July 24, 2022

I am my own best advocate

The other day I woke up grumpy. I was planning to quit smoking tobacco that day and quickly realized it just wasn't the right day. I got myself out of my grumpiness, talked to some people, did some things for myself, and felt much better for the rest of the day.

When I first woke up, however, I made a bit of a scene in a chatroom. I did notice that the county Sherriffs were hanging out by my place a lot throughout the day and even gave me a friendly wave later in the day. In the chatroom I did say, "if surveillance capitalists want to scoop me up in their dragnet, I want to build bombs. Fair is fair."

I didn't mean monitoring chatrooms, that makes perfect sense to me. I meant violating the law to break into my personal computer systems without my authorization. Monitoring social media activity and responding to disturbances of the peace makes perfect sense to me, I applaud that kind of responsiveness. Breaking into computer systems the same as criminals do, however, is still a crime. When law enforcement does that kind of behavior just because criminals do it, they have made themselves also criminals.

If someone breaks into computer systems in an unauthorized manner, breaking the law, should they go to prison for it? Maybe, maybe not. When human beings do enough damage to the rest of the human world, the way society behaves is to take away their security, freedom, and sometimes even their life. If someone breaks in and reports the problem, however, I would be inclined not only to forgive the crime, but to pay the perpetrator money for helping me fix the problem.

When I believe everything I think inside my own mind, despite most of it being incorrect, I can't interact with the rest of the world properly. I get the diagnosis of insanity, I go in for help, I get a drug I take daily to help me interact properly with the rest of the human world. If the rest of the human world believes everything they commonly think, despite most of it being incorrect, they are delusional, mentally ill.

The house I live in was built by a blacksmith, my great-great-uncle. I basically live inside of a historic landmark. It's pretty awesome. He decorated the inside with his own wrought ironwork. Some of it is pointy, but they aren't meathooks. They're horseshoes for luck, decorations, beautiful craftsmanship. People come in here to install internet or do plumbing, and I wonder what they think more than I should. I don't know what other people are thinking, I only know what I'm thinking. Are people afraid of me?

The Bible tells us hundreds of times not to live in fear, anger, and negativity. I have been a person who lived that way, so I understand the mentality. It's not how I choose to live today. As an American, I value my right to convert to Christianity or even Islam, though I have no intention of ever doing so, not at this point. I will tell you who I really am.

One day I opened my Bible, the bookmark was on the cover page of the New Testament. A spider was sitting there and crawled out. I had a problem with spiders inside my house, even sometimes biting me occasionally. In the Old Testament, spiders are a symbol for focused hard work. A spider works hard on what is in front of it to do, accomplishing each task with focus. Spiders are rewarded for it, living in the highest corners of even the palaces of kings. In the New Testament, spiders wove a web of protection over the mouth of the cave where the Savior was put after being taken down off the cross to later be resurrected. I handled my spider problem pretty well by picking up each spider one by one, taking them outside unharmed. My cats did get some of them. That's who I really am, and I am rewarded for it. Most people have to operate on faith, they either get to believe God exists or believe that God doesn't exist. I get to have the reward of God showing Himself to me, so I don't need to have faith or shaky belief. I get to know it for a fact.

My writing, to me, is my writing, my imagination. Some of the stories I put on here are horror stories. The Bible does tell us not to live in baseless fear. You can come knock on my door any time, I would be happy to consider you a friend, and even show you this historic landmark I call home, even if you don't have a warrant, or even if you're a homeless starving criminal, and we treat each other with basic decency, dignity, and respect.

July 15, 2022

The definition of insanity is believing everything you think, despite vast amounts of evidence that you are wrong. I enjoy correcting people about this over and over until they finally hear me and I get a different result.

July 14, 2022

Fight World

Evan was always smart.  He had flunked out of college, only making it
through a year and a half towards a bachelor's degree in chemistry.
He had gotten A's in chemistry, A's in mathematics, and failed
everything else.  He couldn't spell, he had no sense of creativity,
history traumatized him, and he just had no interest in bullshit.  He
never had.

After college he had started making LSD.  He had gotten into it
towards the end of his time at college, and although most people
thought it was impossible to get addicted to LSD, Evan knew he was.
He had the knowledge, and he had no other drive inside of himself.  He
made his own unlimited amounts of LSD, all for himself.  He sold some
of it to get by for a while, going crazier and crazier.  He ended up
penniless, starving, out of LSD, living out of an old Chevy Nova.  He
was homeless in a rough city.  He had gone crazy and knew it.  It
scared him when he would talk to people, knowing that none of them
could tell how crazy he was.

Finally one day he caught himself going too far.  He was starving,
always chewing on his nails from the terror of how his life had
become.  He caught himself gnawing at his own hands until they bled
out of hunger more than anything else.  He knew it was time to turn
things around.  In the city there were places to go for help, always
overrun by the sheer mass of the thousands of people just like Evan.
He knew he would never be heard, he knew he would never get the help
he needed.

Worrying he would be shot for it, he stole enough gas to drive out of
the city, into the countryside, looking for help.  He wondered if his
car would even make it.  It did, he made it to a small rural town
completely empty of his homeless brethren.  He found food at a food
bank staffed by loving Christians, and he should have stopped there.
He was able to get enough to eat again, and living out of his car was
normal to him.  He was able to pass for normal enough, more scared of
himself than anyone else was.

