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Things Change

by j jackson

Life, for me, has consisted of drawing a balance between anxiety and boredom. I guess this is probably true of everyone, though. We each find our own comfort zone between risk and security. It's just that I seem to allow myself to drift way too far in each direction before checking myself and pulling up short of reaching the extreme.

Life, in general, is a matter of balance. Health consists of balancing what's good for you with the practical concerns of living. Drive yourself too hard to be successful (or to survive), fail to maintain your balance by resting and recuperating once in a while, and you ruin your health and die. The older you are, the more important this becomes.

Life has been so good for me lately, because I've learned this lesson. As I look back, I wonder how I could have driven myself so hard, how I could have let people manipulate me the way I did. My work life and my love life have been two areas where I could have acted in a saner manner. Prosperity and passion are difficult areas to negotiate.

It's nice to be relatively free of the hold that people and things have had on me. I'm still mildly addicted to aspects of lifestyle, but nowhere near to how I had been before. Aging calms you down, makes you want less. I guess there's something to be said for a youth that causes you to pursue life with a vengeance, but there's more to be said for sanity.

Working too hard can give you a heart attack-ack-ack-ack-ack-ack. You oughta know by now.

Bill Joel, "Moving Out"

My sanity has always been mediated by work, in both directions. Too much work, you go crazy. Too little, you go insane. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The idle mind is the devil's play thing. Either I'm working or I'm not. One thing that's changing is the fact that I'm back to work.

I feel like working. I have for a number of weeks now. But I want to be outside, enjoying the pleasant weather. Not too hot. Nights that cool down the house so that the daylight heat doesn't accumulate day to day. This is vacation weather. I don't want to work, despite the motive to do so.

This is, perhaps, my most indecisive time of year. In the spring, I tend not to want to work, having lost my motive, preferring to be outside. In the fall and winter, I hide inside from the cold, and so working is the natural thing to do, whether I am motivated or not. But now...

I'm going out now to sit on the back porch and do nothing except enjoy the weather. // Okay. That's done. Actually, it was all I could manage to sit still for five minutes. Then, I began to sweep the porch, cut down weeds in the garden bed, and prune the apple tree. I think I'll take a nap.

A part of my work, one of my purposes (motives), is to put and keep things in order. If this is true, then I haven't been doing so good a job lately. Back when I had a lot of youthful energy, this occupied a lot of my waking time. I used it as a defense, a control against anxiety. If everything was in order, or at least if I'd exhausted the motive by finishing several hours of organizing, then I'd exorcised the demons for another day.

But as the years progressed and I learned to do this very same thing more exclusively with my writing (writing is putting ideas in order, moving them from the more chaotic nature of my mind/brain onto journal pages, and then processing those pages into projects and/or web pages), I needed less and less to organize my physical environment to feel in control. I even got to the point where I could let my house and gardens go for weeks and months at a time, allowing them to become disorganized and overgrown.

But it takes its toll, physical disorganization. It grows on you like the weeds take over your yard. It seeps into your psyche like rain percolates down through the long grass, feeding it even more, causing it to grow out of control. Soon, you are overwhelmed, so that the mental exercises you do to keep away the fear no longer work so well, and you don't know exactly why. It's the physical disorganization. I can't live amid disorganization. I am my environment, eventually. What is outside is inside, and I have to reverse the issue, by organizing.

The universe is in an advancing state of entropy and it is up to us to slow it down in this small sector of the cosmos. Giving in to the progressing chaos, surrendering to the inevitability of disintegration, may be a state of Zen, but it is disconcerting to the rational, anxious, God-fearing mind. To organize is human, to fall apart divine. So, the question is: Is mental health achievable by abandoning the mind in favor of nirvana? Yes, but only temporarily. You have to come back to a real and practical world. To survive, you must organize. It's the compromise we make with our Western God in order to exist.

