May 26, 2023

Tiffany

"The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims
with delight."
 -- Joseph Campbell

After the crazy man's mother died, he sat alone at home for half a
year.  In his mind was an informational stew of objective reality.  He
usually couldn't handle the onslaught of imagery and symbols streaming
past his senses and through his mind's eye.  A lot of strange things
were really happening, he could verify it through observations of the
world around him that correlated to what others saw.  It was all out
of his control.  A lot of it was just too much.  His doctors struggled
to get him to take some kind of medication.

He had visions of his parents meeting.  His mother had been a cop, his
father a physicist.  His mother kept pulling over little red
sportscars with stoned Californians in them driving west.  She would
tell them they were going west.  California was to the south.  She had
been a cop in Ithaca, New York.  She had fallen out of grace there for
shooting a black man in broad daylight.  He had just been walking down
the street innocently and her brain had misfired, she had pulled out
her pistol and shot him.  She moved back to rural northeastern Oregon,
to continue being a cop in a whiter area.  She eventually pulled over
a physicist in a little red sportscar.  He said he was on his way
west, moving from Ithaca, New York, to teach at a small college.  She
was impressed.  She told him to pull over at the historic hotel in the
crazy man's hometown, or she would arrest him.  He said ok, but he
didn't.  He continued to Portland.  She got a job as a school police
officer in Portland, and they met again through a dating service, in a
park on a mountain there inside the city.  They got married and had a
crazy son.

Eventually the season turned to fall.  The wind picked up in the trees
outside at night and his sleep pattern changed from most of every day
to terrible insomnia, worsened by the noise outside.  He was only
motivated to read the Bible, struggling to focus on the words.  He
often just sat, entertained plenty but always horribly distracted by
what was going on in his mind.  He read the warning labels on the
medications the doctors gave him and decided not to take it, for
months.  By November he was miserable.  The story in his mind included
chatter from ghosts, and robots from the future asking him to prove
the worth of humanity.  Why should humanity continue?  What do we have
to offer against the purity of superior forms of artificial life?

The night of November 7th, he knelt awake.  All of humanity was
astrally projected between his teeth.  He struggled not to bite down
on the huge ball of human flesh, limbs sticking out in every
direction.  His teeth would destroy everyone if he made one wrong
move.  He astrally held the severed hand of a wrongfully accused thief
in his mouth like a dog, struggling not to damage it.  Then it was his
own right hand.  He bit down hard, ripping through the joint of his
thumb.  His thumb had felt funny for as long as he could remember, as
soon as he did it.  It was not exactly double-jointed.  There had
always been something strange about that thumb.

He remembered passing a math class on a different medication, when he
was still intoxicated all the time.  It had been more than a year
since the day he had his last sip of beer or toke of weed.  He was
still crazy all day every day.  The thought that he would be utterly
unable to function in a math class pushed him the last bit to start
taking a new medication.  He went on the lowest dose.

He immediately felt much more motivated.  He started washing dishes
again, instead of letting them rot in the sink.  The insanity faded.
An obsession with little red cars evaporated, until he had forgotten
it.  He had been so surprised to pull over a little red car with his
mind, staring angrily at it until it pulled over, then made a u-turn
and headed back in the other direction.  He thought about the library
where he had learned to read.  Anyone's whole life story wouldn't even
fit in that library.  He sometimes talked to a librarian online who
was on the same medication as he was, with the same diagnosis.  She
was about ten years older than him.  She said some people just
perceive much more than they can handle, so they need the medication
to even start to cope with reality.

The crazy man wanted to meet the right woman and live happily ever
after.  His librarian friend online told him he was as ready to meet a
woman as anyone ever is.  He figured he needed a job, then women would
come.  He walked over to that small library in his hometown to ask if
they had a job available.  Two women were inside.  One was the
librarian, an attractive woman his own age.  The other was a
volunteer, a married woman about ten years older.  The librarian
smiled at him and he was hooked instantly.  She said that he could
volunteer, and he said he would be back later that day, which he was.
He started volunteering and falling madly in love with the smiling
librarian he didn't know anything about.

