Go to today's entry first. Or start at the beginning. This is page 7 of my diary, and follows on the previous pages in some web-like sense. The other pages were full. So soon I need an index for my diary.
Someone re-hid my diary the other day, and I didn't find it until yesterday. That's alright this time. For two days now, and today looks the same, I've been crashing. I feel so foolish to crash. It must just be natural to me to be low sometimes. It certainly isn't something to get all hung up about, but that's what I've been doing.
I skipped out of the beer and thai food get together after one set of meetings, and today I'll do the same after the next set. That should be alright too I suppose.
OK. On to the recursive problems. I write here for me. To make me feel like someone listens to me -- in the case of these writings, it is me who listens more clearly. In the past, I always required a personto listen, often Peter. But I see that this tends to make the person involved weird out. They accidently only see the parts I talked of and given my needs those parts are usually sadnesses. So here I am more ethical in writing. Only I have to read these things - and that as I write them. Richard asked me why I wasn't being honest here anymore after I told him why I had stopped writing. Essentially, as my life starts to chage due to others reading these writings, I need to write about the changes too -- the new persons, the new events, my new writing hobby, etc. And, well, these don't seem to be the same sort of thing.
I am not digesting things as I should I suppose. As I want to... What I'd like would be to have things feel normal to me again, and that will take a long time, without Dagney and the Kitten and Sable to keep me warm (in this heatwave). Even finally living on my own - which has always been my most inportant standard of healthy personhood - has not polished away my plummeting moods. I had asked a question previously: Shouldn't I enjoy such a perfect life? Shouldn't I? Stupid me.
A static answer or solution is good only for static problems. Here we have an obvious dynamic or process problem -- What is a good life? Regardless of the rest of the answer, it must contain essential component, namely process. The answer must address that the happily ever after image isn't ever after. It is more simply at that moment after. To add ever in is to make the solution a process or to change the question to: What is the best static life?, and this I do not have the heart to believe... it is too clearly contrary to nature.
I want to just write what I need to. This is where it feels best, and so it shall be -- even if I have no friends left at the end. I'm overreacting, surely. To keep private my thoughts of each of them is as bad as analysing them out loud with Peter endlessly. Although with Peter, the problem was the his analyses were always more extensive then mine -- leaving me to believe his were better. I now believe that a person has to reamin true to their own beliefs even when those beliefs are known to be wrong .. and instead to learn to change them when it makes sense to in a true to self manner. Merely adopting another's just doesn't work. Again, I state what is obvious to me, an dnot to others.
I shall remain sad today since I must get off to a meeting now. My thoughts will wait. But damn I'm annoyed at being a fundamentally sad person deep down. That will always ruin things. Especially with empaths.
Need I say more? Well probably. I've been positively miserable these last few days, with the exception of spending a day wtih Peter. The air conditioner he brought over so kindly still isn't fixed up yet, and I'm dying of sleep deprivation. It'll go away soon I hope.
I'd like to sleep well, without the fear I've been feeling. I twitch at every sound and essentially act as if I haven't had any sleep for quite awhile. That's probably true. Hmmm. To act without fear. That is difficult currently. So much energy and enthusiasm, and fear. Oops.
Noting deep or meaningful though as people I know need it now. I have little left. Last night I taught Carey about parallel parking and driving onthe right side of the road -- being dyslexic does not help in this. She learned to drive in Malaysia here the left side is the default. We humans seem to have an easier time learning a first default then learning a second. Interesting. Perhaps that is why dogma is so easy to come by. Anyhow. She is really good at navigating the streets inrush hour traffic. I wonder exactly what Malay driving must be like for her to take to our streets with such ease... well, barring the wrong side of the road part.
She seemed to think that her assisting others as a volunteer counsellor has played considerably in her success in growing out of her own troubles.
Ah ... dinner arrives!
Further along the trail of life then I was yesterday, I look around and see the same things. How could I not. Humans can perceive exactly two things: the same things and the different things. One is safe then boring. The other is strange then exciting. That's it. Ameobas do this. Plants do this. I think I've defined life.
