Never been one to let the carrier drop

Let me try to explain. I don’t know that I really can, but you all know I’m lousy at keeping secrets, and I’m going to take a stab at it.

$person, I’ve been talking with you every day for years. One big problem I have is I don’t know if I’m talking to a copy of you, or the real you. Or even if that distinction makes *any* sense. What you tell me is that I’m talking to you in the future – when we all know better how to be who we really are. That fits the data.

I have seen more than one world during my time on Earth. I have seen a world where people rollerblade in the street, completely secure in the knowledge no car will hit them – a world where there are no locks, no passwords, nor any need for them. A world where love won over fear. I’ve seen this. I’ve seen the people – so beautiful, so healthy, so happy. I’ve danced with them and skated with them. I don’t know what makes the transition happen, other than it seems to involve my mental headspace in some way. And then I’ve seen this. A world where social media seems to have replaced being social. A world where the news constantly tells us of wars and gunshots fired and bad decisions made because of money.

My gut feeling is both of them are real. I’m a musician, see, and I understand about multitrack decks. And I also understand that there’s no reason to think a three dimensional reality wouldn’t fit in a multitrack deck. You’d just have to have a really really big one. (Big in terms of bytes stored)

I fell in love with you the minute I met you. This isn’t just true of you. There’s a LOT of people out there I fell in love with the minute I met. If you could see my office wall, you would see the pictures of them. But we live in a world that preaches fear. Well, I don’t honestly know where you live.. but you sure act like you live in a world where fear won. And I know I did, or I’d be recording albums instead of writing commissions systems. And in fear world, we do stupid things. Things that don’t work very well. Like not being able to tell people how we feel about them.

When you knew me as a teen I was extrordinarily screwed up. Now I’m just somewhat screwed up, and forever am chasing being a better friend and lover and dreamer. I keep persuing personal growth, but I don’t have any good way to measure success. I do, however, have a good way to measure failure. Showing up in court and being told “I think if you talk to me in the next two years you should go to jail”, that’s failure. Not sure which of us it’s indicative of failure in. Used to think I knew every failure was me. No longer so sure about that.

Now, one mental model I use for handling all this is to think that I’m a very big neural network, and that part of my neural network is the person that’s on the ride, experiencing reality, and part of it is the glue that connects me to the world I’m in. And it’s entirely possible that glue is faulty. What I saw, might not have happened, might have happened, or might have happened entirely differently. Because the you that I talk to using the mental equivalent of texting (this may be prayer, but I wouldn’t want to bet on it) tells me things like ‘Let me in’ and ‘Come home’.

Fuck if I know where home is at this point, or how I would get there.

As far as not talking to you out there, I do the best I can. I think it’s a stupid request, I think you’re being blind, but I also think it’s a request you should be free to make, and one I should comply with. But my mind is broken. Occasionally it glitches and suddenly I’m on a different track’s memories even though I’m still in this track. And I REMEMBER! We’re not supposed to have to live afraid. We did so much better once. And I keep trying to light the fuse.. leave the keys in the ignition, leave the doors unlocked, trust and hope the others trust too.

So, the problem here is that by all indications my mind has some sort of intermittent fault. Despite my investment of (at a guess) $100,000-ish and a smaller but not insignificant investment by my parents into same, we have not found and fixed this fault. What we’ve mostly found out is that the state of our current health care system is awful.

Me, with everything working correctly, accepts $person’s decision. That’s who I want to be. I wish she didn’t want to not talk to me, but if that’s what she wants, it’s what she should have. I certainly wouldn’t want someone forcing their existence on me. However, from time to time, this intermittent fault arises. And, you have to remember also that until my most recent adventure the last time I had seen $person face to face she had been friendly and not been telling me to go away.

Well, when this intermittent fault arises, several things happen

1) Often, I have a period where from my perspective, I’m just not there at all. It looks to me like a blackout.
2) Once this ends, I have a time where I have a very hard time figuring out what is real and what isn’t. At times I’ve been convinced I’m a starship orbiting earth, for example. Now, I doubt if I’m going to have nearly as hard a time knowing that $person doesn’t want to see me now that I have memories of her talking about me in third person to a judge and enumerating all the reasons she doesn’t, but until this most recent adventure, all I had was email, and not a *lot* of email or a lot of detail in said email. For someone who has had the experience of hallucinating text without even being in a faulted state, this wasn’t that helpful.
3) A bunch of other people appear, from my perspective, to also be inhabiting my body. I can’t explain to you what this is like, but they appear to be having conversations with each other using my mouth. This is disorienting to say the least. I can often somewhat control their ability to do this, but not perfectly and I am often embarrassed, ashamed, and unhappy about what has transpired after I return to normal.

