Listen (and say it with me now): I Don't Know

Alarmingly disarming, this simple phrase.  I don't know.  What do you think?  

Makes you remember that it is okay to change your beliefs and update them as you see fit based on, well, on life experience, which is, yeah, actually experiencing things first hand and having the realization that, well, yeah, you weren't exactly spot on accurate as a flaming lefty neo-marxist (not to mention that the people who care about those things aren't the people you actually being attracted to).

In the middle of a very strenuous day, when all we're telling ourselves and all we're told to tell everyone else is that we know know know, let's breathe a sigh of relief, imagine a Benny Goodman lick, and say it, even under our breath, collectively, even as a swear might come out similarly.

I don't know.

Yeah, me neither.  Glad I'm not alone.

If you're thinking it other people are thinking it too.

Exercise (and no booze)

Here's a post to remind all sufferers of substance-dependence issues to get out and exercise, even a little bit.  It makes a huge difference in mood, self-perception, and the capacity to concentrate and prioritize.

I don't care what it does for one's body, i.e. weight loss, in other words, however nice that may be; the primary effect is in the mind.

The other side to this coin is: watch your sugar and refined carb intake.  Sugar and refined carbs (I'm thinking anything with white flour) are basically bad news for mood (I can ruin half a day by eating a bunch of shit), unless exercising strenuously, when they can be used for fuel.  Sure, they feel good going down, but so does a nice cold one on a day very much like this memorial day.

Here We Are

Lacking apt metaphors.

Staring at each other.

Straggling.

Flinging out dreams of ambiguity and eventual decay.

Abusing ourselves for the sake of survival.

Finding solace in twisted drama.

Expecting.

Jumping viciously from one point to the next.  Forgetting the bread crumbs.

Unavailable and bad at listening.

Obsessive-compulsive.

Plaintive.

Introspective.

Monitoring the precursors to the threat to the end of the beginning of whatever it is we've told ourselves it is we've found, and scrambling meanwhile, in the substrate of our dual selves, to figure it all out before the threat manifests.

Adjusting past architectural commemorative for new needed commemorations. Wondering why new needed commemorations went astray.

Lacking apt metaphors.

Glancing fleeting ephemeral mirror reflection enough to tie stomach in knots.

Enough to find smeared vaseline smiles in great vats of opacity.

Enough already.  Enough.

Getting What You Want.

Sometimes this happens, and it turns out that you you didn't want it, whatever it is, after you have obtained possession.

Best way to ameliorate this phenomenon in the future: ask people who have wanted and obtained what it is you want and listen to their answers.

Honesty in Personal Dealings - Different Stories for Different Friends?

Here's the hallmark of vicious self-deception.  You find yourself telling one set of friends one story, and another set of friends a completely different story, or, perhaps, withholding all sorts of information from a second friend/group of friends.  It represents an aggressive need.  It is a need for control over other people's perceptions.  It is more importantly, a need to control all angles of all personally experienced events such that they comport with thresholds or standards of comfort when digested personally. I am as guilty as anyone, or at least used to be.

And so, what inevitably happens?  Some friends get together, two spheres of friends perhaps, at a party, or graduation, or what have you, and viola, they start comparing stories.  After all, they liked the stories they independently heard.

And one day you're therefore sitting at a party, perhaps your own, trying to explain discrepancies that you barely explicitly consciously knew were there.  You just always kept certain friends away from other certain friends because those people were naturally incompatible--it never had anything to do with self-interest.

Anyway.

I recognize that we have to do this self-selection stuff to some degree.  And I guess the real question is whether it is manifestly negative to avoid negative aspects of our own lives, i.e. to avoid thinking about them, to usher away conversation from them, to sort of keep them at all times from consciousness, even while therefore being consistently aware of what we need to keep away from.  After all, what's the use of thinking about bad stuff?  Is there a use in it?

As I've sort of relaxed (although outwardly become much more stiff), memories constantly hover, descending at odd junctures.  But I like them.  Even the bad ones.  I like that they are there, that I can even safely relive them at times.  It is weird, I know, but to safely relive harrowing stuff isn't really traumatic at all.  It is comforting.

