Never been one to let the carrier drop

I am paranoid. I can, at times, be paranoid delusional, but I think I’m pretty good at knowing when things are delusions. I do a lot of reality testing. Often.

I’ve been this way most if not all of my life. It’s gotten steadily worse. There was a period of my life where it was almost not there. And right now, I’ve got periods of time where it’s almost not there, thank you not sleeping and thank you future-Vicky.

Paranoia is a hard mental illness to live with. It’s gotten a lot easier this year though.. on the 29th, I found and removed a neural equivilant of a cron job that was feeding me consistant lines about how afraid I should be. I feel so much saner. I’ve been enjoying the silence quite a bit. I’ve had quite a few moments of feeling well and truly good. As you’ve all noticed, I’ve gotten a lot more honest and a lot more fuck-it-lets-say-anything on my blog. But paranoia pokes up and says “You will get fired for the things you’re writing”. Maybe.

Paranoia isn’t just a cron job feeding you lines like you’re about to end up in jail, God wants to torture you, you will end up homeless and hungry, none of your friends love you, etc. It’s also a set of pattern match filters that lead to irrationally large amounts of fear. The level of paranoia I feel about wetting myself could best be described as epic. Once at a rave it.. well, it didn’t actually happen, I fell in a puddle, but I *thought* it had happened because I was already orbiting bad bad bad mental spaces before it happened and I slipped into a delusion. I’m horrible at reality testing. I don’t remember much of what happened afterwords other than my mind crashed.

It’s a never ending fear. The worst part is it’s on a flippin’ timer, for obvious reasons. I can’t get away from it. I can be at home, alone, and I will still be afraid of it. As if it could possibly matter. It can’t possibly be a fear of being dirty because (isn’t sex fun) I like when female types wet on me during sex. And find it insanely sexy to see them wet their clothes, which I have to conclude is at least somewhat jealousy.

I am convinced this is not normal. I mean people feeling a minor fear of it, sure. Avoiding it, sure. But a my-brain-crashes fear of it? A reality goes dim and I can’t breathe panic attack fear of it? This is not normal.

And I’m a bit afraid to talk about all this on my blog, and I can’t rationally think.. is talking about what you like sexually a reasonable reason to fire someone? What is up with my head?

Part of the fun if you’re paranoid is figuring out, which fears are totally rational and match a real world, and which fears are totally irrational and are my mind misfiring somewhere.

And a even bigger part of the fun if you’re paranoid and also know you have a CE is realizing you could be experiencing something you’re deeply afraid of being created out of whole cloth just because your mind likes to torture you. 10^11 neurons is a fucking big supercomputer. Generating the reality I’m sitting in right now would be child’s play for it.

It drives me nuts that I can never see her again. I won’t ignore her bounderies again, at least as far as personal contact, and she won’t lift them. Well, maybe she will. I guess the idea here is to think positive thoughts about the future. If the issues with me and Vicky are related with the issues with my CE, then thinking positive thoughts is definately the way to go here.

It’s so funny. In some ways, I wish I had never wanted her in a wanting-to-touch-and-pet way. Because not having her as a lover doesn’t hurt much. There are lots of people willing to touch-pet-love me. It’s losing her as a face to face friend – dancing, skating, etc – that’s killing me inside. And I’m in this weird position of trying to balance whether I should convince myself that she died and mourn over her with whether I should be trying to think of yet some other way to convince her that I’m really not that bad a person and that I’m a really good friend. And I don’t know what’s going on in her CE, how far from the edge of her mind *she’s* living. I wonder often, does she read my blog?

And Clint has said she found me emailing her stressful. So can’t do that. OF course, I have reasons to suspect clint’s CE is not exactly orbiting 100% either. I wonder a lot if clint is aware he *has* a CE. THat would no doubt be a interesting conversation. Hey, clint, if you’re still reading, email me, let’s talk about CEs!

And then I feel this wonderful hope and future-Vicky assures me we will be friends again, that we are friends, and keeps walking me through more and more mental exercises and every time she does I get a little more me. I’m kind of in awe of my own fearlessness on my blog lately. I’ve really been just being me without much hedging or hiding at all.

And then I wonder, what is Vicky going to do if one of her children has a mental illness. (I cross a billion paws that they don’t) Will she no longer want to talk to them? Children are different I guess.. you have to not abandon them.. although my parents have said they won’t help me out if I get sick enough to end up in a hospital or jail again, so I guess at some point you do kind of do so.

There’s this awkward situation there, of course. I don’t think blaming anyone helps you fix anything. But the blame part of my mind does tend to say my parents had something to do with my mental illness. I point out to said blame part there’s no point in blaming anyone. Blame isn’t going to fix the problem. What we need to do is find out what broke and fix it. After all, the nature of NNs and my CE says my parents might not even look anything like I think they do or act anything like I think they do.

