Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, it’s basically hopeless to think I could remember who would be responsible besides me in any case. Human memory isn’t written to the way computer memory is, and it’s not.. reliable in the same kinds of ways. So I might remember violence and hate and anger, but it’s impossible to know whether that’s real or not – especially since I’m looking at it from the other side of a closed-head injury. Look, the car I was in didn’t have a airbag. I don’t know how much damage was done to my mind, but I know it was enough that I couldn’t stick out my tongue straight and I was mildly aphasic for weeks afterwords. So talking about remembering who to be angry at is really, really silly. Because I *don’t* know what of my memories are real.

As far as $person[0], I remember you asking me who I wanted on my island. Apparently at this late date we can really safely say the answer is you. I remember you wanted to be CEO of pepsi, and you were a fan of Perot, and left post-it notes all over the house encouraging your parents to vote. I remember we went to many dances together, and we danced, and it was fun and wonderful. I remember you had a duck named comet who helped with the mayor of occaquan’s campaign. I remember six little ducklings growing up in my bathtub. These memories feel real. But unless I can convince you to compare notes with me about which of my memories are real and which aren’t, I’m never going to know.

So, you should probably read these in reverse chronological order, meaning you should read them from oldest to newest. See that category marked $person, over there on the right? Yah, click that. 😉

That said, I have a knack for saying exactly the wrong thing to you. For example, when I said something about what are you going to do about having a child, what I meant is, how are you going to handle it if one of your children has a mental illness (which does, believe me, happen) if you can’t handle one of your friends having one.

And the bit about me not even owning a gun.. what I meant to say was “I would never ever use force on you”. I don’t know how that got so tripped up coming out of my fingers.

Remember, I’m afraid of you being afraid of me, and that’s a nasty, nasty, nasty feedback loop. And I can’t just not care about you – I can’t remove you from my history, or from people I care about, or make how I feel about you have unhappened.

I’m in love with you. That’s a fact. It doesn’t have to be a major detriment on your life. I’ve got people in my life who are in love with me who I’m not in love with. It doesn’t keep us from being friends. However, me being in love with you does, often, make me say exactly the wrong thing at the wrong time when you’re concerned.
Please remember that the part of me that needs to understand what happened is *still a young teen*. Never aged. Time stopped for him. Think of him as a process sitting at a breakpoint.

You remember what that was like? Now throw in DID, mania, and the whole box of cookies I’m trying to keep juggled, including adulting, a day job, a music career, and helping my friends not go under.. I actually think I’m doing quite well, but I’m sure Clint will inform me about how well I’m not doing. But sometimes the amazing thing about the dancing bear is not how well it dances but that it dances at all.

So, when the protective order runs out, I’m going to do my best to *not* run over there and try to convince you to talk to me again. Instead, I’m going to ask ALL my friends for help, and use the gentlest, most careful way I can think of, because at this point, I’m convinced, yes, you’re scared out of your mind too. I don’t know if this is because I’m not seeing the real $person but rather reflected light from you inside the warped and twisted reality engine that is my mind outside my CE, and on the edge you’re just fine, or if this is really how you feel. But I’m gonna keep playing it like it’s real until it’s either utterly clear it’s not or something changes.

FWIW, I won’t call you, but you are free to call me. I want you to call me. And I won’t talk about anything a coworker at a place of business wouldn’t talk about, at least until we’ve negotiated a lowering of DEFCON level and figured out what if anything can be salvaged of our friendship. If that helps any. At the very least, it would mean a lot to me if we could get to strangers at DEFCON 5 and me knowing what you saw happen at the party where what I saw happen was a system crash and a suicide by drowning of *me* and a running away from my parents but still being captured and hurt and hurt and hurt.

So, here we are again. Me writing you. Except not as email, because your request that I not do so was starting to come with handcuffs. So I’ll do it here.

Look, despite some of the insane emails that I’ve sent you in years past, I don’t expect you’ll be my lover. I am, however, hoping you can find time to be my friend, at least enough time to help me put together my memories of what happened at your party enough that they make some kind of sense.