Now, this most recent fault occurred despite, as far as I know, 100% med compliance (i.e. taking Seroquel exactly as prescribed by my doctor) at the maximum dose I was permitted for the weeks leading up to it. I’m trying a new psych med now which *might* help, or might not.

Clearly, looking at #3, I can’t really blame people for finding my presence disorienting and/or disturbing. I don’t think I present any sort of danger of physical attack, but I’m definitely not *normal* in this state, and I and my stable of alters are likely to say things that normal people wouldn’t say. It is not nearly as simple as to say I am choosing this. Steve, I am guessing you are the sort of person who would think that we’re always deciding exactly what we’re doing, and I hope you never have to learn that this isn’t always the case by experiencing life as I do during one of these intermittent faults.

We’re assured abortion stops a beating heart
By the same hand that insists God meant there to be nukes here from the start
By the same voices that assure us that the only way Christ didn’t die in vain
Is if we assume Siddartha and Mohammad were insane
When they tell me about the conditions on unconditional love
I have to ask..
Are you all buying this? Am I the only one who thinks it’s nuts?
Are you all onboard with the idea of money printed with “In God We Trust”?

We’re assured that big brother knows best
Even though he can’t decide if the enemy is the north, south, east, or west
But rest assured, there is a enemy! We promise! So keep your guns clean..
And make sure you’re just one more cog in our machine
But when they tell us about the next war
I have to ask..
Are you all buying this? Am I the only one convinced I’m stuck in hell?
When we measure our freedom by the number of guns we sell..

We’re assured that happiness is something you buy, not something you learn
By advertisers on every channel, by assaults on our senses at every turn
But most of what I want can’t even be bought or sold
And the assurances of retail therapy have really gotten old
So when I’m told a new car will solve all my problems
I have to ask..
Are you all buying this? Am I the only one who thinks we’re lost?
Am I the only one who even knows every object has a hidden cost?

We’re assured that we really need to live in fear
Even if you don’t see the monster under your bed, it really is here
Be afraid of everyone, trust no one, don’t ever let love in
It’s in the fear of love, not small minded ideas about sin, that the devil really wins.

———–

By the way, $person, I’m well and clearly aware that I’m not going to have any sort of romantic entanglement with you this lifetime. If you’d listened to the mp3s I sent you, you’d hear me say that – as I observed, that train has sailed. I just wanted our friendship back, a lot a lot a lot. And I didn’t want to have to lie to you to get it. However, you put me in kind of a bad position when you told me not to write you. Because sane me won’t, and insane me has a major lack of internal filters on what he will or won’t say. He’s not *dangerous* – I’ve been around all sorts of people in manic episodes and nothing bad has happened to anyone – he’s just not the most contained person in the world.

It was asked, what good things happened for people because of my unscheduled and unplanned foray east.

Well, let’s start with the hitchhikers. One of them said he’d spent the last night under a bridge. I was able to deliver him *to his home*. He was only 89 miles away, but you know, when you’re carrying a duffel, 89 miles is a stupidly long way to go. I think it did a lot for his state of mind that I was also able to deliver him his favorite artist (Conway Twitty) on request, courtesy of the laptop in the back of the van.

The second one I wasn’t able to get to where he was going as it was significantly off my route. But I did get him 300 miles down the road, and we had a good talk. He was rainbow folk, and a former Navy cook.

Let’s also mention the guy in the SUV stuck on I-95 because he was out of gas. He had his whole family in the car. I took him to a gas station where he filled up, and then back to his car. We shared no common language.. well, I know the word ‘Amigo’, which I said when he got in the car, and he smiled and then we used hand signals to agree on finding a gas station, etc. Perhaps the word for friend is really the only word you need in any language?

We can also mention Vinnie, as I think spending some time with me venting about her recent situation was good for her. At least, I hope it was.

I feel the need to say, if you are *seriously* thinking I would sexually assault you, have you ever thought of how much I would pay to *not have* the memory of having done so? Like, if someone were to ask me, “I’ll give you $1 million dollars but you have to have the memory of forcing $person to have sex in a way that hurt her.”.. Okay. Keep inserting larger values for the million. Keep inserting. You’re not going to find a number at which I’d take the deal.

