More Susurrations from the Earth

Sometimes it seems I can only write when I’m otherwise incapacitated: at lab meetings, on trains, in waiting rooms. The following bit was forced out of me (by me) on the LIRR the weekend after moving to Asgard.

2 parts of me (3?), the piece which is the purely human bit, the abomination of nature, which like puzzles and reading and zoning out and into itself.

& the piece which is a part of everything, a borrowed bit of consciousness, trapped in the bioelectrochemical labyrinth of the brain. It feels EVERYTHING and it very different from the emotions of the social creature I am (carrotted in at the top of the page, my handwriting seems to whisper as the street trees did on Friday, “There is never any end to the pain it channels because the planet is dying,” the trees respond knowingly without emotion “We know.”) When & how & why did other people shut this voice out? I can shut it out by ploying, plying, and playing with the human bit, but when it fails, I fall. I fall into it. I go deep down into that place in the earth where it weeps.

(An aside) Is there a piece of it which is me? Lauren Thompson? No. I don’t think so.

**

I have spent a lot of time & energy trying to become functional. I have equated functionality with sanity. This turns out to be a fallacy. Just because I do more with my day doesn’t mean it’s imbued with more meaning.

I do lots of things people do, but I do not feel like a person. I am still playing pretend. I am more thought & body than human. Thought & body alone do not make a person. It is this socializing, this bargaining, this compromising with the group consciousness piece, the empathy piece, empathy with the great thing, not face. Faces & and bodies are terrible things. At one moment calling that strictly human piece, the strictly human pieces, the pieces which reward themselves, the masturbatory regions which like to light up with their own cleverness.

Art. Faces & bodies appear art to us.

And then, at the wrong angle wrong moment (most angles, most moments) they reveal themselves as naked masks of muscle and fat, repulsive tubes of flesh, nothing more than limbs and torsos with very little power at all, doing nothing more than what organisms do (a horror for us to see!, for we take so much more than other organisms & to be reminded of our crimes is unthinkable).

Stop imposing. Stop imposing.

Stop dressing. Stop dressing.

We are less than animals.

We are less than nature.

With nothing left to listen to except the soaring progress of our own destruction…(there is nowhere in nature left where man’s crowning “achievements” go unheard with their grinding for more than a few minutes at a time. And even these places are rare.)

How has man’s internal dialogue changed? From the raucous sound of his own living?

I am wearing human skin, but I am an alien in th

I feel as though I am a bit of nature dressed up as human. I want to go home, but there’s no home to go to. This battle is so uphill.

It will not be the same.

**

From later that day:

It’s really important that You make media to infect people’s thinking, to come around to where You are.

Man takes all the e sucks everything from the earth, resources & energy, & gives back nothing but waste & suffering.

He needs to learn this dark truth about himself.

Instead of standing outside of nature, he needs to a fuckin’ vortex of misery, he must rejoin the planet’s ecosystem, a nomad no more.

There is no place to wander to next & You have nearly used up everything here.

Change. And know, death is not the worst thing.

**

I originally intended for this place to be a realm where I put flesh on ideas whose skeletons have formed in conversation, but this restriction seems to limiting now and strains against the intention of growth. That said, this passage presents fetal ideas, unfinished, and defenseless. They are not rules by which I live and their stark deviation from generally accepted sanity is acknowledged…but the, as yet indescribable, resonance of their truth leads me to believe their pursuit will prove fruitful regardless of their veracity: they speak of something worth examining.

Job Anxiety

I'm still having nightmares about working for the government. I'm still having nightmares about being fired. It was humbling and unifying and terrifying. And all sorts of things I think I still need to work through.

This is the quiet trauma of America today. We live to work. We work to live. And this cycle is broken all the time.

Jobs hold a little something over our heads in cruel way. Purpose. Fulfillment. Security. I feel as though the government is still holding this little something over me, but unlike the (albeit uneven) give-and-take that came with the salary and benefits, they have my little something and I can't get it back. I feel like I made a deal with the devil. No really. My aversion to melodrama wants me to delete that sentence, but the deep dread in me months later only festers and I know it's true. I wanted to change the big bad but the big bad changed me. I need to purge this thing.

