mmm

No one has smiled at me like that in waaaaaaaay too long. I almost forgot what it felt like.

the christmas spirit- a short play

This is the skit I performed at the Shrub Christmas Pageant. I was The Christmas Spirit. :D

BEHOLD!

ACT I
The scene is Christmas Eve in a typical suburban house.
NARRATOR: The scene is Christmas Eve in a typical suburban house. A mother and father have come to say good night to their two sons, who are unaware of the unspeakable horror that awaits them.
MOTHER: Good night kids! And remember, go straight to sleep, because it's Christmas Eve!
FATHER: That's right! Now that you boys are over seven, The Christmas Spirit can come for you at any time!
MOTHER: He only takes you if you're awake! So go straight to sleep!
(MOTHER and FATHER start to leave)
MOTHER: Momma wants a beer!
FATHER: And remember-
Good or bad? It's not worth squat
He only cares
If you're awake or not!
FATHER (leaving room again): Good night, kids! See you tomorrow... I hope!
(FATHER leaves room)

ACT II
("Neyhadar Zeytkewen" by Tewelde Redda begins playing- note: this is Tigrinya pop music)
(THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT emerges, wearing a ski mask and robe)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (making a hissing noise, looking around): HWEEEH!
(strides over to two sleeping kids)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (discovering kids): HWEEEH!
(bends down to snarl at kids)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (to BOY UNDER BLANKET): HWEEEH!
(pauses, looks thoughtful while looking at other boy, then bends down to snarl at BOY IN SLEEPING BAG)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT: HWEEEH!
BOY IN SLEEPING BAG: Nooooo!
(THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT throws hands up in glee, then begins dragging BOY IN SLEEPING BAG away)
THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT (suddenly running over to other boy): HWEEEH!
(looking disappointed, THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT resumes dragging BOY IN SLEEPING BAG away)

what i'm doing

What am I doing? I hear this a lot, given that, you know.. I don't have a job and all that.

It's a little frightening and a bit disappointing to realize how much people confuse identity and self-worth and all that with one's job, especially once one has worked in the hive mind-esque confines of a corporation. We haven't evolved much in the past several thousand years; we're still looking to subdivide everyone into tribes, except these tribes have nothing to do with territory and blood relations, which might actually make sense. These tribes are entirely based on what sort of mindless repetitive tasks you're willing to perform and spend all your time thinking about every day.

It's also a little disheartening to realize how much YOU'VE bought into the whole "I am my job" bullshit, especially when you realize how much you've missed out on in life as a result.

Being out of the rat race for the first time in probably 10 or 11 years has given me time to think about what I really want and what's actually important to me. You'd think this would be an easy thing to figure out, but you have to also consider how much cultural brainwashing as well as knee-jerk reactions to said cultural brainwashing there is sitting smugly on top of whatever it is you really do want out of life.

So what do I want? What's really important to me, after all the "I shoulds" and "I musts" have faded away?

The answer: creativity, and service to the world. I want to be learning something new all the time. I want to feel that my existence has meant something to others.

And how do I propose to do these? I think I've finally hit on a solution, and it's been taking up most of my waking time.

I'm currently studying a whole truckload of internet-and-computer-related stuff, namely PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML, Python, and CSS (for the moment), because my eventual goal is to do freelance programming and web design.

If I can pull this off, it solves everything. I'll be able to support myself, but I won't have to sign my life away to some company that'll chain me to one particular location, tell me when I have to get up, when I can eat, when I need to go to bed, and force me to deal with people who have already given up on life for 8+ hours a day. I'll have the freedom to actually DO volunteer projets around the world, or to make music, write, and/or learn more of the arcane, delightfully binary, and human-interaction-free programming stuff I've been in love with since I was eight.

And, if the unthinkable happens, and I actually decide I want to settle down with someone later in life (not likely, given my current love of freedom, and provided, of course, anyone would even be willing to do so, ha), I'll have enough skills and experience built up by that time to get a nice, cushy, $100K+ job somewhere as a database administrator or something.

I finally finished Snow Crash, and before my free time turned into me sitting in front of my laptop with a disheveled semi-circle of books surrounding me, I was playing FFX religiously. Both of these reinspired me in terms of my computer-philia, for reasons I'll explain in some other post (must get back to work).

But, I don't know... I think this is a viable option, and probably better for me in terms of my basic makeup than anything I've decided to do in, oh, I don't know.. the past 13 or 14 years.

jesus christ this week has been insane

Hmm, let's see. This week, despite having a cold/flu/whatever that was bad enough to drive me to see a doctor, I have:

• driven to NYC for the first time ever to drop off a friend at the airport (I've been to the city twice before, but either with family or with a huge field trip group)
  
• answered a three-year-long question, albeit in a disappointing manner (not saying any more about this on here, sorry)
  
• discovered that NYC is... not quite my cup of tea

...Yeah.

Essentially, I drove Nur to the airport on Monday so she could go to Utah to be with her estranged husband. She was supposed to give me her apartment key, so I could give it to her friend, who was going to take two of her cats. If she did (and I'm almost positive she didn't), she waited until we were all massively frustrated at the obtuse postmodern nightmare that is JFK International Airport, and Lauren and I were desperately in need of a restroom. Thus, if she did give me her key, it was invariably lost in the generalized airport chaos.

Fortunately, I will not have to commit burglary in order to save her two adorable four-month-old kitties from starvation and/or dehydration. Nur did send the key to Sam, so he'll be taking things from there. I need to help him find someone to take the cats, since he apparently can't. :/

In terms of other subjects, NYC is... not so gret akshually. I'm sure it's fantastic if: #1 you arrive there with someone who knows the city like the back of their hand, or #2 you have extremely detailed maps that show you which way every one-way street is, and so forth. As it was, our main objective was to find our friend Cat, and, barring that, to get food. We never achieved the former, and the latter took us four hours.

And I suppose I could say that another thing I've learned (as recently as... well, now) is that not only did I have a DXM problem years ago, but I'm also enzyme-deficient. I took 30 mg of it (the recommended dose, believe it or not) two hours ago and I am definitely kind of zwalped. According to the FAQ, this shouldn't happen.

the 60-day aspartame experiment

My dad refuses to drink regular soda at all. Not surprisingly, if you know my father, he views any sort of modern health news (particularly that meat and dairy products are, in fact, bad for you) as complete rubbish. Thus it is going to be an enormous, titanic struggle to get him to even consider the fact that the aspartame in diet soda may in fact be quite toxic.

I was reading http://www.dorway.com, though, and a lot of the evidence there makes a frightening degree of sense. I still get anxiety attacks (though see last post as well about this... ), chest pains, and heart palpitations despite having quit caffeine, and there's always the matter of my occasionally rather disturbing short-term memory issues. I figured the latter was due to DXM, even though I've had these issues since way before I ever ingested that stuff.

Moreover, I wonder if some of the actually somewhat unusual side effects I used to get from DXM (serotonin syndrome, for one) were not in fact caused more by the effects of the aspartame I would consume in vast quantities. Aside from being converted at temperatures greater than 86 degrees F (or 30 degrees C) to methanol, aspartame is also converted in vivo to aspartic acid, also known as aspartate.

DXM works on a vast number of neuronal receptors, including but not limited to sigma opioid (function is largely unknown), PCP2 (dopamine blockade, AKA when you come off DXM addiction you're subjecting yourself to the equivalent of cocaine withdrawal), and serotonin receptors, , but its primary means of action is through blockade of NMDA receptors. Let's flesh out the acronym: N-Methyl D-Aspartate. DXM blocks these receptors.