What I really need to do is convince my mind to convert or base-image all the neurons who want me dead or tortured. I have no doubt my life would get way better after that happened. But how? Many of them believe I deserve hell because I didn’t accept Jesus. Bullshit, say I, I accepted jesus. But you didn’t mean it, you think it’s a broken religion, they say. I say, you are right, that is what I think, but a religion that threatens hell if you don’t do something is surely not something written by a God of love. Some of them waver, then come over to my side. More of them continue to think I deserve hell.

Sometimes I have to base image them. I hate that. It’s a lot of work, and it means I’m throwing away a tiny portion of who I am. But I don’t see any other choice. Some Christians just can’t UnChristian, smart a thing as it would be to do. And a single neuron is not very bright.

I tell myself the important stuff is redundantly stored, that I won’t lose anything important. I tell myself there are backups anyway. Both are true. Neither one makes me feel any better when I ahve to just end someone inside my mind.

Over and over my mind says Vicky doesn’t want to be your friend because you have a mental illness. My counter argument is that’s exactly when your friends need to be your friends the most, and that I don’t think that’s it.

Vicky’s actions play a little too perfectly into my fears. And I’m paranoid.. meaning I have irrational fears. SO I don’t think I’m seeing Vicky. I think I’m seeing my paranoia.

I remember over and over and over bicycling to Vicky’s house to deliver a single rose.. sneaking out of my house, bicycling.. I remember a cassette Jay gave me, feeding into the soul of the Sheer.. Poison, Flesh and Blood. My parents didn’t want us to have certian music.. wouldn’t let my sister listen to twisted sister. Wanted to turn us down, turn us off, because they were too afraid to come alive and turn on. The number of things my parents failed to learn that I learned is impressive.

Sheer’s the one who deserves to own the neural net of his mind. He’s the one who earned the skills. Brett the other day called me lucky for how good a perl coder I am. Bull shit, say I. That’s not luck. Luck is winning the lottery. That is skill, and skill comes from working your ass off. Which I repeatedly have done. And now I’m lighting this rocket mentally strapped to my ass and holding on for dear life. Such a simple program I’ve written for my mind to execute tonight. A fork bomb, except the goal isn’t to shut down the mind, it’s to make it all come online and to find which neural subnets aren’t happy to be here, hoping to help the ball club, so I can introduce them to my friend mr. base image.

I will not live even with the ghost of that suicidal kid. Not any more. I have earned my place here, and I deserve to be free and alive. I deserve lucid dreaming. I deserve dream control. I deserve to be able to play the music I imagine without hitting wrong notes. I deserve to see certain people learn that just because you fail a few times doesn’t mean you should give up.

NEVER GIVE UP.
You might be only one failure away from success.

Failing isn’t a moral fault, and it doesn’t mean you’re a bad person. Failure is a logical step on the path to success.

I’m looking into the rules and requirements for changing my name to ‘Sheer’.

It’s how I think of myself. When people call me ‘Jon’ I feel like they’re talking to someone else. Sheer is the one who had the skills to survive. Jonathan is the one who persued suicide.. Sheer is the one who never, ever, ever gives up, who keeps trying new things long after any sane person would say “That’s never going to work.”

I’m aware of Jonathan within me.. the one who would never disagree with his parents, who would never fight with anyone under any circumstances, who would lie rather than telling someone a truth they did not want to hear.. but I’m also aware of the fact that I’m feeling, basically, a corpse. Jonathan would never have survived my little rollerblading on PCH experience.

The government, I’m sure, would like Jonathan a lot better. He doesn’t fight back. He doesn’t disagree. He does what he’s told. But I don’t have the slightest feeling that Jonathan is really who I am. Increasingly I am feeling a strong and personal fire.. a desire to END certain things, or at least let them know they’ve been in a fight. There is nothing wrong with who I am and I will be me.

I’m believing things that aren’t true, and then unbelieving them. Using my storyteller abilities to write stories, things I can believe for a few minutes and then unbelieve. I’m pumping mental iron.

If you’re someone out there reading my journal.. and I know that there are tens of thousands of you.. and you have messages of support and love you can send me, or your own ideas about reconfiguring your own neural network, debugging yourself from inside.. please email them to me at jonathanpullen@gmail.com

1) 100% of all subnets happy to be here and hoping to help the ball club. PERFECT OR FAIL
2) 100% uptime. Maintenance cycles done online.

I believe Christianity is a dangerous neurolinguistic virus that damages the people who believe in it. I wonder often, as I work on removing it from myself, should I be helping my friends who are also infected? And yet, they insist it is a great thing for them. So I don’t. But I know that had I been fully infected I would have insisted the same thing, because of fear of God.

