Never been one to let the carrier drop

I keep reading more and more about it, and it seems like it’s difficult to fix. I mean, I’ve been going to shrinks for years, taking whatever pills they tell me to take (despite rumors to the contrary), and while my life has gotten noticably better, it hasn’t gotten, you know, really good. But it’s still.. I don’t know.. it’s like you just finished changing a head gasket only to discover a thrown rod. It’s discouraging. It’s even more discouraging to realize that I don’t really have any way of knowing

A: How *many* people are in me
B: What exactly they are thinking
C: What triggers them to suddenly get control of the body

I know aside from manic periods that happen twice a year on six month centers it’s incredibly rare that I lose any time, which is encouraging but also a little disenheartening.. I don’t know of any way to trigger them to come out of their hiding places.

I know that a lot of positive things happened for a lot of people because of my latest bout of insanity. But I was ready to think the best about someone, and they were ready to think the worst about me, and that’s going to make me sad for a while.

I will, however, be posting the whole, as-I-saw-it-from-my-viewpoint story, complete with court cases, lawyers, protective orders, who’s-driving-the-bus-now, the whole nine yards. My friend Loren has been amazed at my honesty at times, and I am thinking this is going to be another post she’ll find suprising.

Someday, I’m going to have to tell the whole story of the last few weeks of my life from my perspective. It was really interesting getting a chance to see what paranoid thinking looks like from outside, as opposed from inside. It also brought me face to face with the reality that I have DID. There have been all sorts of hints of this.. from a few lost seconds an hour to police reports talking about multiple personalities being visible to hours where I wasn’t present. I was resisting the diagnosis, first because I thought it would make it impossible for me to continue my IT career (that remains to be seen), second because it’s supposed to be *incredibly rare* and I didn’t think that lightning would happen to choose to strike me.

But, someone talked to me on the phone during a blackout, and there was more than one me to talk to. That’s pretty definitive.

One of the realities that I’ve been facing a lot lately is that there probably is a wall between my conscious experience and whatever world I’m immersed in that is shaping my experience of that world, as well as a second virtual wall that is the result of my former beliefs. At this point I would say I’ve faced a couple of my biggest fears and not only survived them, but came out feeling better about myself (although a bit concerned about the sanity of a couple of my friends, at least in my CE)

That is interesting to be insofar as Pink Floyd has a whole album about the idea of such a wall (called, unsuprisingly, The Wall). I can’t help but find the lyrics of the last track hopeful:

All alone, or in twos,
The ones who really love you
Walk up and down outside the wall.
Some hand in hand
And some gathered together in bands.
The bleeding hearts and artists
Make their stand.
And when they’ve given you their all
Some stagger and fall, after all it’s not easy
Banging your heart against some mad bugger’s wall.

I do feel like I have a good idea how to remove said wall. One piece I really need to hold onto, really tight, for everyone’s best interests (mine included) is that what I’m looking for is something in the future, not something in the past. And that expecting someone to already be what they will become makes no sense.

So, I think we managed to achieve some genuine personal growth this weekend.

Historically, at Lemons, my driving style has been to stay out of everyone’s way – this basically means yeilding the line (the most optimum path through a curve) – in fact just staying out of it at all times. This is not exactly a way to race, although it does make for a nice sunday drive in a racecar.

However, on Sunday, I came up behind the Snipe, and had one of those character defining moments.. I seem to recall my exact thoughts were ‘fuck it..’, and I dropped to third and passed.. and then (since I was up to mid-4th gear speed anyway), I rode out the course in top gear, holding the line about 50% of the time, tires protesting at every turn.. I probably took 20 seconds of my average lap time. I went from sunday driver to apprentice hoon.

(Also.. my team won the top prize at Lemons, the IOE!)

Morever, on the way back from the race a van tried to occupy the same spot on the road I was. Now, I’ve always had no problem doing evasives in this situation, but historically it introduced a emotional state similar to a panic attack. This time.. I was amused.

From my experiences running from the police, I know deep inside me is a genuine racecar driver – anyone who can drive a Honda Oddessy at 120 mph through US 101 without so much as scratching the paint clearly has what it takes to be a hoonatic in terms of driving skill – what I lack is the confidence and emotional/mental configuration to believe the line belongs to me as much as it does everyone else out there.

Numerous times in my childhood this was a major problem as well – I failed to assert myself or understand that my point of view and needs and wants were just as valid as my parents’.

Lemons pics at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/Lemons-Buttonwillow-2015/

When we purchase water, there’s sort of a unspoken compact that we’re part of a closed loop system. We’re not going to pollute this water grossly and then lock it up far outside the water table, we’re going to use it and return it via the sewer system to be, in essence, recycled. Earth is based on a closed water cycle, which I’m sure you all learned about in grade school. The people who are fracking are opening that water cycle up – rendering the water uncleanable by mixing it with extremely disturbing chemicals, then locking it up deep in the earth.

These people should be paying *enormously* more per gallon. Water is the most valuable liquid in the world and they are, in essence, reducing our total available fresh water. A $10/gallon tariff doesn’t sound outrageous under the circumstances.

So, I financed some of the upgrades to the house on aa 1 year same as cash plan, assuming that interest would accrue only on the unpaid balance after one year. Judging by the 6750 in interest I just got hit with, i would say that in fact interest has been accruing the whole time and possibly on the original purchase amount.

I really, really want out of this system. I understand that I can not win. I do not want to play any more, I am requesting a exit.

