The Snow is Just Fine With Me

My New Blog, on Google Plus

2011-12-02T15:40:00.001-08:00

*New Blog*

plus.ly/patch615

I've started Blogging over at Google Plus. It's more conducive to making posts with links and resources. I also wanted to separate myself from My depressed, manic, and OCD ridden writing here. I'll leave this up for archival purposes, but please forgive the melodrama. ON google plus I'll be posting more about politics neuroscience, psychology, writing, and art. Less about being nuts.

money and happiness

2010-06-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

I can't tell how the day has gone as fast as it has. I spend no more than an hour on the computer with my word processor open waiting for words to come, and I got my hair cut. That shouldn't have taken all this time. I think that's the ultimate take away from living on my own schedule. Time is even more fleeting than we think. It's no secret that the days quickly turn into years, but that the seconds turn into year as well is a less accepted fact.

I think that highlights again how much more important time is than money. This has been a source of conflict in some of my relationships because it's easy to dismiss my lack of interest in money as a behavioural manifestation of some idealogical belief. That's not the case. I do hold some idealogical beliefs as do all people, but I have arguments for my desire to pursue free time and larger goals rather than pursuing money. Some of it is based on differences between me and other people, some of it is based on changes that have occured between my generation and those immediately preceding us, and some of it is simply based on an attempt to calculate potential quality of life without using money as the measure.

My personal attitudes are partly formed by being raised by teachers. My parents both taught in a poor rural school district. They were paid very little but kept it up because they loved teaching. We still traveled and lived interestingly. I spent a few years of my child hood in Japan, for instance. We had to be more creative about ho to pay for these things, such as finding jobs in Japan, and saving for a long time, but we were still able to do it, because it was a priority. IN this inatance doing something you love, and setting your priorities leads to a good life. That's part of why I don't think money is all that important.

I also find that I am more fulfiled by insular activities that cost little than I am by the external ones. I love to read and to write and to play music. These all cost little or no money. I am sustained by my music and writing, and I don't have to pay to do these things. Id be happy just playing music for the rest of my life.

I also think my my generation doesn't think of work, and money, the same way older (or at least recent older) generations had. We look more towards free time as the holy grail than to money. some of this is because of hte advent of credit, and some of it is simply from seeing our parents choose money over free time, and fullfilling employment and becoming miserable anyway. The further intricacies of intergenerational differences are fodder for other essays.

Despite these social reasons for my attitudes towards money, I think that my reasoning justifying my position is sound. I believe that satisfaction with one's life is more based on enjoyment of ones job and amount of freetime. This is supported by refutatuions of the measurment of quality of life by money. It's a conundrum of the west, this disconnection between amount of money and amount of happy. Why is America less happy than poorer places if money is the key to happiness? the answer is either that money isn't the key to happiness, or that our measurments are wrong. I'm leaning towards the idea that money isn't the key to happiness. This is largely due to coloquial evidence, but if someone can find me a study on happiness and amount of freetime (and I"m sure more than one such study exists) you will see that people with more freetime are happier, (this also applies to people who do work that they enjoy)

The point is that the money isn't important. It's the freetime, and the satisfaction. I think my generation is begining to realise that.

a proposition of a model of High seeking behaviour

2010-05-24T15:15:00.000-07:00

One can presume that the phenomenon of creatures altering their state with drugs is primarily due to the way drugs capitilize on endogenous reward systems (like the opioid system) It is important also to note that the cange in state isn't all about feeling pleasure. Though certainly one's opioid system is manipulated when one takes heroin, there is also an equally important change in state and cognition. The feeling of being high, I'll argue, is equally as important as the change in cognition and perception.

Thinking creatures (of whatever degree) are fascinated with modifications in cognition and perception. Some times those changes in perception and cognition are beneficial, Such as the way someone can take shrooms as a way to look at a problem from another angle. Much like dreams, intoxicated experiences often re-imagine and re-frame current problems. When one is at a dead end sometimes dreams and high experiences will find a way out. The use of this is huge.

It is possible that creatures which sought "high" experiences survived more or were more productive sexually because of the removal of inhibitions and the a re-framing of a problem. If someone has an Idea while high about how to more efficiently hunt then his tribe will survive better and the next generation has more "High seekers".

This also leads to another interesting question. If High seeking behaviour is intellectually beneficial, do people with high IQs use drugs more? or use drugs for this purpose more. This could provide some support for the idea of whether high experiences do reframe problems, Though a supperior (and much harder to perform) experiment would be to give a representative sample a serious problem to solve which requires a reframing of the problem (there would have to be a way to still test people who had no difficulty with solving the problem.) and when they cannot solve the problem have them take some sort of drug (marijuana, shrooms) and instruct them to think about the problem, and talk about it while high, then see the percentage who find a solution to the problem.
(this clearly isn't a fully developed study, I have the idea now, I haven't really fleshed it out, I realise there are clear problems with it, but I feel like proposing the rough version of the study and seeing where people go with it.)

If this seems ridiculous then next time you're high (be it on drugs or alcohol, or nicotine) pay attention to how much of the enjoyment and importance of the experience was related to changing ones state of cognition, perception and therefore action

more simply put, Next time you're high ask yourself if you're doing this because it feels good, or because it gives you different ideas and solves problems, and makes you think in a way you normally wouldn't.

some thoughts

2010-05-19T19:45:00.000-07:00

it's dreary outside and I just finished watching a fantastically depressing episode of Skins. The specifics aren't important. All that matters for the moment is that it reminded me of a time when I was going crazy, and the world seemed to fall apart around me. To feel that alone, and that tired, to see such horrid things transpire in your minds eye, it's painful, but in such a pervasive soul filling way.

While watching the episode I kept wanting to write a letter or an email appologising to my then girlfriend for going crazy. I wasn't fully stable by the end of our relationship, and I was entirely mad for good chunks of it. once again deatils aren't that important.

I don't think those feelings ever really leave you. The obsessive thoughts, the wild moods, the lengthy depressions, those go away when the meds are right, and the therapy is right, and the time is right, but that feeling in the pit of your chest that reminds you of how terrible the world really is; that stays. Pesimism was never one of my inate qualities. Somehow it's snuck in under the door.

Of course joy still raises it's head. I still find great beauty in this world that's slowly killing us all, but I can't shake the fear of death, and the realisation that so many people have worse lives than mine, and that means that the whole world is fucked.

I don't do things in sixes anymore. I don't think about crashing my car into the median or the oncoming traffic everytime I drive (I do still have that thought sometimes) and I think I'm past those deep depressions in which I melded with my mattress and pictured my hands bloodied and broken by harsh impact with the walls that held me inside. Now I just have periodic frightful realisations of my imminent death, and the creeping suspicion lying in the back of my head that even the music and writing that seem to make this life worth it may not be enough.

I'm not currently depressed, I feel pretty happy as of late, but still that little fire burns deep within me reminding me that things are finite, and that the chance that the rest of my life is good is on equal footing with the possibility that it turns out terribly.

I'm sorry that this is how I think, and would change it if I could, but I've already done so much changing, and put so much work into getting rid of the OCD and the Mania and the Depression. I wish I could change things.

2010-05-19T01:18:00.000-07:00

Honestly I need a research lab. There are too many good questions, with reasonably testable hypothesis that come into my mind. it could be the question of whether there is a tendency for mentally ill people (or severely mentally ill people ) to be night owls or any of the many other testable hypotheses I think of. Every couple of days I have a research Idea that I truly want to test. Sadly I haven't the means to test these hypothesis. I am rather tired of undergraduate education, I'm tired of regurgitating information. Analysing, and coming up with new ways to test an idea, or synthesising old ideas to come up with some cogent model of how something works; that's the sort of stuff that excites me. That I haven't the resources to pursue these ideas sort of infuriates me. Of course It's all a mater of time, and once I'm off to grad school I'm sure the frustration that comes from not being able to start on research immediately will leave me. Of course the realities of research may also give me pause. I just feel that I am in a unique position to find out new things. Not all of my ideas are good, but until I am given the opportunity to really test them, how do I know. I feel that research will be the best way to fulfil this curiosity that so heavily defines my actions. Creation and curiosity.

Given this post is all musing and little content, tomorrows post will fix that. I simply feel that I'm up against a wall. Right now I am read to find out things no one knows, but I don't have the means. It's an unpleasant place to be.

a few things.

2010-05-17T11:33:00.000-07:00

First I'd like to direct you to a nice visual study guide on Cognitive Biases.
according to the guide itself "Cognitive biases are psychological tendencies
that cause the human brain to draw incorrect
conclusions." So read away.

Secondly I'd like to talk about two ideas that have been bouncing around in my head for quite some time.

My eventual research goals involve the way that we relate to stories, and the way our brain processes them. I think that there are elements of story which are universal but can't be explained just as a recounting of memory, or as something similar to a lie. I think there are non temporal (not related to the time line of events in the story) things about all stories. The best example I've been able to come up with thus far is foreshadowing. It is something that occurs only in stories. Foreshadowing requires knowledge of the end of the story. I also think that foreshadowing happens unconsciously. I do need to figure out how universal or common foreshadowing is though.

the last think I want to talk about is the usage of cigarettes as indicators of passing time. Be it the picture of a cigarette that has burned itself to the butt, where the cigarette looks whole except for where the tobacco was there is now ash. It's a pretty poingiant way of showing time transition, and the sorts of people who smoke tend to have stories. There's also the suggestion of progression towards death.

Anywho

those are my musings for the day.

One problem (of many) in modern mental health.

2010-05-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

Im sort of tired of people, but that's not the topic for tonight's rumination, just an observation that seems particularly salient. Today I want to talk about a particular problem in modern psychology. If you have some sort of anxiety disorder your insurance will cover medications, likely standard anti anxiety drugs like attivan and klonopin, and if you have some particular subsets of anxiety disorder, or depression along with your anxiety (which nearly everyone who is anxious all the time does, obviously) also some sort of anti depressant, usually an ssri. What your insurance won't pay for, or won't pay for as much of, is a particular kind of therapy, called cognitive behavioural therapy.

CBT is one of the most effective methods of dealing with anxiety disorders like OCD genralised anxiety and panic disorder, as well as one of the most effective for depression. When done in concert with antidepressants the rates go even higher. However, if you want this sort of therapy and you don't have money (likely because you can't work because you're spending all your time being anxious) no therapy for you.

This hits at the root of a serious problem with modern psychology. Though the tools are there, the systems to provide services aren't. With budget cuts and the general problems associated with the current financial climate most county mental health systems don't have psychologists on staff. They have psychiatrists, as they must, so drugs can be prescribed, but psychologists period (much less those from the subset of CBT specialists) are not paid for.

Some of this is due to the view of therapy as pointless (spurred on by the low effectiveness of nearly every other sort of therapy) and some of this is simply due to lack of money, but the ultimate result is alonger course of illness and greater rates of disability and hospitilisation for people with anxiety disorders and depression. There are many great CBT specialists who work privately, but if a patient doesn't have money, (and even if you have insurance the co pay is likely to be rather large) the they're shit out of luck.

This is a general problem in mondern mental health care. It's something I probably see more of because the facility in which I work has many clients who are on medi- cal or who don't have any insurance. People lucky enough to have money don't usually come through our facility, and usually can afford to pay for therapy. That's not to say that the problem isn't still valid.

I could explain further, cite sources, and give a personal speil on parts of it, as my OCD is currently in remision because of CBT along with SSRI's (though other problems did arise after this period) but right now I don't feel like putting the time in. Look for the numbers yourself, or if you're interested leave a comment and I'll make an essay with citations and evidence that's a bit more objective.

alone time.

2010-05-14T22:08:00.000-07:00

sometimes I feel like I am losing myself. I need a certain amount of time alone in order to really seek out who I am and to remind myself of that. I haven't been having that time. That's not to say that I don't love being with my girlfriend all the time, It's only to say that Sometimes I just need a bit of a break from people. People are tiring, and draining, and no matter how much you love them, over exposure is going to lead to some sort of resentment over time no mater what. I want to avoid that resentment.

It's hard to explain the need for alone time to extroverts. I just get different things from people than extroverts do. I love people and quite enjoy some of the wonderful interactions I have with them, and the conversations I have, but I can only take so much of them. It's nothing personal, it's just something in me that needs time to rest.

The lack of time on my own has also sapped some of my creativity. I have been writing less, and playing music less, and creating less in general. There are fits and starts, but the longer bits of the process don't really seem to come through.

I need more of my own time. getting that without offending someone or creating another problem is going to be hard. I hadn't insisted on alone time in the past, and I'm guessing that's a problem now. It's such a necessity though, that I may go ahead and confront the situation anyway.

state of things.

2010-03-19T20:34:00.001-07:00

I've just stopped exporting my notes to facebook. I don't suppose I mind the raising of awareness linking it there gives, but I don't feel like receiving positive comments everytime I write something that sounds depressed, or friends asking me why I didn't tell them. frankly I'd much rather deal with some of this stuff alone. I haven't been writing nearly enough, and decided to start the blog up again as a way to force myself into it. It's not that I don't want to write fiction or essays, it's just that the structured sort of writing I'd most like to do requires a different sort of life than mine. that's not to say I can't start writing for real soon, it's just to say that twenty hours a week of work and 15 units of classes doesn't really lend itself to putting time into writing.

I don't really think my meds are working for the depression. I'll just bring that up to the forefront, it's the reason I'm writing after all. I've started taking 100 more mg of seroquel in the morning in order to help with the depression, and I guess it has helped. I did significantly beter this quarter than the last (well perhaps not significantly, actually I may not have done better at all, all of this is up for debate) and I've been better about sleeping less. I don't cry as often. I guess it has helped some, but I still feel so tired, and so sad, and I don't really know what to do about it. I counsel clients to write, so I'm writing. I give advice about this stuff, and I'm relatively good at that because I understand where the clients are coming from, but the help I'm providing at work is partly support, and the availability of someone who understands what's going on. I can't get that from self advice. or really from people I know.

I know people who are depressed, I'm in love with someone who's depressed a lot of the time. Her reasons are different than mine, and create their own problems. She says she feels lonely, and that I help, but she still feels lonely. I can relate. I feel loved most of the time, though sometimes she does play mind games (I don't care to explain the situation. just suffice to say that as far as I can tell we're as healthy as circumstance has allowed) but that's not what any of this is about. I feel lonely because I don't have anyone who really knows what's going on. I still feel sad a lot of the time, and being numb is better than that. I smoke, though I don't drink as much anymore, and that helps. I also take my pills to prevent mania, and psychosis and worst of all mixed episodes, and that's a daily compromise, but I still feel tired in my very centre.

I don't think someone whose depression is rooted in pain from the past can really understand what it's like to feel bad for no reason. Sometimes it's the lack of a reason that hurts the most. I'm scared of death, and realise this every night I sleep alone, thank god I don't sleep alone much anymore. I don't feel like I want to die, though I am tired of my current life and see only a few thin threads that lead me out. I still want to do things and learn things, and create things, but I don't know anymore how long it's going to be until I get to do it for real, get to do it on my own. get to just fucking be what I want to be. I'm tired of working too hard for too little return. I'm tired of keeping myself going with weed and music. I'm tired of waking up every day to go to classes that feel like wastes of my time. And I'm just tired generally.

I already feel somewhat disconnected because of the damn drugs that are keeping me from debt violence adultury and potential death, I don't need to feel more disconnected because of some terrible neurochemical tweek.

I could get on some new drugs, but that's a long process, and one which is going to be hard, and unpleasant. I just don't know if it's bad enough to go through with all that. I'm keeping myself out of the part that's the most destructive. why it has to be the part that's most enjoyable is just a cruel trick.

I'm sure I have more to say, but now music is going to be far more help to me. so Off I go to record a song or two.

thank god for seroquel weed and the release of steam that this blog may provide.

Inexpensive DNA diagnostic tool for use in the third world.

2010-03-02T16:25:00.001-08:00

an important venture I'd suggest supporting if you're able. Could make a world of difference.

exude

2010-01-29T00:39:00.000-08:00

Busyness is no excuse for lack of creative output. While the time one has may be limited the time in which one creates should never go by the wayside. Would that I were going to school solely on loans and grants, rather than paying for it, at least partially, with work, I would have the time I want to devote to creation.

I always feel like there is something in me that needs to get out. it isn't a matter of the nature of output or the quality others apply to it, it is about a vision which I cannot help but share. When asked to make my work more accessible, though I fight with the temptation, I avoid doing so. It isn't because of simple pride about the "rightness" of what I intend to do, or because I don't believe that being more accessible wouldn't benefit me, but because If not fully expressed, what is lurking inside my mind will continue to stew, and boil, and percolate until m mind is no loner my own; until I am filled with the lurkings of ideas unfulfilled, and passion put towards the wills of others.

when I am obstinate and choose to perform my songs improvised, it isn't because I wouldn't be able to rehearse and perform songs. Of course that would take me a huge deal of time, and I would need to write songs in a slightly different way. I Improvise because there is so much melody, and interaction, and desire to produce in my head that I am not satisfied simply performing songs which already exists. For me the creative process, the act of making something new, is truly fulfilling. When I perform a song I have written, I enjoy it, I enjoy the feeling of playing it, but when I improvise I feel something entirely unique; I feel the deep satisfaction of taking that which is inside and putting it out.

If I do not I will burst.

I am irrepressible. This is half because of my neurochemical deficits, and half because I have found that creation is nigh the only thing that makes life worth living.

I am not producing to give myself notoriety, though I do want people to hear me, to read me; I am not producing to say that I have; and I am not producing to make something which will last longer than me; I am producing because I have to.

It doesn't seem like it would be as simple as that, but in the end, it is.

I must create. The fact that in every class, every day of work, every moment of distraction, I am exuding and idea, or a verse, or a melody, or a simple thought which will later build a story. I am not ever comfortable with lack of output. Everything I do gives me reason to create more.

I don't suggest that this makes me unique. I imagine that if more people truly knew themselves they would see that there is also output in them which needs to go out, I simply suggest that I have found that which is in me doesn't sit well. The things I must put out, really aren't going to stay silent without me wanting to explode.

Lack of time is no excuse, because there is never lack of desire, and never lack of inspiration, and never lack of reason.

Produce.

that is all I can do

Create

that is all I am

the times I feel most alive are when I create, when I make, when I become something new.

Would that those were my only hours. I will do what I can to make a life where creation is the goal, and the only goal. Until then I will post sporadically, and burst with ideas. I will fill notebooks, and play songs which no one will ever hear; and gradually I will put out more and more of that which yearns to escape from the rigid edges of my mind, until I am satisfied, or until I am dead.

a question asked and answered.

2009-12-16T11:55:00.001-08:00

It's easy to become jaded and bored with the world when so much experience leads to the same general range of emotion. When one's affect is truncated to no longer include the vast extremes of mania and depression, everything else seems like a half measure. This is half blessing and half curse. It is easy to presume that I am lucky because all I must do to fall asleep at night is take a pill, but it is equally easy to presume that it hurts to not care.

That sounds like somewhat of a contradiction. Apathy, however, genuinely is painful. It is made more-so by the insight into one's desire. Just like belief, no one chooses apathy. One can make the motions of caring, but to actually have a deeper part of oneself activated there has to be the turn of some key, a key to which I haven't access.

When becoming jaded with all of the shortened range of experience that fill my life I fluctuate between contentment and complete discontentment. At least in that I have a full range of experience. Also along with becoming jaded I am thankful for the ability to operate in culture despite my chemistry, and so it is all shot through with ambivalence. I love the ability to function, and hate the inability to feel as deeply as I could before. Each night and each morning is a sacrifice of range for functionality. I'm pleased that I get a choice, but I'm not pleased that the only real acceptable choice is to submit myself to drugs and society. My choice is rendered meaningless because no one would accept a decision to forgo my medicine; no one would accept my decision to, by society standards, fail.

I continue with this course of action because unmedicated I have lost relationships, liver function, and financial stability. I resist the action because unmedicated I am given days of wakefulness filled with writing, a flow of ideas which never stops, and feelings others take illegal drugs to experience. I take my pills in the hopes that they will lengthen my life, prevent another depression, and lead me to a successful job in research, but all I'm truly guaranteed of is a restricting of my affective range.

The question every bipolar person has to ask is haunting me. Is it worth loosing mania and hypomania for a normal life? If the continuation of my illness weren't likely to lead to suicide, debt, and potentially so many other unpleasant ends, there would be no question at all. I'm stuck knowing that I sacrifice a unique ability to experience life with the seasons and to feel more deeply than nigh all my peers. I must take my pills and know that by doing so I cut off a whole range of possibility that so many others have mined successfully to create some of the greatest art there is. I must subdue the wildness in me, and perhaps a modicum of the greatness, in order to aim for a more acceptable success.

Another installment of my seasonal affliction.

2009-11-10T17:13:00.000-08:00

Daylight savings time was invented by people who's alarm clocks went off at 6. The sun was painfully absent from the beginning of their days. They saw fit to set our clocks back and hour when the light began to fade so that their mornings would feel like mornings rather than the ends of the previous night.

If only the world ran on my schedule. My nights have been so much longer. by the time the clock has struck Five, the sun has set, the crows have flown off and the cold has begun the leech into my bones. It doesn't help that there's a sort of cold that has reached its fingers around my mind.

I was feeling the icy fingertips of winter slowing my thought before the time changed, but the removal of the sun from the bulk of my daily activities didn't help slow the progression of depression's insidious tendrils.

Lack of sun, determinism of season, and a cruel chemical trick played on my by my DNA, has left me feeling slow, snappy, and altogether deficient. This isn't new for me, but I had hoped this seasonal shift would no longer be a factor in my life. I did expect to begrudge the leaving of the sun, and I did expect the season to have a slowing effect on me, but I did not expect to still be so beholden to my moods.

I fell into the trap of thinking that modern medicine could solve my ills in a single swift strike. This is a silly error, which I would not have made had I been thinking more clearly, or even paying attention more closely. I should well have known that my little fluctuations are far from over.

partly of course I was simply hoping that I could be strong enough to subsist on a single medication. It's not surprising I wasn't quite that strong. With so much going on in the way of school and work, as well as my creative endeavours, it is no surprise that a single chemical change would make me better.

I feel that I most certainly could subsist on few, or no, medications if I were in an etirely different social situation, but in school, in this world of schedules and responsibilities, bills and tests, I am left to the wills of my moods, or the modifications of medication.

It's no wonder that the successful manic depressives of eras gone by were so often from families with money. With the money to spare, and the time to really put towards a creative endeavour, perhaps I too could have been great. Perhaps I still can be, but time is the important variable here.

Perhaps when I get some new drugs, and more time I'll write more, and sing more, and play more, but these aren't things I want to put in the sector of what if. I want to say fuck you to the mundanity of undergraduate edcuation and just put my time into my two favourite artistic avenues (music, writing). I don't suppose I'll drop all my current responsibilities, but the temptation is pretty great.

the ridiculousness of the 24 hour news cycle

2009-10-15T19:14:00.000-07:00

The 24 hour news cycle is rather ridiculous. I'm sitting in a coffee shop and there's a TV in the corner playing CNN. for the last hour there's been some ridiculously indepth coverage about some kid getting blown away in a balloon. It's being treated with the same gravity and importance as a military coup, and the result is one child having had an exciting, potentially scary, day, and no injuries all around. This is the sort of thing which gets covered now. It's somewhat sad. Now that we have to have news at all hours of the day news has to be made. It's notable that so little really happens in the world during a single day. There are far more notable things occurring today than a child being blown away in a balloon, and yet that's the most sensational thing, so millions of dollars are spent covering the event.

It just seems like a rather ridiculous use of money, of time, and of human resources. I know this criticism has been made before, but I feel like it's reasonable to make it again.

the nature of apathy, and how I hope to fight it.

2009-10-13T13:53:00.000-07:00

I often have these grand designs before I sit down to write something. Before dosing of in my earlier class I had wonderful ideas about what to write, and little bits of them still stir in the back of my mind, but the will is gone. So much now that is the way of things. I have some idea for which passion flows, yet when I actually get to implementing the idea my passion has gone. Some of it's the drugs.

I can't say if I'd be apathetic without the medications, but I do believe it wouldn't be quite as bad. Of course it's not as bad as when I was taking SSRI's, but the issue is still there. Only the deeply bothersome, can make me angry (which was not always the case). I don't like apathy. I was such an idealist, and I so much wanted to spread the wondeful things I had found to all those who surrounded me, now I don't feel that desire so much. My idealism has fallen by the wayside, and though I can find myself having a small bit of caring for other's plights, I just can't seem to get worked up about it as I could in the past.

Of course apathy seems like a relatively harmless ill, but it bothers me. One of the few things about which I can care, is that fact that I don't. It's one of those lesser ills that feels like a gateway to the greater ills. The less one cares about bad things happening to others, the less one does about those things.

So here's my suggestion, Though I suppose it's primarily to myself; when apathy grasps at your chest, breathe in deeply and pause, and then breathe out quickly and do something. It sounds silly, modifying apathy with breath, but I swear that's a key way to get around the problem. Just stop and force yourself to care. It's easy to see after a while, that the things we do often leave marks on us. The things we seem to care about become the things we actually care about. The things we think about tend to come up again and again. Forcing yourself to do something, forcing yourself to sit down and breathe in a breath of action, a breath of willingness to do something will change that apathy and inaction into action, and eventually into caring.

a few things to look at.

2009-07-08T14:44:00.001-07:00

here are some lovely things to look at to go along with the things to listen to I posted a short while ago.

some cool Indian illustrations

Art made from different coloured rice planted in rice paddies.

The Moon Fell On Me some beautiful, stark drawings and captions.

Where my time has gone.

2009-07-01T22:26:00.000-07:00

When I'm not doing this I'm actively doing something else. It's been a long month full of excitement of various kinds. I started work on Monday. I had a shift Monday and Yesterday, and have one tomorrow. It's a fun job thus far. I like the general nature of it. I'm working at a mental health facility. We're a transitional facility for people in crisis. The idea is that we provide a place for people to get through whatever their current issue is, be it an active mania, a suicidal depression, or a psychotic episode. The idea is that after the client has finished with service at a more restrictive mental hospital, or some psych ward after a 5150 (the designation in CA law underwhich someone may be kept against their will for psych evaluation, requires intention to harm oneself or others)

We're here to help people in crisis get through that crisis and set them up with services afterwards. We can get them in touch with social workers, housing, monetary assistance for prescriptions, all sorts of things. It feels good to be doing something that really does help. We are indeed making a difference in the lives of our clients. Even clients who come in more than once are positively affected by our programme.

I'm pleased to be working above all. Having a job is so relieving. I'm getting back into the flow of working, which is a nice feeling. I haven't worked hours this long in a very long time.

In the time leading up to starting work at this job I've been really busy with my band Oh Wait, Too Late. We had a show opening for two wonderful Sacramento bands, Knock Knock, and the English Singles. Knock Knock is one of my favourite bands, so I was rather excited. It was a good go. I've also been writing, though that's fallen a bit by the wayside with school and work.

When I have work I wake up at 9 ish, go to my 10 o'clock class, then I'm in class unitil 2pm. I take a bus back to my house at which I get in my car and drive to work. I work from 3 to 11:30. It's a long day, and when I come home I just deal with the necessary things.

