I'm nuts

I just took this questionnaire online after googling 'why does life always feel like a dream', and the result was 'severe depersonalization'. That's what the dream feeling is. Depersonalization. A result of isolating myself from reality due to severe anxiety.

Oh...

I'm nuts.

Well, that's not really a surprise, I guess.

What is surprising is that it all started to gain momentum and really become a phenomenon after Jerral died, and that it took a year and a half for me to realize that that's when I stopped going to church... almost immediately after I had learned that Jerral had killed himself.  It wasn't a conscious decision.

My shadow

After only a few years of walking in circles, you'll come to know your own shadow very well. It becomes a recognizable caricature of yourself. A simple description that surprises you, upon realizing just how much of yourself you've invested in it. It's you, undeniably. A dynamic, always shifting outline, describing the motion of your life. It's always colored black, even when it's in full color. It may seem as if essential details are missing, but the motion of the black is rich with representation. Details are superfluous. The outline, the shifting outline of the black, the uniform ingredients of the shadow, the outline, the border of the smooth, unperturbed interior, is all that's important for meaningful identity. If you only take the time, and make the effort to notice... it reacts, to what you're feeling, to the motion of your life, as a picture of your life, through a filter which un-taints the seeing of it. It shifts and stretches, and squashes and fades and disappears, and reappears faithfully, reflecting a picture of yourself for the lower part of your eyes that see what we've forgotten how to remember, and it's always there. You can count on it, even if it's not there. You don't ever have to be afraid. It'll always come back.

How to get it

You (you in the general sense, that is) don't know what it means to miss a person anymore, after a long while and a half. You feel the feelingness of the missing, like it were gonna build up into it, but then you kind of forget how to get it. How to remember that thing that you miss.

That's weird, because... it's an empty shell of a memory that I miss now, but then where does the impetus come from? And why do I miss a feeling that I can't even remember? In the doorway of my minds eye?

Eyes don't have doors, in a practical sense. Get a grip, Ash.

Lost inside

You know, you can get lost inside of a song and forget your own identity for a while and become the actual vibrations and the math and the sunken structure. A phenomenon rolling through four dimensions that makes and disappears, makes and disappears as it rolls, like a platen over your atom strings. You know... how you can almost become a song.

Haven't you ever just wanted to be a song? Born at the beginning of it, living your life in the music of it, and dying when it ends? Think of all the different lives of each song. So many lives. Some happy, some sad, some tragic, some violent, some loving and some hateful, but all of them beautiful to somebody.

I've always kind've wanted that, to be a song. That abstract longing to be not an organized collection of atoms making a me-ness, but an organized expanse of vibrations making a sound-ness. Still me, you know? But a music instead of a body.

That's sorta the state of mind I was in about twenty minutes ago, as I was walking and immersed in the sound of music (the hills are alive and have eyes, and all that, you know). I guess I'd forgotten that I have a neck and a head, with orbs of seeing imbedded in it, for just for a second or two because abruptly and without warning, the thing in front of me slid downward, and a new thing fell into place from above (that was my neck pointing my head and my eyes upward, I later deduced... as in a minute or two ago), and suddenly I was walking toward an open expanse of stars instead of a planetary horizon.

That only took like, three quarters of a second to happen, so I wasn't actually back inside of myself yet. I was still just a vibrating feeling with some cognitive powers, and when that starfield hove into view, I thought it was a wormhole, or a warp portal, or a stargate, into my dream memories. For just a second there, that's what it was like...

Like, you know how you can never remember exactly how a dream begins? It's always just sort of a blur that becomes a dream at some indistinct point. That starfield was like the dream gateway that you can never actually remember. The portal into the dream place.

That's why I had to type this up, write it down, punch it in, get it out of my head and onto a substrate that's compatible with the common, awake-type of reality.

Concentrated dream-feeling. A singularity of dream-feeling in that doorway. I think there's an event-horizon there, that you cross over when you die. Oh...

That's what the dream-feeling is? The relativistic effects of warped dream-time, near the dreamularity?

I don't think you're supposed to be awake for that. And that's why it's driving me insane. I keep getting it when I'm awake. Is that it. Why is that.

