Thoughts

Bitter pill affect

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When given social permissions to be myself I don’t do constraint or what is termed normal. I’m poetry and flowers and that tea you mentioned in passing that one time. I’m kisses and touches and tears. I’m telling friends that I love them and music, and songs made up and sung right there.

I’m either locked down or free and I don’t know how to be else. And I don’t know that I want to be.

So if you see me smiling for no reason or catch me with tears in my eyes or, on extremely rare occasion, complimenting some random stranger then walking away. Be happy. You’ve caught a rare glimpse past my shell. Something few ever see.

In joy and in pain I, like most of us, am hidden. A false front. A city of doors. A maze without end.
And sometimes…often…I feel so lost

Waiting for the door to open, having lost the desire to go through

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I’ve talked about big things
Past things
Love things
I’ve talked about social things
Emotional things
Psychological things
I’ve talked about the inner workings of my soul
About music
About poets
I’ve written erotica
One off spy stories
I’ve turned a one off erotica story into a fool blown series with characters and plot
I’ve written, performed, recorded, and edited a serial novelization told in 3 voices and perspectives which span numerous hours and which took an hour of editing per 5 minutes of audio.
Then I did that 2 more times

But now I’m having trouble finding words
But really it’s finding time
Time to sit and be without worry weighing me down
Without concern for finances which never consumed me before
I’ve been lucky enough to have a place to land
I’ve been lucky enough to have freedom enough to be able to write
Even though that’s not how I make money
I dislike having lost that
But I’ve traveled the road of preservation of past instead of future
And that is always filled with painful regrets
Paths cut before completion
It’s like there is a membrane where before was a open door
Writing still exists on the other side
Just now it’s an effort filled with stress and struggle to get there
Maybe it’s lack of sleep
Or maybe living unsettled like this is always a shatter away from failure
The thinner the margin the harder the fall
And at some point the fall seems inevitable

Half awake fall

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I woke up early this morning and found myself reading articles on Medium. As I often do. But today I came across things that led me down the self reflection route.

I haven’t found anything new. Not really. Though I do see a certain lack of certainty. An intellectual understanding of the positions of others which may have been a visceral understanding prior. I think I’m shielding my emotions more.

I feel distant and compartmentalized. Yet I still cry and feel and laugh. Joy and sorrow are a part of my heart and I feel them.

So it’s not like the wall I built before. The house of closed doors where nothing was felt. And it’s not like the tsunamic aftermath of that wall breaking. Nor is it the flayed sadness which permeated after.

This is new. And I’m not sure how I feel about it.

It makes the days and people easier to cope with. But it also makes the words and thoughtforms of art harder to feel. Its like a little magic has gone out of the world to foster stability.

I don’t know what I think about it.

False ‘sins’

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I like everything about Vegas except that it’s Vegas.
I like the lights. That it never seems to sleep. That there are restaurants beyond Denny’s that are open 24/7. I like that the people are present but that they ignore you. I like the high desert and the distant mountains. It all adds up.

But, the frenetic entropic energy of cycled hope and despair which is the core of the city is a drain. The false veneer which residents acknowledge with a nod and a wink grates on me. It is like living in a eggshell. Cozy and brittle. A shorter than normal step from oblivion. And it’s a company town. Every aspect of it is run by the conglomerates which present a different face but reach with the same hands. The law and the power is wielded to enforce the tourist industry. And no statistics which show else is allowed. I know. I’ve looked.

I’ve read the “aw, shucks it’s just people” articles that attempt to justify it. They fall short of the mark.

It’s an interesting town to visit. But it’s not one I’d find myself in again and again. Plastic places pretending to be real.

Uncomfortable with crowds

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Depression is insidious. For me, when its not overwhelming sadness, it’s self destruction. It’s eating too much. Spending too much. Pushing too hard. Overcorrecting until people are sick of it. Or staying up way too late even when I recognize that I’m tired. Even when I’m falling asleep in my chair.

And the thing is, things aren’t bad. I’m anxious for a trip I have to take for work. Basically because there will be a ton of people there and I won’t have any social cover or retreat. Other than that, I’m good.

But still I push past endurance. Still I do this. Self destruction. In service to nothing. And, while I’ve gotten better down the years, I’m still not well. I don’t even know what well looks like. And it baffles me that there are people out in the world who have no idea what this is. They never feel like this. And if they do, they shake it off. Like it’s nothing, like it’s easy.