The universe then is a big database of two sorts of things. There are the time / space coordinates for each and every material unit. There are the records for each alive thingy listing exactly how far on the two gradients that organism is. This latter looks like this:
Thingy type | ALIVE? | Space / Time Coordinates Range | <-safe -------- boring-> | <-strange --- exciting-> |
---|---|---|---|---|
mushroom | Yup | complex - look it up yourself | ..X......................... | ...........X................ |
Carolyn | Definitely | none of your business! | ..X......................... | ........................X... |
Peter | Well known to be | ask him | ........................X... | ......X..................... |
Well, now that I've done up this chart, I don't see it too clearly. I guess the two axes are better described as the emotional reactions (in humans and cats) or the physical responses (in other life forms) to somethng the same and different. Dull.
bye
My mind is full of distilled images everywhere shooting back and forth. I feel insane as this occurs. No thought stays where I put it, instead pictures of other thing sflash in and out. The pounding tides of too much iinformationwithout a schema to hold it in place drives my sanity far away. I need sleep I think. In the cool air of another world. Where there are no obligations or pressures to do see be more than I can be now. Which is nothing except confused and hot and tired.
I'll try to do continuous one-thread here, but I think it won't hold as even grammar slips away from me. I cannot tell what are obligations an what are not. Am I obliged to be happy? to be exactly how I feel anyway? to help, to understand, to know what is going on? I can't tell. And I don't know.
So many dreams converged on me last night. I phoned Peter at 3am after waking suddenly to horrific images. We talked for a couple of hours andnow he sleeps intheother room while I write. He doesn't understand the image flashes because he just feels my feelings. It is like he has no mind for mythoughts. Only for eithe rmy feelings or for concepts I can lay out in rhythm for his conceptual scheme to parlay with. But me... I am not in this. My dreams oly get interpreted. My feelings only get empathized with. Me? Nowhere. Not here.
Impact. I watched as a woman whose with her arm stuck in the compactor of a garbage truck was rescued. They didn't succeed and as the truck ground the garbage, she died. As I ran screaming violently away, I stumbled on a group of young men in dark fashiony suits. They worshipped her death as her body was placed in the driver'sseat of a lovely American Cadillac. A handsome scared but awed fellow placed a two dollar bill in her hand as it floated upwards. She was so plain and nothing in life, and in death she became worshipped. They asked that she grant them favours of life and joy on her journey away from here. I woke screaming.
Other dreams recalled back to me as I lay there in the heat.
As I lay there, I couold here other people in the apartment, talking. The front door squeaked and I heard Peter come in out of the rain storm, soaked and wrapped ina blanket. As I went out to greet him, I looked around for Athena. She was in the doorway, also soaked. I knew her for what she was - Peter's last line of defense. I went to her, ignoring him, since usually he did not bring his defense with him to me. Through folded arms and knees drawn up under her chin, I pulled frustrated, until at last, she let down the defense and opened up.
To she me nothing was there. She was only defending. But nothing more than a defense existed in there.
As I was an excuse to Peter for not oing many things, so she represented only a defense -- an externalized piece of his psyche without further content than to simply protect him.
Yuch. A collective organism of which I meet only parts sometimes, and I refuse to see the whole in action. I left rather than have to watch incomplete people console each other. I can't look at him now easily because I too clearly see the umbilical cord. And I see my alone life and cannot like it either. [I pause in confused pain.]
This will really suck when either of them reads it. The whole collective feel-good feel-bad community will suck at me with questions and reactions I don't want to know about anymore. I didn't get a choice in this and I won't in that either.
She sent a disk of poems and a letter to me. Shaman tricks pop in about my dream as she claims to have a similar one the previous night -- after being told of mine. AFTER I did not solicit this poetry, and as I read it I got angry at its femaleness cloying. Just more big tits in my face. No thanks. The flashes in my mind do not embrace collective entities or liars, comics -- these are not friends. There is no such thing. I think I'll stay alone now. I'm too tired of this god damned dance of power grabbing and attmepts at balance and harmony. I'm too angry now to want to help towards any good ends. Fuck it.
Verbiage reverberating throughout the system. I add to the publishings here, the collected collections of writings.
