Wednesday in Hysteria

 I' m trying to hold on to the memory of that feeling: the universe flatlining. It's not the same. It's a copy of a copy. I'm just lying here, wasting time.

I wake up late. Bumble. Dig in the freezer. Heat up a roll. Margarine was originally made from the stomach juices of pigs. I use it anyway. Munch munch. Thank you.

Smile at the wall. On with Hexidecimal. Check the internet. Nothing is happening. Blow my nose. There is shattered glass in the bathtub. Get some oats. They are smiling at me. Eat me, they say. Okay. If you insist.

It is the last day of the month, which means I need to invoice people and try to resurrect Nexus, my 'sinful downloading and game storage' computer. The last time I used it it froze and the input/output devices wouldn't turn on when it restarted. I pray to the gods of 'turn it off and on again', and hope it just needed a little break. Damn viruses.

Invoices. Numbers. Distances. What does 'Res south' mean? No idea. 'Ignore'.

Calculations. This times this plus that.

Huh? The spreadsheet is lopsided. It's actually skew inside the screen.

Meh.

All done.

I need to be elsewhere. I plug in my CD drive and start Mass Effect 2. I, space cowboy. I prospect for minerals. I display my snipey prowess. I finish one of the earlier missions, and fail to rescue a krogan warlord named Okeer. Man, I love this series. It's like witnessing Star Wars from the instant a galactic community was formed, where everything is fresh and new and still being improved upon. There are so many ideas, so many cultures and histories to explore...

And so many pretty colours when you get a headshot.

Okay. I could do this all day. I may actually do this for most of the day, discounting lifts and driving and so forth, but right now I need to see if Nexus is dead or not.

Shutting down...

Unplug. Hoist. Replug. Buttons.

Sweet Krishna, it’s actually working.

I rejoice in the recovery of my files. Music, games, anime – hours and hours of things I thought I’d lost. I listen to an album I haven’t heard yet and unsuccessfully attempt to finish another level of Supaplex. I ogle at my files. Happeee.

Excel Saga!

ACROSS(su) versus a bowling revolution league in an attempt to take over the single most applicable form of communication known to man – sport. Ha ha. Agony.

That isn’t love

Love isn’t that

I am in love, but I am not loved

Definitely isn’t love

Derriere isn’t love

I want to be loved, but I never seek it out

I offer myself and throw my life away

Looking neither left or right, I will just earnestly

Cheat, wheedle, interfere

And trample down and kick strangers

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

And we get the hell out!

Even if I slip on a banana peel

It is all for his sake anyway

If anything, that is probably

A kind of loyalty called love.

I like Japanese people.

Pay the locksmith. Test the locks. Everything works. Yay.

Converting Oggs to MP3s. Test the MP3s. Everything works. Yay.

Fresh shirt. Blue, plain, short-sleeve.

More music. I finish one level of Supaplex. I grow bored. I listen to several files to make sure they have converted correctly.

Today is impossible. There is a puncture somewhere in the world, and all the time is seeping out. Samoosas. Sorry, lifeforms. One in another in another. Seeeeeeping.

Rearranging files. Old things, new things, things that could be smaller, things that could be classified better. Nothing has meaning until you give it meaning. What is a meaningful conversation, anyway? A conversation to which one prescribes meaning. One could have a meaningful conversation about rabbits or sock drawers, if they so wished.

I give meaning to filing things. Therefore it is not a waste of time.

I drop a hard drive in my lap.

Ow! My xxxxx

The first chance I have, I’m getting that removed.

Yay! Blogs. I read. Hello, person. I approach her difficulties with all the hallmarks of my trade; Logic, Memory, Initiative, Focus. Every reader its book, every book its reader. In this case it’s a song. Finding it is like finding a quote, what words (Instruments), what message (Chords), what tone (Tempo)?

Zoom Time. A downpour of midgets and rain. xxxx. xxxx. Watching roses being watered. Okay, I get it. Wednesday and Sunday. I have a hard enough time eating, I’m not about to kill your plants.

The song I’m looking for comes to me. Jack Wall. Yeesha’s Joyride. The touch of desert winds, dry and solitary. A rapid flight into an oasis. What oasis? That’s up to the listener. The tune is short and leaves its listeners begging for more. It is thirst, and a drop of water.

Thereafter, I am glad to retreat into silence, for a time – a difficult thing, but so necessary. Now, I am listening to Tulla by Ben Houge. Voyage and destination.

I thrill among the bookshelves.

More fiddling. More silence. What was it Ti’ana said? I take her book down from my shelf and scan the pages, realising at once that I have misremembered this. I had thought, ‘Sand and Dust and Ashes’, but it’s ‘Stone and dust and ashes’. But it is still beautiful.

~

“That much remained of him, at least. The memories, the words, and the great wisdom of the man.

She wiped the wetness from her cheeks and smiled. He was in there now, in her head, until she, too, was dust and ashes.

What do you see, Anna?

As she climbed the narrow slope that led out of the valley, she answered him, her voice clear in the desert’s stillness.

‘I see endless desert, and before me the desert moon, rising in the last light of the dusk. And I see you there, everywhere I look. I see you there.’”

