It's 9:01am. I run to the bus at noon. I'll be back on Monday evening, so the blog is necessarily close until then. In the meantime, I need all of my readers to go back over previous entries and prepare a psychological profile of me. Send them to barnacle at beevomit dot org, and I'll post them, anonymously or not, depending on the writer's wishes, when I get back. Haha, I don't actually expect anyone to do this.
Before I leave, I have a quick update to candocanal.org to do.
Only one more day in Maryland, then I leave tomorrow morning. I want to be sure and get in enough blogging to make 0036.html sufficiently big. It's problematic.
Is it possible that I'm simply tired of forcing my world-view on everyone? Time for poetry.
Hot-dog
Bart fought the end
crying bloody sweat beads
leather stink and ape-pheromones
dusty plastic computer parts
black and ashy, on the ground, with little rocks
The sky rounded and became green
an old couch
smooth and bubbly, icy rain
screaming drowned out
time was flat
The crisp cold of space
not cold, not dry, not wet
the curve of area, a topology of ice
nothing is there
but the one
I had some ideas of things to write about, but I don't feel like writing about them anymore. Everything I write in here is some kind of social criticism, and I think the fact that I can so readily imagine people criticizing my thoughts as I write them is indicative of the needlessly aggressive nature of most of my writing, and really, most of my thoughts. I was telling my mom that the one thing that makes me angrier than anything else is when people posit their world-views, and tell me 'the way things are' -- essentially what I see as verbal and intellectual aggression. She very quickly pointed out to me that this is my calling card, so to speak. And I realized it was true; I'm an extremely aggressive person in a lot of ways. Maybe we can all blame capitalism for encouraging that kind of behavior.
Capitalism sort of fosters paranoia, because everyone really is out to get you. That's the defining quality of the system: competition. The goal in capitalism isn't only to do well and prosper, but to crush everyone else who is competing for resources. I've heard people begin economic platitudes with both 'there is an unlimited amount of money in the world' and 'there is a limited amount of money in the world.' which of these statements is true depends on how one defines money. The dictionary isn't too helpful here, so I like to define it as an abstraction of work, so that work may be more easily transferred from entity to entity. By that definition, and assuming that everyone is capable of working harder, smarter, and longer, it might be inferred that there is indeed an unlimited amount of money, or at least that the limits of wealth have as of yet nowhere near been reached. First of all, I believe, perhaps unilaterally and foolishly, as part of my world-view that doesn't happen to include free will, that people are working as hard as they are working, and 'potential' is equivalent to output. If someone is lazy and unwilling to work, then there are reasons for this, causes that have to be eliminated before that person can work more. Maybe this is a shallow, newtonian world-view, though, and maybe every effect doesn't necessarily have to have a cause. I really don't have the background to draw metaphors that describe free will versus determinism from physics, so I think I'll stop flirting with the idea. Anyway, getting back on track, second of all there are certainly a limited amount of resources in the world, regardless of whether or not everyone is working up to their 'potential' or not (I'm not going to solve free will versus determinism in this blog, and furthermore it's likely that it's not a solvable problem). Maybe a more useful thing to do when discussing economics would be to focus on what actually goes on, rather than ideological models like capitalism, communism, etc, and whether or not one is morally superior to another. Not to sound like a liberal, but the fact is that global wealth (and consequently power) is concentrated in the hands of relatively few people. It would follow that redistributing this wealth would redistribute power more evenly. Of course, I'm not doing anything about it, but rather sitting here and theorizing in a web-log.
The eternal question: am I one of the idle rich, or a bum?
I've been sleeping really well lately, and I've also been feeling stupider, as if my brain isn't working as much as it used to be. I think it might be time to stop blogging again, for a little while.
This blog is closed until further notice.
Hello. I've been even more mentally ill than usual lately, and haven't felt like blogging. I've been perceiving everyone and their interaction as aggressive. This is one of those situations of 'the entire world can't be crazy.' either the very nature of all conversation and discussion is adversarial and debate-like, or I'm starting to imagine things. Partially, the nature of all conversation is indeed debate-like. One person makes some statements about reality, and tells the other the way things 'are.' the other isn't going to share this world-view, just because everyone is in a totally different world than everyone else. So the discussion that ensues from trying to forge a mutually agreed-upon understanding of reality is going to consist of points, refutations and augmentations of those points, as both parties try to fit their world-views into the same model of reality that's being conversationally constructed.
If one looks at conversation in terms of trying to prove a point, then debating, arguing, discussing -- whatever you want to call it -- anything outside of a mathematical proof isn't going to approach a universal truth. Every argument is refutable. You can't make any statement about reality without someone disagreeing, and legitimately so. So, perhaps a better way to look at debate would be as striving to reach mutual understanding, and share a model of reality in a sort of intellectual intimacy, rather than a fight.
Really, the problem is me. I just can't stand people. Being 'right' is so important to me that I don't want to have my world-view challenged by anyone. It makes me angry to the point of wanting to kill. My head injury doesn't help, because I feel like things are slipping away from me as they're being said, and I don't have a good grasp of anything. Generally, I don't feel qualified to keep up with another person and have any sort of discussion (or debate), and instead like to sit here on the computer, by myself, and write about things in my blog. That's wy it makes me so furious when people challenge things that they've read in here -- this is supposed to be my haven, this have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too place where I have an audience, I can give my views to people, but they're totally powerless to chime in and augment them or refute them.
Anyway, I've been getting pissed off at everyone I talk to lately, so perhaps the best thing is to avoid talking to anyone for a little while. But then, this god-damned instinctive need for human contact makes itself known.
I was discussing this with my mom, and I came up with the idea that what I need is a 'psychological firewall.' the minds of other people just bother me too much, and their thoughts (or I guess what I assume their thoughts to be based on what they've said) seem to invade my mind against my will. It's worse than that -- they don't 'seem to' invade, they literally do. I have intrusive thoughts in the form of specters or mental figments of people I know who debate my own thoughts. I can't ever escape. At one point, I tried looking at all of these 'inner people' as a part of me, and as imparting useful advice, but I'm not sure that's true. Anyway, I need a firewall. Another example of my hypersensitivity to others' thoughts is if I'm going to the store on some public holiday to buy a card (for example: a fathers day card on fathers day). Everyone knows *exactly* why I'm buying a fathers day card -- they can look directly into my life. I've become predictable, an autonomous entity. One of the greatest sins as far as I'm concerned is for someone to be predictable or subject to easy pattern-analysis. If someone's behavior is readily categorizable, then contempt starts to evolve on my part. This is why I say things like 'i detest all human culture' -- because I do. If someone's patterns of behavior are determined by something external (as they always are), and these patterns are observable in others of a similar background, we then have the recipe for human culture, which fills me with hate and anger.
Sometimes I think this blog is the thing that's driving me crazy, because it's exposing my thoughts to everyone for peer review. I think it might be expected, when someone publishes their views, that these views are going to be subject to attack. And in a way, that's a compliment: that they made enough sense to someone else for that person to start to develop his or her own world view based on something that I've written. But often it doesn't feel so nice and hippyish. Most of the time, it feels like the person doing the questioning is fighting me, and not working towards a greater truth. How dare you suggest that I'm not entirely right? Furthermore, how dare you suggest that your idea or corollary to my idea improves on my idea, and makes it more right? How dare you suggest that communication with me is possible, that your mind can begin to move in sync with mine?
Basically, I want to be left alone.