So I got home about 3am on Monday and took a nice long shower. Then up around 8am. It’s bizarre that I’m up so early, it’s been happening since I started dating Ginger. Initially I attributed it to her work schedule starting really early (normally at work by 7am), then when not around her to my body adapting to the schedule. She was elsewhere last night and I slept until 11am today. It’s about time. So theories? I don’t know, a lot has been going on, a lot of change is ramping up, perhaps some of that translates to stress I’m not aware of coming off my shoulders that was making it hard for me to be comfortable enough to sleep in. I’ve often thought about how when I used to go to camp back in Maine I’d usually sleep 12+ hours the first night. I usually attributed that to finally being disconnected from my responsibilities and feeling comfortable enough to go to bed early and sleep late. But it’s definitely a subconscious thing, as there are no clocks and alarms at camp.
So what about at Burning Man? Not really any clocks either. I had one on the iPod radio in the truck, where we started sleeping after a night or two after realizing it was perfectly fine temperature wise, as well as bigger and more comfortable. I suppose it had an alarm, but I never used it. Every night I ended up going to sleep much earlier than I had planned too, albeit tipsy. That’s not something that I’m not accustomed to though. Followed by being up early again, always well before 10am. It’s not a matter of just getting enough sleep, I was usually tired later in the day, although the heat can just do that.
What has been waking me up and putting me to bed? Not heat. Not usually the sun. No alarms. I hate to think it’s decisions I know I should be making in life but that I am not. Because they’re not obvious decisions, they’re troubling ones deep in my soul that take a leap to grasp to. I don’t know if it’s a leap of faith, but I can’t think of a better description at the moment.
But to some degree, I suppose it is. I tend to be non-committal in life. It’s not that I’m unreliable; to the contrary I can be counted on to put my head down and do what needs to be done. The wavering is in knowing what needs to be done. I have a long struggle with matters of humanity, many hours talking to friends, therapists and the internet about how to tell what’s right and what’s wrong. The trouble being, which a surprisingly high number of people are unwilling to admit, is that these are constructs, and they aren’t real.
Society says killing people is wrong. Except if you’re at war and they want to invade your country. Or of maybe they might want to kill you in the future. Or maybe if they just don’t like you and control a large natural resource that’s important to you… It goes downhill pretty quickly. But of course, it goes downhill in small steps, so it’s easy to convince ourselves that we haven’t gone that far from where we started: A-Z, incrementally doesn’t look that different, but try looking at just A and Z.
There have, of course, been many opinions in this matter. One friends idea that you should simply do what you feel, and apologize if you hurt someones feelings, always sticks in my mind. Of course this falls apart because you end up being the asshole that always hurts peoples feelings and your apologies become empty pretty quick.
Much of humanity, so incredibly fearful of this conundrum creates religions to tell them what actions are good and evil. Some turn to the law of their countries. Few of these groups are ready to speak about the regularity in which the closets that hold their skeletons are usually much much bigger than they’d like to acknowledge. Religions are created by men, not by gods, and can’t be trusted. You are simply relying on someone else to deal with this dilemma for you, and convincing yourself that it’s the best course of action because a god has in fact given you the magical answers. Faith and Magic are different things. Laws are, of course, not a solution. Lawyers are not philosophers, and even if they were, laws are the product of power, and power corrupts. Or perhaps power is corrupted because most of those who seek it are selfish men from the start. I’ve had other rants about this, namely the large number of people who list power as a turn-on on dating sites.
So what do you do? This seems to me, to be the biggest problem of life, perhaps only during the periods spent in self-actualization. Why doesn’t the rest of the world struggle with this as much as I do?
I’ve been trying to revisit old thoughts of maslow-ish conclusions about life, probably mostly in an attempt to put some sort of sane explanation on the tribulations such that they’ll gasp their last breath and fade away, the strength coming from emotion no longer able to exist.
This bit seems to fit my view on life pretty well, wherein a black and white, right and wrong exists not. What’s taken me so long to come to that conclusion is that the mass majority of the population seems to think how they feel and think is right, even though they’re all often in conflict. And if everyone else is right, and I’m thinking they’re all wrong, how can I be right???
So what you’re saying Bryan, is that you can’t count on anyone else for this sort of stuff? Yeah. Swell.