It's disappointing not being able to get writing or music done on those days but it's worth doing and I enjoy finally having money.

I've also been working on some songs on my own. Some have been in the experimental vein I've been mining for quite some time, and one is more standard.

I've been trying to get my musician friends into a group where each of us writes a song each week, or couple of weeks, and then we play all of our songs for eachother and then we write another. We decide on one topic for the song to be about. I basically just want to get my musician friends in one group so I can get them into a band mode.

The first song we're doing is about New York. I'll write about New York later, and why I want to move there, but the song is a bit about that. One of my friends just moved to New York and she sort of stirred the spirit in me. I want to be in a place with a real scene, and a real variety of music. I don't feel like anyone will care, listen, or appreciate my weirder stuff in a place like Davis or Sacramento. I don't know if they will in New York either, but I feel like musicians migrate there. It's like a mecca where I can find other musicians of similar sprit.

Oy. This has been rather ranty, but for the first post back in a while that's ok. I'll try to post again on a regular schedule, but I don't know if that will actually happen. I certainly do hope to try.

but as I said earlier, if I'm not doing this I'm doing something else. So these months of inactivity haven't been pure inactivity, they've been activity in different sectors.
If there's any interest I can get people links and contacts and all that. I'll try to write more because I feel bad for leaving this blog so barren.

Adieu.

more music people should hear.

2009-06-21T19:32:00.000-07:00

Radiohead Vs. Dave Brubeck - Five Step

Radiohead - Bangers + Mash

one great radiohead song, and a great mashup of Fifteen Step, by Radiohead, and Take Five, by the Dave Brubeck quartet.

Something good out of Kansas, who would have thought.

pretty awesome stuff. The pop crossover of all the guitar interplay I love

better than any band based on Harry Potter deserves to be.

It may be impossible to dislike the song Dying is fine, by Ra Ra Riot.

So awesome. The wonderful band Vampire Hands

Music everyone should get to listening too.

2009-06-21T17:05:00.000-07:00

This is music ya'll should listen to. most of it should be stuff you many not have heard. So this is the music I love. There's plenty more, but these are just the things that are mostly overlooked and the things that are so good they could never suffer from over exposure.

A great song by a great band.

as good live as it is recorded, if not better.

definitely a favourite.

this one is a Defining album, and song, for my high school years. "I just got this symphony going" by The Fall of Troy.

A little too awesome, Battles performing "atlas"

ridiculously catchy Sia singing "the girl you lost to cocaine"

Gomez "in our gun" my first dabblings in Indie Rock started a bit with these guys. Before that it had all be Jazz, Ska, and Punk of various stripes.

This is an obvious influence on so many artists, and I'm not going to pretend most people haven't heard David Bowie, but he's so good. David Bowie, doing Rebel Rebel.

in conflict with the daily grind

2009-06-05T21:57:00.000-07:00

I've been wasting my days. Nights go late, and early mornings are a thing of the past. I've been biding time until my break comes. I don't know what my break will be. I have all of these goals, and I can't quite get all of them in order. It's not a problem with indecisiveness. I can settle on a goal, and keep following it, but so far it seems that most of these decisions will be made more by the pattern of events than by my on will and desire.
Today and in days past my life often feels like a pretty big waste of effort. I would rather be writing, or playing music, than working on papers and taking tests. I've been fighting against the things the world requires of me, and begrudgingly doing just enough to continue getting by. There aren't any good guidelines for how to live the way I want to, or the way I need to. I don't want to be dulled by drugs and arbitrary responsibilities.
How much money I make isn't going to have any influence on how good my life is, nor is it likely to get me remembered. It's a selfish goal, being remembered for something, but it's not the sort of selfish that detracts from anyone else. I have to create and discover. I've tried being stagnate, or just living through my life in the haze that everyone else seems to live in, and I can't seem to do it.
I don't feel real in my days of taking classes and working. I feel like I'm wasting the days of my life that I'm never getting back. It's more important that now be brilliant, and enjoyable, and remarkable considering the fact that I don't believe in something afterwards. I don't want to waste what, by all reason I can muster, is the only time I have.
I only put time into my creative goals when I'm procrastinating about doing the work required of me. I can't start doing research tomorrow, and thus far only a few people are willing to pay for my music. I can't spend all day writing and then expect to be able to pay for rent and life and all these things.
So I'm writing this now because I feel conflicted. All of my goals are contrary to the way the organised world works. I can't work with society on these things. The life of a musician isn't one that's easily obtainable. That life means working temp jobs and playing music in all the free time you have. Being a writer means doing your writing when you're alone in your room, forgetting about the work you do all day. People don't treat these things I love so much as careers. Finding someone to pay you to write is ridiculously difficult. The same goes for playing music. I don't know how to go about this. The things that most fulfil me, the things that most give me reason to keep on living, are not the things that will give me money for rent, for food, for a phone. The stuff that gives me what I need to survive and be involved in modern society has nothing to do with that which fulfils me.
Maybe when someday I'm making money as a researcher I'll be ok about all this, and will be able to put all my efforts into creative things, be it creating experiments, or writing, or making music. That day can't come soon enough. Slogging through every day, feeling worried about how I'm going to sustain my life, worrying about being alone, worrying about if anything I do is worthwhile, all of that shit is going to populate my days for quite some time. I can't seem to get past all of that superfluous shit, that drags me down into the mundaneness that seems to keep everyone else mildly content.

A tribe without history, description or subordinate clauses

2009-06-01T20:23:00.000-07:00

"BRAZIL'S PIRAHÃ TRIBE
Living without Numbers or Time

By Rafaela von Bredow

The Pirahã people have no history, no descriptive words and no subordinate clauses. That makes their language one of the strangest in the world -- and also one of the most hotly debated by linguists."

I heard about these guys a while ago, it's very very interesting, and brings up some interesting problems for linguistics as a whole. If you're remotely interesting, go and read this.

School getting in the way of my Learning.

2009-06-01T18:12:00.000-07:00

It's so tiring existing in this life and timeframe I've ended up with. I'm happy with my life I suppose, but sometimes I feel like I don't have time to do the things that really matter to me. I don't like the way that school works. Grades don't mean a whole lot to me, and the way time is structured doesn't work as well for me. The weird mix of strict schedule and completely unstructured time is hard to parse. I'm not the sort of person who has my life on a schedule.
But that's not where the worry really occurs. I prefer the sorts of goals one has for a job. More particularly I prefer the sorts of goals one has as a researcher.

I often feel like school gets in the way of learning. I have a lot of things to get done that have nothing to do with school. I've learned more from my own research and my own reading than I feel I ever have from school.

I wanted to go to university because I love learning, and I thought that university was about learning. It isn't. That seems obvious now, but at the outset it wasn't. Of course I learn things while in school, but that isn't the prime directive. The primary goal of school is either to get a degree, or just to figure out what one wants to do.

Grades aren't an accurate evaluation of one's intelligence, or of ones skill, it's simply about study skills, and a certain devotion to minutae. I've never been the best at studying, or the best at managing my time, but there's never been any doubt about my intelligence.

I'm just frustrated that I can't strike out on my own yet. I can't do research on my own, or just put time into my writing and my music. I am stuck doing work on papers that are of little interest or ultimate import, I'm stuck studying for classes which will not further my goals in any way. I'm tired of doing work that isn't worth anything. I want to do the things that I love as my prime activity. Maybe just work a job and then in all the extra time do what I'd like. With school it's not like that, I don't get off after the class is over, there are papers and studying afterwards. If I'm done with work, I'm done with work.

With research it's like work with the possibility of involving myself in mental machinations afterwards as well. I think about that sort of thing and enjoy it, but when I have to write papers and study instead of being able to spend more time doing research or music or writing, that's all I feel like I'm doing.

It's just a little frustrating seeing my creative endeavours falling by the wayside while I gain nothing of import.

Learning for learning

2009-05-24T01:33:00.000-07:00

I have piles of books everywhere. I had to steal milk crates to supplement my shelving. Even after that addition I still have books on my floor because I don't have any space for them. I don't have an excuse for the pile of clothing. I have a little alcove (about one metres by two metres) with my amps and guitars and basses. It's a nice organisation I guess. I want to have a space where the living room can have my books and instruments, that way my room just has the books I'm working on reading and my work desk, and a dresser. I really would be down for having spartan space if it weren't for the books and music.

That's somewhat indicative of my personality though. The over flowing of books. I haven't read all of them of course (what's the use of a whole bunch of books you've already read?) but it's nice having all these books. At least once a week I end up pulling books off of my shelves or out of their piles to find some passage or some line. Sometimes it's simply to see what I wrote in a margin, or to find inspiration for a band name, or a story.

I don't really understand people who don't have books. I go to the library too. I understand not buying books, but sometimes you just can't find it at the library. Beyond that used books are brilliant to have around. I have so many books that I got for free from either dumpster diving, or library purges, or the shelves of teachers moving classrooms. I have piles of books that were curiculum for classes I never took. I got some brilliant books on discount that were intended for an English class in Irish literature which I didn't have time to take. The books were great though.

That's the point. I don't really get how people couldn't enjoy these worlds created by others. The sorts of people who end up with favourite television shows should have a similar affinity for reading. "The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them." (Mark Twain) I love stories of all sorts though. I end up watching television shows and feel enthralled. That happens with great books too. I think it's even better with books. I have more stories from books in my head than movies and TV.

That whole gap in my understanding is lined up with my disappointment in so many of the people I've met in college. I've met plenty of wonderful people, and even the people I've met who I didn't like weren't particularly bad, but even among that group of wonderful people, I've found a stunningly low percentage interested in learning. There are people interested in grades, and people interested in careers, and people interested in social activities, but the people interested in learning for learning's sake are few and far between.

When I get excited about what I study, and go on these wonderful little rants from the books I've read, the studies I've read, I feel so lively. It's like a way for me to filter out the people who aren't excited about learning. I drop facts too much. I just bring up random facts in a conversation, or take things literally and explain things to people. I know some of that comes from some of my own insecurities, but I'm pretty damn sure that some of that is me trying to seek out kindred spirits.

I don't think the method really works.

...

2009-05-17T23:50:00.000-07:00

It's hard to get away from one's moods. It would be radically difficult to write something happy right now. I'm feeling despondent. This melancholy has settled on me, and I'm not sure what to do. There isn't much I can do.

I wish I could control all this. Of course I've gotten better at sorting out the world around me to improve moods, but there are some things I'm just not any good at yet. I'm still essentially alone. I've not gotten any better at turning basic connections into more meaningful relationships. Sometimes it's just like a cycle of missed connections. I really wish there were something I could do about it though.

yesterday Matt and I were talking about how everyone has insecurities. We were also kind of trying to single in on our own insecurities, and I couldn't think of mine. I wasn't in doubt that I had some, but it took me a while to figure out what they are.

I'm worried that I'll end up alone. I'm also worried that my creative output is all shit. I latched on pretty heavily to my diagnoses after figuring it out, but I feel like that was just me finally making sense of a large part of my life that couldn't be reconciled otherwise.

Before I got treatment for OCD I was spending a whole bunch of hours a day just doing rituals. So latching on to the definition and diagnoses for me was just a way of finally making that part of my life able to be dealt with.

I do have insecurities about who I am on drugs, but those aren't what are bothering me right now. I'm feeling lonely. I was desperately in love with Julie while I was going out with her. I really did think we'd get married or something of the sort. When all that ended it left me a little out of it. I had to deal with going crazy, and getting better all while dealing with her leaving. I just tend to doubt that I'll ever find something like that again. Even when I feel like I will find something good, I lament my immediate loneliness.

I like having time to myself, and I can entertain myself, but I need someone to confide in in a certain way. I need companionship. I so miss that. I don't know exactly what to do to get back in something like that. I'd do whatever I could.

the first glimmer of a career in music.

2009-05-17T02:47:00.000-07:00

I just skateboarded home. It was lovely, and I sung an Irish drinking song on the way. I do really wish that most of my nights were like that. I play a show, I drink and have fun dancing and talking, and then I go home to write and listen to music. It is the best way a night can end. I feel like I may be on the brink (the brink being within a year of) of becoming a musician at least part time. I do believe that my guitarist and I could continue on playing music for a living, and working shitty temp jobs in the interim. we just had a great show. The turn out was low, but everyone at the show felt engaged, and felt like the show was fun and enjoyable. we are learning to be entertaining. The music has never been an issue, it has never been in question that the music was good. What we needed was a show that people enjoyed. we are finally getting to that point. We have some great shows with great people, and I feel like we are finally getting to a point where we can be amazing. we can do a show that everyone will enjoy, regardless of their opinion of the music. That's how we work. Our music is very poppy, but has depth. So it is something to which people can dance, and can have fun too, but if they take the time to listen, they will find a different layer of meaning.

I haven't been this excited about a band ever. I've been in a few bands, and none of them have had as much potential as that which I'm in now. I feel like there is potential. I have never looked at music as a career. It always seemed like something I do on the side, but Matt and the band I'm in (Oh Wait, Too Late) has given be cause to re-evaluate the situation. I don't know if we'll go anywhere, but if we do, I'm happy to go all the way with this band. I've never felt dedicated enough to feel like that was an option. I will agree to whatever the band requires, because I really do love what we're doing. I really do feel like this can be my life. Living on a tight budget doing a temp job but putting my creative effort towards a band. I feel like maybe this is a new branch I can move my life into. I never thought of myself as that sort of person, who would be happy to be in a band, and do shit jobs to do it. I always pictured myself as a researcher or as a clinician, but now that's changing. I think that that's an important change. It's interesting to feel this progressing. I feel like I could do anything right now. That sort of freedom is hard won, and I feel like grasping it as long as I can. I have time for a career in research later, I should just take this opportunity at face value. I have done this far, and I think we can keep it going as long as people care to listen.

just another post.

2009-05-13T22:13:00.000-07:00

While taking my shower I was dreaming up blog topics. I kept coming back to some grand article titled "confessions of a serial monogomist" it's an entirely ridiculous idea. I was going to write about being in love and not being happy as a single person, and what that means.

Ultimately it's not very interesting to talk about myself in that way. I highly doubt anyone wants to hear about my feelings on romance. It's one of those things that I get tempted to write about, but don't because as self serving as this is, I like to keep up the illusion that I'm writing for the purpose of being read.

I'm also going to avoid writing once again about how blogging is so much wankery. I'm sure anyone who reads this is well aware of how mastrubatory this sort of writing can be.

In a lot of ways this is here for my dreaming. I dream up so many ideas in a day, fewer now on my drugs, but still a large amount. I sort of need to filter them out. Or maybe it's not really a dream sorting process. I'm pretty sure I just need to remove myself from the equation. By getting all of the stuff that irks me out onto a page I can use my other ideas without so much interference.

I'm not sure if that's true either. I may just be keeping my muscles flexed while doing school and music. I'm just writing as a way to keep my skill with the language and my ability to rant intact. I haven't been working nearly enough on stories, though I have three or so in the workings. I feel like maybe I'm just writing here to keep my writing abilities on hold while I'm busy with other things. I don't really know if that's a good thing. Perhaps I should just throw myself back into my writing. Of course it's not like I have time. I don't make money writing. I don't get closer to the end of my schooling by writing. Basically I'm at a point where I have to either sit tight and just keep my writing skills oiled with inane things like this blog, or I can go all into it and neglect these other sections of my life. I'm really tempted to opt for neglecting everything else.

The California part of my upbringing

2009-05-11T23:25:00.000-07:00

I didn't grow up quite like anyone else. The main place I grew up is right where the Cascades meet the Sierra Nevada's. Mount Lassen is just at the end of the Cascades, It's volcanic rubble from an eruption in 1914 reminding us of that. My front yard was not a yard. There was a paved road and then forest. The forest was owned by somebody, and trails went through it, but it still felt like a living breathing thing.

It was a walk across my small five road town and across the train tracks into PGandE territory before I could find a slightly more wild bit of the forest. The forest in front of my house had felled trees all over after a particularly windy storm, and the debris made running and jumping about rather fun, but the lack of animals to chase and observe left it feeling less real than the meadow behind our house, filled with ducks and geese.

I know so much of that forest so well. I injured myself on more trees than I can count. The sticking up branches sometimes would scuff my knee, and the trees with lower branches were never safe from a climbing.

I still love a good tree to climb. The deciduous trees down in this valley have so many more bends and so much more to grab onto than the pine trees of my youth. The heat here is so much worse than the relative cool that was always there in my home town. 80 degrees was a hot summer, and we'd had snow almost every month of the year.

we were where the air was thin and the water unfiltered. My friends and I would go to drink from the broken pipe over at the spring that spouted fresh clear water that was being pumped to the houses in the small town.

As intellectually confining as the place was, it was definitely physically freeing. The forested half of my upbringing makes me feel a little boxed in when surrounded by anything other than trees. I still climb trees whenever I find one worth, and I still feel like there is little better to do with ones day than go on a walk to just write in some place with birds and trees, and a little bit of water.

Sometimes I just want to leave.

2009-05-04T19:34:00.000-07:00

I love stories and films and shows in which people just leave. They drop things and go to some other place. Find themselves dropped into New York, or London. I've always wanted to just drop things and disappear into some foreign place. I'm surprised I never did anything like that while manic.

Now I'm remembering something like that though. I think the part of these stories I always miss is a partner. I have to have someone I'm running away with. Once when Julie was visiting me in Davis, we drove all the way to San Francisco just because we could. Just because I so wanted to take her there. We didn't practically have the time. We went to the Amtrak to see if we could take the train and that wasn't an option because it was too late.

I drove us there anyways. All the way to Japan town where we stopped at my favourite udonya, and I had great Kitsune udon with Julie. I don't remember what she had. I remember getting lost in north beach where the signs began showing up in Korean, and Chinese, and then I hit the coast. We drove back and the sun set down on us as I pressed the gas pedal and listened to the loud rev of the engine. She sat beside me and we held hands. It was great.

I've never done any disappearing act on my own. I'd love to, but I feel like now that I'm relatively sane, it's too late. I had my chance, but going it alone wasn't what I wanted. I never wanted to disappear into the world alone and isolated while surrounded by city walls. I wanted to go into the void with someone to share the isolation with. To gradually find solace in this ordered world. I wanted to explore a city with a lover.

I never fully fulfilled that desire. It's something I'm not entirely ok with. One of those desires I never got to fulfil. I've had weeks of writing. I am having relative success with my band, I'm working on towards becoming a neuroscientist. I've met other goals, or at least explored their bounds. That disappearing act is one I may never get to fulfil.

I've not really had a partner in quite some time. I'm sane again, and I feel like I can finally give as much as I get, if not more. I want to asuage this loneliness, and I'm ok with how selfish that wish is. I want to be with someone, and I'd like that to be sooner rather than later. I'm not sure how to make that happen, just like I'm not sure how I could ever fulfil my disappearance fantasy. I'm in a limbo which isn't mediated by insanity or by the less kind arms of fate. I don't really know what to do in my situation. I've so many options, but no idea on how to act.

some things brought up by a walk.

2009-05-03T22:25:00.000-07:00

I went for an hourlong walk today. That's not something I do often. The whole time I was reminded pretty heavily of the situations in which I used to take long walks. When I was manic I would walk late at night or even early in the morning, still up from the night before. It cleared my head, and let out some of the energy that builds up. I always felt like the world was more open when I was walking.

When I would get seriously Obsessive Compulsive I ran. I had a few routes I'd run. Things would just get to be too much and I'd put on my running stuff and just run out of the door. It was the only real respite from all of the terrible things I imagined and the strictures of ritual. Even while running some of the stuff that so bothered me during the rest of the day would come up, just not as badly. I would run past trees and imagine them as gallows, and run past cars tensing my fist and imagining the process of slamming my fist through the wing mirror.

Running had less of the rituals, and less of the rules of my every day life. It felt so good to be out. The suburban sprawl still felt somewhat confining, but it was better than my room. I've thought a lot about how a strictly ordered environment, with concrete, and numbered streets, and walls and stoplights effects one's mind.

I don't suppose I would have been saved from the OCD had I stayed in the wilderness, but I don't feel like it would have been quite so bad. I just connect the going mad with leaving the mountains because they occurred in concert. The mountains were a different sort of confining. The social world was small, and the intellectual world even smaller. I felt unfulfilled in many ways. Leaving was good.

The strictures of suburbs may not have been very healthy though. It's a trade off. In order to have the intellectual challenges and opportunities I had to trade that physical freedom and space.

I only lament the loss of the forest when I'm alone. When there aren't people with whom to interact, when I would like to just go on a walk not bordered by houses and sidewalks. When I'm with other people I'm thankful for the density. It's only when by trick of fate or turn of mood I end up alone but energetic. A walk around Davis doesn't fulfil the way a walk through the forest does. I can stop at a bench and write, but I don't feel the same way. Cars pass, and houses are lit up. There are open fields if one goes far enough, but they're flat, and homogenous. Those fields aren't like the meadows of my youth. The house lined streets don't give me a feeling of openness.

I was raised in such a wide open place, that to live in a place with walls and doors and cars and sirens is a big adjustment. I'm stable here, but only with medicines. I'm happy here, but still confined. Of course my father went mad in the mountains. The wide open spaces didn't prevent his madness, just gave a large space for it's expression. He could feel manic and go on a huge hike into the wilderness. He could go wild in the woods rather than running into people and parties and all the things that occur in a college town. I don't think I would have avoided madness by staying in the woods, I just don't know that it would have been as bad if I had space to spread out into.

my dad didn't need medication for some forty years while in the mountains. He was able to live manic, and depressed, and cyclic. He could live out his wild life without confinement. The social structures confine, the world doesn't. It's almost the reverse here. Pavement sprawls endlessly, but people are in all sorts of configurations. I can never burn enough bridges to not have friends somewhere. I'm not one to burn bridges, but it's comforting to know I could. I know so many people, doing so many things. The freedom I once had when I walked out my door now only spreads to intellectual freedom and social freedom.

I won't knock what I have, but I will lament that which I've lost.

Other People's art.

2009-05-01T00:07:00.000-07:00

I found an amazing album on Stumble Audio, but I don't really have the money to buy the album. It's Harajuku No Emo Ko by Tober. It's really charming. I feel like I'm listening to a nice middleground between pavement's loose indie rock and Braid's emo/indie. The album was made in 2004 and I can't find anything about the band. I'm really surprised to find an album that sounds like this from a band I've never heard. I feel like an aficionado of that early indie rock scene. That whole Urbana Illinois scene, and the influence of a bunch of New Jersey and Washington DC bands.

It's refreshing to find something I missed. I could probably spend seven bucks on an EP but I'm trying to be as frugal as possible now. Music is one of those thins that I buy whether I have money or not. Most of the bands listen to are small enough that it actually hurts them if I steal their album. Sometimes download is the only way to get a hold of something, but I'd much rather pay the artist. I like buying demos at shows. I usually buy shirts at shows though, because I've usually got the album already, and I'd like to wear the shirt, and I know the money is going into the bands hands.

A book I really liked "the boy detective fails" by Joe Meno was obtained at a reading. There were only about ten people there. I brought a copy of Meno's Hairstyles of the Damned from the library. I got both Hairstyles' and Boy Detective' signed, and felt really cool about it. Also a plus was the fact that I knew he was getting the money for the book. I put the money in his hands
He was actually going to spend it on gas, or food, or booze, or cigarettes, while on the road.

It's a much nicer way to support an artist.

I've been finding lots of great music lately, and lots of great stories, and lots of great shows. I'm just in a mode of discovery right now. Sometimes going through all this work by other people helps me with my own. I love reading anything I can get my hands on. So many books so little time. I read for pleasure rather than reading for classes. It's a passion. You kind of have to be into it for it to make any sense. There are just people who read.

I've also been finding cool people lately. Cool musicians and cool scientists. It's just a nice time for me, finding all these people and things that I had missed for a while.

It's a very nice part of settling in.

Some Misconceptions about OCD

2009-04-30T00:07:00.000-07:00

After a while it gets pretty hard to write about yourself. There's only so much interesting material to delve into. That's one serious issue I have with the nature of blogging. I've never been the sort to make posts with links to various things. I'm not the sort who really blogs news. Basically all I have to write about comes from my own experience and my own interests. The occasional post about neuroscience or storytelling gets written, but the nature of those posts is pretty centred on me too.

I've written about it before, but I feel a little narcissistic writing about myself so much. I know that's not why I do this, but it is a problem that sneaks up on me now and then. I've always been pretty self critical about that sort of thing.

So while I was seeking treatment for OCD I was pretty paranoid about misrepresnting myself. If I told a psychologist I was doing rituals for 3 hours a day, I was probably doing rituals for more like 4. I just couldn't get myself to say how many hours I was actually doing because I had convinced myself that I was just seeking attention. I had this whole worry that I was just being a nuisance when I admitted to how often I was doing a ritual.

That's part of OCD actually, that whole worry that you're misrepresenting yourself. People with OCD will sometimes convince themselves that the police are looking for them to arrest them for murder. The way it works is you have a thought about killing someone you love. The thought is graphic and scary, and you are appalled by it. The thought is so real you're even a little convinced that you did kill the person, or that you're going to. SO you do something to keep from thinking the thought, to keep from killing the person. I would touch my left shoulder to my left ear 6 times, touch my left cheek with my tongue 6 times and turn around counter clockwise 6 times. Sometimes I'd do this stuff in multiples of 6. That stopped the thought. Problem there is that you have to do it more and more to stop the thought. So you'll be lying in the foetal position on your bed picturing the death of your girlfriend and doing these rituals in 6s but it just won't fucking stop.

That's one of the most terrifying things in the world. I've never had a panic attack, but I can't imagine it being much worse than this. There are little things that bother you too. It's not just that big thought that haunts you. Things not being straight is bad. If there's a stack of papers I would fix it. after exams I would go up to the front to turn it in, and spend a minute or so making sure all the papers and testing forms were in straight orderly piles. It didn't matter how embarrassed I was to be doing it, I would still go through the motions.

Eventually even stepping on cracks and segments in the pavement would bring it on, so I couldn't do that. I couldn't go into bathrooms with small tiles because I would end up stepping on lines. I had to watch where I was walking all the time.

I went to a therapist to work on this stuff, and when taking the scale (the yale brown obsessive compulsive scale) I filled it out so that the final number was a 6 and I wrote over each number six times so that it was bold and clear.

So I wasn't just into keeping my room clean. Things didn't just need to be straight. I wasn't the colloquial definition of OCD. I was the clinical definition of OCD. I imagined my girlfriend dying in gruesome ways, and sometimes imagined myself killing her. If I had bad thoughts on the sidewalk, I would lick tyres to keep them from coming on. Sometimes in going someplace I would lick the whole row of tyres.

It always annoys me when people use OCD in a colloquial way. It's always for something silly. I just can't see OCD that way. Something silly that means you like your pencils straight. I see OCD as that thing that makes some people wash their hands until they bleed, that made me so afraid I spent 3 or 4 hours a day (probably more in actuality) doing rituals to avoid seeing my girlfriends death. OCD was the thing that convinced me that I was going to slam my fist through a wall, and watch the way the rough drywall tore at my skin.

OCD isn't someone being anal. OCD is actually pretty fucking horrible.

