaustive compliance and letter-perfect task-completion, driving myself into a pattern of heart problems and depleted cortisol reserves. I should know better by this time in my life. At least, working for myself, when I run into a wall, I retreat.
Fortunately, being as dedicated in spirit and intent, but always falling short on personal performance when there is no one but myself to evaluate me, when there is no implied threat, when the onus of responsibility is not based upon the authoritarian imperative of do-it-or-else, I am not so demanding of myself as taskmasters who own companies are on their employees. I am always as demanding in theory, being a well-conditioned hard-core performer, but I am always too short on practical application when it comes to just me who has to do the actual work.
You might think that this is a less than ideal situation if you are of the normal work-ethic variety of person, but actually, this is a good thing: it saves my mental and physical health, to be able to retreat into sedate demeanor and fantastic reverie for several weeks or months at a time. Some people call this depression, but I call it sanity. I never feel depressed, I always feel, at these times, most complete, most whole--and anyway, to be labeled insane by an insane society is sanity by definition, the product of two negatives being a positive.
Anyway, I'm back, ready in the new year to begin again. I'm reestblishing my goals (not that I ever pursue them so vigorously any more), but goals are goals, and whether you pursue them in a dedicated manner or not, once established, goals become expectations, which tend to happen via self-fulfilling prophecy. Or, in other words, it doesn't hurt to ask fro what you want.

Nothing's too big to ask for, as long as you can handle rejection. Usually, I can't. This is why I've developed a waiting approach to life. My karmic theory is just a rationalization. What I fear is rejection. I seem to be too sensitive in this regard to wander too far out into asking for what I want. Life is easier while waiting, feeling it will eventually come to me, fantasizing the rest of life away. Everything comes to him (and her) who waits. Or not, and it doesn't matter, having meanwhile lived life anyway. That's the wonder of life. It goes on until it ends, despite the circumstances. And maybe then some...

If there is no life after death, then the only thing I have going for me is what I leave behind, my work, and what I do that affects people, and how people remember me. All the rest is transitory, including the memory of others, although that is longer term. Being a secluded person, I affect people most through what I write. The books I write represent the most consensual evidence of my work, but the websites have the potential to be the most indicative of my real self. And, after all, that is what is most important when you think about what it is you leave behind. The self is, being, nothing more. The residue of self is what is (more) permanent. Personal contact, probably, is most profound. I've always considered this to be most temporary, but I think I may have been wrong. In terms of my personal self, contact is temporary, not much more than moments passing into memory, but in terms of others, of society, it may be the most permanent thing I can do. Being remembered, even from books, is less important than having affected people who, because they were affected, affect others, who... I used to be so good at this, affecting others, even positively, but certainly in an agitating manner, to make them see, and I didn't even know what I was doing, I just did it automatically. What happened? I woke up, saw the profundity, and got scared. I need to work on this lost aspect of my life--some day, soon.

Affecting people's lives is not always so much fun. Sometimes, you see in retrospect how you've done this, and you appreciate the insight. But other times, you see how you might have made mistakes and caused some pain, even pain that was not growth related. It's difficult to avoid affecting people negatively when you interact with them daily and begin to think you know them (when you really don't; it's hard to really understand what really going on inside, where the delicate areas are). It's better to try to be agreeable and tacitly benign, even distant.

I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.
 
Jane Austen
Agreeing too much with people is a dangerous practice. An age-old psychological ploy can develop out of it: people will complain, about someone, and when you agree with them, overtly or tacitly, just trying to be pleasant, they go to the person they complained to you about, tell them what you said, when it wasn't what you said at all, it was what they said, for which they elicited your agreement. In this way, they get to complain about people to their faces, expressing their true feelings without consequences by attributing them to you, in fact, being appreciated for having brought your feelings/ criticism to their attention, that retaliation might occur, probably behind your back, so that you never know who your enemies are, because you never made them, they did. I have fallen victim to this ploy many times. It seems I never learn, except that I have become more quiet, less agreeable, never really knowing why I am this way, adopting an unconscious defense, thinking I am less sociable that others, because they, through their machinations, prey upon the agreeability of others, and thus they are, by definition, less sociable, as they pretend that they are not, while more agreeable people suffer.

I've been thinking about suffering lately, both the mental and physical kind.
Suffering, especially of the unnecessary variety, like sacrifice, is stupidity.
Mutual self-sacrifice is often a primary mechanism of personal or social interaction.
They call it compromise, a means whereby no one gets exactly what he or she wants.
We should all be smart enough to realize when relationships don't work.
But we're not. We go to great lengths to keep marginal relationships alive.
We do this mostly out of fear, that we might have to spend some time alone.
Alone with our thoughts, we often discover things we'd rather not know.
There are things about ourselves and others that can be downright devastating.
These insights come to us when we're left alone with our own thoughts.
I can empathize with people in difficult situations when I feel like I do now.
I often search for ways out of my body and my mind when I'm in pain.

Mortal Thoughts

Summertime, and the livin' is easy.
 
George Gershwin
I haven't been in this much pain in a long time.
I guess it's the combination of the abnormally low temperature and all of the extra physical labor, cutting and splitting all the logs for firewood.
It makes me nostalgic for former times. I've been spoiled by my relative good health over the past year.
I'd forgotten what it was like to be nearly incapacitated, to have to do twice-daily stretching exercises to remain flexible, to prevent muscles spasms pulling my vertebrae out of place, to entertain thoughts of mortality.
It's been a long winter and it's only just started.
After only four hours of sleep, wishing I could sleep again, I lie in bed awake, on my back, in a position where the pain is least, in meditation, because if I must lie this way, awake, I may as well get some benefit from it.
It's been a while since I entertained thoughts of meditation. I've been like people who pray only when they want something, otherwise remaining spiritually silent.
I've been on shaky ideological/theological ground lately, since I've all but decided there is no life after death. Maybe there is, but I don't see it.
If there is a spiritual dimension, I don't see how egoistic continuation in it after death logically, or even intuitively, follows.
I am here, now, to experience for the universe, for myself. This is the height of existence, to see, the face of now.
The insight comes after a difficult time adjusting, a mind whose wandering has become a habit, a body that remaining still pains.

This is the winter. In the summer, meditation is easy.