In other words... DXM is something of an antidote (albeit with horrible side effects) to aspartame. It kind of makes sense. I started drinking diet sodas when I was 14 or 15, and also began having all sorts of weird psychological issues which I attributed, probably at least partially accurately, to the situation I was living in. However, when the situation ended, some of the issues remained. It's not too far-fetched to imagine that I may have picked up my DXM habit in a bizarre attempt to self-medicate my apparent aspartame poisoning.

NMDA receptors are named thusly because they show a higher affinity for NMDA, a synthetic substance, than for glutamate. Glutamate is present endogenously, however, and so NMDA receptors could also be referred to as glutamate receptors. The glutamatergic system is involved with excitatory (stimulating) responses, while its counterpart is the GABAergic system, involved with inhibitory responses.

This is a strange, strange world we live in; we drink poison every day, and try to counteract it with another poison. Hmm.

It's funny; I wrote in a personal journal once that my one of my biggest problems in life is that I feel as if the volume knob has been turned up to 11 on every possible stimulus. I think I've always been like this, from birth; as an infant, if anyone sneezed or made any sort of loud noise, I'd scream continuously. I've also mentioned having asthma as a child. Both the excess stimulation and the asthma can be linked directly back to an excess of glutamatergic responses, most likely made far worse by aspartame.

The site I mentioned above proposes an experiment: avoid all aspartame-containing products for 60 days straight, and compare your mental state at the end of the experiment to how things were at the beginning. If you notice a significant improvement, aspartame is the culprit.

I'm going to try this, starting tomorrow (today, really). If my anxiety attacks and heart issues have lessened by the end of 60 days, I'll have my answer.

not sure what to make of all this

I'm aware I've been really reclusive lately. It's nothing to do with anyone except me, so please don't worry. I'm having anxiety issues, but I'm not ingesting weird chemicals and having subsequent horrors. On the surface, everything is good, and it seems OkCupid may be coming through for me yet again. Enough on the latter subject. Back to the anxiety issues:

Warnings From World Leaders All Within 72 Hours

A Second 9/11

U.S. Is Funding Iranian Nuclear Program

So... yeah. Fear-mongering? Maybe. It wouldn't surprise me. I've seen the whole "We're in for another terrorist attack! Remain loyal to your corporate-controlled government! Only STATE-OWNED media will give you the truth!" spiel before. Nothing ever happens.

On the other hand... I've had a seriously bad feeling for about a month now. I've learned to pay attention to these.

Part of my anxiety is the result of my finally processing and letting go of the past three years or so. In a nutshell, this time period, despite all the fun and nonsense and adventure, was, on a deeper level, about me facing my Jungian "shadow", as well as my past. And so I've been playing out this weird shadow puppet drama, with an improvised script and all my best and worst qualities out on display, because the only way you *can* face your shadow is to run out there and meet it head-on. You can sit at home and analyze it all you want, but until you actually get out there and deal with it in practice, you're not going to get anywhere.

At least that's how it is for me. But as a result, I've made a lot of mistakes, I've lost a lot of people and situations that were dear to me, and the resultant guilt was enough to propel me into my first and hopefully only foray into the delightful world of serious depression, which lasted from about January 2007 until April or May 2008.

But I've beaten that, too, and come out stronger, happier, and more independent. I've been increasingly more and more able to put it all behind me, to not get caught up in useless nostalgia for the good times, and to not get sacked by guilt and sadness over the bad times. "Letting go", though, is a difficult process, and it's not surprising it's caused me quite a bit of anxiety recently.

I don't feel, however, that this is the *only* reason behind my anxiety, though. I've had similar feelings before, though never like this, and... I don't know. Something feels very, very wrong.

My question is, though, what can we do? I'm already working on a (probably wildly unimportant) website aimed at bringing people together a la Facebook but minus the inherent divisiveness. If I think of anything else, I'll do that as well, but.. will it be enough, should something unthinkable happen?

If the economy collapses, will everyone I know and love be all right? And this is of course being well aware that the economy collapsing is a *pleasant* scenario compared to some of the other possibilities.

I'm stocking up on rice, beans, and canned vegetables. I suppose I should stock up on bottled water, as well.

Am I being completely paranoid? Probably. Is everything going to be okay? Possibly, though the current economic crisis is a very real and very powerful reminder that maybe things aren't all sweetness and light out there.

I just wish some sort of higher power would come down and give me even a hint of what's going to happen. I hate waiting for anything.

spontaneous parades, whee!

So tonight I went to an election night potluck dinner at White Clay, bringing thrice the normal amount of aloo gobhi with me (it was eaten entirely, hooray!).

A lot of THC was consumed, as was a lot of alcohol. This is important for later in the story.

Sometime around midnight, Steve Fox (who does not imbibe in the former intoxicant, btw) heard Obama jubilation coming from west of us. Shouting "Parade!", he led all 15-20 of us to the northern part of the UD campus, where we discovered a lot of people yelling and cheering and screaming.

Somehow, we wound up taking them all with us.

Over the course of the night, we wound up with somewhere between 300-600 people, all screaming at the top of their lungs, periodically stopping so that the original group of people could give speeches. Steve Fox gave a number of these as well, all very inspiring.

The solidarity was amazing; I've never seen or experienced anything like it. I do of course know that probably 90% or more of the people we somehow accumulated were only there to take part in a spontaneous parade. (I mean, seriously.. wouldn't you?)

Black of spirit and cynical as I am (I spent a good portion of the beginning of the parade thinking about how I could easily see how people get caught up in things like Nazism), though, something about tonight really warmed some as-yet-uncorroded part of my heart.

When we all started to head our separate ways, after the final speeches, the cops, who had been harassing us all night, cornered the organizers from the original group we met up with. They were wearing University of Delaware shirts and were far more obvious targets than any of us. As a group, we all converged on the cops.

"The cops would have harassed them for at least an hour or two if 200 people hadn't shown up in support," Jack said afterwards. He was probably right.

Intimidating the police.. yet another first of the night.

The really funny thing is... this all started because we were high as shit.

a non-personal post! part 2

This one has unfortunately been read by one of the whopping three people who ever read this blog. Well, two and a half, I guess, because John has read *a post* of this blog, yet hasn't read the rest. I guess the material here *is* a little dense. :D

The post below, however, is not. It's just weird.

I do want to perform this, however...

****

Looking for something to spice up those lazy Saturday afternoons?
(shows two people sitting in room looking bored)

Try new Maximum Strength Wonf!
(shot of person 1's hand sprinkling something out of a spice bottle, clearly marked "Maximum Strength WONF", into a drink)

(shot of person 1, looking at camera)
Person 1: It's guaranteed to liven things up!

(shows both people; person 2 takes sip of Wonf-laced drink)
(Person 2 immediately changes; his/her head is wrapped entirely in a towel, and he/she is gesticulating wildly)
Person 2: Ouuouooul! Ouuouuul! (wordless howling noise)

(person 1 winks)

(person 2 thrashes about even more frantically, continues wordless howling, begins knocking over furniture while person 1 looks on, pleased)

(shows closeup of Maximum Strength WONF bottle)
Narrator: Maximum Strength Wonf. It's refreshing.

Person 2 (1/2 body shot): OOOUOUUOUL!

a non-personal post! part 1

Well, this one's *sort of* non-personal, anyway. I don't know how to completely separate my mindset from what I write. What I've posted below was written while I was working at QS Pharma. It kind of shows you what working there was like.