(for those of you who are seriously anal, but enjoy keeping things straight, and who don't seem to have many other coping mechanisms I suggest you look up OCPD or Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder)

happy to be on working drugs.

2009-04-28T00:39:00.000-07:00

I'm so glad to be well. I've been helping out a manic friend for most of the weekend, and I remember how good that felt, but also how bad all the consequences could be. It's so nice to be well. I can fall asleep at a reasonable time, I can do what I'd like. I love not being thrown about on my moods.

Of course I did love manias. People take cocaine to feel the way I feel if I just don't take my drugs and stay up for a night. It's just the depressions. The depressions are too much. I don't know how long it would be. 5 years, 10 years, but after enough of those depressions I'd just say fuck it and get the hell out of the living world. I'm glad I have another option than going through those horrible downs.

Seroquel really is a miracle drug. My dad is stable (without doubt) for the first time in probably 40 years. I am back in school, and able, and well, and succeeding. I still have my doubts about my creative process, and about the things I produce, but I feel like I've been given and early reprieve from what is meant to be a lifelong struggle.

I feel quite sorry for prior generations of manic folks, tossed about with no ability to avoid all this wildness. The Woolfes and Byrons. I'm so lucky to be in the situation I am. Tonight I'll go to bed thankful.

a short bit on stories.

2009-04-27T00:41:00.000-07:00

I can't get over how interesting stories are. I just love reading, and hearing, and watching, and telling stories. I don't really care where they're from, or how true they are. I almost feel like a story is truer than the actual events.

Ultimately our pasts are just the stories we tell about the past. I often feel like I've integrated some of the bits of stories I've read and seen into the fabric of my own life. Those bits of me that are most like Holden Caulfeild are that way because of and interaction between how I am and how the book made me.

There are a few important functions of language. One asks for things, and passes on information. As far as pure necessity goes, it's difficult to figure out what stories are for. Of course there are those elements of passing on knowledge and instilling values, but I suppose that's what I was getting at. We use stories to encode our societal values, and to suggest what is expected of each individual. We use stories as a way of keeping entertained.

There are a lot of wonderful things we use stories for.

I've more to say, but will get to it later. This post felt like pure speculation, and not in a good way. But such things happen.

How we relate to stories.

2009-04-26T02:03:00.000-07:00

Sometimes there's nothing profound to be said. My posts the last few nights have been short ones. That's not necesarilly a bad thing, but it is something I take notice of. I'm not sure what's turned me towards these shorter posts. Some of it is just lack of inspiration, but some of it is a better idea of what I want to say.

If I have the simple desire to recount my day, then the post is likely to be more concise. If I warble on about some topic, not fully knowing what I'd like to talk about, then the post will be long.

I'm never sure how a post will be take either. Some of the posts I've written that people mention to me afterwards aren't the ones I would expect to have a big draw, or a big emotive force. It's really interesting seeing what of my writing is taken up by others.

It's that intersection between reader and writer that's so interesting. The way some people attach to a book, or a story. I'm really interested in how that interaction works. There are certain stories and posts that really enthral me, and I don't know how much of that is an interaction with the author or how much of it is simply the story embodying part of me.

It takes some serious thought to figure out why we like some story so much. What of a character do we see ourselves in?

Some stories are easier to peg than others. The reasons I love Catcher in the Rye are pretty obvious. There are certain things about Holden Caulfield that seem to fit for me as well. I loved Catcher in the Rye the most when I was disaffected, and crazy, and gradually falling out of step with the whole lousy world.

Some are more difficult to figure out. I still don't quite know what it is about Ender's Game that enthrals me. I've read the book tens of times and I still don't know. I can see some ways I relate myself to Ender, but it's not as simple as the relationship I have with Holden Caulfeild.

It's never what I expect people to latch on to. The posts that I write as a one off, on a whim, tend to be the ones that people adhere to. Same goes for parts of a story. People always take something a little different than was intended.

A manic friend and some drinking.

2009-04-25T04:11:00.000-07:00

I really should be asleep by now. Normally I would be, but I just spent the last hour helping my friend by bringing her some of the drug I take. She too is bipolar, and currently In quite a manic. She was prescribed what I take, but there's no where to fill a perscription at four in the morning.

She should be asleep by now. I made sure not to leave until she was well on her way to being passed out. Normally my drugs get taken by somewhere around eleven thirty. That I didn't take them umtil ten minutes ago is mostly because of the sort of night I've had.

I went to a friends party. It was great. I ended up drinking more than I have in quite a while. I haven't been drunk enough to puke in months. I'm pretty sure that I went off to puke and after a bit of puking was given a ride back home. I do hope I wasn't any trouble for them. That tends to happen when I loose control over things.

I rather hate not being sure what happened to me for the bulk of the night. It's bothersome. I've no reason to be particularly worried about anything I may have done, but it's bothersome to even thing that I may have.

There's a reason I don't really drink so much anymore, and I feel like tonight is meant as an affirmation of that fact.

Introversion.

2009-04-24T00:03:00.000-07:00

I have a threshold for dealing with people. I may have gotten the hours down. 4.5-8 hours is my limit. Within that window I start to get really annoyed and unpersonable. I can still be a nice person, but it's really hard. Those hours don't have to be spent in the same room either. If for thirty minutes of that I'm watching tv and the other person is in my room I still am going to get a little peeved. It's nothing personal.

I get energy from the inside. I stay in and read, and play music, and write, and these things recharge me. Being out with people, no matter how much I enjoy it, is draining. That's true of everyone from my family to my best friends. I've occasionally had girlfriends who I could put up with for longer, but that's an exception to the rule.

I hate to make people feel put off or unhappy because I'm getting annoyed, and I really do try to prevent it. I just have to have a refractory period before I can start going again. I love people (well sometimes I hate them, but for the most part I love them). It's not a function of my like or dislike of someone. My favourite people annoy me after a while.

Such is Introversion. No matter how personable someone is when you meet them, or how nice they are, they still may be introverted. One may still get their energies from the quiet spaces of home. I live in my head, and I'd rather not do anything about it.

So if you know someone like me, give them a break every once in a while. If they get snappy after a few hours of time with you, it's probably not personal. Rationality is hard when you're drained.

Some thoughts on Death and Life.

2009-04-22T23:32:00.000-07:00

It's hard to not think of death when the sun sets. I'm never sure how afraid to be. It's something that's bothered me ever since I stopped believing in a god. That's something no one can deny about religion; it sure is comforting.

I still cross myself when I hear sirens. When I was daft I used to pray a rosary to calm the fuck down. I didn't think anyone was listening, but the repetitive action felt good. I was raised with religion. Hell, I worked at a church camp for most of my highschool summers, and two of my college ones.

Belief isn't really something we chose though. My dad believes in god because of a vision during a psychosis. I do have to admit that if I saw something like that I'd probably be swayed, even if only to make myself feel better about the impending END that awaits us all.

I always read before I go to bed. Lately I've been rereading a collection of Philip K. Dick stories. I don't know why these tend to bring thoughts of death up more than anything else I read before bed, but the simple fact is they do.

I haven't been having the horrible experience I used too; wake up scared and breathless, having a clear realisation that after this there is nothing. It's more been a feeling of death looming and then a desire to be sharing my bed with someone, anyone really.

That whole experience of finding oneself alone at night, the reaper knocking at your door, and your heart beating out of your chest is something I've heard described by other non-believers as well. It's not a pleasant experience, but there's not much I can do about it.

I really do think I'd believe if I had a choice. Once you're out there's no getting back in though. So what I want to get at here is on how I've been thinking about death lately. I don't know how I feel. I'm not afraid of it for the most part. I do think it's the end, and I've only got the time I'm alive to experience and be. That's bothersome but like so many other things I can't help, I just deal with it.

The reason this comes up, besides the fact of the thought coming to me at night, is that I don't feel like I have time to put up with pointless things. There are so many trivial things that one does to keep on in this world, but frankly, most of them aren't worth my (or your) time. Dealing with the busy work parts of classes, working in jobs we don't like in order to pay bills.

That's part of why I usually say fuck it to all the things that seem trivial. I don't tend to study so much, though some of that is just because I don't usually need too. I don't care about administrative things. I spend more of my time playing music, writing, consuming stories. I do things I enjoy because I must. It's not something I want to negotiate. We tend to negotiate our lives away. We don't ask someone out because we're afraid of rejection, but the more time we waste being wallflowers the less time we have between now and death to find happiness.

I don't know that long life is really a great thing unless you're really living. I want to find out how we tick, and unless I'm doing that what good is my life. I want to make music that no one else can make, and if I'm not doing that what's the point. I want to write things that only I could write.

Do you see a theme here. I want to be fully. I've experienced more in 21 years than most people do in forty. I don't say this because I want to make you feel guilty or worried, I don't say this because I think everyone is wasting their lives. I say this because I want people to think a little. If this is all there is, what are you going to do with it.

If you live your life fully and then you get heaven, then great. If there's an afterlife you're not going to be penalised for living well in this life, but if there isn't one, you've penalised yourself.

Now is when you can make a difference, and now is all that you know for sure you've got. Tomorrow is unsure. Death is unsure. Maybe sorrow is all that awaits us, but something that we can all be sure of is that we are alive now.

I'm afraid of death, because no mater how bad life gets, it's still life. I want to be tired by the time I die. I want to have experienced so much that I'm simply tired of being here. I can't see that happening any time soon. And that won't ever happen if I don't just grab life by the balls.

Tonight I'm going to think about death, and I'm going to worry about sleeping alone, But tomorrow, I'm going to go to try to enjoy things. I'm going to stop being so cautious about everything. I'm going to stop treating things as if they are just hazards to be crossed. Routines should be thrown by the wayside unless you can make them enjoyable.

Tomorrow I should stop worrying about falling asleep alone and do something about it. Instead of waiting all day to get to writing, I'm going to write. Instead of waiting for permission to do what I want to do, I'm going to do what I want to do.

That's basically been my philosophy thus far, but I feel like right now is a crystallising moment. The Episcopalian in me wants to bring up the confession of sins, I have not loved you with our whole hearts. Apply that to life. I have not loved life with my whole heart. I've been cynical and disappointed. The world has made me look down on this life, but it's all I have.

My bicycle is not the best one there is, but it is my favourite because it is what I have. The same is true of life. I have not loved thee with my whole heart. I have sinned in thought word and deed. The only person I was hurting was myself.

Now's the time to stop all that.

Costs/Benefits.

2009-04-21T23:44:00.000-07:00

It's not always easy to come up with new things to write. That's particularly true of draining days. Matt and I played a show. It went well, but it still drained me of a bit of energy. That's the primary deficit I've felt since going on my drugs, I don't have thoughts going on all the time.

There are now times where I don't have more than one thing going on in my head. It's odd, and it seriously hinders my ability to produce more creative output. so I try to wrack my brain, but it just doesn't want to cooperate.

It's a little maddening. I already knew I couldn't rely on my brain for accuracy in perception, or for stability of moods, but finding that I can't rely on it for creative output is seriously disheartening. Of course I had months where no creation occurred, during depressions. I suppose the daily decrease in great ideas is part of spreading my uncreative state over a longer period, as well as spreading my really productive periods over a longer time span.

I don't know if the maths work out for that though. If I produced more in the earlier condition where I had my ups and downs or if I'm likely to produce more now that I've got everything even.

It's hard to know if the trade off is worth it.

That is the central question of my life right now. I'll have to figure it out eventually, but it's hard to have perspective on something so close to oneself.

I could deal with it if the products of this lack of creativity didn't irk me so much. Posts like this where there isn't a whole lot of outside interest make me feel a little like that creative decline isn't worth it. The saddest thing is I can't immediately do anything to stop all this. I have to keep on working with my brain hindered.

So I may keep writing these horrid posts with so little to offer. I may continue to feel the effects of declining creativity. It's something I haven't come to peace with.

Achille's dilema.

2009-04-20T23:38:00.000-07:00

Well Matt and I have another show tomorrow. This one will be acoustic. I'm really looking forward to more playing. I like having shows. Besides that I've two tests tomorrow.

But of course that's not what you're reading for. Information about what I'm doing tomorrow isn't really important in this paradigm. Giving info about what I'm doing isn't worth shirking off studying. So I have some larger goals with this post.

Partly to remember why I'm writing this blog at all. Of course my life is less tumultuous now, my drugs working, my sorting out of the world coming a long a little better, but that doesn't mean that the centre of all this needs to be left behind.

All the while I've been intending to ask serious questions about my nature and where I fit in things. With the coming of better days I'm having to redefine that. My days are largely a set of things that need to be done, and the time that before filled with a million thoughts now only fills with one or two. The slowing of my cognition, though to some extents useful, has somewhat hindered the sheer volume of ideas I used to have.

I've written too many times about what it's like finding out how to be oneself in a different situation to not know where this ends. I'll find some small truth and latch onto it hoping to avoid finding more. It's a continual process and surely enough after explaining it, it will continue.

So what may be more important is what is going on in my past rather than my current life.

Today wasn't wild. It was nice and slow, and eventful but in a good way. That isn't how my days used to be. I had a few different descriptions of my thought. I almost forget them now being so far removed from Sane and un-medicated thought.

I used to think in probabilities. In the book Dune Paul Atriedes through the drug Melange and a genetic gift found the fabric of space time and could see the golden thread that led through the weave. Before my drugs, and before my madness (sometimes during as well) I could see the weave. No golden thread stood out, but the whole weave was visible to me. Within three weeks I could see the repercusions of an action. All this went on while my brain processed tens of other things.

All the time a song was playing as well. If I wasn't singing, it was playing in my head. I cannot know if my mental experience is like someone else's, and being mildly dyslexic, I'm rather sure that what I see as a P probably looks a hell of a lot like a q would to anyone else. I know that through madness I have a different perspective than just about anyone.

The change of that perspective on drugs is so drastic. I am no longer the person I was. I had such a view on the world. I could see everything as the parts that make up other things. Objects broke down for me. Stories filled my brain and all the time things were flying by waiting to be grabbed back up.

I wrote on my arms because there was so much I needed to know, and there wasn't space in my brain to remember assignments or appointments. I had pages everywhere of various thoughts and Ideas. While everyone else was paying attention in class or leaving it alone entirely, I was half attending and half reading.

A teacher would call on me while I was reading to try and trip me up, and I would still answer the question correctly. When I actually payed attention in class Teachers often had to add a caveat to their questions "What is the bla bla bla , Someone other than Patrick this time."

So having a brain that is otherwise so disordered is a change. A drastic change that I haven't really talked about before.

I often wish that I could just go crazy for just a little longer. Make enough money to support myself for a few months and then go off of my drugs, induce mania, and go back on them before I hit a depression. I could create so much. The rate of thoughts will be maddening, and I'll have so much to produce. Not just these nightly posts of maybe three pages. I could make something amazing.

I can't do that though. I have too much to lose. I don't know If I could take another depression. I don't know if I could live through it. And frankly, if I have a mixed episode there's a gauranteed suicide attempt in the works. I'm not someone who wants that, but I know what depression is like and I don't think I could take it.

God if I only could get both. I have to dull my brilliance to keep my life going. I get to choose a long life of moderate (or realistically, very minor) brilliance and productivity, or I get a short life of wild brilliance that may end before I'm thirty.

The Worst thing about this paradigm is how tempted I am to aim for the short but brilliant life. I know I could produce amazing things on my drugs as well. Just my continuation of this blog and my music and writing is a sign of that. However I can't help but feel a bit worried. Look what this blog has devolved into. I tell you about the happenings of my day, and give analysis. The people still reading are doing so in hopes that they will find something exicting or interesting like the things I used to produce. I have a feeling I'm letting them down.

It's not all my fault though. I still have all this information filling my brain, I still have all these thoughts to be had, but I just can't keep them going at the same rate. I can't just close my eyes an have ten things going on at once. Where before I had writing problems because I had too many Ideas now I have problems because I've too few.

There has been a significant cognitive twist. I don't think that it is the worst possible side effect, but I don't know if I can keep going accepting this hindered brain as mine. It's only painful to think the way I do now because I know the brilliance I once had. I know how unique my mind could have been. My life short, and wild, but oh so productive. Were I just to stop taking my medicine it would be mine in a week. It is hard because that life is so close.

People don't adhere to their drugs because of this, because their minds aren't theirs. There are places where I've arguably improved because of the changes in cognition my drugs have afforded, but it's not all about thinking, a lot of it is how I feel.

It doesn't matter if my writing is more connective and cogent if there's so little of it. It doesn't matter if I can put effort towards something if I don't have that inspirational spark.

While in a hypomania I can produce half a book. And I could do it again, and again any time I get in that state. Without hypomania I have to work everyday for a year to produce half a book. With my new brain I have to sit down every day and write just to know what my mind is.

Though I'll keep taking my meds because I believe I'm smart enough, hell, even brilliant enough, to overcome the cognitive deficits that now befall me, and because If I can be brilliant with drugs I have 80-100 years rather than 30-50 in which my life can unfurl and my works can be written and played.

I don't want to die, and I'm confident (or overconfident) enough to think that I'm still smarter than most people even when my drugs slow me down. So my drugs will keep being taken. My life will keep on going, without suicidal thoughts, and days where I cry for no reason.

That doesn't mean I have fully forgiven fate, or genetics, or that God I don't believe exists, for giving me a taste of brilliance and then making me choose between a short life that leads to fame, or a long one with no notoriety.

The mother of Achilles gave him the same choice. To die in battle, famous, strong, forever remembered, or to live on a farm and be remembered by only his family. We know which choice he made. His rage, His pride, are things of legend.

Perhaps I'm less proud. Perhaps I'm humble enough to take the offer of the farm. Or maybe I'm more fully taking on the mantle of pride and thinking myself above the choice. Thinking of myself as able to create my future despite all the evidence to the contrary.

A good show and Hot day.

2009-04-20T00:12:00.000-07:00

Tonight I just played a show. It was hot and sweaty despite being outside. I described it to my room-mates as sweating the pacific ocean. I really enjoyed playing but the sweat ran down my face and it still was for a while afterwards while I sat watching the band that followed us, with a beer by my side.

It was nice having a beer and some relaxation. The band that followed us was good for that. I'm not really into them, and Matt and I left before their set was over, but they're good. I don't listen to them on my own because they aren't really my thing.

We publicised a lot, so plenty of people who we knew came. Not as many people as we had hoped took our free demos. If anyone wants one let me know and I can get you one some way or another.

I wrote a little verse in my notebook while the other band was playing

the sun is down, the heat remains
my head is clogged and I'm bereft of all compose
Or metered rhyme
I can't control the tongue of mine and on I go though meaning's gone.

I'm hoping tomorrow isn't as how, but I don't expect it to get cooler. The sun was out so hot yesterday and today. I'm not ready for the heat of summer. maybe this will get me there, but one is never prepared for the drastic heat of a Davis summer.

I would like more nights like this though. I like playing shows. The more we do the happier I am. Matt and I are playing one on Tuesday, just the two of us. That should be fun. Have some work to do tomorrow, on top of practising. Looking forward to playing, but I should probably be focusing on the classes a bit more.

Oh well.

Picnic Day.

2009-04-18T23:31:00.000-07:00

Picnic day was good. I woke up and had a nice breakfast with friends, and then drank some, then went and wandered campus with them. I ran into other people I knew and hung out with them as well. The whole day was pretty nice. It was the hottest it's been in Davis this year. I was really glad I'd worn shorts.

I've been thinking about a lot of things. Mostly I'm just excited about the show my band is doing tomorrow. It should be good.

I had some nice conversations with a few people, some of them about neuroscience, some of them about mental illness, some about the value of translations of literature. I'm not sure how many of them were anything more than time wasters, but that's fine by me at the moment.

I still feel rather warm, and feel like I may have gotten a sunburn. That's not a farfetched idea. I don't much like sunburns, but I dislike sunscreen more. I don't know where I got the dislike from, but I just really don't like sunscreen. I'm not built for the heat. I'm far to white for that to be my ideal environment.

I left campus around 10 and I felt like I was going to come home and play guitar and write, but by the time I got back I didn't feel creative anymore. I hate it when that happens. The creativity is sometimes sapped out of me by hanging out with people. I really can't put up with people for more than 4 or 5 hours without getting really tired and out of it afterwards. I have a bit of a refractory period, where I need to rest and recover. I'm not particularly moody anymore when I've spent to much time around people, but I do feel drained. I just sat about and watched an hour of Ashes to Ashes. I didn't create anything and I feel somewhat deficient for that.

It's something I would have kicked myself for in the past.

I want to make things, but somehow I don't get to it.

I don't really want to live a life where making things is a side project to all of my other goings on. I don't really feel real except for when I'm making things. That's a problem for me when I have classes and other things to do. I don't want to live by just doing things and getting by. I want to thrive rather than just exist.

I'm ok with my life right now though. Things are amazing and I'm happy about it. Sometimes I just get in a funk. I can't hang out with people for so long without feeling at least a little misanthropic.

It's one of those things that's genuinely me rather than whatever is wrong with me.

It felt good just spitting out a post. That's usually true. I still feel uncreative, and out of it, but I'm guessing that'll pass after a while. I'm guessing all I need to do is eat a little bit and then I'll feel right as rain. It's hard to tell these things. I still don't fully know how I react to things. I guess it's just a matter of time.

Making a Demo and waiting for picnic day.

2009-04-18T00:03:00.000-07:00

I spent most of the evening Burning CDs making CD cases, and drawing on said CDs and CD cases. All this for my band Osabear. It was a fun little night though. Matt, Nico (his girlfriend, my friend) and I worked on these things and a poster. We're getting ready for our show on Sunday. I'm really looking forward to it. It'll be really nice playing a show with the whole band rather than just Matt and me.

I'm also really psyched because some of the art on our demo's is really tight Nico did an awesome job on all the ones she did. I did ok, and Matt did pretty well. It was a good use of time. Next time we're totally designing one and just printing it out. Of course this way they're all unique.

The demo isn't bad. Not as good as us live, but that's to be expected until we can get a recording with a really good engineer or producer.

I'm also pretty excited because I found a CD on my windscreen under the wiper, along with a note and a pretty case. It was from a cute girl who walks by my car from time to time and likes my bumpersticker. What's doubly surprising is that it's good music. It's a nice ecclectic mix, and I'm just really happy with it. I always end up making mixtapes for grils, but I've only ever gotten one or two, so it's really exciting.

I was looking for something to get what I can't have off of my mind, and sure enough, here it is.

Life is good right now. Tomorrow is picnic day, so that means lots of people on campus and generally lots of drinking. One nice plus of my drugs is that if I drink in the morning it takes far less alcohol. Tomorrow is a traditional day to drink in the morning, so don't think it's becoming a habit or anything. I'm still being nice and responsible. It's all part of figuring out the balance.

The whole figuring out of my balance is getting easier and easier, and it's nice that life is so good. I like it quite a lot. Things haven't been this good in a while, and I'm really glad to note that.

I tend to be a bit wordy (confirmed by Matt) so I'm gonna stop it around here. I'm looking forward to tomorrow, and it's nice to be doing that again.

an obsession with stories.

2009-04-17T01:32:00.000-07:00

I'm a bit disappointed that the sharks lost the first game of their series against the Ducks. That was sort of a cap to my night. The bar was nice though. had two pints, groaning along with about 20 other sharks fans.

I don't know why I've lost so some of my abilities of observation. I haven't had a whole lot to write about, part of it might be that I've started keeping this comic diary thing. It's pretty tight. I'm not very good at the drawing just yet, but it's nice to make observations with a visual component.

It's an entirely different sort of thing than just writing a journal, or posts. The character of it, even with the large amount of writing that I do next to the drawings, is one which better suits to logging events. I don't feel quite so narcissistic when I have drawings to go along with the stuff about my day.

On a different note, I want stories. I get sort of obsessed with stories. Be it television, or books, or music, or comic books. I love reading stories. I love watching stories. I don't really know where it came from, but stories just fill my head. I know a whole bunch of stories, from all mediums. I love trying to make stories too. It's hard to come up with something that hasn't been told one way or another, but it's fun sorting through all the possible events and lines.

Most kids like stories when they're growing up, I guess I just never grew out of it. I spend most of my time (excepting a lot of the time I spend on music) consuming and producing stories. Even some of the music has to do with stories as well, but that's more about the tune and the variability.

This caries over to myths. I've read a lot of different ranges of myth. I'm particularly fond of Irish Myth. the overlaps between these myths and greek myths, and norse myths are interesting. It's interesting to see what sorts of things crop up more than once. There's a lot of stuff that consistent in myths of all sorts.

All of the crossovers and all of the consistencies may be able to tell us something about ourselves. I like having a window into the anals of history, and the stories we've told for so long.

I'd love to figure out what my obsession came from.

I feel like I've not been writing very interesting posts the last few days. If I'm right about that I apologise. I'm likely to produce something interesting eventually.

Tax Day.

2009-04-15T23:37:00.000-07:00

I'm busy watching south park. I've been letting my TV watching take a lot of my day up. While watching though, I've been drawing while watching though. I'm not too bad at drawing objects but my pictures of people are pretty bad. I've been working on comic like drawings. I'm pretty pleased about what I've figured out today.

I've started keeping this big notebook, with drawings and notes. It's a nice thing to get started on. I've been keeping notebooks for years, but it's really nice to start keeping one with pictures. The only times I've let people read through my notebooks they've said I should do more drawing. I think it's mostly because people like to see drawings in notebooks, but besides that, It's a nice skill to have.

I really do need to stop watching so much TV. I don't really know why I've been watching so much.

Part of it's the stories. Easily consumed stories. Of course we don't process most of what we see on television. Id really like to do some studies about it in the future, but still. TV really does get to be addictive.

I'd love to have more interesting things to write about today, but I was a little neglectful about the fitting everything in on time. I filed my taxes today. I made so little money. That's not a horrible thing, it just makes me feel like all that time wasn't worth much.

It's nice to finally be twenty one so when I finished my taxes I could just go down to the store and get a pint of new castle brown ale. It was very nice. Having something to relax with after being done with taxes.

It's been a busy, but not busy day. It's like I did a whole bunch, but didn't do anything at all. I guess the TV watching was basically a reward for finishing stuff I needed to get done.

Sorry for the disinteresting post, but that's what Tax day with do to me.

maturing perhaps.

2009-04-14T22:56:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I don't knoo what to write about, or what to sing about, or what notes to play, I just babble and something comes out. I write a few sentences which don't have any meaning, and they'll just open up the floodgates.

It doesn't always work so well, but prodding myself doesn't work any better, so I tend to treat writing as writing, no matter what it's about. That's the best attitude I can muster when it comes to feeling uninspired.

Having fewer thoughts in my head has been something to get used to. That's a topic I'm talking a lot about, adjustments and the such. It's interesting that these things are so up on the foreground for me. I'm markedly different than my peers, but I don't really mind. I like this adjustment. I've been doing far better than I would have expected too. I haven't smoked marijuana since getting on my pills. I don't think it would be a problem if I did, I've just come to realise that when I did smoke it had no purpose. I didn't do it to calm down, or to relax, or to improve my social interactions. I just did it with no real rhyme or reason. So I've just decided I don't really care to anymore. Perhaps on occasion I will still, but I don't really feel like it's something that will fit into my weekly life like it used to.