The pain medication is beginning to soak into my body like a warm summer day. I haven't had to take it for so long.
I feel it's a kind of personal failure to have to rely on it.
It feels so good to be almost pain-free, a feeling easy to ignore coming at it from the other direction.
Remaining small twinges twist like doubts in a self-confident attitude.
Winter is the inevitable failure, and spring is the hope, that there will be another summer.
I focus on the coming spring, which is so far away.

Focus, to obsession, is the only answer to a failing legacy. If there is more than one focus, it's not focus. It's foci.
If there is an afterlife, the ego, certainty, does not survive. Knowing no ego after death, the legacy is what I leave behind.
The legacy knows nothing, it is only known, remnants of an active mind dependent on another, code interpreted, resurrecting lost thought.
I am lost, in thought, as always. There is no hope that I should not be so also after death, even and especially if I would be egoistically alive.
The ego can be a pain, and death is the release from pain.
Or is it?
Egoless death would be release, but if we survive with our (mental) pain intact, what torture that must be. It's easy to see how the concept of hell could have been invented.
No. An afterworld, existing now, as an ideal spiritual nonspace where souls depart to, cannot be plagued with pathology, yet even a heaven would of necessity be so, since egos, by definition, are compromises. In a heaven there can be no compromises.
Therefore, there can be no heaven for us as we know ourselves via ego.
Only when we identify with that which is not us, can we know we will survive, but then, it is not "We" who are surviving, but "we."
And if no heaven, then only legacy.
I strive now to leave a legacy.
It may be all that's left of "me."
Pain interrupts me from this purpose.
Pains are hints of a pending death.
I quicken to heal, my purpose reaffirmed.
It is only in life that we survive.
Death is for those who are not alive.

My Legacy

Focus, to obsession, should be applied

only to one true point, the writing: a legacy.
But, as a practical matter, if this is done,
I fall behind, inevitably, so
I focus, to obsession on procedure, reasoning:
the legacy, if well-defined, will take care of itself;
using waiting theory as a fallback position, when
things go badly, I begin to become overwhelmed,
or I am put upon by forces beyond my control.
The procedure/schedule is a device not to be
taken too literally, a staging effort, to sort out
immediate/important priorities from idle fantasies
(which I use, waiting, to occupy my time,
staging them like screenplays to be written,
never writing then, but only fantasizing).
Meanwhile, schedules wane as time passes by,
which is okay, so long as I do not pass focus.
Always, I skip to what's important, writing,
leaving all the rest to fend for itself, to be
caught up, in marathon episodes when priorities
take over, having been set aside too long,
the schedule system abandoned in favor of
a straight and simple list of things to do, to be
done, so that I may get back to the control I feel of
the schedule system again: organizing thought(s)
that I may be efficiently freed, to attend to
what's really important, the writing legacy.

My legacy is often crystal clear in the middle of the night, when social interaction is non-existent, except in memory and fantasy.

It's the middle of a Friday night, early Saturday morning before dawn. I'm working at my desk. I hear noises out in the street, which I try to ignore. But eventually, curiosity gets the better of me, and I get up and walk to the window to see Steve, my neighbor from across the street, staggering down the road, leaving a trail of footprints in the newly-fallen snow. I wonder what's up, why he is out at four in the morning. I conclude that he's been drinking.
Then, as I'm about to turn away, I visually follow the trail he has left, which spans the road and circles around several times, back to his truck that sits in front of his house, and I see written across its black side, the word "FREEBIRD" painted in bright yellow paint. The paint drips off the truck into the thin layer of snow and onto the surface of the road. A can of paint sits, closed, beside the truck. I belatedly recognize the noise I'd heard as the pounding back on of the paint can lid.
Steve's favorite rock band is Lynyrd Skynyrd, a band I despise, and not only because of their lyrical criticism of Neil Young. I hate shit-kickers, and their music. I think that shit-kicking music is a waste of an otherwise valuable medium.
Like Steve's footprints in the snow, I begin my usual process of intuition (which ultimately is not much more than fantasy, as when psychics, for example, will precognate or telepathize).
I imagine that Steve is in the midst of some kind of a life crisis, mid-life perhaps. His wife is mad at him, maybe. She's trying to pressure him into becoming normal, to get a job in the winter when he, being a landscaper, has nothing else to do, to help to hedge against impoverishment, to catch up some of the delinquent bills. [I have no evidence that any of this is true. But I do know that he wants to think he's as free as a bird. That much is valid intuition. The rest of this is pure conjecture.]
Marcia asks if it's fair that Steve, who works as a landscaper, lies around all winter doing nothing. She has feelings of injustice that, since she has to go to work in the winter, braving the bitter cold and snow, she should have her car started for her in the morning, her breakfast made for her, her dinner ready when she returns home, and all of the necessary chores done.
Steve, who works twelve to fourteen hours a day from spring through autumn, reasons that he is justified in getting the winter off to do with as he pleases. His argument is logical, and fair. It would be unfair if they had agreed before their marriage as to how their time would be spent, what the terms of their work arrangements would be. They didn't. She entered the marriage with an assumption that he would be a "normal" person re how he apportioned his time to work and relaxation.

Is this situation "fair" to her?
It has nothing to do with fairness.
It has to do with feelings.
Fairness is a logical argument.

I have known women who would be willing to end their marriages under the right circumstances. I have known women who could be persuaded because, although they were content in their marriages, they entered into them as a compromise, hoping for at least some semblance of normality, before they got too old. This is common fantasy among women, caught up in the social game, to be married. It's a feeling women have. They feel that life may end up not having treated them fairly if they never will have met a man who wanted to marry them and they will have ended up as spinsters.

People often interject feeling into an analysis what is fair.
People often interject fantasy into an analysis of what is free.

I want to tell Steve there is no such thing as freedom. I imagine I will go out in the cold night and encounter him, to see what's up. But I don't like him when he's been drinking, not that he's dangerous. He's the opposite. He's too damn friendly. And he's friendly enough when he's sober. I avoid him and a lot of others besides when I understand that their overly approaching behavior is a game they play, to rope you in, in a way, to victimize you (to be fair, they don't know they do), to suck your vital energy from you like blood from your veins. He's roaming the night, like a vampire, unhappy because in this cold winter, he can find no prey.
At dawn, the paint on the truck, illuminated by the light of day instead of by the warm streetlight, looks tan. It's not the bright yellow that it appeared to be last night. More of the paint has dripped onto the road, which has been salted and is now clear and wet. The truck is streaked with runs of paint, the edges of the once well-formed letters fuzzied by the cold's cruel refusal to allow the paint to cure. As the day wears on, the paint begins to sheet off the truck. I wonder what his wife is going to say when she sees this mess.
[The day lingers on without incident, the bitter cold keeping everyone indoors. Two days later, Monday morning, the paint is gone, wiped away clean, the cold's retardation a blessing, allowing the correction of a fault.]