I’m *begging* you for help. My mind is badly damaged. I don’t even know if it is a closed head injury from a rear end impact in a car with no airbags at 60 mph (I was stopped, he wasn’t) or if it’s psychological damage from some sort of abuse (memories suggest there was a lot of that, but memories are unreliable), or if it was the experience of being cut off from my support network by Kayti (my experience with Kayti HURT a lot), or it’s just that it wasn’t rated for the number of cycles per second I’ve asked of it repeatedly. (I’ve pushed the limits. A lot.)

In the real, in the now, it works very well most of the time. See my linkedin recommendations. I’m really good at what I do, and I do a lot of things. In mania, I have a lot less control, but since you’ve asked that I not contact you, that’s the only time that I even think about it. Except as a backgrounded task, I’m thinking about it all the time, and it’s hurting all the time. We could really both save ourselves a lot of trouble by just having a conversation while I’m not manic. PLEASE consider this. I know there’s sort of a “Sheer is a horrible monster / Sheer is a rapist / We Hate Sheer” club out there. But I haven’t in fact raped anybody, unless you know something I don’t, and I never would have kicked my sister in the stomach – the threat was just the only way to stop her from *constantly* physically attacking me. Or so my memory (admittedly a fragmented view) tells the tale. And I do in fact try my hardest to be the very best person I can be, every day. As far as your “Don’t talk to me”, it is *really* hard keeping track of reality during periods of mania when you have DID. I invite you to try and do better than me, except that I don’t, because no one should have to go through the experience of *needing* DID, and I think I must.

But I’m begging you. Consider that you might not have the whole story, especially about things you’ve been told by my sister. Consider that if you heard my side of it you might feel differently. And consider that I have no reasonable way of assembling my memories of the night I first went dead inside at all without you.

Please, if I ever meant anything at all to you, please help.

Also.. Our friendship was for a time the best thing in my life. Maybe I remember it as better than it was. But I kind of doubt it. I’d really like it back. Enough to jump through basically any hoop.

There’s a letter on the desktop that I dug out of a drawer
The last truce we ever came to
In our adolescent war
And I start to feel the fever
From the warm air through the screen
You come regular like seasons
Shadowing my dreams
And the Mississippi’s mighty
But it starts in Minnesota
At a place that you could walk across
With five steps down
And I guess that’s how you started
Like a pinprick to my heart
But at this point you rush right through me
And I start to drown
And there’s not enough room
In this world for my pain
Signals cross and love gets lost
And time passed makes it plain
Of all my demon spirits
I need you the most
I’m in love with your ghost
I’m in love with your ghost
Dark and dangerous like a secret (don’t tell a soul)
That gets whispered in a hush
When I wake the things I dreamed about you (don’t tell a soul)
Last night make me blush
And you kiss me like a lover
Then you sting me like a viper
I go follow to the river
Play your memory like a piper
And I feel it like a sickness
How this love is killing me
I’d walk into the fingers
Of your fire willingly
And dance the edge of sanity
I’ve never been this close
In love with your ghost, ooh
Ooh
Unknowing captor
You never know how much you
Pierce my spirit
But I can’t touch you
Can you hear it
A cry to be free
Oh I’m forever under lock and key
As you pass through me
Now I see your face before me
I would launch a thousand ships
To bring your heart back to my island
As the sand beneath me slips
As I burn up in your presence
And I know now how it feels
To be weakened like Achilles
With you always at my heels
This bitter pill I swallow
Is the silence that I keep
It poisons me I can’t swim free
The river is too deep
Though I’m baptized by your touch
I am no worse than most
In love with your ghost (in love with your ghost)
You are shadowing my dreams
(In love with your ghost)
(In love with your ghost)

For $person[0]

Shame
Doesn’t Become you
There are no mistakes
In the final view

No blame
How could it be so wrong
That your heart was braver
Than your will was strong

For every path you follow
There’s another left behind
Every door you don’t kick open
There’s a million more to try
For everything you taught me
Here’s the one I learned the best
There is nothing but the moment
Don’t you waste it on regret

I’ll Go
Who will it have to be?
Will you just get by?
Forget what you need?
Just know
I don’t need to fit in (But i’d like to)
Is there room for you
In your life with him

For every path you follow
There’s another left behind
Every door you don’t kick open
There’s a million more to try
For everything you taught me
Here’s the one I learned the best
There is nothing but the moment
don’t you waste it on regret

It’s out of my hands – out of my hands
But I miss my friend – I miss my friend
So this is the price of honesty
I’m not sorry (But it hurts. A lot.)

