Intuixiety

Here’s the thing about my brain, body, connection:
I was trained to try to work my intuition like a muscle. I’ve written about that before but that was YEARS ago, I don’t expect you to look it up. Anyway, I have worked at this working from intuition thing for a very long time, since I was about eighteen, and that, my friends, is a very long time. But what has happened in perhaps the last fifteen years or so, is that now that I no longer self-medicate for painful shyness, depression, social and other anxiety disorders, some of the physical sensations I had learned to associate with the “pay attention” signals from the realms of the mothers, are now mixed with my ever increasing, anxiety based physical symptoms. This now occurs at a level which makes it quite difficult for me to sort out whether, when I get a certain butterflies, nervy, slightly nauseous feeling is it a phone call from the psyche or a chemicals gone wrong, message.

This is one of the reasons that I take so little of my properly prescribed medication. I always am trying to sort out which way the wind is truly blowing. The funny thing about that? That I am required to get drug tested on a fairly regular basis to ascertain that I am actually taking drugs! This irony is certainly not lost on me.

So the question for me becomes, as it probably has been since the beginning, is how much of myself will I lose if I take psych meds? This whole issue is really “up” for me right now, as I finally reached the decision to put my little (cat) girl in Prozac. What a hard decision that was. Sorting out the power and control issues incumbent in forcing psych meds, that I have refused myself, on another being... Not comfortable at all. But she has been a victim of severe anxiety for such a long time that I have decided to at least try it for awhile and see if she becomes a happier creature. The perpetual question: will she lose some essential self-ness?

More J. MacD; all apropos 'n stuff

“Illness is an ego trip, especially after you have started to feel a little better. You turn inward. How do I feel right now compared to five minutes ago, an hour ago, yesterday? Is this pain in my hip connected to the infection? Is it something new? Why can’t they come when I ring? All intensely personal. Petulant. To each one of us the self is the most enchanting object in all creation. Sickness intensifies the preoccupation with the self. And, of course, the true bore, the classic bore, is the person who is as totally preoccupied with himself all the time as the rest of us are when we are unwell.”
John D. MacDonald

I learned something today

Watching “Coronation Street” gives me major anxiety. 94% of the characters are criminally stupid or sociopathic or completely self involved and self indulgent. Waiting to see the results of the completely bad behavior is a total car crash. So what? Am I supposed to take a pill just to watch my favourite show? No, that would be also criminally stupid. The alternative? Do I have to quit my (relatively harmless) Sunday indulgence as well as so many other favourite activities? Feh. Double feh.

Perfectly hideous earworm

Boom Boom Out Go The Lights - Pat Travers Band

First of all, who the hell is Pat Travers anyway?

Secondly, some old blues songs just aren’t right, and covering them in any serious way does not make you awesome but rather a newly hatched dinosaur. Even the completely cool Nick Cave should have left off “Black Betty” from “Kicking Against the Pricks”.

Thirdly, why? Why did my subconcious decide to dredge up this abortion? Sometimes I think I’ve been saddled with the crocodile brain of a sixteen year old bomb dude from 1979.

AM earworms

You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away - The Beatles
I was contemplating what it must have felt like to be John Lennon when the news about Helter Skelter came out....

Lord I gots the vapours

I had a most unusual (for me) experience yesterday at work.
The track drapes in the front room were mussed and the folk asked me to try to fix that. So I got up and took a look, and determined that the hooks on two of the folds were out of the little plastic part of the track. Incidentally I absolutely HATE those kind of curtains. Why oh why do we need to make something as simple as a piece of fabric mechanical? You will never find those in any house I live in, ever!

Anyway, I had to go behind the curtains to try to fix that. That’s when I realized I was dizzy with the kind of dizziness one gets occasionally from standing up too fast. I was talking it through, that I felt dizzy, that I was going to wait a second, then I would reach up again, get dizzy again, all the while still talking about what I was experiencing.

Suddenly I heard a whooshing noise, then a loud a loud clunk, only realizing when my head started to hurt that it had been my head hitting the floor. I was really confused as to how the floor had reached up and smacked me in the head. I sat up and I seemed trapped in some weird cave of white light, white walls and white curtains. I was trying to fight my way out of miles of unending dusty curtains. I was quite disoriented.