I think maybe I did use marijuana to calm myself down in the past. Self medicating almost definitely occurred. I don't need to anymore though. The things that gradually go by the wayside are interesting. Certain tendencies are mostly gone. I've replaced the me that has a serious difficultly waking up for classes with one who goes to bed at a reasonable hour. It's not to say that those prior tendencies were entirely my fault, or even all of them bad, just that some of these old things have fallen by the wayside.

It's wrong to associate this change solely with drugs though. Some of these changes are me growing up. I don't like to think of my drugs as the actors in the changes going on with me, but more as helpers. I can do certain things because of my drugs. I don't wake up early because of my drugs, but I am able to because of them. It's like the lyrics of a song I wrong "It's my music that keeps me sane, My morning pills just help me to play"

That's not a huge thing to realise, but it does make me feel more in control. Thinking of my drugs as tools that I'm choosing to use rather than as these things that force me into a very particular box. I guess that's one of the key changes in my view of things, I am viewing myself as the one in control rather than seeing myself as someone blown about on moods, and wills and whatever else have you.

I don't know if it matters, but I want to know what of this change is my drugs and what of it is simply me maturing. I doubt I'll ever find out, but it would be nice to have some sort of idea what I have control over and what is just the effect of all the things surrounding me.

On another note. My mental length metre may be broken if I consider seven paragraphs painfully short.

probabilites

2009-04-13T23:35:00.000-07:00

I really need to get this order of when I take drugs and when I write down. Today was a bit odd because I had actual work to do, so I guess that's an excuse, but It's not a good one. I've been rather good about the scheduling thusfar, but tonight I just missed the ball. On the upside, I'm not so out of it that I can't write. I did take my pills and I was laying down rather happily, ready to just drift off to sleep, but I feel like it's important writing this, It's also important brushing my teeth, which seem to always have problems.

So I guess this goes under the heading of taking care of myself. That's a rather unusual way to treat writing, unless I'm completely out of touch with writers everywhere and secretly that's all writing is for anybody.

I think I've come to the conclusion that my solution for anything should be either writing a post about it or writing a song about it. Whatever it may be. There are some obvious exceptions, like bills, and gaping head wounds, but for the most part, a song or a post are the best tools I have to deal with the world around me.

This is a little disconnected, but anytime a message, or a phonecall isn't returned I entertain the idea that whoever isn't responding may be dead. I end up sort of figuring out how I would find out, and if I really am close enough to the person and their family and friends to be notified if they were to die. It's epically morbid, but it's not done in any depressing way. It used to worry me endlessly, at least when I was still suffering from OCD, but now it's just an interesting exercise in thinking about how closely I am connected to people I know. Just whether you would be able to get a hold of someone's parents if you had to is an interesting indicator of how closely interrelated you are. Of course it's not the only one, but it's an important one for the whole them dying scenario.

It's one of the options for why someone doesn't call back, I always end up thinking in possibilities. All the little probabilities of certain things ocuring flutter through my brain. It used to be, before my drugs, and before my madness, that I had a very unusual representation of probability. I now know how biased it was, but I could see all the eventual events pretty well. I'm not sure I remember exactly how it worked, but there was something unusual about the way I imagined the future.

Things don't tend to surprise me. I always feel like I've already accounted for events. I've already figured out what the possibilities are so when one of them occurs I'm not surprised. I'm pretty unsurprised by everything. I'm not sure if the possibilities plotting is an adequate explanation.

anywho. I need to be getting off to bed. Buenas Noches.

Avoiding and Arduous research paper.

2009-04-13T13:04:00.000-07:00

I'm trying to work on a really arduous paper right now. It's for my cognitive development class. The problem I'm having it sorting through all the studies that are about subjective shit, and trying to find some that are more empirical. I'm also having trouble finding research on the things I know about, language and the such.

It's hard searching for research papers in a topic one doesn't know a whole lot about, and even harder when that topic shows up a whole bunch of qualitative, subjective studies, even among the peer reviewed material. I would think that Cognitive Development could be a vitally interesting topic, but only if the topics breached were done so in an empirical fashion.

I may be dismissing it too soon, but it is disheartening thus far to look through the available research. The really clever research seems to be done by people who are outside the field of development looking in. It's a bit like sociology so far as I can tell. I'm still willing to give it a chance, but thus far the available resources are not promising.

The Importance of Forgetting songs.

2009-04-12T23:17:00.000-07:00

after my recounting of that argument I had with Matt, I had an interesting realisation regarding my writing process. I'm someone who writes songs, and then leaves them never to be heard. I've forgotten more songs than most bands have. That's not a qualitative analysis, doesn't make me any better, just different.

Tonight I played 6 songs. Two of which I have distinct parts to, and the other four which I made up on the spot. 3 of those made up ones were relatively good. I didn't record any of this, and I can't remember the four I made up.

These were complete songs, with lyrics and full construction an everything, but I won't ever play them again because I can't remember them. Not a single part of them has survived except whatever has gotten into my brain.

That's why the whole forgetting of a song doesn't bother me. I do it every night. I have hundreds of songs I'll never play again. Most of them are what I think of as songs for the moment. Some of them are only good once, because they are so heavily tied to whatever time I wrote them at.

One of the songs I wrote was a song to that girl I can't get out of my head. It had some clever and yearning lyrics. It's good that she won't hear it. It made me feel a bit better about the whole thing too.

That's a lot of what these songs I do by myself are for. What I'd really like Exactly to do is to just do songs like that and just be together enough that we can do performances where the songs are never the same. Just whatever we do right then, and whatever lyrics come out of my mouth. I've gotten good at just blurting out these things over all this time that I write songs most nights.

I can just produce a song if you give me my loop pedal and a guitar. 9 out of 10 times the songs are good, and that's better than the hit and miss ratio of most bands pre written songs, so I feel good about it. I guess sometimes I lament the loss of good songs that I should have recorded, but as I said before, all the songs I forget are scrapped for parts. So I have the good things from songs I've forgotten and those good things go towards my new songs. It's a lot like the Improvisational methods and improv practices of really good jazz musicians. There are things that they pick up on from prior improvisations that make their solos better.

Each song, and each solo, though done on the spot, is actually the product of many different solos played and forgotten. All those lines one's heard and played and taken note of influence the parts that they play. My guitar parts don't all sound the same because I have so many old ones to work from. The things that were good about my old songs come out, and the things that were bad gradually get filtered away.

That's the logic of the songs I just make up on the spot.

The lyrics are another thing. I'm unproven when it comes to that sort of improvisation on stage, but in my room (for all that that's worth) I tend to be pretty good at putting together interesting melodies and lyrics. Sometimes quite affecting, Often with a cogent theme. That's something that could be told from the times I have recorded things.

I like that method of loosing things. That's why Matt's worry about it doesn't resonate with me. Loosing songs, and having all of this material that will never be heard is just part of my process. It's somewhat a part of a lot of musician's process.

That's one thing I like about what we do with Osabear, we record the random songs we just make up, but we throw away most of it, so the interesting things from the old songs can be taken up and used again. That's probably the reason I've stuck with it, besides the performance of good songs we already have.

The whole point is that loosing a song isn't something that bothers me. It's not quite like having something you want to figure out on the tip of your tongue but not quite out, it's more like having all these cool ideas just below the surface waiting for the right stimulus to pull them out.

a bit about moods and band dynamics.

2009-04-12T17:56:00.000-07:00

Just had a bit of an argument with matt. He had a chord progression he started working on. By that time we had been done with practice for about half an hour, and we were sitting around basically doing nothing. Jason was in his room studying, and matt while playing this chord progression asked if I had my recorder. I didn't have it with me, and using the vocal mic through the computer didn't work. So that went wrong.

anyway, he went into Jason's room to try and get him to play a beat to it. Jason wasn't much for that, and I was feeling a bit dazed too. So I went in and messed around a little bit, and matt got a little pissed cause he lost the thought that he had.

He was still talking about it while we left te apartment and in the car ride back to my place. He didn't really accept the point that by going in and just interrupting Jason's studying he was making it seem like what he wanted was more important than what Jason wanted. Ironically earlier in the day right before practice he was talking about some of the people they were hanging out with last night and how he dislikes dealing with people who are so set on what they want to do that they don't consider the opinions of others.

I can understand where he's coming from with the fact that he'll loose the song if he doesn't get to it just then, but I don't think he really accounts for other's enough. I know that a song will disappear, but when he wondered how often that happens, I wasn't that interested. I know how songs get lost that way, but it doesn't bother me so much, if only because the stuff that disappears ends up integrated into other songs. We sort of pick up all the stuff from songs that we've lost and forgotten and we incorporate it into our new songs. So I'm not just dismissing his thought, and his disappointment at loosing a song, I'm just not bothered by it because the song's aren't lost, just parts of them are. Each song we forget is put into our other songs. Every song that we don't use can be an influence on the songs that we do.

So while my terse, and sommewhat annoyed answer of "that doesn't interest me" seems insulting, I don't mean it to be, I just mean that the phenomenon isn't one which I can A: do anything about B: that seems to cause a whole lot of detriment to the overall writing process or C: one that I care to discuss at length.

Today I just haven't been in a mood. I don't really know what that means. These moods affect me more than other people. So when I say I'm not in the mood for something I mean it. It's not something I can easily change by some active process, it's something that I have to either let pass, or just sit with.

I'm not just copping out when I say that. I was just sitting down and feeling despondent, and wishing that I had more to do. Matt was playing the guitar, and I didn't have a guitar or a recorder, or a penny whistle. I was there with a ukulele that I wasn't used to, and expected to feel involved and creative. It's not a situation that makes me feel particularly like playing and singing.

I always end up feeling like an outside observer. I feel like I can understand more than one point of view. I also end up feeling like Matt can't. Or like he can but doesn't.

he doesn't feel like he's asking all that much, and most of the time he isn't, but that's not always true.

All I wanted right then was my loop pedal and my guitar. I didn't want to just sing over guitar, or just play along on a little ukulele. That's not something that I could do a whole lot about.

Matt often talks about the way a location or an orientation can change the music produced, but he doesn't seem to be able to incorporate that into his understanding of how other people can be out of a mood. People have moods that vary based on situation, and he understands that, he just doesn't seem to fit it into other stuff.

Of course I have my own issues, so don't take this as a general boo matt thing. I just feel like stating all this stuff that I can't really manage to say in actual conversation. I don't have much patience for people when It comes to explaining things. So I much prefer explaining in writing. it's far easier, and it allows me to take more time to deal with comments and refutation. It's useful.

Anyhow, that's all I had to say. Will likely post sometime tonight as well, but I felt like I wanted to get this whole little explanation out.

a conundrum.

2009-04-12T01:47:00.001-07:00

I do write every day, but the timestamp changes at midnight. I'm writing saturday's post right now. Saturday was good. I enjoyed the weather and the music and the nighttime. I don't have much to say though. That doesn't happen to me often. Being at a lack for words isn't a state I've often found myself in.

So tonight I went on a date. It was nice, the fellow I went out with was very nice and rather cute. I don't know how I feel about it because the whole time, and for most of the last week, and the week before that, and if I'm not mistaken the week before that I haven't been able to get this girl out of my head. I've tried. I've tried more intensely now that I've found that she's going out with this guy that she was tentatively with earlier. That paradox where trying to forget something makes you remember it took effect.

I don't like it when this sort of thing happens. I like the sweet joy of infatuation, but not the sting of unrequited love. I don't have any idea why she's gotten stuck in my head. I'll do my best to excise the thought, but it's not coming out.

I feel like telling her that. Just a simple "I can't get you out of my head" but I know the question that follows that, "what does that mean" and frankly I'm not ready to answer that. Best case scenario is she leaves the guy she's seeing and runs off with me, worst case she's horribly offput by it and then I don't ever see her again. The best way to play it is just to keep in touch and keep trying to hang out with other people and get her off my mind. If I can't seem to manage then I guess I'll just have to either grow some balls or live in limbo.

I miss when things were simple. I feel fine about myself right now. That's important. I feel more ok than I have in ages. I feel like I'm in a good place, and the only thing that's really bothering me is that when I go to sleep I feel cold and alone.

Of course I need to try to avoid giving in to my generally co-dependent tendencies, but besides that, it would be good for me to not fall asleep alone anymore. I'm tired of it, and there's just something about this girl that sticks to me. That just happens sometimes. It's not any one thing, just something get's lodged in my brain and I can't shake it.

I don't really know what I'm going to do, and I don't want to keep playing the field and having dates that I enjoy, but am not fully there for. I guess I'll figure it out eventually, but for now I'm stuck.

a changing attitude towards parties.

2009-04-11T01:11:00.000-07:00

I should be asleep now, but of course it is Friday so I've a reprieve. Went to a show and a party. Both were good. I'm getting much better at being the designated driver. That doesn't seem like it would be very hard to get used to, but the associative nature of memory does tend to make me feel odd when not drinking at a party. Of course the nature of parties in Davis is very drink heavy, conversation or other activity light.

This is a problem to a certain extent, but I've gotten over the problem with the putting on of an English accent, and a healthy sense of apathy. The whole purpose of a party changes when you no longer are drinking and trying to get laid. I tend to make the party into a time to meet people, and a time to be entertained by the stupidity of others. I tend to be straightforward no matter what, but drunk people don't notice this, so a statement about how they are being stupid is taken as a joke, or a chide. It makes my conversations much more interesting. So though I feel a little bad about it, I essentially enjoy parties because I get to fuck with people. I don't always intentionally do so either, sometimes I just try to talk to people and be entertained, but that always gets boring.

I much prefer the sort of gathering where it's just friends and there's a hanging out aspect to all of it. That is always far more enjoyable, sober or drunk. Meeting people at parties doesn't make much of a difference. I've met many people at parties, and I know them, but I know them in the context of parties, rarely do the connections go beyond that. It's a hard thing to figure out.

Honestly I'm getting to a point where I'd rather hang out alone with people I know. It's a seminal moment when one realises that.

I'm only twenty one, but I feel a little too old for those sorts of parties. I'm more suited to drinking with friends, or going out for a pint or two. I can understand both of those things, but the wild parties of my youth seem so shitty now. When I was really drinking a whole lot it was just with friends anyway. That's the way of things for me. This larger set of connections doesn't work. I'd rather meet someone at a dinner party, or at a little gathering that's quiet and a little boring than at a loud party where there's nothing but tumult and drunkenness.

I guess realising that can be seen as a particular milestone. I'm certainly likely to try to get smaller gatherings going. When I move into my new apartment next year, I'll try to get smaller gatherings like that together. It will be a better space for those.

Having to go to other people's events is a bit of a hassle. It'll be nice to have a place that's more resolutely my own.

Still settling in.

2009-04-09T23:29:00.000-07:00

New drugs don't equal perfect neurochemistry. Of course that statement is obvious, but one doesn't expect the actual effects of that truth. I guess I should have realised earlier, but a new set of drugs doesn't mean complete removal of symptoms. The thing that made all this apparent was my despondent mood most of last night.

I don't like that I'll still on occasion have horrible moods for absolutely no reason. Of course I don't know how much of it is because of the world genuinely sucking and how much is from my chemistry, but I'm awfully tempted to blame chemistry considering the whole character of the despondency.

The real question here is just about what my continued life is going to be like. I still don't fully know. I know how much better things are, but sometimes the inability to think in the same way, and the loss of manias just irks me. Now that I realise that sometimes I'll get little bouts of unwarranted sadness as well, I'm not as pleased with my situation. I'll keep on with the drugs, and I'll keep living a bit better than I had, but I still have my doubts.

In a related note, I'm going to quit smoking. I don't really smoke very much as it is, but when I feel really fucking bad about something, the best option is to smoke. I have a few cigarettes and I feel better. It's not a happiness thing, it's just a coping thing. I know that If I keep it up though I'll end up just being a smoker like any other. I have one more cigarette in the pack I've got, and I'll smoke it, and then I'm done. I've said this before, but frankly I was in a much different mental state at the time. What I need to do now is figure out another way to cope. Of course I have other coping mechanisms, but that oral fixation, and the plugging of my nicotonic receptors is a great way of dealing with things.

I'm changing. It's gradual, this getting used to being the drugged me. I'm getting used to being a little more predictable, and a little crankier over time. I'm getting used to being less able to pick up nuance, and to track someone's use of nonspecific referents (saying those people to refer to some group earlier referenced by name)

Of course these deficits aren't all drugs, the inability to pick up on certain nuance is just one of my normal problems, and the referents problem seems to only happen with my bandmate who tends to generalise all over the place. I'm fine with generalisation I just need referents to be clear. people isn't specific enough. He'd expect me to understand these things and I seem like I'm being anal when I ask for clarity, but I really don't understand. It's hard.

I'm not sure if I made that problem clear in the last paragraph, so it may not be understood, but I don't feel like trying to explain it better.

I just need to keep getting used to everything. I'm tired of having to get used to it on my own. I have my band which is wonderful, but that's not the sort of partnership that would make this whole process better. The only person who's seemed fitting for such a role is with someone else. It's so much harder to do everything on one's own. That's anotehr problem with all this. I'm not so good at all the courting and the finding someone to share shit with. Maybe I'll figure it out eventually, but It's hard to figure that stuff out as well as get used to myself.

It's a bit of a catch 22, To get used to myself it would be helpful to have someone as a partner, but to get someone as a partner I have to be more used to myself.

That's one of those problems that's bothering me now. I do prefer this problem to the possibility that I'd feel so horrible I'd want to take my own life. I'd rather this than to feel as bad as I've felt, but it's sad that I have to compare it to such horrid things in order to feel better about it.

I hate police, but love Detective shows.

2009-04-08T23:33:00.000-07:00

I was feeling despondent, but I'm out of it now. I'm pretty pleased to be out of it. The way I got out of it was by watching some new police procedurals on television.

I hate police as an institution (and often as people, though that is more on a case by case basis) but for some reason I love police procedurals. up to about 2005 I watched ever single episode of law and order, including the spin offs. Watched it with my family a whole lot. I also have ended up watching a few different detective procedurals. Some of them are different than others, but some are just good old fashioned cop glorifying bullshit.

But as the new show Castle has been helping me realise, It's all because of the stories. For those not in the know, castle is a show in which the main character is a mystery writer who tags along with a detective to crimes to get ideas for his books.

So of course Castle thinks of all of the cases in terms of what the best story would be. That gets me to thinking. In these sorts of shows it's all about the storyline. I used to predict the results of Law and Order episodes. I was pretty accurate. My parents actually strongly encouraged that I not tell them anything during the episodes because if I talked I would pretty consistently ruin it.

That's the point though, I love these shows because they're just that, procedural. The whole thing is based on how a story works. There are very strict rules to set up and to how the story goes about after that. All of the little twists and turns are part of the formula, and what's exciting is seeing how the writers twist the formula.

The best procedural dramas make you believe that the end result was the only possible end result. It doesn't matter if it was a twist or if it was the butler all along, it just matters that you believe that it was the only option.

Modern police procedurals in many ways are our current myths. Often they're the most popular shows on television, be it CSI or NYPD Blue, and they always have characteristics that are similar to classic myths.

The modern Achilles', all rage and power, hamstrung by pride. That describes so many of the most compelling police characters in television.

I hate the ideals that they put forth, and the assumption that police are necessary or that their tactics are just, but I can't help but love the stories.

So there it is. I love my procedural dramas, no matter how prejiduced and misinforming they are, because they're an avenue for telling stories that are comfortably the same, but which differ Just enough.

I love Ashes to Ashes, and Law and Order, and Castle, and a few new ones that are coming up. I love the way the stories fit together so well, and the consistencies and inconsistencies. It's fun to second guess the writers. It's fun to see the interpersonal relations. No mater what I think about the faulty morals that these shows espouse to a largely influencable public, I can't get past how good the stories are.

I don't like violence but I love Achilles, and Cuchulain. I don't like police, but I love detective fiction. I can't get enough of Philip Marlowe, and Sam Spade. I can't get enough of Seely Booth and Temperance Brenan. It's tricky, balancing my dislike of the attitudes these myths may be strengthening in us and what wonderful stories they are.

Who am I

2009-04-08T00:59:00.000-07:00

I'm sure it's been noticed, but I have a tendency to be a little long winded. In my responses to people and my statements about things, I tend to speak over the necessary length. I tend to feel that more details are necessary than everyone else seems to. I'm not sure what to make of that.

Something else as of late that's been coming to my attention more and more, is how literal I've become. I take so many things literally, and I just don't catch nuance the way I used to. I don't know why that is. Perhaps since I haven't as many things going on in my head the track that once was devoted to nuance is no longer active.

It's hard to figure out, and I'm not worried enough about it to do some serious exploration, but I have been taking things very literally far too often lately. Of course some of this is based on my bandmates tendency to over generalise and a few of his verbal quirks.

The way we interact with others tells us so much.

This is entirely unrelated, but I'm not sure what to refer to myself as. Labels never seem to work quite right. Of course I'm bipolar, but that doesn't quite cover it, and then there's the bisexual bit, but that also doesn't do it. If we add in the musician bit, I'm still not covered, and then we add the writer bit (and I call myself a writer because I write ever day, and try to produce something). That also falls short. So we can go with more general terms, such as Californian, but I'm not like the most of the rest of California, having been from the far north of the state. I also am not like most estado unidensens. I lived in Japan when I was little, but I'm not Japanese. So perhaps we can define me by some heritage aspect. So I'm English, French, German, Chezch and Irish. None of those quite cover it either.

The fact is I can't figure out how to quantify myself. Anytime I've tried to really figure out who I am, I've come up short. Usually I don't bother with the labels and generalisations, but they work well as an example of not fitting into the mould. Of course no one really does, but some fit better than others. The point is that I can't figure out who I am.

I've been trying for a while and the complex answer hasn't gotten any clearer. I'm ok with having a difficult answer to the question, I'm not as ok with having no answer. One would hope that having been in so many situations would give one more data about how I react to situations. It hasn't I've been in the worst and the best of much of human existence, and yet I don't have any idea who I am because some of that worst and best was part of me and some of it was whatever malady I'm suffering from.

Just the role of drugs in my life is a difficult thing to figure out.

I Just sort of want to know who I am. And I don't yet.

The heritage of madness.

2009-04-06T23:24:00.000-07:00

My Fingers are hurting from a good band practice. Well it was just me and matt, but still since we're the core of the band that counts. We got the songs down pretty well, and I think the getting of two shows has gotten us excited. We have shows coming up in this month and in the next. It's really exciting to be getting shows going.

I like the music we're doing. As I've said before, it's not like what I do on my own, which is high concept and really unusual. What I'm doing with osabear is popier, but it is really good. I get it stuck in my head and I don't mind. That's usually a good sign.

Besides my fingers hurting, I'm in the same state I've been in for a few nights. A good state that is nowhere on the spectrum of crazy that I'm so used to. I've started to get used to the scheduling things that order my life. It's something that will take time to fully get used to, but I'm pleased to be so settled in.

I do need to find another job, the one I currently have hasn't started because we haven't enough clients. We don't have the money to keep too many staffers on, and that's not likely to change until July. Of course they didn't tell me this, so I found out from one of my friends who works there. At least that gives me some time to try and get a new job. I'll try to get something menial and shallow. I just want hours. I could work just about anywhere and be pleased with it. I would of course rather have a job that I enjoy, but the last time I tried that, this is what happened, I've been out of work for months. So I technically have a job, but I never get called in.

It's rather annoying. With my last job they never officially fired me, they just stopped calling me in. I probably could have managed to get some hours again but I was crazy at the time, which was the reason they didn't call me in anymore.

It's interesting to realise that I've been living off of school loans for the last six months or so. It's not a good thing. Not that I'd be able to do anymore about it than I have.

It's not nice being in this odd limbo. I don't much like having so much uncertainty. Of course I can deal with it, but I'd rather not have to. I've been in so many situations that others haven't. It always surprises me how much Ive done in three years. I haven't achieved anything, but I've done a lot. That statement only makes sense if you realise that I'm no further towards my goals than I was when I started. Well I guess I'm a bit further towards my goals, but not enough to account for three years.

Those are some of the hazards of having lived an interesting life. I don't know how that's going to continue. It's odd to think that the wildness is behind me. Of course it's only behind me if I keep up with my drugs, and though I intend to, one never knows.

Without drugs I would have been well on my way to being a brilliant artist who died before he came into pre-eminence. I was reading an interesting list of posthumous works which were sufficient legacies, and I came across so many that seemed like the sorts of things I might create. So many things I really loved as well. I'm willing to put up with the effects of drugs to avoid drowning in the missisippi, or stabbing myself multiple times in Los Angeles, or overdosing in some motel room, or hanging myself to the sounds of "the idiot"

Of course I don't think I would necessarily have lived up to the epic deaths listed above, but something similar very well could happen to an unmedicated me. All that would be required would be one depression where I had the energy to carry it out.

That's a sobering realisation. It's nice to claim kin with such brilliant people, but it's not so nice to realise that the variable I share with them is one which so often leads to tragedy.

that I know details of those who came before me is also somewhat startling. I've always found myself gravitating towards such individuals. I always think that I may very well know all the mad people on campus, because I know so many of them. it's not just a one way attraction either. I've found people suffering from maddness of various sorts attaching themselves to me as well.

That me without drugs could equal someone brilliant, but someone also so horrible fragile is startling. I deal with it, but realising that there are only some pills between me and nigh certain death is harsh. Of course this certain death is more eventual than some, but If I want to take my predecessors as a model I could do such varying things as put stones in my pockets and wade into the river, buy an abercrombie and fitch shotgun and blow my head off, and go off to fight in Greece for their independence just to die from complications of some malady.

I have a lot of people to model on. Brilliant but so sad at the same time. Thank god for these drugs.

it can't be helped

2009-04-05T23:41:00.000-07:00

Rereading the post from last night I am reminded very harshly of something; I cannot change the order in which I do things too drastically. I took my pills before writing my post, and it didn't work out. I'm in many ways forced into habits, and in order to fulfil the things I'd like to fulfil, I need to keep those habits. It's not entirely pleasant for me to realise this, but it is useful the know.

I've remarked strongly on the tyrrany of schedules, but there is something useful about them. Whether or not I like it, I am a slave to a certain form of schedule. I do have, at the very least, a school schedule and a medication schedule. That's quite a lot for someone who at his best would do little but read, write, and play music. When I wanted so badly to become a surgeon people were very surprised because I always seemed like such an easy going person. The strictness of the regimen and the amount of time required didn't seem to fit me. I would have done it for something I truly wanted to do.

The only reason that desire has gone by the wayside has been my mental illness. I've found some interesting things about me, and they all lead me towards wondering what our brains do and how they do it. Neuro-surgery was always an option as well, but it's so hack and slash. There's so little we truly know. When I tell people how I changed my mind I make it sound like a choice, a realisation that we don't truly understand the brain and that I am best meant to further that understanding. What actually happened was that I went mad, and the things that most interested me, the brain, the way it works, and how it sometimes doesn't, were all consuming. I of course found more interest in neuroscience the moment I started up school, so there was a measure of choice, but the way that madness drove me towards it is still important.

How many of my decisions have been driven by this malady that so haunts my days?