A quick illustration about how much of a jerk I am. Hold on to your mice. Things went all screwy for me for awhile, and I started getting too little sleep and quickening my temper. Athena is more a more filling in the space I once occupied, talking with my old friends when they call her number, living in my house, etc. And now she occupies my virtual environment, and uses my phone to worry on. Wasn't moving out enough? Why must I know this female creature with no mental life other than as a victim / female / empath/ consummate liar? I don't want to. Evidence: I moved out of my home of 5 years to get away from her. I visit my cats on the front lawn without knocking on the front door. I let everyone Icould think of know my phone number is not the one she shares with Peter -- the one I shared with him for years. Isn't that sufficient for these communal junkies to get the message? I tried to support Peter inhis wannbe writerness by encouraging him to write and publish, so he transmits this to her for her to do the same. Doesn't he realize that I don't give one iota of a care if she, the story teller, gets publishes too. Aren't the ridiculous stories I hear enough publication for her?
Only good thing: I may end up not being jealous because of concluding that he is too much like her. He tells me this, and I think oh, he must mean the parts of himi like and enjoy. And I blind myself to the things he really means. The group emotions, the be friendly at all costs, and supportive. They take turns being each others mother, or should I say womb? Not in my language... but in theirs, yes. In theirs, Peter is a nomadic wanderer. In mine, he likes to go out to play video games a lot. In theirs, they are both writers. In mine dreamers.
I think I cannot hold in my own rage and disgust anymore. Especially not here .. even here they give me no privacy. Always telling me about their reactions (through only Peter of course) to what I wrote 4 days ago.
My understanding of reality is crumbling as I have less of a stable environment around me to assist in keepingit constant. I have never done this for myself. And the cracks are starting to show in my world view. Perhaps I'll live there for awhile. In the mental cracks.
I saw Monika Claire on the street yesterday. She looked happy. Good -- with her life sense she deserves to be.
Writing here helps abate the frustration and anger of seeing through the eyes of a female refugee victim mentality. I am none of these. So many years ago, I embraced not being a gender and not being a victim.
The people where I live now worry at me because I don't lock the front door. In a society like ours, it is supposed to be the female living on her own who has worries about being attacked or bothered. Not the red-neck males. Heh. I guess I have been fooled by the advertisements of a stereotype. I amthe one who is not worried about these things. In Pittsburgh, twice I chased someone out of the house where I lived -- both times a person (male) who had wandered in off the street to quietly and comfortably loot if no one was home. Twice I told them to get out as each gave me its version of justified trespassing. This is not a difficult thing to do -- for me. Perhaps others are not so easily able to look after things as I can, at least this sort of thing. But I am not going to live in fear and dread because they choose to. No way.
I'm reiterating my things to keepthem in me a bit louder and clearer. With this much sleep depravation, I need to keep things seeming continuous. Geez, am I ever fucked up today. A year later - his own opinion
.........................................
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Who knows what that means? Not me.
Meanderings through thought. My specialty. But what do I think of today? Only energy drainage .. a friend pulled it on me this morning for too long. Aw well.
Events
I got a vaporization letter from Athena, similar to the one I got a year or so ago from a previous girlfriend of Peter's. I try to stay away as much as possible from the people he meets, girlfriend or not. Let's just say he gets awfully excited about people who meet his standards in some way, and ignores other parts of who they are. I've learned to duck away rather than go through the roller coaster relationships that he indulges in. I have never found such people to be as interesting as he does, nor as dismally a failure after awhile. Many times I have entered the initial indulgence with him and then the fall as well. Laura, Stefan, Ian, Frank, Roy, Barry, oh and I'm sure I forget many of them. None of these people ended up as long term friends. I wonder why. And then there are the more recent people hwo I have said I will not meet in any significant way: Rosalinda, Elizabeth, Stephanie, Kathleen, Athena, Jason -- people he has met all within the last year and a half -- after I decided not to get involved anymore in this way.
