Sometimes the tuner breaks, you get stuck on a station. You find yourself in a rut and conditions aren’t looking to get much better. Broken wings and busted sails.
Suddenly you’re driven out of that fugue, you’re focused. You take up old and new hobbies, start calling people again. If they’ve known you long enough they’ll understand, it’s the way this life of yours works. Or works you? If they don’t know you that well or don’t understand you’ll make the effort to reconcile. You usually do. They want you in their life even when you forget it. You write off another 2 month episode to being someone who lives on all scales of the spectrum, someone who inundates themselves with the world before reflecting back into it with your own kind of refraction. The price you pay is well worth it. People pay you to pay it.
At times it seems to seem like you’re living through a constant inverse catharsis.
Catharsis – the process of releasing, and thereby providing relief from, strong or repressed emotions.
Inverse catharsis – the process of apprehending, releasing, and thereby attaining, strong and involved emotions.
Inverse catharsis. Pick up one concern to temporarily get away from the last. The immensity takes its toll. You wouldn’t trade it for the world.
You’ve told yourself that more than once. You’ve also considered an attempt at learning enough about neuroscience to be the first person to lobotomize the precise parts of existence that are causing you to come up with this idea in the first place.
Drugs are worth discovering if you’re the type that can do a lot of discovering on drugs. Some people do things that make their body make them, some people use their body to get them elsewhere. It takes drugs to take drugs. The brain doesn’t know the difference but you do. These altered states are novel (sometimes they come from a novel) just long enough to lift you out or dip you under that plane of existence that seems so dreary. Nothing’s distinguishable anymore. Existence becomes associative, however you add it up it comes out the same. In the end all the states and phases you find are one in the same. I feel guilty for saying it, a discovery you wish you could wish away and one I’d never wish on another. One way or another they all kill you, going the way of Bukowski.
I don’t mean that, I leave first person behind and go places you should never go alone.. then again who would want to come along anyway? Dangerous thinking when you leave your ego behind. I wonder how we’d view the world if we didn’t refer to some part of ourselves as an ego. History could’ve went a different way, Freud could’ve overdosed on cocaine before designing the framework of how we conceive ourselves.
“A small dose lifted me to the heights in a wonderful fashion. I am just now busy collecting the literature for a song of praise to this magical substance.”
– Freud (who ‘lifted himself to the heights’ for twelve years before dropping the habit, one he said he was ‘eager to conclude’)
I’ll admit the precision of accepted psychology can be reassuring when you accept it. To know we know so much and wonder how much we know. Epistemic limits and all, you won’t know when you find them.
See you distract yourself, escapism. You can make a productive life out of escaping it. It’s just part of how I operate, like my patternless sleeping patterns. That’s not writing it off and this isn’t denial. You lay in bed as each noise you hear assigns itself to its own channel in your brain, each dedicated to keeping you awake in their own way. From time to time your thoughts are harder to identify as your own. There’s no escape, well there is isn’t there? I think I’ll go to sleep. Escapes cousin. A temporary solution to your ephemerally permanent corporeal problems.
I woke up, back at it. Better take a pill, a hit, drink a cup, run around a bit. Do your own kind of devotional, be child like. Should probably eat something. Write it all down, get it out of your system just long enough to look down and regurgitate the concentrate. What’s wrong and right with the world today? What can I focus on to get myself to see something else? All I can do is laugh at and with it.
Laughter to make sense of it all, or at least to make light of its senseless nature. People usually respond well to humor, except for when they don’t. When they don’t.. they really don’t. It doesn’t go over their heads, it goes too deep. Can’t help but laugh. They become part of a joke they can’t laugh at. Just as much as I am. God’s a comedian after all.