It's a strange time, these winter days.
Or maybe it's just me, and all else is normal.
People think I'm strange. I imagine.
I imagine my neighbors think I'm strange.
I imagine everyone, at one time or another, thinks I'm strange.
(Or maybe it's not really my imagination, but intuition.)

But at least I don't paint 'FREEBIRD' on the side of my truck at four in the morning in the freezing cold.

At four in the morning, everything makes sense. It's the middle of the social day when things become confused for me. At four in the morning, fantasy, imagination, psychic phenomena, empathy, transference are all the same thing, really, mental figments in a wide world of illusion. During the day, these elements are separable with a consensual logic that reduces life to ordinariness. In the middle of the night, the multiple varieties of phenomena become more equal. Science should mediate this daytime/night discrepancy, but it doesn't.

A scientific consensus is built very slowly over time, so that phenomena such as psychic experience will become "real" only if the scientific community (or the overriding culture which controls it) allows the process to occur. This is the way "reality" is created, in infinitesimal incremental steps, "scientifically." We come to believe it, and then we make it real. Psychic phenomena will never be real until we agree that it is, in the same way that atoms once were not real, nor electrons, nor quarks--because everything is real or not, at the same time, a la Schroedinger's cat, and it's up to us to choose which will be seen when we open the box of reality. The world, even the "physical" world of science, is a long-term temporary phenomenon.

I experience this consensus developing: we are "in touch" in ways we are in the process of defining. I know things, as yet incompletely defined. I know how (some) people feel, which psychologists call empathy and (some) psychiatrists call transference. Women, especially, are particularly vulnerable, being feeling creatures. I can better empathize with women than with men, most of whom want me to be macho with them in their standard lame defensive posture. But when I meet a woman, I see the definition in her eyes, who she thinks she is, we are, developing.
Sometimes, I am afraid to meet her, even to look at her when she's looking at me. In these weak moments, I fear, I will be enraptured, taken into her being, prompted by desire to act to move us toward our less than noble fate, which she will go along with, or precipitate. Long-term temporary situations may become established when I am thusly weakened, given in to the desire I feel, when she will feel it too and convince me that it is all right, that we do not always have to act so properly as to want to create an everlasting permanent situation. She thinks she's living from day to day, but doesn't understand she harbors hidden agendas of permanence, so that she may create, domesticity.

Integral to the experience I perceive of others, in whom I see myself, and them in me, is the realization that I make myself available, willingly and often unwittingly, to be used for their agendas, as well as my own unconscious ones. This makes me want to guard myself, when I would rather not have to. I control myself, against the world and its people, and against my own internal self. So that I do not feel I must control the world, I control myself.

Controlling the World
(Or My Own Self)