He didn't stop there, though.  He started looking for psychiatric
help.  He never opened up to anyone, he just said he wanted a job.  He
just thought that was a normal thing for a person to say.  They could
tell he was on some kind of drug, but they asked stupid questions
about it.  They started there, giving him all the mental tools he
would ever need to stay off any drug forever.  The main thing that
allowed him to learn all of what he had to do was his own desire.  He
never wanted to touch anything again that would make him any crazier.
The therapists helped coordinate for him to meet with the man who ran
the local laundromat.  He cleaned up as well as he could, and went to
the laundromat to meet with the man.  He was more presentable than
anyone except Evan could have expected.  He knew he could present
himself well, if nothing else.

The job sounded good.  The therapists had said the man needed help
with a few odd jobs, and Evan would also learn from the man how to
repair appliances.  Evan didn't have the heart to make them feel small
by telling them he was perfectly capable of something like that
already.  Evan was a walking miracle of the human will to survive,
driving a miracle of the human will to fix a car that shouldn't be
able to run.  He hadn't even told the therapists his real name.
Watching them struggle to find a birth certificate that didn't exist
didn't make him laugh.  He didn't find anything humorous in it.

The laundromat had rows and rows of washers and driers.  He walked
past them all, gently touching them, happy to think about a new life
working for a good Christian man.  At the far end from the front door
were bathrooms and a large sink.  The laundromat seemed impressive.
It seemed well-kept.  It excited him to think about being someone
there helping keep things in pristine working order.

He walked back across the laundromat to wait by the door, looking out
the window at the most perfect main street of a town he could imagine.
A car went by only once every few minutes.  No one hustled, no one
bustled, no one treated each other like garbage, murdering for a $5
fix.  He looked up at a clock on the wall.  The man was a few minutes
late.  It didn't bother Evan, with a life like he had been leading.
He noticed a small stain on the tile floor by the window at the front
of the laundromat.  He fixated on it patiently.  He didn't know how
long he waited until the door opened and the man walked in.  Evan
looked at the clock.  The man was 22 minutes late, but it didn't
bother Evan.

They started talking, and Evan didn't miss a beat.  He had been in
college, he hadn't worked much.  He didn't mention hitting rock
bottom, eating the flesh of his own living hands.  The man looked at
him wrong.  Evan's heart sank, realizing the man intended to use him
like any of the grotesquely disproportioned prostitutes of whom men
like this drove into the city to occasionally murder.  Evan ignored
his instinct to fight or flee.  He had nowhere else to go.  The man
told him he owned a trailer park and wanted Evan to trim weeds,
complaining that no one seemed to want to work.  Evan looked him in
the eyes, concealing his thoughts of chewing on them.  The man
complained and complained, saying his trust had been broken too many
times before.  Evan understood, but he hated this man with a deep fury
and passion he wasn't even capable of showing anymore.

The first day he worked only about three hours total.  He could barely
hold the equipment.  He had been getting enough to eat, and all of his
weight had come back as muscle for some reason, but he was still very
weak.  The man was abusive.  He arrived late, making comments about
how he couldn't afford to chase Evan around getting him to work.  Evan
didn't waste time, he got all the weeds trimmed.  The man left, saying
he had wasted more time telling Evan what to do than he had worked.
The trailer park was full of people on drugs, waiting to move to the
city to be homeless.  Evan wondered if he should warn them.  They
looked at him like they wondered if they should warn him about the
landlord, but he already knew.

Evan waited at the trailer park for the man to return, after trimming
all of the weeds.  He waited about an hour.  Finally the man showed up
again.  Evan wasn't worried about waiting around, but when Evan
mentioned payment, and the man said, "well, you only worked a couple
of hours today," Evan immediately tendered his resignation.  The man
sighed dramatically and handed Evan a $10 bill.  They said their
farewells.

Evan spent the money on gas, and stole the rest to fill his tank.  He
drove back the laundromat and parked.  He walked to a junkyard, snuck
in, and stole battered plates off another broken down Chevy Nova to
replace the current stolen plates on his.  He had done this time and
time again.  In the junkyard he also found two large steel plates with
plastic spacers to insulate them and hold them apart, plenty of wire,
and a large rectifying diode.  He went to a grocery store and stole a
box of baking soda and a box of tea candles.  He walked back the
laundromat, and by the time he got there it was dark.

He went into the laundromat.  No one was likely to be here, but the
man left it open 24/7.  That was perfect.  Evan didn't want to hurt a
single person, he never had.  He selected a drier and started pulling
it apart, getting the power cord off it still attached to a large
transformer to step down the voltage from 220 to about 50 volts.  The
diode would handle it perfectly.  He twisted the wires to the input of
the diode, and connected the DC outputs to one of each of the large
steel plates.  It was all ready to go now.  He filled the sink with
water, poured in all of the baking soda, and stirred it well.  He
dropped the steel plates into the sink, careful to keep the diode and
transformer out of the water.  He plugged it all into the wall, and
was pleased to not see a single spark.  The water started gurgling,
hydrogen gas and oxygen coming out of it quickly, rising to the
ceiling.  The water level was even dropping at a barely perceptable
rate.  Evan quickly adjusted the faucet to perfectly match the drop in
water, so that the sink would always be full but never run over.  He
had to be quick now.  He ran across the room to the spot on the
ground, next to the large window at the front.  The hydrogen gas would
reach that spot last.  He set a tea candle on the floor, lit it, and
walked quickly to his car.

He started the car, revved the engine, and peeled out back to the big
city, armed only with everything he would ever need to stay off drugs
for the rest of his life.  His future in the same old homeless life
seemed so much brighter than ever, just like the therapists had told
him.

July 01, 2022