****

MAN, 48, ARRESTED FOR THINKING OF A RED CAR INSTEAD OF A BLUE ONE
Thomas Knudson, a factory worker in Chicago, was carted off by authorities last night after the thought of a red car accidentally surfaced in his mind during a workplace discussion about blue cars.

Knudson claimed the rogue thought arose in his mind due to fatigue brought on by long working hours. "It's never happened like this before," Knudson explained. "I just couldn't think about what I was supposed to for a second."

"You can't have people's thoughts deviating from the norm like this," Knudson's supervisor, Anna Wydkoff, told Tribune reporters. "I'm sorry to see him go, he was a hard worker, but if he was that tired, he's burned out and needs to be eliminated anyway."

Knudson's wife agrees. "It's never okay to think thoughts not dictated to you by an outside source. Tom was wrong, and fully deserves his fate, but he seems to want to do the right thing here."

Knudson is scheduled to be vaporized in the "You Failed" chamber on Tuesday. Some, however, do not believe mere instantaneous execution is enough of a punishment for rogue thinkers.

"We need to figure out how to place people in a state where they're conscious yet do not consume any resources," Senate Leader Harold Whaup suggested. "This way, rather than people escaping from the horrors of their failures through the 'You Failed' chamber, we could instead place them into this state of undeath indefinitely and have them programmed to feel and think nothing but the most intense humiliation imaginable for the rest of eternity."

Rogue thought errors such as Knudson's have declined in frequency over the past few years, but kinesthetic errors have risen somewhat, primarily among the elderly, in whom illness and in some cases mere old age contribute to the inability to control one's movements enough to sync within +/- 0.5 seconds of everyone else.

Bertha Jenkins, 34, of Chicago, had this to say: "I know someday my body'll fail me and I'll fall outside specifications. I just have to try to delay that as long as possible." When told of Harold Whaup's plan, Bertha agreed. "Yes, when I do fail to meet the guidelines for thought and movement I really should be reminded of my utter inferiority for all eternity."

Scientists are currently trying to create robots physically incapable of falling outside thought and movement specifications; one's consciousness would simply be downloaded into these machines, making the need for our failure-prone organic bodies invalid.

But some have other ideas- allowed, of course, by specifications. Greg Watkins, another Chicago native, gave us his take on the replacement of human bodies with robots.

"I don't think that's right. The whole point of these specifications is for us to voluntarily give up our free will and even our individual molecular disparities, not to increase efficiency, but just because it's the right thing to do."

Thomas Knudson agrees, looking forward to his destruction in the "You Failed" chamber. "When we fail, like I did recently, it's a sign that on some probably unconscious or cellular level we don't accept the program anymore, and when that happens we need to be eliminated at the very least."

"Making us all robots would make us one with our programming. We're not worthy of that honor. We need to be able to fail so that we're eternally separate from our holy programming."

the raven and the snake

I've had a transformative experience over the past two months. Any relationship you open yourself to at all has the potential to be transformative, since you wind up learning more about yourself. It's just that most of my transformative relationships prior to this were the sort where all sorts of rough beasts were dragged up from my own personal underworld, and, while I'd always learn a *little* about some of my more positive aspects, most of what I learned was about my ability to deal with said beasts.

This wasn't like that. At all.

It's a very odd, rather symbolic coincidence, though, after having a transformative experience, to be given a discarded snake skin by someone you don't even know. If by some miracle someone who was there is reading this, this is The Kid Who Always Wears The Hat. I don't know his name, like I said.

The fact that this happened at this time, along with my having had an awesomely horrifying ayahuasca experience last Friday night, tells me something.

I've had to fight off a lot of demons along my way here. Most of these I've had to fight solely within the confines of my own mind, but in recent years, some of them have manifested in my relationships with other people, and for that, I am truly sorry.

But this last experience tells me it's all been worth it, that I've been to the bottom of my being and managed to come back bearing light. I've had to face my own inner Chiron or wound over the course of my life; astrologically, my natal Moon squares Chiron as well as the horrifying underworld double-whammy of Uranus and Lilith (both in Scorpio, no less). The person in question has Venus square Chiron in her natal chart, and while I can't say how that may have manifested in her life, I can say that my Moon square can be traced right back to when I was eight.

I had nightmares continuously, every night, for a month. It was the same dream, over and over again, me seeing myself two-dimensionally, in a sort of distorted Super Mario 2 - esque castle, taking a conveyor belt down into a pit instead of jumping to where I was supposed to. And in that pit this awful creature appeared, with an expression I can't name or describe. This face haunted my every waking moment for that entire month.

My parents were sympathetic at first, allowing me to sleep with the light on, but they eventually shrank back in the face of whatever malevolent spirit was tormenting me. It wasn't demonic in origin. It was something worse. My mother admitted to me years later that before my sister was born, she "saw" an apparition of some sort try to enter the house, which I later figured out was the Goetic demon Balam, and she did some sort of incantation to the archangels, which caused a rush of power to flow past her, and hit the.. creature, causing it to howl and implode.

But whatever this thing was that was after me was beyond demonic. I could feel whatever it was laughing derisively at my mother's every attempt to rescue me from it.

And, eventually, defeated and pissed off, my mother turned off the light in my room, leaving me to face whatever it was on my own. "You have to learn to face your fears," she said.

And oh, did I ever. I was in that room, in the dark, faced with something my parents had no idea how to fight, knowing that *they* were angry at *me* for not defeating it.

It's been a long, hard road getting back, but this recent experience has shown me that it's all been worth it. And, as something of a rebuttal, love is only the confusing, apparently destructive mess it can be if we try to force it into the shapes we think it should go into. We're human, after all, and we want things to make sense and have shape and structure... but the nature of the universe isn't like that. And all we can really do is try to be as open to everything as possible, and enjoy every dance, as long as it lasts.

I have no regrets, whatsoever. This is unusual, given my prior relationships with people.

So... the snake skin is going into my closet, where all the other items I feel have magical and/or personal significance to me are. It'll be there with the piece of a gravestone I found with Nur and Tarsila during The Smear Summer (symbolizing, to me, the death of an old personality), the human rib I found at Chuck's Farm '06 (yes, you read that right, a HUMAN RIB... the symbolism behind this is a weird Creation-mythos kind of thing, what with the universe giving birth to itself inside my head while I watched some Jamaican people jump around making ridiculous basslines),...

...and the raven feather I found in late August.

<3.

memory lane part 2

So the nonsense poem from the previous entry made me think of old stuff, so I ransacked LJ entries to find interesting vignettes.

New stuff will be coming soon. I promise. This is just sort of a clearing of my memory banks.

1/27/05

I was talking to Jason from Young Vulgarians last night and he told me that they had broken up. :( :( :(

I will SO miss their live shows.

Their record label describes their shows better than I can:
"The band made most of its music free or very cheap, the profits usually being thrown off stages during live shows in infamous GREEN $HOWER$. In concerts -- the design of which was heavily influenced by the writings of DeBord, Koolhaas and Baudrillard -- Young Vulgarians let in dogs from the street to run wild, smashed computer equipment on each-other‘s heads, pushed shopping carts across the ceiling, threw Christmas trees and bread and magazines back and forth with the crowd, climbed everything climbable, tore ceilings apart, stood on their heads while performing, jumped quite high in the air with keytars and afros, and spat bloody sugar at teenagers. "

They forgot to mention Jason sticking the microphone in his mouth while singing.