See, to me, *that* is what love is like. You want the person you love to *not be hurt*. This would seem to be kind of basic, love 101, not advanced love, not anything that takes ideas more advanced than you’d expect to find in the mind of the average 10 year old. If the person *must* be hurt, you would want it to *not be your agency* that hurt them, or even your body. I’ve already got the somewhat awful situation of it’s the *idea* of me that’s hurting $person a little bit, because $person thinks I would do something I wouldn’t do. (Or maybe she doesn’t. I could write a whole novel on the subject of that.)

Okay, so this is going to be a difficult couple of posts to do. I am crossing my paws I manage to do it all accurately and with as little observer bias as possible and in a way that doesn’t cost me any more friendships.

Whoever you are, you might want to start with Assume Good Faith. I don’t want to add any more pain and fear into a system (Earth) I already clearly see as having too much.

However, let’s talk about the deep dark past first, when my intentions might not have been so well formed. I feel the need to bring up the past because one of the reasons for one of the things I wish was different in the present *is* the past.

In particular, I’d like to start out by talking about my sister, who I think is probably the victim of a mental illness at least the size of mine. Now, at this point I have forgiven her for everything she has ever done. But, in my young-Sheer adventure, she was weirdly and scarily violent. I later discovered there was a lunar cycle thing going on there, but at the time it just seemed like sometimes, I got my hair pulled, I got punched, I got kicked in the stomach, often for apparently no provocation at all. And she had.. well, still has, last I checked.. this way of talking to me that made me feel about three inches tall. She was a master of word choice and tone of voice and all the things you need to make someone feel tiny and she used them.

Now, at some point in our cohabitation, I did something which I still (Sort of) regret and which is still (apparently) quite in her memory.. she was pregnant, and she had been attacking me pretty much whenever she wanted, and I threatened to kick her in the stomach. I don’t think I would have actually ever done it – my parents check my memory (or at least claim to) that I wasn’t violent towards *her* generally. But I had reached that mental and emotional place that I think is often referred to as “Enough”.

It had a dramatic effect on her. At the time I was quite pleased. she moved out! I think she didn’t trust her ability to not attack me (not something she had a lot of practice with) and she wasn’t sure she could still get away with attacking me whenever she wanted.

Anyway, I’ve never been proud of that particular moment.. as I said, I don’t want to add more pain and fear into a system that has too much..

Somewhat recently.. about five years ago I think.. my sister decided that she’s terrified of me and wants me to stay as far away as possible. As far as I can tell she thinks that at some point I’m going to end up raping her. This is difficult for me to credit insofar as A: I’m really militant about this whole nonviolent thing, B: I wouldn’t want to have the memory of having done it and C: This is so far out of my core personality that people who know me often laugh at the idea. But I guess if you’re 3000 miles away and learning about all my exploits via the internet it sounds credible, and I think there’s a little group of people in that position that have started passing the idea that they should be afraid of me around like a joint. And my sister is definitely a big part of that. Okay, for me this has been mildly annoying, insofar as she can’t be present at any family gatherings that I’m present at.. at some point I started realizing that it is yet another way for my sister to bully me, which resulted in me rolling my eyes a bit and sighing and wondering if she’s ever going to get over her Issues.

But lets move to nearer times for a minute. As most of you know, I have this repeating issue I’ve been having where every six months or so I go manic, black out, and end up in jail or a mental hospital after sending a bunch of emails to one person who wishes at this point I would go away.

Now, let’s get a few things out on record. If I had one wish without wishing for more, at this point, it would be to have my friendship with this person back. And I undoubtedly in these emails say a few things which are inappropriate insofar as a lot of my internal censors are not working correctly. They’re never threatening (because that’s not the person I am) or graphic, but clearly they make her unhappy and my inability to just stop has been upsetting everyone, myself included. Now, it’s possible if my sister wasn’t ostensibly afraid of me, this person would be willing to just talk to me and everything could come down from defcon 1, but that is not to be.

Obviously something inside me is not working right. For a long time, I went through the motions of going to shrinks and doctors and taking pills and surely this will fix me. Of very late (the last few days) I’ve started to ponder whether I need to take a somewhat more self-directed and aggressive approach insofar as I do have this sinking feeling that nothing is getting any better and it has been not just years at this point but a solid decade.

Anyway, so, it’s gotten to where friends can tell when one of these events is about to strike me.. I recently came from SoCal wound tighter than a clock spring and decided, if such a word really describes how things happen in this state (I think maybe the words “it eventiated” ) that I was going to go, not for the first time, to Virginia.