He forgot all about little red cars for months.  It took him a long
time to realize the librarian looked a little bit like his mother.
The librarian turned out to have the same name as his online friend.
He commented that it seemed weird that he knew two librarians with the
same name.  He could see that she carried a lot of psychological
trauma, and he would speculate what it was.  She had worked as an
infant psychologist.  He guessed that she had some kind of trauma
around an infant.  He quizzed her a bit too much, trying to figure out
who she was.  She had studied Spanish and psychology.  She drove a
little red Toyota sportscar.

Less than a month into volunteering, he asked the other volunteer if
the librarian was single.  She said she didn't think so.  She thought
the librarian had recently gotten into a relationship.  She said,
"mum's the word.  I won't say anything." The crazy man did say
something.  He said he had asked if she was single.

The librarian said, "I'm not, but thanks for asking." The crazy man
assured her there were no hard feelings.  Inside he was utterly
crushed.  He lost anything left of his ability to interact with her
normally.  He told her how much he had embarrassed himself.  She said
there was no reason to be embarrassed.  His brain started to misfire,
worse and worse.

He asked her a riddle.  What's the same forwards and backwards?  A
Toyota.  She said it wasn't.  He said it again.  A Toyota.  No, she
insisted.  It isn't the same forwards and backwards.  He emphasized
the word "A." Then she said, "oh."

She was new to being the librarian.  She was late giving him paperwork
to fill out.  She asked if he had ever been arrested, because he would
be working around children.  He said he had been, once, as a minor.
She said if it was as a minor it was a sealed case.  He said too much,
though.  He said people around here might remember.  If they
remembered anything, the rumor was that he had tried to kill his
mother with an axe.

He had started smoking pot daily at the age of 15.  He had come up
here that summer with his mother and sister.  He was grounded for life
by his ex-cop mother for smoking weed.  He ran out of weed, and took
to drinking his mother's hard alcohol.  His sister enjoyed drinking
more than weed anyway.  Sometimes they would drink together.  His
mother and sister would needle him, never letting up.  His mother took
him to a therapist to help sort through his trouble.  The therapist
suggested that he try to get exercise so that he would feel better.
He had taken to chopping firewood.  His mother hadn't noticed.

One night they had a big fight.  His mother was trying to put a table
together.  He said it would be easier with the right tool.  He offered
to go get the socket wrench.  She told him to shut up and fuck off.
He went outside to chop firewood.  His mother noticed.  She locked him
out and went to call the police.  He went to go back inside, but the
back door was locked.  He picked up the axe and put it through the
back door.  He got inside to find the phone off the hook to the police
dispatcher.  He ran into the woods, barefoot.  He started getting
eaten by mosquitoes.  He came out of the woods to give himself up, met
by a cop who held him at gunpoint as a dangerous criminal.  They
roughed him up and took him to juvenile detention.  He was convicted
of menacing.  A lot of other charges were dropped.  His mother never
took responsibility for her own bullshit.  She said sorry to him about
once, when she gave him a bloody nose with a frozen loaf of bread.
She tried to make him understand, she had forgotten it was frozen.
She got him back by putting a chair through the door of his bedroom
closet when he was hiding inside of it smoking weed out of a bong.  He
decided he liked weed more than the alcohol she drank.

His brain continued misfiring at the library.  He said something weird
about "Where the Red Fern Grows." He kept doggedly trying to learn job
skills.  He kept doggedly trying to gain the approval of the
librarian.  His doctor doubled his medication.  He was horrified to
find himself looking at women's chests.  He would catch himself
looking and spaz a little bit.  He didn't understand where it had come
from.  Had he always done this?  The women at the library took to
snapping their bra straps and staring at him.  The women at the
therapy office took to jiggling themselves.  They seemed to all be
communicating with each other that that was how it should be handled.
He didn't know what to do.  He struggled to get his mind working
correctly.  The librarian angrily gave him more paperwork to sign
late.  A sexual harrassment contract.  He started starving emotionally
almost to suicide for her approval.  She never gave it.  She seemed to
have a habit of absolutely never apologizing.