On the other hand, another motive I have is to cause change. This is not necessarily my work, but I can see how some of it, the more caustic stuff, might be. Usually, my work is constructive in that it is born of an organizational motive, putting ideas together and ordering them. But beneath that operational level something more sinister is going on, a seductive desire to cause discord, to get into people's heads and turn over the muck of sediment that has settled into their polluted souls (and my own). In this sense, I am a surreptitious therapist.

I'd be a good therapist, like Tracy Ulman on Ally McBeal, who confronts her patients directly with the truth and shocks them. She's not so worried about helping her patient-characters as she is about expressing her own quirky personality. (To be fair, it is a sitcom and she is a comedienne.)

If I were a therapist, I'd confront people in this same unconventional way and have people crying at their folly, which would be good in a therapeutic situation, both as catharsis and in service to insight, because I have this talent for convincing people that their unseen faults are the truth. It wouldn't matter to me that patients became unduly upset and angry with me because it's never been a part of my agenda or technique to win friends and influence people.

This can be seen as a fault, to be sure, and the fact that I will not network has caused me lots of problems in my life, but it does have it's upside. I don't have to play the games that people play when they need to be sociable. My direct approach (avoided when I'm feeling vulnerable to the whims and machinations of society, which is more often than not) is effective at waking people up. Never mind that they might grow to hate me for it. If they can't stand the heat, they should get out of the clinic.

Most people are such wussies, really. They really can't tolerate what's really going on, especially within themselves, and have to make up a lot of rationalizations, myths, and superstitions like religions, projections, and outright self-lies in order to adapt to a caustic world of change. We are programmed to expect a certain type of world in childhood and then, inevitably, we grow up into an entirely different one and must adapt. But most often we don't, but instead we try to adapt our world to us, struggling within an economic system to earn enough credits to construct our own little worlds within the larger hostile one. The more credits we earn (or steal), the bigger little world we can afford. Most of us settle for modest homes. Some few of us construct large businesses.

I would bring all of that down in the name of honesty. Change is good. It serves the social purpose of centralization, tearing apart old structures to better accommodate a larger segment of the whole. The same is true for the individual psyche. We construct psychic barricades in childhood that separate us from reality and perpetuate the illusion that we live in. I would dispel all illusion, despite the turmoil it creates. I struggle to dispel illusion within myself. I would use the same tactics to infect others, if I could, if I were a therapist.

But I'm not a therapist. I have enough of a problem doing self-therapy. I can't even establish a sense of normality in my own life, not that being normal is so desirable a thing to be. What's normal, what's expected, changes over time.

Trying to Make Sense of an Impossible Relationship

I am a factory.
She is a county park
where the birds sing,
while my noisy machine
works overtime.

I am up earlier than she is.
I watch her prepare and leave for work.
She wears a nice dress and make-up,
and keeps regular hours.
I wear old clothes and work third shift.

I want my life to be a classic work of literature, but I tend to see it as a long series of sitcoms, a few of which were hits, but most of which were short-lived bombs. In (my) life, like on tv, change predominates. Some of it is good, most of it, maybe. But I don't want to see it that way. It's like the TV Guide. If the listing you want to watch is wrong, it doesn't matter how many they got right.

(My) life, like the cable tv version of TV Guide, is a joke (as is, maybe, the printed version too; I wouldn't know). This is a source of irritation to me. I don't mind being ridiculed for the way I've lived. I've gotten used to that. But I don't want to be a joke. In every household where I have had occasion to visit and watch tv, someone has remarked about how the inaccurate the TV Guide Channel listings are. There are so many mistakes, you have to think it's funny, to keep from getting pissed off at it, when you expect to see something and it isn't on, or when you are watching something and want to know what it is and its description is obviously not what the guide says it is. But if anyone would call them on the accuracy of their content, I'm guessing their response would be something like "nobody's perfect; mistakes are made," and/or the info they get from programmers is inaccurate. But this is their business. It's their raison d'etre. When your business is a joke to your customers, do you really expect to remain in business? I guess you do if you got a monopoly on the market. I guess this is the Microsoft syndrome here that keeps them from feeling they need a zero defect policy.

I don't want to be like the cable TV Guide. But I am. I am inaccurate. The world, like tv programming, changes on me, and I have a hard time keeping up. And I don't have a monopoly on the world. I try to create my own microcosm, but when I see myself doing it, I stop and try to dispel the enveloping illusion.

And, as if sitcoms weren't bad enough, there's sports. My life is like a sport. No one takes it all that seriously except the assholes, like businessmen who think I should live it according to their anal values. And then there's that other set of assholes who'd rather watch than play. Watching sports is to participating in them as masturbation is to sex. It may be somewhat gratifying, but it's not the real thing. At least my life is the real thing (although for a long time it wasn't, when I worked for business people). Yeah, change is good.

Lots of people try to change, but can't. Me, I've never had any problem in that area. It happens, automatically, almost without effort. I plan to change. I forget about it. I change. I've beaten even the worst of my habits in that way, without hardly even trying. I don't believe in trying [at tasks and projects or at relationships]. Either it works or it doesn't. Trying is a way of avoiding succeeding. People who say they can't change (actually, they aren't looking closely enough), are too caught up in who they are. They're too invested. They should lighten up and be willing to be someone else. When you're willing to let go, you become who you want to be. People think that you change by making the effort, when the exact opposite is true. You change by not wanting to remain the same.

I moved to New York for my health. I'm paranoid and this is the only place where my fear is justified.

a comedienne on TV

I'm only paranoid 'cause they want me dead.

Mel Gibson, Conspiracy Theory

Everyone is always talking about how much 9-11 changed us. The 9-11 anniversary prompts all the commonplace tv 'reporters' to comment on how much the terror attack changed America. I don't see it. We all seem pretty much the same to me. And I'm certainly no different than I was before 9-11. We all seem to be going about our daily lives much the same as we always have, even the FBI, which is no more competent now that before. America may be a bit more paranoid now, but that's not a very big deal as far as I can see. I've always been paranoid and have gotten so used to it that its a normal way of life for me. The big difference in my life after 9-11 is that maybe America is a bit more paranoid and I am becoming healed by the realization that I have been pretty much right all along in my specific adaptation. The world is a very dangerous place, which most Aamericans maybe never before wanted to understand.

But maybe I'm wrong about the change. Maybe I'm looking for subtlety when I should be less finely tuned. I'm just awakening to some changes around me. I think I've been in a kind of fog. I went shopping today and on my way home, I stopped by the local Phar-Mor store, only to find that it had gone out of business. Old signs on the windows announced 'Bankruptcy Sale.' I hadn't heard a word about it, and it hasn't been all that long since I'd been in that store.

I went to Ames in the same shopping center. I had heard that they were going into bankruptcy, but apparently it's going to be a terminal action. They've got 'going out of business' signs up. I've done all my miscellaneous shopping at Ames because I liked their prices, but I guess they were too low.

Returning home, I noticed that the gas station at the corner, the one my ex used to manage before she got transferred to a bigger, better place, has been torn down. I was vaguely aware that they were doing some kind of work there, but with a dumpster the size of my house blocking the site from the back street I always take to avoid traffic at the corner, I couldn't see exactly what they were up to. This last demise hit a nostalgic nerve. It marks the end of an era. It's like a message: "Wind it up. It's time to move on."

Is it, though? I feel like Robin Williams in Bicentennial Man, when all of his past, his old friends, and familiar places are fading away and new times are phasing in. Maybe it's time to move, or maybe it's time to dig in and await the newcomers. My ex-neighbors put a sign up in the yard next door: 'Rent To Own This House.' So that's what they've been up to, moving from house to house, buying up real estate. I've always wanted to do that. Maybe I will. The only real drawback is that the house I'm living in requires too much work to get it up to code in order to sell it. If only I thought I could make out on the deal, and find a new place with equal or cheaper living expenses, make a small profit on the house, then, maybe... But I'd only be happy with something like a house on the beach, and I'm no robot.

