Month: April 2019

291 this morning.  No booze last night.  Spent the night as usual half in this world and half somewhere else.  I lead a strange life.  In some important respects, I do live in a cave.  As far as the degree of emotional support I get from others, and regular human interaction, it’s not that different.  And this is not really a bad thing.  I am finding resources within me which will are invaluable.  How much more can you cherish human contact when you do not come to it with your own needs?

I will add: dreams are like nightly drug experiences.  They are chaotic, uncontrolled, largely, but conscious to the extent you can remember them.  I can control my dreams when I want, but I’ve learned to let go.  What I know is not what I need to learn.

You know, the smarter I get, the more stupidity I see.  Ordinary stupidity I can handle.  Lord knows I’m a fucking idiot at least once every day.  But arrogant stupidity, preaching stupidity, self righteous stupidity gets on my every last nerve.

But I suppose seeing that more clearly will help too.  That, too, is something to be digested, grist for the mill.  In the end, I can only help myself.

The process of getting pain by the balls is one of increasing the capacity for emotional digestion. And the stronger your digestion, the more you can “eat”, which is to say, the more life experience becomes richer and wider and deeper.  The less you have just cause to fear, the more you can see and feel and hear and touch and smell and taste and grok.

Conversely, avoiding experience to avoid pain is a walling in and dimming down.

To use a word currently popular in self help books (along with fuck) I am getting touch with my inner badass.

John Lennon more or less died of instant karma.

is the idea is that life is not something other than packing yourself an outstanding lunch every day and washing up in the evening.

When you reject experience, you create holes in your life.

What if the rest of your life consisted in nothing BUT doing the things you don’t consider “life”?

I don’t think we find enjoyment so much as release it.

These are public notes to myself.

I have long allowed myself to mumble when by myself.  It allows the less conscious to speak to the more conscious.  And I have long muttered to myself “so much death, so much death.”

I found myself able to look emotionally into this, and I feel like a soldier who has seen fields littered with dead bodies, dead bodies everywhere, like Antietam or Gettysburg must have looked.  You see this death, and you want to help, to do something, but there is nothing left.  There are no souls to be saved.  There is merely the burying or the burning.  There is silence, and it is not a living silence, but a gaping dark void.

And I feel too like I haunt myself.  I am a ghost to myself.  I am both parties in the film The Others.  I am the new tenants, and the ones who never left.  There is a split, but there is also a new communication, something which has not happened before, a possibility of ending the spell.

This is all right hemisphere stuff.  I could intellectualize it, but won’t at this point.  I am merely conveying feelings I should be writing in my journal, but for whatever reason feel like casting out into the Somewhere and Anywhere, the mists and vacuums of this global electronic thing, which would stop in a moment if it were ever unplugged, the Center we all look into without seeing anyone else, except sideways.

A big part of trauma is a part of your nervous system is saying NEVER AGAIN.  It is saying “I never want to feel that feeling again”.  This is the root of hypervigilence.  It is watching, scanning, looking for patterns, for anything unusual, anything out of the ordinary, and putting the worst possible interpretation on anything that is–or more commonly–is perceived as out of place.

To heal trauma, therefore, requires faith.  You have to go naked, or so it feels, into the world.  You have to go somewhat as a child, as someone who does not know what is possible.

Christ’s dictum to be as innocent as a dove and as cunning as a serpent is apposite.  You need to forget malice, forget grief, forget all the cares and worries of the world.  But not forget them, either.  It’s a dance, a difficult feat of emotional magic, but it is a worthy ideal.

You have to learn to love as if that is the only thing in the world, and when wounded, to go naked out again.

Oh, perhaps I am waxing rhapsodic in a vague parody of myself, and people like me.

Most of all, this voice needs to be reduced in volume.  It has a place.  It does not need to be silenced.  That is not the goal.  This is hyPOvigilence, which is a real risk for most trauma survivors.  It simply needs to learn, through contact with the real world (it had in reality been in an internal loop) how to function properly.

I am realizing that a big part of sanity is trusting in your own sanity.  This is one of the great comedic/tragic aspects of human existence: happiness in large measure does depend on some degree of complacency, that some questions are fundamentally answered.  Take their dogma from a Buddhist, and they are no longer a Buddhist, are they?

I can imagine many, many iterations of how this world may work.  We can’t of course trust entirely any texts we read.  There is too much fog everywhere.

But what I find it congenial to believe, and what I am going to choose believe, in a fashion a la William James, is that this world is basically benign.  Our punishments consist in the main from not realizing higher joys.  Even though there is evil, it does not prevail in all realms–there is a heaven, rather there are heavens–and there is an implicit and benign order none of us are clever enough to appreciate or grasp fully, or even in large measure.

There is no great pressure to DO, to make something of this ONE AND ONLY LIFE.  Such pressure, in the main, seems to drive people crazy, and away from their natural goodness.  Give people enough to eat, and time to enjoy life, and by and large they become healthy happy people on their own, without dogma.

I am going to release the frenzy within me.  I am going to quit doubting my own sanity.  I will trust myself when all men doubt me, but make allowance for their doubting too.

I am going to start posting my weight daily on here, too.  292 this morning.  I am shooting for 240, or probably better 230.  I’m a big guy, and will always be a big guy, but I’m carrying much too much fat.

On that note, I drank about 5 Angry Orchards, one bottle of red, and one bottle of port last night.  That’s not on any diets.  But I woke up feeling good this morning. I need to get to where I can have one or two at the bar, then not stop at the liquor store on the way home because I feel so good.  It’s doable.  Everything I dream is doable.

I am going to try and be more consciously positive too.  I’m obviously a fault finder.  A critic.  This can be a useful role, but it is an unhappy one, and I am going to try and make the next thirty years my best.

When dealing with the unseen, with heaven and hell, the potential for imaginative creation is endless. When you tie this with the need some have to control others, you have an inherent tendency towards punishment inflation.

The wages of sin is a headache.

A year long headache.

A lifetime of headaches.

A thousand years of headaches.

A million years of headaches.

An eternity of headaches.

There is no reason not to suppose these things evolve. The notion, once constituted, is enormously useful for social control and endlessly adaptable.

It seems to me it is more interesting to build a continuum based on how much of their true core self people are willing to share in all contexts.  Someone willing to share all in all contexts is socially open. Someone unwilling or unable to ever share is closed.

Talking a lot does not mean someone actually like people, or is interacting with them honestly.

Conversely, not feeling the need to speak does not betray timidity or “introversion.”

Many people we label introverts are simply uncomfortable both with being emotionally dishonest and superficial, on the one hand, and being reliably misunderstood by silly people on the other. This says nothing about their latent capacities, only what they learned from repeated experience.