Finding A Way Out -

It's been too long since I simply felt comfortable in my own skin.  Since I've found a way to just stay loose and relatively relaxed while living my life.  I recognize that specifics change, where you live or where you work, for example, but alcohol fundamentally changed my sensitivity to my surrounding environment, and since sobriety, I've been working back to a healthy understanding of stimuli in the outside world, trying less to get trapped in negative (or positive) feedback loops that can't be corrected.  This is more of a quick reflection, and a reminder of my new emerging self, the old self in many ways, and this familiarity I feel now is really quite beautiful, because I haven't been like this (even if "this" is for short spurts right now--it is intensely focused and much sharper and less worried or acutely aware of all the wrong things), in a long long while, over 10 years, at least.

Feels Good To Cry

Not that it feels good to feel sad, but that, well, instead of suffering under the nausea of stewing abstract or undefined emotions or just general sadness, the need to cry in an infrequent crier (me) allows a sort of peak of sharpened acuity that is very much not present most of the time and is refreshing in its own way that I cannot do justice to in words, but would very much like to share somehow even though sharing is absolutely impossible in this sense.

Almost like this (my effort):

All of the sad events that have happened in my life are not really mine.   I see them, out there, almost like a TV show or movie, and consume them in that way, as fiction, and when they become mine, when I own them, like, well, every May 13th, I find it fucking refreshing, and I cry, because they have distilled into painful experience and I am simultaneously absolutely helpless to do anything about them.  Because I agree that those events are strange and weird and downright petrifying.  Fuck, imagine that, right?  And there, that, imaging, well, turns out, there's no need to imagine at all.  All I have to do is remember.

Original Ideas

Original ideas are very hard to come by.  Ideas, not so much.  Ideas percolate or ferment, or rot, or make friends, or sing out loud, all the time, non-stop, it seems, no matter their intrinsic banality, or a lack of caffeine, or that pit bull that won't shut up because its owner trained him to think that airplanes or backfiring cars or neighbors were enemies (well!  well! aren't they, he might shout, in a steroid binge of sorts).

And anyway, how do you know if you've got one or not?  It takes serious work on its own right.  I mean, what's the set of all ideas out there, where is it?  And how do you compare your idea with the ideas of that set!  And then, what's your method for ascertaining whether similar ideas were close or identical to yours?  And anyway, what's the use of the idea?  Does it help improve something?

Which is to say that we are all depositories of a lot of ideas, that we consume endlessly, but that producing ideas--even moderately questionably novel ideas at that--takes a bunch more work.  If you don't think that's the case you are either a) much smarter than me or b) fooling yourself.

Comment: The Possibility of Sobriety -

I find this message warming and I am also shocked by it: of course it is possible to stop drinking!  You just have to go through a few uncomfortable stages to do it~ and Yes, it gets to the point where alcohol doesn't even get in.

Anonymous has left a new comment on your post "What Happens When You Stop Drinking?": 

Day 4 and its Saturdayy night. A first for me to be AF at the weekend. I have to say that reading this blog is the thing which has kick started me in to believing it might be possible. I keep telling myself I am not giving up anything, I am actually freeing myself from alcohol. It's kind of scary because if I think about making plans for the future, like the odd weekend away or a family occasion I kind of think twice about it because everything we do always involves drink. Can I really manage to be totally clean of alcohol. It would be fantastic to get to the point where the thought of it doesn't even enter my head. Do you ever get to this point? 

I would sell my soul for something pure and true . . .

Ain't it the case, my friends, to taste that distilled purity, drip drop, itty-bitty minute laced indulgence for us kiddos, layin' back, as we are, in the summer time of our sobriety, our uninterrupted plateau of higher calling, i.e. that which we mustn't think of directly, except when reminded of the difference, the stark recall button pushed, pressed, deeper now, we're getting there, until, ahh, simple utter relief, oh so long coming.

If only.

If only I flailed in the middlemen of my own ignorance and came out with friends.

If only I could frolic undisturbed for years in a bed of rose pedals.  If only romance would tingle on the fringe of my life and I would have the courage to look back for once, instead of finding uncountable excuses in the molecular structure of fractal outlines;  anywhere that is generic, please i beg of you.  Direct eye contact makes me sick.