To me, they are aliens. I can’t relate to that frame of reference. I don’t know what it is. So we are aliens to each other. Describing the indiscribable. And getting lost in the words we can’t share.

And I wonder, how many dichotomies are like this? How many fundamental schisms of perspective are there?

We share this world, but I don’t think we live in the same one. And that is the hardest thing to accept and convey. The reason we are so fundamentally divided is that we have codified our stances as fundamental parts of our being. And so, every deviation is a existential fight for identity with no person or group able to give ground. Lest we are forced to redefine our self as other.

I despair for humanity. Not because I think we are doomed but because I see the downward trend. And I don’t know if we’ll make it out. I hope there is some angle I’m not seeing. Some truth that lays fallow and unknown waiting to bring forth life.

But still its late, and even now I procrastinate.
I can still get a couple of hours of sleep, maybe.
I can control me. And maybe that’s all we could ever do. And maybe that will need to be enough.

Slow to wake when nightmares replace dreams

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I wake slowly. Knowing that the extra twenty minutes I snooze my alarm to won’t matter. But I still do it. I pet the cat by my side. She rolls over my hand and goes back to sleep. I long to join her. But that extra 20 minutes was a dream. A hope which fades with every passing second. I have to get up.

It’s not a particularly hard job. Nor a harsh work environment. I’m just tired. So fucking tired of too short weekends and work weeks which drag away hours from those weekends.

It’s what fuels discontent. What makes every day a little worse. The accumulation of hours without end. Without purpose. Without hope of change.

As the day wears on, I am reminded of good things. Of love. Of hope. Of kissable lips. Of the dream of the brighter world. The sadness lingers like hot breathe against soft skin.

Quench my thirst on love. On desire. On dreams of far places, where I am becomes we. And what was becomes joy.

When an author dreams

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Out past the fringes on a world run in partnership with embodied ai there is a threat coming which has already fought 3 galaxy class military cruisers. After a battle in which 2 of the ai’s ran rather than risk destruction the third sent a tightbeam containing the footage of the battle and the last backup they had to the nearest outpost. Unfortunately, at light speeds the message took 12 years to arrive and while the message was intact, the backup was incomplete. It was was clear though that the enemy had no desire to negotiate or speak and instead desired only destruction.

They spun the backup up but were disappointed to find that most of its memories of the journey out to the rim had been lost. So they had no idea what vector the threat was coming from. Central had received word from the 2 retreating ships but their telemetry was incomplete. The leader of their expedition was lost.

The leaders backup was embodied in a small vessel capable of space flight and left to its own devices. No longer relevant.

Years pass as the Ai and humans prepare for a battle they are unsure of

The little Ai is seen as an annoyance, a demenstration of the fallibility of even beings such as they.

6 years later the little ai receives a narrow beam which nearly fries his tesseract brain with an overlad of information. The remaining telemetry and backup containing a couple of years of captivity. The data is seen as suspect but they are required by law to allow the ai his memories. Now the ai is distrusted because it’s possible the memories have been tampered with

But the ai knows that what’s coming was contained in one of the tower ships commissioned by humanity to explore out beyond the fringes. Ships which came back strange and requiring human/clone crew which engage in bizzare behaviour to further some unknown goal.

One such ship resides in the ai’s system and it flies out to it after seeking the assistance of a human. Since human thoughtforms are strange and since this human was willing to listen.

They arrive and find a massive interior dedicated to some kind of game in which the humans gather some kind of power to themselves and go on a journey. Gathering more and more power until they can win the ‘game’. Everything on the ship is a game and even death is impermanent. As a new clone will be grown and the consciousness embodied there. So many deaths has resulted in a kind of memory fatigue which means it’s inhabitamts no longer realize what they were trying to win

And the most frightening thing is, this ship type was what attacked the ai fringes those many years ago

Outside even when included

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Every year my family gets together to celebrate the holidays, Christmas and Thanksgiving. And every year they ask someone to say a prayer. This year they asked me. I said no. I was gracious about it, but I said No.