I can never know how my life would have progressed had I not been born with this madness. Had I not been the heir of the swing of mood and temperament, what might I have done? I can't know if my creativity would have been so apparent had I not been so driven to write and sing while manic. I can't know so many things.

I wish that my mind hadn't exacted such a price. Of course I can't worry about it too much. Shikataganai. It can't be helped. Shikataganakata, it couldn't have been helped.

Every day I write (in kana) shikataganai on my left wrist. It's where I can look at it, and see it when I play guitar, and when I turn my palm toward me. It is a good reminder that I can't have helped the things that have happened to me. I know there are some problems with simply accepting the world, and I do hold the world responsible for those things I can change, but there is so much I have no control over that having a reminder on my wrist is a good thing.

I plan to get it tattoed, because there is so much stuff that I cannot control, and besides the pleasure/pain aspect of actually getting a tattoo, having it written there every day has been useful to me. Having that reminder that I can't help certain things and I should accept that, without sorrow or joy, simply accept.

wish I could have written more, but drugs have kicked in.

2009-04-05T02:38:00.000-07:00

I'm writing only because I have gotten in the habit of doing it every day and foregoing that tradition wouldn't be wise.

I'm tired. It's been a busy, but unproductive, day.

I intended to just steal something from my old notebooks and post it here, but I haven't been finding anything I like. That seems to happen a lot, Finding that I don't really feel like the person I used to be, and don't really like the things I produced in the past. The poetry I wrote feels trite. That's an issue with getting older, one realises the folly of youth.

I also find myself wondering how much the folly of youth was the fault of youth and how much the fault of illness. When did the craziness start?

My drugs are beginning to take effect. I wish I could have written more.

I'm not down, even if my writing is.

2009-04-04T01:15:00.000-07:00

My last post was very long, and quite a downer really. I'm feeling fine. I suppose that's important to note. tonight has been good, and there isn't anything horrible happening or about to happen. I'm feeling good and in fact feel like the future is bright. Considering how good things are, how depressing my last post was is rather profound.

It makes the point of the post a little clearer though. The bit about even the good moments being tainted by the horrible ones. I don't need to hammer that nail in twice, but It does deserve more mention.

ON all happy notes, I have a love life. That's not something that has been the case before. I feel bad that I have to sort my feelings out and that that may hurt someone's feelings, but I do feel good that I have a chance at not aloneness. That's a profound change for me.

It feels good to not be so purely single. My life is starting up again. That's good. My drugs work, my life works, and the things that before had thrown me into unemployment, and unenrolment in school, are no longer seriously plaguing me. Even if they hide around the corner, I'm ok.

Everyone has things they have to hide from, unless of course I'm overgeneralising. I do tend to do that from time to time. Thinking that people are more like me than is the case. Of course saying that I'm too much different would be an error in the other direction.

Whatever. The point is that I am well, even with the bad things lurking behind me. I am alright with my lot, and with my errors. I'm alright in general.

Things are good, and should be for some time.

It feels weird, but I'm happy to get used to it.

wasting all my breath, and the atheists prayer

2009-04-04T00:09:00.000-07:00

Tonight's been one of watching science fiction television. That's not entirely a waste, but I do feel like perhaps I could have used the time more wisely. As seems to happen a lot, I have a song in my head.

I keep playing it over, and it doesn't get old. The song is 'wasting all my breath" By All Get Out. I only have four songs by the band. The four songs are the ones that they recorded for a Daytrotter session Their particular session can be found here.

The first verse is the one that's been asserting itself in my consciousness.

'We're all gonna die,
That's just life, in time
The Hallelujah, the by and by
we'll all fly away so high
there's a final chance to breathe
the smoke in my lungs ain't gonna help me
it's a speedy process
of wasting all my breath on cigarettes."

It's the only statement I've ever heard that accurately expresses how I felt when I smoked. I still smoke on occasion, but I'm not a smoker by most standards. What I mean is it sounds like how I felt when I was smoking a pack a day. That wasn't for a very long time. Maybe a few months. I don't even remember what time was like then. But that whole verse is right.

I don't know why it's been pushing forward in my brain so strongly.
That last line, "wasting all my breath on cigarettes" just repeats, and the low tone he hits makes things feel right.

I've often felt hopeless, and when my philosophies are criticised, the primary comment has to do with their negativity. The smoke in my lungs ain't gonna help me. But somehow it did. I take things too literally most of the time, and I tend to espouse ideas that aren't optimistic in the least. I feel like I've earned the right to pessimism, but I don't think everyone gets that.

I don't feel like someone can objectively look at the world and see a great overwealth of good or of freedom. I don't always think those two are connected, though I have my suspicions. I feel like anyone who does, either has a whole lot of explaining to do or is yet another victim of indoctrination and misinformation. Those are generally the attitudes of conspiracy theorists. I don't bother with such things, I've evidence for what I believe, and none of it is hidden from view.

But all that is of less importance right now than the way that this song is coming into my head and why. one of the hardest things I ever tried to write was a description of the act of smoking. The reason it was so hard, and so eluded me was because there's just something about it that made my emotional scars into real ones. I breathed in smoke, and felt the things it did to my lungs, speedily, slowly, and at whatever pace it chose, and then I could feel a little better about the things that didn't have a noticeable physical consequence. Sometimes the feeling of warm paper wrapped tobacco and filter and the touch of the filter to my lips was all I could feel, because I was just tired of feeling anything else.

That description shouldn't have any serious emotive force, but as I write it I'm on the brink of tears, because it was never a matter of erasing the emotional and mental scars, but only of dealing with them.

when my lungs ache a little, and I realise that it's from the bit of smoking I'd done, I think of the emotional scars that tie, and I feel a little better. I feel a little more like things will be alright. If we're lucky we end up coming out even. no one ever wins, we just have that chance to break even.

for a few shitty months that still haunt me, the smoke in my lungs was one of a few things that I was hoping would help me break even. Some shit may always haunt me. Even while I'm well, I just remember my depression, and I shudder. There's enough to be depressed about that even without my chemical imbalance throwing me into a depression, there's cause for one. That it seems the case now, when things are well, when all these avenues are open to me, when my world is blooming, suggests that it always will be. There will always be cause for depression. there will always be something haunting me. If it's not my own chemistry it'll be my brother's death, or my father's mental illness, or the general injustice of the world. If nothing else, I will always have these realisations that I'm a pill away from insanity.

I'm on the brink every day. Every good day, and every bad day. No matter how good my life gets, or how small my sorrows are in comparison to those of most of the rest of the world, I'm going to have these things lurking in the shaddows waiting to pounce.

God I wish it weren't the case. I wish I believed in God so he could take from me these worries. I wish that praying still made anything better. I wish that I didn't have nights were I'm lying awake just because I'm afraid of the nothing that I'm sure is waiting for me after my body fails me. I wish that my brain hadn't already failed me. I wish that there weren't ever times where I couldn't stop crying, and had started for no reason at all. I wish that the homemade rosary hanging on my bookshelf gave me more solace than a couple hundred miligrams of pharmaceutical.

God do I wish for these things.

I feel like writing the atheists prayer and shouting it out to the world so that everyone could hear.

Dear God,
Save me from myself
when I die and fall into that nothingness I'm so sure awaits me
Catch me
pull me out of my own arrogance
either delude me now so I can die happy thinking you're there
or give me some reward for the nights
where I can't sleep because I'm so afraid
where I feel nothing but pain and panic
and where I cannot do anything for fear that you simply arent
My father who aren't in heaven
give me some reward for being sceptical
you know I don't get any reward as it is
No comfort
No solace
Little peace
Tell me I'm wrong in a booming hallucination
tell me I'm wrong so I can wake up free of worry, and guilt
Tell me you love me in rays of light and happiness
so these tears will dry on my cheeks
and the pain I've felt won't matter
Make it so that my death
will be more than just relief from pain
so that I won't be alright with death because it's better than suffering
but because it's not the end
Love me
be infinite
hear this
be
even though you're impossible
just fucking exist.
I've tried to believe
with every piece of me
Forgive me for not succeeding
forgive me for thinking too much.

Tonight, and how I represent time.

2009-04-02T23:52:00.000-07:00

I went out tonight. It was nice. I got out of classes, came home and then looked at an apartment with my bandmate. The place was nice. I think it'd be a good place to live in next year. After that we played some music, and then we went over to the apartment where our other two memebers live and played even more music. After that it was off to a show that was alright and a poetry reading that was great for the one poet I went inside for. I spent more time out in the front smoking with interesting people. I smoked more cigarettes today than I have in a while. It's a social activity, and I just like having something between my fingers like that.

I can do without it, but It feels good. All the while I heard a line from this song by a band All Get Out. They're rather good, and the song is "Wasting all my breath" The line that kept coming up had do do with "wasting all my breath on cigarettes".

It artfully brought up that little death wish that drives one to smoke. There're other things that appeal to smoking, but other than oral fixation, they aren't that big. I have been smoking less and less though. I find it a little gross, and I don't do it habitually anymore. It's mostly just at parties. I've already explained when I started. It's basically how I got over my ex girlfirend who I was in love with. It took cigarettes and time and was happening inconvieniently while I was having one of my breakdowns.

That brings up more stuff though. I've been a lot of things. I've been an EMT, and I've been crazy, and I've been kicked out of school, and I've written many a thing, and I'm a musician. I've been in love, and I've gone on bike trips that lasted a few hundred miles. I've lived in Japan, and in the mountains. My life has been very full for someone of 21. Age isn't really a way to judge these things of course, but if we want to think in terms of how much one should have experienced by twenty one, I've exceeded the threshold.

I don't know what this really means. It means I've got more stories than most people do, but it also means that I've got a more cynical view than a lot of people. I've been in a lot of situations, and because of the staes I've been in while in those situations I have some serious deficits. I take things literally far to often. I'm bad at certain types of nuance, I don't have tact. These aren't all horrible problems, but they are noticeable. I'm on drugs that relatively few people take. I'm part of a long history of interesting people who created great things and died young old and inbetween.

I'm someone who's had a few lives in these past few years. I don't know exactly how it happened, and I couldn't have planned it. It doesn't feel like I've only been in Davis for 3 years. I feel like I'm older than I am. My joints creak, and the world looks a little dimmer than it used to. My brain doesn't always recall things the way I'd like it too, and I have all this wealth of experience to draw from, and yet I've only really had most of this life experience in the span of three or four years.

I don't care about time, because it doesn't organise properly in my brain. I don't have a good representation of my childhood, and I have an over representation of the last few years, but somehow it just doesn't feel right to be true to the time lock when it isn't time that's done this to me. The crazy don't live in the same linear time everyone else seems to. I can't do anything about it but be.

That sounds so weird, and a little pretentious, but I just don't feel like I'm hinged to time the way everyone else. I'm not real in the present all the time, and the past is huge. I have been for so long, and people think I'm older than I am. Sure some of it's the beard, but I identify with people who have a longer span of life behind them, and people who have older references. I am not of my generation, I am not of any generation. I don't know what that means, just that I don't quite fit. I can't reconcile my experience of time with the quantifiable aspects of it.

on being Awkward

2009-04-02T00:18:00.000-07:00

I seriously considered deleting the last post. I don't know how much stuff I want about me out on the net, but that's not really the concern that is most important. Lovelorn writing is rarely interesting. That's why sonnets get boring after a while. Being infatuated is all consuming but I don't think that I should write about it.

The problem with writing every day is how much mood and emotion make my writing. If I've been happy all day then my writing will be a certain way. If I've been pissed off all day it will be another way. Even now that I'm taking drugs to keep myself less dependent on moods, and now that I have largely unhinged my life from the sway of my ups and downs, I still end up writing based on my emotions.

It's hard to remove oneself from all that when writing something. I can't ever be objective, and it's hard to write even about this connectivity while I have something else on my mind. I don't need to write another post about how I'm tired of being alone and would love to have a partner in all this. I've written that post far too many times already. What I need is to get my mind off the whole subject. If only I could turn myself into a ascetic. If only I could just focus on God, or on enlightenment, or even just on art.

All this other stuff is trouble. Love, and Relations with other human beings. I'm no good at nuance, and I'm no good at the varied things people do to start relationships. I don't even know what those things are. All my techniques are for the most part useless and/or juvenile. Mixtapes though sweet don't engender attachment. Letters are not a good idea, as I've found many times. I am at a loss.

There are more and more of those situations for me now that I have the sanity to pay attention to them. Now that I've started to really deal with my head, I have time to see my other shortcomings, and I find them to be rather great. I'm a very nice person, but I don't have tact, I'm very bad at certain types of nuance, and when people ask questions I answer them literally whether or not it's appropriate.

I'm fixing as much as I can, but some of it's just me. I'm always so awkward and it works to a certain extent but I just don't know how to get around it.

Someone said to me that awkward people are probably a bit better off because everyone's awkward those people who aren't are just hiding it behind techniques and facades. I think she was right about that. That's why I'm ok with being awkward, but it does make things hard sometimes.

In my social life, I have a lot of work to do. I connect with people in interesting ways, but I find myself unable to really have any control over what I'm doing. The connections I make are made without my intention, and the way I go about all of this is just a reaction. I don't have a plan, and if I did I don't think I'd be able to implement it.

I wish I had a plan, and could put it to work, and get results. But I'm at the whim of my awkwardity and the flow of time. I'm at the whim of fate if you will. It's not a happy place to be. I just want to get a few things right.

I'm not very good at this.

2009-04-01T23:45:00.000-07:00

I'm running into one of the problems with keeping a journal on the internet; I can't write about romantic shit without it possibly getting read by the very people I'm writing about. There are pluses and minuses to that. I could use it as a way of passively writing a letter of affection and so avoid rejection. The minuses are more of an issue tonight though. I have someone I can't get out of my mind. I'll not say who because I've a feeling that'd be a mistake, (which brings up another problem, what if this message gives someone false hope)

When I get infatuated I get and urge to make grand romantic gestures and to write letters. I've written many very stupid, stupid, ill advised letters. I've not delivered all of them, thank the gods, but that still leaves the ones I did deliver. Those letters were bad ideas. It's always too much. The love letter (its not love, but infatuation letter doesn't have the same ring) is the bane of the sensitive male's existence. It kills affection and keeps one from finding whatever attraction may have been lurking under the surface.

I can't get this person out of my head, I don't want to give false hope to anyone else, but I don't know if the person is available or interested and finding out takes time and I just don't want to fucking wait. If I just have patience things might work out, but that's the thing, I spent a long time being patient, a long lonely time, and I don't really feel like it anymore.

I've been tired of being alone for almost as long as I've been alone, and when I find someone who I can talk to, who is interesting and kind and keeps me engaged I want to get started right away. I don't want to wait for our paths to cross, I don't want to wait for the normal course of things to work out, because I'm so excited for what could be, and so scared that if I don't get going I'll loose my chance.

That's the flurry that's rushing around my head. There've been plenty of songs about it. I don't feel like adding to the omnibus. A line that comes to mind (though I don't want to set myself up for the same end result) "When I'm stable long enough, I start to look around for love, See a sweet and floral print, My mind begins the arrangements, But when I start to feel that pull, Turns out I just pulled myself, She would never go with me, Were I the last girl on earth"

The chorus (hopefully) doesn't fit my situation, but I gotta say, Rivers Cuomo tends to write songs that fit really well for me. *the song is Pink Triangle*

Anyhow. I may make another, less lovelorn post, but It will be at another time likely.

Books of Poetry.

2009-03-31T22:56:00.001-07:00

Tonight I've been sifting through my books of poems, All by others, Looking for titles which sound like band names. It's hard finding a band name to which you're willing to commit. We have a few reasonably good ones but I can't help but feel that there's some more meaningful name that's hiding somewhere. I've gone to the pages of my favourite books of verse to find names suitable. It's also a nice look back at the poetry I've read and so admired. There is so much great poetry out there, and I've only a little bit of it.

There are many great titles too. I've a few great titles that I would love to use as band names already. It's hard to decide on one, but I'm just sending any that sound mildly good and letting my bandmate sort through them to find if they're any good. The name for my other band just fell in our laps. We call ourselves Exactly. It's a word I use often, to elbow into conversations. It always works, likely because of the force of my personality, and my ability to just jump in on conversations. The name that seemed obvious for this unnamed band isn't quite as good. It's somewhat clever, but not enough so to make it interesting over a long period of time.

I'm enjoying the reading of my old Langston Hughes, and William Butler Yeats, and Robert Frost, and Seamus Heaney, and Walt Whitman, and Friedrich Holderlin, and Allen Ginsberg. It's nice sorting through verses that aren't mine and that are all so well wrought.

I haven't really written poetry in a long time. I've focused more on these posts, and on the stories and essays I write on an average day. The poems I used to write are, in retrospect, rather trite. It helps that I was so young when writing them that I thought my sorrows were the worst of the worst. I've not written poetry about my mental state, and I suppose I should. I remember making a good turn of phrase as being such a rewarding thing. I'm sure it still would be, I simply haven't taken the time to in so long.

Besides this realisation that my poetry has been lacking (as in non-existent) in the last few years, I've also fallen back in love with all my piles of books. This happens periodically, when I've gotten over how in the way my stacks of books are. I fall in love with all of these lovely, useful artefacts that fill my shelves. I went through my books finding these books of poetry, and it felt so good.

Being able to sort through piles of good books, read and unread, and reread and never to be read is just a great feeling. It's like being part of the lives of all of the authors. The joy of a good book is something I very much intend to engender in my kids. My parents gave me a love of books, and I can't think of many things they've given me that have been more rewarding. I can't say that the mental illness or tooth problems have been appreciated inheritances. But this love of books is quite great. I have my piles and they are all so pretty and useful and lovely.

I find myself speechless surrounded by so many words. So many great words as writ by saints and scoundrels. As I'm sure you can tell I'm rather infatuated with these items, these books.

Here ends my little love rant to books and poems, and my little bit of woe at having such trouble finding a band name. I'm sure there is more in me to write, but perhaps it will be saved for later, or put into one of my many other writing projects.

good night to you all.

I didn't sign the social contract, so why am I still subject?

2009-03-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

I'm posting far earlier this evening than I'm used to. Normally it's write, take pills, go to bed. I guess I'm changing it up because I'd like to avoid the tyranny of scheduling. I've already written about that, so you should have a pretty good idea of what I mean.

Today while going on to campus to go to class and have my psychologist appointment, I started on writing a little political/philosophical tract on anarchism. I'm not done and I don't think that this is the proper venue to post it. I'm just doing it because I haven't seriously put forth my views in quite some time, and in writing I can remove inconsistencies, and put forth the ideas without having to remove anyone's illusory ideas. That's my primary problem with having a vocal political discussion, I have to deal with whatever preconceived notions my counterpart has. That's not to say I won't have to deal with some of those if I accept questions and criticisms of my writing, but at least I can do so in a measured and concise fashion. I'm big on opening up for questions and discussions, but I find quite often that many people don't have the same base of knowledge as I do, and if I have a certain type of discussion with those people I either dominate it and don't learn anything or spend the entire time trying to give the other people some sort of reference from which to assess my position.

There are problems with my attitudes towards political discussion and my attitudes towards other people's opinions, but I'm working on it.

Besides working on that, thusfar short, political tract, I've simply been cleaning my room and doing laundry and getting done chores. I haven't really taken care of any of that stuff in a while, as in months. It's nice to get back on top of things, and a little disconcerting to realise how out of it I've been. That I'm in a state where I can finally take care of most of this stuff is a good sign though. I'm very pleased to be in a situation which allows me to take care of all the stuff I've got going on.

That's the primary problem with my politics. Reconciling my ideals with my daily life is extremely hard as long as I'm pursuing a career in academia. One might think that a career in academia is perfectly suited to professing interesting political ideas, but my ideas are somewhat threatening to the structure of academia as well. It's a problem. I want to be part of a system which I tend to think of as corrupting.

I'm not a fan of heirarchy in any of its varieties, and the academic variety is no exception. So I'm trying to become part of this heirarchy in order to research on the brain and it's function but I am also strongly opposed to it. There are things I can do when I eventually run my own lab, and when I've got more control over the direct application of my power, but just the having of said power is somewhat of a conflict of interest. I suppose it's an instance of curiosity overpowering ideals. I don't suppose it will be a serious issue, but I'm still somewhat ill at ease with it.

I've always hated jumping through hoops, and I still do. Even in elementary school I wasn't much for following the rules as they were writ. It helped that I wanted to learn, but I didn't want to do well in school. I didn't want to do badly, I simply didn't care about how I did in school I just wanted to learn more. That's the vitality that this system doesn't reward. It isn't a desire to learn which is rewarded, it's ability and willingness to jump through hoops.

That I may become the facilitator of one of those hoops isn't a comfortable thing. There is also the issue of who I may be getting grant money for research from. The government and corporations which provide grant money deeply bother me. The sorts of malfeasance going on in those circles is disgusting. When I say disgusting I mean it in the literal sense, I am so bothered that my breath momentarily leaves me.

So there's some sorting I need to do. I want so much to learn these things no one knows about the brain, but all the while I have to put up with a generally unfavourable and in many ways immoral system. The fact that the University of California does weapons research for the US is a big bother. If I'm to be part of that behemoth then I must somehow reconcile that. If I get money from the government for research I can't know that said research wouldn't be used for military applications though I doubt my arm of research would be particularly useful.

The thing is I don't know how to disengage from all these systems I so abhor. The main cause for my philosophy is that I don't have a choice. I was born here and I am automatically subject to the laws, to the taxes, to the police force, to all the things put forth in a social contract with this government, and with the companies that surround me, and yet I never signed that contract.

The social contract may have been made at some point, but I never got a say in signing it. Even to leave I need permission of many groups larger than myself. In order to live, eat breath and have shelter I must subject myself to more of these systems. If I chose to disengage and remain in this country I'll simply be leaching off the systems I'm trying to disengage from. The point is that None of us is given the option to opt out.

I am registered with the Selective Service. It is a legal requirement, and in order to pay for college I had to sign up. I couldn't say fuck it and protest that way, because I wouldn't have been eligible for federal monies for university. I need that money because my family doesn't have enough to put me through, and no mater how much I know and how well I can construct experiments I cannot perform them without a degree. I cannot be a part of all this science without access to many things and in order to get access I must subject myself further to systems of government and corporations.

I've oft thought of the implications of that. I am subject to a contract I never signed.

I wish more people would think about that. None of us who were born in this country ever got a choice in being a part of the social contract.

Remember how subject to the government's whims and to the whims of those to whom you owe money and to whom you pay rent and with whom you've cellphone and electric and television contracts, and then think of how many of those contracts you've just taken at face value.

I'm in an ironclad contract with the state, and I have been in it for my whole life, and there is no getting out.

A good weekend, and still getting used to my head

2009-03-30T00:05:00.000-07:00

If I use chords my songs end up sounding like 90s emo. It's a good thing in my head, because then I can write these lovely songs for just me, because that's what I like to listen to. I don't know that there's much love out there for those sorts of songs though. I'd have to develop them further and frankly I just like having them for myself. Little songs written about theoretical situations, and about actual situations.

Been looking for shows for my band. We don't know what we're gonna call ourselves. It's a problem, but one that I'm sure we'll figure out soon.

I went on a date tonight. It was nice. Had Mexican food and watched that horror movie "the haunting in Connecticut" it was surprisingly good, but I don't feel like going into particulars. It was actually scary and interesting, even with the silly "based on a true story" triteness.

It has been a good weekend.

There's been a lot going on in my head. It's a nice change. It's good to know that the drugs haven't dulled me into a sedated bliss. I'd rather have some wild problems than a completely flat life. I've had great ideas and have had lots of intersecting problems and solutions and examples floating around in my brain space. The big surprise here is that there isn't any elevation of mood to go along with it. My brain still works, and it does so independent of the wild moods that once preceded quick thought.

The practice of writing every day has been wonderfully useful. It's good to get everything out of my head so I can sort through it all. Much like when I'm cleaning my room and I have to put all the piles of things where my bed is so that I can sort them back into the more ordered spaces. It makes thinking easier.

Sometimes I just pause. My head just stops. That's something I don't know that I'll get used to. It's mildly disconcerting, and I don't know quite what to make of it. I know it's probably part of the sedating effect of the seroquel, but I don't know how to parse it. It's such a unique experience, having my head just not work for a moment. I imagine this is what it's like for certain stroke patients, only for them it's constant.

I've been sorting out what is me and what was my mental illness, and it's sort of a fun process. The driving creative type, and the musician and writer are both actually me. That's wonderful to realise. I feel like my writing (other than these posts) has gone down a bit, perhaps not in quality but most certainly in quantity. That may bode well for the school quarter to come, because I won't be putting all that time into writing when I should be studying. Of course knowing me, I doubt studying will ever take the foreground. I don't think that will ever be the case, at least not while I'm unable to do reasearch of my own.

I'm very excited for my classes. They're all psychology classes, in fact they're all cognitive neuroscience classes. That's very exciting because that's what I want to do. I have my seminar tomorrow, and then tuesday I've Perception, Cognitive Development, and Cognitive Neuroscience. I'm looking so forward to all this. The stuff that we cover in these classes is so interesting and so much of it is new. I haven't learned a lot of it yet, and that's of vital interest to me. I think that this may be a quarter where I'd enjoy putting out the amount of effort I'd need to to get straight As.

I'm so topsy turvy today though. I've lots of things on my mind, most of them good. I feel like tonight is one of those nights were I could just stay up and clean my room, listen to music and write. I've had many nights like that, and it is a little sad to prevent them by taking my drugs on time. I'm ok with it though because I'll be able to put my whole energies into my class tomorrow which promises to be wonderful.

It takes some getting used to, putting off the energetic cleaning and writing that I do when all hyped up for some other day. That's part of why my room is such a mess. The whole space has books and clothes spread all about and I don't much like it, but the hyper cleaning sprees that I before went on, no longer come to me. I have to figure out how to clean like a normal person, and I just don't know how that works. I imagine it wouldn't be so bad if I just had to do a little bit every day, but I haven't cleaned since before starting on my drugs, so the mess is a large mess, and I don't have the will to clean it all up. It's somewhat daunting without a head of steam to get me doing it all.

I'm sure I'll get it sometime when I'm avoiding working on classwork or something. I'm not sure, but I would hope so.

My head is a little too jumbled to fully post much further, I don't have organised thoughts like I did last night with my lovely rant on anarchism. Sometimes that happens. I hope my blog posts don't suffer from it.

I do appologise for all these self centred posts. It's not hard for me to write about things other than myself, but there is a lot of stuff going on with me, and people keep telling me I'm interesting. I'm not sure it's a good thing, because I'd ultimately like to keep my ego in check, but it does make me feel a little more justified in writing about the things going on with my head.

I do suppose it's interesting to hear about how someone is dealing and has dealt with mental illness and the drugs that go along with it and all that stuff. I guess I am in a unique position to report on that stuff.

If it ever gets boring, repetative, or overly self important please do let me know in comments or emails.

some anarchist questions

2009-03-29T02:04:00.000-07:00

So today has been good. I've had a good time hanging out with my friend andd his novia. It's been nice. I won't tell you what my plans for the evening were because they're mildly incriminating. I remarked that the bag I was carrying was the worst thing I could be holding were I to be searched. The only way It could have been more incriminating would have been the addition of explosives or firearms.