It appears to me that he has a desire to mix people together (one I hope he never applies to me again) and context break them at the same toime to get them to really open up. I have gone through so many of these interactions, and never do I come out of them with other than a better understanding of people. I never come out with a friendship -- which is usually the key he uses to bring the interactions about. My friendships are longer lasting, more tolerant, more supportive.
[wow .. a letter just arrived from a guy telling me to get a life. Heh. I wonder what he considers a life to be made up of if it doesn't include what I write.]
As a Canadian long weekend draws to a much welcomed close, I could use some coffee. :)
I met with some wonderful and talented people the other evening. The surprise encounter with a friend's friends during dinner together ended up as an evening of exploration and fun. People seem to accumulate friends over the years using search strategies that fill their needs. In meeting a whole bunch of people of a friend's friend at one time, I realized that they shared a number of qualities, inthis case, warmth, education and intelligence, wit and mild narcissism (a combination I really enjoyed). And I realized that these people were the result of a selection criteria that I would never have used -- even though I really enoyed the result. Time to revise a bit!
Many people I know have a selection filter, and [the sunlight covers my screen into warm unreadability, and as I use brackets I purr in warm memory of my cats far and away] create different sorts of communities around themselves -- filling their own needs and creating their own social universes. I have selected highly intelligent and exploratory people - usually anarchistic in many ways. Psychologically rather than socially keyed people. People who wil understand or learn to understand what I have said, and who will appreciate me. This last is a standard generated 20 years ago. Perhaps I am no longer the geeky math brain I was when I was 10 and I had skipped a couple of gradees just previously. (No shit!)
............................................................
I found another place to sleep last night because a Marguarita Party was being held outside my bedroom window all day and night last night. The window ledge was a beer table and the hammock hanging directly beside it had partiers snuggling in it. I'm not a prude, but I do enjoy sleeping at 11pm without too much lack of privacy.
I have still to talk with my landlords about th e uncivilized behaviour of others. Hmmm probably won't go all that well. Their behaviour is standard weekend party behaviour adverted by all the beer commercials .. which is fine by me *except* that it happened 2 feet from my bedroom, bonfire and all. That, Ithink, is not right. And neither was being called a bitch for having asked that they move a few feet farther out from my bedroom window. I'll see how it goes, but I think I may end up moving instead. The situation is not fair enough since the previous occupant of my apartment is the primary cause of the bad behaviur - he hasn't altered what counts as his territory after he moved to a new one. Uneducated male. Anyway -- not to worry. I'll look after it.
Its later, and I chatted with my landlady. She was really helpful, and I think maybe even in agreement with me about having bonfires on her roof! I hope so.
I must crash soon. I hope everything is good in the world, and that all are happy. There - I am capable of a mushy feeling! Time for bed now.
Off to have lunch with friend. miau for now.
I haven't been able to write for awhile -- not a writer's block thing -- this is a diary, not a literary masterpiece. No the reason, not an excuse, is one of confusion. I have felt my mind everywhere and I've been travelling the roads of structure to re-build a few bits. Memory flashbacks are hard to handle. I think that is the real reason I don't remember things - even things as trivial as what I wrote here yesterday, and as big as what meetings I have t go off to in the morning. A universal big black comfort zone of absence.
Just as the petals falling off of the cut flower stems on my pseudo-table here dare not look back up to the stem tops, the crown they once wore, so I do not look back into the past to ... to ... that is the question really. To what? Or rather, my favorite the rorschach question: Why?
I think its structural, not a content problem. Clearly I've been given the intellectual stamp of quality - at least by various universities and people. And I'm creative and spontaneous enough ... though introverted enough to also be a bumbling fool more than my share of the time - at least in my feelings. Oh, objective reality, where art thou?
A refresher course in [two people haning out on the ether net in their house keep a chattin' with me!] [went to the drive-in the other night, and there were four of us, all of whom would have enjoyed the whole thing over electronic media so much more. Are we losing our in-person in-your-face touch? |[-- reality responds --]| ] in something or other may be appropriate. Hmmm. Could I take my newly burgeoning career as a known entity in the public spheres and learn to trust my mind more -- remove the block and let me be me.
Ah, and now we turn to the reason these pages exist in the first place. Get away from the cover story of my surface and let out me really me. So easily hidden and so easily lost. Elusive and the petals touch the ground to taste earth and not nutrition any longer.