How to describe it

How to describe what I feel?  I'll start with the simple things. It's just on the plus side of warm tonight - slash - this morning. My left knee hurts on the left side of it, near the back of the patella and slightly underneath, making me limp a little. On a drunken scale of 1 to 10, I'm at a 3.  I've been drinking constantly since I got off work. I feel gyp'd.

I feel like I've, on the whole, faked out the anxiety today. That means I've successfully distracted myself from it for most of the time that I've been conscious today. It's like hide - n - seek. Funny, I just thought of that. Not that there hasn't been anxiety... just not mine, primarily. I'm sorry. It's just today.

Cops have been being where I've been being a lot tonight. It doesn't bother me as much as it used to, being tailed by the DPD as I wander aimlessly after work night after night after night, thousands of times. I think they used to hope that they'd catch me felonizing something. Now after so long, I think  they're just bored and checking out what the familiar ghosts are wandering, and doing to.

I wonder what kind of nick name they've given me. The Roving Red Handed Reader.  That's how I'd nick myself if I did. I wonder if the DPD has a nick-name for me. That's something, huh? How many people would realistically have cause to wonder something like that?

If my knees could cry, there would be dirty rivulets running down them. Like right this moment, I feel disappointed and deflated. It's not for any particular reason. It's just a feeling I almost had a few severals of clusters of seconds ago, that didn't pan out You know?

Now, now I am starting to feel terrible, just like I want to force open a rusty valve wheel, like in an old submarine, and scream out all of the years and years of wails and sorries in one loud and obnoxious and ugly HONK, to wake up the neighborhood at five ay em.

Brcause misery loves company. But I didn't, and instead, I'm doing this thing. My brain broke a couple of years ago, as if, things weren't, bad enough, already. It broke, right on the nudge of the crack between the oh wells and what ifs, right above the I'm sorrys, I'm losts, it hurts"s and forgive me's..

I feel my footsteps on the sidewalk like colors. Brown for the heel striking the cement, black for the toes after, and over again and over again, and over. And shades of gray rolling underneath. A rich tapestry of blackish & white-ish sorrow, and I'm on top of the narrow concrete wheel of it, walking it and making it spin, and giving it life. 

Damn. That just then, I think, was probably the most depressing thing I've ever spelt out.

I don't know what hurts more. Being sorry, or being too tired to make up for it. Is that a natural human condition? I don't want 'sorry and afraid and exhausted' to be the words that described my life, but you know...want in one hand, and take a big ole ugly, smelly dump in the other, and see which one gets filled up with the molecular by-products of complex life, and then wonder what the 'f a miracle is, or if the word is just a synonym for a practical joke. Oh, a big one, I mean. A big practical joke. Not just a normal one, like on April Fools. I mean a... a quantum one, or something.

Greetings

Greetings, fragnasticators from planet Schmelvelinia. I am EliAsh from planet Denton.

You are not EliAsh from planet Denton. Therefore, you are not from. However, you are not necessarily not to.

Therefore, henceforth you shall now also be to too, but not too to. Forthwith, while to is still you and you are still to, you are not to be TOO to too, while remaining to, and are too to, too... but not TOO to; vis-à-vis R2D2. Ergo, absurdum illegitimi non carborundum.

Hencewith, all collapsinating of local quantumnasticating waveforms shall be collapselapsicated and dictatorated anonymouslessly, and preferably with no observationalistics running amok all over the place.

Forthforth, going forth and so forth, all new non-observationalasticationals of the collapsicationation of any form of waveform shall forthhencely and posthastily be forth forwarded forward for six sixtieths of a sixpence to the Prince of Whence, hence the son of King Wenceslas, who backed his car on the feets of Stephen.

Boogers

You know what I just realized? Boogers have absolutely no smell whatsoever.

A dream - too filthy

A nightmare. I only just remembered it... from sometime last week.

I awoke wrapped up in blankets, shivering and sick, and lying on the cold uncomfortable floor of the old house on Sena street. The walls of that house are like the inside of a cave... hard and rough and cracked, and cold to the touch. Like stone. I was nestled up against one of those walls. It was cold in the house as per the norm, since there was no gas or electricity or water, and there were candles burning in every room.