Because how do I say a prayer when it won’t be to their god. How can I say a prayer when it will first be spoken in the language of my prayers then again in their language. How would I explain that we don’t give thanks for what our god gave us but ask what we can do for our god. Not a god of blessings but one of a deeper path. How do I explain an entire lifetime of belief and structure and obligate choices. How do I even this prayer which is orchestrated would be an affront.

I don’t know. Don’t know how to tell them I’m not like them. In how many ways I’m not like them. And even when they grasp my paganism, they think that yule is a good thing, something similar to a celebration instead of a solemn affair.

It’s exhausting to stay quiet. To not broach subjects. To keep quiet on others. And still, there is always more. Lines that can’t be crossed and words that can’t be said.

My god would say, “The work is the work. You have to act before you can know.” And that’s true but how do you tell them that what they presume, even when told repeatedly otherwise, isn’t true.

It’s an odd feeling. To be included but excluded at the same time. To belong to something but not fit into it. There is a pressure and a sadness there.
I know how easy it would be to give in, to shred my self and conform. To lie and mouth their words in petty forgery of faith.

But then who would I be?

The gap grows in our manic grins

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Imagination and hope seem to be the two ways we hurt ourselves the most. We live in some future world where the daily struggle to be alive, to exist, is easy. So we miss what might be in the moment. What opportunity exists right now. But still, that escape of hope is vital. Self delusion is necessary. Without it, we would not be able to function in the corrupt and fucked up world where we are a step away. A mistake away from disappearance. From falling out of the daily beating of ‘normal’ life and into the shadow world where broken people and fractured society walk.

The consequences of failure are so high for most of us that we don’t, can’t, take the necessary risks to get beyond the cliff edge. We depend on hope. On lotteries and sweepstakes and the hope that maybe we can live without being afraid.

This is the consequences of not just late stage capitalism but of a society that believes that anyone can be rich if they work hard enough. And so make sure that the rich don’t have to live in the same world as the rest of us. Because we aspire to be there one day and we don’t want to have our funds taken when we do.

But that’s poor people, honest people, thinking. The thought that a seventy percent tax rate means that they actually pay seventy percent the same way we look at our paychecks and wonder where all the money goes. They don’t. They have access to all the tax dodges and schemes which allow them to pay in the zero to ten percent range. So that’s what they pay. And those dodges are legal. Because they’ve convinced us that them paying less means that somewhere, somehow we will get paid more.

Maybe in the past wealth built things. Roads and schools and infrastructure. A thin cynical maybe. But now, wealth only builds more wealth. And companies do not pass record profits on to their employees. They pass them on to their stockholders. Which isn’t us, because we can’t afford to play in their arena. And even if we tried, that extra ten dollars a year isn’t going to change our life. And neither is the extra ten grand that tax cuts profit them going to make a difference, if they even notice.

So, why do we keep doing this? Because we hope. Because we secretly aspire to be there “one day”. And we think ten thousand is alot and we would love to have that money. But we are not them. And we never will be. The system is gated. And even if you squeeze through the bars, somehow…and become the wealthy. You do so leaving behind the millions of people who weren’t lucky enough to have the opportunity, the twin composition of chance and foresight, to squeeze through before you close the loophole behind you.

Other capitalist countries don’t have our problems. Because they have societies which are not built on iconoclastic single points. Which aren’t built on the idea that anyone can be rich. And while that thought structure is useful, it is also harmful. And we are seeing first hand exactly how harmful it is when protections are stripped away in an effort to protect their wealth. Rather than protect the rest of us from their casual predation.

Brief contemplation on the confluence of art and life

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It’s hard to keep writing when the song in your heart is silent. When its constant mutters and chatter bleed off into silence so quietly that you jerk awake, lulled by the absence for those brief moments indulging in that quiet that never seems to stay. Until you see that the chatter has gone. And you are left with the quiet.

It’s no secret that I use my pain and bouts of depression to fuel my art. And there is no doubt that it has led to a well fed blood forest.

It’s weird. The quiet was the moments when I would create in. Maybe I need to reassess. And know that this is not quiet. Instead it’s the steady white noise, too busy to stop and think. Too busy to experience and grow. Far too busy. But what must that mean?

And can I get back to that without sacrificing what I’ve gained. I don’t know. I have this need to now commit to trying but that feels like the first step to failure. So instead I’ll commit to a small change. And perhaps that change will lead to another.