Sexually Rejected Male Fruit Flies Turn To Drink.

Here.

One Day, When All of This is Better -

. . . you know the next few words: MAYBE I'LL HAVE A DRINK, or so I thought to myself, a few hours ago.  IF, and only if things get progressively better and there's like remarkably objective and true advancement, will I, one infinitely far day into the future, have a drink.  And before I could even complete the thought, my body slid into the negative space and said: Allow yourself one whole night of drinking.

And we all know the history that's being recreated with those thoughts, now, don't we?

Eating kumkwats and finding a way to habituate my brain toward a forward meandering sentences without pre-forming them conclusively, or tidying up all of the bows prior to creation.  It is a dichotomy I tell myself, that exists, in that writing, or producing, takes a place in the chronology of events, and editing comes afterward.  It cannot be untrue, though.  Without some product, there can be no editing.  And so, well, hence writers block.  You sit and think, and nothing is good enough, so you or I, we--we--mentally edit it until there's a little nub of confused circles and really nothing to actually write down.  Or at least nothing as close to the form of all of the mental edits told you were worth writing down.  Thing is, of course, that having the space to write down something--anything--away and afar from the internal editor, is valid in and of itself.  Creation and destruction, our old friends from freshman philosophy, and they are true.  As true as anything else these days can be true.

Facing Death --

Death is something we consciously avoid thinking about.  But what if you had a disease that gauraunteed shortened life and there was no cure for this disease?  How would that help to shape your behavior for your shortened life?

Personally, and this is strange, my first instinct would be to give in and stop trying so hard all the time.  But I doubt that's how I would really deal with it.

Busy as of late, folks.  Hope everyone out there is doing well.

Learn to Tame Intuition -

I've almost always been a strongly intuitive person.  On personality tests I was by far intuitive--off the charts.  And as such, it was easy to do some post-hoc justifications about events in my life that turned out unnecessarily bad.  Intuition doesn't always yield badness, though, so it is tricky to find a way to thread the needle of trusting it just enough, while also retaining the capacity of self-doubt.  I mean, I get that it could be a beneficial strategy to always follow intuition for some people, even objectively, without their subsequent justification.  So, anyway, I guess I'm at a point in my life where I'm starting to let my intuition back in, so long as I have bright line rules.  Which is to say that I'm not tingling with my own sobriety so much that I'm hesitant to even try something or take a stand on something, at least a little bit. For a long time I was plunged so deep into the water of "taking a stand" or "trying" it was a bit hard to see the forest for the trees.  So I backed way, way, up, into the cerebral restrained land of 20,000 feet up, unengaged with a lot of my own emotion about the world.  And therein lies the strangeness.  That is, that I can at once have a bunch of emotion and also be estranged from it.  To be completely honest, I think the idea that I experienced the world on a different level than the world I did happen to experience and that it takes time for me to realize the other level of experience that was previously submerged is a bit of a hoax.  It makes much more sense to say that I've learned valuable things about myself and others and applied them retroactively.  Anyway.  The point is only that I am allowing myself more intense, or colorful, or engaged, interaction, and less cerebral restraint.  That's the point.  And it feels good in a way, because I do feel in control.  And I do revert to cerebral states later.

One of the basic premises of life that I'd failed to grasp at any level prior to my sobriety was of repetition and knowledge acquisition.  It goes like this: you try something once, let's say running around a large park with a lot of interlocked trails.  You learn a good chunk, but you tell yourself you know more than you actually do, so the second time you run, you go out and get promptly lost because of  your over-confidence.  Now, instead, I stick to the same route a few times, maybe a month, and then branch out once I've had a chance to feel like things are truly familiar, in my gut.  Trick is that gut feelings of familiar take all sorts of practice, which was the missing piece before in my life.  OK?  Enough for now.

Lighten Up. The Rule.

To lighten up.

Stop taking seriously all of the things you currently tell yourself you must do.

Start trying to enjoy activities for the sheer sake of doing them, in that moment.

Repeat.

Stop trying to obtain status.  Relax and don't imagine life getting any better.  Ever.  If that were the case, what changes would you make?

Caveat: it is almost impossible to make flaccid the hard-on dreams of big illustrious lifestyle, mostly because those big dreams sort of keep us going.  The best answer I can give is to adjust expectations in an honest way, and see what you currently have going on.  Not being the queen of england or the king of france doesn't make your life worthless.  It may actually make it more worthwhile.

Deep Into Meta-Criticism = Depression?

Very simple thought for the day.  I spent a lot of my life creating, if you will, multi-dimensional and slightly flexible systems of criticism that, I thought, if I could just successfully communicate, would be the purpose of my life.

There's something ironic about this.  Instead of developing many-layered critiques, I should have been trying to build something up in the positive sense.  And.  The worst part of this: building positive structures, whatever they are (whether actual structures, scientific models, documents, or guitars), is actually much harder.