I finally got disentangled. I could see the nice, normal, living room. But man did I feel surreal. Poor Mrs. Folk was pretty wigged out. She has pretty severe verbal difficulty due to Alzheimer's so she was having a lot of trouble expressing her discomfiture. Old Mr. Folk seemed to take it pretty philosophically however. Eventually we laughed and laughed, Mrs. Folk and I. Probably because it made her extremely nervous, and aside from the surreal feeling I continued to have for a couple hours, I was really terribly embarrassed. So what to do but laugh?.

I find it odd that embarrassment was the overweening sensation. How could one possibly find anything embarrassing about something as unexpected and uncontrolled as fainting? But that is exactly what I felt, kind of stupid, clumsy, and idiotic. Embarrassment, what a strange, social construct. In retrospect I realize that I spend an awful lot of time either feeling or reliving it. And I hear it’s even worse in some other cultures. I sure wish there was a pill for that.

Chemical Castration

I’ve been having a bit of a “flat affect.” You may not have noticed.

So “we” are trying some new things. Massive doses of vitamin D3 is one. Three weeks after taking 5000 IU’s a day my levels are up into the bottom ranges of normal. Therefore I assume, that there was in fact, a previous deficit. Even though it’s one of the least expensive supplements I’ve ever gotten I am glad to say I can now drop on down to 3000 IU’s. Every little bit it helps.

Also it would appear that somewhere a hypo-thyroid thing appeared. I am being told that this nifty new pill will put some zippy in my pip. Am I pzipy yet? You tell me.

Then there’s the perennial favourite, which is that it is no longer February and early March in Michigan. This winter was a straight out bitch. What a long drawn out drag.

And there is the slow burn, subtle furious-ness at government and their insistence and propaganda that as a fat smoker I am THE embodiment of THE problem. Slow burn hatred is never good for my productivity. But again, I’m sure noone noticed.

And there you have it, the word castration is coming from the Greek word kaezein.
And that’s a cheesy movie reference, if you don’t get it it really can’t be helped.

More Avoid-dance

So while I’m NOT working on my paper (The Duty Of Dissent), or my final exam, I should finally say something about the blog meltdown we experienced earlier this summer.
In retrospect I think this partially explains it.
I graduated in May. Then there was this crazy, crazy, crazy scene with Uncle Bunny about the moving to Houston, as well as his aide going kookoopuffs whackjob. Suddenly I had to completely step in and finish this weird karmic thing we have had in this huge burst of total frenzy-ness. (If you notice he left on August 9th). And the band kinda fell apart too.
And suddenly my identities were gone.
This thing with Uncle Bunny had been going on over 10 years. The skool thing was really intense for 3 years and I REALLY identified with being the great and wonderful Oz, I mean student.
So I just think I had a bit of a blind sided, dis-corporation. I am all incorporated now. Knock on a polyvinyl or whatever keyboard...
And if anyone is curious, Uncle Bunny claims to be doing OK, despite getting there just in time for the crazy hurricane and no power for something like 14 days.

Downed a peg

I have had to rethink my opinion of myself as somewhat expert on cats. I am now baffled and befuddled because I have never had indoor cats before. My young male is driving me and my little girl (cat) batshit. He is SO aggressive. And so mischievous, and so unrepentant, and so becoming an ankle biter, and so into everything he should not be. And I am SO turning into a total bitch and making widespread misery.

A few weeks ago I found myself truly, screaming at the top of my lungs at him and Oliver had to stop me spraying him with window washer because I couldn’t find the water spray before disaster seemed imminent.

To be fair, it’s only when he’s awake that it’s such a problem....

No promises, and knock on simulated wood veneer...

But, maybe, I’m back.

It is still rough, ruff, ruffe, but I feel a little less paralyzed in all lobes of my monkey mind.

Sorry for the freakout/bailout but that’s what happens when your blogger has “issues”. One of which is literally overwhelming anxiety from it being an election season. Man, do I have a hard time processing all that shite. It’s as if it has the properties of a big, sticky wad of suffocating, smeary, putrid, plasticene. And then it’s as if it was shot straight into my mainline just clogging up all my functions and trying to beak apart my heart. Why does it always have to be in fall when I am already struggling through a major seasonal affective shift? As well as why are people such little bitches about it all?