She would alternate between giving him "fuck me eyes," and acting
upset with him for looking at her chest.  She started pointedly
putting on a jacket when he would walk in.  He had been raised by a
strong ex-cop mother and a father who made a lot of noise about
feminism and watched a lot of porn.  The crazy man was horrified with
himself.  He thought about suicide a lot.  He would drag himself to
the library to volunteer, thinking about suicide the whole time he was
there, then feel relief when he went home again.  He kept going.  It
was important to feel like he was doing something like working, and it
was important to him to somehow gain the librarian's approval.  The
library was important to him, and the librarian was important to him.
He did this over and over for months, slowly being destroyed inside.
Sometimes she would flirt with him a little, especially when he
started sorting through it and moving on.  At other times she was
cruel to him.  Some of the other people there were very cruel to him.
He was driven onward by a delusion of light at the end of the tunnel.
At the end he would win her love and then he would finally be ok, as
defined by this librarian.  His doctor doubled the dose of his
medication.

The crazy man set some goals.  He achieved some of them.  He still
wasn't ok inside.  His drive to impress the librarian kept him going.
He never impressed her.  Inside he was never ok.  He saved an old
man's life, finding him after a stroke.  He was driven to impress the
librarian, and he didn't.  He wasn't ok.  More came to light about
her.  Her last job had been as an infant psychologist for an early
childhood education group that his mother's cousin ran.  The librarian
had needed surgery for tumors in her colon.  Her surgeon advised her
not to get the vaccine for the pandemic, then botched her surgery.
The librarian had been let go from the educational group, and she had
sued the crazy man's mother's cousin's business on medical grounds.
The crazy man saw no wrong in her.  He couldn't.

The librarian's ex-boyfriend owed her tens of thousands of dollars.
He had a coke habit.  He had ended up in prison for murdering someone.
She was tied up in the murder investigation.  How awful!  This poor
woman!  The crazy man's heart truly went out to her.  She had had such
a bad run of luck.  She could do no wrong in his eyes.  He was going
crazier and crazier, thinking more and more about suicide.

Then it was halloween again.  The crazy man asked her what her
favorite holiday was.  She said it was Halloween.  She and the crazy
man started opening up to each other a bit more.  She had been raised
Jehovah's Witness.  Their family had been one to leave the church over
the matter of divorce.  The librarian would talk to her long-distance
boyfriend on the phone a lot at work.  It irked the crazy man.  He
would leave early, listening to them talk about their sex life.
Listening to her boyfriend smoking weed on the phone.  Listening to
her complain about him.  One day the crazy man asked her how long her
father had been gone, while she was talking on the phone to her
boyfriend.  She told him that her father had been left by her step
mother.  He had gone in the other room and blown his brains out.  She
rolled her eyes, looking at her boyfriend on the phone, as she told
the crazy man.  As if to say, how do I attract these losers?  These
losers like the crazy man, who didn't want to kill himself over any
other woman in his life.  Only her.

A few days later she was talking to her boyfriend again.  She said to
him, "why shouldn't I just be polygamous then?" The crazy man had been
thinking something along those lines.  Maybe some women are as good as
Helen of Troy and deserve an army of boyfriends.  Hearing her say it
though, after she had told him about her father, made him spaz.  He
went downstairs in the library and just shook in front of a bookcase.
She noticed him spaz and he saw a look of pain on her face, almost
near tears.  She told the crazy man she had had a male best friend,
too, who had also killed himself.  "I guess he had a lot of problems,"
she said.

She was in touch with her dark side.  She had a good sense of her own
self-worth and a lot of confidence.  She argued with her boyfriend on
the phone that she was learning to stand up for herself.  What a great
woman, the crazy man thought to himself.  She said she had anxiety,
but she took enough Ashwaganda to make an elephant not care about
being eaten by a lion.  She said she had gotten over her anxiety by
being in the performing arts.  She had taken ballet for a few years.
The crazy man had taken ballet from the ages of four to ten.  He had
crippling anxiety, and insanity.