As I lay there, miserable and feverish, the feeble gray light of a cold and overcast morning began to seep inside through the windows, and I saw that the house was filled with people. Matt's friends. Some kind of party that I had nothing to do with, and that I didn't feel like caring about at all.

I rolled onto my other side and saw that Fr. Justin was there. Here, at the party, at my house. Of all people, I muttered to myself as he knelt beside me on the floor. I was embarrassed to have been discovered in such an undignified repose... unwashed and apathetic, wrapped in soiled blankets infused with the smell of days old sick, with a thin layer of accumulated grime coating my skin with an oily sheen.

Fr. Justin didn't say anything. He just got up and looked down at me lying there, then he kind of jerked his head in the other direction, indicating that I should get up and follow him. Then he walked into Matt"s room.

So, still wrapped up in those dirty blankets, I managed to stand somehow and I shuffled and stumbled my way toward my brothers room. From the kitchen I could see Fr. Justin sitting in there on the edge of the bed, quietly surveying the squalor as he waited for me.

The room was filthy. It stank. There were discarded plates containing the remnants of rotting food, and in every corner piles of mouldering laundry were heaped alongside open bags of stinking garbage. Beer bottles filled with swampy cigarette butts littered every available surface, and the carpet was infused with cigarette burns. Several ashtrays had spilled over onto the floor.

Then I came out of the sick and to myself, and I was suddenly aware that the entire house was in a similar condition, and so was I. It was me too, I realized. Filthy and despicable and repugnant and foul to the senses. The moisture of my body and of my self and of my will had become standing water... poisonous and stagnant. I felt embarrassed and humiliated and ashamed.

I tripped on the threshold of the doorway to my brothers room and landed on my knees. Fr. Justin was still sitting on the edge of the bed, looking down at me with a vague expression of distaste. I cupped my hands to receive a blessing, but Fr. Justin stood abruptly and said, "No, there's too much filth. It's unclean."

He strode out of the room and I hurried to follow him, knockering about and bestumbling forward on my hands and knees. Out of the room and into the kitchen, still wrapped up in those dirty blankets, and back into the living room where I saw the hem of Fr. Justin's robe flutter as it disappeared through the doorway into my own bedroom.

It took me a little while to crawl the distance through the kitchen and into the living room, through the mingling crowd, and to my room. I saw Fr. Justin in there. In that place that used to be my bedroom, in the old house on Sena street where I used to live. The one with the cold walls, rough and hard, like the walls of a cave. He was sitting on an old wooden stool that I used to know something about... just inside the doorway, hunched over and smoking a cigarette.

My eyes widened in alarm and I tried to reach for the cigarette to take it away from him, and at the same time I tried to cup my palms for a blessing. Then I fell, and as I fell, I wailed in dismay. And then, somewhere inside the utter clusterfuck of chaos that was unraveling the goodness of myself and of my sanity, right then and there, in the mean time of a night mare, I caught a glimpse of Fr. Justin flicking a cigarette ash onto the floor and muttering, "It's just too filthy, too filthy. Forget it. You're just too filthy..."

The dime sized spot of pain right under your sternum

Have you ever been listening to a song that reminded you of someone lost to you, maybe a friend you haven't seen for years, or an ex, or someone close to you who died, or maybe someone who is still in your life, and who you've shared a lot of it with?

Do you know that feeling that happens right underneath your breast bone, or your sternum? When you hear that music. You know that feeling, right? It's a definite physical sensation, almost like a pain of reminding. It refers to a segment of memories which contained that music, but the happening of those memories never knew this feeling I'm trying to describe because it didn't even exist when those memories were made... the feelings only manifest after the fact, usually by about a year. What? Why?

What IS that? It feels good and bad at the same time. It's like a pressure, about the size of a dime,.. but very concentrated. Right underneath the hardest part of your chest.

How does this thing happen? Just what in the heck is the mechanism for the physical manifestation of something as insubstantial and abstract as an emotion? What's it for? Why does it hurt and attract at the same time? Pain is supposed to be a tool for the learned avoidance of things which can harm us. And there's the pain, right there under the bone and inside the flesh. But then why does it also attract? It's like, when a moth dives into a candle flame. It's like two polar opposites conspiring just to 'ef with logic. Attractive and painful. Compelling and miserable. Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria!

