I have received a criticism lately, that I haven't been doing my part to keep my internet readership amused with recent posts. In response: I have been writing. In fact, I have written more in the last three weeks than I have in the three months before that put together. I just can't post what I've written here, for various reasons. Many of my regular readers know or suspect what I'm talking about, and I expect that Blake at least is moderately shocked that I've managed to contain myself to date. Maybe those things will see the light of day, someday. Maybe not.
In the meantime, to keep people amused, here is another excerpt from the Rules, which have also benefited greatly from my recent bouts of mental wheel-spinning. Might even be ready for me to start shopping for editors, so those of you who have full(est) editions - of which there are three authorized hard-copies, and even one autographed pirate copy - should get their comments and criticisms in. Here's today excerpt:
The Jeckle & Hyde Rule
Ladies want to be treated like whores. Whores want to be treated like ladies. Southern girls are usually ladies. Northern girls are usually whores. Western girls are usually psychos.
Explanation: The Jeckle & Hyde Rule
Your girl loves hearing “Baby, you look beautiful tonight.” But she still occasionally needs to hear “Bitch, that is fucking HOT. Come here!”
By dint of the same hormonal swings that result in psychotic and bitchy mood swings, women are many-spendored things. You may not believe this, but in every girl, there is princess, a slut, a lady, a whore, a rockstar, a groupie, and any other character label you can think of. The whole Breakfast Club is there. There are times when she wants to act and be treated like a lady. There are time when she wants to act and be treated like a whore. It’s just a matter of how she’s feeling, which means it’s a matter of which way her hormones are driving her, and how much success (if any) her mind is having keeping the hormones reigned in, or at least flowing in a consistent direction.
The point is that anything you could ever want from a woman, you can probably get from the woman you’re with. You just need to draw it out of her. I understand that you are the Star of the Show, but remember that she lost her copy of the script: she doesn’t know the lines she’s supposed to be reciting, and she’s CERTAINLY not following the stage directions.
If she’s with you, odds are that she’s probably willing to indulge you in whatever it is that you want. You might have to bribe her with some exchange or gift, but brief bargaining aside, she’s probably going to be game for whatever you might be in to. Just ask. Ask politely, but make your desires clear. If you want her to act like a lady, trust me, she can make that happen, in ways that might amaze you. If you want her to act like a whore, she can make that happen too, in ways that will probably amaze you even more. Yes, I’m talking about YOUR wife/girlfriend/whatever. You just need to learn how to get that part of her character to come out and play.
What you have to keep in mind is that she is under all sorts of societal and cultural influences that demand she act like an upstanding girl who doesn’t do anything improper – which refers to her acting above or below her station. Society frowns on that. So, if you want to take advantage of The Whore Inside, you generally have to find some way to coax her out. But don’t ever doubt that she’s in there.
The way to do this is simply to earn her trust. If you can get her to trust you, lots of barriers and inhibitions will go down. She will relax away from rigid cultural guidelines, and stop worrying that you’re going to think of her as a slut or a freak. Or at least, she'll get comfortable (and even turned on) by you thinking of her as a slut of a freak. This will snowball. She relaxes a little, has a good time, leading her to relax further. She probably won't be able to help feeling a bit ashamed about how she's acting, but she will be turned on as well. And so long as you don't go over the top in your enthusiasm, she will dig that you dig the things she is ashamed of, and - even more - she will dig that she can trust you with those parts of her character. BUT YOU WILL HAVE TO EARN IT. She needs to be able to trust you not to be a judgmental jackass AT ANY POINT. If you can manage that, you will get there. Although it’s going to take a while, it will be worth it. A woman who can be around you with no reservations or restrictions… let me tell you.
The alternative to spending a lot of time making her comfortable and setting her fears to rest is to create some scene or circumstance where she will relax away from cultural norms for other reasons. The best way to do that is to build a fantasy. Ever notice how girls consider Halloween as an opportunity to dress like hookers, either overtly or some other costume with strong hooker overtones? Ever notice how much freakier she is when you go away on vacation? Those occasions give her some distance from herself, and let her get away from her rigid day-to-day persona, and into whatever role she might really want to play at the time. This can work for you.