For every path you follow
There’s another left behind
Every door you don’t kick open
There’s a million more to ty
For everything you taught me
Here’s the one I learned the best
There is nothing but the moment
Don’t you waste it on regret

Oh, the moment.. happens now
The moment.. everything..
How could it be so wrong?

“And if it rains again tonight.. I can think light-years ahead.. or I can put myself back a thousand years ago.. and say, well I’ve always been here before or it will be good to be born..
I’m a slow loser, but I’m a fast learner, that much I know. Anyone can go, that much I know. Anyone can go, that much I know.. Anyone can go..” –Jefferson Starship, “Hyperdrive”

So, normally our minds remain sync-locked with frames being passed to them from our senses – or the message bus that represents the edge.. or $WHATEVER is out there. We can’t really know where the information is coming from or even how much it’s being modified on the way in to our conscious experience. However, we can experience some really interesting things if we are willing to play with that sync lock a little.

You see, the human mind has a pulse – several, actually, the clocks that drive it that we can see on a EEG.. and it also has a throttle.

Get really engaged with the world around you, and you start running at processing rates higher than those frames coming from the outside world. Go far enough, and you can outrun your ghost. (Your ghost is the history of all the decisions you’ve already made, and all your fears and doubts, as living neural networks influencing your free will and your conscious experience)

How do you do this? Well, the easy and obvious way is to consciously choose to not sleep, and then stay engaged in your life. It’s not enough to not sleep and passively watch TV or something. You have to be *participating* – in a way that results in your making many decisions a second. But, if you do that, well, shortly, you’re on the linear.

It’s a bit of a roller coaster. Push your mind hard, and you’ll climb in speed. Slack off, and you’ll slow down. Close your eyes for sleep, and you’ll start the landing process. Take any of a certain family of drugs (seroquel being the one that’s most easily available to me), and you’ll enter a downward ramp with approach to land.

Some things worth knowing about riding:

1) It takes practice. It ain’t easy. Your mind will at first be susceptible to all sorts of weird oscillations and feedback loops and wobbles. Every time you ride, you get better at damping these out and staying on the horse.
2) It ain’t always easy, and it ain’t always fun.
3) The pain is temporary, the gain is permanent. Thusly, it’s worth riding. To those of you who have never been, I would strongly suggest going at least once. No, you won’t die. A lot of people have told me it’s going to kill me. It never has yet, and I’ve been on it many, many times. And every time, I come back stronger, faster, more capable. Ask my friends how I compare to the average Joe Sixpack in terms of what I can do.
4) Emotions that you can damp out and/or ignore in ordinary reality, you are going to *feel* while you’re on the ride. Study anger management. Be unafraid and unashamed of crying. Be okay with feeling things, because you’re gonna.
5) People *not on the ride* are going to seem *very* slow to you. You’re going to seem fast to them. You’re on a linear accelerator, after all. This is relativity at work. Don’t let it throw you, and have much patience, because you’re going to need it – by the time you’re 2:1 it’s going to be a challenge to communicate at all.

In my case, balancing arrogance and humility becomes a lot more challenging while I’m doing it. Some of this is needful – because my friends will encourage me to come down before I’m ready, and I have to have enough backbone to say “my ride, not yours.”. I probably overdo this.. but I might also overdo humility in everyday life, or more likely submissiveness. That I’m not getting the life I want even in my dreams suggests to me a lot that something is not right in my head regarding this. This is my mind.. I for sure should be king in here.