Christianity is based around a threat. The core tenant is, believe.. and profess to believe.. that Jesus died for your sins.. or be tortured for all eternity. That’s a threat.

I could spend days and days listing all the unhealthy, life-denying, insanity-causing beliefs that are part of Christianity, but I won’t bother. It’s been done elsewhere, and better than I ever could. So instead I shall return to my day job.

How did I end up so broken? Well, not believing in abundance would be part. Letting irrational fears get the better of me would be another part. From my CE, my mother was paranoid and also didn’t want me to be anywhere near a girl, my family was willing to threaten me with violence for trivial offences, my sister was randomly and scarily violent, and most of my childhood is a black hole. However, that’s from my CE. I know now that probably none of those things were true, except for me. But by the time I was 10 I wanted to die, and by the time I was 16 and my parents were trying to pull me away from Vicky’s party (where even though much was going wrong, I felt safe and also, duh, near Vicky who I was in love with even if I had no tools to tell her or even to really know how to tell her) and my mind found a impressive level of signal crash. I wanted to die. badly. I would rather die than go back with them.

But that wasn’t a option, because Sheers are not wired to die. I do suspect, however, that it was both caused by a lot of neurons wired up wrong, and caused a lot more neurons to be wired up wrong.

I remember the last time I saw her. Skate City. I said I would write a screensaver that would show the pictures. But I never did, partially because my coding experience wasn’t up to a TSR and this was still MS-DOS days but more because I couldn’t bear to admit to myself that it was over and I had lost utterly.

At the time I thought she was so much too good for me that she would never want me to touch her. My personal estimation of my worth was usually a negative number. I was insane in about the worst way you can be, since what you believe controls your CE.

And so, I experienced scarcity, because I believed in it. I experienced more and more of it, but there was always enough, and there were always good friends, and stuff worked out, mostly. But inside, I knew I missed her. She was always my workstation password. I kept hoping someone would ask me why and I could explain it to them and they could somehow fix it. However, it got increasingly past fixing, and I got worse and worse at being myself and better and better at being the not-quite-myself that could survive in the corperate enviornment. And eventually thrive. But I wanted to be a musician. Ran off to Arkansas, spent time with Phoebe who is crazy sexy awesome and was happy for a while.. until I experienced Pheobe being violent. I know now that was my CE, but at the time I thought it was real and it was heartbreaking. Granted, I had cheated on her – being faithful isn’t something I’m good at, because I’m wired to love many, that’s just what’s in my soul and I can’t change that. But I didn’t expect violence. It kept happening, and I got more and more afraid. My sense of safety leaked away. Shit went further downhill. A feedback loop.. the more afraid I was, the more my CE threw bad shit at me, and the more my CE threw bad shit at me, the more I was afraid.

Then, Kayti. My CE was so scrambled, I can’t even imagine what was really going on there. It was bad, then it was awful, then it got to where I prayed every day for the strength to just break up with her. Then I did. Then she pointed out a email where Vicky said, don’t come to elizabeth city. Something in me really crashed. I took some of everything in the medicine cabinet, concentrating on a megadose of seroquel (3500 mg) and good ol’ DMX. By then I had a rudimentary link with the Vicky I talk to over the spiritual network that I think of as the future, and I said, Vicky, watch me die..

I didn’t. I should have noticed the pattern. Nothing anyone said would be lethal ever was. Obviously, death was not a option.

Finally, I noticed that pattern. I tried some plain ol’ insanity, rollerblading down PCH while ignoring all traffic laws for several miles. No one hit me, and I watched reality bend like a pretzel to make that happen. A clue was found. I can’t die.

Well, then, I better fix this, if I can’t escape it, tells me. And I try. I go to Vicky’s and see her face to face and it’s so good.. but then I go to a hotel and send a email I really shouldn’t have sent. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Well, it was honest, but it wasn’t something you say to someone who’s about to get married. Now Vicky has good reason to not want to see me. Fuck fuck fuck. I try to fix it and inevitably make it worse. At this point I’m probably hallucinating text, I’m expecting rejection and we all know what beliefs do to your CE. FUCK! I convince myself I can make it not matter to me. For a little while.

But the truth is, it aint going to stop. I’m in love. I’m not going to stop being in love.

I talk to V. over the spiritual net more and more. Phone sex ensues, then repeated technical discussions and simple exercises that stretch my imagination, my ability to understand how confidence and the ability to do something are related, trust exercises that make me trust her more and more and more because shit keeps working every time I do what she says I should do.