Now, there were some signs from the beginning that this trip was going to be different. Normally, I don’t actually get there, and I think that my mom has a good time calling the person who lives in Virginia and gossiping / winding her up about how afraid she should be of me. (If it sounds like I don’t have a lot of trust in my family, well A: I’m paranoid, we know that B: I don’t C: I have DID. That doesn’t happen because you come from a great family situation). However, first of all, the ‘Blackout’ phase of this trip was a good deal longer than usual.. over a day is completely missing, and the resulting jump looks to me like a teleport from the west coast to the east coast.. second of all, I spent so much time with crosstalk among alters that I ended up with a blister on my tongue.. I was present for some of that, and it was delightfully weird, as crosstalk among alters generally is. Third of all, none of the usual thing stopped me. I got a ticket in Minnesota, that didn’t stop me. I got stuck in St Louis because of the usual confusion of why we bother to do resource allocation tracking for food. That didn’t stop me although it did get me a three day hold. I finally got to $CITY and carefully did *not* go to person’s house (I was really hoping person would come out and talk to me on neutral ground, and either give me a Last Goodbye or, there was a bit of me still holding out hope, return to being my face to face friend)

What I did do was go to a bar and sing “Little Pink Houses” and “When The Saints Go Marching In” – I actually got invited up on stage with the singer, which fit my energy just fine. I talked to some old timers about being patriotic. I went to a church.. twice.. and both times had some pretty authentic (not to mention awesome) spiritual experiences that I have yet to fully grok but make me think I should go back to some churches. The church service was in Spanish. I think that helped *a lot* because the words didn’t make me mad.. and recently at a class I learned that only 7% of human communication is the words.. so I was a lot more aware of the tone of the experience etc. The second time I went to the church (a day later) they had live music and I think they were expecting me and ultimately I cried my eyes out about the whole situation, which has probably been something that has been needing to happen for several years now.

And I sat in my car and I waited. When it became clear person was not wiling to come to me, I decided.. partially as a matter of a way to make myself even less threatening and partially because I had reached the point where I did not trust myself at all to be myself after trying to operate a car while peaking on seroquel.. to check myself into a hospital and see if *that* would get me some kind of something.

Well, it did. Last Goodbye was apparently the answer, but instead of showing up to deliver it in person, I got a court summons and a protective order. This was both good and bad, and I still feel like I should have done things a bit differently here. It gave me a chance to hear person talk (and I *love* hearing person talk.. the way she uses her voice and her hands when talking just pets my brain somehow) and it also gave me something I had been really badly needing, a 3d memory that wasn’t text of rejection. See, the last time I saw her face to face she was behaving as a friend to me. And knowing as much as I do about information theory.. not to mention having *had the experience* – I know it is trivially easy to hallucinate text.

And I will say, she wasn’t actively mean about it. If my sister were ever to take out a protective order, she’d take advantage of the time to also make me actively wish that suicide is something that woudl work. (Repeated testing has told me, at least in my case, there’s a hypervisor, suicide doesn’t work. Not that there aren’t times lately where I wish it would). I can actually sort of imagine my sister describing how sick, perverted, useless, stupid, ugly, weak, and other undesirable behaviors I am.. I guess I have a alter who is a software model of my sister. Now there’s something I could use to lose.

Anyway, protective order… initially my response was “Well, if that’s what she wants, she shoudl have it” since I’ve never been of the position that if person wants distance from me she should have anything *but* that.. it’s just the alters that come up during a mania that, I honestly forget, have no memory of the times between. But, it occurs to me, this is giving said alters a tool to hurt me a lot a lot since person can now have me thrown in jail for sending her a email. I wonder if person has ever worn handcuffs the way cops put them on, which always hurts you paws, or been in a cold room of cinderblocks designed by idiot humans who think punishing is a good idea to send the message “You’re a bad person. You deserve to hurt.”. I also wonder if person really does think I deserve to hurt because there’s something wrong with my mind. I doubt it a lot.

Anyway, I already do hurt because something’s wrong with my mind.

I’ve begged God for a early death.. like, now would be good.. bu that’s not the sort of wish apparently that we get. So I’m stuck here, wishing I wasn’t. Maybe if I had a better attitude you’d still want to be friends. I do have a lot of friends, and I’m grateful for them, and I’m loved, and I’m grateful for that, and sometimes it gets all the way into my core and that’s very nice, and sometimes it can’t and that’s not so nice.