~

Before I close the book, I stumble upon another of my favourite passages:

~

‘Gifts, she recalled him saying, aren’t frivolous things, they’re very necessary. They’re demonstrations of love and affection, and their “excess” makes life more than mere drudgery. You can do without many things, Anna, but not gifts, however small and insignificant they might seem.’

~

I remember a small metal pulley. I remember stolen flowers. I remember books I have given, and books I have received. The gift of poetry. We spill words into one another, and give that meaning. Effort, thought, direction. Sometimes I forget why that is so necessary.

I think of Anne Frank in her Secret Annex, where even right at the end they observed one anothers’ birthdays and offered gifts. These small things.

Back on my shelf. Good book. Don’t worry, I’ll complete you one day, even if I have to steal from the local library to do it.

More words spoken, and more words needed. Gifts. Understanding. You are alone, because we are all alone; but that need not be everything you are.

It has just occurred to me that there very well may have been a severed head sitting on the bar counter at Cool Runnings and I’ll never know, because I never thought to ask if anyone else could see it too.

Okay. Reading. My soul flutters closer to the wall. Is this... pity? It may very well be. This is something I haven’t fully investigated.

I do not fear. To fear you have to have something to lose. I am Void. I am nothing, and I have nothing. If my hard drive didn’t start this morning, that would be just one more thing I don’t have and do without. I’m not even sure having it is that much of a salvation.

Empathy. Use the Force! When in your life have you ever been scared?

Oh, that’s low. You know I can’t share that.

How about that time that guy tried to break your thumb in the school library? Who was more scared there; me, with my tendons tight and trembling, or him, wondering if he’d actually have to go through with it?

What about that lonely winter morning you were picking up litter in the park at 4 am, black hood, black coat, leaning over a trashcan when someone walked around the path? No I wasn’t scared then. I was gone by then, deeper into the oceanic trenches than ever before. I recall that moment because for a minute or more we stood there staring at one another’s living shadows, neither moving nor speaking. I wondered what he would do then.

He ran, down the hill and away into the night. I heard his gasping breaths from thirty metres, as I stood musing on fear. I am your monster, and you are mine.

But still, I struggle to define this thing.

I think of hysteria. I think how I laugh at the absurdity of each day, as it spins and curves and rushes on so furiously, how I hear things, how I see things, how I read things, inside and out, and I can’t tell what it all actually is because it is there and not here. I laugh at them. I laugh and make jokes and quake at the freaking absurdity of it all. Hysteria. Laughter by any physical description is pain.

Haha.

I don’t fear any omnipresent evil force. Rape, assault, murder – this is The City. Expecting those things to appear at any given moment is natural. l know people who have been raped, held at gunpoint, beaten up, whatever. I also know that none of that has ever happened to me – not physically – and that my extraordinary luck in such matters won’t last forever.

And when the evil does find me, I’ll be laughing.

Oddly, I’m not particularly tired tonight. The half-wakefulness is still there, but I don’t mind so much.

Downloads are running in the background. The lights are off because I don’t like to see the walls, and here’s me, still thinking about fear.

The only official diagnosis I have ever been given is hyper-anxiety. This, as far as I understand it, is all about fear, and reaction to it: the reptilian brain. fight or flight. At any crucial point of decision-making I can’t actually settle on any specific course of action. These moments haunt me, and I can’t ever let any of them go. I dwell over every mistake, and because they are always on my mind I can only rarely recall instances of success. A great deal of the time this fuels an overwhelming drive to do things better, to change, to transform into something quick-thinking and certain – the quintessential reactor. At other times it acts as a core inhibitor, and forces me to shut down and do nothing but laugh and smile.

And this, perhaps, is where fear manifests into action. I get stuck at that point of decision-making and refuse to fight or flee until I am backed into a corner, and I am given a choice between two deaths: physical death, whereby I end myself, or mental death, whereby I break out of my inhibitor state and change who I am completely. This rarely occurs, but it has happened.

Hyper-anxiety is such a small thing, but I believe it was the drop in the ocean that tipped over my world and splashed its contents into the wondrous void of space. Without it, I would have behaved very differently in each situation I was presented with. I may not have started compartmentalising everything into little files and folders, separating the physical from the emotional and tossing together a barrier to prevent any leakage between the two. But leakages do happen, and I think that’s when everything starts shaking and peeling and smearing into one big colourful mess. I refuse to recognise emotions for their ability to affect reality, so my mind tries to present them to me as physical quantities, because physical things are a reality, and you have to deal with them.

If I have any other actual mental disorders, I don’t know what they are. Except, perhaps, a chronic mistrust of psychologists and medicine. Whatever broke inside of me, those pieces weren’t torn apart by physical things, so I can’t see how chemicals can put them back together. All it would do is add another problem to the batch and make it harder to concentrate on keeping away from the wall and firmly centering myself in the Void. Psychologists are just something I can’t naturally approach because I have trust issues, and I have never known a psychologist to respect any confidentiality or to see that compartmentalisation is not necessarily a bad thing.

I enjoy madness. I mean, if fear can become laughter, then why can’t emptiness become joy? It’s all in the mind, or so I have led myself to believe.