Note to mental health professionals: I do this by choice, by my own free will. I will voluntarily contact someone and/or go to a mental hospital if I ever feel like harming myself or others, or like I’ve taken actions that would likely lead to that result. I will be the first to admit that my view with regard to $person[0] is far from rational at all times, and that’s more foregrounded when I’m in this state. However, I’m getting better and better at not reaching out, at just accepting the situation for what it is. On the other hand, I am growing more and more loathing of the other people ($family_member[0] and $family_member[1]) who have done things to make the situation worse. I somewhat forgive them, but only somewhat, because I don’t believe in complete forgiveness until a situation is fixed. At this point I’m willing to offer whatever apology or amends they feel would be appropriate that I can also agree makes any kind of sense, so if you all are doing this as a grudge thing, consider letting it go? But, as far as $family_member[1] – at some point, I’ll stop poking at you with how much I loathe the way $religion[0] loads on my mind – but I’m never going to adopt it as a firm belief for the majority of this system, it’s too sick, twisted, and wrong.

I’ve probably already talked about this, but I think one of the reasons that discussions about politics and religion often end in arguments is that English is not a good language for talking about such things.

It has some basic flaws – the biggest one, by far, is the overloads, Not as big, but also frustrating, is that there’s no great way to speak of relative certainty of a statement of truth without adding a lot of words.

The overloads thing is a serious problem. There are many, many neural symbols that map the word ‘God’, for example, and many, many that map the word ‘Love’. So the statement ‘God is Love’ can map out all sorts of ways in different people’s minds as far as what the actual meaning, in neural symbols – ultimately the most real post-linguistic definition you can have – in different minds. And ultimately, as my friend Tory reminded me repeatedly, you can end up with semantic arguments – which waste a lot of energy and do not move the ball down the field.

For those of you who are not programmers, a overload is when one function call can execute more than one set of code. In programming languages, overloads are type constrained – that is, you can only have one overload for String Foo(String Bar) – you could have a String Foo(Int Bar), but not a second String Foo(String Bar). English has no such constraints, nor does it have any easy way short of a lot of discussion – such as I often have with $future-person[0] – about *which* exact meaning for Love and God you have – to nail down exactly what is meant by what. Linguistically, overloads are just asking for trouble.

So, I have this problem. It’s a persistent one, and it’s likely to continue being a persistent one for the forseable future.

During certain periods in my internal cycle, if I open the throttles on my mind and give it something entertaining to chew on, like recording a album, dancing, or thinking about life, there’s no rev limiter.

It spins up, faster and faster, until eventually it starts to wobble and shakes itself into a shutdown condition. Next thing I know, I’m somewhere where the doors don’t open. Generally I get sprung fairly quickly, generally no one has been actually hurt although there is sometimes some property damage, usually caused by the cops spike stripping me.

I’ve learned to avoid driving while doing it. Safest that way. However, even when I do it in my own house, people come and tell me that I don’t have atonomy over my own body, that even though I’m threatening no one and I’m eating and drinking, I’m not permitted to do this.

Many of my friends think that this activity is seriously unhappy-making, and undesirable, and it’s only a matter of time before I kill myself or someone else.

Here’s why it’s challenging: every time, from my perspective, it’s a win.

Every time, I have more mental capacity, more flexibility, more mental power and capability. This isn’t illusory – I can often measure it very real-world ways. Things I couldn’t do before the ramp up that I can do afterwords. And I suspect that it is one path to developing http://www.sheer.us/weblogs/?p=3211. I’ve learned not to try to contact $person[0], although apparently I haven’t mastered yet not contacting $person[1]. So I need to improve the software so that it keeps me from contacting CLASS($person[]). Which I will make a honest attempt at. (I don’t stop missing these people ever. I don’t think it’s likely that I ever will. But, you want to remove me from your life, I figure that’s your right. Just forgive me if I want to build the ability to dream about you anyway.

But.. even if I remove that possibility, it’s clear that I’m growing whenever I climb the linear mental accelerator that no-sleep during a approach window represents.

At this point, I’m thinking I should plan these. My body seems to like every six months for them – I think I should take vacation time, I should have my lawyer on call to block any attempt to commit me that isn’t as bona fide as it comes, and I should just really embrace this as this is how I choose to be. Slowly my friends are coming to see my point of view. I think increasingly they’re starting to see that my life is not giving me what I need, and that it’s not reasonable to expect me to sit here with one engine out and the other at idle when I was made to fly.

