Month: June 2014

There is some room for bragging, right?  I’ll take my victories where I find them.

I can cover leagues with a single step, a life in a breath.

Yes, I am drinking, but it only makes me more honest.

Can anyone  argue that we are infants, stupid, ignorant, just-at-the-beginning, when it comes to understanding the complex interactions of various sorts of music, dance, and mood?

Brainwashing, coercion: these are likely more advanced than I like to think.

But elicitive techniques, those which pull out, which facilitate expression, self creation, re-formation, joy formation: we are primitives.

And the primitives are likely advanced.

Never, ever, ever assume you know what needs knowing. You are likely a dumbass of the first order, not having even reached the level of being capable of learning.

Certainly, that applies to me.

Who can imagine the heights the human race can reach, if it ever applies its full creative instincts to qualitative joy, to Goodness, to harmony, peace, and the death of wars of various sorts?

I am a Humanist.  I do not believe we are the measure of all things.  That would imply many bad things about the things.  But I do believe we are, relatively, perfectable, that social life is perfectable, that many useful things are knowable that are not yet known or sufficiently widely practiced.

I think we need to keep plugging.  We need to keep trying.  We need to foster hope and accomplishment.  Believe more is possible, and dammit if it doesn’t show up on cue.

This whole happy thing is a bit new to me, but I am running with it.

There is a cycle of releasing trauma, but also of building the opposite.  I have tapped into all my underground reservoirs; I feel confident in this.  I have connection.  All the parts are in communication.  No part is forgotten.  Now my core self needs to build a home filled with light and love.

That no doubt sounds odd and vague.  Shit, I’m still figuring it out.  It will take time.

I watch people.  That’s what I do.  I talk to people, listen to them, listen and learn about their stories, their beliefs, what defines them.

And what I see is pain all around.  Most every person you deal with during the day, or see walking down the road, or who changes your oil: they have demons, traumas, they have not dealt with.

I look at our world, and all of us wandering around, crazy.

And I remember my job is to not be crazy, but to understand it.  And I go on.

That, my friends, is a boring drunk man’s tale.

And if you are crazy, be good at it, then come home.  We will welcome you, perhaps for the first time ever.

There is so much love in this universe.  If we can but manifest a fraction of it, we can change the world.

I would give everything I have and am to learn this skill.

What connection does the Cote D’Ivoire have with soccer?  Colonialism.  Soccer–Football–is an export a great many colonized countries choose to continue.

It is a cultural meme, repeated.  It is something We created, and which They want.

Oh, when will we pursue It, Goodness?

All the abstractions float, hover.  They exist as possibilities in minds, as thoughts that could move.  We in turn live by rote.  We assume of today what we assumed of yesterday.

I am so dumb.  So are you.  I will try to remember this tomorrow.   Will you?

Here is a random link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePIImGMjn_8

Maybe not fully random.

I will return momentarily to this task, but feel a need to permit myself a small brag.  I reached 1395 on my BPI for Lumosity today.  It’s not 1400, which  is a goal I have set, but I feel the need to brag, to assert myself.  It’s 98.9th percentile for my age.  On Attention I am at 99.5, which is as good as you can get with their system.

It is worth noting as well that these percentile scores are among people who USE Lumosity.  It is likely safe to assume that only roughly the top third of Americans use it, so that score is even better.

It is perhaps a bit pathetic to feel the need to point this out, but part of my healing will be, I think, openly asserting myself more often and more directly.  I have never had a place in the room.  Now I will.

Well, I am having my own adventure.  I sent that in part to myself.  I just cancelled all my Facebook news feeds, and am going to put myself, to the extent possible, on a news fast.  I am going to try and see my new therapist twice a week until most of the horror is gone.  As I believe I’ve shared, the movie which best represents the emotional tone of my family is “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.  When I told that to the last therapist (who is in another State, hence the new one), she said “we may have some work to do.” [I will add, can we not assume that Toby Hooper had his own share of trauma, that this movie came from somewhere, and not somewhere pleasant?]

As I’ve shared, I like to think of myself as a Master Sergeant, as a professional NCO, but not yet at the fully politicized level.  I try to do my work well, silently (you can laugh out loud at that), and with full commitment.

I am relieving myself of my operational duties for the time being.  I am not going to fight anyone on anything for a while.  There are others who can and will take my place.

At the same time, pain is so often replaced as an end, rather than a means, that one can rightly question how well it has been used in most religions for most of history.

Everything useful can be made harmful.  All good ideas can be perverted by applying them too much or too little.

Let me frame this in 21st Century terms: all of us must come to terms with all traumas, large and small, in our past, and we must learn the skill of emotional processing, even of difficult information.  This is the task both of individual and social maturity.

Once this is done, expanded perceptions become possible, and those, in turn, facilitate further growth.

This is the model I am convinced is “correct”, to the extent one can apply a word like that to abstractions.

I will add as well, that this model precludes the Sybaritic path of assuming life is meant to be easy, and that only circumstances prevent us from being happy.

That last sentence is a paraphrase from a book I found immensely useful at a certain point in my life, Garth Woods “The Myth of Neurosis”.  Easily one of the five most useful self help books I have ever read, with others being “Learned Optimism”, “Trauma and Recovery”, and “The Drama of the Gifted Child.” I’d have to think about number 5.