So my lovely plans for the night were not gone through with. I wasn't planing anything particularly bad, but I'm understandably paranoid about police reading through profiles which have UC Davis affiliation. They don't have anything better to do in this town, so I'll take the fifth.

Among the things I carried was a book called "Patterns of Anarchy". It's an overview of anarchist thought throughout the last century or so. That's the time that has been the most filled with anarchist influence. Sadly much of the influence has gone by the wayside. Most people when they think anarchy think of chaos and destruction. This is a misconception brought about by governments (primarily in this case the US government) to discredit anarchist ideals. Whenever there was some sort of violent upheaval among people in the late 1800s and the early 1900s, anarchists were blamed. In many cases the anarchists blamed were found to be innocent, the haymarket affair being one prime example.

This propaganda against anarchism started being more fervent around the time that state police and pinkertons were being first used to quell strikes in factories primarily in the midwest. Before this time police as we know them did not exist. The first state police were created solely to break up union activity and prevent organising of the working populous.

It would take a lot more time and a lot more research and citing of sources to tell you all about other important things in this history. I don't have the time or the primary sources from which to work. I'd suggest a few books if anyone wants to hear my suggestions. The point however is that anarchy has gotten a bad name because it's been taken from it's original meaning and used as something entirely different.

Anarchy literally translates to Without Government. It's that simple. there are may differing views on how this would work, and what sorts of organisational structures would exist, but the unifying principle is that the governments which thusfar exist are primarily dominating entities.

My take on this is fairly complicated and nuanced, and with my primary vehicles for promoting these ideals still in the editing and revising phase I can't just give you my manifesto. I'll explain the general ideas but they don't stand as well without details and examples.

Essentially I don't approve of organisational structures which take on a life of their own. One example would be the US Legislature. The general operating principles and the unwritten cronyism and corporate influence do not change when the people in the legislature change. We can refer to the legislature as a single entity which for all of my life has been essentially unchanged. The influence of corporations on bill writing and on voting is very heavy no matter who the senators and congrespeople are. There are changes in attitudes to social programmes and tax plans, but there is no change in attitudes on the influence of the corporate on the process. This is an example of the organisation taking on a life of its own. In this instance the legislature is its own entity made up of the people in it, but not defined by them. Once they enter said system they conform to the requirements of the system.

This is observable in corporations, large religious institutions, and other governments. The particulars are different, but in each case one can discern core values and operating principles which are held above those of the people who make up the group.

The reason I'm not fond of these supra-human entities is because they are indifferent. There isn't evil there, because there is no morality or accountability. A company has its goals and pursues them in whatever fashion best allows it to meet them. If a company's goals are profits and growth (as is very often the case) they will move towards those goals everything else be damned. It is only when public disapproval, or interactions with the government promise to hinder growth and profit that tactics change. Though the decisions to pursue these avenues of action are ostensibly made by people, the consistency of these decisions across companies suggests that the decision doesn't care who makes it.

All of this has been floating in my head tonight because I'm severely bothered by the way that a lot of things are going. That the "best country in the world" the US of A is as bad as it is seems a bad sign to me. If this is the best, then we humans are doing something wrong.

My friends and I were biking throughout Davis and I kept grabbing my U Lock out of my back pocket and brandishing it. The heft felt good in my hands. The whole time I was worried about and wondering about police. The power that they had over me, the fact that they could call my holding of the ULock (a potential weapon) "Probable Cause" and theoretically kill me; all of that bothered me deeply.

There are hundreds of things wrong with modern policing, but I cannot say it as well as was done in "Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America" The title is intentionally hyperbolic. The research is wonderful and the topic matter as important as this stuff gets.

The whole point here though is that I've been thinking politics and social organisation and the influence of capitalism on the media.

All of this was crystalised while we watched "The Motorcycle Diaries" it was good, and very affecting. Since then I've been looking for non-corporate news sources (much harder than it sounds) and have been thinking of how best to write the third part of my novella (which draws heavily from my organisational ideals).

I'm getting a bit to bleary eyed to continue on this topic, but It must be noted that one needs question the society in which they live. Whatever one comes to is their own, but so many people don't do that. Things are good, or so they seem, because we've internalised so many of the control mechanisms.

Just think about how things work, and how you want to be involved in the processes. Do you vote, and if you do is there actually any efficacy in it? My ideas aren't well formed enough in this post for one to mull them over really well, but if you see something in them think of the organisations you are in and around; how are they changed when new people enter them, what are their core operating principles, and how do those principles differ from the stated principles?

The problem with schedules.

2009-03-27T01:30:00.000-07:00

Keeping up the posting every night is a good thing for me. Having regular band practices and having a regular schedule are good things for me. I just wish that I weren't subject to the more dominating things about a normal schedule. I like the benefits of having band practices at consistent times, and I like the benefits of requiring myself to post every night, I just don't like the control that is exacted over my life with school and work schedules. It's like one's life isn't their own. With band practice or writing I set the schedule and I feel like all of it is my own. I'm just parcelling out my hours as I chose because I have things to do, But when I sign up for classes, or for a work schedule it's like I'm giving a certain range of hours to other people. The hours are no longer mine.

We've gotten so used to scheduling every hour of our days that we don't think of it as an affront anymore. It's no longer considered an odd thing for a kid to have a full schedule that gets them out the door at 8 and gets them back home at 8. That is such an arduous schedule if you really think about it, and yet it is what we expect of the average middle class child.

I'm not saying that I don't understand the need for a certain amount of scheduling, I just wonder if we're trading productivity for humanity. I'm also worried that perhaps what we're producing won't be of any worth. We're creating students who are so good at fitting within the lines that when a problem that requires more of them occurs only the people who didn't fit manage to solve it. I've always been the smart kid but I've never been the straight As kid, because I know things, and I know how to do things, but I do not every subject myself to the tyranny of school work.

I know that's a bit hyperbolic, and I realise that some of the refusal to do all my work is just laziness, but I also realise that blind acceptance of school work isn't a healthy attitude. People who get straight As rarely have outside lives. That we even bother with grades as a way of measuring anything is somewhat ridiculous. I could write an essay just on the problems with the logic of grading, but this isn't the place. I simply want to ask the question, who are we raising, and what are we making ourselves to become. This every so scheduled life, and these absolute deadlines aren't so good for us. That we add more and more activities to the average day, with little time for unstructured relaxing that doesn't centre around a television.

I don't know how to fix it for everyone else, but for me, I don't treat the hours after school as study time. I don't treat the hours of my days as anything really, they simply are. If I have a class I need to go to I go to it; if I have work to go to I go to it, but in the time that isn't taken by one of those absolutes I do things as I'd like, and at my fancy.

I just want to make the point that doing well as everyone else defines it isn't a good thing. Being dazed and going about ones day along with the mores that society runs on is dangerous. Making a little rebellion once in a while. Doing school because you want to learn rather than because you simply want to jump through the hoops to get a degree, working because you enjoy what you're doing for work, not just because you need the money. Those may seem like minor distinctions, but they can make all the difference. The stress you feel from going to school for a degree is gone when you go because you want to learn. The stress you feel from working for money is gone when you just enjoy whatever about your job there is to enjoy. The repetitive accuracy of a factory job, the personal interactions of a service job. The point is that we must all take an accounting of our time and decide how much of it is our and how much we're giving to other people. I'd suggest that when you give your time away to work, or to school, be sure you're willing to waste those hours, or make the most of them in that situation. We don't get another life when these ones are done, so why should we be spending every available hour doing what other people want us to do?

Just an important meditation on the nature of scheduling, and how perhaps we should be aware that we're loosing all that time. Be aware that when you get paid 8 dollars an hour whoever your working for is saying that an hour of your life is only worth that much. They are putting a finite price on your existence. I could calculate it for you based on average life span in hours, but I won't do that. Let's just say that when we work, we really are selling ourselves, no matter what it is we're doing.

Just think about how you spend your time, and if it's not how you want to be spending it, then say fuck it to work, to school, to whatever you're doing, and make the time you're spending into your own time. Play music all the time instead of working, and make that your work. Write instead of going to school, and make that your avenue for learning. Make your time YOURs again.

Anyhow, that's a bit of my philosophy. Call it a minor part of a manifesto if you will. Schedules are dominating, so make sure you want to be submissive before you agree to one.

Getting used to the new meds.

2009-03-25T23:08:00.001-07:00

I had a very long and very interesting idea to plug here, but I started on it, and a paragraph in, I felt like it just wasn't quite right. I have these ideas all the time, big and small, important and unimportant, but only so many of them are of worth.

I've been having less as of late. The ideas that usually flood my brain, and the songs that play whether I want them to or not; the need to produce or explode, and that energy that just takes me every once in a while, are gone. I'm convinced my pills are saving me. From a possible suicide, from depression which steals from me months at a time. I'm being saved by these drugs, but the sedation, and the dampening of ideas is such a burden. I was so defined by constant production. I've said it before, I'm not real unless I'm creating. Fitting into whatever this modern mould is doesn't work for me.

I will keep taking my drugs, but gods do I wish for a world in which I didn't have to. I value my life enough to take the slow creation, and effortful work that comes with it, over the fiery passion that it's replaced. If only to continue living and perhaps increase my creation over the longer time I'll be spending here.

I can feel why people don't stick to their drugs. I picked up the guitar today and played for about an hour, but the things that came out all sounded the same. The songs I played were songs I already knew. I've plenty of days where new things come out, but I hate those days where it doesn't happen. I've been having new ideas for parts of stories, and for stories themselves, and I keep loosing them. I keep losing the things that used to keep me grounded.

I feel so disjointed. I still want to drink and smoke and be wild, as if it would bring back the creativity that once was paired with debauchery. I'm not sure if this is permanent. I hope that it isn't.

I don't feel right without some world being created in my head. I don't feel right without ideas flowing so fast that I can't even hold onto them.

I think that's where my problem is. I've spent too long being exceptional. By exceptional I don't mean wonderful or brilliant, I mean an exception. I have been too long an exception to the rules that govern most people. For better or worse I've gotten used to being either this dynamo skittering with thought and creative passion or being this inert blob made of pain and despondency.

Being in this odd inbetween state that it seems is normal for everyone just doesn't feel right. I don't know how normal people exist. I still don't know how. I feel like everyone would rebel against their mundane lives if they had even once felt the power and beauty and terror of a mania. If just once people had felt the horribleness of a depression perhaps they wouldn't have such faith in indifferent systems. If people knew what I know I don't think they would be the way they are.

Everyone seems to me deluded and overly optimistic. Even while everyone is crying wolf and worried that their savings will disappear under an ocean of debt, they still believe in some sort of meaning to the world.

I can't feel that. I can't feel the love of God, and I can't feel ever that normal is good enough. So I am left with the decision to either live in a way that the rest of the world accepts, taking my pills and being dulled down into a manageable middle, or to go crazy and be at odds with all that this world stands for.

If I weren't afraid of another depression, afraid of that horrible time when I feel like destroying my hands and myself, I would stop my pills to feel the joy of mania and to once again have so many thoughts piling around in my head that I have to get them out on every surface I can. I used to cover my arms with notes, and fill notebooks with ideas. I used to positively crackle with passion, and now I am much like everyone else, whatever the fuck that means.

I'm glowering right now feeling bad about the lack of creative prowess I've been displaying lately. My pills sit on the desk next to my computer. I will take them soon, before heading off to bed, but they'll go down into my stomach, anchoring me to the rest of humanity.

There's the good and there's the bad about all this. I am no longer a risk to kill myself, I no longer will spend all of my money on frivolous things, I no longer will have to after every mania go get an STD test and check on my finances and feel my liver aching. But I also will no longer have 72 hour writing sessions broken up only by cigarettes and store visits, I will no longer have a song in my head every hour of every day.

I like the benefits and I hate the costs. I don't know if it's worth it, being sane. I was both happier and so indescribably sadder while I was crazy.

I have been so many things. I have lived more lives than most 21 yearolds could ever hope to. I have existed for what feel like 26 years. My time has been lengthened, and now dulled and medicated I don't feel like the person I've been the last three years, or six years, or whatever it has felt like to me.

I don't know if I'm the same person, and I need to find new ways to bring out the good things about my craziness. I need to find out how to bring out the creativity and passion that before smouldered beneath my breast.

I think I'm succeeding to a certain extent, but I don't know, and if I keep feeling this hopeless, what's the point of taking these drugs at all?

Writing like this may be one of the ways I can draw out the passion that I haven't been finding in the slow rhythms of every day. I know that when I write, things feel good. The stuff that comes out, be it filled with vitriol, or filled with joy, always feels true. That can't be said of most things. My writing and my music feel true, and for someone who isn't even sure about there being any objective truth that's a rather important statement.

So for all my ranting, and for all that I feel a little constricted on these new drugs, things are good. I am well, and I am still writing. I am still producing written word that hasn't been written before, that is hopefully interesting. As long as my blood is still pumping and my hands still writing, I will be ok.

I wish the truth were happier.

2009-03-24T01:50:00.001-07:00

I hear better stories on the street than I could ever come up with on my own. Dead Mothers and stolen bicycles. Torrid tragedies remembered by streetlamps.

I was walking to the store, Cigarette in mouth, breathing in smoke which simultaneously comforted me about my coming death and increased its proximity. In the centre of the street, a few people met and began talking loudly about a party, or something of the sort. One of the girls, clearly drunk, and rather obnoxious sounding said "I can't believe they stole that bike off my front lawn. That was my mom's bike. She's fucking dead and they stole it. That's all I have to remember her by. She's fucking dead and they stole her bike. What sort of people do that, just steal a bike off a front lawn. What the hell am I gonna do?"

I walked down the sidewalk, away from there middle of the street conference. While I was smoking and watching the billows rise up above me into the night, I could hear two of the voices behind me while I walked. "That was my mom's bike. I needed that. I can't believe they did that, I just can't fucking believe it." I couldn't make out what the friend was saying.

About halfway to the store, and about a block after the voices disappeared into a house on my street, I could still hear the timbre of the girl's voice. It was the voice of the girl at a party you just wish would shut up. The voice that sounds just as annoying when complaining about there not being enough dip for the chips as when complaining about something that needs to be complained about. It was so sad. That's a voice I would disregard normally. I would have just felt annoyed by tone and not have bothered to hear content. It's something to note; the most annoying people still have problems.

I finished my cigarette feeling great and horrible at the same time. I knew I shouldn't be smoking. It's bad for my lungs, the smell is atrocious, and the benefits aren't really that apparent. It makes some things bearable. It's not a habit yet I guess. I've only bought one pack in the last three months. That's a good sign, but that I still need them is a bother. But I still need drugs every night. To feel good I need lots of things. To feel right I need lots of things.

while worrying about my lungs and the shortening of my life I lit another cigarette and wondered if that bike would be returned, and how that girl's mother died, and who she was, and what the hell was going on, and if it was recent or something that the girl just talked about every time she got drunk. Was this all just something that came to my head because I like stories? Did I make all of this up and convince myself it was real. Shit.

I hear more interesting stories in the middle of the night, in the middle of the street than I could ever come up with, but I wish I could. I wish the stories I heard were made up, and I wish the stories didn't have to be true. I wish that girl's bike, that had once belonged to her mother, hadn't been stolen. I wish that the stories about me, about going crazy, about shattering my life into a million pieces and having to pick them up and patiently glue them back together with drugs and persistence weren't true.

I wish my life this far with a dead brother, a crazy father, a crazy self, and generally unfulfilled dreams and ambitions weren't true.

I can make up stories, but they're never as interesting as the sad ones that I hear at night, when I can't sleep and my feet just want to strike the pavement, and my lungs just want a mix of fresh air and carcinogenic smoke.

I wish the truth were happier than it is, for me and for everyone else.

stagnation bothers me.

2009-03-23T19:22:00.000-07:00

I'm so much more likely to want to write when I don't have time for it. I've written obsessively for a long time, but that tends to be more obvious when I have stuff to do all day. It doesn't seem like I write so much when I'm not doing anything else in a day.

I have a feeling it's just because time feels different based on context. But it still doesn't help me feel more inspired while I'm sitting in front of the TV writing.

So, in this advertisement for that movie "monsters vs aliens" they were playing a lovely song called Hey Pachuco by Royal Crown Revue. Something to note is that this is a kids movie, and the song is about Pachucos, a particular breed of Mexican sometimes gangster from the 1940s. The song is largely based on the Los Angeles riots between sailors and pachucos.

It's a pretty awesome slice of history. I'd suggest you check it out. I just find it interesting that it's in the advertisement for a kids movie.

So that's sort of proof that I haven't a whole lot to write about. I sort of hate having nothing to do. IT gets very old. I'm not good at being useless. I'm way more ok with sitting down and watching television without being busy than I ever have been before. I still have a bit of trouble being stagnate though.

Even writing sometimes doesn't work as a way of fulfilling myself.

Regarding Obama

2009-03-21T20:36:00.000-07:00

Regarding Obama.
I've no doubt he'll work on the problems, but I don't think that the general intertwinedness between the corporate and the governmental will be overcome. That's a serious problem for me because it is not only a conflict of interest, it effectively disenfranchises whatever amount of the 300 million us citizens votes. We are given a few options for candidates, and those candidates cannot run without corporate funding. We sort of chose the candidate that ends up in office, but effective advertising is shown to have such a profound effect on purchasing behaviour that it would be a bad idea to think it didn't do something similar with voting. Essentially all candidates are fundamentally Liberal Capitalists, with varying attitudes on social issues. The social issues can vary because the people funding them aren't worried about the social, they're only worried about making money. So the variance in candidates though very real doesn't change the fundamental outlook that they must have in order to get the office. This applies to all of our elected officials, and once one looks at the process of lobbying in congress it becomes even more apparent how intertwined the corporate and the governmental are. So while I see Obama making changes, which will be beneficial, it will not remove one of the basic problems that lead to all this. The serious influence of the corporate on the governmental will not change under his leadership, or under the leadership of any president elected by the same system. The liberal capitalist agenda will remain strong, and the fundamental conflict of interest which causes ills to the planet, the people and the ability of citizens to affect the governing body above them will not be resolved.

It is a somewhat pessimistic way of looking things, but things are dark. I'm not of the opinion that this Liberal Capitalism is evil. It isn't, but I am worried by the fact that it is indifferent. There are no socially constructed taboos, and mores, to prevent them from doing ill. Humans however have implicit rules engrained in us from birth. The indifference of the powerful is dangerous. The Corporate doesn't control everything, but their amount of influence is so large as to be astronomically difficult to fully represent the vast expanse of their power.

There could be hope in all this, but I'd have to think more. I don't think that that fundamental problem will be solved while the US still exists, but there is a small chance I'm wrong, and I really do hope I am.

My 21st birthday, and my Animus.

2009-03-20T00:35:00.000-07:00

I'll preface this post with the note that I have two songs that have been running through my head tonight. One of them is by my band Sans Francisco, the other is by Tom Waits.

The one by my band is called Dear Antigone, lyrics and vocals by me, guitar and harmonies by my band mate Matt Sevrens. It goes like this

Someone once said, cellar door is the most beautiful phrase in our language
I'm not sure I believe that assertion, now that I've heard your song
Oh Antigone, You have so enthralled me
Oh Antigone, you've so enthralled me

You say the words you think, You say them unabashedly
My voice could never do you justice
in these sad little songs I sing
and I hope that I can be all the things that you seem to ask of me
A hope that you can bring me peace, if not a rest from all this
please Antigone
Please Antigone
Please take me

You say, it's all in Vain
I don't know, what it is you want, out of me
I once tried to measure an hour, in wasted time
when with you, It's never so good as when you're there
it's never so bad as when I'm missing you
dear Antigone
please set me free, from the shackles that so roughly bind me
to this world
could this lovely girl, in front of me
my dear Antigone, be

So that was the whole song, but the whole thing has been going through my head. I need to find my Antigone. (not necessarily a girl, though the song does suggest that.)
That's what I've been missing, someone who can set me free from the shackles that so roughly bind me.

I talked to my ex girlfriend tonight, while avoiding working on a paper that's due tomorrow. The thing that kept coming to mind was the fact that she never really understood my need to create. It's not a matter of choosing to create less so I have more time for classes and school and work. There isn't a choice for me. She never seemed to get that. She fell out of love with me and also couldn't deal with being so close to all of my mental problems. It's something I think I've gotten over, but she still makes me want to smoke.

At the time it was both a fulfilling of oral fixations and a desire to put physical scars where the emotional ones were. It worked to an extent.

I got over her with oral fixations. I smoked more cigarettes in those couple of months than I ever had before and ever will again. Talking to her, or using instant messaging to talk to her, still makes me want to smoke. I guess that's a sign I haven't really gotten over her. I don't love her anymore, and haven't for some time, but there's still some bitterness there for me. I felt pretty abandoned when all that went down.

That ties into the other song that was in my head, Little Drop of Poison. It's not important that I put down the lyrics in this post, you can look them up if you'd care to. it's tied into all this though.

So instead of being with someone who doesn't understand my need to create I need an Antigone. I guess that's my model for a partner. I'm looking for one of those really, because I'm no good at dating, or at playing the field. I'm good at being in a relationship and caring for someone.

I've been figuring out my head, and the only thing that's constant no mater what is going on with me is this need to create. I always am making things and when I'm not I don't feel real.

I feel real right now, sitting and writing this. I was almost in a mood to neglect posting here, but that's not something I ever want to do. I have to write every day. I don't feel fulfilled otherwise. Sure I was writing a paper today, but that's not the sort of writing I mean. When writing a paper, no matter how enjoyable, I can't just say the things I think. There's too much back story and too much messiness to put into a paper for school. I have to write these ridiculous rants and these long long posts about what it is to be me, because I haven't figured that out yet.

I'm getting better at it. The realisation that I really do need an Antigone, a partner in all of this is one step in figuring it out. Writing every day, whether or not I feel like it is another step. The things that drive me are pretty clear, creation and a desire to help someone and be helped by someone.

I had so many things I wanted to say when I was thinking about this blog post outside, smoking a cigar to signify the end of the paper I wrote tonight and the end of my 20th year. Today is my 21st birthday. I'm not a new person, but it's a notable landmark. My first adult birthday, while sane.

I have a final, and a psychiatrist appointment tomorrow, then I'm done for the week. I have work some of next week, which will be a nice change of pace. I'm ready to take on the world as a slightly different person. Like I've said before I still don't want to conform to the way the world is, but I do want to be able to deal with it on my own terms rather than the on the terms of my moods.

The whole mess of who I am and who I want to be, and my goals and my desires is all too messy to deal with at once. I have too take all this day by day, and so far that's going well. My friends are helpful in this, and my drugs are helpful in this. Breaking up my routines with writing and song has really given me something to look forward to.

As unusual as it is, I look forward to this blog post every day, not always consciously, but still the anticipation is there. I like being able to finally say all the things that build up over a day, especially a day like this with paper writing and two finals and a discussion with my ex girlfriend. These are things that just tend to make me want to get more and more shit out.

The moral of all this is that I'm ready. I'm here. I am creating, and I will be doing so for the rest of my life however long or short it is. I've shortened my life with tobacco and alcohol, with marijuana and wild nights, and I've lengthened it with atypical anti-psychotics that can keep me from just saying fuck it to this life that I haven't found meaning in yet.

The only thing I've found of worth is to create. So every day, unless my computer breaks again, I'll be here, typing away my sorrows and joys and in betweens because for me this is more than a narcicistic bit of self aggrandisement, it's an outlet, and on some really shitty, or unproductive days, my reason for keeping on going.

It's dramatic, but these aren't histrionics. I'm doing this because I need to, and read or not, this blog is keeping me sane in a more fundamental sense than the neurochemical. I'm not sure I believe in a soul, or in something about us that isn't just our brains, but if any such thing exists this is where I'm giving mine room to breath.

This is my animus. Unless I take to doing this in private, every day you'll get to see some of it, some of my animus spilled on the page, and explained, not just for you but for me.

my way with words isn't mine.

2009-03-19T00:25:00.000-07:00

I tend to think of my ability with words as something that just came about naturally, but that's far from the case. The way my parent's used language around me while I was growing up and the way that my dad thought about writing all influenced how I use language. I used to write essays for my dad on various topics. It was fun, but important, and I know that that improved my writing style. So while I have a way with words, it's not because I have some natural ability. I have a way with words because of the training I had. That's useful to know.

What I tend to think of as natural ability is more a product of being raised on writing, and reading, and language. It's nicely sobering to remember that what I've got comes from practice and training rather than just a way with words.

I don't know exactly what brought that on, but It seems important. There's an intersection between natural ability and environment that's vital to the development of a skill or talent. Same goes for music and other things. The music is the same way. I heard music growing up. It would have been a bit better if, like in the family of my friend Paul, people played music all the time, but exposure is still important. It's important to not think of a skill as something entirely yours. It's about the influences. Not laying claim to a skill is a good way of avoiding that bravado that comes from making something that you think is good. That my writing skill is really something given me by my parents, and by my time practising, is humbling in a good way.

Creation is my only refuge.

2009-03-18T00:27:00.001-07:00

The point I made in the other post is rather profound. I don't know how true any of the stuff regarding Sans Francisco is, because I think I'm just having a bad day, but the statements about creation are true. I only feel real when I'm creating. Sometimes a conversation will enthral me. That's actually one of the preconditions for my infatuation with someone, in conversation with them I am enthralled. The only other times which are real to me are the ones in which I'm making something.

That's an important thing to note. What is real to us is so much a mater of perception. The fact is that everything in memory is foggy and is somewhat surreal to begin with, but when that sort of patina is draped over the present, one can imagine how disconcerting it would be. My present is like that. If I'm not making something I am in a limbo. I am in a between. There's not a lot I can do about it except to create everywhere. To always be making something new, whether or not I think what I create is going to be of worth. That's one of the changes for me. I can't feel real just by going to a party. I don't automatically feel expansive, I have to induce it.

I can't just be driven by a mood and then go on into the world that way. I have to push myself into these furies of creation to make the world mine. Other wise I don't feel as if I've done anything.

An hour of class often feels like wasted time. The transit between home and school feels like wasted time, and the majority of conversations I have feel like wasted time. One effect of my drug is that I'm less depressive, and tend to be a bit nicer to be around. That shows how drastically unpleasant I must have been. But I still cannot shake this feeling that nigh everything I must do is pointless. I am real when I write, and I am real when I play music that hasn't been played before. I am real when I'm typing this poorly structured essay, because it is the flowing out of something new that keeps me going.

I've long wondered about the value of existence, and the only things that haven't come up short have been writing and music. Everything else is sullied by the fact that we don't know if there is meaning. Everything else is unsure, and may be of no use to anyone in the long run. But Creation.

Gods. I want to write Creation in all caps to make my point, because language isn't even sufficient to explain what I want to say. CREATING is a reason to live. That's all.

I often have felt I hadn't a reason to live. I've often felt the power, as well as the hopelessness, of being alive. I have felt a wide wide range of things, and the one thing that has stuck out to me is that I can keep on living as long as I can create.

That is the only thing that inspires me to continue. When the world has fallen down around me, and I feel this strong desire to drive my hands through some wall, and destroy their ability to play guitar, their ability to write, The only thing that sustains me is this ability to create.

The only reason I don't end up slamming my hands against the wall again and again until they are useless, is because creation is worth living for.

I'm willing to have gone through whatever ills I have gone through in order to create.

I don't know if that will always be the case, but up to now that has been the thing that has kept me alive.

I am still alive because I can create. There isn't another redeeming value to life that I've found yet.

One can argue all they want with that logic, but they will be found short.

creation is my only refuge.

I'm only real when I'm creating.

2009-03-18T00:04:00.000-07:00

I'm not always sure what I'm going to write about when I sit down to write a blog post, but I do it every day and somehow I always come up with some writing topic. That's something new to me, having to force myself to write every day. I write every day whether or not I feel like it, because no longer do my moods drive me to write. I still feel driven sometimes, and I still have important things to say (or so I think), but I don't have the same sort of fervour.

I sort of want to move. I like Davis. The place is fine, but I feel almost like I need a new setting to fit the new person I'm becoming. I'm still the same in a lot of ways, but not being blown about on the winds of mood is something that takes a lot of settling down to. I'm getting used to it of course, but I don't entirely feel the same. I almost miss the wild fluctuations, even though they caused so much distress.

Sometimes I feel like the stuff I'm putting the most time into now isn't the stuff I want to produce. I'm playing music that I like with matt, but I feel like there's a whole lot of boundary pushing I want to do with my other music. That hit me today while sitting around with Matt. It wasn't a practice session or anything, but I kept on being more and more annoyed at the little things he does, and it kind of hit me that I'd rather be sitting with my loop pedal and working on some of the difficult problems that I have with the musical pointillism stuff. The thing is that when playing with him I get bored. The bass lines bore me, and the things no matter how good they sound tend to feel less vital than the stuff I create alone or with Dan.

I like playing with Matt, and I want it to go somewhere, I'm excited about it in a lot of ways, but I can't just do that, and sometimes it gets in the way for the stuff that most interests me. It hurts that I woke up at 4 in the afternoon, so already I haven't as much time to do the stuff I want to, but I'm still not willing to take the time that I would play my musical pointillism and put it towards this other stuff I'm doing.

I guess that's what my problem is. I like doing this but not at the cost of the music that I feel like no one is doing. Sans Francisco is doing something interesting, but it's not something that engages me every time I play it. When I play one of the bass lines I'm not fully there, and when I sing one of the lines I'm not fully there. It doesn't feel like creation. That's the thing I'm not real unless I'm making something. The time when I'm writing music, or writing blog posts, or making something are when I'm fully involved. Rehearsing things I've already made bores me to death. Writing bass lines to things already written bores me to death. I can only do so much of it before I get all pissed off.

I have to be making new things. I like playing my own songs that I've written, but not nearly as much as writing new things. That's part of why there's a heavy improv element to the musical pointillism stuff, that way I'm real while I'm on stage. That way I'm actually a full person. I'm not performing something that already exists.

I just want to be real, and the only way I can do that is by making. Making anything really. I don't create the way others breathe, but if I don't create there isn't a point in breathing.

I'm tired of doing the same things over again. I know how important it is to have a song tight, have it put together so well that it sounds perfect, but I don't know if I have the patience to make that happen. I can't cede my existence for that long. It's so close to making something, and yet so far. I want to eschew the routine, the practised, the automatic. I can spend my time in front of the TV not existing, but I WILL not spend my time with a guitar or bass in my hands not existing. That's part of why I don't remember bass lines. I can't stand doing the same thing every time. I tried. I will continue to try, and I intellectually understand the importance of it, but I can't force myself into that rut.

I'll keep on with Sans Francisco, but I'm keeping on for when we make new songs. I'm keeping on for the catchyness of the songs we write, not because I like playing the song perfectly. I don't like playing a song perfectly, if it's the same song I've played ten billion times. I like writing the song. I'll perform because I must, but I exist only for the creative bit. Playing music isn't creative, only making it is.

Musical Pointillism

2009-03-17T01:23:00.000-07:00

Eating pasta, watching television, and happily done downloading some lovely albums. I've no finals on lovely St Patrick's day, which I so love so the plan for tomorrow is to sleep in, sit about, watch television, and drink an beer or two. I'm rather looking forward to it. Perhaps some reading and some writing and music.

got back about half an hour ago from smoking cigars and talking about musical stuff with my friend Dan. He's the drummer percussionist guy from my band Exactly. He's been working on programming a loop on Macs MSP. It's pretty exciting, and he's got awesome stuff going on. I'm pretty psyched, because this means he can do a lot of things with the percussion. The possibilities are really wide ranging. We talked a little about specifics and if the parameters of his program could do what we wanted it too. He automatically came up with some solutions to our problems. It's exciting.

The problems I've been having with my musical pointillism has been in the fact that it's only guitar and a loop. I'm good at creating a static picture, which though certain rhythms will show up and there is movement, is generally a singular picture. Adding this dynamic looped percussion set up gives it a certain amount of motion. There's also the bass line, which I'm using my delay pedal (able to loop for around 3000 msec) for. The trick is that over those three(I may have more, not sure) seconds a certain number of repeats lead to a fade away.

I'm going to have my friend matt, and guitarist in my other band Sans Francisco, play bass this way. The strictures of the delay pedal will counteract some of the melodic things he can't help but do. It's going to be useful.

I have two inputs on my loop pedal, the one I'm using on my guitar, and the other input is ostensibly a Mic input, and what I want to do is get a mic and have my friend Paul who is off and on in Sans Francisco, and is one of the main members of Exactly, will play trombone through the mic and on the loop. It should be useful.

Point is there's a whole bunch of stuff that we want to do with this. It allows for creative input from all parties, (well I don't know if Matt will end up feeling like he's got creative input) and it's got a lot of possibilities. It's my first serious chance to be the primary creative force behind something musical. It's really nice. Being the impetus behind something is great.

There's lots of musical stuff floating around in my head, but it's far more manageable on my drugs, which is super nice. That's what I've been thinking.

My Generation's art.

2009-03-16T00:46:00.000-07:00

I always worry that my generation will write memoirs no one will ever get the chance to read. We'll pour effort into long descriptions of going mad, or growing up a certain way, and no one will ever see them to benefit from them. It's fine for the person who writes the book, because writing about the bad parts of ones life makes them seem not less bad, but more manageable. It isn't quite as good for the rest of the world.

I used to worry my generation wouldn't create much interesting art, but I'm no longer worried about the creation of interesting art, I'm more worried about the desimination of that art. There are great band made up of people my age, but it's the shitty ones who get radio plays. There are great painters, and writers, and sculptors, and all sorts of other things, but those aren't things that come up to the public view.

My generation will create, but I don't think anyone will see it. That gives great reason to ask the question; is art without an audience art at all?

That's a troubling question, especially for someone like me who has art *music in my case* but rarely shows it to anyone. Our memoirs may be good, our songs great, our paintings brilliant, but it's all for naught if no one sees them, hears them or reads them. We listen to music for different reasons now. The same is true for how we consume writing and visual art.

Music is a distraction and something to go in the background. I don't know how people can listen to top forty hits on their iPods all day long, but that is what they do. the visual art that makes it is in advertisements, and the writing we enjoy is about sordid affairs, or about celebreties.

Art serves it's purpose as a placating remedy given to the masses. It's the same crticism that's been used since the Horkheimer and Adorno paper "The culture Industry." I fell like this art that my generation makes to put in advertisments and television shows, and the television shows themselves, and the art in full page ads are all worth less because their purpose isn't art.

To a certain extent I'm a formalist that way.

I'd like to keep going on this topic but my meds are kicking in and I litterally can't. It's like it's gradually powering down my brain.

A bit about my current state

2009-03-15T18:47:00.001-07:00

My room is a horrible mess. I haven't cleaned properly in months. I feel a little bad about it, but I never feel the need to clean. It's not a good thing that I willingly eschew cleanliness, but for some reason it just doesn't seem that important.

Even last night when I had people over it didn't seem a big deal to me. That's the thing. I just don't want to do any of these things I'm responsible for. Or maybe it's more like I have a pool of resources I can put towards anything and cleaning my room just isn't one of the things I choose to put resources towards.

That would make sense to me. I've been doing a lot more music lately, and it's been pretty good by my accounting. I've also been getting on top of the stuff I need to do for my job. And then there's school. I've been rather good about that as of late. I just don't have the extra resources to get to cleaning my room, or sorting out my clothes.

That's probably not a good thing, but I think I'm operating on the same schedule as I was when off of my meds, and it doesn't apply to my medicated state. That may be part of it. I'm much better with my meds, nicer, better to be around, less snappy, less negative, less wild. They're definitely a good thing for me, I just need to get used to them.

It's not just that either, I have to get used to a whole different life and figure out if I'm comfortable with just doing the routine things that each of us does every day. I don't know if I feel like the way the world is structured suits me. I don't want to live in the confines of habit. The routines I feel I need to go through stifle me. For all my desire to understand the human brain to a greater degree, for all my desire to explore the things that make us human, sometimes I just want to quit it all and play music. Sometimes I want to say fuck it, and just write books, songs and poems. Sometimes all of this is too much.

Of course the drugs make me realise a bit more fully the weight that a routine puts on ones shoulders. I've even had to justify the taking of them to myself. I'm taking them to avoid depressions, and to perhaps lengthen my life by preventing a possible (hell considering statistics on the subject among people sharing my disorder, likely) suicide. I'm not taking them to become a productive member of society. I'm not taking them so that I can work and be prosperous, I'm taking them to save my life.

That's a pretty profound difference. They're being prescribed to allow me to fit into society, but I don't need to fit in, in fact I'd much rather not fit in. I'm taking them to fit in or not fit in on my own terms. To a certain extent it's the same as my hindsight justification for the short time for which I could have considered myself a smoker. Cigarettes in some way helped me cope with the shittyness of life, and for all that they very well may have shortened my life by a few months or a few years, they have, by preventing my just giving up, given me back many more.

Right now for me is a time for rediffining of terms. Who am I? I don't know anymore, but I'm working on it. I am not someone who wants to be subject to the greater trends of society, and anytime I see myself doing something just because it's what has always been done, I feel a little bit of myself die. So far that and my desire to create have been the only certain things. I want to create, and even though society doesn't value my music or my writing the way they value the creation of pointless monetary assets, I want to continue as if what I do is the most important thing there is.

That's all I'm really sure off, but I guess that's a lot. I have to resources to do those things I want to as well, so I'm not so bad off. I just need to figure out the rest, through song, and writing. Maybe I'll find out and I can tell everyone who I am, but with this being a completely new experience and the fact that I'm always changing even if only a little bit, It may be rather hard to do.

the weather and my writing style.

2009-03-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

The weather has taken a nasty turn. I'd rather it just rained instead of threatening with big grey clouds and cool winds. Waiting for the other shoe to drop is never something I've been a fan of. I've spent enough time waiting for things to go wrong, or turn for the worse in my normal life, I don't usually like it for weather.

The weather metaphor is used a lot for bipolar disorder. It's a pretty accurate one. The clouds roll in and it threatens to rain before a torrent falls down. The same happens with manias, where you've those days where the sun just peeks out from the clouds and it's still cold out. It's like the lead up.

Oddest thing, I'm imagining this read in an English accent. I tend to write in a way that just sounds better read out loud in an english accent. I can do it in the Irish but that's not quite how I write. I don't really know why it sounds so much better to me when it doesn't sound estado unidensen. I've never been comfortable with being from the US, and that may just be part of it.

I've always had trouble figuring out where my writing style comes from because I've all these influences that aren't connected to where I'm from. I spent too much time reading books of all different sorts. I spent too much time in Japan, and I spent too much time wishing I weren't from the part of northern California I was from.

That irks me a bit. It's not necessarily of importance enough to blog about, but in actuality, what is?

My current band and music

2009-03-14T16:48:00.000-07:00

You all should go over to www.mattsevrens.com to see the music my new band has been making. It's catchy, and unusual. I think people will like it. So do check it out. it's not the stuff that I've written that musical philosophy stuff about. It's not my Post chordalism, or musical pointalism or whatever. It's folky pop with clever lyrics.

Do check it out. If you enjoy it let me know. Perhaps I'll post more if there is interest.

finnally my computer has been fixed.

2009-03-14T13:11:00.000-07:00

My computer has been fixed. I'm so tempted to yell that, with my lovely caps lock key. I rather missed her. The thing is, turns out I use the computer far more than I had thought. It's almost like most of the easily kept social ties are on the internet now. It's a good and bad thing. It's good for my gas consumption, and bad for keeping my body in biking shape. It's good for my introverted but people loving people loving persona, but bad for the actually people I love.

I'm ambivalent about how much of my life, and the lives of others, centre around computers, but as far as action is concerned, I'm unlikely to change my direct involvement with said devices.

Something I'm sort of surprised to have missed is posting on this blog. I had been doing so every day, and it had been quite a release. I just didn't realise how much until I no longer had it at my fingertips. That gave me time to sit and handwrite part of the memoirs I'm working on, but handwriting is a practice in passion not in work ethic. I am a shite editor when it comes to handwritten works, and transposing them to my primary mode of wirting, my computer is always a troublesome endeavour. I'm not overly worried about that transition, but it will be a large amount of additional work over the editing and rewriting. One of my friends said it takes at least five years to write a good memoir. All that made me think of was the David Bowie song "five years", but she's right about one thing. Perhaps not the time in particular but certainly the fact of a long time being needed. I'd say more like two or three years, but on never fully knows. I would find it interesting to have it take 3 years, so that it's about as long as the primary time of focus.

But that's enough mulling. For now I'm just happy to have my computer back and my blog back and my connection to the rest of the world (well my non physical connection to it at least) back.

Rather pleased if you couldn't tell.

2009-03-09T18:11:00.000-07:00

I'm working on a paper right now. I felt like writing but no longer felt like writing my paper, so while I've use of a computer I've decided to once again post on this lovely page of mine.

My teeth have been hurting me. I rather hate dental work, despite realising it's necessity. The thing that most bothers me is the ability of dental problems to remove all other thoughts from ones brain. If my teeth hurt I'm unlikely to be thinking about anything else. That occurs in a lot of different cases, but because my teeth hurt I'm having trouble thinking of anything else.

The paper I'm working on is titled "Madness and Meaning: Mental Illness and the Essentialist Turn" That sentence is rather hard because the shift key on this shitty school keyboard keeps sticking. I have to make a serious amount of effort to press it again and again. It leaves me tempted to not capilatise anything. That of course is a bad idea, but I can't seem to shake it nonetheless.

Not having a computer seriously puts a damper on my existence. There are plenty of things my computer is good for, and without it I realise again how much time I spend using it. It's usually just in passing, for the listening of music, or the reading of blogs and articles, but without it my life is significantly different. I write on notebooks for hours, giving my hand these uncomfortable cramps that I try to get rid of by massaging my hand while watching television. I don't like my life without a computer. Typing is a hugely useful thing for me. My hand writing is bad and I've a tendency to grip to hard. All of this leads me to wish I had a keyboard under my fingers to catch the thoughts that fall out of them.

My computer will soon be fixed, and the same goes for my teeth, so these minor things that ail me will be done for, however I'm a little too in the moment to just think of them as temporary.

Some challenges posited by my memoir writing.

2009-03-05T10:35:00.000-08:00

my computer is well on it's way to being fixed, and my memoir is on it's way to being written. That's not to say I have near enough material as of yet, but on the plus side, I'm up to about 10,000 words and I haven't yet gotten to the meat. Actually that may be the minus side. I haven't actually figured that out.

The problem with this writing I've been doing is that my life is confusing. Trying to structure it so that people could make sense of my ups downs and various influences is a nigh arduous task. Timeline doesn't properly organise my life, and normal memoir structure doesn't either. I don't want my readers to be as confused as I was once they get to the bit about madness.

That's where the issue is, in portrayal of moods and all of that I can't rely on time, or on history. I seem to be doing that a lot, working on things for which I've no forebarers. It's a hard thing to do.

Of course there are many memoirs to look at, and read and reference, but somehow I feel like my memory of events is unsusual. I explained to someone earlier this week how I remember things so well; I tie everything together. If I'm learning about one topic I tie it to another, and another and so on until everything is a jumble of connections.

I have connections, not timelines. I have to go back and use details to sort out the actual timeline of my life. I think that my dad's first break that I was aware of was after my brother's death, but that's only because I'm assuming a partially causal relationship, not because I have any real feeling about which occured first. I could always figure out which years these things happened in through memory and through asking people, but I don't really think that would clear the air.

I want to explain things in an order that makes more sense. That's why this memoir is going to be an interesting experiment. I don't know if I'll ever end up releasing it, but I do know that there's quite a lot of stuff that interacts. It's not stream of consciousness, but it is structured based on sense rather than time.

Most people understand time, but for me, with my ups and downs, and dilation and contraction, time isn't the best way of ordering things. I don't experience time in the same way, and I don't know quite how to reconcile this experience with others.

So be it.

Wishing I could post more. Damn broken computer.

2009-03-02T13:28:00.000-08:00

The stuff i've been writing in notebooks as of late all points to the writing of a memoir. I'm pretty sure I finally have the impetus and will to do it. It may end up being more like a "dreams of my russian summers", memoir only in the loose sense. I'm expecting it to be more about the truth than about the actual events. That's a tricky thing of course. I have a feeling stuff from the blog will come in handy and get slid in there, but I imagine most of it will be new stuff. I intend to continue writing the blog as soon as my computer is repaired (which should be soon). I'm using a school computer right now, and so will keep this post short.

The memoir may take some time away from my posting, and I do intend to put some serious work into it. I'm not entirely sure if I'll ever finish it, or where I'll get with it, but I do hope to find out.

I've had a lot to say as of late, mostly because my new meds have been giving me an unusual freedom from the mercurial nature of my moods. I do hope I can write more of it down here when the computer is fixed. That memoir may take a year, or two, or longer, but if I manage to finish it the people who read this will be the first to know.

So good luck, Will be back when I'm able.

adieu.

a contemplation on memory

2009-02-27T11:04:00.000-08:00

My posting has been very very sporadic of late. My computer died and I've yet to get it fixed. Ah the life of a college student. I have been writing every day though. There are a lot of interesting things happening to me, and though the presumption is a bit egotistical, I bet you'd like to hear about them.

I'm on new drugs. Taking Seroquel. We're still working up to a normal dose but I feel better and friends are taking note. The fact that I can actually chose what to work on rather than being at the whim of mood and inspiration is very odd. I've been taking time to get used to not being nervous about the next coming episode. There's just a whole lot of stuff that I'm still getting used to.

I could explain more, but I've been thinking other interesting things that are more interesting to everyone else. I don't feel so hopeless anymore. Though I still don't believe in a god and I still don't really feel like life has any meaning, I haven't been feeling so hopeless. I haven't felt as blown about on the winds of time and space.

All the things I wrote while I felt that way show a lot. I don't know how accurate or inaccurate the things I though were, but it's certainly interesting to see what I was thinking in the past. It's a different sort of revision now. Before this looking back at things I had written was a study in differing writing style and growth as a human being, now it's more like reading things written by an entirely different person who I happen to have the memories of.

All of this has also given me a differing view on the way memory works. Of course I've been taking courses on exactly that topic as well, so I know better how it actually works, but I've also had these philosophical thoughts about it. That sureness, and lack of sureness that memory has is something I'm rather enthralled by. The fact is that we know only our current state. What is now is all that is. I think I can finally finish reading Swan's way, and the other volumes of "À la recherche du temps perdu" (or Remembrance of things past) The insights that it has about memory, and its sheer size are a few things that interest me.

I've had some of those Proustian thoughts myself. The ones about memory being held in time isolated from other events. It's all of interest to me more now than it was before, because being well and remembering not being well is a surreal experience. The things remembered take on a movie like quality.

I remember tics and gestures I used to do, and I remember being curled up in the foetal position on a bed, but I don't always feel like those people are me. That's the leap that we all make, that these things we remember really happened to us. It's an easy leap to make, and logically solid, but it still is a leap. That's where all of this coalesces into one problem.

It's the same damn question we as a species have been asking since the advanced development of our forebrain. Who am I. If my memories don't define me, because they are only me in as much as I admit they are, then what does? If my actions now become but memories later, then are they important either?

That's the thing. I can't really say if the zen living in the moment is really the best way to go or if the western Sartrean existentialist equivalent is a solution. I don't know if there is a positive thing about our existences, and I don't know if now that I'm well enough to continue on in a way that isn't horrible tumultuous I'll have enough good to outweigh the bad.

That's the problem, the answers don't come. In what I study, the brain and its workings, I don't get to find out what meaning there might be. I'm given more things to mull over, but I'm never given a large number of explanations. That's where I hit a wall. These questions that we ask are nigh unanswerable.

I'm awfully tempted to take the Wittgenstein view that we're just asking the wrong questions. That's a significant idea. Asking what it all means may not be a question that makes sense. An object doesn't mean anything. A state of existence doesn't mean anything. We associate our words with semantic quatility, do we also then associate what they refer to with semantic quality? I'd guess that we do. We want to construct meaning out of our memories, and out of the objects in our world, and out of our lives, but the fact is that meaning may not be applicable to these entities. That's where we may fail, this application of a human construction on something beyond us, be it life, or memory, or whatever else.

lack of posting, explained.

2009-02-23T15:59:00.000-08:00

Haven't been posting as much lately mostly because my computer died. I do apologise for that. I'm not sure how long it will be until my computer is fixed, but I have been twittering more because my cell phone still works. so if you still want to hear from me I'd suggest going through the backlogs of this blog or going to my twitter at www.twitter.com/patch615

Finally Finding out who I am: Living on an even tack

2009-02-18T00:31:00.000-08:00

I'm on an even tack. It's unusual and wonderful. I haven't felt this normal in a long long time. I'm so happy that things are good.

I have a few things to talk about, though I really could (and would be more than happy to) go on all day about how my new drugs are affecting me.

It's been a weekend of papers and music. I played a show today with one of my bands, and this weekend I started another band. It's pretty exciting. I need to get back on recording my solo stuff, but I haven't really had the time.

I've really been enjoying all the creative stuff I've been able to do as of late. It's nice. I was worried that my new drug would hinder my creativity, or just change it in some odd way, but it really has made things better. I can create at will now. Before it required passion, or inspiration, now it just works.

That's something I've never known, being able to do something just by working at it. I always was able to do some things naturally and simply couldn't do the others. It's very odd finding that I'm actually able to change my abilities by exerting effort. It's weird being able to write a paper without having some spark behind the writing.

My friends have noticed the difference too. I was worried about giving up alcohol, and to a certain extent weed, but frankly, I know I'm not going to miss it. Another plus is the fact that one of my drinking buddies from when I was drinking a WHOLE lot, also has quit drinking because of the drugs he's on, so we can not drink together. It'll be interesting.

I'm feeling good. Even the stuff that's a cause for anxiety, debt, schoolwork, being single, isn't nearly as bad as it ever was. It feels good to feel good and not worry about the consequences.

It's nice loving music again. Before music was what got me through. I didn't love it the same way. It was like a relationship you have because if you didn't have that person to lean on you wouldn't be able to support yourself. Now it's one of those things where I'm not playing music because I need to, because I couldn't live without it, I'm playing because I love it. Of course I still feel like I need to play, I still have music coming out of me all the time, and just can't hold it back, but it's not so urgent. I can play music without the need for catharsis.

That cathartic turn that writing and music took for me is something I'm glad to be over. Writing to excise demons is always a study in futility. Those demons remain, and the things you write don't bring anything positive into the world about you. The writing is flat, and bitter, and full of the ugliness that language so brilliantly can display.

Language and writing can be so ugly and harsh when used that way. Music too can take on that edge. Music not made as a remembrance of what it felt like to be in a world that was ending, but which was played because playing it would make the world end.

I haven't known who I am without these vast fluctuations in mood. In the mountains I was stifled and so wasn't able to feel who I might be in less confining circumstances, and once I got here I went mad. I've never fully figured out who the hell I am. I know some things about me that couldn't be suppressed by depression, and couldn't be exaggerated away by mania. Those things stick out, but I'm still in a mode of self discovery.

Some would argue that who you are under pressure, in the worst of the worst, is the essence of your being, if that's the case I better know who I am than most people ever will. However, I think that who I will be in the rest of my life (drugs willing) is really about when I'm well.

It's such a trip finding out what is real, what isn't. It's so odd finding out which things really pique my fancy, and which were just infatuations enhanced by mania. It's great finding out that I really am this driven, exciting person I thought I was in mania, but without the arrogance and over reaching. It's also great finding that I'm not the waste of air, and paper, and space, and resources, my depressions had me so convinced I was.

I'm here, and I am finally me.

This is my first chance to find out what makes up my world, and what I am. I feel reborn, with some of the ties I had before, debts, and friends, and school, and memory, but that is no more than I was given at my birth. I am new. The me that will walk out my door tomorrow is going to be a different me than has walked out that door hundreds of times before.

An excerpt from my notebook.

2009-02-15T01:00:00.000-08:00

This is an excerpt from one of my current notebooks

"The world is organised in such a way that people like me (whatever that means) are noted for honour but nor for support. The value of art of course may be changing, but as things have been and may continue to be for a long time coming, I am valued in one way and forsaken in another.

I just make note of this because there is still a heavy stigma regarding mental illness, but the social enthusiasm that mania brings as well as the creativity are rewarded. Like everything else in my world this exhibits a very apparent duality, or polarity of things.

I'm still not sure if I prefer Manic-depression to Bipolar as a term for what I've got. Both make sense, and both are valid. Bipolar just seems like it doesn't fully explain it, unless of course you already think of Major Depressive Disorder as Unipolar depression. Of course only psychologists and crazy folks think of it that way. Which is why I feel Manic-depression is more descriptive to the lay person.

All of it is semantics though. Not to say Semantics aren't important, Just that getting to the semanticity of a single word neglects some serious complexities in the disorder itself."

"It seems like being mentally ill is all I ever write about anymore. What happened to my other interests? I used to write varied things about varied characters but as of late all that comes out is the examinations and laments about my head. I know how much it has affected my view of the world, but it did not remove all my other interests. What happened?"

Preparing for Normality.

2009-02-13T00:39:00.000-08:00

My head has felt a little different these last couple of days. I started on a new drug (new to me, not new in the other sense) to sort out my brain. It seems like it's working. I haven't been having the crying spells that had been cropping up this last week.

I just feel normal. That's so unusual for me. I don't feel like there's any serious cognitive impairment, but every once in a while my eyes just sort of loose focus. It's not like the world goes blurry, because everything is clear, my processing just goes out of focus. So I could be looking out at some trees, and the trees will still have defined edges, but the visual image doesn't have any connection to anything else. It's like all I'm getting is the feed, and none of the associations.

That doesn't happen often enough for it to be a serious problem. I do need to start going to bed earlier on this drug, it's pretty sedating. I always used to have trouble falling asleep, so going to bed at 2, let alone as early as midnight, was kind of the only option. There are a few things I need to get used to.