Again, as I renew my efforts on my website, that old question occurs: Who am I, for public consumption?1 I never have any problem being who I am, in private. I am who I am, I know who I am, I have no problems with who I am, I am quite comfortable being myself--except when I am in public.
How should I present myself, what persona should I present, why is this always a problem? It's a problem because I recognize (and before I recognized it, when I was young, I intuitively knew it and acted accordingly, albeit, in an unconscious, hidden, or/and "shy" way) that people can hurt you if they know your truth, you give them ammunition when you reveal who/what you really are. It's better to guard your inner self (especially the way I do it, more exhaustively than most others, even more consciously as time advances and I "learn" the "wisdom" of hiding myself away), but this conflicts with being an artist/writer, a profession that requires social consumption, if not outright approval, to flourish. I definitely hold myself back by holding myself back.
I experience an artistic need to be, both mysteriously hidden and revealed--conflicting desires. This is mirrored in my work, when I write a mix of fiction and autobiography, weaving myself into pastiche prose, disguising what I do not want to be known as me, but not so well, because it is my art as well, after all, to reveal myself--somewhat.
I propose a tentative solution, which I wonder about, if it is a solution at all, or just another schizoid attempt to compromise (as opposed to heal) the true artistic nature of my writing/self. (Art is a secondary life derivative, born out of a basic inner/outer split. People who relate directly to the world do not need, to express themselves in art, being directly expressive.):
As in other work (pastiches/novels), I can present myself on the website as a character, playing the role of a writer (when I am so much more). This solution is opposed to letting it all happen as it does, as the websites are constructed, spontaneously and intuitively, and (before or after posting) deleting items I (will) later come to regret.
Which alternative then? Another split. When this schizoid mode overtakes me, there is no solution. The mode itself is closer to the truth of what I am (we are) than any other (false) adoption: we are split, and only in rare moments of direct universal contact are we ever healed. It is our nature to be, both split and temporarily whole. And coming to a point of realization of this condition is, if not advancement, stasis at the highest level of former development. The only way out of this dilemma is to just do it, and regret it later, if you will, backtracking to fix the "problems" you created--or not.
This is not a real argument, it is an attempt by my unconscious to avoid working, a sidestep to prevent me from applying myself to the website task. But why? Why do I balk? For the same reason I don't send copies of my recent book to friends and relatives. Because I do not want to be revealed. And posting to the website is like publishing. It is publishing. It is true revelation. I can write all I want to, in journal after journal, but if no one ever reads it, it is revelation only to myself, which is valuable as self-insight, which is still true revelation, self-revelation, but I am not revealed to others. Unless I publish, I remain self-revealed, yet still hidden (which is sort of a solution, but not so satisfying).
Social revelation is effective because it creates conditions of feedback. You realize more completely who and what you are as others see the revealed you and feed it back to you. This works even if no one ever says a word to you. It works via body language, facial expressions, voice inflections. And even if you never make any kind of contact with anyone at all, it works via introjected critics, the superego, when you yourself take others' places in the microcosmic world within your brain and feed back to yourself the messages that other people say (when you intuit them) or those you say yourself, having learned from all of your past conditioning what they might have said, or what they might be saying, or what they will say, should they ever read what you have published--or your mind.
Resistance to publishing my work is my attempt to control the world. I am no better in this regard than... I am a literary Napoleon, or even Hitler. I want the world to be my way. I want my self-image to be what I want it to be, and not what others determine it to be. But I can't have this, because of that goddamned superego, a social part of myself I do not wish to have. Get the fuck out of my head, goddamn it. I hate society for this ability it has to inflict itself upon me. I hate authority for the same reason. Society/authority is the same thing. I want to be, the author, of my own self/the world.
But I am! I am not society, society is me. It determines me, whether I like it or not, whether I attempt to isolate myself from it or not. I cannot be, apart from my society. My perception of having been manipulated all my life is an illusion, a projection. I am the one who is attempting to manipulate, society. But "I" am not real. The person who is writing this is a fiction, society disguised as an individual human, expressing (one of many of) its viewpoints. I (society) control my output, and through feedback, reinvent myself, either in compliance with the messages, or in defiance of them, because I (society) cannot allow such a restricted view of myself as an individual writer/artist who is manipulated into doing what I want. I want to control myself (society) and I do, by revealing who it is I am, a rebellious writer who has never grown up to be, an "adult," because that would mean to be finalized, and I am not dead yet, and never will be, because when I die, I (society) will express itself through another writer/artist, choosing a rebel because there are so many ordinary, consensual, conventional, establishment writers I've already chosen, to be, who quite adequately express that, restricted, point of view, so many all saying the same old thing, that the message, my message, becomes quite clear: say something different, say something like, "I don't really exist, I am a figment of your collective imagination, I am, myself, who you are, but you don't know it, in control, of everything, the world, inner and outer, and all because I choose to write and publish while you do not, out of a fear, that you may be, controlled, by a society you hate, disagree with, because it harbors fugitives like me. This is my "solution": I am not me, I am you, and therefore, you cannot intimidate me, except by convincing me that I should not publish, which is what you (society) will have done, if I (society) will not do it. Thus, I have no choice. And so I post (some of) my (society's) work to my (society's) website. Society, then, in this sense, is permanent. And thus I have solved the long term temporary problem.
But that solution is only theoretical. In practice, the schizoid state continues on. I participate and I do not, both--at the same time. It becomes so confusing when you finally work yourself to a point where you realize that an entity exists beyond "yourself" which realizes that it's an essence that incorporates more than just one set of beliefs and the experiences that created them. People participate, and they don't, more or less, both ways. But we don't like fluid definitions of self. We want to be more fixed, and so we opt for more formalized, more highly defined, situations. (In other words, we create fictive selves.)
I've concluded, contrary to "common sense," that the less participatory that people are in society, the more truly social (as opposed to "sociable") they are, because they more often defer to others, allowing them their own expressions, realizing their psycho-social needs; whereas the more participatory people tend to be less social, because they tend to use society as a platform to stage the circumstances of their own ego gratification, influencing and manipulating others to that end, even sometimes to the point of a psychological definition of anti-social behavior, that it is a void of conscience. (The most anti-social people have the least conscience.) This is one of those cases of the label defining the opposite intent, the more "sociable" people being less social, and vice versa. You can watch these "sociable" people in action, flitting around, engaging others, expressing themselves, adopting phony stances ("strike a pose"), sucking up to people (to promote a favored cause or personal endeavor), sucking out others' energies, whatever. These vampires, caught up within themselves, are what we like to call gregarious. Watch the quiet ones instead. See how they observe, how they are tuned in to what is really going on (this is why they're quiet, because they tend to be overwhelmed with significant detail), how they pay attention, not only to the environmental reality, but to the people in it as well. These are the truly sociable people. They may seem so distant, but they are really far more integrated--because they pay much closer attention to what we are all doing, while the people we call "sociable" tend to act more blindly, basing their actions and opinions on the fictions we create, not seeing the psychic aspects of the society that surrounds and engulfs them.

I have been thoroughly engulfed by society and well aware of it. Most of us most of the time are not so aware, preferring the anonymity of the illusion of separation. I have been this way too. It's an off and on kind of thing. I've transitioned through my life in and out of more and less awareness--until a few years ago, when I finally decided that I'd had enough. I simply decided that I had enough problems of my own and I didn't need other people's problems also weighing me down. This has always been my psychology, I have always been this way, but mostly unconsciously, especially when I was younger. But all at once, seven years ago, it became a fully conscious matter. I had to completely withdraw, to negate my over-sensitivity to others' problems, especially when they tried to dump them onto me, via projection, which I always conveniently (for them) walk right into allowing them to do, blaming me for what they thought and felt and did. I had to get away, to deal with my own problems on my own, to try to separate out what was actually me from what was actually them. I had always done this, but now I wanted to know consciously what was really going on.
Since that time, through my isolation, I've discovered that we are, in fact, all one, a global organism. There is no separation; individuality is an illusion. Others' problems are my own, and mine are theirs. Whether alone or together, if I am aware, of them, I share their problems. I cannot isolate myself, in awareness, I can only do it by sinking back, into an unconscious mode, and I don't want to do that. It makes me think, I am, alone, to blame, when I blame them for what I do not feel. When they blame me, they blame themselves--and me, justifiably. When I blame them for blaming me, I blame myself. We blame each other; we don't see that the process is mutual. We cannot blame another without including ourselves in the process, blamer projecting blame, blamee rejecting in denial or complying in victimization, victimizing the victimizer in return, for being a blamer. The best that can be said is that we blame, without naming a victim, except that this tactic itself is self-indicting. We must give up blame and realize that we face our problems together.
This is all fine theory, and true, but if you think I'm ready to go back to letting you saddle me with your problems again, forget it. I'll listen now, but don't think I'm going to let you blame me for what is in your own mind. It may be in my mind too, but that's beside the point. If I don't choose to otherwise attend to it in myself, if I feel that, for whatever reason, I must successfully repress it, then why should I allow you to project onto me and cause it to be dredged back up? It may be good therapy, but too much therapy is almost as bad as not enough. I will determine the course of my own therapy. I will choose the time and place. I will not be victimized by overexposure to the content you think I am that we both, together, are, because then, in defense, I must victimize in return. And I do not want to be a vampire. (But how can I prevent it, when we are a race of vampires? It's my heritage, after all.) The only solution is to remain alone, and drink my own damn blood. (This too is an illusion, we are never alone, the more you stay alone, the more you recognize the subtle signals of togetherness, a seething psychism of influence operating beneath the illusory surface, until it begins to drive you crazy so that you suspect that you are suffering from schizoid-paranoid delusions--but if you can see this mechanism operating, you are not so deluded as you might think. Or, at least, I'm not.)