Letter? Later? I want my life to be a different shape. I am not an idealist any longer because the world is already better. How can peoplen ot see this as the route to further harmony. Disaster is not caused by the money-grabbers or the evil or even the sheep. It is there in the unsatisification inside each idealist. I see the challenge to be in the creating of self worth without utopia, in the redistribution of generosity without charity, the world is as it is... neither utopian nor lacking in hope. And each of us can travel around seeking the shape of destiny to fit our own nature. Where is the confusion except in choosing not to seek.
What is my question?
Why? not.
............................................................
Funny that in spite of confusion, I am happy and although scared at night thanks to my neighbours scare tactics (get this: there are gangs out there, and heroin addicts, and oohh very scary things, folks. No ther are not. There are just pushy neighbours who want to bully me into complacency. HA) at every little thing that goes bump, Neko and I are warm together.
On to bigger things. As Rita wanders the world looking for the balance for her, I stay still and miss her and enjoy her life experiment. And mine, actually. What do you know.. why not!
g'night.
I meditated this morning a little, and I feel a lot more relaxed now. The sound of my own self-commands has lessened up as a consequence. Which is nice. So now I can do tons of work today. Lucky me! actually.
Well I seem to have taken quite a writing vacation. I think its the heat. Spending so many years in school writing -- during the winter only -- has left me with the habit, I suppose. Hot weather, relax and do nothing much. Now I am working and summers are like weekends, arbitrary choices of population soothing, just as the beer commercials would have us believe. When habits coincide with conventions, life can be very simple. When they collide, doesn't the conventionhave just so much momentum that it will provide environmental arguments for its [is this "its" right, Greg?] continued existence. Petrified layers of conventionprotect themselves in the utilization of our easy habitification. Or something along those lines.
And as the saga draws to a continuing and never a close, I try to stay cool. Lay low, and be more me.
So am I completely not interested in writing when things a better? No, I think that I am shyer about good things, then about bad. Intimate moments have always been private to me, while the eventful and dramatic - and hence, relatively painful to me - events have been very public usually.
So I shall have to try to expose [to myself of course] more of my happier moments to notice. Too.
[Peter arrives to visit with me. Just a sec.]
............................................................
Well, just an hour or two anyway. But I'm back here again. And again. So easily distracted. Peter announced that he is less stuffy now. And he smiled while saying so. I'll bite. Much of the baggage of the old relationship he and I built is missing now. Most of it really except the parts that really do live in my own head, and probably did through most of it.
When a forest fire ravages the old growth forests, a few years later the seeds start to grow in newly enrichened soil. Perhaps it is too early to believe that the soil itself has been rejuvenated. Then again in the scale of the forest life, a few years there is around half a year in person years. It is also very individual. My rate of recovery, when there is no currently added problems, is very quick.
In removing myself from the old habits and painfully creating new ones to replace them, I did indeed burn down the old growth forest. The beautiful nesting spots had long since gone unused, and the squirrels failed to play in the branches. The trails, once blazened and then frequented together were overgrown, and neither of us visited the beautiful lakes hidden in the glades any longer. Now younger treeOAs line newer paths. Often they diverge where before we would have insisted on travelling together. But this has become a pleasure. Perhaps it will be for years -- a feeling that out there is another trail blazer, wandering a different pattern of reactions and thoughts -- a shared adventure more often in the tree tops and along the brooks, and less often on the ground where we would likely bicker once again about which fork to take.
I enjoy watching and sharing from a greater experiential distant. I enjoy to the coming together on occasion to share the analyses and thoughts of a fellow voyager. Though very different, our realms can live at peace interwoven in spots and where the squirrels be happy playing once again.
............................................................
And just to prove to myself that I am not merely Pollyanna-ing out here, my cynical side says, to quote an earlier admirer, "Get a life!" giggle.
and you hear a
] poof [
as she vanishes in a puff of analysis
Still later:
Webster says: Dogma. I say it is the insisting a set of views come what may. Now I've been using an approach that is in essence dogmatic to get out of having not my own mindset. One's own ideas are most easily obtainable when one filters out all of the garbledsocializationsuperegounconsiouslyadoptedbeliefstructures. Phew.