Runaway Audience Fantasy -

Most of what we do, even when alone, implicates or concerns other people in some large way.  I don't mean that there's a global supply chain and that it takes a host of folks to get me my tea (which is true). What I mean is that we, as individuals, so often act as if there were audience to act to, or for, that we often forget how alone we actually are.  There really and truly is often nobody watching.

This isn't necessarily depressing.  In many ways it can be freeing.  If our actions are broadcast out into the masses for collective judgment on a daily and micro-neurological level, we don't have to work so hard to impress everyone else.  We can, instead, honestly be free to figure out what we're interested in doing absent other people.  And, once we do that, we can reintroduce people to that activity to build healthy relationships.

The Bowels of Self-Pity.

I've spent a lot of my life thinking I'm not good enough.

You know what I'm saying?  You've felt that way a time or two before?

Well, I certainly have, so thanks for asking.

Summon the audible warp speed machinery, as we peer closely into a specific instance of cowardice, next to the bowels of self-pity, as I cry on your shoulder and you cry on mine, and we curse the world for making us feel this way about ourselves.

When someone told us that we weren't the best.  When we had to lay out a modicum of effort in the hopes of an already diminished (shrunken, pitiless, frigid, and shrink-wrapped) return, one who doesn't even talk back it is so thanked by us for having resurrected it from the pits of sewage-eating bacteria.

The bottom line is this: What if we could have everything we always wanted?  And the way to get it?  Through shutting the fuck up about it all the time and putting in the work.  What if that was the only thing separating us from our dreams, or happiness?  From fullness? Would we still find a crack to complain into, to fill with our pre-manufacted sob stories of meta-criticism?  Or would step up and be consistent for once in our weak little meaningless lives?

We'll see.

Growing into a Stereotype?

Afraid that you, young adult, are slowly growing into a horrid stereotype of yourself, your culture, and your values, one that you were, just a few years ago, thoroughly repulsed by and found to be seriously similar to people like your parents?

I have the solution!

Stop idolizing stereotypes.

Watch That Ego! Rational Response to Innate Egomania?

On one hand we're tiny, truly insignificant.  Even when restricting our significance measurement to the whole of the human race, or the whole country (whichever country you happen to be in), or even, the whole town.  This purposefully excludes huge concepts like the solar system or the universe, or all of time.

Let's just say it plain.  As individuals, we don't matter that much.  We don't.  I'm not trying to etch it into wood or marble as my forearm musculature ripples in out-sized pornographic display.  No, I'm saying it simply.  We're pretty small.

We often think we matter much more than we do, though.  And that's a very important thought.  It keeps us going, for one.  It makes us more attractive to potential friends and lovers.

How we craft our own meaning, our own narrative, is at the core of our lives.

And let's back up for a second: many of us--us drinkers--would prefer to stay cynical and stay outside.  But we're not being courageous by concocting world theories based on criticism.  We're being very, very scared, and meek, and embracing smallness.  In short, we don't often commit.  To anything.  We don't want to face our smallness.  But we must.  We must continually do it if only to live at some basic level of existential sustenance, some threshold wherein we're cease to be human.

What's the first step out?  Try something that you're not good at.  Try it again.  And again.  Frustrated? Living with anger?  Washing the dishes?  Think about how that anger permeates the crinkles in your face and provides apt handles for all those self-critical thoughts.  How comfortable we all are to denigrate ourselves.  How comfortable we all are to be ego-maniacs in a full tidal wave of bipolarity.

Saying "Fuck Everything" Is Illogical and Lazy.

No matter how much I want to say it, dream of saying it, or practice how I might say it were I to go ahead with the damned statement, it doesn't make sense.  Life is--breathe with me here--about getting into stuff, and developing yourself within that stuff--not about your status so much, as about your purpose, I think, in that you desire what it is you like to do absent too much social rewards (I'm not foolish enough to think that we can excise social rewards completely).   That's why dead end jobs (or regular jobs?) can suck so much: they have no purpose outside of financial reward, which is, at heart, not satisfying.  Sure, you can learn to spend the money you make on what you care for, and this is the essence of "life as a budget item," with limited capacity and limited choice, etc.  What I'm talking about here is only that stuff that's exquisitely intangible and highly personally rewarding.  Catching a sunrise on an early morning run.  Making someone else laugh genuinely (implied, that you've spread their perception a bit wider, or focused it in a slightly different way than previous).  Laughing to yourself on an isolated street, or in a crowded coffee shop.  The shock and pungency of getting drawn in, to a conversation that you didn't expect.

The layers upon layers of time that we're lucky enough to have and don't fully appreciate while staying aware that we should appreciate them, and our capacity to talk about those layers and that consciousness in a light-hearted or serious way, and to respond to statements that are as abstract as these without even wincing.

Forgiving Someone.

Failing and having the flexibility to keep on working without full understanding.

The smell of maple leaves in autumn.

The maroon LL Bean sweater I've had for 13 years.

Believing that connections between people are possible, even if awkward and difficult.

Making breakfast for someone.

Learning a language.

Being comfortable in a social setting.

Learning that perfection is youthful delusion, but that it is worth keeping in mind anyway.