So, I was talking about things I might have done right or wrong. I got a lawyer, which might or might not have been a good idea.. as I said, I didn’t really exacly want to win but I also was willing to admit that it would be a good idea for me not to lose. THe judge, not too suprisingly, sided with person – I can’t really conceive of the situation where the judge doesn’t, since person is there saying “I want this person not to talk to me”, which really is a reasonable request and something we should all be free to ask for. My position doesn’t look very reasonable at all, since it’s “If I forget and do talk to you, I want to not go to jail.. “. I keep hoping if I develop the habit of writing the things I would have put in the emails into blog posts instead, maybe the next time I go manic.. plus, of course, as I mentioned, I now have a very real, visceral, 3D memory of rejection. And the wish that I hadn’t dragged person through all the unhappiness in the spaces in between. Not to mention dragging me through all said unhappiness.

What I wish most is that none of the ‘be afraid of me’ club were convincing themselves of something that, as far as I can tell both from the way I’ve behaved my entire adult life and from the way my friends treat me, makes any sense at all. However, this is America, and fear is something we love to sell ourselves, so I guess I’m not surprised to find people convincing themselves that I’m a threat.

More later.

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, today I went to Best Buy to buy christmas presents.. Yes, I know I’m a little late, but the people I was buying for are away having Christmas with family and lovers and whatnot and so I wasn’t really able to give them their presents before Christmas anyway. But that’s not the point of this post.. which, I gather, is the first one I’ve posted for half a year. More on that later.

The point to this post is that Best Buy in Seattle has a little mini-guitar center inside. So I go in, and play with assorted keyboards, and participate in a brief impromptu jam session with some Best Buy employees, and this one guy is totally blown away by my chops on a AX-7 clone that has a synthesizer in it, and asks if I’m in a band. Well, no, I say.. but I’ve been in a few.

And this is where it gets a little weird for me. I’ve always thought of myself as strictly the bottom of the barrel garage band musician, but the most recent band I was in has a song that was downloaded a hundred thousand times this month. Granted, we didn’t make any money for any of those downloads, but still, a hundred thousand times.. that’s gotta be a bit more than a garage band. But.. I was once accused of having delusions of grandeur by someone who completely misunderstood my metaphor for talking about being a rock star. To be fair, I wasn’t myself, or even sane, at the time. But it does beg the question, when does one become one? A million downloads a month? Ten million? Or must I actually derive some revenue from it?

So far, HWGA2010 has made $7. The MC album has made.. I’m not sure. No one bothered to keep records. But I think it’s safe to say both of them have not even remotely approached their publishing cost, much less the cost in time to make them.

It’s a problem. The world has lots and lots and lots of good music. More than any one person could listen to in a lifetime, I’m pretty sure, although you’d have to ask a <sic>library scientist</sic> about that. So people will pay me to write medeocre java, but not – thus far – music that is getting increasingly on towards good. Still, it’s my creative outlet, and it gives me another language to speak to people in, one that’s sometimes better suited for expressing my emotions.

Which reminds me. I’ve become increasingly suspicious of english. I’ve written emails to people – and posted blog posts – that I don’t feel like capture me. I’ve written some that I hate, some that don’t sound like me to me, some that I recognize where I was coming from but no longer represent how I feel or what I think. I haven’t been blogging much because I’m not sure that the part of me that blogs and the part of me that walks around and does stuff is actually all that connected. Originally, my theory was that blogging was going to be good for me. Then I tried writing emails to a single, trusted friend (the designated /dev/null inbox has changed a few times) and I found that much more helpful both in terms of arranging my thoughts and in terms of feeling some human connection. That the people in question may have never read most of the emails wasn’t the point.. in fact, sometimes I found it more helpful to write the emails and then *not* send them. (I’ve stopped doing this after a few mortifying times that I out of habit or technical incompetence or misunderstanding of how my phone works when composing emails in offline mode actually ended up sending them anyway). Sometimes I even contemplate writing letters and then burning them.

All this is to say, I’ll blog new music, and shows, and occasional updates, but my deepest intermost thoughts are generally things the world can live without.. and in many cases, I’m happier not having them lurk in a database somewhere, because I can think that they are gone, forgotten, and possibly never to trouble me again.

Happy 2011, people. As of today, I’ve not been a addict for 8 months. 4 more and I can get a cake or something.

T