So earn her trust. Take her on a vacation. And let her know that you love the whore in her every bit as much as you love the lady. You will be AMAZED.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
Monday, January 19, 2009
Just A Little Announcement...
One of my best and oldest friends in the world, a girl that I love in ways that seem a bit odd and alien even to me (feelings? I don't have feelings! Hell, I hardly even have nerve endings!), is having a hard time lately. Personal drama, kind of thing. One of those messes of such magnitude that the biggest dilemma is not finding the best solution, but working up the stones to make the choice that sucks the least.
I don't like seeing my friends that way, so while there's really nothing I can do to help her out, I can take this opportunity to plug a little event that I'm involved in, which never fails to be an AMAZING time for everyone involved. So if any of you, my somewhat loyal readers, feel the need to take a little vacation to get away from things, or even if you don't feel the need for a vacation, but are willing to be talked into one, check this out:
The 10th Annual Thomas Jefferson School of Law Alumni Surf Society Beach Clean-Up and BBQ is happening on April 25. The associated festivities will begin on Thursday the 23rd, and continue through Monday the 27th. It is, without a doubt, the biggest and best party of the year for the law school. We always get more alumni turn-out than any Alumni Association event. We usually get more student turn-out than any student event. The funny part is that the Alumni Surf Society is only tangentially associated with the law school. The Clean-Up and BBQ is almost entirely funded privately, by four of us from the Class of '02 (yes, THAT class). Since we don't depend on law school/alumni association funds, and since our 'organization' exists outside their aegis, we are not subject to their rules or restrictions. Thus, we can do any goddamn thing we please, and don't even bother making pretenses about form or propriety. Turns out that, mostly as a result of the efforts that V puts in, nobody can touch the Beach Clean-up.
In fact, we (by which I mean mostly Erik) have had to fight off attempts by both the alumni association and various student organizations to try to take over the Beach Clean-Up. All of which efforts have been put down with varying degrees of savagery. Which is to be expected; three of us in the central group are career litigators, and the fourth is a patent prosecutor.
In any rate, this year's festivities will one again be based at Puesta del Sol in San Diego, right where Ocean Beach turns into Sunset Cliffs. Check it out. It's a great venue, and there is nothing like 11 am brunch on a sunny balcony overlooking the ocean after an extended evening of partying. There are also photos on the Surf Society myspace page, and the Surf Society Facebook page. Look for the photo of Brad standing next to the 'fridge. That was from last year. Last year was not atypical.
If you need some more details about what will be going on, I'm afraid that I can't provide many of them since - other than our customary Friday trip to Costco for supplies, and other than Saturday walking the beach - there really is no plan except "Good friends, good food, good booze, good times."
So. If you are looking for an excuse to have a good time (Blake), or if you have no excuse not to have a good time (Lisa), or if you just need need to have a good time to get over, around, and/or through all the shit you've been dealing with (Jen), come on down. I'd love to see you there.
I don't like seeing my friends that way, so while there's really nothing I can do to help her out, I can take this opportunity to plug a little event that I'm involved in, which never fails to be an AMAZING time for everyone involved. So if any of you, my somewhat loyal readers, feel the need to take a little vacation to get away from things, or even if you don't feel the need for a vacation, but are willing to be talked into one, check this out:
The 10th Annual Thomas Jefferson School of Law Alumni Surf Society Beach Clean-Up and BBQ is happening on April 25. The associated festivities will begin on Thursday the 23rd, and continue through Monday the 27th. It is, without a doubt, the biggest and best party of the year for the law school. We always get more alumni turn-out than any Alumni Association event. We usually get more student turn-out than any student event. The funny part is that the Alumni Surf Society is only tangentially associated with the law school. The Clean-Up and BBQ is almost entirely funded privately, by four of us from the Class of '02 (yes, THAT class). Since we don't depend on law school/alumni association funds, and since our 'organization' exists outside their aegis, we are not subject to their rules or restrictions. Thus, we can do any goddamn thing we please, and don't even bother making pretenses about form or propriety. Turns out that, mostly as a result of the efforts that V puts in, nobody can touch the Beach Clean-up.
In fact, we (by which I mean mostly Erik) have had to fight off attempts by both the alumni association and various student organizations to try to take over the Beach Clean-Up. All of which efforts have been put down with varying degrees of savagery. Which is to be expected; three of us in the central group are career litigators, and the fourth is a patent prosecutor.
In any rate, this year's festivities will one again be based at Puesta del Sol in San Diego, right where Ocean Beach turns into Sunset Cliffs. Check it out. It's a great venue, and there is nothing like 11 am brunch on a sunny balcony overlooking the ocean after an extended evening of partying. There are also photos on the Surf Society myspace page, and the Surf Society Facebook page. Look for the photo of Brad standing next to the 'fridge. That was from last year. Last year was not atypical.
If you need some more details about what will be going on, I'm afraid that I can't provide many of them since - other than our customary Friday trip to Costco for supplies, and other than Saturday walking the beach - there really is no plan except "Good friends, good food, good booze, good times."
So. If you are looking for an excuse to have a good time (Blake), or if you have no excuse not to have a good time (Lisa), or if you just need need to have a good time to get over, around, and/or through all the shit you've been dealing with (Jen), come on down. I'd love to see you there.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Guest Post: On Sluts.
This is re-posted with permission from my friend Blake, about whom any of my regular readers will have heard of, at the very least. Given my recent and ongoing association with bitches of truly world-class caliber (you know who you are), I thought it might be fun to throw in a little change up, and view things from somebody else's perspective. If nothing else, this shit is funny as hell. So, without further ado:
(*******************************************************)
Slut.
In my English classes we talk about ‘loaded words.’ Loaded words are words so pregnant with meaning that one must be careful in using them; do not confuse them with words you should or should not use when loaded. In English professor-speak, we would say these words are rich in both denotation and connotation. These are the words you use when you want to say a lot with a little.
Slut definitely qualifies as a loaded word. I’m certain that everyone has their own set of images and understandings for the word ‘slut.’ Maybe it’s the girl you knew back in college; the guy you met at the bars last night. Oh, be sure, slut is non-discriminatory. Boys and girls, men and women alike, all can be sluts, slutty, sluttish, in touch and touching their inner slut.
Setting aside the definitions, both denotative and connotative for just a moment, take a good, long look and listen at the word itself. Slut. It slides out of your mouth, doesn’t it? Or it starts too, with that mandatorily sibilant s… ssssssslut. The s slides to the l, giving brief pause before the mini-grunt of the u—uh—surprised –sounding, almost, and ending with that sharp flick of the tongue to make the t. Slut. You say it and smile; you say it and grin. You say it just to say it. Even said in anger, people still smile when they say it, when they hear it, when they know it.
But the true power in the word slut, what makes me love her so, is in her connotations, in that pregnancy of meaning we mentioned in passing earlier, in the images, acts, and imaginations which the term calls to mind.
I have known two kinds of sluts in my life, and while they were very, very different in nature, they both had one strong trait in common.
The first slut I ever met was a slut because she was looking for something. A searching slut, if you will. She had yet to define herself, wholly and completely, and in her sluttishness, she gave herself a certain kind of freedom for exploration and experimentation that the normal rules of society could never have allowed. She was, when I met her, still a little hesitant, still a little inhibited, but with little prompting from me, she turned tricks that would have made Cleopatra blush. She loved me and left me, moving on to other targets who, hopefully to her, had more to teach than I did. I’ve lost track of her, but I do pray that she found was she was looking for.
The second slut I ever met wasn’t looking for anything more than good time. She was done searching for meaning in life; she had found that she could get anything she needed between the sheets, or across the foot of the bed, or in the backseat, or, once, outside the bar in the alleyway. She fucked for the pure joy of fucking, and anything she happened to learn was simply a little extra frosting on her nipples, ready to be savored by the next up-and-comer.
But all the sweet, sweaty memories the word slut calls into my mind aren’t anything to do with why I love the word. While the connotations of slut run deep into the seedy underbelly of sex, seduction, wantonness, greed, lust, and (often) betrayal, those aren’t the connotations that carry the most power for the slutty at heart.
Sluts are free. They’re clear in their desires and communications. Sluts don’t have hidden agendas, they don’t play mind games, they don’t concern themselves with subtleties of language.
The reasons I love the word slut are the same reasons I dislike the word tease, used in the same context. I have a few scars from my varied encounters with sluts. Only two have taken stitches, and they’ve all healed inside a month. My encounters with so-called moral women, the apparently upstanding girls, the women with ‘nothing to hide’ that have left me drunk, cowering, crying, requiring therapy and vowing never to date again.
I love slut for the same reasons I love clarity, simplicity and elegance. For as rude and unabashed as sluts behave, in all the delightful ways they behave so badly, they’re clear about their intents and purpose. It’s a lovely, lovely contradiction. So honest and so forthright about something that people shouldn’t discuss outside trusted friends and relationships.
It’s little wonder that the rings of slut have grown to include less offensive offenses. I saw a t-shirt that said “Snuggleslut” on it. Please, children. Sluts rarely snuggle. Rarely. I’ve been called a bookslut by those aware of my penchants for hardcover tomes. I’ve known people who’ve referred to themselves as foodsluts, sleepsluts, gamesluts, and puppysluts. I dislike all of these terms. I dislike this watering down of the proud term slut.
Sluts are sexy, sweaty boys and girls who want nothing more than to go someplace where the chances of interruption are as limited as possible, and work you over generally in delightful fashion, leaving you weak, sticky and smiling. People who focus more on the cuddling after the fact simply cannot qualify as sluts. Granted, I love a good cuddle, but I love being exhausted into a good cuddle even more. And, much as I love my books, they’ve never, never done for me anything near what a true slut has done.
I think if we all had a little more slut in us… Wait. I think we’ve all got the potential to be a bit sluttier. I think if we all loosen up the reigns a bit, if we all got a little more in touch with our inner slut… if at times we all took off our dignity and restrictions with our clothing and simply did our sluttish best… I think we’d all be a little happier. Sluts; we should all be so lucky.
(*******************************************************)
Slut.
In my English classes we talk about ‘loaded words.’ Loaded words are words so pregnant with meaning that one must be careful in using them; do not confuse them with words you should or should not use when loaded. In English professor-speak, we would say these words are rich in both denotation and connotation. These are the words you use when you want to say a lot with a little.
Slut definitely qualifies as a loaded word. I’m certain that everyone has their own set of images and understandings for the word ‘slut.’ Maybe it’s the girl you knew back in college; the guy you met at the bars last night. Oh, be sure, slut is non-discriminatory. Boys and girls, men and women alike, all can be sluts, slutty, sluttish, in touch and touching their inner slut.
Setting aside the definitions, both denotative and connotative for just a moment, take a good, long look and listen at the word itself. Slut. It slides out of your mouth, doesn’t it? Or it starts too, with that mandatorily sibilant s… ssssssslut. The s slides to the l, giving brief pause before the mini-grunt of the u—uh—surprised –sounding, almost, and ending with that sharp flick of the tongue to make the t. Slut. You say it and smile; you say it and grin. You say it just to say it. Even said in anger, people still smile when they say it, when they hear it, when they know it.
But the true power in the word slut, what makes me love her so, is in her connotations, in that pregnancy of meaning we mentioned in passing earlier, in the images, acts, and imaginations which the term calls to mind.
I have known two kinds of sluts in my life, and while they were very, very different in nature, they both had one strong trait in common.
The first slut I ever met was a slut because she was looking for something. A searching slut, if you will. She had yet to define herself, wholly and completely, and in her sluttishness, she gave herself a certain kind of freedom for exploration and experimentation that the normal rules of society could never have allowed. She was, when I met her, still a little hesitant, still a little inhibited, but with little prompting from me, she turned tricks that would have made Cleopatra blush. She loved me and left me, moving on to other targets who, hopefully to her, had more to teach than I did. I’ve lost track of her, but I do pray that she found was she was looking for.
The second slut I ever met wasn’t looking for anything more than good time. She was done searching for meaning in life; she had found that she could get anything she needed between the sheets, or across the foot of the bed, or in the backseat, or, once, outside the bar in the alleyway. She fucked for the pure joy of fucking, and anything she happened to learn was simply a little extra frosting on her nipples, ready to be savored by the next up-and-comer.
But all the sweet, sweaty memories the word slut calls into my mind aren’t anything to do with why I love the word. While the connotations of slut run deep into the seedy underbelly of sex, seduction, wantonness, greed, lust, and (often) betrayal, those aren’t the connotations that carry the most power for the slutty at heart.
Sluts are free. They’re clear in their desires and communications. Sluts don’t have hidden agendas, they don’t play mind games, they don’t concern themselves with subtleties of language.
The reasons I love the word slut are the same reasons I dislike the word tease, used in the same context. I have a few scars from my varied encounters with sluts. Only two have taken stitches, and they’ve all healed inside a month. My encounters with so-called moral women, the apparently upstanding girls, the women with ‘nothing to hide’ that have left me drunk, cowering, crying, requiring therapy and vowing never to date again.
I love slut for the same reasons I love clarity, simplicity and elegance. For as rude and unabashed as sluts behave, in all the delightful ways they behave so badly, they’re clear about their intents and purpose. It’s a lovely, lovely contradiction. So honest and so forthright about something that people shouldn’t discuss outside trusted friends and relationships.
It’s little wonder that the rings of slut have grown to include less offensive offenses. I saw a t-shirt that said “Snuggleslut” on it. Please, children. Sluts rarely snuggle. Rarely. I’ve been called a bookslut by those aware of my penchants for hardcover tomes. I’ve known people who’ve referred to themselves as foodsluts, sleepsluts, gamesluts, and puppysluts. I dislike all of these terms. I dislike this watering down of the proud term slut.
Sluts are sexy, sweaty boys and girls who want nothing more than to go someplace where the chances of interruption are as limited as possible, and work you over generally in delightful fashion, leaving you weak, sticky and smiling. People who focus more on the cuddling after the fact simply cannot qualify as sluts. Granted, I love a good cuddle, but I love being exhausted into a good cuddle even more. And, much as I love my books, they’ve never, never done for me anything near what a true slut has done.
I think if we all had a little more slut in us… Wait. I think we’ve all got the potential to be a bit sluttier. I think if we all loosen up the reigns a bit, if we all got a little more in touch with our inner slut… if at times we all took off our dignity and restrictions with our clothing and simply did our sluttish best… I think we’d all be a little happier. Sluts; we should all be so lucky.
Friday, January 9, 2009
The Zen On The Other Side
Blake always used to say that whenever he though he had me figured out, I would do or say something the completely destroyed whatever his theory of the day was. I know that I tend to confuse the hell out of people. Once again, it’s recently been pointed out to me that my mind doesn’t work the way other peoples’ minds work. I don’t bother denying it. It’s been a long time since anyone could call my mindset ‘normal.’ If ever. I fake it well, but the best way to describe my typical mindset would be: ‘functionally insane.’