This is a piece from a sparse journal which in less than 75 pages, interspersed with (far too many) practical matters, pointless lists, and unexplained empty or nearly empty pages saw me through my last semester at college, my first post-college job, and the initial stages of rejection and job-hunting. The hand-writing varies unsettlingly and often ignores the lines. Cross-outs are scribbling messes, sometimes completely obscuring the first attempt at composition. The spelling is apathetic even for me, and the condensation of letters is rampant despite the sprawling script.

"When You have a routine, it's very easy to regurgitate the status quo. Little repetitions lead You through the larger repetition. 'I am doing A because of B because of C...because of x, y, and z." But when there's a disruption in this pattern, You begin to question why You're doing anything at all.

You wonder what the point is. The end-goal. You wonder about its sustainability. It seems like the world is going to hell in a hand basket...again...except this time we have numbers and charts.

Science has made the end look so sure."

Just an FYI

You may have noticed, (maybe?), that the previous post keeps changing every few minutes. I think this is how I will update posts from now on. As I can never see my own thoughts as fully finished, I think it's best that I publish them as they organically occur. Otherwise, it seems I will never publish anything.

So check again at the end of the day if You see a post You like. There may be even more to it than the first time You viewed it.

More on Nootropics

It may frustrate You to know my hiatus has nothing to do with my absence from writing. There are many little snippets sitting unpublished on this very blog as well as some chewy nuggets idling in my green notebook. However, the topic at hand pulls me out of my shyness.

A recent articles, brought to my attention by the lovely io9 (http://io9.com/5617273/two-new-scientific-studies-reveal-hallucinogens-are-good-for-your-mental-health), discussing the psychiatric applications of ketamine and LSD bring me back to my earlier post on nootropics, which I had promised to expand.

It amuses me to see in retrospect how the tone of the entries surrounding the entry on nootropics directly correlates to the types of sensations which are discussed in the review article in Nature (http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v11/n9/abs/nrn2884.html).

Skeptics of artificially changing our brain chemistry would be quick to invalidate any these musings incurred "under the influence." However, since when has evolution always been right? In other words, why should we trust that our natural brain chemistry is optimal?

Prior to recent years, our intellect's heavy focus on the ego served us very well. It ensured that we and our offspring prospered. But now that we are more or less safe from the cut-throat existence of our ancestors, the predilections of this selfish character are literally killing us as a species. Homo sapiens' inflated ego has reached the point of diminishing returns.

Indeed, many of our other given attributes have proven less than sufficient (a fact we are generally willing to admit and medicate), why should we not try to fine tune our heads? As creatures who have gained the evolutionary edge from our brain-power, perhaps it is our hubris which stands in our way, a psychology of previous investment. After all, we have spent eons working out our neurophysiology to this point. But this mindset is a general delusion pervading too many of our institutions, masquerading as a love of progress.

We forget that progress is not linear. Sometimes we take a wrong turn, technologically, sociologically, agriculturally, etc. Like us, evolution is not entirely rational, and what works in the short term will not always work out in the long term. (I speak here of our dependence on fossil fuels, personalized transportation habits, urban planning, and agricultural...well, disaster.) We should be probing out in all directions, not hurtling out towards the first one which yields promising results, keeping our eyes closed and fingers crossed that things continue on the way they have.

Perhaps, our lives are still too short, and our experiences too telescopic, for us to fathom on a daily basis how long a species lives and the permutations on such a life which are possible. Which is why I am so pleased (!) that the aforementioned research results (which have really been known for decades) are finally coming in fruition in literally, THE most well-renowned scientific journals.

The review article in Nature provides a chart for assessing "altered states of consciousness." However, like Stanislav Grof (read this interview http://www.thesunmagazine.org/issues/404/across_the_universe), I clench at the term "altered" to describe these states, which are entirely achievable without drugs, as well as with their aid. States which would benefit all people such as insightfulness, experience of unity, and blissful states, and other states which many others have an innate curiosity towards experiencing like elementary visual alterations, audio-visual synesthaesia, vivid imagery, and changed meaning of percepts.