Oh! Here's another anecdote:
"Apart from that, their singer is a total madman, in a good way. He was wearing this weird orange suit and as soon as he came on he started consuming whole packets of sugar. His antics included... frankenstein-walking through the audience, picking up the mike stand and swinging it like an instrument of death, lying on the ground while wailing gibberish about being in an institution as a child, singing with the microphone stuffed in his mouth while crouched in the fetal position on a speaker stack, and (this was the crowning finish of one of their songs) crawling through the audience back onto the stage and tunneling behind the drumkit, where he stayed, in the fetal position, for about five minutes. I was laughing so hard i was crying. These guys are the SHIT."

I will miss them badly.

4/27/05
Last night I was still studying at around 4 AM (I had to get up at 8:30; this is pretty typical for me) and I "heard" the weirdest noise outside. I'm sure it was a fatigue-induced auditory hallucination.

It sounded like a small dog LAUGHING..

9/1/05
I saw Tricycle Guy again this morning. "Hey," I said to him in greeting.
"Bijorgdow," he replied, whizzing past me. At least that's what it sounded like.

That's basically a microcosm of how this year is going.

5/03/06

Wake up, go to class. Come home, do work. Eat dinner. Do more work. Go to class having not slept. Do work. Go to class. Do work. Come home. Eat dinner. Pass out exhausted. Wake up, go to class...

Only a few more weeks. Then I can be human again. I kind of forget what that's like sometimes. :/ My life as it is now is a cycle of feverish labor then unconsciousness where I have the weirdest dreams. More on those later.

I sort of half-fell-asleep in PChem yesterday while the teacher was talking. My body kept going but my mind was completely asleep, dreaming while I was awake. I thought I was taking notes but instead I have things scrawled in my notebook about Batman and unicorns. While I was doing an assignment earlier I caught myself writing "and maybe you can tell the delta-H a bedtime story".

Lab time in 1/2 hour.

memory lane part 1

Okay, I'm tired of obsessively and reclusively re-learning HTML and JavaScript in an attempt to start down a new career path, at least for the night. Here's a bizarre poem I wrote back in 2004.

Good luck figuring this one out. Incidentally, a bunch of lines from it serve as the song titles to my second TBMPHE album, also called Fox For The Five.

Those barbecues
Floating around in those rooms
Why do they?
BUFFALOONS
The sand is seventeen boxes
FOX FOR THE FIVE
And the parch hlang yep khippi zey potu lehng fak.
We spin around madly,
A dance made for three,
And bananas all posmified...
Zip Zap Marie.
Orangutans gibber, wolves howl and yet I
Cannot fashion this chain to be more than it is.
Fazmatazz Arnold and sing of the Zhlee
Who has come a long way
To be cured of the leaps.
I can't stop this whining noise, stuck in my head...
When the train comes, I'm off
To sell motor insurance.
Hal's got the mice, yeah, but I've got the celery.
Kids in small funny boxes.
Here comes 803.
Yeah, 803, now, he connects all the others
And speaks fluent Hebrew and Hap and Gz'mu.
When you've got 803 you've got nothing but Steve.
803! 803!
THURG VIM KOLLI VING HEVE!

I don't know what's more frightening... the fact that I managed to compile such complete nonsense into a poem (of sorts).. or that I still remember it.

Juxtaposition

I have a lot of things I want to write about. I introduced Jecca to The Shrub recently; I'd like to do a piece on the history of The Shrub, and how we've all formed this weird, "gigantic, alcoholic, argumentative family."

But I also want to write about Acid Night '05, and how it, for me, was really the night everything kind of cemented together, turning us from what was initially a bunch of college kids hanging out to what it is now. And I want to write about the first time I did DXM and the ensuing life-changing experience.. but this will entail writing about the horribly unhappy times that led up to that. There's so much I could write about, and I'm confident in my ability to describe each individual anecdote.

My concern is that I won't be able to string these anecdotes together. I don't want them to be separate from one another, because they aren't. We look at episodes from different parts of our lives, and we think they're discrete sections. "This was the time I was happy because of this or that. This one over here was the time I was unhappy because of something else." But these things aren't discrete. They all entwine together, weaving themselves into a pattern, and everyone's individual patterns all weave together in some way or another and form something even larger, inconceivably vast.

I can't really describe what I'm feeling right now. It's intensely positive, that's all I can really say. Everything is very good right now, and I'm a pretty happy Rusty at the moment. Perhaps because of this, I've been thinking about a lot of things, and reading through old LJ posts, and I've been able to see things in a new light. I won't go so far as to say I understand everything. I understand a lot more of it, but I can't exactly put into words what it is I understand.

Our lives all tell stories, like I was saying above. The meaning behind mine seems to be, thus far, about how we create our own realities to one degree or another. I'm not saying that just thinking about things in a positive light is going to turn everything into rainbows and puppies. If you're living in some war-torn nightmare scenario, all the positive thinking in the world isn't going to change your daily life. You're still going to get shot at every day. You're still going to spend your waking moments in fear of what's to come.

But you can still choose how it affects you. Obviously, the worse the situation is, the harder it will be to stay afloat. But the choice is still always there. I've been through my own personal hells, yet I still found happiness at different times, despite the darkness around me. Conversely, I've seen heaven in a grain of sand, as the poem goes, and could not reach it because of the cages I had constructed around myself.

Somehow, when you compare the years I spent with my grandmother to the past ten years or so, they both balance each other out. The former was like blips of light in the midst of a vast, all-encompassing darkness. The latter was like playing in some divine, sunlit garden, only to be periodically swayed back into the pitch-black forest surrounding it by the words of formless demons.

I know none of this makes sense. It barely makes sense even to me. What I do know, however, is that I've somehow managed to juxtapose the two themes- light in the midst of darkness and darkness in the midst of light- and, somehow, through this, I've managed to learn how to just *be*.

How this feels is beyond my capacity for description.

In other news... reading through my LiveJournal reminded me of something. I need to resurrect The Nvoblamolux Dhasiddi Du Epic.

In case I've never mentioned this before, this is, in the words of the LJ post, about "an elderly-ish man who worships a newspaper, wears a bright red bathrobe everywhere, has all sorts of weird imaginary friends, and eventually falls in love with and later marries a saucepan that falls on his head".

...Yeah. Nvoblamolux Dhasiddi Du needs to return, walking sideways and shaking his head in rhythm with the Mary Tyler Moore Show's theme song all the way.

<3.

Politics! This will be a rarity, don't worry.

Weird experience last night.

I went to White Clay Drive (Jan's house) to watch the Vice Presidential debate with friends, after having assisted my family with the (now hopefully completed) car fiasco earlier in the evening. The debate was... interesting. The weird experience, though, came before I even got there. You'll see what I mean.

But first, a little about politics... If you've talked to me in the past month or so, you know that I hate Sarah Palin. Well, now I REALLY hate Sarah Palin.

Look, I don't like Biden, either. He moved to have Salvia divinorum made illegal in Delaware, thanks to that kid that supposedly killed himself after doing it (Brett Chidester). Newsflash with that one: I know someone that knew him, and apparently, though I'm digressing by even saying this much, salvia did not lead Brett Chidester to kill himself.

By saying this I'm not stepping aboard my "End The Drug War" soapbox, I'm just trying to prove a point. Biden is a politician, and therefore greedy, self-aggrandizing, and hypocritical, just like any other American politician. If he thinks something will advance his career, he'll vote for it, regardless of whether or not it's actually reasonable or helpful. That's the nature of politics. No democratically elected official is going to ride in on his or her white horse and save the public at the expense of his or her own career.