I demand an answer to this crap. Or at least a reason for it. Even if it's a stupid reason, as long as it's the truth.

You

I went home from work early tonight. Relatively early after staying late, that is. I was feeling sick... ugly.

I gotta get home and wipe my feet off, man. I hadda kick those frikin' boots off. OH... bad idea. There sure are a lot of empties on the floor in my compartment. I guess I need some new ones. New empties... some future past tense empties? Some past future tense not-empties?

You know, there sure are a lot of dead bodies in the ground. How do I know that? It's obviously because I used to be one of those dead bodies, so that's how I know. Through experience. That, and also... well, how to describe it? Through a simple feeling... I mean, a simple lack of feeling, fuel, and energy to work, pretend, and make it through the day.

However, I did learn through that very same feeling that I'm not the kind of guy who'd cheat a friend to make it through the day, and because of that, I also figured out that someday they (you know, everybody who isn't me) are gonna exercise an unreasonable amount of strain on my simple way. To cheat me into cheating, that is.

Meaning... you know. Meaning that I know someday that they are gonna separate the part of my brain that can discriminate the friendly from the enemy.

Oh, they've already done it. You are the enemy.

That guy

So, Jason Lee is kind of a regular at my store. He's come in several times, and it's not uncommon for somebody to approach him like they were old friends, just because he's a well known actor.

Well, I just feel like I gotta say it, but I ain't that person. When Jason Lee comes to my register when I'm working, I treat him like a normal dude, like as if he wasn't famous or anything. Sometimes all I say is, "How's it going. That be all for you?" And other times, I'll turn on the natural charm, just like I would with any ordinary slob who comes into the store who isn't Jason Lee, and I'll say something like, "Yeah, that's my favorite Gatorade flavor too," or "Cool hat bro."

My point is, I think that as long as I keep treating Jason Lee like a normal person, and not some kind of meta Ultron humanoid who is too good to be true when he comes to my register to buy Gatorade, that maybe possibly someday he'll want to be my buddy.

The mean time

Meanwhile.

We all know the... word(s)? The expression? Meanwhile. It's two words scrunched up close together to make a new word.

Kinda like meantime, except that a meantime - as in 'the meantime' - is more like a 'something' that you can be inside of and experience directly and personally. A meanwhile, on the other hand, feels more like an outside observation of a meantime.

I've come to realize lately that the meantimes of my life that I feel compelled to share might not be easily given away... in that they're easy to give, but maybe not so easy to. receive. They're abstract. Maybe they're too mine and not enough yours, and therefore can't be yours, or anyone else's. That makes me a little sad, if that's the case.

But what the fuck do I know? I'm making all this shit up as I go along.

Anyway.

I've always assumed that the feelings that spring out of all of these moments I feel will naturally wind up seeping into the soil of future hours, taking root there and spreading the information of my experiences into and throughout a more or less timeless condition, conducive to a specific type of existence called being human.

I'm not so sure about that now, and that makes me nervous, and anxious, and unsure... and it hurts, too.

Life

Do you ever stop to think about what's going on in all of the life around you? Just the plant life is enough to consider for now, so... say for instance, you're walking along and you're surrounded by mostly plant life, which isn't unusual. What that means to the average person is that it's there, it's motionless, and it's green, and it's reliable.

Think about it though... in all of that green life, there are complex things going on all the time in every cell of every motionless blade of grass and every different kind of leaf, at every second, and during every piece of a piece of a second.

There's motion going on down inside those cells that you can't see. Lots of hectic motion. The green machine of life doing what it does with chemical reactions, moving molecules around very quickly, using the energy from the sun and from the nutrients in the dirt to push around specific electrons to different atoms... choosing the ones that work, rejecting the ones that don't, sliding rapidly spinning RNA molecules up and down chains of DNA, unzipping and combining them, making copies, editing, repairing, constantly fighting against the unmaker, and all according to an immaculate and permanently ordered set of physical laws which spend electrical charges like pennies against the landlord of entropy, so that this invisible machine may persist constantly and in fantastic, amazing motion, completely dedicated to the singular purpose of delivering that impetus which is sustains the momentum of life.