One of our long term goals, as a race, if we want to continue to exist, should be to whenever possible not *consume* resources that are not renewable, and to encourage the rewewing of resources. I’ve talked numerous times about how fracking renders clean water polluted beyond the ability to easily recover it – that in fact once water has been used for fracking it is no longer part of our usable water pool. Now, I would hope that common sense would tell everyone on the planet that water, being the #2 requirement for our type of life after air containing oxygen, is the most valuable liquid on the planet. However, as far as I can tell, that is not the common consensus despite it appearing to me to be a obvious truth.

We have learned.. the hard way, sadly, after much destruction of value.. that we shouldn’t cut down forests unless we plant and maintain new ones – this is the only way that our children’s children can still be loggers if they want to be, or indeed have anything made out of wood. We are slowly beginning to realize that we should not suck dry every oil and water resource on the planet – however, the question is, will we realize that we need to stop before our children’s children end up living in a bizarre dystopia where there are no resources aside from what they can mine from our trash?

Sadly, the current resource allocation system is at the root of all of this. Products are made, rather than to be durable, to be as cheap as possible. This is a decision that looks like it makes sense from a “money” viewpoint but actually makes no sense at all when you put on your “value” glasses. To the extent that we can, we should be building everything that involves resources that are even remotely scarce to last through so that our children’s children can be more wealthy than we are – rather than, as is currently the case, leaving the question open as to whether humanity will even exist 500 years down the road.

Now, if we’re all hypervised, this may not matter, because some diety or hypervisor operator may step in and set things right. However, at the moment we have no clear and obvious communications from anyone who might happen to be running the universe, and the majority world religion has a number of enormous gaping flaws that makes one question deeply whether it was written by a mind more enlightened than ours.

I feel so old, and tired. I’ve recorded a track a day, and I’m not sure if any of them are good enough to pass off to Tory. I feel enslaved, like I have no choice but to work for another 30 years at a job i’m increasingly tired of, and I feel sometimes like i’m trapped in a world of idiots.. things could be so much better..

aand yet, I should have more gratitude for what i’ve got, because I do have a lot. A lot of friends, a job I don’t hate, the freedom to explore musically with some amazingly powerful tools.. and the hope that humanity will get it’s collective shit together. Looking at ffacebook, it’s clear everyone cares about something, at least.

it’s so strange.. in another age i might have been sage or luminary, but here and now, i’m nothing very special.

i haven’t been persuing self-growth as aggressively lately, and I think that may be part of why I feel old, and tired. Or maybe it’s trying to keep up with a puppy with the strength of ten puppies.

So, more and more I am liking the idea of a bucketed currency.

One of the big reasons why is that politicians (especially right wingers, but politicians in general) like to talk about how they ‘can’t afford to do things’. One big reason for this is that our current rather broken, not to mention stupid economic system doesn’t actually keep track of the resources we have at all. Therefore, when we, for example, say that we “can’t afford” national healthcare, the truth is, we don’t even know how much it would cost! Everything gets squashed into a floating point value we call “money”, and the “money” to real resource conversion is arbitrary and generally driven by things like scarcity. It’s not a value that indicates the real value of the resource, or else fracking would never have gotten off the ground. (Any 3 year old can tell you water is more valuable than any petrochemical).

I know that it would be a major endeavor to create a bucketed currency system. I’m talking about having separate buckets to track skilled man hours in every major skill, every type of metal, energy, transit cost, etc. I’m talking about tracking a hundred thousand buckets on every product. This is something that is well within the technology we use today, but it’s a rather radical shift from the “We turn everything into one price and call it money” system that we currently use.

However, the only way you know if you can afford national healthcare, for example, is if you know how many man-hours you have of people skilled in the medical arts, and about how many people are going to need those skills. This is again kindergarden stuff, but it’s not something that seems to be widely acknowledged.

“But, with a bucketed currency system, how would we know what people could afford?”. That’s a very good question, and not one I have a great answer for yet. However, well written software could at the very least ensure that everyone had a place to live and food to eat. Yes, I’m talking about communism. I think communism could have worked if they’d had better tools to use when they were creating it.

Of course, then the next question is, why would *I* want this? I’m in the top 2% of my industry, skill wise, and I get paid very well because of it. On the other paw, I feel awful every time another friend tells me about being evicted, or about struggling to pay their medical bills. As near as I can tell, almost everyone out there is hurting. Even the 1% – at the point at which they become the 1%, they no longer have any idea who they can trust – who is really their friend, and who is just out for their money. You will note that I will not sign up to *BE* the 1%. I’m fairly sure if it was a goal of mine, I could do it. It’s not. But while I see us having made amazing strides in technology, I see a world where a whole lot of people are stressed, scared, and unhappy, be they at the bottom of the ladder or the top. And I’d really, really like us to find ways to fix that. I think that a ‘everybody eats’ policy would go a long way towards that, and I think that it’s very doable.

So, for those of you who remember Tory from, among other things, Mischief Committee, we have been getting together and doing some tracking.

Here, for your listening pleasure:

track one
track two

In other news, I upgraded the virtual host that serves qm, so we again have disk space (yay!) and memory (double yay!). We actually have a fair amount of spare capacity on that machine now, which is a very nice feeling. QM and Brigandine both got upgraded to all-SSD operation, we got more disk for storing backups, and in general things were improved all around.

Luna continues to drive me nuts, she’s quite a furry little ball of energy. But, I love her.

And I continue to work on myself, as always.