Which is why perhaps the only valid point Sarah Palin made last night was that Biden seems to have flip-flopped on the war issue. When the sentiment regarding invading Iraq was positive (or, at least as positive as it was ever going to get), Biden was all for the U.S. invading Iraq even if it had to do so itself. Now, the official Barack Obama page claims he and Joe Biden are "fully committed to ending the war on Iraq".

So essentially, he's not to be trusted. But why, then, do I find him more palatable than Sarah Palin?

Because what we're dealing with as far as Biden goes is simple, unadulterated greed. Greed can be reasoned with. I realize this is a naive and idealistic notion, but there is the chance, slight though it may be, that if we as a society manage to convince people like him that the war in Iraq is economically (or possibly even just politically) unsound, they just might listen. Again, the odds against this happening are astronomical, given the vast amounts of money that change hands during wartime, as well as the ignorance of the vast unquestioning flag-waving hordes out there, but theoretically it is possible.

Sarah Palin, though? We're not dealing with reason here. I'm sure part of the reason she's running for VP is the morally questionable, but still understandable lust for wealth and status... but I don't think it's the entire reason. She's on a crusade. Unlike Biden, her support for the war in Iraq has nothing to do with the way the political winds are blowing. She really believes in it.

And what frightens me to no end is that the reason she believes in it is because of her religion. She wants to continue good old Dubya's crusade against the Middle East so that we can keep Israel safe. And if Bush is any indication, her motives for doing so have nothing to do with protecting innocent Israeli civilians from harm and everything to do with a lot of ancient bullshit about rebuilding the Temple of Solomon so that Armageddon can take place.

It isn't at all that I'm out for the destruction of Israel, by any means. I have a ton of Jewish friends, and it's rumored among my family that I may have some degree of Jewish background. Israel, on it's own, is not the problem. The problem is the boorish and hopelessly barbaric policies our nation espouses regarding the protection of Israel. We do nothing diplomatically over there, and on the rare occasions we do, it's from the standpoint of the Paternalistic White Man giving the shining apple of reason to the dirty brown Arabs. The entire situation over there is mindblowingly complex, and will never be solved with brute force and/or imperialistic attitudes.

Like I said, Biden will support bills and policies that may well be backwards, unjust, and oppressive if he thinks it will advance him politically. But again, this means he can be swayed, even if only theoretically, if it can be shown that such bills and policies are, in fact, not advantageous to support.

I said, earlier, that there are no "knights in shining armor" politically. Well, perhaps I was a bit mistaken. Sarah Palin may well be one. But she's not going to scoop you up out of the arms of danger, put you on her white horse, and ride you to her beautiful castle in some idyllic realm of peace, where you'll live happily ever after. No, she's out to bring us all back to a world where men are burly, jocular hunters, women are barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen, and men, women and children alike literally fear their vengeful, terrible god. She's a knight, all right, straight out of the Middle Ages.

Honestly, I don't care what people choose to believe in. I have my beliefs, you have yours. As long as your beliefs don't affect my life, I don't care if you believe God is a giant hamburger and that when we die we all become his condiments.

I do care, however, when religion plays a role in policy, with my main griping point being the war in Iraq, or in general, really. You want to send our troops to war to keep us safe? Fine. That's their job, when you think about it. (Whether or not our conquest of Iraq ever had anything to do with national security is another issue I won't discuss here, but the reasoning, at least, is sound.) But don't you dare send people's husbands, wives, sisters, brothers, fathers, mothers, and friends to war for your personal beliefs. There's really only two degrees of separation, at best, between those of us here in the States and the military over in Iraq or Afghanistan. You either have friends or family members over there, or you know someone who does.

I hated Sarah Palin even more last night after I saw her simpering face smirking at Biden's admittedly repetitious and woefully out-of-touch attempts at defending his position. It was the arrogance I saw in her, really, that did it for me. The fact that some soccer- oops, excuse me: HOCKEY- mom, operating based on Cretaceous-era beliefs, can not only directly affect the lives of millions of people worldwide, but can also feel very secure about her right to do so, is absolutely insane. The fact that said hockey mom may have a hand in our friends and family members not coming back from Iraq for another few years is monstrous.

And the fact that the Cretaceous-era beliefs she holds, which have at least an influence on her rabid support for our administration's tragically flawed policies on Israel, may in fact be the ticket to getting her elected thanks to the shockingly high number of people who also share such prehistoric notions, is horribly disheartening.

I don't want to register as a Democrat, because I'm absolutely not one. I'm a hard-line anarcho-libertarian, thankyouverymuch. But I'm tempted to vote for the Democratic side, just this once, just to make sure I can look back on things and say "Well, McCain and Palin still won, kids, which is why you're wearing loincloths and we have to rummage through a lot of radioactive waste every day to find dinner, but I didn't vote for 'em."

Because I think this election is somehow important, and this has to do with the "weird experience" I mentioned earlier. I went to the liquor store to buy my current liquor fad product (Mike's Hard Lemonade), and the clerks were watching the debate. I made an instant friend just by talking about how I hated Palin. I walked down North College on my way to White Clay Drive, and you could see the debate being watched inside people's houses and apartments.

I'm generally pretty proud of my absolute disconnect with pop culture. My sister gets some celebrity magazine; I have no idea who the people are in it. I don't watch TV, and I haven't voluntarily turned on the radio in years. My point here is that it's very rare for me to be involved in something that the majority of people are also involved with, and it gave me a really eerie feeling.

People are fed up with all the lies and corruption. The battle lines seem to be forming, between those who would rocket everything back to some nightmarish 1950's Leave It To Beaver scenario (with guns and far more degradation of women, of course), and those who, regardless of how much we may blunder everything, do have at least some desire to improve things.

The Chinese had a curse: "may you live in interesting times". It's too soon to tell if it really is a curse or a blessing, but it's quite a ride, thus far.

A Story About Sunshine

So last night I was talking with John about DXM, and how, though the ways it affected us were both very different, it still served as something of a catalyst to break us both free of certain mental prisons we had been stuck in prior to having experienced it. And I was thinking of writing about my first DXM experience, and how it changed my life forever afterwards (in a tremendously positive way).

But then, for some reason, I got to thinking about Sunshine, and... well... that's also a story that needs to be told.

And John, if you read this... I know you hated Sunshine and his patchouli-scentedness, but... you have to understand the complete story.

Sunshine was one of the defining elements of last year's Chuck's Farm. There are many, many such defining elements; he was only one of them. Chuck's Farm can't really be described in memories or vignettes; certain things just stick out in your mind. For instance, one of the defining elements of Chuck's Farm '06 was me, zwarked out of my mind on acid, DOB (I think that's probably what it was...), nitrous, pot, and probably heroin by that point, watching some dirty, middle-aged literal-hillbilly farmer angrily chasing a piglet around while calling it a "scrongly shittum".

These are the memories that last a lifetime. But I'm digressing.

The aforementioned pig episode happened on A Saturday At Chuck's Farm, as did Sunshine. The capitalization is justified if you've been there.

Friday Night At Chuck's Farm is as follows. You hit up the sketched-out, Howard-Stern-looking old head in the van for his ridiculously good quality acid (which, as I said, was also DOB the one year). You eat way too much of it, forget why you're in the woods (you're looking for firewood), listen to people making music that makes the universe give birth to itself inside your head, talk with your friends about the moon eventually just GOING AWAY and about the way planets smell, figure out a little bit more about why in the world we're all here on this miserable rock and how to make the best of it, and generally have a fantastic time while you're at it.