He said/she said

He should have said “They are proud of acting ignorant” as opposed to “being ignorant”.
There are several reasons.

One is that those guys are the most calculated, well oiled, hate filled. thanotoser, machine cogs, ever and it sure isn’t ignorance that makes them say such things.

Secondly, every petty psych major wannabe like me, knows you don’t tell children they are assholes but rather that they are acting like assholes.....

Thirdly, you know that really hard thing, that thing about hate the sin but not the sinner? Yeah, theoretically, we’re still trying for that.

P.S. First ever time using a label of politics

Loyalty Schmoyalty

Here’s my issue with it that arose, yet again, yesterday afternoon.

There appears to be almost nothing, short of malicious cruelty, that pisses me off more than abusing my loyalty. Here is the (apparently unforgivable) sin that, time and again, has set me on the path of permanently poofing people.

Be a difficult person. Cultivate our relationship. Share confidences.
Later, when myriad people have come to me on the basis of knowing that we are friends to express their concerns about your behaviors and I have then spent a good bit of energy defending your personal and social ineptitude, utilizing my knowledge of you, your life circumstances, and your real fears, difficulties and vulnerabilities to try to soften the opinion of the harsh and exacting social milieu regarding your inappropriateness or general asshole-ness, let me then find out that you have lied to or about me, dissed me, or in some other way betrayed me.

That is pretty much the sure fire recipe to get me to drop you like a brick. Or perhaps millstone would be the the more fitting descriptor here.

Unfortunately, in this, most recent circumstance, due to certain overlaying conditions, I have to tough it out for a pre-described period. In essence that means that I now have to lie by omission. Pretend that I am not aware of having been juked.

It’s going to be a long, annoying, summer.

Cold turkey, will sure give you the runs

If there is one thing I’ve learned in my checkered, chessed, and parcheesi’d past, it’s to step down, over cold turkey, whenever possible.
Now for some people (court ordered, boneheads, recalcitrant) or in some circumstances (Jail, rehab, de-tox) or with some substances (me & tobacco so far) it’s not likely to work.
But cold turkey is for that brand of people who say things like “Go ahead, punch me as hard as you can, right in my stomach”. And I guess if you’re just a flat out pain freak it might even be fun.
But my step down program has always worked (other than tobacco) every time I’ve needed it to and it’s relatively painless. It’s based on halves and doubles. Either cut the dose in half each time or double the time between or if you really need to be macho, both.

I used to think withdrawal was meritorious in that it would make one think thrice about picking up. But then I used to enjoy a bit of pain as well. And the reality of pain is one of our most fleeting memories. (Thank you brain chemistry for that at least.) I am so over that bit. And I have also learned that if one is determined to pick up, nothing is likely to stand in the way, other than a bullet ot something of that ilk.
People who are in that headspace don’t call their sponsors. That is one of the big ass problems of 12 stepping.

I mention all this because I will be off the caffeine by Monday. I started at the level of one cup tea, one cup coffee on Weds. Thurs. I had one cup tea. Fri. 1/2 a teabag. Today 1/4. Tomorrow a few grains. So far, no debilitating headache. Sweet.

So if I can painlessly get off it, compared to the pretty severe pain it causes me, I’m ahead in the game. Of course when the memory of the pain it gives me has fleeted, I could easily forget to not pick up..... Cuz coffee, tea and chocolates are such sweet poizens.

Earworms and more

Yesterday, Dennis Moore - Monty Python
Today, God Save The People - Godspell.
Yes, more Godspell. For about 18 hours now.
This drove me so crazy I decided to look at some of the articles. Since it had been brought up recently on NPR I figured there would be a goodly number to peruse.
Sure enough, there were plenty.
The gist of it is: The most susceptible people are musicians, obsessives and women. So there you go, I am apparently doomed.

I also appreciated Oliver Sacks freely copping to having taken “mountains of amphetamine, mescaline, and cannabis”. In future I will use this as ammunition against those who try to discredit my credentials and experiences. After all we all just LOVE Oliver Sacks, don’t we?