So as I wean myself away from another's structured view of the universe and recapture my own, I find what?
I am not in essence dogmatic. It is a wonderful tool for changing though from having a system of views open completely to revision -- by the standards of successful argumentation in my case -- to one of personal evaluation based on personal (and not shared) values. [such a conventional way of talking about all of this... I find it unncessarily disturbing -- deal with it, my admirer would say [it's nice to have a face -- electronic anyway -- to the little work-ethiced voice in my own head -- the admirer of getting a life :) ]] [emacs is pissed off at the smiley's use of a bracket. poor emacs ;) ]
Here's how it works. I absolutely refuse to debate my beliefs with anyone. I used to do the absolute opposite. I intend to end up at the reasonable position of having the wisdom to know that the simple losing of a debate isn't sufficient to change my mind. More is required. Certainly a good argument is required. But .. but .. but. More is necessary. Having good timber is required to build a good house, but it is not sufficient. A house needs good plumbing, and roofing, and well, I don't really know, actually. But surely there are more elements.
A healthy mind has many constituents too. And constructing one is therefore a more complex matter than merely hammering boards all of the time - even if the boards are quite good.
It's cloudy today, and cooler, and maybe it'll rain again. That'll be very nice. My great "new" air hockey game is rally fun. It sat in Tracey's basement for 20 years, a childhood toy discarded. After all that time, the batteries still worked! Ray-O-Vac is my brand from now on! (Even if they don't have a website.)
............................................................
Later:
A good friend of mine, call this person Nancy, acheives her way in the world by lying and bullying. Se tries not to do it to me, but I think her judgement isn't really there. She lies to everyone to gain self-advantage. So why should I believe that she does not do this to me? I have done so much to protect most people here by not writing about them too much. How can I not now though? Perhaps I shall have to wait a little longer to really explain my feelings where the harm is too great.
Several months ago, Peter wrote 3 people off as bullies. Me (his SO), Kathleen (who really was at the time his friend and not mine), and Richard (who had become a friend to both of us). My life benefits so much from being sincere to myself. I need to continue to be. The three people did not respond inthe same way. Towo of them have not really interacted with him since -- only mild variances to the contrary. Why.. And why have I tried to retain what is worthwhile, including a possible good future?
The good is there. I shall mine for it in me as much as anything.
As my karma stays in balance for the rest of my life, I can choose the conservsative approach -- losing karma for lack of bravery, gaining for wisdom in forethought. Or, I can choose to live more boldly, risiking the gains I've achieved as Peter risked his, and as it turns out at this point to his detriment. I don't know which way I shall go. But I do know that in either case the loosening of the bonds of fear and self-seeing weakness will allow me to do greater things than my childhood environment was ever designed for. From that environment, that mundane, sandy soil, I grew up angry, alone, antagonistic, and arrogant. I've removed the first three in severing the bonds of a small world view (mostly, probably).
Note: I wish I could say thanks to Richard for the warm and sincere conversation over dinner this evening. I'm afraid that is hard to do. There must be a way. The openness warmed my heart a lot. And I wish he'd find it in him to be there more often with me.
This's probably the end of all my relatings with the collective mind over there, in part and in whole. | .|. | I don't think I can stand it if the mind clump starts to attack with more good-intentioned "blatherings". |
So what shall I do now? Live a life without an eastern best friend. Its seems best since he will always push his creatures at me otherwise. What ever happened to consensuality? Perhaps it was never there inteh first place. I have been a fool.
I've been away from there for 2 1/2 months now, and as the wounds seem to heal apparently the [I'm supposed to go out now] boundaries will be crossed again. How much do I have to lose to stop Peter from sending his compadres from stepping over into my life -- even ones who deny that he has sent them?
Very curiously, Peter did spend the night here, and left some time in the morning so that his car wouldn't become towed away. Is this why I received a letter at around the time he left? Fascinating. Not a coincidence although I am sure I do not know the causality of it. Guess I am evil.