Maybe if I got a job, I could afford to move. Right now, dumping a lot of money into this house would be counterproductive. Any old job would do, just something to create a small cash flow. Since writing no longer seems so important, maybe I could relegate it to an hour or two a day. I haven't been writing much more than that anyway. Maybe. It's a thought.

Okay. So maybe America is changing a little bit. That's okay. It fits in with my original premise: things change. But the world hasn't changed. We (Americans) may be (a little bit) more aware of it now, but the world is the same old place, with the same old problems, escalating a bit perhaps with our attention placed on it, which always heats things up, but in the end, still heading in the same direction it's always been heading, toward The Tribulation.

Further Thoughts on Endtime Events

The U.S. is targeting Iraq because Saddam's regime is so vulnerable. It's the weakest link in the chain of nations between Afghanistan and Palestine. It's the most isolated and least networked of the Muslim nations. And its strategic location, once it becomes a pawn of the West again, can be used to inhibit terrorist traffic between the East and the Mideast.

Saddam was our friend, but through a miscommunication from our representative (or intentionally on our part; maybe we wanted an excuse to attack him), he was given a green light to invade Kuwait. (Maybe he was doing things we didn't like.) Since that time, relations have deteriorated. It seems to me that he'd rather be our friend, but... It seems to me that being a friend of the U.S., although in some cases it may be somewhat lucrative, has its downside. Cultural imperialism is a difficult pill to swallow. But look at it this way: it's inevitable. In one way or another, there is going to be a ubiquitous world culture. Take a look at Afghanistan in five years. It'll be a mini-United States.

I had thought previously that the U.S. would pursue the Taliban through Iran and Iraq and into the Middle East. But I was wrong. They will skip right over Iran, because there is every likelihood that it will reverse its Islamic fundamentalist course from within, and probably in the very near future.

The purpose of the battles in the war on terror (or, in other words, the end-time conflicts of The Tribulation), is to weed out the remaining elements that are isolated from the 'new world order,' the nation-tribes that resist the centralization principle of the developing global organism. When these isolated elements are overcome in a (series of) 'final' battle(s), then the ensuing peace will be the Millennium, where the "lion will lie down with the lamb." In other words, the whole world will police itself in the same way that the 'civilized' countries now do, with one monocultural police force (imagine a ubiquitous force of black, flak-jacketed, helmeted, face-shielded thugs wielding batons and dispensing tear gas, pepper spray, rubber bullets and lots of high tech, non-lethal devices) riding herd over divergent cultures and points of view, allowing them, tolerating them, so long as they don't threaten the centralized authority, but coming down hard on them when they do. (We have historical precedents for this: the Roman Empire, the British Empire, the defense of the IMF.) In this sense, the Millennium is the 'Brave New World.'

The realization of the eternal life of the prophecies will be another, more positive result of the global organism, when modern medicine combined with the application of the discoveries of genetic research will solve the 'problem' of aging and death so that people can inhabit indefinitely a calm and peaceful world where even the planetary weather is tamed by technological advances that we've already successfully begun, but abandoned (the cloud seeding of hurricanes to reduce their strength) because South American countries that are even more superstitious than we are believed that the practice was disturbing their environments.

The irony of this whole situation is that I want the end result, but I don't look forward to the caustic way that we will get there, and 'hawks' want the way we will get there without arriving at the inevitable end (global government) result. World centralization is totally unacceptable to American interests, unless, of course, the whole world will become America (which is a possibility--at least in effect, if not in name. We're already well on the way).

I believe that it's possible to arrive at a just centralized system without war, by giving the disenfranchised remnant populations of the earth a certain dignity, by working globally to assure that every human has the basic rights and access to means of satisfaction of basic needs, by enfranchising destitute populations, so that they don't have to be rebelling against imperialist repressors and the local warlords they control who would bomb them into the Millennium. Ultimate centralization requires that all disenfranchised people be included. They can't be bombed away (well, they could; Hitler, Saddam and a handful of lesser madmen like Assad and Milosovic have tried it) and they can't be dragged screaming into the post-millennial world. They've got to go there willing with full citizenship and preservation of their cultural traditions--to the extent that these do not interfere with the centralization principle. The problem is that it's too easy to make the argument that they do interfere. Aggression and violence are always easier than diplomacy and empowerment.