On earworms

Well I of course missed it, because I don’t listen to the external radio (except Sounds Of The Subcontinent). But apparently they had some sort of earworm discussion on NPR this weekend. My friend at the market mentioned it to me because she knew of my propensity for music constantly coming out of my face. But she made it sound as if they were saying that having this fully orchestrated radio playing in your head almost constantly was unusual. I am weirded out, I thought everyone had this. Do you have it?

Blog-o-phobia

I don’t exactly know what’s going on here but suddenly the blog has come to represent - something else, something problematic. Allen Ginsburg said that “things are symbols of themselves”. Maybe I’m just not getting that on the “meta” level, but for me things are usually symbols of something else altogether. The result being that I constantly am doing the psychic gymnastics of robbing Peter to pay Paul in the act of balancing what gets done and what hangs fire.

Any piece of paperwork or act of responsibility becomes a tower of outcomes, relationships, and probably most damaging of all, power dynamics. Scaling those towers or bringing them into any kind of proper perspective is intensely fraught with - “stuff”.
Here are things that end up on the view side of the electron microscope of my neurosis's:
The phone
The mail
College paperwork
Assignments
Work paperwork
Taxes
The bills
Changing services, starting new services
Cleaning
Dharma
Writing

There’s probably more but those are the completely blatant examples. For me, no cigar has ever been just a cigar, if you know what I mean. The power dynamic and who has it runs me, a lot. I wonder whether this is generally a womens issue or whether men have it as well since the power trip really does affect all of us peons?

Inexplicable AM Earworm

Just A Closer Walk With Thee - Sung by a man initially, but when I started thinking about it, it changed to the Patsy Cline version.

Which begs the question - Why would I be hearing an obscure (to me) version which only changes to a well known (to me) version when I focus? Seems that is some indication of more complexity to the earworm phenomena than I usually accredit. Such as, possibly it has connections to a really deep part of the memory and subconscious. Or perhaps sometimes, (for me anyway) it’s picking up stuff from “outside”. Interesting questions if anyone (but me) gives a fig.

Blame it on the boogie

Blame everything on the yard sale
No really. It really is it’s fault. It put me so far behind in everything:
School reading
Housework (and created extra)
Bill Paying
Eating properly
Blogging

I have had to just get my hyper-focus on all week and put my life back together. So that’s that and that’s all done. Now I have to go uptown and try to undue some of the damage neglecting the bills has done. I may have lost my safe deposit box. That would really suck.....

i haven’t even had time to read the newspaper since Sunday. I keep buying ‘em, they keep piling up, maybe tomorrow.....

Damn Essay

AM earworm (You’ve Got To) Hide Your Love Away - Lennon & McCartney

It wasn’t really my intention to get up this early. Given, the cats were doing the usual 6:14 am, exploratory, breakfast bid for attention. I can usually growl, turn over, cover my head and get another hour though. But the brain engine started revving. The volume on the earworm went up. And I had to pee.
Upon returning to bed people were long and loudly laughing outside my window and I thought to myself “who laughs like that at 6:15 in the morning? They must be trippin’ or something.” Then I wanted to get up, to spy on the laughers, to see if they were tweaked. I hope not cuz they were pushing a baby carriage begging the question “where in the world are you taking your baby at 6:16 in the morning anyway?” Maybe to church.

Now I’m up. The cats are fed and Little ghee has performed the obligatory breakfast dance. My own stomach starts growling warningly and the roommate clogged the sink so dishes wait in a pile for his return from work to fix his screwup.

And that brings us to the subject that is on my mind of late. Lying. Why do people so casually do it? I, myself, cannot escape culpability on this. I admit I am a fan of the sin of omission if it’s going to prevent a big problem. BUT (and it’s a biggish but) that is usually a deliberate, planned maneuver to avoid hurting someone's feelings or putting them on the defensive. After spending many years purging myself of the lying factor (apparently there’s a gene for it in my family or something), I became what some friends and coworkers called “ the queen of no tact”. It is a fact that rabid, ruthless, truth telling is most unwelcome in our society. It is however interesting to note that several of the people who shamed me most often and most enthusiastically about my brutal truthing were in the final analysis found to be avid and compulsive liars themselves. I adopted a “shut my mouth” policy. Not overtly lying, but very frequently not telling my whole truths either.

I used to attribute much of it to astrology. There is an actual link in my view. A lot of water in your chart just seems to make truth a fluid substance. Try living with a lot of un-evolved Pisces if you don’t believe that. Try a quintuple Pisces if you want a most blatant example.