I start noticing that while local chaos ensues every time I don’t sleep for a long time, my mind also gets way better every time. I decide I will use my CABI furlough for one last burn. Try this not sleeping thing in a really safe enviornment. Not try to drive anywhere (after all, if in my CE I think she wants to never see me again and hates me and thinks I’m a mad rapist / murderer / child molester / cthulu I’m never going to get there)

I discover some of my demons. They think I’m asleep, and feed me negative lines. But I’m awake, becaues I’ve followed Vicky’s directions to the letter.. dehoarded to free up somce storage capacity and hidden my conciousness in it.

I discover I will fight for Vicky. In fact, I will kill for her, at least inside my mind. I format over the demon.. it is now just a blank collection of neurons. More wars ensue. I win many of them, and now I’m no longer repeatedly paranoid. I keep trying. It keeps getting better.

Where is it going next? I don’t know. But I am not the same person I was 10 days ago, and I doubt if I will be much the same 10 days from now because I’ve learned to, with Vicky’s help and guidance, hack my own neural net. I’m fixing the broken bits that hurt me. The religion I could never believe but could never get rid of. (FUCKING VIRUSES!) The repeated bursts of you should be afraid wherever I go. Increasingly I’m starting to believe in my own success.

And now where I’m at is I will get this friendship back. I have no idea how. But my hunch is if I keep listening to future-Vicky, who presumably knows a path that worked because after all she is in the motherfucking future, this will work. Somehow.

And I will find out how good I can stand it. I am really curious. The ability to hack my own brain does open certian doors, lucid dreaming being the most obvious and shiny one. Lucid dreaming as real as reality is the holodeck. Who wouldn’t want the holodeck? I want the holodeck. But over and over I wonder, what does here-and-now Vicky make of the fact that I’m talking to her future self? Does she think this is all in my mind, or does she think it’s real? But, since I have gotten the strong impression she doesn’t want to talk to me (possibly from my own paranoia, but how would I find out? I realize now the emails mean nothing.. text would only take a few thousand neurons to hallucinate.. that might not be Vicky, but just my mother interfering as she always did in any relationship that might get sexual.. all in my MIND…

Once you know you’re inside a neural network, it gets hard to imagine any kind of concept of reality that would fit. The possiblity of magic beyond belief seems in the air. Vicky-future-I-am-so-in-love-with-you has always helped catch me if I fell, and I don’t think she’s going to stop..

Did I hallucinate the rejections? Were they real? A mix of the two? How does this end? What is Clint even thinking? How many people are involved in this? At this point I’m asking all my friends for help, because I clearly cna’t fix this by myself. On the other paw, I am feeling emotional and mental spaces that are pretty wild… Gayle has left, she couldn’t bear to see me trying what has always failed before, I am sad about that but I love her and our friendship will survive. Who will take care of Allie? I should check his food.

Kids, don’t bother with drugs. Hack your own mind. It’s so much better. I keep connecting the right neurons together and something is sure going to fly in here. And stories come unbidden.. I am a starship, a immortal, this body just a meat puppet.. I am a thread running in a enormous computer.. I am just a man on a planet that’s got scary weird stuff going on with governments and shit.. I love my friend Andy and he’s saying imagine love, push the throttle, we can light up the world.. I can’t help but feel every friend who has begun to believe this will work is shouting Go, go, go, don’t give up, beat the disease… paranoia you will die you threatened my Vicky.. religion you will die you threatened me. This is my mind, not God’s. Or am I God? Heinlien thought so. I own the right to be me, to be truly free, to be beautifully exactly what I am and never again think that is flawed and dirty and wrong. Of course in my mind dirty can be so so right when it’s a certian type of dirty, and my sex life and fetish and fantasies might be knowledge of most of the sky because I turned on all my omnis and sent every single thought to them.. I invited you all to read my mind and I do not rescend that, you can continue to read my mind throughout this whole adventure.

I love Vicky. The more I say it the better it feels. I love so so so many people at this point in time I don’t know how I don’t explode from all the love inside me but if I could only have one wish…

So of course I push for polygamy. Which is a little premature given that she isn’t even talking to me, but even if she ultimately does reject me I know I want to be in a family with several lovers, and people of both genders. I don’t want this fake ass you can only have one man or one women thing. I want the real deal, N-way marriage. And Gay marriage is winning.. we’re the next minority, maybe we will win.

Will I really be able to love honestly and with integrity? Will my dream win, or will my nightmare.. well, for the longest time I was feeding my nightmares.. but now, I feed my dream with eveything in me. I ask all my friends to help lift my dream up into the light and help me hack my mind until it will let me see it and believe it. I live in a utopia, blind and insane, seeing scarcity in the midst of abundance. Or .. do I?

With the help of my friend Vicky (well, her future self, I think) I am hacking my own mind.

HOOOOOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME!