IPOD
RADIO
I'm not in love with the new site design. It takes more clicks to get at anything, and I can only link to the blogs of the five people who come to the top of my friends list underneath my favorite SG's. I shall refrain from doing a top 5 friends list.
As of this moment I have a job that's compatible with cdl school, thought it's a lot of commuting, ass early, eight bucks an hour. but it allows me to do the weekend classes. There's a second shift job I have an interview for next week that's 3.50 more an hour but won't allow me to do the weekend classes, since it would intefere with the extra 4 hours wednesday evening that weekend class entails. I could however do the morning CDL schedule, in which case I'd be leaving the house at 6 am and arriving home at night at 11pm for 5 months. It's not a gauntlet I'm really looking forward to running, but I spose I'm setting myself up for that kind of schedule as a career getting into trucking. I just watched a documentary about the holocaust and this schedule I'm contemplating is a lot milder inconvenience than what a lot of people have had to deal with in their lives.
there was also a job really close by that I could ride a pedal powered bike to get to, that would work with the weekend cdl training schedule, as long as i'm ok with 6.75 an hour. fuck fuck fuck fuck. there is a direct relationship between scheduling inconvenience and the jobs available to me right now. At least if I get the second shift job I'll have weekends off and maybe enough money to get my car going again.
in other new I've started to get my ass in gear as far as doing some shooting with a couple of my antique cameras. takes some fiddly engineering to get 120 rollfilm to work in cameras from the twenties and thirties that take large obsolete rollfilm sizes, but it can be done. My image processing computer is getting really constipated lately, but hopefully I'll have some good pics to post here.
As of this moment I have a job that's compatible with cdl school, thought it's a lot of commuting, ass early, eight bucks an hour. but it allows me to do the weekend classes. There's a second shift job I have an interview for next week that's 3.50 more an hour but won't allow me to do the weekend classes, since it would intefere with the extra 4 hours wednesday evening that weekend class entails. I could however do the morning CDL schedule, in which case I'd be leaving the house at 6 am and arriving home at night at 11pm for 5 months. It's not a gauntlet I'm really looking forward to running, but I spose I'm setting myself up for that kind of schedule as a career getting into trucking. I just watched a documentary about the holocaust and this schedule I'm contemplating is a lot milder inconvenience than what a lot of people have had to deal with in their lives.
there was also a job really close by that I could ride a pedal powered bike to get to, that would work with the weekend cdl training schedule, as long as i'm ok with 6.75 an hour. fuck fuck fuck fuck. there is a direct relationship between scheduling inconvenience and the jobs available to me right now. At least if I get the second shift job I'll have weekends off and maybe enough money to get my car going again.
in other new I've started to get my ass in gear as far as doing some shooting with a couple of my antique cameras. takes some fiddly engineering to get 120 rollfilm to work in cameras from the twenties and thirties that take large obsolete rollfilm sizes, but it can be done. My image processing computer is getting really constipated lately, but hopefully I'll have some good pics to post here.
Thing about photobucket.com is that something about going through them makes pics darker than they started out. I guess I'll just have to overall lighten pics before sending them there. Anyway, I don't know if you can tell on your screen but this pic was taken at night, Eight seconds exposure, and it shows that the sky is in fact blue at night. At least it is if you set your white balance to tungsten, which arguably is just creating the blue; but if you don't do it you'll get yellow clouds from city lights. On the other hand I once saw timelapse footage of the nighttime skyscape taken in the desert so I already know the sky is blue at night anyway. But it's still cool to capture it yourself.
I'm feeling pretty crappy today. Partly from my legs aching from being inside too much, partly my lazy ass's fault and partly the crapola weather. Also I'm really down about my job situation. I applied to a temp agency that's looking for seasonal production laborers for Yankee Candle, and was hoping for a call today or sometime this week. I was a great employee at YC, but I worry and worry and worry that no employer will ever take me because of my bad credit rating; and I still don't really know whether they can tell I got fired one time or not. Job questionnaires always ask you if you've ever been convicted of a felony, and assure you that it won't necessarily exclude you from consideration for a job, but what is the point of asking that question, or whether you have ever been "involuntarily dismissed from a job" unless it's specifically to exclude you from consideration on the basis of that answer?
One thing I've never quite been able to do throughout my life was to get by on what I could earn. Even now living in a trailer, with a $195 a moth lot fee and my utilities, It seems I still can't even fucking do it now. I feel like the biggest fucking loser and most useless worthless person on the planet when I look at myself as an Economic Production Unit.
Sometimes I worry about not passing my test to get a CDL, as I am naturally less physically adept at a lot of things than other people, but on the other had at NETTTS you can keep practicing in their trucks as long as you need it and can come up with the $75 test fee. On the other hand I can ride a motorcycle, and do a lot of things related to catching fish that's beyond the dexterity of others I've seen. And anyway there was one truck driver we used to get at the AIC bookstore who was as dumb as a box of rocks and he couldn't back his rig up to our loading dock, so we had to go out into the street with hand trucks to get our shipments off his truck. If he could get a CDL I sure as hell can.
And it remains the case I can always sell this trailer I live in and get about 30 grand or so for it, but I would so fucking hate to have to go through that. I know that there are people you can find on this site with infinitely worse problems than mine, but still, being me can really suck.
And now for something completely different
or at least somewhat different
Well there's this buddhist notion "no obstruction" that I've been mentating about lately. For a while now I've tended to feel like there were no obstructions to my life outside of me, they were all just within me. But recently it occurred to me that there must also be no obstructions within me either, I just make the mistake of construing things about myself as obstructions. For example, being ADD in a world of boring repetitive tasks, and not having the upbringing such as would have nurtured me to live in the power of the abilities that I do have; there is a world of creativity and inagination and nonconformity to live in, but my heart is all sad and closed and jittery and anxious, and lacking the courage to live its own life on its own terms. Actually now that I'm thinking about it I feel like there really is obstruction within me, I know it's all an elaborate fabrication I construct to hem myself in, to cling to what I already know, but damn it's effective.
I had been thinking about it along other lines though, in terms of relationships, and my seeing myself as not suitable for them. That's just me throwing up barriers within myself, I can see quite plainly, and yet sometimes I think that the notion of needing to be in a relationship, and of being lonely and dwelling on it, is itself the obstruction, to simply living my life and taking on what ever presents itself. To imagine objects of desire, and obstructions to them, is just the self trying to prove that it exists with things that appear to define what it is. I crave, I am frustrated, therefore I am.
I have a feeling that what "no obstruction" really means when you're truly realized it is that you disabuse yourself of the habit of thinking there is a basis for imagining that anything could be an obstruction to anything else. Nothing in the way and nothing for it to be in the way of. No signal, nothing to signify, nothing to interfere with the no-signal.
Be great if I could just live on brooditation energy. Jobs are a real slap in the face. To a lot of good people.
I seem to be one of the very few people in the world who's not in a big fuckin hurry all the fuckin time. People who are in a big hurry all the time have this annoying habit of passing me on the right, and no doubt they hate me for only going 5, 10, or 15 mph over the speed limit in the left lane. Couple evenings ago a guy passed me on the right in a no passing zone in a school zone where the limit is 25 and I was doing thirty because i myself once got pulled over right there. He even had his trunk crunched from someone who was apparently in even bigger a hurry than him one time. So today I'm heading back up to mass after visiting NETTTS and I'm putt putting through an intersection at the same speed as the rest of traffic and a woman in an SUV blows by me on my right at maybe 40-45 and cuts in front of me. But a cop saw
her do it and immediately cranked up his siren and nailed that bitch's ass. Yeah, it's nice to see a cop nailing someone for what they did to me.
Thing about bikes is that even though they're a lot faster than cars, they're not about being in a big fuckin hurry the way cars are. There about enjoying the journey, they're about having passion beyond a passion for getting to work on time. Internal combustions engines were a huge cultural mistake in a certain sense, in that they made it possible, and eventually necessary, to be in a hurry all the time, where before things had a more manageable speed with the limitations of how fast horses could move or how often the train came through.
One time I was listening to Car Talk on the way in to work, and they were talking about how someone had observed that over in Italy they drive like maniacs, but noone gets road rage, and had asked why that was. Someone had subsequently posted on their website that the Italians are obsessed with speed, but Americans are obsessed with time. The Italians don't give a crap about being on time for anything; they just like going fast. Clocks, internal combustion engines, and a Protestant work ethic make for a fuckin stressed-out, in a hurry culture that insists on passing me on the right.
That photograph I posted above looks really great full size on a monitor; it has an open, still feel to it. Tonight on the news they were talking about a murder that just occurred on the bike path I was riding on that runs along the right river bank in this photograph(the pic was taken from a bridge) about a quarter mile from where I took it. Peace and beauty and poverty and crime and danger stand shoulder to shoulder in a lot of places in Springfield. Maybe all there really is to say is that the world is what you decide to see, a vision and opinion of things that you inflict upon yourself. Or I could say that being in a hurry and stressed out or poor and murderous are vexing distractions from the stillness and openness and light that are available to us if we will grant ourselves a moment to notice them. Don't know if that thought leads anywhere. I love the world, but hate work, time, cars, bills. I like certain people but overall I hate people. Nothing for it I guess. IF you never learn to make your own decisions, you can find yourself caught between worrying about whether the bigger mistake is in not taking time to appreciate how beautiful the world is, or in taking that time because you need to be working or looking for work and combating your financial anxieties. I think if humans, or maybe just me, had an inherent capacity to be sane and rational, we could find balance, but I think that what I am is an organizm with clashing structures of agenda within my mind that are incompatible with one another and not amenable to being brought into balance by any mechanism of psychological adjustment and reason. So Instead of being adjusted and living, I am anxious and listless, never able to feel right about what I decide to do. This is some kinda random ramble ain't it. The underlying pic is me pretending to do what someone well adjusted might do.
Cats like to get into anything they'll fit into. I spose it would be cool to do stuff like that if I were a cat.
Today I watched her crawl up between the top of my car's tire and the top of the wheel well. There's also a cabinet door I had to put a latch on, because the cats figured out how to open the door and get into the hollow space under the bathtub, and bring out shriveled up dead mice.
Last night I had to rescue a mouse from the cat pictured above. Interesting thing is that it appeared to be some type of Kangaroo Mouse, i.e, Muad'Dib, from the way it bounded off. I dinna think we had that sorta mouse round here.
As for me I met up with The NETTTS CDL school rep today That school costs more than others but has more instruction time. Thursday I'm going down there to see what kind of financial aid would be available for me.
One disadvantage of motorcycling as much as I do is that my balls are killing me.
Vibration.
The temp agency did call me with a possible pending job, so hopefully there will be a coupla bucks coming from that. Keep me alive.
Hm. Guess that's it for the momint.
Today I watched her crawl up between the top of my car's tire and the top of the wheel well. There's also a cabinet door I had to put a latch on, because the cats figured out how to open the door and get into the hollow space under the bathtub, and bring out shriveled up dead mice.
Last night I had to rescue a mouse from the cat pictured above. Interesting thing is that it appeared to be some type of Kangaroo Mouse, i.e, Muad'Dib, from the way it bounded off. I dinna think we had that sorta mouse round here.
As for me I met up with The NETTTS CDL school rep today That school costs more than others but has more instruction time. Thursday I'm going down there to see what kind of financial aid would be available for me.
One disadvantage of motorcycling as much as I do is that my balls are killing me.
Vibration. The temp agency did call me with a possible pending job, so hopefully there will be a coupla bucks coming from that. Keep me alive.
Hm. Guess that's it for the momint.
Hello again.
On friday I found out that the CDL school a couple miles from my house is 3,995 for a 30 day course, which is 40 hours of classroom time plus 120 hours of hands on instruction. Too bad I didn't have the presence of mind to seize this opportunity last summer when I still had some money, not having been unemployed for so long... 20/20 hindsight. Can't point to a real long list of good decisions I've made in my life anyway.
In any case, I could sell my bike and use some of my remaining cash to raise the money, but then I'd be left with a not-running car and very little cash to fix it. What would be really nice would be get a home equity loan against my trailer, but my credit is exceedingly bad. It may ultimately be necessary to sell my trailer to free up the cash, which is an exceedingly stressful self-inflicted violence, but would ultimately be worth it to give myself a financially viable future and a job I wouldn't hate. My ideal lifestyle would be to go truckin across the country, making tonsa money and partying with my favorite SG's when I'm in their areas, but I guess that's rather an overidealized picture and getting rather ahead of myself.
Actually tuesday a guy from another CDL school is coming by to pitch his school at me. Maybe they can offer financial aid such as won't necessitate my gutting myself financially right now. Well whatever, we'll see.
I had a couple of extremely important linguistic insights while commenting in Enola's journal this morning.
1. Recuse has the same Letters as Rescue, it being a narrower definition of rescue, exclusively from jury service, as far as I know. I think that makes it a palindrome, although that might be the word for a word like RADAR which is spelled the same forwards and backwards.
2. would it not make more sense to spell "three", "threee"?
other linguistic insights I had a while ago include
3. misspell is and odd word to spell, and if you mispel it mispell or misspel you're conveying the concept as or perhps even more effectively that if you don't mispel it.
4. if you mispel "prepare" "perpare", you get a word of comparable meaning and utility.
Now I shall whine a bit. I was reading ZakSmith's last journal entry and he mentioned how his paintings take all day every day for a month. I hate trying. But it is abundantly evident that such things as are created by wonderworkers, which incidentally is another linguistic insight i once had, wonderworkers being a great word to use for great artists or musicians, though its conventional older meaning refers to people who perform miracles or charaltans who dupe the gullible with fake ones, are the results of great quantites of trying. Of effort, dedication, commitment, guts, what have you. I rarely bestir myself to try much of anything. And here comes the whining-i think it has a lot to do with how demoralized i was as a kid, with my dad always riding me to work hard, he made himself this terrible model of what a hard working person is like, angry, bitter, violent, mentally and physically cruel. He never encouraged me to pursue anything i showed an interest in, her always made work something directly opposed to my following what was in my heart and something i was a worthless lazy bastard and doomed to financial failure for not doing. A brief example-- I used to spend a lot of time looking up at the night sky with my binoculars, and his respone was thus: "is that all you're ever gonna do, look at stars with your binoculars?" Not: "it's great that you have this interest: go with it!" This is as mild as his unsupportiveness would get. At the other extreme our wills would clash and we would come to blows, and he would always win; at least twice I had to give up fighting because he had his hands around my throat and I couldn't breathe.
So I feel sad and bitter and demoralized a lot of time and I wonder, who would I have been if I had had supportive parents?' I know other people like Temper who also have had bad experiences with their parents, but unlike me came out of the experience, as far as I can tell, way more together and way more functional than me. Irony of my life is that I have a streak of violence and anger in me, that I got from my father, that led me to physically fought with him; now I have major trouble dealing with authority figures and am fearful of confrontations with anyone about anything. I guess I lost fights with him a few times too many and absorbed too much of his hateful attitude toward the relationship of the passions in my heart and the world of work, to digest what I have the innate capacity to digest and grow out of. A B-17 Flying fortress was a tough plane and could lose an engine or the tail rudder and still make it back home, but even the B-17 went down if enough flak hit it, took out three engines or set the fuel on fire. Everyone has limits of what they can take.
Bah. I shall learn to drive trucks. Make a few bucks and see some new places. Publish my theory of motivation on the web. My brain will still need to vent on occasion so here's the forum for that.
love and kisses to all.
On friday I found out that the CDL school a couple miles from my house is 3,995 for a 30 day course, which is 40 hours of classroom time plus 120 hours of hands on instruction. Too bad I didn't have the presence of mind to seize this opportunity last summer when I still had some money, not having been unemployed for so long... 20/20 hindsight. Can't point to a real long list of good decisions I've made in my life anyway.
In any case, I could sell my bike and use some of my remaining cash to raise the money, but then I'd be left with a not-running car and very little cash to fix it. What would be really nice would be get a home equity loan against my trailer, but my credit is exceedingly bad. It may ultimately be necessary to sell my trailer to free up the cash, which is an exceedingly stressful self-inflicted violence, but would ultimately be worth it to give myself a financially viable future and a job I wouldn't hate. My ideal lifestyle would be to go truckin across the country, making tonsa money and partying with my favorite SG's when I'm in their areas, but I guess that's rather an overidealized picture and getting rather ahead of myself.
Actually tuesday a guy from another CDL school is coming by to pitch his school at me. Maybe they can offer financial aid such as won't necessitate my gutting myself financially right now. Well whatever, we'll see.
I had a couple of extremely important linguistic insights while commenting in Enola's journal this morning.
1. Recuse has the same Letters as Rescue, it being a narrower definition of rescue, exclusively from jury service, as far as I know. I think that makes it a palindrome, although that might be the word for a word like RADAR which is spelled the same forwards and backwards.
2. would it not make more sense to spell "three", "threee"?
other linguistic insights I had a while ago include
3. misspell is and odd word to spell, and if you mispel it mispell or misspel you're conveying the concept as or perhps even more effectively that if you don't mispel it.
4. if you mispel "prepare" "perpare", you get a word of comparable meaning and utility.
Now I shall whine a bit. I was reading ZakSmith's last journal entry and he mentioned how his paintings take all day every day for a month. I hate trying. But it is abundantly evident that such things as are created by wonderworkers, which incidentally is another linguistic insight i once had, wonderworkers being a great word to use for great artists or musicians, though its conventional older meaning refers to people who perform miracles or charaltans who dupe the gullible with fake ones, are the results of great quantites of trying. Of effort, dedication, commitment, guts, what have you. I rarely bestir myself to try much of anything. And here comes the whining-i think it has a lot to do with how demoralized i was as a kid, with my dad always riding me to work hard, he made himself this terrible model of what a hard working person is like, angry, bitter, violent, mentally and physically cruel. He never encouraged me to pursue anything i showed an interest in, her always made work something directly opposed to my following what was in my heart and something i was a worthless lazy bastard and doomed to financial failure for not doing. A brief example-- I used to spend a lot of time looking up at the night sky with my binoculars, and his respone was thus: "is that all you're ever gonna do, look at stars with your binoculars?" Not: "it's great that you have this interest: go with it!" This is as mild as his unsupportiveness would get. At the other extreme our wills would clash and we would come to blows, and he would always win; at least twice I had to give up fighting because he had his hands around my throat and I couldn't breathe.
So I feel sad and bitter and demoralized a lot of time and I wonder, who would I have been if I had had supportive parents?' I know other people like Temper who also have had bad experiences with their parents, but unlike me came out of the experience, as far as I can tell, way more together and way more functional than me. Irony of my life is that I have a streak of violence and anger in me, that I got from my father, that led me to physically fought with him; now I have major trouble dealing with authority figures and am fearful of confrontations with anyone about anything. I guess I lost fights with him a few times too many and absorbed too much of his hateful attitude toward the relationship of the passions in my heart and the world of work, to digest what I have the innate capacity to digest and grow out of. A B-17 Flying fortress was a tough plane and could lose an engine or the tail rudder and still make it back home, but even the B-17 went down if enough flak hit it, took out three engines or set the fuel on fire. Everyone has limits of what they can take.
Bah. I shall learn to drive trucks. Make a few bucks and see some new places. Publish my theory of motivation on the web. My brain will still need to vent on occasion so here's the forum for that.
love and kisses to all.
Ja, und? "Yes, and. . . ?"
Is a useful German expression I picked up from Run Lola Run that means "what you just said is entirely meaningless, a fact that is observable from the lack of ramifications that follow your having said it". I don't know if english has an expression of comparable point and force.
It's what you might say about my last journal entry, though one person was kind enough to offer a commonality of understanding.
Sometimes your brain just needs to take a really huge shit.
Last night I was on break from tossing bags of ice, and I was sitting next to a couple of truck drivers, listening to them talk about how much money they make. Holy fuck. I sent an inquiry off to a truck driving school this morning. I'd like to know how much it costs and how long it takes to get a CDL. I do recall from having moved a couple of times that i hate driving big trucks but for that kind of money I'll get over it. I get to thinking that to go into that profession would be some kind of failure, failure to get into an academic career, but then i pose the question "prove what to whom?" I can get a laptop with voice type and let my thoughts wander where they will and If I get an idea just speak into the mike and get it on the computer. I also think that I would be lonely, that I couldn't make personal connections, find a relationship. Well, if you observe my photos from previous journal entries there ain't no pictures of people in them; for all my social skills I might as well be autistic. Or maybe it's just that hinge factor of how to form relationships ..
anyway, I need not become any more or less social on the road than I would be at home, just get a laptop with a wireless lan, a couple different connection ports and do my journaling and emailing from whereever I am, assuming available connectivity. And with my own mobile business I could just base myself whereever if ever I find someone to be with, and just do local routes wherever that may be. Gotta stop thinking inside a box, however much I crave to be boxed in and told what to do. And If i want I can truck around for a few years and then go back to school yet again, instead of being a latin teacher maybe do some actual archaeology. I realized when I was taking my exam today that I do have some affection for that field as well, people have given me support in pursuit of it and it does have the pluses of having colleagues in the field with whom one can share a beer on occasion.
Whatever. I get a lot more ideas that ever i implement, just right now I can see that I have some options for my life. a horizon, a destination and a good sized check when you get there does not seem a particularly hateful sort of life. Prove what to whom? Just do something, just be and be OK. The very definition of non-neurosis.
Edited a bit, later on for grammar. It occured to me that So What is the english equivalent of Ja und? But i don't know if it's exactly identical in feel, but to speculate further would just exceed my linguistic expertise. So you;ll just have to wonder.
I thought of a terribly clever pithy saying " sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're seeing things or just seeing things."
Is a useful German expression I picked up from Run Lola Run that means "what you just said is entirely meaningless, a fact that is observable from the lack of ramifications that follow your having said it". I don't know if english has an expression of comparable point and force.
It's what you might say about my last journal entry, though one person was kind enough to offer a commonality of understanding.
Sometimes your brain just needs to take a really huge shit.
Last night I was on break from tossing bags of ice, and I was sitting next to a couple of truck drivers, listening to them talk about how much money they make. Holy fuck. I sent an inquiry off to a truck driving school this morning. I'd like to know how much it costs and how long it takes to get a CDL. I do recall from having moved a couple of times that i hate driving big trucks but for that kind of money I'll get over it. I get to thinking that to go into that profession would be some kind of failure, failure to get into an academic career, but then i pose the question "prove what to whom?" I can get a laptop with voice type and let my thoughts wander where they will and If I get an idea just speak into the mike and get it on the computer. I also think that I would be lonely, that I couldn't make personal connections, find a relationship. Well, if you observe my photos from previous journal entries there ain't no pictures of people in them; for all my social skills I might as well be autistic. Or maybe it's just that hinge factor of how to form relationships ..
anyway, I need not become any more or less social on the road than I would be at home, just get a laptop with a wireless lan, a couple different connection ports and do my journaling and emailing from whereever I am, assuming available connectivity. And with my own mobile business I could just base myself whereever if ever I find someone to be with, and just do local routes wherever that may be. Gotta stop thinking inside a box, however much I crave to be boxed in and told what to do. And If i want I can truck around for a few years and then go back to school yet again, instead of being a latin teacher maybe do some actual archaeology. I realized when I was taking my exam today that I do have some affection for that field as well, people have given me support in pursuit of it and it does have the pluses of having colleagues in the field with whom one can share a beer on occasion.
Whatever. I get a lot more ideas that ever i implement, just right now I can see that I have some options for my life. a horizon, a destination and a good sized check when you get there does not seem a particularly hateful sort of life. Prove what to whom? Just do something, just be and be OK. The very definition of non-neurosis.
Edited a bit, later on for grammar. It occured to me that So What is the english equivalent of Ja und? But i don't know if it's exactly identical in feel, but to speculate further would just exceed my linguistic expertise. So you;ll just have to wonder.
I thought of a terribly clever pithy saying " sometimes it's hard to tell whether you're seeing things or just seeing things."
My head isn't real clear about a lot of things a lot of the time. Last night I had to send a rather apologetic email to a professor of mine for having missed an exam due to having gotten the date wrong. I even knew what the date was, but my mind just didn't focus on that fact that the date was yesterday.
Another time I was talking on the phone with an ex-gf who's in grad school and I couldn't remember what year she was going to graduate. She told me later that she was on the verge of never speaking to me again after that. But she told me later that she had come to understand what was up with me after watching a tv show about pathological liars, where they were described as in a sense being unaware that other people exist.
I have all this anxiety about jobs and money, cars, bills, expectations of me on the part of others. It comes together in my head and gut like a sticky blob of tar. I walk out to get my mail and I love the openess of the air and daylight but I don't let myself stay in it, I go inside and worry about things, work, money, looking for jobs, not knowing whether I should admit on applications that I've been fired for surfing the net at work, cars shaking themselves apart, mechanics asking me if I'm sure I want to do the repairs because the car is such a POS, but I need to have it for the jobs I sometimes have. I have my bike, but what if there's a hurricane and I need to get to work? Do I sell the bike and get the car fixed, get religion so I can pray that something else doesn't go wrong with it? Or buy another car and hope that that one lasts better than this one did?
I do have a temp job and a funcitioning bike and my employment prospects have some glimmers of hope on the horizon. But the anxiety is sort of a continuous siezure of worries about things the overwhelms your mind in a murky obsession, dark cloudy sticky heavy dread of disasters waiting around the corner to pounce on you just when you thought you were safe.
I have a tendency to dislike my writing compared to that of others. It seems to me that a lot of other people have a more limpid and poised style, reflecting how their thoughts are so clear and logical compared to mind. Mine are this great knot of tied up knots of emotion that I feel in my gut; and maddeningly obsessive analyses of the things that have been said to me and that I have read and that have happened to me, me trying to untangle the gordian knot that you tie yourself and your heart and mind into when you just don't deal with things. For me life is like one continuous process of that trial Prince Baron (timothy dalton) has flash gordon take where you stick your hand into that stump, it being a test of your bravery, cuz that giant scorpion thing might sting you. every job listing, every envelope containing my bank statement or a bill, every time I take the car into the shop for an oil change or to get inspected, or going to the dentist, is a hole in a stump and some of the holes have scorpions in them, and it's all I can think about, like a heavy draght of molasses weighing in my guts, tensing my neck and leaving me in a sort of blurry semiwakefulness to lots of things that people who can handle things are more fully alert to. I wish I was one of those people who could handle things well enough to be able to bring himslef to deposit a check in the bank wihout being afraid or what the receipt reports of my balance.
And I know full well that there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do for me, and that I just have to pick myslef up and deal with it. In a certain sense there is absolutely no point in having written this, as some might point out there are people who have far more serious problems than I and that I am perhaps beneath contempt for having let myself get into the condition I'm in. Decadent, a child. I don't know whether to hate the world or myself, or what to think of the world when I see beautiful spring days like today but my mind cannot get over how demoralizing the ugliness and tedium and desperate need for things to work that is the world of jobs and money. Healthy people can somehow sort these things out and be OK. At least I am assuming that there are in fact healthy people and they they can do things that I would imagine that healthy people deal with a lot better than me.
Maybe I'm too pitiful to be worth reading but I guess a journal should at least be honest if it's to mean anything. So that's my shit for today. Thanks for reading if you have, maybe you know something I don't already know, tell me.
Another time I was talking on the phone with an ex-gf who's in grad school and I couldn't remember what year she was going to graduate. She told me later that she was on the verge of never speaking to me again after that. But she told me later that she had come to understand what was up with me after watching a tv show about pathological liars, where they were described as in a sense being unaware that other people exist.
I have all this anxiety about jobs and money, cars, bills, expectations of me on the part of others. It comes together in my head and gut like a sticky blob of tar. I walk out to get my mail and I love the openess of the air and daylight but I don't let myself stay in it, I go inside and worry about things, work, money, looking for jobs, not knowing whether I should admit on applications that I've been fired for surfing the net at work, cars shaking themselves apart, mechanics asking me if I'm sure I want to do the repairs because the car is such a POS, but I need to have it for the jobs I sometimes have. I have my bike, but what if there's a hurricane and I need to get to work? Do I sell the bike and get the car fixed, get religion so I can pray that something else doesn't go wrong with it? Or buy another car and hope that that one lasts better than this one did?
I do have a temp job and a funcitioning bike and my employment prospects have some glimmers of hope on the horizon. But the anxiety is sort of a continuous siezure of worries about things the overwhelms your mind in a murky obsession, dark cloudy sticky heavy dread of disasters waiting around the corner to pounce on you just when you thought you were safe.
I have a tendency to dislike my writing compared to that of others. It seems to me that a lot of other people have a more limpid and poised style, reflecting how their thoughts are so clear and logical compared to mind. Mine are this great knot of tied up knots of emotion that I feel in my gut; and maddeningly obsessive analyses of the things that have been said to me and that I have read and that have happened to me, me trying to untangle the gordian knot that you tie yourself and your heart and mind into when you just don't deal with things. For me life is like one continuous process of that trial Prince Baron (timothy dalton) has flash gordon take where you stick your hand into that stump, it being a test of your bravery, cuz that giant scorpion thing might sting you. every job listing, every envelope containing my bank statement or a bill, every time I take the car into the shop for an oil change or to get inspected, or going to the dentist, is a hole in a stump and some of the holes have scorpions in them, and it's all I can think about, like a heavy draght of molasses weighing in my guts, tensing my neck and leaving me in a sort of blurry semiwakefulness to lots of things that people who can handle things are more fully alert to. I wish I was one of those people who could handle things well enough to be able to bring himslef to deposit a check in the bank wihout being afraid or what the receipt reports of my balance.
And I know full well that there is absolutely nothing that anyone can do for me, and that I just have to pick myslef up and deal with it. In a certain sense there is absolutely no point in having written this, as some might point out there are people who have far more serious problems than I and that I am perhaps beneath contempt for having let myself get into the condition I'm in. Decadent, a child. I don't know whether to hate the world or myself, or what to think of the world when I see beautiful spring days like today but my mind cannot get over how demoralizing the ugliness and tedium and desperate need for things to work that is the world of jobs and money. Healthy people can somehow sort these things out and be OK. At least I am assuming that there are in fact healthy people and they they can do things that I would imagine that healthy people deal with a lot better than me.
Maybe I'm too pitiful to be worth reading but I guess a journal should at least be honest if it's to mean anything. So that's my shit for today. Thanks for reading if you have, maybe you know something I don't already know, tell me.
No signal, nothing to be signified.
Yet I remain bound by my own construing. Waiting, striving for the realization of the Exact Right Thing To Do And To Be. Yet there is only being. Grass and rain. Unfortuantely also bills and jobs. People and words. Construing is a bit of a snarl in your hair, a tangle of what's normally straight and falling freely. I contemplate and set aside my construing, bit by bit and it erodes, my blood starts to flow a bit, the rain passes and the sun breaks for a while.
Squinting in the brightness.
Hello there. After I wrote out all that stuff for my last post I started thinking of any number of reasons why the idea would never work, and I found it rather disheartening to consider the all of the human failings that would effectively prevent this idea from working. I find the human race eminently un-fixable in light of having had an idea that attempted a fix.
So yesterday I was farting around on my (pedal-powered) bike being comparably unproductive as when I was in the mall food court, having my prison reform idea, poking around the old industrial city of holyoke enjoying the colors and textures of the old brick buildings. I found this old blue truck. It reminded me of the movie Mystery Men, which I love, and the part where you first see Mr. Furious' workplace, where a Herkimer battle jitney is parked, and the camera passes over the HERKIMER logo on the vehicle's grille. I love little aesthetic touches of design such as that, and i've developed an eye for classic vehicle logos as a result.
And I found this cool old fire alarm box.
And I loved the red of this smokestack against the blue sky. Digital image enhancement is one more thing I'm going to have to sell my soul or something like that in exchange for the motivation to learn how to do it. So as to be able to show the red like I originally saw it.
So yesterday I was farting around on my (pedal-powered) bike being comparably unproductive as when I was in the mall food court, having my prison reform idea, poking around the old industrial city of holyoke enjoying the colors and textures of the old brick buildings. I found this old blue truck. It reminded me of the movie Mystery Men, which I love, and the part where you first see Mr. Furious' workplace, where a Herkimer battle jitney is parked, and the camera passes over the HERKIMER logo on the vehicle's grille. I love little aesthetic touches of design such as that, and i've developed an eye for classic vehicle logos as a result.
And I found this cool old fire alarm box.
And I loved the red of this smokestack against the blue sky. Digital image enhancement is one more thing I'm going to have to sell my soul or something like that in exchange for the motivation to learn how to do it. So as to be able to show the red like I originally saw it.
Yesterday I was having myself a cheeseburger and some chili at the mall food court when I got me an idea and was therefore rather annoyed. The trouble with new ideas is that when you get them you have this responsibility to the world to propagate them for the benefit of all mankind. Which is fine unless you don't have a graduate degree in the field in which you get important ideas, in which case noone is ever going to pay any attention to you.
For this reason, my fallback position is to my journal on the SG website as a medium for scattering the seeds of my ideas on the wind, and hope that somehow sooner or later to make a connection with them, and grow them beyond the confines of my admittedly capacious cranium.
I'll try to be succinct so I and my readers can return to looking at and reading about the lives of charming and attractive tattooed young women, in a timely manner.
A few years a go I worked out 5 yes 5 fundamental impulses, or 5 fundamental aspects of motivation, that account for very nearly everything that human beings and most other complex organisms think and do.
1. Competitive
2. Communicative
3. Consumptive
4. Reproductive
5. Upkeep.
Lots of things like the drives to learn or to control or to conform are actually when you examine them, what I call "synthetic" impulses, distinct categories of action that stem from the action to two or more of the basic 5 impulses working together. Most activites satisfy the demands of more than one impulse. Incidentally it isn't necessary to infer the existence of something you cold call a survival instinct, although if you wanted to think there was one it wouldn't really interfere with anything for the most part, it's just unnecessary. An organism need only have drives to do things, it doesn't mean that there has to be a sort of theoretical orchestrator working behind them.
Anyway, there were some goings-on in they psychology discussion groin that got me thinkin and theorizin about some stuff, but first I think I need to point out a couple of other things, one being that the competitive and communicative impulses are actually one and the same thing, a distinct behavioral agenda with a distinct mechanism for achieving that agenda. The second is that human beings are pretty much all arranged in a pyramid, the rich and powerful on top, the poor and ostracises on the bottom, slackers and SG's and others in various positions between. The compet/comm impulse is the drive to take the very best position that you possibly can on the pyramid. According to circumstance of ability and environment it can mean trying to climb higher or working very hard to fix yourself in a favorable place, it can mean pushing others down or pulling them up. (nurturing is a synthesis of comp/comm and reproductive). The pyramid is built and operated by an astonishingly complex network of statements exchanged between people that describe who belongs where and what posessions and occupations and beliefs and whatnot function to establish that they belong where they belong.
For each of us it starts out like this. You are born, Splat. You cryout and someone picks you up and starts to take care of you. This basic process never fundamentally changes, it just gets real complicated. You can't just cry out and belong, you have to do specific things, what to do and say, or people are going to trample you into a bloody mire, to borrow from Tolkien, pushing you down and pulling themselves up, even fusing to bond with you to hold you in a workable place.