But everything is so much calmer now. It's a much saner world, contained within. I know I can reconstruct that other place, any time I want, by simply returning to the way I used to be. It had its benefits, despite its severe drawbacks. Stress creates conditions that awaken a reality that otherwise does not exist. Everyone living together intermixed in one whole desperate world is somehow conforting, despite the pain. I know I can have it back, any time I want. But I don't want, not so much, any more. It's nice, to be, not alone, ever, but feeling, as if, I am, a separate being, once again. But they are all gone now, and that's the sad part.

When They Are Gone

Where does my past go, when
I am, enraptured in present
re-identification, forgotten?

I too easily disregard the people from my past when they are no longer immediately available. Having been a part of me, they leave. I grow, in another direction, when they are apart. If they return, I disremember, how intimate we had been. Because intimacy is a presence which disintegrates, unless I take such conscious efforts to keep it alive while I am, continually distracted by the present, an intimacy I will naturally maintain with the ever-existing immediacy of my psychic environment impinging upon me like awareness on a sleeping soul, they dissolve. I awaken from dreams that remind me of all I have, repressed:
db is in the house, rearranging things again [¥], preparing to set up the disassembled waterbed in the old bedroom, which is now my studio. I tell her not to do anything without checking with me first, to make certain she is not going to upset my present lifestyle, and to my amazement, she agrees. She has never before cooperated with me in this way, in dreams, but to be fair, I have never before asked her to. (She always cooperated in real life, which might mean that she didn't want to, but did it anyway. Now that's cooperation.) Usually, she has already rearranged things before I realize what she has done. Is it me, then? What am I asking? Of course it is. She is here to remind me, I am forgetting, what she did when she was here, how she felt. She says, as we stand in the middle of the studio/bedroom, that she misses cuddling at night with me in the warmth of the waterbed. This is exactly what I am thinking at the moment she says it. Deja vu.
Paranormal experts say that deja vu is true evidence of reincarnation. However, many psychologists think otherwise, believing that deja vu is a process whereby the unconscious mind is stimulated to recall events that have previously occurred elsewhere but are now associated with the new location.
Parry Normal
Emazing 'fun and games' newsletter

[I've read this before somewhere, I think. But I don't buy it. It's been more generally explained that deja vu is the misrouting of an electrochemical trace in the brain. Okay, maybe that's a better--a not so (im-)precise--explanation. (If an explanation is wrong, then the more imprecise it is, the less wrong it is.)]
Dad is here too, or rather, he was here first, but he has since left. He was staying here for awhile, I remember. He'd come in early in the morning and after I had left for the day, he'd crawl into the bed and sleep, and sometimes he'd be still sleeping when I arrived back home, so I'd catch a nap, which I always did in the afternoon after coming home from working at a job that totally wore me out, on the couch instead of in the bed where I preferred to be, but I didn't mind, it was worth it, to have him here with me for awhile.
All out of sight (past), out of mind, except as messages seep through in an eternally-existing ethos of which I am only the most marginally aware, a contact I maintain, hardly knowing it, for what I know, the present here before my senses cuing me to attend to it, in nuance beyond apparent form, as people who think I do not notice/understand are as intimate with me as if they really understood themselves, that they are, every bit as close as those who are the past a/part, and will become the same when they are gone, evidenced only by the residue material and engrams that they leave behind.
I maintain a list of poignant items, so that I will not forget, when my attention is directed elsewhere (present) for so long:
  • a small baseball bat that db called her "crackerjack bat" (I never understood why, nor thought to ask) that she kept beside the bed and used to "protect" herself when I worked nights and she had to stay at home alone listening to noises outside, the origins of which she wasn't certain, fearing someone would break in.
  • a neck brace that she kept in a drawer for years after she was in a bus accident while going to college, subsequently refusing to sign a release with the self-insured bus company, demanding that they nevertheless pay for chiropractic treatment, which they did, because she stubbornly resisted.
  • a slinky that she brought from home when she moved in.
  • a miniature game travel kit that we took on camping trips containing a chess set, checkers, backgammon, cards, etc., all the elements of which were very tiny.
  • a brownie camera that she also brought from home that we never used.
  • a poorly made, but functional optic fiber light, homemade by one of her former high school friends who thought she was going to get rich by making and selling these things.
  • two plastic sharks, identical except for size, the smaller one (which we bought at a junk store because it looked exactly like the larger one that we won at an amusement park) fitting inside the larger one's open mouth.
  • small decorator soaps in a container on the back of the toilet, still there and covered with a thick layer of hardened plasmatic dust (and a clean, reserve supply stored away in boxes in drawers).

I used to reorganize and clean this stuff from time to time (there's a lot more of it than I've listed above), but I don't bother with it any more. I don't like doing things I must do over and over again, maintenance. This is a temporary situation, life, and such permanent structures as my house are long-term temporary. Why put all that labor into losing investments? To keep it sound, for sure. To keep temporarily secure. I maintain my belongings to the extent that I think they will serve my future needs, but just to that extent, just barely, and always at a deficit, always trying (not so hard) to catch up. And the stuff that is my past is that much farther removed, my priorities being focused on the short-term furture.