I wish more people would join me. I’ve got reasons to think others have done this before me.. it’s all over the music of Owl City, for example, and hinted at in U2 and sometimes VNV Nation.

Every time, the experience with the linear accelerator convinces me I should take another ride. And I wonder, to what extent are people telling me not to do it because they’re afraid to do it themselves? How many of the experts that tell me how wrong and dangerous this is have done it themselves?

One possibility that I’m considering strongly is that I’m not actually at the edge of my mind, and that I’m supposed to be. That the people I see in my ordinary reality are reflected light from the real people that are out there filtered through many, many layers – too many layers – of neural filters built out of my persistent and irrational fears. I can’t tell what anyone else’s conscious experience is, and as far as I can tell, no one else can tell what mine is, although I encourage you, if you have the technology to read my mind, please do so. If you can help me reconnect with the people I can’t handle losing, please do so.

$person[0], I wonder if you read this blog, a lot a lot. I will admit I find it likely that you do, or that you have a friend reading it for you to watch for certain things. Wish I knew what they were. If so, I can’t say so in cleartext most of the time, but I need your help. A abuser destroyed part of my mind, and I’m just guessing at what happened with little but static and noise to go on. Apparently your friendship was something that part of me rested on, and while I accept the loss because I must, it never stops hurting and I can’t find any way to make it stop. I told you if you told me your lines I would respect them, but my fear is your lines are never and nowhere, and I also fear this may be because you believe things about me that just are not true, and the only part of me fearless enough to even try to approach you is the part of me that is the least representative of my ability to be a normal, contained individual. Please believe that the person you met IRL the first time I came to visit you this century is representative of who I am in person. But I can’t do that in email, especially not when I’m in ‘trust and send’ mode, which I can only really enter with you, for reasons that will become apparent when we talk, if they haven’t already.

$person[1], I don’t even know what I said to make you so angry. I have zero memory of it, it happened in a blackout from my perspective. I doubt you’re reading my blog, as I have to accept I probably don’t matter that much to you. So be it, but I wish we were still friends.

I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere
I know I’ll find you somehow
Somehow, somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

The mist is lifting slowly
I can see the way ahead
And I’ve left behind the empty streets
That once inspired my life
And the strength of the emotion
Is like thunder in the air
‘Cos the promise that we made each other
Haunts me to the end

I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere
I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere you can hear my voice
I know I’ll find you somehow
Somehow, somehow
I know I’ll find you somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

The secret of your beauty
And the mystery of your soul
I’ve been searching for in everyone I meet
And the times I’ve been mistaken
It’s impossible to say
And the grass is growing
Underneath our feet

I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere
I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere you can hear my voice
I know I’ll find you somehow
Somehow, somehow
I know I’ll find you somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

[Interlude:]
You see I know you’re out there somewhere
O yes I know you’re out there somewhere
You see I know I’ll find you somehow
O yes I know I’ll find you somehow

the words that I remember
From my childhood still are true
That there’s none so blind
As those who will not see
And to those who lack the courage
And say it’s dangerous to try
Well they just don’t know
That love eternal will not be denied

I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere
I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere you can hear my voice
I know I’ll find you somehow
Somehow, somehow
I know I’ll find you somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

Yes I know it’s going to happen
I can feel you getting near
And soon we’ll be returning
To the fountain of our youth
And if you wake up wondering
In the darkness I’ll be there
My arms will close around you
And protect you with the truth

I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere, somewhere
I know you’re out there somewhere
Somewhere you can hear my voice
I know I’ll find you somehow
Somehow, somehow
I know I’ll find you somehow
And somehow I’ll return again to you

—-

Note to $person – if you read this blog, which I kind of doubt – I probably should create a separate tag for future-$person. I know you are not her yet. I have no idea how I ended up in such a strange situation – well, that’s not true, I have some guesses, most of which have to do with the futility of committing suicide inside a hypervisor that’s programmed to not let you die or possibly the concept of quantum immortality as part of MWI – but I won’t be showing up on your doorstep again unless something goes seriously wrong with my mind. If you ever discover that you have a Sheer-shaped hole in your life, feel free to approach me. I will understand that you’re not her yet, but still welcome you in my life.