Now we add the idea that it is frequently attributable to “authoritarian” parents. If draconian punishments were administered the children lie instead of taking personal responsibility. This is something I’m going to be watching for in my lying studies in future. I think there is potentially a good deal of validity to this theorem.
For an example, I offer my observation of 2 brothers I know who lie in the same ways (casually, frequently and often easily detected and/or disproved) about the same kinds of things ( usually attempting to make themselves look better, cooler, smarter than they are and avoiding taking personal responsibility for their fuckups whether minute or large). Since I know their parents and have had the opportunity to hear many stories about their childhoods I feel that there certainly could be a correlation. The father is a bit of a raging ass.

Another factor I believe I detect a link with, is substance abuse. The most apparently upright citizen will easily lie if this issue is present. That one becomes a chicken and egg conundrum though. Did the self esteem problem that needs to be bolstered by lying occur before or after the substance issue?

And here’s one I really hate. I have been outright instructed to and expected to lie, by various bosses. This idea that lying is being built into business models really, really, bugs me. Force me to lie and eventually I’ll find a way to quit.

If I catch someone in one or two minor lies I can possibly, probably, mostly, overlook it . The circumstances, how comfortable or glib they seem to feel about it is a real tell. I try to accept people for the face that they want me to see. But I watch and frankly I’m judgmental. If the public face varies too much from the real face I stop trusting altogether.

Those are generally white and grey lies. My true horror is the black lie. Buddhism says this is pretending to have spiritual accomplishments you don’t. This can screw up peoples karma for millennia. Probably just not a good idea. I have seen many painful examples of this. My friend who committed suicide after the Rajneesh scandal destroyed what he believed in. Another who now hates Buddhism after following a false guru destroyed his family. Those are just a couple examples, I’ve seen a lot more. Obsessed as I am with cults and false prophets this is a big issue for me. The idea of one person throwing a huge monkey wrench into another’s spiritual growth for fun, profit and power is very alien and abhorrent.

I also think that lying for fun, profit and power about things like WMD’s or Jews, the Rom, and homosexuals being a problem or whether your industry is destroying the environment and your workers lives and health, which results in the death of anywhere from one to millions of human beings is pretty much the black lie as well. If I believed in Satan I would think it was downright Satanic. As it is I have to try to accept that those are just extreme examples of complete ignorance of the nature of reality and that the people committing such atrocities actually, truly, believe that this will somehow bring them happiness. It’s a hard pill to swallow but it is one of the only ways to try to retain compassion for them in their stupid, ignorant, destructive, negative, foolish, shortsighted, wickedness.

Which brings me to my question. By accepting all the little lies are we totally laying the foundation for the really big ones?

Lists

Apparently I have switched my focus from writing to reading. However I’ve got to get back in the saddle as I have three major writing projects on the summer burner. I have really enjoyed the several weeks of reading a novel a day though. Nothing like being sick for an excuse to just lay around munching down the mind candy. Lot’s of John MacDonald and children’s books, but I never finished The Prince which is a day overdue now.

I’m back to thinking about Blake, Tolstoy and Swedenborg, their manias and visions and am hoping to squooze in some more research on TLE now that I’m thinking about it again. But my list of summer tasks grows each day and I’m not making much counter strikes on the scratching the finished ones off as of yet.

I am back on the blood sugar efforts as well as having got myself down to one black tea bag a day and no chocolate for a couple weeks now. I’ve also gotten the smokes back down to 18 per day. Having trouble getting beyond that yet. Been sounding very Sylvia Simon lately.

First order of business is triune: Get the hole in my stomach healed, get ready for a big garage sale beginning of June and get the Elder program up to par.
In between all of that I have to try to get going on finding some money for school next year as well as get admitted somewhere. Those are the big ticket items.
The rest is the perpetual house chores and I’m hoping to garden.
Now that I don’t have to do crap like writing 12 page papers, I hope to get more of this sort of writing done as well as I’ve set myself a goal of 20 new songs over the summer. I have 2 half written so far.

All right, that’s a start. I'll get back to you with something profound when I get it put together. I’d say I’m getting stronger everyday but I see where that gets me.....