How Long To Live A Lie?

I wonder if we wait out living a lie in the present for a hope at something "true" and "real" in the future, and if so, how long it takes to start to accept the present for reality, and at what increments the true present reality intercedes or overlays to displace the perceived potential future.

I think about 5-10 years, in general, though I know there are outliers.

The other question I have is at what level of specificity folks hold out for their dreams.  My guess is that dreams are vague and opaque at best, and if there was any actual flesh on the meat of the matter, the dream would look mightily different.  Which begs the question perhaps: if we know that are dreams are by definition inaccurate, well, we sort of also know that we would never want to have those dreams in reality, since having them would necessitate their destruction.

Likely result: change dreams.

Who Are You?

I used to sing along with The Who as a pre-teen.  I never really knew what the lyrics meant, except that they held a type of aggressive in your face brand of introspection, or supposed introspection, the kind that elders certainly must be incapable of, and that only folks under a certain age would find intoxicating, precisely because they could tap into it.  (There's another way to read this divide, as with all divides, and it is not that the brand of introspection pushed out of my speakers as a 12 year old was only accessible to those under a certain age, but that instead it was only listenable, that is, bearable, by those under a certain age, because at its core was something selfish and ugly and utterly hormonal, instead of any genuine question--i.e. a question that isn't afraid of an answer -this was, instead, perhaps, a question asked with a specific answer already in mind; a question asked only for the sake of the answer.  And the answer was a kind of fuck you.)  And anyway, the song is basically a bender of a song anyway!  Or it is a love song.  Or it is both.

Anyway, I think the brand of introspection there was still very romantic, or idealistic, in that it tried to perhaps strip the layers of normalcy and socialization, the pressures that we all feel are so static and staid and true and never change as we learn about them, and which are actually quite fluid perhaps.  And alcohol is a nice foil, i.e. it is convenient to feel that alcohol provides access to this truth, this core stuff, but the real truth is that we have to deal with all sorts of stuff that incentivizes our behavior every single day, whether enforcing it or punishing it, and that's what makes humans so fantastic and miserable.  And love is a similarly nice foil, to say that we love someone else and that person loves us makes our lives true and meaningful.

But we still have to deal with a lot of little piddly shit that isn't related directly to the raw pure emotion of love or drunkeness or anything like that, which, collectively, is sort of what being an adult is all about, since those pure things are there, mostly, well, all the time, and yet cannot necessarily be talked about explicitly.

Which brings me to my larger point.  In any given situation, you kind of have to have an idea of what you prefer, who you are, and not necessarily be driven by other people's strategies/perspectives on your behavior.  Yes, to some extent, obviously, you must adjust based on other people's adjustments, sure, but if that flexibility could be quantified into a number, that number shouldn't really rise higher than some threshold only you can figure out (i.e. only us individually), and we have to do that, figure it out, that is, in order to live and be consistent with ourselves, and we have to also make sure to doubt our own motivations and our own need to tell stories that are flattering to our perspectives at the same time, etc.

Staying Underwhelmed -

I've been intensely focused on staying localized within my own sphere of being.  That sounds sort of opaque, I realize, and what I mean isn't quite definable.  It is a zone of being within what I care about, and trying hard not to get caught up in what doesn't matter.  There's endless ways to get caught up, and each one seems to be gluey and sticky and almost aggressively alive, and normally I'd be oh-so-open to just being absorbed into everything else, telling myself all the while that I'm cool with it, cool with it, cool with it, repeated like a mantra, when the entire time I'm internally freaking out, imploding in a kind of restrained frozen way that is painful because it cannot be expressed correctly and because there's nobody to really express such experiences to, exactly, though some folks masquerade as soothsayers in this respect.  I used to imagine how it all might work out without thinking for a second about how to get where it was working out, and now I see steps--specific and concrete--toward what I want, even when what I want is a mindset, a way of existing, and I exercise those steps with as much patience as possible, which I admit, doesn't meet threshold acceptance on most days, and yes, I can just adjust my expectations, except that I cannot adjust my expectations, and it is the slow strangulation of results which I must lather in if I am to succeed at all.