Connection to the Abstract

Our connection with the abstract pretty much forms all manner of internal dynamics we have come to know as our personality.  How much what we know we don't know impacts our internal processes--further, how much we conceive of the "unknown unknowns" as thick and extremely large, or small and insignificant, also plays a very specific role in shaping all of our interactions.

If that seems abstract, bear with me as I lay it out for a moment in two purposefully extreme examples.

1.  Known Parameters and Embedded Comfort.

Folks in this realm don't know what they don't know and they don't care that much that they don't know.  "I'm not a math person," for instance, so such a person simply looks the other way when math comes up, ceding authority to others.  When faced with unknown specialty fields, people in this group can look the other way, like our non-math person, or they can dive in and sort of "pretend" to know a field, which can be useful to some extent and in short bursts, at least until things stop making sense.

Let me back up.

These people are people who are generally comfortable.  They aren't really intimidated by status or by complex thoughts, and they aren't extremely worried about how different cultures might live or how a sense of what is normal might be relative or itinerant.  Their sense of themselves is centered and they speak with relative confidence.  They have comfort because the sense that they are small, or insignificant, or that their conception of the world could be startingly wrong, are all sort of absent notions.


2.  A Sense of Much Larger Abstractness and Paralysis.

Then there are those people with a deep sense of humility because they have a sense of the magnitude of stuff they don't understand.  They won't purport to just "get" things like taxes, or Bayesian theorems, or the incompleteness theorem, because they know that "truly" getting stuff takes years, even lifetimes, or is even impossible.  They get that they can't see the whole picture on anything, even more mundane stuff like politics and policy, and they won't purport to do so.  Only experts can proffer opinions, and being an expert is a serious thing that we should defer to.

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Obviously, nobody is just one or the other, and both have their attributes and drawbacks.  But my point is that this continuum, of how we view that which we don't know, our relationship to uncertainty, forms/informs much of how we treat everything else.

Can't Get Him Back

I listen to Neil Young.  Bear with me now.

I listen to the familiarity of memory, the companionship of my father.  He died when I was 18 years old.  He didn't die from a freak accident.  Anyway, what's negative is unimportant.  What is important is that I loved him incredibly.  I'm his son, why not.  We had a camaraderie that I can't seem to replace.  I look all over.  I have multiple false father figures.  I have surging deep level sadness come up to swallow me at inopportune moments.

I feel as if I am in a stasis, and all of this is shrouded in a like bullshit therapy session overlay, and that's just what it is.  there is no conclusion.

Because even though I can come close to feeling him when I listen this particularly Neil young--music he wasn't even alive to hear, but which holds the very essence of how he acted--I can never get him back.  Ever.  I can't come to grips with that.  I've never been able to come to grips with it.  I just don't know how you do, you know, actually like replace the loss that is so fucking huge.

Anyway.  I like to cry because it allows me the momentary release and the true real felt emotion that I so rarely actually feel.  I cry rarely. 

"What are you trying to prove.  Trying to get closer but not too close.  Trying to get through.  You're invisible.  Nobody can touch you now.  I can touch you now."

A Nice Thought - Start Tomorrow New. Be Refreshed and Find Purity in Discipline.

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense

Meaning To -

I keep meaning to post.  I'm sorry that I haven't been more ebullient, preferring instead to saunter into the corner and find blissful solitude, if only for a bit.

Like many, I'm tired.  I am tired in a good way, but also in the way that not-sleeping brings, a kind of bleary edge-of-the galaxy fatigue that distorts shapes and runs rip-shod over normal interactive types of endeavors.

Anyway, I'll be back.

Nice Big Creamy Frothy Double IPA!

Had a nice satisfying drink in my sleep last night.  A dream, I admit, and no hangover!

I'm always a mirror for those around me, and that's no different when those people are drunk.  I don't deign toward chemically induced profusion if not necessary for affect, and believe me, it is not necessary.  I found a nice slice of affect was still sitting there at the core of who I am, and that's not so bad, even if it isn't "perfectly balanced and rational and hyper aware."  Because fuck it, right?  Why not relax a bit with all these heavy bands of worry and fatigue?  What is the right way to live, I've asked, and repeated, to myself, all the while avoiding the question with the question.  What is the right way to live. What is the right way to breathe?  There is none.

Don't Blame Me For Not Trying

No matter what my track record, you can't say that I haven't tried, damnit.

I've reached out to people I had no inclination to befriend.  I've taken a job I never thought I could do, ever.  I've bought an apartment, married a beautiful woman, had a son, and learned to become decent in a really difficult language.  I've lost 20 pounds, found a way to keep surviving with a certain "couched" optimism, and most people would probably just say I'm "nice!"  Which leads me to believe they have no idea what I'm thinking!  Which leads me to believe that my efforts are partially successful = I shan't feel guilt.

Guilt free.

Simple Things

An ode to non-obsessive tendencies.  Playing basketball with kids.  Visiting with family.  Doing a good job for the sake of the good job.  Figuring out something that is hard and technical and non-obvious on one's own.  Understanding one's limits.  Finding a way to manage, and survive, and keep moving forward, without glamorizing the future or the past.  Genuinely giving your love over to someone and not expecting anything for it.  Developing a less than ideal sense of one's own capabilities.