Well, the psych discussion group has recently been having a heated exchange about whether people choose to have mental illnesses. Those who regard mental illness as chosen by the mentally ill will say such things as the mentally ill are just having a pity party, they are seeking attention. Without going too deeply into that debate, everyone in the world needs some attention. Some are just more adept at doing exactly what their culture asks them to do, according to its particular norms. People, like me, who are described as neurotic, somehow cannot meet the general expectations of what they think various social pressures demand of them, and that can cause depression or anxiety and various other reactions. The thing is that even if you see youself as not fitting in, as having no place place in the pyramid, the comp/comm impulse NEVER turns off; even suicide is just the overwhelming power of that impulse having internalized negative inputs/statement about the self which have then made this drive turn toxic and destroy the self with all the power that's evolve to drive the self to survive. Suicide is also widely known as a cry for help. I'll also quickly point out that depression is in fact not a feeling so much as an unwillingness to feel, the mind that cannot make the connections to others that it needs to make, that has internalized statements(perversely at first from others but then taking over for them, via the very action of the drive to communicate and pick up things to say with which to present oneself) that it cannot make the needed connections with others, and as a result has the rug pulled out from under the feet of the very force of its being, it wills itself to shut down, be unable to feel the force of life itself.
All this is presented in order to say that human beings have an overwhelming drive to construe themselves as belonging somewhere, and one and the same with this drive is the overwhelming need to Say Something to Somebody. Indeed, why the hell else would i be typing this, or belong to this site or ever leave a comment in anyone's journal.
Now because I've never really been in the habit of using my time wisely, yesterday when I was in the mall food court prior to heading over to B&N to look for books on how to draw manga, i somehow got to thinking about a History channel program I once saw about the history of prisons.
In the mid to late nineteen century there was this idea of keeping all of the prisoners in solitary confinement, so that they would have time to contemplate their lives and get reformed. Problem was this didn't work, the prisoners went insane. Don't know what percentage went insane but a significant one. Anyway that Idea fell by the wayside and solitary is now sort of prison within prison.
The problem with allowing inmates to interact with one another is that the're criminals, the use a lotta drugs and rape and murder each other most assiduously. A man in prison either commits a crime or has one committed to him every day that he is there. This is not a place where people get rehabilitated. Which is an oversimplification but not exactly a wanton one. Or as Chris Rock puts it, prison is crime school. Prison inmates are their own pyramid with in the larger pyramid of the culture that put them there. It is their community and they learn to be part of that culture in order to survive just as every human being in every other circumstance does.
My idea is to erase the community of criminals/prison inmates altogether. Prisoners should be kept completely isolated from one another and allowed form no relationships of community with other criminals. Instead they should only be allowed access to other forms of community, with counselors at the prison, perhaps, but the idea I have had is that they should be given an online community, effectively. They should be given pen-pals, or web correspondents on the outside world. The system should be heavily firewalled so that the inmates should never have any means of gaining personal imformation about the persons outside with whom they are communicating, nor should the persons on the outside ever have any way of determining the identity of the inmate of giving them personal information in any way. There will certainly be manipulative psychopaths who try to abuse the system and victimize people on the outside when they get out and the anonymity firewall is to protect all involved from each other. Anyway, the object is that the inmate, having this overwhelming need to Say Something to Somebody, will find that the only people available to him are those on the outside, who are to be volunteers, including ordinary people, perhaps therapists and/or clergy according to what the inmate seeks out. I know you could set up an Orwellian Dystopia using very similar techniques. But what I want to do is to use this human drive to communicate and form bonds to facilitate the minds of criminals repairing themselves by giving them the opportunity to form bonds and integrate with non criminal culture. I know there all sorts of reasons why this might not work, among them that criminals and non-criminals may have so little in common that they would have nothing to talk about, or the indifference of man toward his fellow man could mean that there would never be enough outside volunteers to correspond with the inmates for the program to ever be more than an experiment. It would also require a change in the theory of prison sentencing, rather than length of sentence being measure in proportion to the severity of the crime, this kind of theory of prison would necessarily create a greater uniformity of sentencing, prescribing terms not based on the severity of specific crimes but based on the amount of time that the inmate needs, if this idea is not manifiestly folly, to create himslef an new identity of one who share common bonds and values and view of self with people who are not criminals. In a certain sense you could say that a genuine attempt to change people's minds rather than just punish them as insidious quality of judging those minds as broken and then performing radical surgery to change them. and it migh vor various reasons never work. But It is at least rooted in the theory that if you give people the oppotunity to form bonds with other health and supportive minds that they shape themselves in accordance with the values that they will hopefully come to share with those minds. Practice is always far intidier than principle, so who knows. But at least this idea is in digitally transmissible form, and has a little whisper of existence.
Thanks if you've read all this, an unseemly long serious blog about psychology and prison reform.
For this reason, my fallback position is to my journal on the SG website as a medium for scattering the seeds of my ideas on the wind, and hope that somehow sooner or later to make a connection with them, and grow them beyond the confines of my admittedly capacious cranium.
I'll try to be succinct so I and my readers can return to looking at and reading about the lives of charming and attractive tattooed young women, in a timely manner.
A few years a go I worked out 5 yes 5 fundamental impulses, or 5 fundamental aspects of motivation, that account for very nearly everything that human beings and most other complex organisms think and do.
1. Competitive
2. Communicative
3. Consumptive
4. Reproductive
5. Upkeep.
Lots of things like the drives to learn or to control or to conform are actually when you examine them, what I call "synthetic" impulses, distinct categories of action that stem from the action to two or more of the basic 5 impulses working together. Most activites satisfy the demands of more than one impulse. Incidentally it isn't necessary to infer the existence of something you cold call a survival instinct, although if you wanted to think there was one it wouldn't really interfere with anything for the most part, it's just unnecessary. An organism need only have drives to do things, it doesn't mean that there has to be a sort of theoretical orchestrator working behind them.