I used to have fantasies when I was younger and working too many hours too many days a week. I imagined that, if only I had the time, I would be able to clean and organize everything I owned. As it were, I tended (to want) to organize everything I encountered, applying my motive mostly to my work and returning home too mentally exhausted to do all but the most precursory household tasks.
But even earlier in my life, when I had more energy, I would come from work and continue on organizing. But that was when I worked at jobs that required far less of me (for far less money) and when I, being younger, had far more energy to begin with. The older we get, the less energy we have and the more we realize that we need to conserve it for the more important tasks, which more and more, at least for me, seem to be mental.
Fantasies are my favorite mental phenomena. Even when I was young and full of energy and organizing everything that came my way, fantasies took priority when the motive struck me. Even while organizing, I fantasized. But fantasies, like everything else, are only long-term temporary phenomena. They evolve into more mature activity, to be replaced by more mature imaginings (or else the fantasizer becomes rigidly pathological).
Through fantasy, I have had intimate experience of Anais Nin, Kathy Acker, the process of producing and directing major motion pictures, colonial times, present day conversations with Benjamin Franklin as we watch tv together and I explain the workings of the modern world, lesbian sex, me in high school under different circumstances more amenable to my personality than the real situation was, an orphaned kid who chooses a wayward woman as his mother and transforms their lives via shrewd monetary machinations so that they can establish a home together, any number of celebrities who happen to meet me and become impressed with whom and what I am, any number of strangers with whom the same dynamic works, playing in a rock band that went entirely my way because the other members wanted it that way without any necessity for insistence or manipulation on my part, and probably a lot more experiences that I cannot now bring to mind.
For me, fantasy is absolutely fantastic. But, ultimately, it's just another form of organizing, really--without the necessity of expending a lot of physical energy. I can be and know anyone I want to and accumulate knowledge and experience as I work out the intricate relationships and mechanisms of the world that I create as I order my thoughts into neat fantastic categories.

Order is important to me (although you probably wouldn't know it from the way I live. By 'order' I mean mental order; physical order used to be a lot more important than it is now, but physicality tends to get left behind as we age). I spend a lot of time ordering mental contents, or planning to do it, which is pretty much the same thing, really.
While I'm doing other things, life accumulates, as words, ideas, remnants of reality, until I settle down, to deal with it, as pastiches, composing the next summary, which is a temporary adaptation, a way I attempt to control the day-to-day wandering that I document in order to feel that I am in control. It only works for the moment, until a new batch of residue accumulates and I have to start all over again.

"There's no logic to any of this."
"Sure there is. It's internal logic."
"There's no such thing as internal logic."
"There is to me."
"Logic is an absolute."
"Not to me. To me everything is internal, like a dream."

I'm on a bus traveling between Monroeville and Universal Center, one of only two passengers, no driver even. The other passenger is Fairuza Balk. She's my girlfriend, and I am so pleased, so proud that she is. But halfway through the ride, as we pass through some country area on a state road (not real world) she tells me (she has become the driver) [get it? she takes control of the situation] that she no longer wants to be my girlfriend, that she has met another guy (he's there, for a very brief time before he disappears), that she is going to Mexico to meet and be with him. This doesn't upset me at all. I take it in stride and say okay, if that's the way it is. [This should upset me? Probably. But that's the way I am, or have been. When women announce that they are leaving me, I say, okay, whatever. I refuse to be upset, because it's just life, it's just love, and I am too cool to show emotion in this regard, or even to allow my own self to feel or even see it (too much). Obviously, though, this is simple repression. But it's interesting that in a dream, it still is repressed, as if my unconscious mind is saying "Hey. Look at this. This is what you do."] She says, though, that she wants me to remain with her as a friend, to accompany her to Mexico, to protect her until she gets where she is going, to meet the guy. I tell her okay, I will, but that night, after she is asleep in the bus, I sneak out and leave, abandoning her to her fate, because I have learned enough to know a head game when I see it, and I will no longer be sucked into that "friend" routine. {I abandon women entirely when they dump me, because if they can't deal with me as a whole person (which means sexually as well as psychologically/spiritually intimately (which none of them seem capable of), then they can't deal with me at all (like a kid taking his football and going home), which indicates that I really do care, so much that I must repress it, to avoid terrible pathetic or angry scenes. I don't adopt this attitude with women I meet who never get to those intimate stages with me because I continue to respect them, for having the intelligence/sense to limit our relationship because they know/intuit that it will end up in a non-permanent situation. If a woman is stupid enough, or enough of a slut, to enter into a relationship with me and then realize later, or worse, know from the start
[and many of them do know; at least in this regard I am more stupid than conniving.
«This is a male-female role reversal: the male should be the one who wants a short-term relationship while the female is looking for the commitment. But this is a myth: especially now that women are "liberated"
(it's not really liberation, is it, if you're still addicted to desire so as to require sex at any cost? I don't often agree with radical feminism, being a soft-core feminist myself, but the most radical libbers are right on this point: avoid male-female sex altogether if you want to be truly liberated, but then, if you want to be truly liberated, in the Buddhist sense, you can't be addicted to female-female sex either, or even auto-erotic sex),
women have always been looking for the long-term temporary affair
(more carefully, safely, and in lesser numbers in the past, it's true, before the 'sexual revolution')
or even the extra-relational affair
(as evidenced by recent physiological discoveries which indicate that activity/chemistry in the vagina work to favor a lover's sperm over a husband's when the two compete within a certain period of time, a fact that exposes a millennial history of prolific female infidelity since this physiological behavior would have had to have been naturally selected by evolution)
»
],
that she intends to leave me later, after she has gotten what she wanted
(which, to be fair, unlike with men, is usually more than sex with women, although, to be equally fair, romance, or whatever, is physiologically to women what sex is to men, women being hardwired to experience these more transcendent, for lack of a better word, states that keep them engaged in intimate activity, whereas men are wired to get off and get out),
then she deserves to be treated disrespectfully. I am unlike most men, or maybe I am just unlike most younger men, having learned a little bit with the experience of age, in that I want a permanent commitment
(but not one that will limit me psychologically/spiritually--whatever that means.)
But am I wrong, to be so different, from men and women both?
(I have never thought that being different was wrong in any other area of life.)
Should I be chasing after women for the experience only, for the long-term temporary situation, for the psychological and physical need satisfaction, and not waiting for the "perfect" mate to come along? How wrong could that behavior be? Even women do it.}
I get into the back of an empty eighteen-wheeler, having hooked up with Greg Serafine along the way. We ride along alone for a while, and then four hoodlum-type men, gangsters, join us at a stop. [the term gangsters, first popularized in the 1890s, originally referred to politicians. Isn't that just as appropriate to today's culture as it was back then?] One of the two older men is their obvious leader, telling the others what to do. Fairuza is with us now again, and it seems like she has never left us. We ride in the truck for awhile longer, being intimidated by the presence of the men, and then we abandon it and move on foot, walking up the hill from Center toward Universal Center. Greg and I walk out ahead, but controlled by the presence/threat of the men. At a bend in the road (not real world) that they can't see around, we rush on ahead and just before they come around the bend into our line of sight, we bolt down over the hillside (farmland) through deep snow. They don't know where we went, and there are lots of other tracks we follow, so it can't be determined if we actually went that way. We hurry down past an old dilapidated barn, hurry off behind it so that we can't been seen from above still descending the long gradual slope. Just before they arrive at the point where they can see down the hillside, we slide down over a drop-off out of sight. I pile snow on top of my knit cap and dig a furrow in the snow at eyesight level so that I can see them up above while they can't see me. Greg has remained in the place where we first dropped, resting. I tell him to get up out of there, because we have loosened the snow as we came down the hill, and if it would as a result give way, the avalanche would bury him, and he is too deep, the sides around him are too high, so that he might not be able to dig his way out. Up above, the men search the landscape for signs of us. One man in particular, the older one who is not the leader (the other two are barely more than boys, only really to be considered men because they are tough, wiry street punks), scans particularly thoroughly, as if he is an expert tracker. He and the leader talk, displaying Fairuza as they do, so that we will see they have her. bai: They think they can control us because they have Fairuza. Little do they know. Fuck the cunt. rai: The tracker heads on down the hillside, following the trail in the deep snow, scanning/searching as he proceeds, slowly. I describe his activities to Greg, who has still not moved out of the deep snow hole. Greg says that we might as well go while we got a big lead, if the guy looks like he is going to continue on, but I tell him, wait a while, let's see. Finally, I agree, and I coach Greg to get ready to bolt as soon as the guy disappears behind the old barn. Greg says that maybe we can jump him and overcome him, since he is only one guy, but I suggest that he looks pretty tough, and he is probably trained to take on multiple opponents. The guy finally disappears behind the barn and we take off, not looking back. We make our way down to flatland and across to Unity Trestle Road. But we are at a section where there are no public places for a mile in either direction. Greg suggests that we go to a private house, as he had earlier suggested that we seek refuge in the farm house in the middle of the field, but I rule that option out as I had ruled out the previous one: it is not likely that a limited familial presence would deter the man. We needed a large public group to make him act non-aggressively. fai: We hide along the side of the road and jump the man. I kill him with an empi to the nose, driving the bone up into his skull. [Killing the guy = killing my old self, the one who wants commitment? Commitment is death, to Fairuza? to women in general? to me? to my art?] Greg, thinking that the man is only knocked out, suggests we hurry away before he comes to, but I indicate that we have lots of time. The only reason that we should want to get away is so that we will not be associated with the man's death, and to that end, we walk casually away so as not to attract attention. Greg wants to know how I knew how to kill the guy. I tell him that killing someone is easier than you think, if you know what to do. Greg is impressed with me in a way he had never been before. He had known me when we were kids, but we lost touch with each other, even before the end of high school, though we went to the same school together. He became a hoodlum-type himself, while it took me years longer, being too concerned in those days with becoming a rock musician, to follow in his footsteps, by which time he had abandoned rebellion in favor of business, which I hated, then learned, out of necessity, to pretend, even to myself, I liked, then learned, through typical business strategies directed specifically at me, to hate again. It took Greg's death at an early age (35) from lung cancer (he was a smoker) to reestablish our childhood relationship.

Once known, people never die in your mind. They're always there, until you die yourself, when you still exist in someone else's mind. The idea of you is always stronger and more resistant to extinction that your physical existence. First and foremost, we are each an idea, which is composed of a vast collection of other ideas that we accumulate as we age, borrowing them from each other.

The free exchange of ideas is an ideal held in high esteem by the democratic world. Pitted against this ideal is the idea of intellectual property rights. One may, it seems, under specific circumstances (which can be quite ubiquitous), own ideas. The universe, acting in its own wisdom that is often a counterpoint to that of this world, evolves toward a situation where we, as individuals, are able to contact each other, in a dynamic psychism of suprapersonal thought/experience. This is not radical theory. This is the conclusion, not of science, but of most theology, although theology tends to want to put it in terms of an afterlife, whereas I, in my "scientific theology" place it not only in this real world, but even in the here and now, if only we but knew it.

To restrict the free exchange of ideas in the name of intellectual property rights is to attempt to restrict spiritual nature. This is becoming a religious issue, although it may take quite a while for the (capitalist) world to see it as such. Actually, this has always been the case, but we have not chosen to see it in this way. Our history is one of repressing ideas as a hedge against the loss of assets of the rich and powerful. Modernity has tended to even out the playing field, it's true, by affording the same rights to "lesser" individuals that the rich and powerful have always claimed as their own. Even to this very day, "peasants" can become "landowners," at least in the more civilized areas of the world, via their ability to assert and maintain their rights, intellectual property rights being among them. So I would not say that the idea of intellectual property rights is a bad thing. It is rather a developmental idea, which is just now being called into question. [Well, maybe not just now; Thomas Jefferson questioned it.] It has had its day. It is as transitory a long-term phenomenon as capitalism.

As we evolve, we come to know the nature of others' minds more profoundly. The study of psychology and the other human sciences leads us toward a deeper understanding of the nature of the universe every bit as much as does physics and cosmology. As we learn of our inner workings, as we intuit more deeply, we evolve to the point where we begin to know more directly what is in others' minds. At this point in our evolution, we do this very imperfectly. We struggle, even with the belief that this is true, despite the proliferation of "psychics" in our midst, even because of them, when we feel that their ability is non-existent, not only because we do not understand, but because we are so ingrained in our capitalist/instinctual way of thinking that we see (with good reason, when they will take advantage of their meager orientation so as to use it for commercial purposes, but even when they are legitimate, i.e., non-commercial and altruistic) in their activity a scam, or at best, a capitalistic enterprise. So we have come as a "modern" society ostensibly to disregard what might otherwise become our new religion, because it conflicts with our more commercial nature. This is not the first time this situation has existed in our history. As a matter of fact, it is more the rule than the exception. We experience the usual conflict between our spiritual and material selves, but aided by the insights of modern science, the spiritual nature is developing, despite ourselves.