Then the Funrise occurs. The Funrise is John's way of not speaking about the sunrise, which heralds a number of dark and horrible things. Chief among which is the fact that eventually the acid wears off and you realize you're sitting in the middle of a goddamn field, literally 30 minutes driving distance from anything resembling a town, with maybe 7-20 of your close friends and probably about two thousand complete strangers, all of whom are on drugs, and many of whom are carrying guns.

And you also realize that with all the drug-taking and loud music and fireworks going on, you're not going to get any sleep at all for the second night in a row, and this is a problem when you remember that there is some sort of "Real World" out there beyond the borders of this bacchanalian anarchist utopia... and said "Real World" requires that you get up for work on Monday morning.

This is Saturday At Chuck's Farm.

Last year was no different. I spent the better part of Saturday morning and afternoon blissed out on my newfound serenity, having tangled with four hits of LSD the van guy said he had saved from 1968, from a Grateful Dead tour, and come out the victor. I have no idea whether or not this is true, but I do know this... it was STRONG. But, eventually, as my time without sleeping was approaching the 30-hour mark, and I had the strong, and later confirmed, suspicion that that time would double before I met the sweet embrace of sleep once more, I started to get the Saturday At Chuck's Farm Disease.

Usually this consists of thoughts of "why in the world did I do this, I'll never do this again if you let me out of here still sane" (even though you do it the next chance you get) and grandiose schemes to hitchhike to some form of civilization, before you realize you lost your debit card, you spent most of your cash-at-hand on things that made you see colors, and you'd still have 3 hours of transit time before you could sleep anyway.

It was in this state of mind that I met Sunshine.

Sunshine was a drug dealer. Or, as he put it, a "gangster."

A Hawaiian gangster, mind you.

I don't remember exactly how we met, except that he had somehow fallen into the gravity of the Magical Adventure Club 3000, as do all strange and wonderful things. I do remember staggering out of the tent after sunset, having drank a prodigious amount of scotch in a failed attempt at sleep. Gabe and Sunshine were sitting around the campfire, talking. I decided to share the remainder of my pot with them in the hopes that maybe that would put me to sleep. No dice, of course.

The sleepless horror that is Saturday Night At Chuck's Farm makes you realize one thing and one thing alone: all we have is each other. And if you didn't know how before, you learn to make conversation as if it was your last desperate hope towards sanity.. because it is. All you have to keep the nagging, post-acid thought-loops about how miserable you're going to be Monday morning at bay is the words and ideas of others.

So Gabe and Sunshine and I talked, for what seemed like forever.

I realized that whatever I had thought I knew about love and lust was mere child's play in the face of this bearish Hawaiian man's patchouli-scented animal passion for some girl whose dreadlocks "drove him insane". I think this is probably what John didn't like about him. (John?)

But then we started talking about DXM, and that's when things got really interesting.

Sunshine told me that he had taken so much DXM one time that he had started going up a flight of stairs, reached the top, and then, without any continuity whatsoever, found himself back where he started. He said that his life had split, at that point, into one reality that had kept going once it reached the top of the stairs, the reality that had gone on to find him talking to me at that moment, and another reality doomed to climb the stairs eternally.

And I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had been in a similar place once. I knew exactly what it meant for time to stop, to experience time as slices of static, unchanging moments, one cel in an animation after another, all totally disparate. I had experienced these "slices of time" both from an outside observer's perspective, and from within, trapped in bizarre, non-geometric entanglements with emotionless cyclopean anthropoid things, electric femininity, and inanimate objects, for all eternity. And for all I know, in some reality, some other me is still there.

I don't know what's weirder.. that I've met a Hawaiian gangster named Sunshine... or that I connected with him on such a deep, existential level.

Life is strange.

mottos and metaphors

I slept for 15 hours today; I got home yesterday at around 6, and progressively felt worse and worse, freezing and shaking, until I finally went to bed. With the aid of our good friend Benadryl, I slept till about 3 PM, stayed awake long enough to check Facebook and write an email, then went back to sleep until about 11. I still feel ugh, but the freezing part is gone. It's Benadryl time soon.

With my sleep schedule well and truly fux0red by illness and diphenhydramine, I've been up since 11, trying to get some writing done.

I've had several mottos over the years. A sad one, about 10 years ago, was "embrace pain, fear nothing." This was when I was overcoming the Void, mentioned in earlier posts. Running full-tilt into emotional states, regardless of outcome, seemed to be a good way to reintroduce myself to emotions again. And it was, I suppose, though I cringe to this day when I remember the almost childlike intensity of some of the more negative emotional states I found myself in.

For a while after that, my motto was basically "It's all meaningless anyway!" I was working on music I referred to simply as -> 0 <- , pronounced "zero", and which would later become The Happiest Sadist. I suppose I exposed myself a bit too intimately to some bad emotional states, since I had become, at the time of this motto, a tad.. shall we say nihilistic? It didn't help that I was doing first-plateau doses of DXM on practically a daily basis; I've noticed that a number of people who get involved with DXM develop either a fear of or an intense fascination with the concept of zero. In my case, it was the latter.

A happier, yet still somewhat off-kilter motto I developed sometime in 2004, following a string of unrequited love affairs, was the oft-used and generic "Carpe diem." This I followed to the letter. I still look back on this time with a bit of romanticism; it was freedom minus my previous nihilism, yet with an unfortunate undertone of unconscious self-destruction. I didn't really believe anything would work, but I had come to love life again, and felt that even trying to do what I loved was worth any pain and suffering produced by my actions.

I shocked, horrified, and awed people with my apparent callous disregard for my personal health, safety, and sanity, but I can't say I really *regret* much of this period.

I'd like to think that my outlook has matured over the years, perhaps as a result of the "carpe diem" phase I went through. It's no longer necessary to me to push anything; I'm content to let things go where they will.

What follows is an extended metaphor for my current view of the world. I don't relally have a motto anymore, per se.

Imagine you live in a large, classroom-type place with a myriad of other people. You are all separated from each other by unbreakable glass walls. You have no need for food, drink, or sleep. Instead, you sit at your desk all day, and atop your desk is all the art supplies you could ever need: paint, brushes, canvases, paper, you name it.

You have a choice: you can spend your days painting, or you can do nothing and amuse yourself however you will. You can try to entertain or be entertained by those in the room with you, but keep in mind that you will never be able to touch them or reach them in any way.

If you choose to paint, you also have to realize that at the close of every day, a horrible monster will come into the room and eat everyone's paintings. There is no way to prevent this. If your paintings are especially beautiful or meaningful, the monster will first make sure to deface or otherwise pervert your paintings before finally eating them.

If you choose not to paint, the monster may still come for you anyway, and you'll come to sometime later to find a tiny piece of yourself missing.

What do you do? Some in the room with you choose not to paint, and you watch them grow smaller and smaller, over time. Less human. But that's their choice. You have no right to decide for them, or even to judge them on their decisions.

Those that do choose to paint are continually saddened by their artwork being eaten and/or destroyed every day. Some of them, as a result, paint only scenes of violence or cruelty or ugliness, in the hopes that the monster will either find them unnecessary to deface or even pleasing enough to not eat. And the monster does take some of these paintings home to its unthinkable lair, but these paintings are typically so horrifying and empty that they appall anyone who sees them.