Terrorist risk level raised to 'high'...Citing new threats against U.S. targets in Southeast Asia and the Middle East, the Bush administration designated the nation to be at "high risk" of terrorist attack Tuesday and deployed live antiaircraft missiles in Washington. [MSNBC]

When I first heard of this, I immediately suspected that the administration was manipulating the situation in order to take advantage of the 9-11 anniversary and increase their 'terror war' popularity. But as additional news was released on the ensuing days and we learned that the traffic had been monitored to/from the men arrested near Buffalo, I saw that the threat could be real.

At least two of five men arrested in a Buffalo suburb received weapons training at an al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan, federal officials said. The five men appeared in U.S. District Court Saturday on charges of providing material support to terrorists. [CNN]

It really doesn't matter though. It's better to err on the side of caution. It's a healthy perspective to have, to suspect your government. It's always up to something. It's the nature of the beast, which welcomes change as a disrupting influence. It's up to us to resist the perception that change is disruption, in order to avoid it's bad effects. I would say that these are difficult times, but all times are difficult. It's not the times, but our adaptation to them.

Time is out of joint, oh, cursed spite
that ever I was born to set it right.

Hamlet
Act I, Scene V

The days shorten. Equal days and nights. The break-even point.
I look into the mirror of the world and see myself as someone else.
I flick through a tv mirror and see other selves I know are who I am.
Nothing is so appealing as it used to be. Dissatisfied, I cannot work.
I'd like to move, to another town, start over again, without a history.
I have no friends. All of my friends are in my past, long since seen.
I don't answer my phone. There's no one I want to talk to.
I'd like to start my life over, but you can't undo who you are.
Even if I could go back, I'd still be the same person.
Inevitably, intelligence ages. Once aged, it can't be reversed.
Once dispelled, naiveté is forever gone.
It's no longer fun to pretend to be ignorant.
It's no longer fun to pretend to be young.
It's no longer fun to strive to succeed.
I do things now just to keep my head above water.
Things I used to do to make myself content are no longer necessary.
Life is a temporary state of being, and attitude more temporary.
I keep saying the same things, hoping to convince myself.
I find myself only to lose myself again.
I regret this, and then I regret being regretful.
I say or do stupid things, and then regret them.
And then I regret regretting them.
I discover how to live intelligently and then I forget it.
I rediscover it after maybe years and am pissed that I forgot.
I realize I used to know a lot of things I have forgotten.
Things change, and I think they'll always be this way.
I think new attitudes will never change back.
It will be like this forever from now on.
This can be either good or bad, depending on the attitude.
And then things change back, and I wonder how I missed them.
This is the way things are, always. Nothing is forgotten.
People remember all of the stupid things I've done.
People define me in this way. I hate it, but it's a fact.
I hate caring what people think of me and I hate that I hate it.
I hate worrying about how people see me, how I look.
I hate having to determine my appearance.
I want to be who I am, without a care or self-appraisal.
I hate wanting to change myself into something new.
I hate trying to define and redefine myself.
I want to move to the desert and contemplate the sunset.
I want to live alone, without anyone knowing who I am.
I want to practice survival skills and live from hand to mouth.
I don't want to be what I used to be, when I was naive.
But I still am, the same person, defined by people who know me.
I want to throw out all of the old clothes that don't fit.
I hate trying to lose weight to get back into them.
I want to grow old gracefully and look like Kurt Vonnegut.
And it's only just turned fall. Winter is still a long way away.
These are winter thoughts. This is a winter attitude.
It's getting cold. I'd like to wander away to a warm place.
I'd like to be free of possessions, owning only what I carry.
I'd like to free myself of attachments and roam around.
I feel like everything I've said I should keep to myself.
I feel embarrassed that I even have these kinds of thoughts.
I struggle within to define myself as successful.
I fight the perception that people see me as a failure.
Thus far, I have been a success at self-definition.
But I feel if I let my guard down, their beliefs will prevail.
I must remain who I am, because anything else is less.
People who think otherwise sow seeds of destruction.
I used to be so much more successful when I was younger.
I had to prove myself, and did. But now I don't, so I'm not.
[But this is a destructive self-definition, a seed.]
All I used to do, working, writing, living, was to prove an end.
I had to prove myself, to be approved of.
Now, I'm different. I'm contented, and out of phase.
Society moves on, without me. I am left behind.
I don't mind, except when people think I should.
The world is crazy, and I am sane, at last.
But the problem is: the crazy world defines me.
The social art of other-definition is a nasty habit.