I won't be drinking much alcohol anymore. My dad is on the same stuff, and I know that alcohol affects him a whole lot more now. Drinking the way I used to is just out of the question. Given, I used to drink pretty prodigiously. I like alcohol for alcohol's sake though, so I'll still be able to enjoy a snifter of Irish whiskey, or a bottle of good beer. It will just seem like I had far more beer or whiskey than I did. I suppose I'm fine with that. I'm willing to give up drinking for a modicum of sanity. Shit, even if it just rids me of the depressions I'll happily give up drinking. The problem I keep hitting is figuring out how to deal with social situations. parties are exculsively drinking affairs, and frankly they're rather boring while sober. I really don't like parties, and I really do like alcohol, so there's that. I'll likely just be the DD a bit more often when my friends want to go out drinking for the evening. And I do have a rather good excuse. It'll just be a little hard to explain considering how much I drank before.

Of course all of that is probably a good thing. I will miss it, but I am most certainly NOT going to miss depressions.

I'm really hoping my creativity doesn't suffer, but as if to prove that it won't, I'm working on a concept album. This isn't like some of my other projects, started in mania's and never followed through with. I think it may be good. I'm being a little backwards about it, Lyrics first. I've always gone the other way around. I feel like that might produce interesting results. I'm not sure if I want to do it alone or get some friends involved. I ultimately just want to get it done as soon and well as possible, but I don't really know how that'll work.

I'll likely write the songs and then see if my band likes them. They'd have to like all of them for it to work, but if they did that would be nice, I could use drums and a trombone in the songs I think. It's still a major work in progress, I've only the lyrics for one and a half of the songs. It's exciting though. It's interesting learning to work when neither despondent nor ecstatic.

I spent so much time getting used to, and understanding my mental issues that adjusting to a normal life is hard. It won't be exactly a normal life of course, but that doesn't make it less daunting. I haven't ever really been normal. My youth was spent in a very small town, up in the mountains, in this very specific microcosm of a world. my adulthood thus far has been spent grapling with mental illness. All the while I've never quite felt like there are people like me. I take a sort of Shikatagnai attitude about that, but it still is something to note.

Shikataganai is a Japanese phrase meaning "It can't be Helped" is an admission of futility, but not in a defeatist manner

Normal is going to be weird. Normal is not something I've ever truly experienced, and anything close to that is going to be foreign. I don't really know what to expect. I'm not apprehensive, but I am unsure. It will be interesting to find out how I take to whatever bit of normality I can grasp.

Debt, stress, and a sense of futility.

2009-02-10T22:14:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I really hate my life. There are quite a few things that are pissing me off right now. It's usually money that worries me the most. Not because of the credit crunch, though that isn't very helpful. It's all because of things in my past, recklessness being one of those things.

The need for money to do the things I want is rather infuriating. I live simply, I try to be frugal. I live in a small apartment, and try to get my rent in on time. I don't buy things I don't need, and I recently got a job. So why do I still have these goddamned problems. I am simply tired. Tired of paying for things, tired of having to go through hoops just to exist.

my skills aren't of any serious worth. I can chop wood, I can make things, I can scavenge. I can write, and Play music. None of these things pays the damn rent. None.

So I'm stuck with no ability to really survive without the patronage of others. I am talented, but that doesn't get me anywhere. The things I do aren't valued by our societal structure, and I am left in debt.

I don't presume that I am the only one who has these sorts of troubles, but I only know my own troubles, so they are of what I write. That's the problem.

My fucking life. When some things are good, others are bad. Or rather things are always bad, I just don't always know it.

I feel like I burden the people around me. That's mostly because I do. It's hard for the people around me, and I'm tired of doing that. It hurts them and it hurts my pride, and my pride is one of the few things I'm sure I've got. God knows I'd give up my pride if it would give me the things I need, like money, or security, or any number of things.

So that's where I am. I don't have any existential depression, just this new fucking stress about money, and about being able to live on my own. It's an untenable situation.

Like I've already said, I'm just tired. Just too fucking tired. I'm gonna keep on going, and I'm going to try to fix things, but there's only so much I can do. I don't have much control over all of this, and that is disconcerting. I am at the will of things beyond my control. That's not the way I would like to be. I don't want to be blown about on the winds like this. I want to have some control, or to at least believe I do.

I don't want to be the victim of fate. I just want to be. I'm not free to live. That we have to pay to live is a clear problem with this fucking world. You cannot live without money in the western world.

NO matter how smart I am, or how skilled I am, the same constraints apply. The same constraints bind me into these knots I can't untie.

Have I been defeated?

2009-02-09T23:49:00.000-08:00

I don't know why I'm doing two posts tonight. There's not anything particular that's driving it's way out of me. I don't have some hidden demon to let free onto the page. All that is unique to this night is a new bottle of pills, a few due dates for the morrow, and a very ambivalent mood.

I feel beaten. I don't think of taking my new meds as a failure. Recognising something is wrong and dealing with it as soon as I have is remarkable. I just feel defeated. It's not specific, nor do I have much real sense of how to combat the feeling.

So much of me just wants to be over with all the extra stuff I have to deal with. Grades, school work, work, money, meds,

If I could just be out in the woods with a garden to tend and other food I could restock periodically, and just write and play music, I'd be happy. Well I say that, butwould I be happy? I don't know. It's an impossible condition, that woodsy condition I talk about. Sometimes I feel like I'm more tired than curious, and I'd rather take a rest in the woods of the US or in an apartment somewhere instead of going on to ask the big questions I want to ask.

Sometimes I wish I could give away my ambitions to people more equipped to use them. Give my ideas and intelligence to someone who wasn't infuriated by the asinine nature of administration, and of money. I wish I could ask my questions, and do my experiements without all these intermediate steps.

Find some mentor and work under them, and then work my way up. No classes that teach me only what I already know, or could find out rather easily. No more money spent in the service of gaining information I already have. Could I just start my experiments now? I have them designed, I have my ideas, and I know what I need to do to make them testable, and to determine their validity. I know what I need to do, why do I need to prove myself for so fucking long.

I am already proven. I'm just so tired. Of the way the world is. Humans construct things, and I don't want to deal with our constructions. So much of what I have to do is separating the stupid human creations from that which was there before.

That's so infuriating.

I'm going to take my pill, and go to bed. If it works my days will start to be level. And then I'll start taking more, and I won't go into those crying spells I've been having. I will alter my chemistry until I am able to move along in a way that the rest of humanity can deal with. I will conform myself to the stupid structures and restrictions of those around me rather than forging my own ground. I am defeated. It wasn't a deceptive feeling. I am changing myself for the world around me. I am changing to better fit into this world of artificiality that I so vehemently eschew.

I am defeated, but nonetheless, tonight I will take my pill and go to sleep. I will say goodnight to the me which is at odds with this world and will wake up muted.

I will be muted. And I will be well enough to control certain things, but I will be muted, and shallow, and like those around me. I will be well, and I will be as the world needs me to be.

God how I hate that idea.

I will take my pill, and I don't know who I'll wake up as. I'm hoping I'll wake up as me, a little less sad, and blown about, a little less likely to cry for no reason, but I don't know.
I don't know if I will wake up defeated, or wake up simply modulated.

an Essay evening.

2009-02-09T22:10:00.001-08:00

my left arm still aches just a little bit from the bloodwork I had done today. It's kind of cool looking at the little needle hole in the crook of my elbow. Today has been fast, and slow, and everywhere at once. I wrote a paper for a class. It's mostly done, but I've been feeling so uncreative lately, and I don't think this essay is one of my better ones. I don't know how to make it better though. That's always hard for me, finding that my writing isn't where I want it to be. How hard some things come is worse just because of how easy writing comes normally.

I start taking new beds today. It'll be my first time taking meds for bipolar disorder. I'm looking forward to certain things not happening. No more crushing depressions, no more of the aftermath from wild manias. Of course I'm afraid that some of my creativity will be extinguished, but I don't really believe that it'll be a problem. I just have to learn how to live on a normal even mood. I've never really done routine, or when I've tried it's been completely subverted. That's something new, learning to live on an even level. I look forward to knowing how everyone manages.

I don't look forward to not drinking. I won't miss marijuana, the social bits perhaps, but the rest not so much. But alcohol I love. I love being sane more, so I'll be fine, but I find it ironic that I'm going to stop my serious drinking before I turn twenty one. A good whiskey or a good beer is incomparable. That's not to say I don't try. Of course I can still have a little from time to time, but the separation from the ability to get drunk is pretty marked.

Even with normal moods I'm going to be different. That's something that takes some getting used to. A little bit of medicine doesn't make me normal, it just makes me a bit better. I'm not saying that I'd like to be normal, but I would like to know what it's like. As of now I have no reference point.

This whole thing comes easily. This post has been easy to write, easy to sit down to. When I try to write these graded and marked things the words don't come out as well. It's because I have to constrain my thoughts to some single topic. I can write on some topic, but I can't remove the subjectivity and passion from it. A research paper is fine, because I have all these facts to fall back on, and it's just a thought process. I can also write blog posts and essays and stories filled with whatever it is that defines my papers. There's something I can put into it, but when I have to write some paper making a subjective analysis I just can't do it. I can't pretend to be objective about something so subjective. That's where the problem lies.

there are more things in heaven and earth than are imagined in your philosophy

2009-02-08T23:05:00.000-08:00

listing grievances or putting out a log of my existence never feels very satisfying. I don't like to wallow in my own life. I spend enough of my time having to deal with that which surrounds me, no reason to push it into my writing as well. It's sometimes unavoidable though.

I'd rather write about characters who aren't me. I'd rather tell stories about people who have different problems, and different proclivities. Somehow that's not what occurs. The only character I truly know is myself, and even that comes into doubt. So I write about myself again and again trying to dissect the contradictory person I am. It's a troublesome process. All I ever feel is drained.

Self criticism also only goes so far. How long before railing against my ills and insufficiencies makes those things the centre of my being? It's all in a mess of self doubt that I can't quite reconcile with anything else.

Where does all my self awareness get me? If I cannot change that which I feel, and think by being aware of my own insufficiencies, does it matter that I know? Does knowledge ever make up for anything?

God how I wish I knew. I feel like I would rather be fully aware of a tragic fate than uncertain with a possibility of happiness. All this damn waiting and uncertainty makes for such a bother. The things that I was so deeply attracted to in high school seem to have correlates now. What I loved in Shakespear makes more sense for my current state than for my state in adolescence. My fascination with Hamlet, and with Othello, these tragic characters, makes far more sense when looking at who I have become than when looking at who I was.

In Hamlet's famous soliloquy towards the middle of the play he hits on something really poignant, for reference I'll add some of the preceding matter. Mind you this is from memory and I haven't read Hamlet for a number of years, so forgive any inaccuracies:

to be or not to be, that is the question, whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune or to take arms against a see of troubles and by opposing end them. To die, To sleep, perchance to dream but in that sleep of death what dreams may come

That's the thing that always sticks out, that undiscovered country is what holds us back from death, and even from the future. We prefer those evils which we know to those we have no accounting of. Even an improvement which is foreign scares many, simply for its newness.

It is a fundamentally human trait, this fear of the new. We are uncomfortable with change. That's partly why I think I might rather know for sure of some horrible fate than have to wait and see if things will turn out alright.

I know that isn't really the case, I'm fine being left in the dark and waiting for the uncertain, but the central urge to avoid the new, and stay with the routine still bites at my innards.

That's what this is all about, those things that still grab at me despite my better efforts. Days where I cry for no reason, and days where I feel like I could take on the world despite objective evidence to the contrary. These are the things that are so puzzling. Who am I if I have no control?

I notice that most of this post is (are) questions (not sure if that's the correct grammar for the sentence). I can't help but feel that's what most of our existence is. If this is the era of anything it is the era of knowledge. It is knowledge, or whatever we think knowledge is that defines us. That includes the questions we ask, and the things we think we know.

Which knowledge we chose to ignore and which we chose to take up, which things we chose to put forth as knowledge despite their lack of supporting evidence. Hell even a latching on to evidence as a support for our mental conception of the world.

We are now so defined by what we know, or by what people say we know. I'm rather ambivalent about that. Everyone thinks they have a truth. We are back into a modernist world where the virtues are meta-narrative and Truth (capital T).

Everyone has their knowledge and sticks to it, and that leaves me here in my bubble of uncertainty. I am stuck knowing that all of our ideas are based on ephemera. We are in Plato's cave, seeing only the shadows. We do not see objects, we see the light that they reflect. We do not ever touch things, we are only influenced by the fields around them. We do not ever know anything, because the truth of science (and even that isn't immutable) is that it must be able to be proven wrong. We are uncertain, as much so as we always have been.

"there are more things in heaven and earth than are imagined in your philosophy"

How long till I write myself dry?

2009-02-06T19:36:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I just leave the text box open on a tab in my browser. I never really know when I might want to post something. I also never know if it's going to be asinine or if it's going to be profound. The desire to write comes whether or not I've anything to say. That's the sort of thing that gets to me though. That maybe I'll just write and write until all of the interesting things people could hear out of me have been written already.

How often can I write without putting every little bit of myself on the page?

That's not even the primary concern though. I'm more worried about boring the hell out of the people who might read my writing than I am of draining myself dry. I'd rather not exanguinate myself for art, but somehow I imagine that'll happen.

I don't even really know why I feel that should be something all the people who read this know. It's a conundrum I'm not entirely comfortable with. I post and post until I have nothing to say, so is my posting something that I do to empty my head or is it something that I do until I can't do it anymore? Is the emptying of my head a side effect or the goal?

Of what worth is a post if it gives no information and makes no artistic contribution to the world?

Probably none.

Probably none.

A beautiful deluge.

2009-02-06T19:04:00.001-08:00

Today I witnessed an unusual downpour. it was trickling one minute and suddenly out from the sky came a deluge. The water poured at a prodigious rate, and everything was water and fury.

Walking around in the rain felt a bit like home. It's an unusual thing. I feel most comfortable in climes that imitate Ireland and England. That dreary, rainy thing just suits me better.

Not sure what to make of that. I could come up with explanations regarding my heritage or something like that. I don't feel like doing that. This isn't an observation made as a foil for biological or psychological musing. I just felt like noting how good it feels to have the water flowing down.

It isn't the rain that depresses me, it is the need, (or social construction) to stay inside that depresses me. It is this insularity, and separation from nature that makes me feel uncomfortable. That's true a lot of the time. I don't feel right surrounded by the sounds of machines.

We go camping because we like that feeling. We like that closeness. I don't understand people who go "camping" with a trailer, or with electronics, or with any number of other things. It is this tie to and reliance on technology, and artificiality which seems to cause so much ill. It's not suggested much, but our move from living with nature, to living against it is a possible cause to many of our ills.

People are so afraid of getting wet that they lug around umbrellas, and put on heavy coats. It's as funny as it is sad.

Like so much else, I wish for a change. Some sort of change.

What to do about lack of nature?

2009-02-03T22:47:00.000-08:00

One of the themes that comes up consistently in my writing is the idea that the cities we live in, and the artificialities we surround ourselves with, are some how at odds with our nature. It's a very nuanced opinion, so a single sentence couldn't really encapsulate it. That's the problem. The theme comes up, but there are all these complications regarding whys, and regarding how our current state may not always be at odds with us.

That's the thing. I don't have a lot of solutions to offer, only critiques. I don't want to just provide a negative analysis of this aspect of modernity. Offering solutions is part of a good critique, and I just don't have any.

This idea(along with it's twin, madness) has dominated my writing since I moved away from the forests I grew up in. The forests were magnificent. I hated the people. The confining nature of the social structure was all the more evident for the openness of the world around me.

I spent so much effort trying to get out, trying to separate myself from the nearsightedness so clearly displayed, that I missed the full effect of a forest on my psyche.

The freedom of being able to leave my front door and be in a world where I could completely avoid human interaction was amazing. If I were to leave my door today I would find pavement, and the sound of engines. Everywhere are the sounds of machines, whirring on, slowly insinuating that there is some mechanical god keeping us all in check.

I want to fix that. The only solution to this disparity between what we are and what our cites are is what I've been thinking of as plant terrorism. I use the word terrorism because it has emotive force. what I'd like to do doesn't resemble terrorism in any way. I am not planing on spreading fear. It is the spreading of plant life that I'd like to work on.

on all of the concrete structures that line the campus I want to plant climbers which will grow up the walls, covering the cold, too-smooth manmade stone. Find someplace with the right conditions and plant an Ivy. one of the great things about this is the fact that once you have ivy on a wall, taking it off takes pieces of the wall with it. The permanence of what we create isn't really permanence at all. Each thing we make can be destroyed in rather short measure, adding plants reminds us of that.

I understand the problems with upkeep, and damage to property, but I feel like removing some of the anxiety, and damage our overly planned cities cause is well worth a bit of vandalism. We've spent so long trying to subvert nature, it's time to , if only slightly, help it along.

The things that surround us are concrete and glass, and we are slaves to these materials. The wood we see is processed, and stained, and varnished. The trees we see are city approved, and managed by arborists, and experts. In a city, or even a town of any decent size, the wills of nature are secondary to the wills of man.

So maybe we can avert this crisis of mind that living in our manmade shelters seems to be causing. Plant something. Make the world less grey, and perhaps things will get a little better.

Morbid thoughts.

2009-02-03T00:20:00.000-08:00

Sometimes you just need someone to talk to. I think that's part of why we get into relationships. I know it's a big thing for me. Some nights are just too long. I know that if I chose to lie down I'd be met with nothing by fear and despondency. That's why I seek out someone who could understand me.

I guess it's shelter from the storm which I seek. I also want someone who I don't get tired of. People are great. And people are horrible. I can't deal with people for too long without getting some time to myself, but sometimes there are people who I can put up with no matter what. There are people who I don't feel like I need to get away from. They come few and far between, but when this occurs, it is magnificent.

I'm tired of waiting for something to happen. There is so much that I want, but can do nothing about. I just don't know what to do about that. The things that bother me the most are the thoughts I have in the middle of the night, while trying to get to sleep. The thoughts that haunt me, about death and about all the shit that could happen. That striking fear that makes one seek out any sign of life they can find.

Today in a class the professor was talking about suicide (psych class) and while he was talking about it I thought of (and pictured) someone just standing up and holding a gun to their left temple (presumably they were left handed) and pulling the trigger. I pictured the blood splatter out to the right of the room, and the scattering of people after the event. I imagined still sitting in my seat, blood and brain on my shirt, not doing anything.

Everyone around me would have been running or crying. Everyone would have been shocked, but I was sitting alone, unphased, waiting for whatever was next.

It was a morbid thought, and I realised it, but there was little I could do about it.

like the lyrics to a beauty pill song "The season makes me cruel, but I have these thoughts in the summertime too."

longing for a forest.

2009-02-01T19:27:00.000-08:00

Yesterday in my daily errands I decided to go on a bike ride. I was downtown on my bicycle, and for no reason in particular I rode her down the bike paths into south Davis, and ended up following the bike loop. I Found myself looking for stretches of wilderness.

I'm not a creature of cities. Even a dirt road, kept by the wheels that roll over it, is too human for me. The woods have a particular feel to them. Walking through a meadow out towards a stand of trees is entirely different than any experience in the suburban, or urban environments most of us live in.

Davis would be wonderful if you grew up here. There are places to play, and there are trees and paths and parks. All of that would seem so wide and open. It is only when you've been in the truly wide and open that all of this is sullied.

I am shaped by my experiences, and cannot get around that. the things I hated about growing up in the mountains shape me as much as the things that I loved. The things I detest hold as much sway over me as the things I adore.

Of course some of this thinking has been brought on by an unusual desire to stay in. I want to get away from all of the traditional worries of the world. I want to get away from debt and away from bills, and away from cars, and away from dental problems, and away from administration of anysort. All I can do while here is retreat into my room. That doesn't suffice. Were I in the mountains I could just walk out my door, and I would be someplace different. I would be in the trees, away from the heavy influence of man. I could go off the dirt roads that run through the forest and just walk. The branches would crack beneath my feet, and the sound of the wind in the trees would inspire song in my thoughts.

I wouldn't close myself off with headphones, or with conversation, because the things I could hear wouldn't be engine noises, and electrical hums, and the buzzing of fluorescent lights.

on the State of My Generation

2009-01-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

I worry about my generation. I worry about other things too, of course. There are plenty of things to worry about.

I've a few reasons for worrying about where my generation is going. All the generations before us fucked things up pretty magnificently. I'm also worried because we haven't done anything to inspire confidence. There are small inklings of interest, involvement, artistic movements, but no where is a revolutionary spark. There is no Students for a Democratic Society.

we are the new moderates.

We are the children of an academic nihilism, of post-modern ideals in a world which is decidedly at odds with itself. We are still dealing with the modern with tools given us by the past. The modes of interaction we have are the same, the way we act is the same, but the technologies that mediate all this are far different. We are dealing with a modern world in the only way we are able, as humans. We are the same as most of our ancestors, and most of our ancestors wouldn't recognise cars, much less computers.

I don't know what to make of that.

We are blamed of narcissism. That is part function of our raising, with "helicopter moms" suburban wealth, and advertising that while making us feel inadequate, makes us feel special. The cultural touchstones are television shows, and video games. What we remember are media constructions, not defining events.

9/11 is supposed to be the event that defines us, but ultimately it does nothing to create a movement, or a unity, it is an event that fits for all generations, and is really an event of our parents. Like so much of what happens now, it is the result of our parents', and grandparents' stupidity, or lack of foresight, or obstinacy.

Where are we to draw collectivity from?

Where independent movements flourished in earlier generations we have movements co-opted by advertising from the beginning (or near enough). I don't see art from people my age. There aren't galleries with our work, and the walls that before might have been covered in beautiful Graffiti on are for the most part left clean.

The short film on youtube is comedic. Some of it is brilliant, but very little (if any) of it profound. The blogs we write are about us, and not about the larger world around us. The myspace profiles we keep up painstakingly are filled with ephemera, changing from week to week, from fad to fad.

It is all in flux. A musical style is born and dies with one band. An art style lives for a week, and then fades away. Who writes the books, I don't think my generation does.

Where we have so much ability to produce, we have so little production. The fact that we are always talking gets in the way of the fact that we never have anything to say.

I don't think I can asses our place as a generation. We are a generation of mundane creation. Where before the aura of art was created by some establishment, we now are held back by commercialisation.

We don't paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa because she is everywhere, and everywhere the same.
There aren't any remixes of Starry Starry Night, because it is sacred through reproduction. A poster of that painting hangs in nearly every college dorm room in the United States. That painting is ubiquitous, and as such is unchangeable. Because one form of it is everywhere, it cannot be messed with. cannot be remixed. In an era of mass production the establishment is they who decide what is printed.
The smart young artists decide to become designers, making ad campaigns for the powerful, instead of making art which subverts the status quo. There is no refuge from advertising. There is no refuge from mass production, and there is no refuge from technology.

We know that ads effect buying behaviour. It's not something that can be avoided. If people are exposed to ads, a predictable percentage of them will go out and buy product. This is a dynamic that has a lot of influence on my generation's actions. We are defined by comodifiable trends. While the Hippies had some time before their style and attitudes were adopted by capitalism, (or rather were sold back to them) our modern Hipsters are a product of the sold to begin with.

The roots of rolled up pant legs, thrift store clothing, and fixed gear bicycles were all from communities separate from the subculture of hipsters. It was only once these things were sold with such fervency that they became hipster staples.

Fashion is largely the co-opting of practical modifications for aesthetic reasons. I roll up my pant legs so they don't get caught in the sprocket when I ride my bike, but eventually if what I do becomes some sort of ideal, people will roll their pant legs up without having biked anywhere.

If I look like I shopped in a thrift store, it is because I did, and I did so because i don't have the money to buy new clothes. If a hipster does, it's because the styles that are sold to them in department stores, or in urban outfitters, or wherever they shop, are intentionally reminiscent of the clothes I pick out at the thrift store.

If a band sounds lo-fi, and rough, it is likely because they cannot afford the sort of equipment that makes them sound clean, and even. Sure there's a stylistic component, but what hipsters don't realise is that there is a very clear monetary component.

The people who make the trends are not the people who have money to follow fashion. People who spend money to look like b-boys are not b-boys. That is an essential problem in our era. The things that mark some community are co-opted. People who look like me may not be like me.

If I look like a hipster because of lack of money, that does not make me a hipster. When I was a punk, seeing someone with a Mohawk meant I had found kin. It now doesn't mean anything of the sort. Someone riding a certain type of bicycle, or any seemingly self made bicycle used to mean I had found people also interested in bicycles, no longer is that true.

We are not what we appear to be. Appearances no longer count for much. I can't help but wish they did.

You can't have a revolution without a community. the counter culture communities are all appropriated by ads, and by commercialisation. The primary organisations are determined by our elders, or at least by their politics. We are the new moderates. Perhaps a little more progressive than the age before us, but we are prematurely old. The attitudes (and excesses) of adulthood are now ours.
I don't think we'll be the generation to have revolutionary ideals and then sell out for a house in the suburbs and a lease on stability, because we've already been sold.

We don't own ourselves anymore. Credit card companies, and Loan companies, and our parents, and our jobs, and our schools, and our stores; they are our owners. How can we sell out when we don't have possession of even ourselves.

So how are we going to break free of the bond of our forbearer's mistakes, and the bond of advertisers?
How do we keep the meaningful from being transformed into the superficial?

Late nights, Guitar, and Idiosyncracies.

2009-01-29T00:44:00.000-08:00

There are a lot of nights where playing guitar and writing keep me up far past when I should be down to bed. It's a common phenomenon for me. I don't even consider tiredness in all that. It's separate from the bipolar though. When I'm Manic I go out on walks at three in the morning on a week night because I just have to go out and walk, because I just need to be moving. It's far different when I stretch my night longer and longer because I've been writing and playing.

When I was a little kid I used to play with my legos so intently that when I finally realised I had to pee (which was when I was near wetting myself) I had to run to the bathroom. It was a really sudden thing. I got so into the world of my legos, and so into what I was doing that nothing else was important. Eating, Sleeping, Peeing. these things only happen when they absolutely had too.

I think that is one of the things I can really separate from my madness. I may be obsessive and energetic by chemistry, but I feel like even when I'm my most normal, least chemically imbalanced, this singularity of focus is pretty common. flight of thoughts is pretty common too. That's where all this trouble comes in. The things that are more pronounced in mania are also parts of me when I'm not manic.

So I'm going to describe something interesting that I hadn't heard from anywhere else before I came up with it. It'd be nice to see if other guitarists feel this sometimes. I get what I call a "guitar high" If I play guitar for long enough, I sometimes (more often than not really) get this high that is very similar to being high on marijuana. It's bizarre, and notable by outside observers.

I also get Guitar withdrawals. I just want to play so badly. My hands even make instinctive guitar playing motions. I make stringed instruments wherever i can, and play anything remotely guitar like. more than a few days I just couldn't take. I try to take a guitar everywhere. The few times I haven't, I sorely regretted it. This is also something other people could tell you. I am just not comfortable without a guitar around.

Also noted, having a guitar to put all my energy into is magnificent. This conduit through which to spout whatever musical thoughts I'm having is a great thing. I love the feeling of strings on my fingers, and the callouses are marks of pride. If my fingers hurt a bit through the day, my day goes better.

That visceral connection between the strings and my soft fleshy finger tips (no longer so soft or fleshy) is so essential. The ability to say something that language cannot express is magnificent. I've mentioned what I mean by that in earlier posts.