Emotions are Richer

Our emotional palette is richer than any other experiential continuum, I think.  We have, in other words, capacity to experience permutations upon permutations of unique emotional responses, even when the situations that we respond to are not unique.

This is part of the reason that we can experience the approximation of beauty wherein something will be stunning--i.e. unexceptionable intoxicating and/or fulfilling in the put of the stomach way that we cannot quite get our words around.

This is also part of the reason that we have long swaths of emotional reality throughout our lives that only become clear, if they do, in retrospect, and why we can only talk in generalities about certain things even when we feel something very specific.

This is also why there will be no end to new music.

Two Years

Today, as in now, I'm two years sober.

Everything has changed since I've stopped drinking.  New job.  Home ownership.  Married.  More money.  Less assholish behavior.  Richer relationships with other people.  Much less socializing.

I'm happy that I'm sober and I intend to stay that way.  Outside, thunder cracks to catch up with lightning, and traffic oozes by under the dance, as it always does.

Good luck to all.

Five Signs of Normalized Depression

You're brain seems to have become wrapped tightly in a high resin plastic sheath.  This could have been a liquid--polyurethane is the first thing that comes to mind--at one point in the past, but lately has crystallized into a definite anti-oxygen barrier resembling any type of normal fruit baggy, trash collection agent, or similarly smooth thin and fully suffocating device.

You've become invincibly unique in your self-perception and self-identity, and do not take critical comments lightly.  In fact, you begin to huff and puff and decide (wrongly) that the commenter is full of shit and their entire worldview is a sign of their fully demented delusional mindset, such that if they died, perhaps, you wouldn't mind it terribly.

Your capacity to produce work--i.e. deliverable results--is greatly diminished.  You find great complexity in everything and very few solutions.

Your friends are all in bands, just waiting to be discovered, but not working to be discovered.  You think they're stupid.  You have no band.  You are a one-man band.

Your glasses are thick in frame and thin in lens.

Social critique is more important than . . . anything else, especially your parents, whom you have a visceral dislike for, and what you think are fully developed theories of development and taste that encapsulate them.

Everyone's face looks exactly the same.

To be continued.

Blast Me With A Chocolate -

I'm actually getting slightly anxious about my two year anniversary: two years of dorkdom.  Two years of abstention.  Two years of tedium.  Of obsessive tendency.  Of avoidance.  Of sobriety.

I've found myself in the throws of increasingly valid and frequently meaningless thoughts.  It feels good to actually be embedded into something less opaque, if that makes sense, like to just remember the blissful intensity of my pre-youth, the wanderings of my heretofore previously sober and non-drunk (though a little stoned self); to abscond into the rose colored glasses of nostalgia just a little bit, if only to avoid the depressing mechanistic quality of every day life in a big city with a lot of people and not that much nature or cleanliness.  I desire not to internalize some sort of self-help induced grief and indulge whimsical fantasies that inculcate me against hope and possibility. I desire not to find a way into the grind.  I desire not to be in the fold.  I also desire it.  Except a different fold.  See?

I want to chose my insights, instead of having them chose me.

Alas, all is not calm and cool in the land.  T-minus 7 days.  And then I'll implode in aggressive fashion with the restraint releasing quality of a monk tied snugly with kevlar enforced mint- green garden hose that's been sitting full of pulsating froth, released at once unto blue slate sidewalk and instantaneously misted out of existence by the heat.

I've gone overboard here in a way that is precisely calculated to reveal something quickly, with the least pain possible.

Blocked.

I'm not sure what surgery might be necessary to repair it.  They used to do something electrical, maybe still do.  My fingers plunge onto keys mislabeled.  Words come back in foreign tongue.  There's a city, a village at least, coming back to me, in abstract geometrical patterns that I claim modern.  Novelty is a fine line between jackass and rip off.  The village is something to show someone, something that should be familiar.

Turns out I've got memories of things that don't exist anymore.

I'm not sure how I got here, where it is I am, at the moment.  I'm finding out my insecurities still seem as stable as freshman year of high school, and the only thing I remember from then are ripped jeans and wooden corn cob pipes.  I don't recognize a baseline personality.

I drink white tea and drink green tea.  And I stopped all layers of masturbation.  I hope.  Except that maybe I'm riding on some larger jacking hand, flipping me up in the air for a short ride at the apex, increased pressure at the nadir, and maybe the hand is increasingly desperate, both to execute, and unsure of what will happen once executed.  Caught in a raw state.  Blocked.  Like I said before a few times already.

Maybe it is true that loneliness distorts personality more than drunkeness.

Capacity to Be Critical--

This is really a hard skill.  I think mostly we fall into two diametrically opposed categories: either we find ourselves flawless and we defend our work to the death (even when our effort is small compared to our relative capacity), or we tell ourselves that we're horrible and use our horribleness as an excuse not to try too much.

The hard skill is of self-criticism, such that you (or I) can improve, even when our ego is bruised.  Such that we can look at our own work and say, even when we want otherwise, that it needs work.

It is the capacity to do work and continue to do work instead of complaining, flagellating, or making everyone else the enemy.

Not About Stasis

I used to be obsessed with complexity.  That is, pointing out enough complexity to show people how astute I was without trying to actually do anything with that complexity.

While there's no doubt that things are always extraordinarily complex, often for reasons that we don't have awareness of, there was also a mistake in my methods.

I should have been trying to manage down the complexity into singularly elegant models that function in some way to capture "it" without sacrificing too much rawness.  That is, by finding a way to actually talk about ineffably large and seemingly incomprehensible stuff, we can actually turn a corner make steps forward.  Label assumptions.  Make explicit all manipulations.  Present something that is at first glance evident, but at second glance has multiple, let's say 60,000, layers.  Something that might take years to study.  Without the study so much, or the desire to impress.

What's the take away?  We can drink and fuel ourselves with the delusion that we're in some way aware of much more than what we are aware of, that our innate intelligence is broadly superior, and that we're in tune with what we already need to be to obtain current and possible future desires.  We're not, of course.  But by stepping back we can actually refine our desires, and not just the means to obtain them. We can develop ourselves instead of talking about how developed we already are.  We can strive to figure out, and figure out, and figure out, and figure out.  And stop with all the smug satisfaction.

It's not like a complicated data set with tons of variables . . .

that you first have to clean and polish and then carefully plug into giant pivot tables and read carefully, where the results will be contingent and highly contextual.

if you drink, you will suffer.  and then you will die.  you will suffer more than if you didn't drink, and you will die sooner.

that's my reality.  it isn't fantasy.

Excuses.

We hold all of this pent up nuance inside that nobody sees, and we desire very strongly to let it out.  But when we can't get it out, or when the nuance isn't noticed when we do, or when we see other people unintelligibly letting it out--pure amateurs, we think, though we never actually practice what we may self-preach--we only have one friend.  And that friend is liquid, and goes right inside to buddy up with all of the nuance.  And it is good at smothering its buddies.  And pretty soon all of the nuance is hostility.  And the hostility is easier to let out. And the reactions are strong, but the excuses made are about how others don't understand, about how they don't see.  And the crime is that we've become blind to any nuance ourselves, but still use it as a crutch.