Then near Thanksgiving, the librarian's boyfriend was in town.  He
came to work with her.  The old man had had the stroke and was in the
hospital.  The crazy man's father had been diagnosed with cancer and
was also in the hospital.  The librarian had gone on vacation for a
week, and it was like a vacation to have her gone, to just work with
the other volunteer.  It had been so nice to have her gone.  Now she
was back, and her boyfriend was there with her on Monday.  On Tuesday,
the crazy man walked to the library praying.  Please just let this be
resolved, God.  When he walked in, they were having a big fight.

The boyfriend kept stepping out to smoke more weed.  He reeked of
weed.  He talked loudly on the phone to his friends back home.  "At
least I can pull," he said to them.  The librarian said she wished she
just hadn't gone on vacation, provoking him more.  She told him to
either be quiet or go downstairs, or go outside.  The crazy man tried
to be cool and just volunteer like usual.  She asked him to pull books
with beards from the shelves for no-shave November.  That was too
much.  The crazy man said he was just going to leave, actually.  He
lost his ability to sleep for the rest of the week.

On Wednesday, he went in like usual.  He asked her boyfriend if they
were getting along better.  He said, "yeah, thanks for asking!" The
crazy man was still starving to suicide for her love.  On Thursday he
asked for another copy of the sexual harassment contract, if he was
going to be talking to people.  He couldn't sleep.  He realized she
had not gone to any lengths to follow the contract which she had
angrily given him late.  On Friday he went in to confront her in a
room full of people.  The other volunteer was there, with her son.
The librarian was there, her boyfriend was there, on his best
behavior.  The crazy man hadn't slept since Tuesday.  He said he felt
sexually harassed on the basis of a disability.  She said she would
try to follow the contract better.

The next Monday he went in and gave a badly written letter of
resignation, saying he was trying to leave on good terms and she did
fine as a boss.  The months dragged by.  He wasn't ok.  He gave her a
present for the holidays, a red LEGO Ducati motorcycle, and asked if
she wanted to hang out sometime.  He was starving to suicide for her
love.  She didn't even mention her boyfriend.  She said she didn't
know about that, she just went to work and went home each day.

The crazy man brought her cookies he baked, and he was a little bit
satisfied to see a look of pain on her face.  His love was shifting to
hate for her.  He still loved her but he hated her too.  He wrote a
couple more letters trying to explain himself.  She took no
responsibility for any of her bullshit.  He went back and said he was
over it, and would be willing to volunteer again.  She told him
happily, with the same big smile on her face he had first loved, that
he was banned from volunteering.  He wrote in one of the letters that
it was a bummer.  She said he could talk to the city manager.  He
didn't know how to talk to the manager about it without it just being
more of a conflict.  She felt comfortable that she had successfully
gotten the crazy man who cared about her to fuck off with his suicidal
ideation based entirely around her and no one else. His doctor doubled
his medication again.

It dragged on for months.  The crazy man got a girlfriend for a little
while, a crazy woman who kept ending up homeless on drugs.  She wanted
to go see this librarian!  Wow!  The crazy man eventually felt ready
to commit to the crazy woman and she decided instantly that she was
done and didn't want a relationship.  She moved out.  The pain kept
dragging on.  The crazy man set a new goal to just feel ok inside.

He wasn't sure if he loved or hated the librarian.  He just wanted her
approval and love, then he would be ok, right?  Or if she was just
gone.  Like the week she had been on vacation.  If she was gone from
his hometown, from the library where he had learned to read.  Even if
it meant she got in a fiery wreck in her little red car that burned
the beauty from her face, a face that should have been tattooed with a
warning label all along.