You might want to review quantum immortality and MWI if that last bit didn’t make any sense to you.

And for the rest of you, no, I don’t think I’m currently any crazier than usual, or approaching insanity any faster than usual. I do think that my recent spate of creative activity has, as my friend Jeff would say, loosened my fibers some. But not anywhere near redline. I am sleeping every night.

So, one of the quotes that I’ve often given of my internal version of $person is “The people in heaven and hell inhabit the same physical space. The difference is in what’s going on in their minds.”

And, this may be one of my more tinfoil-hat thoughts, but it occurs to me it would be much easier to immerse people in a utopia and then degrade it inside their minds to be hellish than the other way around. Anyone who has studied information science knows that it’s much easier to take a optimal signal and degrade it than to take a suboptimal signal and enhance it – this is kind of the point of the oft-mocked Enhance Button trope.

Now, it’s really not unreasonable to think that I might be in $UTOPIA, experiencing $DYSTOPIA – since not a lot of horrible things are happening to me personally and almost all of them involve communication streams from other people, it would not be that difficult for my neural network to be ‘green-screening’ things – subbing out news and facebook with alternate signals to make it look like the world is a much worse place than it is.

I’ve talked about how our conscious experience is at some distance from our senses – there are many layers of neurons between the part of us that is on the ride, and the part of us that is detecting the ride. So, this isn’t as insane as it sounds on the surface. Of course, you kind of have to play it as it lays – you can’t know if what you’re experiencing is real or not, but you have to treat it as it is – if for no other reason than you wouldn’t want to risk the other individuals on the ride by treating it as if it was a video game unless you had absolute proof that there isn’t a monolithic reality and everyone is getting a custom feed of the ride, something which is rather hard to prove or disprove either way. (One of the things I’ve talked about is the challenges of authenticating God, or determining whether what you’re experiencing is a diety or mental illness)

And, I know there’s something wrong with my mind. It appears to me to be a rare and intermittent fault, but it could be that it’s far more prevalent than I think and that in fact most of what I’m experiencing is in some way altered by it. Debugging the system that’s damaged from inside the system that’s damaged is a challenge, which is why I have so much hope that my friends will choose to help me figure out what’s real and what isn’t rather than retreating from me in fear because there’s something wrong with my mind. Of course from my perceptions, I’m not the only one who’s a bit on the sick side – in fact, almost everyone I see here is crazy in one way or another. It may be, if evolution is the correct backstory for us, that we’re pushing the bounderies of the size or configuration of neural network that’s stable. Or, if you like my personal pet theory, the problem may not be the hardware but rather the memetic cruft that has built up over the years – bad software, malware even, which is resulting in suboptimal results.

As I’ve talked about before, it’s possible the reason I’m experiencing $DYSTOPIA is that I chose to do so, either because I wanted the experience for artistic reasons (This seems extra-reasonable when considering the current track I’m working on) or because I wanted a challenge. It’s also possible that I’m being punished for some previous behavior (karma) although it seems like if the purpose of the punishment is to help me grow, it might help to know what the behavior was. If the purpose of the punishment is just to punish, then the universe is governed by forces that are at least partially evil, and it could just be random or sadistic.

Anyway, if it’s not the work of a agent at all, but rather simple random chance that has led to me experiencing something less than utopic even though I’m immersed in a utopia (which is possible, see the thesis at the top of this post) then it seems like it very much behooves me to debug whatever’s wrong with my mind and figure out how to get back to the ideal experience. And, of course, if it’s possible within the confines of the amount of CPU I have available to me, it seems like it behooves me to be able to experience a utopia even if one’s not actually there. Clearly our minds have ample CPU to make up reality out of whole cloth (as I discuss in this article) so the question is how to I motivate the rest of my mind to work with my conscious experience to make this happen. In general, the ability to be a Bal Shem – to hack my neurological software to do whatever I want it to do – is a ability I often cultivate.