In addition to the obvious benefits of insightfulness, experience of unity, and blissful states, which have the potential for creating more peaceable human beings, I believe that there are real advantages to experiencing the "secondary" perceptual effects of these "non-ordinary" states.

The human mind longs to feel different, and experience things differently. Altering input and processing is like exercise for the brain. Who doesn't want a limber brain?

Low Days

I had been low. I am better now. This is something I wrote during my mental hiatus (though part of me swears I already posted this...hesitation runs deep during the down days.)

:You think it's the abstract thoughts of depression that get You, but it's not. It's the mundane ones. It's be fine if it were just the philosophical nothings that end in nihilism. "What is the point of it all?" is really a fine question all by itself: more inspiring that discouraging, but when this question holds hostage the paper-cut sufferings of daily life with its unfathomable answer, that when the paralysis sets in.

The real question a depressed person asks is not "What is the point of all this?" but "What is the point of all this if I feel pain?"

Subway Graffiti

My tiny green notebook is nearing capacity and I've begun to transcribe some of its tib-bits. I thought I'd share this one with You:

I wonder about the graffiti on the subway tracks, well not on the tracks, on the tunnels I guess, the metal posts that keep the streets above from falling on the streets below.Do the graffiti-ists do it just to know it's there? Or to some other end? Like harnessing the unconscious night-vision of straphangers reading off and therefore feeding their spray-painted sygil? Or is it just to have a piece of this city, to occupy it indefinitely publicly yet privately with a piece of their art, of their mind? Or is it simply to tell another person "I did this thing!" and to have that person think every time they pass on the subway line "The did this thing for me."?

Biologist's Gripe

So I posted this in response to what my awesome friend wrote here:

http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/blog/how_scifi_scientist

And I am preserving it here, because I am a narcissistic nerd.

Me:

I agree completely!

But, why do You think it is that biologists always seem to get such a bad wrap in science fiction?

The advancements that physicists make in sci fi always inspire "wonder and excitement." Yet, advancements in biology, with a few exceptions for "practical medicine," seem confined forever to the horror and dystopian genres. We are unhesitant to explore new territory, manipulate our environments, and create new tools. Yet when we direct that same sense of adventure inward, instead of out, somehow we cross a line and become the stuff of monsters...But why should we not try to guide our evolution?

Kennelly:

I don't know. I wrote this when I was drunk.

But The Fantastic Voyage isn't like that, that's biologists doing good and going on adventures and stuff. It's mostly horror, not sci fi that badly characterises biologists. I've got more comments, but I've forgotten them.

Me:

I don't know. Sci fi seems to put biologists in a "dubious at best" category, unless they're doctors or ecologists, just maintaining and preserving the status quo, but physicists get to be saints of the stars for throwing together interstellar space travel. "Good biologists" in fiction just don't CHANGE anything. It seems unfair. Or maybe it's just because the humans in those sort of tales (with badass forward thinking biologists) would be too foreign for us to relate to.

Raw, raw, raw

Why is it that the things in my past which hurt, still hurt? Why don't they scab over and scar, like a normal person's (who can laugh at their follies)? Instead they flush me with pain anew upon remembrance. Have I simply lived too little? Remembered too often? (Sensitized myself like the subways' squeaks which cringe me deeper, deeper with each passing.) Am I simply always picking the wound? I try so hard lately to pick up and move on, to fill my time. Fill it, fill it, fill it! With new multi-sensory memories, and other lives lived through books and films, and such. And yet, still! An accidental visit to an unhappy place in my mental geography leaves me immobilized there. Seeped in the horror of the moment.

This is my primary tragedy: I want always to remember so I can always understand... the unthinkable things some people do...but I am raw, raw, raw...It was so hard being a child. (Nostalgia, what a truly stupid thing.)

The Present is a Rough Draft.

With all the problems our society has, with all the problems each one of us has, how can we view the way things are done now as anything but a rough draft for things to come? If we're not working to make things better, if we're just passing through tasting the tastes, then we're not really living. To live is to change.