And then there's self-definition. From time to time I rename myself, searching for one of my other identities when I discover that the name I've been using is (overly) used by others and my identity feels like it's becoming watered down and slipping away from me. (I understand the potential pathology involved in here.) I just investigated 'Joe Doe,' but it's even more overly used.

But identities change, by themselves. Maybe that's enough. Maybe I shouldn't be playing around with them intentionally. But then, what's the difference. Who I am right now, and who I have always been, different people over time, are all fictions anyway. What difference does it make which fiction I choose or am chosen to be?

A New Definition

I believe in peace; yet I believe in revolution.
But violent revolution accomplishes nothing.

Of necessity, successful revolution creates a regime like unto the one it has replaced, when those who overthrow the existing regime act to the same motive as it acts in order to rise to power and maintain it. There is a better way.

Violence begets violence.
Peace begets peace.

Nevertheless, I can understand why oppressed peoples feel the need to rebel against the authority that represses them. The disenfranchised have every right to assert themselves and try to better their existence, even resorting to violence.

But it's not my way.

Disenfranchised citizens are an indicator of the nature of a society. An inverse proportion exists between the level of disenfranchisement of the masses and the value of a government in terms of its ability to represent its citizens.

Nowhere is this better exemplified than in the religious ideals of our founding fathers, who were, by and large, Christians. But the people who most vociferously attest that they are the epitome of Christianity, the fundamentalists, seem not to understand that Jesus championed the poor and destitute against the vested business interests, which the fundamentalists promote.

But the vested interests always attempt to silence advocates of the masses and, if they cannot, they kill them.

Maybe it is better, after all, to allow the capitalist motive to rule the world. It tends to keep rogue elements in line.

But the same motive, when it controls governments, has a different effect.

People in power, despite their political affiliation, overspend on programs that are designed, not to help people, but to enable their grip on power. Liberals allow conservatives to stereotype them as being spendthrift, but conservatives spend just as much as liberals do; they just spend differently and have their own pet projects and favorite groups, like the military and corporate welfare.

The correct use of money is a difficult business. And business, generally, knows this. Businesses that do not know it go out of business when times get tough. Smart businesses know when and how to be frugal. Smarter businesses remain frugal all the time. But there is no incentive for the government, whether liberal or conservative, to adopt this strategy. Conservatives propose cutting back only so that they can divert the money to their own favored causes. [Tax relief, at least in the way that Republicans structure it, diverts taxpayer money toward businesses.] Political theory and agendas, not efficiency, drive government legislation.

Washington spends money in a token manner; but the people who end up with the money are not always the people involved in the causes for which it is earmarked. Only a small percentage of budgeted money ever gets to the token cause for which it is intended. Contractors, middlemen, and bureau- cracies end up with the lion's share.

We could pass laws that limit the overhead of these secondary expenditures. We legislate the same for charitable organ- izations all the time. But we won't do it for government because the very people who would propose the legislation are the same people who benefit from excess expenditure of taxpayers money--the senators and congressmen who need the political contributions and support of the businessmen who get the money and/or service and favors from the government.

It all almost makes me want to become a communist. But despots are the same in any form of government. Change can be a positive thing. But some things never change.

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