Caution: Inside my head.

I just turned away in the middle of a decision to go up on top of the roof and sit and draw. It felt so wrong. Like I would have been adding a weight to my life that I don't want right now.

This happens often during the creative process. The emotional feelers are out, wanting good vibes and then bad ones come in and shut everything down.

And now I feel as if I were to go up there, I might want to jump off. But no, that's just indulgence. The building isn't high enough.

I almost deleted those last words. Somehow even in an anonymous blog I didn't want to sound suicidal, maybe not even to myself. The funny thing is, my antidepressants seem to be making me more volatile, more impulsive and hotheaded than I've been in years. But I don't really feel good about it.

Living inside infinity

There are too many things to talk about, too many things to seek or search, too many pages to the book of sand. One carves out a path at one's peril, to find later that it has all been filled back in.

I want to reach you. I want you to know I exist, at least for a little while longer.

The Answer

I believe the Internet is becoming the place we turn to for answers, but more importantly for THE answer. And it won't give you that.

Hint: I am at least two people, probably more.

Today I almost started a new blog using my real-world name. It would have been like this blog, a meandering of my personal thoughts, but with my real-person name.

I couldn't do it. My mind refuses it. I'm of at least two: The real-world me is conservative, humorous, sarcastic, and quite boring to people, although intelligent and very creative. Almost everything he posts on Facebook is ignored. He is considered by others to be quaintly out of style and harmless, a great human being who can help you out in a pinch, rather absent-minded but often quiet and usually lost in a fog.

He wears his body uncomfortably and contorts his voice and face into strange expressions that are bizarre. He comes across as being effiminate and singsongy, even though inside he hates this. He uses his hands a lot when talking, as if all his expression isn't enough. You would call him animated without being entertaining. He tries to avoid using long words and obtruse sentence structure, which he replaces with a faux-folksy gee-whiz stupidity.


Oh God, I am so sick of being more than one person. The fact is that most of me, if not all of me, are people that others can't waste their time to fathom. The strain of it all is overwhelming me. I spend most of my time physically alone in crowds, or physically alone at home. The fact that I tend to be more than one person is probably the most interesting thing about me, but certainly not the most strange.

Lately I've been reading books that illustrate the danger of living an isolated life. You are at risk of being attacked and isolated and taken advantage of. Feeling myself in danger of this, I retreat more and more into a world where I am my own company, except as required. I've managed to put one of me, the most unsocially acceptable one, to rest for now, but the others are really no better. If I weren't of middle age and moderately successful in life, I'd be a perfect target for cults.

Flying

Last night I dreamt I was flying again. This time there was a Japanese kid who was flying indoors where I was and my admiration of his technique caused me to climb up on something and dive off, landing inches from the floor and swimming about in the air, gradually gaining altitude.

Flying is something that you can’t really describe in words until you’ve done it. While very much like swimming, it takes a certain amount of mental focus to sustain. Just a little bit of arm movement can get you fairly high in the air, although with the proper concentration, almost no motion is needed. Probably the best part is the look on others' faces when they see how easy it is.

One of the best ways to learn to fly is pole vaulting, but flying on a swing is almost as good. The trick is to get the air and your momentum balanced to create weightlessness, which a pole vault does very well. Most people, once they are airborne, panic as their stomach rises, which is the main reason they fall back into the earth.

I remain convinced that the mind has plenty of energy to overcome the puny but persistence pull of gravity. That this focus happens in dreams isn’t surprising.

It’s interesting to note that levitation and flying are coming into the mainstream attention and fascination of adults.

It's happening

It's not so much that the line between reality and unreality is blurred. It's more like someone has stuck a stick in your brain and stirred the real and unreal sections together.

I could have a lisp. I could have a wine colored birthmark across my face. Then I would have reason to complain. But I only have emotional fracturing and inner thoughts that won't go away. And a world that is oblivious. I shouldn't complain. I'm not complaining. I'm just telling you what it's like.

What if?

What if it's all bogus? What if your brain really is the only one? What if all these allusions to parallel worlds are just hints or remnants or reverberations of what is really going on?

What if you really are living in a fragile bubble, and every discontinuity, every mis-apprehending, every deja vu, every scrap of paranoia is real? Would it matter? Would you do anything different? Would you just scrap morality and kindness and go for life as entertainment? Somehow, I don't think so.

The only thing that would be different, what would that be? You'd still feel lonely. You'd still feel singled out for all sorts of crazy treatment, from wonderful serendipities to a face bruised from closed doors and being ignored. You'd still feel frustrated by your faults. You might cry a little more. Or less.

This is what dissociation feels like: a disconnect between what people say and do and what is really happening. Forgetfulness. Mistakeness. Loss of hearing and buzzing in the ears. A sudden ability to lose 35 lbs of fat. A hidden ability to do the unthinkable task of caring for an aging parent. Double rainbows ending on the highway in front of you. Shadows getting longer in one day.

I guess if I knew that it was all bogus, I'd at least know something for sure. Right now, I don't know anything.