Anyway, there were some goings-on in they psychology discussion groin that got me thinkin and theorizin about some stuff, but first I think I need to point out a couple of other things, one being that the competitive and communicative impulses are actually one and the same thing, a distinct behavioral agenda with a distinct mechanism for achieving that agenda. The second is that human beings are pretty much all arranged in a pyramid, the rich and powerful on top, the poor and ostracises on the bottom, slackers and SG's and others in various positions between. The compet/comm impulse is the drive to take the very best position that you possibly can on the pyramid. According to circumstance of ability and environment it can mean trying to climb higher or working very hard to fix yourself in a favorable place, it can mean pushing others down or pulling them up. (nurturing is a synthesis of comp/comm and reproductive). The pyramid is built and operated by an astonishingly complex network of statements exchanged between people that describe who belongs where and what posessions and occupations and beliefs and whatnot function to establish that they belong where they belong.
For each of us it starts out like this. You are born, Splat. You cryout and someone picks you up and starts to take care of you. This basic process never fundamentally changes, it just gets real complicated. You can't just cry out and belong, you have to do specific things, what to do and say, or people are going to trample you into a bloody mire, to borrow from Tolkien, pushing you down and pulling themselves up, even fusing to bond with you to hold you in a workable place.
Well, the psych discussion group has recently been having a heated exchange about whether people choose to have mental illnesses. Those who regard mental illness as chosen by the mentally ill will say such things as the mentally ill are just having a pity party, they are seeking attention. Without going too deeply into that debate, everyone in the world needs some attention. Some are just more adept at doing exactly what their culture asks them to do, according to its particular norms. People, like me, who are described as neurotic, somehow cannot meet the general expectations of what they think various social pressures demand of them, and that can cause depression or anxiety and various other reactions. The thing is that even if you see youself as not fitting in, as having no place place in the pyramid, the comp/comm impulse NEVER turns off; even suicide is just the overwhelming power of that impulse having internalized negative inputs/statement about the self which have then made this drive turn toxic and destroy the self with all the power that's evolve to drive the self to survive. Suicide is also widely known as a cry for help. I'll also quickly point out that depression is in fact not a feeling so much as an unwillingness to feel, the mind that cannot make the connections to others that it needs to make, that has internalized statements(perversely at first from others but then taking over for them, via the very action of the drive to communicate and pick up things to say with which to present oneself) that it cannot make the needed connections with others, and as a result has the rug pulled out from under the feet of the very force of its being, it wills itself to shut down, be unable to feel the force of life itself.
All this is presented in order to say that human beings have an overwhelming drive to construe themselves as belonging somewhere, and one and the same with this drive is the overwhelming need to Say Something to Somebody. Indeed, why the hell else would i be typing this, or belong to this site or ever leave a comment in anyone's journal.
Now because I've never really been in the habit of using my time wisely, yesterday when I was in the mall food court prior to heading over to B&N to look for books on how to draw manga, i somehow got to thinking about a History channel program I once saw about the history of prisons.
In the mid to late nineteen century there was this idea of keeping all of the prisoners in solitary confinement, so that they would have time to contemplate their lives and get reformed. Problem was this didn't work, the prisoners went insane. Don't know what percentage went insane but a significant one. Anyway that Idea fell by the wayside and solitary is now sort of prison within prison.
The problem with allowing inmates to interact with one another is that the're criminals, the use a lotta drugs and rape and murder each other most assiduously. A man in prison either commits a crime or has one committed to him every day that he is there. This is not a place where people get rehabilitated. Which is an oversimplification but not exactly a wanton one. Or as Chris Rock puts it, prison is crime school. Prison inmates are their own pyramid with in the larger pyramid of the culture that put them there. It is their community and they learn to be part of that culture in order to survive just as every human being in every other circumstance does.
My idea is to erase the community of criminals/prison inmates altogether. Prisoners should be kept completely isolated from one another and allowed form no relationships of community with other criminals. Instead they should only be allowed access to other forms of community, with counselors at the prison, perhaps, but the idea I have had is that they should be given an online community, effectively. They should be given pen-pals, or web correspondents on the outside world. The system should be heavily firewalled so that the inmates should never have any means of gaining personal imformation about the persons outside with whom they are communicating, nor should the persons on the outside ever have any way of determining the identity of the inmate of giving them personal information in any way. There will certainly be manipulative psychopaths who try to abuse the system and victimize people on the outside when they get out and the anonymity firewall is to protect all involved from each other. Anyway, the object is that the inmate, having this overwhelming need to Say Something to Somebody, will find that the only people available to him are those on the outside, who are to be volunteers, including ordinary people, perhaps therapists and/or clergy according to what the inmate seeks out. I know you could set up an Orwellian Dystopia using very similar techniques. But what I want to do is to use this human drive to communicate and form bonds to facilitate the minds of criminals repairing themselves by giving them the opportunity to form bonds and integrate with non criminal culture. I know there all sorts of reasons why this might not work, among them that criminals and non-criminals may have so little in common that they would have nothing to talk about, or the indifference of man toward his fellow man could mean that there would never be enough outside volunteers to correspond with the inmates for the program to ever be more than an experiment. It would also require a change in the theory of prison sentencing, rather than length of sentence being measure in proportion to the severity of the crime, this kind of theory of prison would necessarily create a greater uniformity of sentencing, prescribing terms not based on the severity of specific crimes but based on the amount of time that the inmate needs, if this idea is not manifiestly folly, to create himslef an new identity of one who share common bonds and values and view of self with people who are not criminals. In a certain sense you could say that a genuine attempt to change people's minds rather than just punish them as insidious quality of judging those minds as broken and then performing radical surgery to change them. and it migh vor various reasons never work. But It is at least rooted in the theory that if you give people the oppotunity to form bonds with other health and supportive minds that they shape themselves in accordance with the values that they will hopefully come to share with those minds. Practice is always far intidier than principle, so who knows. But at least this idea is in digitally transmissible form, and has a little whisper of existence.
Thanks if you've read all this, an unseemly long serious blog about psychology and prison reform.