The way I see it, the only option is to paint that which inspires, that which is beautiful... if the end result is ultimately the same, if the monster is going to eat and/or mutilate your paintings no matter what, unless you give in to it and paint only the scenes of death and decay it loves... why *not* paint what is beautiful? Yes, it will leave you in the end. The monster will take it from you, belittle you, and then paint over it with horrible colors, perverting it into untold horrors... but you had it for a while. It was yours. You saw it, you experienced it. The monster cannot take that from you.

And anyone else that sees or experiences what you paint will have the same experience of beauty and inspiration that you have had. You will have brightened their lives, for a few minutes at least.

What else can we do? We're alive, whether we like it or not. Everyone else's mileage may vary, but I'd rather fill my life with what gives me hope and a sense of meaning than tool through each day waiting to die.

And who knows? Maybe if we all create enough beauty and inspiration, we'll somehow be able to drive the monster back someday. I doubt it, but I think it's worth a try.

As an aside, I suppose I do have a motto now. It's far less applicable to daily life, but it fits. I was thinking about it while trying desperately to get this one story done tonight.

The motto is:
"Writing fiction is REALLY FUCKING HARD."

Introducing... The Cosmic Bubble

Okay, so.. I've fixed one part of the timestamp problem with this site. Except now apparently they have AM switched with PM. I wrote this at 1:51 PM today, not AM. Weird. (grumble)

So my life has been, in general, quite strange. In fact, though I've been through some bad times (obviously), I think the weird times far outnumber the bad ones. Below is a little anecdote that's so weird that when I think about it, I really question my sanity... except this was, indeed, real. And no drugs were involved. I was eight.

My parents sent me to this camp for smart kids the summer before I turned nine. It was really cool. It was in this converted high school, and we made rockets and played these really weird, Apple II-quality pseudo-educational computer games where you had these little characters that had to solve puzzles and make decisions. I made new friends, only one of whose names I remember (Ben Kowalski?) and generally had a good time.

This wasn't strange at all. What was strange was "The Cosmic Bubble."

The entire camp was apparently sponsored by the whole DARE/Just Say No! campaign of the late eighties. McGruff the Crime Dog made sporadic appearances. His presence during the Cosmic Bubble episode was sort of the icing on the cake.

They gathered us together one day and told us we were going to experience "The Cosmic Bubble!" I was a strange child, world-weary and cynical, having, just six months earlier, had a recurring nightmare that scarred me for years. I was used to idealistic People In Charge being continually disappointed by our generation's apparent inability to get along with each other at that time. In second grade they called us to an assembly in which they made us all sign the "Declaration of Interdependence" which I guess they thought would have enough of an impact on us to make us realize we were all one and/or make us stop our inane, pointless battles. No dice. We were beating on each other during the assembly.

I thought "The Cosmic Bubble" would be something like that. I was very wrong.

No, instead, they led us all to a series of corridors in the school where the lights had all been turned out, save for intermittent strobe lighting. The corridors were lined, somehow, with plastic sheeting along the floors, walls, and ceilings. We were, essentially, walking through a vast network of plastic tubing, similar to the scene in E.T. where they're walking between (I think) the van they're using to transport E.T. and the NASA building. I can't describe it any better than that.

Worse, they had somehow installed some sort of fan system that caused the plastic tubing to periodically expand and contract, as if it were breathing.

So.. picture this, if you will. You're eight years old, you're in a bunch of darkened hallways, lit by the eerie, staccato glow of strobe lights, and the walls, floors, and ceilings are breathing.

Oh, and to top it all off, while you're having this near-hallucinatory experience, McGruff the Crime Dog is wandering around, muttering vague warnings about drugs.

This whole experience left enough of a mark on me that, nine years later, during a fever hallucination, I saw McGruff coming for me. He was apparently quite incensed that I had been stealing vodka from my parents' liquor cabinet.

If my "Cosmic Bubble" experience was at all typical, it's kind of unsurprising so many of us have gone on to experiment with drugs.

the void makes its first written appearance!

I don't know where this came from, or why I decided to share it. It's a bit bleak, but it's all true, and it does have a happy ending. I promise.

Also, Blogger apparently is off by 6 hours. To figure out when I've written things, take the time the entry is listed as, and add 6 hours to it. For example, this will probably say I posted at 11 PM. It's actually 5 AM. Weird. I don't know why I find it important to inform you of this but here it is, anyway.

****

There came a time, January of 1998, to be exact, when I woke up one morning and realized that the Pavlovian anti-feeling conditioning I had been inflicting on myself had been entirely successful. I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

And the realization was so horrifying I spent the day twisting and turning on my bed, desperate for some scrap of emotion to feed me, something to give my life some sort of color or meaning, finding nothing. I wasn't happy. I wasn't sad. I wasn't angry. I wasn't content. I wasn't anything at all.

Emotions give our lives direction. We wake up with certain feelings that color our day. Our entire lives are a shifting tapestry of words and actions, both caused by and causing emotions. To eliminate emotion entirely removes any semblance of pattern or meaning to these tapestries. Life becomes a set of routine tasks, blobs of paint thrown randomly onto a canvas, no rhyme or reason connecting anything. You live one moment to the next, you do what you're told because there is absolutely no reason at all to not do what you're told. Dislike what you're doing? So what? You don't- you can't- like what you're doing, either. Pain is gone, but so is pleasure.

If you think it impossible for a person to eliminate all feeling, you don't know me, and you don't know how far I'll go in order to prove a point or win a battle. I realize this narrative is a tad dark; there is a light at the end of the tunnel, however. Be patient.

I found myself unable to live in an utterly emotionless state, so I began the process of deprogramming myself sometime during the following summer. By the subsequent winter, I had regained a good portion of my former emotional capacity... but I still remembered what it was to be without feelings at all, and could slip back into that when the situation called for it.

The benefit to this came about perhaps a year later. To my utter delight, my grandmother had gone completely off the deep end, deciding to sell the house in which she kept us all prisoner. I was ecstatic.

One night, I was up late doing AP Chem and AP Calc homework. I was sitting in the living room, the contents of which had been stripped bare of furniture and the meager furnishings that had been present in it. There had never been carpeting in it, save for a strange, ovoid rug in the center of the room. This was gone. It was essentially me, a couch without cushions, and a table lamp sitting on the floor.

I was in my little corner of the room, surrounded by the glow of the lamp, contentedly working on my homework, my thoughts repeatedly drifting to the girl I was making progress with at school. At some point, my grandmother stomped/shuffled into the room. She feigned an expression of concern.

"Are you still up?" she asked. I smiled blankly, slipping effortlessly back into the feelingless void.

"Yeah, I'm still trying to finish this," I said, cheerfully, indicating my work. She mulled over this for a second, and her expression changed, becoming more a portrait of her inner workings; sly, calculating.

"Are you sure you're not.. upset over anything?" She said this with such an undertone of hope it was hard not to laugh. I knew exactly what she wanted. She was scanning my face, looking for a reaction. She wanted to see pain in my eyes. She wanted me to tell her how I didn't understand what was going on, how I was afraid of what would happen, afraid of not having anywhere to live. Then she would express mock sympathy for me, and tell me how it really wasn't her fault, it was my mother's. Her hands were tied, you see. If my mother had just been more cooperative, she would never have had to do this, didn't I understand? And all this would go on amid a slew of ghoulish, pseudo-grandmotherly clucking and tutting.