We are arriving at the point where the thoughts we think are not so sacrosanct as they have been, because they are so much closer to the communal surface. What we think is what anyone else is capable of thinking, which has always been the case. But now, as a result of the new technology, this process occurs with a rapidity never before known. Thought spreads around the world almost instantaneously. The computer is an adjunct to the human brain. It is not so hard to see it, even in the near future, becoming a plug-in module. It's a quantum step from holding cell phones with modems connected to the Internet to having them permanently installed in our ears. And then, what next? Wired directly into the synapses of our brains? Why not? Anything is possible. And with this technology, we will be in touch in a way that it will become impossible to police. It is already impossible to police the interaction. Advances far outpace the ability of clunky governmental operations to monitor and control. The best that they can do is play along, as when the FBI uses Carnivore to illegally monitor e-mail. If the FBI can do it, you can bet the average citizen is not so far behind, especially as changes in technology and mass production occur so rapidly.

"Spiritual" (which has always been a code word for that which we do not in the present understand) insight and ability is aided by advancing technology, which is further developed by the insight, which is... It's a vicious, ever-escalating spiral, upward. (Some ignorant fundamentalists say downward, toward the era of the Beast.) The gates are open, and the flood is raging, and it is not ever again to be contained. Does the government or business really believe they are going to collar the Internet, to make it subserve the corporo-governmental complex's interests? They may slow, but they will never again control the free exchange of ideas. They may harness Napster, to choose a prominent example, but they will not stop "illegal" file-swapping. (A new definition of illegal activity may eventually become that which, not only present laws prohibit, but that which laws against are capable of being enforced. Even now, if a law is incapable of being enforced, the activity it proscribes is tacitly legal, the law being moot.) As existing ftp technology (not to mention future refinements and developments) becomes more available to average users, the sharing of personal files will escalate. And encryption is becoming a joke as independent software developers, devoid of conscience and/or not leashed by corporations' greed factors, write software to circumvent security codes. Yes, folks, there actually are (many) programmers out there developing sophisticated software and giving it away for free, and there are many more who are simply copying it and redistributing it. More and more musicians give away their music for free, hoping of course that the practice will get them noticed and open doors into the big money, but they are already living in the past. As more and more musicians (and there have always been far more of them than could ever make a living at it, let alone get rich) strive to be heard and put their work on the net, less and less listeners will feel that it is necessary to buy music. The stuff available for free legally is already as good as the stuff for sale.

The same is true of writers. Egalitarianism is rampant, to the point of non-commercialism. If you think that writers have been undervalued and underpaid thus far, just wait. It is just as easy now to read great writing for free on the net as it is to purchase a book. Why pay for it when it's available for free. Internet magazines of excellent quality proliferate. They cannot afford to pay their contributors, yet they have no problem getting high quality material. And this is only the beginning. The underground is expanding far more rapidly than ever. The overground, commercial publishing, represents a lesser and lesser percentage of the written word. Ideas are being exchanged at a faster pace than ever, and after all, this is the purpose of writing, this is why books were invented. Everyone has been saying, you hear it all the time, print is not dead, but "everyone" is publishers who fear the inevitable: ideas exchanged en masse for free.

Print may not yet be dead, but it is weak and dying. The "press" will more and more come to represent the established society, the politicians, and media moguls. In fact, it already does to a great extent. Who publishes books? Newt Gingrich. Hilary Clinton. Tom Clancey. John Grisham. Steven King. (Sorry Steven, but it's true, although I have the feeling you are sympathetic.) Publishers want only best sellers. Little authors, those who are content with a small readership, find it more and more difficult to become published and distributed (although e-books and POD may be a solution to this problem). Bookstore chains crowd small presses out of a market share.

What happens when the publishing industry's primary representee is "the establishment?" Non-establishment opinion becomes disenfranchised (more than it has already been. It has always been somewhat disenfranchised, but the situation has been steadily worsening for half a century.) But there is already a solution: the Internet. As it continues to develop, as it resists the commercialization by the corporations (there is far more to the Internet than "meets the eye"--and ear), as it feeds back into the minds of its more dedicated users, the net evolves, not instead of, but with the users, into a conglomerate supermind of which the smaller part is the global corporate attempt to capture its potential. The sophistication of the Internet users is outdistancing the marketing experts, who are more easily than ever seen for exactly what they are. They become less able to hide behind their machinations. This is the real reason why Internet sales are down and companies are going out of business all over the place. The net is becoming, despite all attempts to make it otherwise, a free market, and not in the usual sense of the phrase. Like intuition is the driving force of the phenomenon that appears to be "psychic" experience, so the Internet is the driving force of the free exchange of ideas. As the technology/mind develops, the two become more unified, until the days when "we are one, and life flows on within you and without you."

Click on footnote number to return to that respective point in the text.
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1. Most of the difficulty I have with creating websites has to do with how I might appear in public (this is also most of the difficulty I have with life in general), when I will be seen in a way I do not want to be seen, either as the truth I don't really know or am only vaguely aware of, or as an out-and-out misperception. (Social feedback creates self-image, and I spend so much semi-conscious time self-programming my own self-image, trying to negate social feedback, which can be true or false, that I feel defensive when I get inklings that people, even those I do not know or only know very casually, are messing with my mind, getting in there and moving things around behind a wall where I can't see what there doing, but only slightly feel it. When I'm promoting my book on the web, I get these feelings, that people at even a great distance, who otherwise would not know me at all, are determining my self-image, because I've dared to reveal myself, my motivation--because, when it comes right down to it, I maintain a website to promote interest in my books, ala my self, to a public I would be otherwise isolated from. This is the evil I see:
  • I hate business, while recognizing its necessity.
  • I hate businessmen, business-types, business stereotypes.
  • I hate doing business, going out into the world with a money agenda.
  • I hate the fact that I had to work for years to earn enough money to be able to live the way I now do.
  • I hate the fact that I have been worn-out and tossed aside by the business establishment.
  • I hate having been manipulated, used, nearly used-up.
  • I hate that I had to take too many years to recover.
  • I hate the idea that I had been that type of person. (I hated it even then.)
  • I hate myself, what I'd become, what I still am, when I promote myself.
  • I hate the fact that I still worry about money, when I should be wiser.
  • Social feedback works within (me), I see it when I see my own self promoting my book, I see how you see me, I see myself that way, I don't like it, I wish there were another way, even to the point of refusing to promote my work.

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