Why do people holdfast to habit? Why do people invest so much in the status quo? Forming habits of beliefs to make the habits of life easier. Falsity upon falsity. One reinforces the other meaninglessly, spiraling further away from the real mysteries of life all around us...art in all its splendor, seeking to reflect an inner world, we all know, but is not this one we share directly in the corporeal plane.

Countless choirs screaming in words that fall short, "Yes, that thing/that thought/that dream/that feeling! Yes, I know it too!"

***

I refuse to believe that asking questions and rejecting insufficient answers is a new trick our species just learned to do. Or that it is a unique characteristic of only a "certain type of person."

The comforts of our current day, on the contrary, don't push for inquiry. It's the crisis which is philosophical.

Why are we not constantly revising the thoughts of the thinkers before us, instead of delusionally grasping onto their words as gospel (nostalgia, what a truly stupid thing), or trying to reinvent the wheel. Just read people, read! It's all there! All the questions You seek to ask. No answers. No answers. I'm sorry. This life just doesn't do that. This life is ups, downs, commiseration, celebration, contemplation...but answers? No.

This life: You can like it, lump it, or leave it.

Facsimile of Lightheartedness

I am the facsimile of lightheartedness. The gravity of life weighs me down so that I am teetering on the edge of the abyss of unknowing. And so I can let it push me over into insanity or laugh at the absurdity of it all, of it all, of it all. I see it all! In hysterics, not laughing, not joking, but also these things. But hysteria, that is where I live. Don't be fooled! I am not what I seem with my easy-smile and my playful dress. This is all just so pointless! And so it's all I can do to keep each knowing thought contained in my head, the size of the universe, the size of everything, still adds up to nothing. Nothing of inherent value.

For, if our reason for living was anything but chemical, anything but the firing of synapses in just the right way (a music of the mind!), we would have something concrete to tell depressed people and it would make them better. But there's nothing to say. Nothing to do. Just try, and try, to re-wire.

"What are the neurophysiological and neuroanantomical consequences of altered sensory and motor experience? Studies demonstrate the neural assemblies change their firing pattern as a consequence of experience. More importantly, the cortical organization of neural assemblies changed due to experience."

Well, there You have it. The crossroads of hope and nihilism. Yes, cynic! This could be better. Yes, lost soul! There doesn't seem to be any meaning in any of this. But there is the possibility for change...in the plasticity of the human brain! In other words, life is unfair but You can learn to enjoy it...living, dying, these are just other options You have.

From an earlier private journal entry: "It's just like, I could go kill myself, or I could go eat a salad and watch TV, because there's this thing I might want to go to later."

Sussurations

Wow, it's been a week? I am so lazy.

Extrapolations of quick jots from my fast-filling little green notebook:

Susurrations:

This is a word I learned about twelve hours before its application organically arose in the following rant. What does that say about semantics? Is there an incubation period for certain words? Do some words instantaneously fill a void in vocabulary? Or do we actively seek to find a use for our new tools?

I'm sitting in a car next to, in particular, a boy who should not be so nervous to be sitting next to me, because I'm very glad he's there. Semi-familiar music I'd like to hear more often is playing around semi-familiar people I'd like to see more often. It's not so early. But it's very very early. Night was not a thing that happened. Hardly even the sun-rise was. The grandfather clock chimed indeterminately every hour or half hour, but always so unbelievably soon after it's last chiming.

And so and then it was morning. We let it be, reduced and bonded by our weighty words to funny little noises. And he went out for a cigarette and I fell asleep and instantly afterward was woken with "Diner? New York City?." "I'm up!" And everyone was surprised to see me dressed.

(I came in alone fanning optimism and I left with people and high hopes I tried to stifle. A lovely asymmetry, if You ask me.

They are talking. I am silent. I close my inner ears trying to keep the phrases fresh. Eager to preserve the sanctity of the evening/night/dawn/morning's conversation, or maybe I am just still so full of words to digest. Mulling. Mulling. Mulling.)

As we drive, we pass many farms. A farmer sprays his crops.

I feel the sussurations of the earth call out to me. I try to rise out of myself and go down to that place inside the earth where it hurts and weep with it. My skin pinches up and my hair stands on end. The me that is me stays in my body and I know it would have done me no good to go down to that place and weep. The earth knows no difference. It fights the infection with no discretion, a fever here, a plague there. We duck into our air-conditioned buildings and take our medications.

We've found a way to deflect its curse and pass it off on those who deserve it least.

^

This thought is so incomplete from the panorama-sensation followed by the poly-sensory pictogram which presented itself on this occasion. But there You have it, for now.

Nootropics

Fixing the brain chemistry to eliminate counter-productive fears. This is something I'm working on, in a sense.

I've been fond of racetams for some time now. Piracetam in particular. Cheap. Effective. And totally harmless. Seriously, there's no euphoria and no sucked out dry feeling the day after stopping and there's no building a tolerance to it. It just works with increasing efficacy as You keep taking it. The only problem is to have it working at all, You seem to need to take it every day at regular intervals (and for about a week before it starts to kick it). Very inconvenient.

Adrafinil, and the whole ampakine family of smart drugs, excite me, but adrafinil definitely burns You out all by itself, with a little happy rush at the beginning, a feeling one could get used to, in not the best of ways. And developing a tolerance is an issue as well.

Huperzine A rocks my socks. It's an acetyl cholinesterase inhibitor which leads to more acetyl choline being around the brain, which lead to more acetyl choline doing the synaptic talky thing it does. Huperzine A is also a NMDA receptor antagonist, as are many of our fond dissociatives: N2O, ketamine, DXM, etc. From anecdotal something or others (let's just take that Fifth here, yeah), I've observed that NMDA receptor antagonists foster an introspective mind-set, but since Huperzine A increases instead of decreases brain activity (like most recreational NMDA receptor antagonists) the thoughts You have actually stay put long enough to be transcribed.

More on this later...Tired now. There is still no substitute for sleep unfortunately.

Breaching the Gap

I've generally been planning these before I type them. That doesn't seem to be a sustainable way to output. More free-association! Less inhibition! (I know You didn't think that was possible for me.)

When did I last update? A week ago perhaps? The week before? I'm not sure. Time stretches and shrinks. A voice in my head often jests "Time is the joke!" And now the laughter is with me not at me.

So many people. So many conversations. So rich! As Joe D said on the car-ride back from shore-house "Ah, this is what it is to live a full life!" Indeed.

For the first time in forever, I like talking again. Though I still falter: stutter and stumble, apologizing and addenduming. It seems words always fall short of what I mean to say.

Ted Smith said to me this weekend in our year long conversation on a hilltop which was someone else's couch a funny word I'd never heard before. I asked him what it meant and he said he wasn't sure but it sounded like what he meant to say. Ah! That's what language is. I see.

To say that humans are social creatures seems a half-truth, because if we truly were, wouldn't we have a better way of communicating than speech? To say You know what an honest someone's thinking based on his words is like saying You understand the vastness of the ocean by looking at a waterfall. Deeply moving, chilling, awe-inspiring, mood-altering. Yes, it can be all things, but it's still just the faintest echo of the infinity going on inside someone's head.

To art! To art! To filling in the gaps.

I long to fill the spaces between our experiences with music and body language. I want, I need (!) to learn an instrument. When will I make time for this?

Sleep less! Live more!

But I don't know, when do the diminishing returns start? (Maybe around this morning when I dropped a box full of ice and samples all over the laboratory floor?)

But we need to compare notes on the abyss of unknowing! Yes, mine IS as big as Yours.

Don't hold in. Hold each other close. (These words sing in my head stretched out over hours, trembling, weeping (which is not like crying but the overflow of limitless thoughts seeping out the orifices making the voice and body quiver) back and forth with the interruption of doubts threatening to sprout. The seeds of Melancholy: "Your imploring is insufficient!" she screams.)

You're safe; You're safe. You will have food tomorrow. You will have a roof over Your head tomorrow. You will be safe tomorrow. I don't know these things to be true any more than You do, but I know they need to operate as truths for us to move forward. Even though everything about us tells us otherwise. Our social structure. Our language. Our brain chemistry. We must over-come this.

Our biological evolution is not moving as fast as our technological evolution; so we must un-stigmatize the "unnatural." The natural is insufficient. We are animals with the potential for endless understanding trapped inside our heads.

Current Reading and Writing Goals

In my introduction(s), I was pretty vague, laying down justifications and lofty aims instead of, well, what I was meaning to say.

In terms of what I like to read and what I'd like to write, I'm interested in two different somewhat related ideas right now.

The first is how the big life questions and answers of more recent generations differ from the Q&A of previous generations. To establish something of a baseline, I'm reading books on comparative religion, mythology, and folk-lore (which have always interested me anyway). For the more modern view, I've been reading books on cults, conspiracy theories, and (as always) science fiction.

I'd like to realize this idea by writing about the shore-house, channeling through different guests and their counterparts at different points in time. The present colors these parties, but the past resonants through them. I thank everyone who filled out the shore-survey, as Your answers will greatly help me with this task.

The second idea is sort of the daughter of this first one, though it occurred to me before it. It's a science fiction story in which people have decided to answer the big life questions by linking everybody up to everybody else for one big collective consciousness. This post-human/trans-human non-sense has been done before; so, I'm trying to read as much as I can of the established genre to help foment my vision and of course, give hat-tips where hat-tips are due.

The current model for the global mind-meld is basically mental music that everyone can hear and play. This allows people to synch up via a sort of melodious biofeedback system.

If anyone has suggested readings for these areas, that'd be cool. Especially books on cults from a sociological view-point. So far the only book I've read on the topic was by an Evangelical Christian, Ronald Enroth, who was for the most-part un-biased, but fell into the occasional ejaculations of scripture.

The Call Only the Straphanger Hears

This post is not for the squeamish. Contains violent imagery.

I have this fantasy now in which I go to Penn Station dressed in Velcro-ed business attire and a Barbie mask both of which I whip off while running down the stairs to my train, revealing Celtic warrior wear underneath complete with blood, mud, and woading...What do You think?

***

With so many people tracing the same steps every morning (a costly habit in time, money, and energy), the daily commute seems like too great a source of power for cosmic forces not to tap. Riders, drivers, by-standers, and passers-by lose lives every year clamoring to heed the call of the Big Apple, without settling directly in her, justifying the excess of the suburban sprawl. And so in reverence to this hungry power, I lift my thoughts to it/him/her and sometimes I find she tempts me with the thoughts of strange pleasures, releases from the grinding ritual we perform, but really, I think, she just wants the thing acknowledged. She wants her her fetters pulled at and struggled in. She craves a physical manifestation of the maddening.

***

An unbidden fantasy flashes in my mind as I leave work to head straight home (why, in the greatest city in the world, do I make no pit-stops? why rush a return to my unahppy abode?). The hot surface of the street vendor's flat grill entreats me and demands answers. I find myself wonder: How would it feel to throw my forearm onto it? And in rich psychosomia, I experience the result, in my mind like a deep dream, and in my waking body as a faint pulsing echo. First it would sting, and my muscles would tense with the reflex of retraction. Oh no, but I would press harder, (as the Suburban Spirit bids). Besides, my soft skin would stick to the griddle, leaning my weight down would only make it cook faster, making my skin numb and unelastic. Ripping it off, pealing apart the dead pieces, I wouldn't feel a thing beside the trickling heat in the surrounding tissue. Oh, hmmm, and how would it look? First red, then cooked white, oozing with the remains of my subcutaneous layer, speckles of burned fat mixed with the metal alloy of the heating appliance. My ears buzz from inside: How would it sound? And a voice my own and not answers in an cheery sing-song: At first, like nothing. Then sizzling, sizzling, sizzling. Oh and how would it smell?! (I answer before I finish asking, simultaneous thoughts building and interweaving in anticipation.) Would burning flesh stand out in a city of a thousand foul and fetid scents and more? Side-walk and street traffic wouldn't even know the difference. Cooking body parts are cooking body parts. A norm. Nothing more than pork roasting. It would smell as it does now, I think, my mental flash reverberating with the present. I shiver and tingle. And the Suburban God and I laugh. Yes! It would be a good tease on the evening news, how long would it would take for anyone to notice anything "out of place" (provided I was a good girl about it and didn't make a show or a peep of it) with a young woman resting her arm on a giant hot plate outside a hospital?

Ah, but I'm fast-paced, hard-faced walking down the street in actuality. All pauses from the marionette motion pulling me forward make me queasy. What's to say stopping for a snack or drink or word are so out of the question? I don't know. It all seems to go in the same category as pushing my arm down on that vendor's grill. If I can't call attention to the absurdity of the situation, what's the worth in doing it at all?

It begins to rain, a New York rain, which is a sorry excuse for a rain. It's more like an aerosolized dead man's spit, against which umbrellas are less than useless, caught up in the wind and other people's faces. As I descend into the sacred subway station, hot air rushes me, blowing up my skirt, like the cloying rotting breath of a hundred horny old men. My head swims. I swear as I climb downwards, downwards, downwards, I can feel haphazard oily prickles on wrinkled rough skin brushing my exposed thighs. As the bile rises in my throat, (wishing to match disgusting with disgusting) I find that I have been beaten to it. Fresh vomit stands scentless at my feet, its acidic odor masked by the general decay and humidity of the station. It expresses my sentiments exactly. And somehow I feel as though my tiny prayer has been answered. Oh what a generous commute, to meet my every whim!

***

I hope to continue on with this ungelded narration. It's definitely part of a bigger weirdness.

Bodies In-Between

For those of You who don't know (which would probably be anyone reading this besides Kyle Pearce) my day-dreams basically consist of permutations on the lives of four people, tangled up in one over-arching story-line. The following scene involves a character I first met roaming the cereal-aisle for a break-fast food which would cut the roof of her mouth. Since then, I've been calling her MaC-E (pronounced like Macy), short for Masochistic Cereal Eater, and nothing more fitting has ever occurred to me.

She's very near and dear to my heart, as she's a toned-up/toned-down version of me in high school (the real high school me would be strangely both too boring and too unbelievable to worth writing about).

***

She didn't necessarily feel terrible about her body. No, quite to the contrary. She frequently brazened outfits which elicited various "helpful" tips from the school faculty. "Dear, You'd let Your natural beauty shine if You didn't wear such dark make-up," "If You want success, You have to dress for it." And even, her favorite, "Honey, You're leaving all the wrong things to the imagination." Why they thought she would take this advice seriously, why they thought her impression on her peers was of any consequence to her was, well, a rather steady source of amusement, and yet...

The television roared innocuous light and color in the living room. The modern family's hearth, she mentally sniped. A place of gathering. It was her mother's (second? third?) child. Absently blathering. Enunciation clear and void of regional origins. Each voice was like a baby without a navel. Unnatural yet universally appealing. However, this sterility was was necessary to travel clearly into the living rooms of boob tubes everywhere. Not everyone could afford the kind of speakers Mac-E's mother bought. Yet, despite their hefty price-tag, artificiality broke through. A reverberation on each sound, note, and syllable which reminded MaC-E to the point of distraction that this performance was not for her, but at her. To persuade her to keep watching, keep listening. To persuade passivity.

But she couldn't. She had too many questions. She questioned the motives of even the most innocuous programming: save-the-earth PSAs, commercial-less news programs, public broadcasting, etc.

She longed for interaction. She wanted a Q&A session for these gods of the glow-box. Like right now, she wondered about this woman dancing before her in quick cuts. Yes, You look wonderful from that angle, doing that, but how do You look when You sit down? Do You look like I do? Do You find that Your stomach ripples up unevenly, unpleasantly... unphotogenically? Do Your thighs spread out and flatten?...Is anyone really attractive from every angle?

***

This rough draft may be edited and re-added at later points...and certainly expanded upon, (suggestions welcome!) but first some reflections, and credit. This entry was inspired by a late-night (early morning?) conversation with Michelle Hutt while watching Shakira music videos...

***

At the heart of the body-image problem are two simple truths:

1) The longer You examine a human body, the more flaws become apparent.

2) The only human body an average person gets to observe with any scrutiny is his/her own.

Thus, the saturation of the media with increasingly undressed persons is a double-edged sword. Sure we get more human bodies to scrutinize, but only after they've been sanitized for Your-viewing-pleasure.

In conclusion, let's make awkward porn...

A Defensive Spasm and a Messy Table of Contents

Even as I write this, I feel a pull from within trying to retract each statement as I put them down.

I hesitate. I feel embarrassed, foolishly nostalgic even, for a time, when I didn't care what other people thought of me (but then I didn't care about anything at all).

Why am I fighting the gravity of my inner workings, which demand their privacy?

The egotist in me, would rather I ruminate in solitude, free from any influences which might alter some mystical "natural" course, which he holds on the highest pedestal, because of course my thoughts are so unique (!) and brilliant (!) they should find enlightenment all on their own when and where others have failed for centuries...Well, it's obvious why this voice should be silenced.

Then, what of the shy new girl in my head? Who fears judgement and rejection?

Well, to her I say, in all Your efforts to escape insult, You will have simply escaped notice.

When I was in VA, working for the government, trying to take a safe route, trying to find security in career and conscience, I found a new mantra breeding malaise in my mind: "If You let this life be everything, it will be the end of You." And I knew that it was true.

So I hope this can be my something else. Or part of it. Or the beginning of it. Or What Have You.

***

Entries will include not just my thoughts, but thoughts of characters who've been stirring around in there. Please don't hold me to their opinions or conflate my actions with theirs (or anyone else's in my present material life). Some are more similar to me than others. Many are fragments of people who shaped my environment without shaping my mind, and I've found I'm as compelled to explore their psychology as I am my own.

In addition to probing inward, I will set my brain-tentacles to tackle more practical matters as well. In particular, I intend to spend some time explaining scientific phenomena, as I hope to sharpen this skill to bridge the gap between science and the general public.

I want to give an honest glimpse of my mental geography, as squeamish as the effect may be, for both You and me. Therefore, because I strive to leave my thoughts unfiltered, I will label my entries with warnings according to any graphic content they may contain.

Up-dates will be daily (except on weekends, possibly leading to double entries on Sundays?) but brief.

Introduction

So I was just wondering what You were thinking...and maybe how You were thinking it...

Is it linear? Each thought after the other culminating in self-discovery. Or is it a sort of snowballing? A circular process which builds some ideas while coming back to others. Or does it seem to roll out on a loop? A main motif guiding the progression while others simple push it forward. Or is it more like a play? In which personal philosophies interact like characters in a play, each with their own strengths and weakness: the fates favoring some and thwarting others...

I suppose it's like all of these things, in-between them, and more.

What stimulates certain mental patterns to dominate some times and not others.

Some external impetus is usually to blame, but sometimes not. The mind is a disconcerting creature like that. Ungoverned by natural laws. (A chaotic neutral, really.)

Alone inside our heads, it's hard to get a good gage on the productivity of others' thoughts.

How far along is everyone else with answering the big questions in life:

Why am I here? What should I be doing? When will it be enough? And does anybody really like me?

The only way to get a glimpse is to absorb what others share. Yet, despite the urgent quest for this essential knowledge, we tangle ourselves up in the complexities of what would be the most mundane of life's questions. (“You like me; right?”) And in an attempt to win each other's favor, we dress ourselves up in what we think we'd like to see...A maddening cycle of well-meaning obfuscation increasing the already unsurmountable gap between human minds.

The ever-widening chasm and rising walls each side: it's enough make me want to rip my clothes off and demand “Everybody touch me!”

And so here I do my part and share. (But also that as well.)

The Abstract to this Experiment

Every hallmark birthday, I've made a resolution. And by channeling through the importance of the one "holiday" which is personally my own, I've made them stick.

When I turned turned 14, I stood up to my parents and peers and forsook meat. At 21, I completed the process and gave up animal products altogether.

In the past, I shrunk away from leaving my imprint on the planet, (by trying to live sustainably), and today, (finally satisfied that I am worth the resources I consume) I hope to make some ripples in the minds of those who oddly show interest in my opinion. (I don't feign popularity.)

So this year (and from now on) I hope to explain to You (Your patience is necessary yet voluntary) what I was meaning to say when I rambled at You.