Something about going back and reading past rants about this very topic kind of kills my motivation to talk about it. On one hand, I don’t feel like I’ve gotten very far in this singular private debate. On another hand, if most of the problems I have in life are the product of the subconscious, because I’m unwilling to hold any person or particular event directly responsibly for my tribulations, than it would make sense that any progress I make by way of philosophical musings would be subconscious as well, and therefore not immediately, directly attributable.
I’ve been a bad person to ask these questions, because I immediately start thinking about it, or talk about it, and perhaps give off some impression that I’m trying to let them down easy, when in fact I’m trying to sound ‘normal’ and give a response that seems reasonable rather than lose them in my personal tribulations over such ideas.
Once again I’m finding myself in situations where a significant other is talking about important, relationship defining things, and I just sit there with nothing to say. There are a few identifiable reasons for this.
First, I don’t really understand the connection. Like when someone tells me: “That computer is loud”, then twenty minutes later is upset because I did not shut it off. And somehow, not turning it off is indication that I’m not listening to them, don’t love them, etc. Ginger calls these people “high-context”. I’ve learned that I just need to avoid them. There are times when the connection is more immediate, more debated, and I just don’t understand. I feel like these times are often paired with a sort of stress that if I don’t figure it out I’m going to lose something that’s important to me. But I just can’t figure it out. And it’s not until years later, combined with much therapy, that I reason I never could have figured it out, because there wasn’t any sort of linear logic. It was logic, mixed with feelings, perhaps a teaspoon of arrogance, but key parts of the line are left out. This is because they make sense, and are thereto assumed by the speaker. But it makes for a hell of a jump for the listener.
Secondly, I don’t know where to start. I’m well known for telling tales, that get caught up in sub-tales, and other needed information. In my head it’s a stream of consciousness, it makes sense to tell the other tales because they’re somehow related. But if I stop and think, the relation isn’t necessary for the initial story to make sense. When someone asks me about feeling depressed I start telling them about when my parents sent me to counselors (house fire, divorce, high school), when I dropped out and was depressed, therapy after quitting Strategy and breaking up with Maria, feeling depressed and thus breaking up with Susan. Somehow all of these stories feel important to the discussion, and they are. It’s arguable that I make simple problems complicated because I weigh in lots of past, but I think I’m alright at dealing with simple problems. I’ve spent many years thinking and writing about myself and what it’s like to be human; while I’d like to think I can make some summaries as a product of all that work, thinking I can ignore what’s made me who I am when I talk about a problem I’m having seems absurd.
Third, I don’t want to say how I feel unless I can also say what it means. This often leads to my mind following through a sort of flow chart of how much I’ve figured out in my head, not saying anything, trying to figure out where it goes next. To say, “You annoy me”, feels horrible. At the very least I need to work up to, “you annoy me when…”. But the trouble is that I rarely believe this is caused by a problem with someone else. At the very least, that person is simply different than me and it is perfectly reasonable for them to be that way. Then the question in my head becomes, is this a problem with me or with them? That is, is this a problem that upsets me because of a particular problem I have, or one they have? Followed by, is this something I can live with, or does all of the above mean that I need to spend less time around this person so that I can live at ease? Which obviously is leading into the last paragraph because it’s all going on in my head while someone sits there wondering why I’m not responding.
Fourth, it’s too much for me to keep track of without taking notes. Don’t think any of this drivel I write is spoken in real life. I’m far too easily distracted and only accomplish this writing with the help of modern technology. Many people hate talking about problems online. I grew up actually preferring it because I can take the time to think about problems, and reread what has already been said to get my mind back on the right rails when I’m off on a side track. All of the above combines into this and in the past I’ve had to ask someone what they think we’ve resolved and what is still open.
Of course, all this writing hasn’t given me any real usable answers today. Or maybe it has. Maybe it’s just been therapeutic enough for me to find some ease in feelings that are surfacing and looking to be expressed. People often worry about where they’re going in life, what they’re going to do for work, etc. It seems cruel to me that I worry not of these things, but much more about how other people are going to fit in to my life. I feel like a puzzle piece with jagged ends, rolling around the outside of a contrived array of art trying to find a place to connect. I’m out of time, off to lunch and the great out of the basement.
Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir: You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe.