By "cooperative" she meant obedient. Broken. She wanted to see me hurt, afraid. And she wanted to twist the situation such that I would blame my mother for my fear and pain. She wanted to erode, distort, and dissolve the relationship I had with my mother. She wanted to humiliate her by sending us out into the street, hopefully with my sister and I blaming our mother for it. This would be her revenge against the ungrateful child who had dared to defy her some thirty-odd years earlier.

I knew the game. I had seen her try to achieve it for the past seven years. I hadn't let her win then. I certainly wasn't going to now.

"Nope!" I said, smiling winningly, carefree, the picture of innocence. "I'm not upset about anything." Her eyes probed my face, looking for weakness. She could detect a smile held half a second too long, or with too much or too little force, and use it as a trigger to fly into a rage. She found no incongruities in my facial expression; the void was serving me well.

"Are you sure?" she asked again, smiling hopefully. Her eyes, hungry, desperate for pain to feed on, did not match her smile.

"I'm sure!" I told her. I shrugged. "I have to get back to my work, now." Mystified, she nodded, murmuring things I'm sure were meant to sound supportive, and set off back to her room, periodically looking over her shoulder to catch me in a moment of weakness. She found none.

A few minutes later, she came back, this time bearing a Coke from the hoard she kept in her room. My family had, some years before, been so poor we had trouble putting food on the table. My parents fed us three meals a day, but we were only a hair's breadth away from being far worse off than that. I remember eating a dog biscuit once. A good portion of suburban America has no idea what it is to go to sleep dreaming of food.

But she always had enough to eat: boxes and boxes of cookies, donuts filled with all kinds of delicious sweetness, you name it. Knowing we were... not starving by any means, just hungry, unsatisfied by the amount of food we were able to afford... she would attempt to lure my sister and I over to her "side" with her delectable poisons. The price was listening to her litanies of hate about my parents, stories which were blown completely out of proportion so as to make her into the hero and my parents into sadistic monsters bent on oppressing her. Often enough, the stories were not just falsely represented, but entirely fabricated. I can truthfully say I never took the bait.

But I recognized what her bringing me the Coke out of her secret stash meant, and my heart filled with elation even through the numbness of the void.

She was conceding defeat. She had recognized, even though it took seven years in the making, that she had no power over me.

I had won.

She had come into my life and warped and twisted and eroded everything in it, and no one could do anything to stop her. For seven years, I had burned with resentment over this, over how utterly and completely wrong it was that someone so small, so fundamentally pathetic, really, could have so much power over people like my parents and my sister, who, despite any differences we may have, are immensely strong people firmly on the side of good.

And yet I had finally won against her. I cannot put into words how I felt.

As for the actual deprogramming process, in which I had to re-learn how to feel feelings... I shall not describe that here. I have taken up too much of your time already, and the telling of it is better suited to another story, anyway. Suffice it to say that it was, without a doubt, the most unbelievably painful process I have ever experienced.

I have read that the reason heroin withdrawal is so nightmarishly painful is that your body has essentially forgotten how to manage pain. It has become so used to its opioid receptors being stimulated that it has decided to cease stimulating them itself. And so, when the artificial stimulation ceases, practically every stimulation causes pain; the body has no means of calming stimulation anymore.

Imagine this on an emotional level, and you'll have an idea what I'm talking about.

But what I have in my life now has made it all worth it. I have people from all walks of life who care about me, and vice versa. I have strengthened bonds with my immediate family for having suffered through the dark times with them. And I have come far enough through the lingering darkness to have had friends and even lovers in the years since.

So many people out there have far less than I do, and, knowing this, I would gladly repeat the whole mess over again if, by some miracle, I could take them to where I am now by doing so.

<3.

I thought I was going to sleep. I was wrong! Hello insomnia! Here's a story.

****

He thought back to everyone that had wronged him, and forgave them.

Another part of his mind, buried, cold, reptilian, hissed its displeasure at this foolishness, this pretentious Jesus trip. But he had listened to worse from it, listened to it, and, to his continued shame and regret, had even acted on these still, harsh whispers of venom.

"How," the voices continued, "do you even presume to have the power to forgive anyone? What is this 'forgiveness' you speak of? So you 'forgive' those who have caused you such suffering, such distress, such pain? So what? The pain is still there. Have you forgotten?"

"It doesn't matter," he answered the voices in his mind, "for I have learned from my suffering. If I were as boastful as you say I am, I would say that I cherish all such opportunities for growth. But I avoid pain like anyone else, often unfortunately at the cost of more pain to myself and even others. But everything I have endured has benefit, for I can use my knowledge to help others avoid suffering."

"Such pretty words," the voices spat, their alien clangor now more apparent with the rise in volume. "But you forget something. You claim you have forgiven others for the pain they have caused you, as if that meant anything. But what about the pain you have caused others? How can you, in your arrogance, presume to 'forgive' anyone else for causing you pain, when, in all likelihood, any 'injustice' you felt was done to you was merely their way of getting back at you for having caused them suffering? How can you simply ignore this?"

"I cannot," he said, simply. "I wish I could undo everything I have done to others. But this is not within my power."

The voices hummed with malevolent intensity, moving in for the kill. "See? You are weak, pathetic. You speak of forgiveness, some magnanimous gesture. Oh, how great you are, you who can deign to 'forgive' those who have merely sought to repay your own unkindnesses. All your words are empty. You are a child pretending to be king. What power have you? Who do you think you are? What unbelievable arrogance possessed you to believe you had the right or the power to forgive anyone else? Where would you even get this idea?"

"Because I forgive myself." The voices were silent for a moment, frightened, then resounded again, more dissonant than before.

"What difference does that make? How can you presume to 'forgive' yourself, you who have caused so much hurt in the world? What incredible pomposity! Let the world see you as you are, bloated on your own feelings of self-worth, your delusions of grandeur. How can you dare 'forgive' anyone?"

"Because they are human, just as I am. And in the end, our mistakes don't matter as long as even one person exists to gather up the fallen threads of our lives and weave them into something new. We are all experiencing life in all its awful, ridiculous, horrifying majesty. We are all billions upon billions of electrons hurtling into one another, creating sheer novelty for the joy of it. We are all whirling madly, ecstatically, through this insane dance of life, terrified, rendered speechless by the beauty of it all. Mistakes? There are no mistakes, only different threads in the pattern of life."

The voices retreated, sharp staccato snatches of malice. "What of the Holocaust? What of any of the other horrors and monstrosities mankind has visited upon itself and the world? You dare to write these off as some poetic drivel about creation and how there are no mistakes?"

"No," he said, listening as the voices crouched, waiting to leap for his throat. "It is only how I see it. I have no power to stop such things. All I have power to do is recognize myself as human, as is everyone else. I have the power to rid myself of hate for others, and for myself. And as long as I can draw breath, I will continue to do so, regardless of what I may experience."

Hissing, the voices drew back, unable to challenge a declaration of will such as this.

Welcome to my new blog. This is intended to be a collection of stories, fictional and otherwise. If you want generally whiny personal updates, check here.

In person I'm often incoherent, unable to sort my thoughts into a logical progression. I'm continually trying to get my point across, but the stories I tell tend to be rambling and pointless, often stopping somewhere in the middle because I've already told you the end and I've suddenly remembered some vastly important detail that changes the entire story.

I've been writing since forever. With writing, I have the time to sort everything out. I've lived a strange, strange life and I think there are stories to tell out of this that need telling.

That's not going to happen via speech, however, unless you like disconnected, homeless-person-esque narratives.

I should be sleeping now because I have stuff to do later but I wanted to post this and see what it looked like.