All this thinking has wearied me. I need to meditate.

I enter the ‘lotus hit by a garbage truck’ position, and think a few thoughts. I’ve been missing things out. That’s the hyper-anxiety. I’ve become so involved in certain problems and trying to solve things already past that I haven’t stopped to consider why exactly I’ve been reacting to others in certain ways. That’s illogical – and a good librarian is anything but illogical.

Root form Hexaemer: one of the twelve basic dimensions of structured reality is Meaning. Meaning is then separated into two Attributive Laws: Purpose and Effect. These two entities have a direct relationship: when Purpose and Effect are equal, a state of Purity exists between the two entities. When Purpose and Effect are unequal, a state of Corruption exists between the two entities.

Sometimes, Corruption is as simple as missing what’s already there, or putting in extra details that don’t belong. Sometimes, harbouring Purity is as difficult as identifying all the variables in an equation you haven’t ever seen.

I have an early morning tomorrow. These downloads can run throughout the night. More anime, to console my aching cranium. I’m not awake. I’m not asleep. I don’t think I’ve been either for a very, very long time.

Love Hina.

On the roof, looking at the sky, the sun’s light is warm and gentle

When I look at the sky I can feel the energy building up inside

THAT’S SO WONDERFUL!

I am living!

I can’t quit, I can’t give up!

Good bye to the bewildered yesterday,

My feelings are springing up inside

You've got to nurture those flowers so they can bloom over and over.

Memories are sweet hiding places

But you’ve got to Live to see another day

One day a blessing will come, stretch out your hands!

Good bye to the bewildered yesterday

My feelings are springing up

I can bring them up many times, let a flower blossom

Memories are sweet hiding places

Live to see another day

One day a blessing will come,

Stretch out your hands!

All my hopes for the world, and the things I’ll never know.

~

Vegetarians are weird

I’m all for limiting the amount of suffering on our planet. I’d even say I’m probably one of the top 100 people who stand against torture. But despite professing these beliefs I am not a vegetarian, and have not considered being one since late 2007, when I briefly flirted with pacifism.

This isn’t because I don’t care about fluffy animals leading short, meaningless lives in slaughterhouses or anything so mundane as ‘liking the taste of meat’. If those are your only reasons for not being a veggie, then shame on you, you heartless cad.

My choice to eat meat is made not because I think less than veggies, but because I think more about them – or at the very least more broadly. You see, I am part of that slim portion of the population that believes plants can feel pain, or at the very least its emotional equivalent.

All life has intention, the most base of which is to continue living. Potatoes have neurotoxins to poison animals that try to eat them. Pineapples have enough barbs to ensure their place as the most deadly m*****f*****s in all creation. Thorns, tree bark, bitter sap – these are all used to defend a plant from death, which suggests the plant’s will is to survive. If cruelty entails going against another entity’s will for pleasure (satisfaction, survival, gluttony… any old excuse), then to a point, one must admit that killing plants is as cruel as killing animals.

Some veggies would argue that the prime difference between killing one and killing the other is that animals suffer before they die. They don’t consider that plants can feel pain too. For example, when pruned a plant not only produces sap to clot the wound, but will also vary in its growth cycle to prevent being damaged again. Some plants release allelochemicals only after being grazed upon; chemicals which draw carnivores towards the plant to kill any herbivore nearby.

What does one call active distress to stimuli but pain?

I don’t blame vegetarians. Ignorance is a wonderful thing that can at least give Earth the illusion of being a happy albeit boring place. I would love to believe I could eat something without causing pain to another living entity, but I cannot. Consider the most basic ramification feeding has on the food web:

 Joe-bob the Vegetarian decides to be nice to the animals and eats fruit instead of a cow.

Smiggle the earthworm has no new soil to till (no fruit has fallen to the ground), and after enduring the agony of starvation for several days, it dies.

Angusine the bluebird is perplexed by the recent earthworm shortage. After struggling to feed her family for a week or so, watching her children die one by one, Angustine commits suicide by flying into a window.

Joe-bob and Jane the Bald are blissfully unaware that their vegetarianism is killing the world. On the bright side, all the animal corpses everywhere make wonderful fertiliser for more trees, which in turn can boost the maximum supportable number of human beings on the planet.

As illustrated, eating an increased amount of fruit from the bottom of the food chain throws off the balance of nature, ending biodiversity in favour of bland stability. IS THIS WHAT YOU WANT, VEGGIES?

Sane people – or at the very least ‘I’, have realised that all life is dependent on resources. As we are living on a globe with limited resources surrounded by a gaping chasm of empty space, we need to take those resources before they are taken by others in order to survive. Cruel and evil as it may be, it is necessary, and one of the prime reasons I choose not to worship any ‘Creator’. I do not revel in the thought of taking another life, but I understand that it is the only way to continue mine, and console myself in the fact that I too will die, and my corpse will be eaten by thousands of bacteria, worms and plants that in turn will be eaten by larger life forms – cows and pigs and chickens whose ancestors died to feed me long ago. If there is any fairness or justice in the world, it is that we all die, eventually.