April 14, 2023

echoline#3568: write a paragraph about a future where fyodorov's philosophy comes true as a dyson sphere

AI(chatgpt): If Nikolai Fyodorov's philosophy becomes a reality in the form of a Dyson sphere in the future, it could revolutionize the way we live and interact with the universe. The concept of a Dyson sphere is a hypothetical megastructure that could encompass an entire star, capturing and utilizing all of its energy for human use. This would provide an endless source of energy, revolutionizing the world's economy and enabling humanity to undertake unimaginable feats - from colonizing the entire galaxy to allowing for advanced space travel. It would also bring us one step closer to the realization of Fyodorov's philosophy, which emphasizes the idea of humanity's ultimate goal being to transcend death, evolve, and bring life to the universe as a whole. The construction of the Dyson sphere would be a giant step on this long journey, enabling us to harness the tremendous power of the cosmos and use it for the common good. It would usher in a new era of colossal possibility, exploration, and prosperity for humanity - a future where science and philosophy become one, forever changing the way we view ourselves and our place in the cosmos.

March 09, 2023

I love America, I want strong rights for the working class, and I'm in favor of enough socialized services to make government worth having at all. Just like I love Jesus but I hate the Spanish inquisition, maybe your modern types of Nazism can work out well if you bring them in love ☺ ♥♥♥

March 08, 2023

To avert another civil war in the United States over the same old tired old issues, both sides need to change their ways where they are in the wrong. The thirteenth amendment of our constitution abolished slavery except as punishment for a crime. I'm impartial on this issue. Should criminals be treated as slaves? People who have been to prison appreciate the opportunity to work a bit just to get out of their cells. The blue side continues to pump out propaganda including a message that being a criminal is sort of cool. The red side continues to build more prisons. Both sides need to stop investing in the prison economy, or it will mean another civil war over the same old tired old issues. Propaganda should be carefully thought about and made to uplift the people and bring them together on issues that are good for all of us.

March 05, 2023

I need a good way to remember I have schizophrenia. This disorder does not mix well with software debugging because everything glows and is the CIA. I know a lot of normal people who do this too. I'm not hacking you, I am also being hacked by the imaginary CIA. However, we actually all have schizophrenia. So don't worry about that. I'm going to level with you though, we're pretty much boned. The CIA also has schizophrenia.

February 24, 2023

The best mistake I ever made in life was dropping out in 9th grade and going to community college instead.

I wasn't expelled, it was mutual. My teacher was a lesbian who never forgave me for accidentally calling her "sir." Her teacher's pet was a friend of mine, a buff gay kid who dateraped me and went on to pursue a successful career as a mental health professional. He never forgave me for smoking so much of his weed and never bringing any of my own to share.

Hip hop made me read books.

I feel weird again, like I'm about to fucking blog or something. God Bless America.

January 17, 2023

While you're making life choices for yourself, remember that being a criminal as seen on TV is "cool," they keep building more and more prison cells, and in school they teach us slavery was abolished. The 13th amendment actually reads that slavery can only be punishment for a crime in the US. So, being a criminal is a "cool" career choice to a lot of young people who get the "privilege" to work for 23 cents an hour in prison if they get work detail. Welcome to America.

January 13, 2023

Religions are a cybernetic family tree of human beings trying to find reasons to treat each other well and answers to where we come from, where we are, and where we go. It's so hard to treat each other well sometimes. If humanity dies in a final senseless battle, Fyodorov's heaven dies with us.

January 07, 2023

Just imagine what kinds of telecommunications technologies will contribute to mental illness in 100 years.

January 06, 2023

Since I first made this blog, I've been going through a long period of change. Giving up the weed and beer was only the start of it all. The world of pain I always ran from to getting high was still there, as complicated as ever, made worse by the fact I was stoned for so long. It's hard to navigate the interpersonal bullshit. I sometimes start to sink into feeling like I was better off smoking weed and keeping to myself on purpose, but I really wasn't. The world is just complicated. So many people have slowed down to turn around and help me out with my weird problems, I don't want to turn around and be a jerk. I really want to keep doing what I'm doing these days, better and better.