Former Lovers (and Near Lovers):

I was insincere, or at least a bit too emotional, when I wrote previously about former lovers.  They occupy a strange place in my mind.  And for clarity, they're not all former lovers; they're former "intimates," some of whom I had relations with that were never physically manifested, though I am sure that these were intimate relations nevertheless.  Anyway, the point.  The point is that getting sober, or getting older and getting sober, had for a long time possessed me by cycling back intense and crystal clear memories, memories that I felt, at least, were sharp and accurate and intensely vivid, so much so that they sucked me from my present state and overcame me at times, entrancing as they were--to relive the past without reliving the past.  To examine all angles of a series of events without having the weight of decision-making in real time.

Except.  Except that I never had these types of reshuffling snapshot live-feeds into the past when with any lovers/former lovers/intimates.  And so you see that this group of relatively select people, people who I felt a vulnerability I cannot try to write, except to say that I ceased to feel a separation vis-a-vis my body and the world and the other person, such was our connection, also happens to be the same people I cannot access in my new found sobriety.  And I look back at those times now with a fresh layer of nostalgia for the child-like innocence that those times represent, and also, I wonder: why don't I cycle through these memories as well?  What is it about incredibly close compatriots that keeps me separate from them now?  Why can't I taste at least the memory of their sweet elixir, and at least get my shit straight about our interactions?

I can force myself to remember the objective specifics, but it is not the same.

Odd phenomenon, I thought, or didn't think.  And this was really want I mean to detail in the previous post.  And instead of actually working to describe it (yes, it is work), I simply did what came much easier (and resulted in a much cheaper post, though it still stings to get a rebuke in the comments like that--almost like a former lover scorned that he/she is not remembered appropriately).

To be clear: it isn't as if I don't remember these people.  I can tell you about all of our interactions.  I can tell you where we went, how we went, what we talked about, generally, etc.  It is more about the energy or mood of our interactions.  I don't think it means that I have forgotten.  I have a sneaking suspicion that it is more about my own inability to {insert appropriate verb here},.

Sobriety = Revamp Entire LIfe

I know, I know, it sounds dramatic, but sobriety really triggers a bit of re-engineering, if you will, regarding almost every aspect of life.  To wit: it isn't just the cessation of drinking that changes.  It is everything else.

Friends, family, social relations general, exercise routines, nutrition, worldview (potentially), and more.

And I'm not talking about religious conversion, i.e. the need to talk to everybody about one's sobriety.  God help us if that were the case.  I know far too many office-mates who already like to vocalize their self-help routines daily, as if to compare and contrast (and be better than others).

I'm talking about the fine stuff, the granular small bits around the edges that slowly permeate the whole.

Enough said for now.

Certain Comments Not Allowed

Comments that say you're currently drinking, for instance.

Plans to get sober, but present boozing, do not qualify you for writing about sobriety, or getting any of the support from sober people.  Sorry.  I'm just going to delete them.  If you've been sober for even one day, fine, comment all you like.

Nothing is Pre-Determined

I like the idea that we can "do" anything we want to do. I also have entirely mixed feelings about it. While life is certainly not akin to prison for me and millions like me, there are limitations, and I have a feeling that for most of my childhood, and early adulthood, I was told implicitly that almost anything is possible. And it isn't.  And there's a lot of hard work between the dots of intense pleasure and clarity that, mind you, actually do exist.  But nobody said that, or I didn't want to hear it.   Which isn't a complaint.  It is just a ramification of dreaming for too long.  Fantasy is good as fantasy.  When fantasy becomes reality, there's a lot of crap to deal with that sort of detracts from the fantasy part.  I still feel that, despite knowing the substance of the last sentence, all of us get drugged into feeling like potential decisions we are about to make carry less weight than similar decisions we made in the past.  

Former Lovers

What space do they occupy in our minds?  How does it work?

I have one in mind.  I have this anesthetized feeling toward her, that, I'm sure, isn't somehow my real accurate feeling.  And yet, it persists, a hammer wrapped in cloth.  It will still break the window, wont' it, if I swing?  It will still hurt its owner?  Won't it?  I don't know.  I've wrapped it up with a lot of cloth, mind you, quite thick, in woolens and sheets and strips and shards of those things best left to whimsy of nostalgic meandering, and I find it sick and both convenient and repulsive now, the way it is, and yet.

I can't quite touch it.

Damn it.

I want to touch it.

I mean that sincerely.  I want the crystal clean memories of yesteryear, to live through them at times in a way that won't be wholly cathartic, in a way that won't be fully punishing, but instead fractionally cathartic and punishing, and unlike a walk in the park, it will reach into me and tell me that I am alive because I know what mistakes mean and that I'm alive because I know where I was and where I was, it was fundamentally flawed in a way that is irreparable now, and so, must be wrapped every so tightly, except that I long to flail flawed markers around and just relish in it, you know, the imperfection, the subtlety and the numerosity of imperfect existence, crystallized and sweet on a sunny day just like any other.