How would we be different if we were aware of all of this, all of the time, just naturally? The same way that we are aware of the sky being blue? As something that's taken as a given, as common sense... the invisible blur of life at the atomic level which is always happening, like a jet engine that never ever stops, constantly spinning, always moving? As if we were perpetually embedded in the basic nuts and bolts of the alive parts of the universe, one second at a time, and also aware of it? Would it be wonderful?
.

Coraline

I watched Coraline yesterday on my day off. Something I noticed as I was reviewing it after - I do that with animated films to find easter eggs - and there was one, right off the bat. There was graffiti on the back of the moving truck that said, 'stopmo rulz'. You know. Stop-motion animation. I got such a kick out of that, I forgot to review any more of it.

So Anywho. That little girl, Coraline... she's just a straight up little shit, ain't she? Why is she so mean to Wybie? Calling him 'Why Were You Born', just a minute and a half after meeting him, is just flat out abusive. Even after evil mom 'fixes' Wybie so that he can't talk, Coraline is just all down with that. "So, he can't talk? I like it!" she says. And it's not like she's just blissfully unaware that something dastardly has been done to Wybie. How would she have liked to have had her larynx magically unexisted from her throat, or worse? She even asked him if it hurt! That's exactly the same thing as being aware of empathy, but willfully choosing to ignore it! Evil! Just as bad as the mother, or worse!

And she didn't show any sign of giving a diddly squat when Other Dad sacrificed his life to stop the evil robot mantis from forcibly manipulating his appendages into chopping her to bits, saving not only her life, but the soul of one of the ghost kids. What a heroic act! But Coraline doesn't give an old dusty fart.

At least she gets better a little later, when she unties the fake smile from Wybie's face, and I guess Coraline saved the day at the end, and was even almost nice to Wybie, except that she still punched him hard enough to hurt. I guess it was too much to just be nice, without any kind of qualifier.

Oh, and one more thing. That was just truly, fundamentally, elementally, unforgivably stupid to throw the unhanded needle fingers of that disembodied needle hand, STILL CLUTCHING THE KEY for Pete's sake, down into the well. It shouldn't take a mentat to be able to anticipate possible future events based on past events of a similar nature. That is, if a disembodied needle hand can come back to life, then maybe, MAYBE some unhanded needle fingers might be able to do the same thing? YOU THINK?!

Maybe I'm being too hard on Coraline. She's just a kid, after all. Maybe when she grows up she won't be so mean and stupid.

I watched this with Leah when it came out back in '09, and I don't remember any of that. However, I do remember that Leah used to have this short lived obsession with posting pictures of herself on Facebook with buttons for eyes. I didn't really like that... it kind of freaked me out.

A dream - no weapons

A dream.

I was at the old homestead in Omaha where I grew up. There was an army at the back of the house, occupying the old back bedroom that used to be a porch. I was in the living room.at the front. I snuck through the kitchen and saw them preparing their heavy weapons. "Hey, I thought we had a treaty. No heavy weapons." The leader of the back room army just kind of smirked and continued polishing some bomb casings. "Fine.heavy weapons. I have nukes. I'll just use nukes."

That got to him, and they abandoned the heavier stuff and they started firing crossbows at me as I ran back through the kitchen to the front room. I turned as I was running and pulled a pistol, and fired at the leader.

I had a bullets eye view in extreme slow motion. It took about 30 seconds for the bullet to reach the enemy. Right before it went into his eye, the viewpoint changed. It shifted out a little to the side, and I could see the bullet slowly, ever slow slowly, penetrate his eyeball. It made a very slight dent at first, but then the surface tension of the eyeball gave and the bullet just slid in through a hole that formed a perfect seal around the bullet as it penetrated, until the length of the bullet had passed all the way into the eye, and there was just a neat hole that sloped inward. The view followed the path of the bullet through the face, tracking it as it went through the head, and as this was happening, wherever the bullet passed, blood would be forced out through little irregularities in the skin... a dimple, or a mole near the ear, and when the bullet passed the ear, blood came out of the ear, gushing out, but oh so slowly. The bullet finally exited the back of the head in a dramatic and extremely messy fashion.