Not a lot of people know what I’m about to tell you. Or at least, not a lot of people know all of it. Blake was around for parts, but that was during a period were both of us were pretty caught up with goings on in our own lives – or in our own minds, as the case may be. It really arose from extended periods in my teen and early twenties where I didn’t sleep. At least, I didn’t sleep in the normal sense of the word. Even today, that people can close their eyes, drift off, and be totally under for six or seven hours at a time is a bit alien to me.
It started out as general insomnia, and to a certain degree, was self-inflicted. My family moved to a new town when I was about 16, which was not good for me. We had lived in cosmopolitan Silicon Valley. We moved to a small tourist town. Where we were, I had not many close friends, but a lot of friends. I knew some people there who were screwed up not only as badly as I was (which was not all that badly at the time), but who also were screwed up in the same way that I was. There was each of a blond girl and a brunette girl who seemed to find me non-repulsive. I had high hopes.
But in the new town, there really weren’t a lot of people worth knowing. Not many people worth talking to. The simple fact of the matter is that in addition to being a lot smarter than pretty much all of my classmates, I also had much broader interests than any of them – largely by dint of spending so many years in Silicon Valley. In Solvang nobody and nothing was really very interesting, so – aside from hockey – pretty much everything just became annoyance. Buzzing, which kept me from whatever book or project I was distracting myself with. So I started napping in afternoons, and staying up late at night. I LOVED the peace of the late night times. When the rest of the world stopped, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone or anything that I didn’t want to. Those were the best times in Solvang; when I didn’t have to deal with being there. I could lose myself in a book, or a re-run, or a music video, and forget about where I was.
But my sleep habits got REALLY screwed up over those two years, since I would not really sleep, but just sort of doze for a few hours right after school, and then for a few hours around dawn. Besides the sleep schedule, I’m sure it wasn’t healthy that I spent that much time alone. But I did learn a lot about myself. Easy to figure out what you think, why, and how, when you go a year or two spending five or six hours every night alone with your thoughts. It helps when you don’t have a whole lot of conversation going on even during those times where you have no choice but to be around other people. High school, for example.
When I went away to college, my sleep schedule remained fucked up, but I quit being quite so solitary. I had some suitemates who were okay. I kept up email correspondence with some old friends. And, of course, I was playing a lot of hockey.
But about half-way through college, I went through a period where I pretty much stopped sleeping altogether. I started having… nightmares, I guess the word is. Nothing really terrifying, though. Just things that made me not want to sleep. I remember one where I was walking through a forest, and then I realized that they weren’t trees that were surrounding me. They were pikes. And the branches overhead were people that I knew and loved, impaled on the pikes. I walked beneath the shaft that my brother was on, and he reached down and grabbled my shoulder. He said, “Please Matt, can you get me a glass of water?”
Stomach wounds make people unnaturally thirsty.
Or where I was walking through the aftermath of an endless medieval battlefield. Nobody impaled, just endless bodies (and body parts); anyone still alive must have screamed themselves out. My feet squishing in ground muddied with blood. And I was unspeakably tired, so much so that I could barely stand. I was wearing heavy armor, which made staying on my feet that much more difficult. I’d lost my sword, but that didn’t matter, since I no longer had the strength to lift it. I’d lost my helmet as well. Blood and sweat were trickling into my eyes, and I was too tired to lift a hand to wipe it away. For hours I stumbled and staggered through the fields of the fallen. Lifting one foot up, and putting it down (squish in the mud). Then the other (squish). Then the first again (squish). So tired. But keep walking. Keep moving. I will not stop. There must be an end to it, and however exhausted, I must find it. Keep walking. Keep moving. I will not stop. I will not lie down and become one of the fallen.
So I would quit sleeping, at least in the conventional sense. Sometimes for a few nights in a row, sometimes for a few weeks. Never knew how long it would be (or why) before I could close my eyes and find nothing but peace. During those periods without sleep, I never used any real amounts of caffeine or No-Doze or anything like that, just an endless stack of books, cable TV, and an internet connection. I’d usually doze off for a few hours after the sun came up, since I learned that I wouldn’t sleep deeply enough to dream. I’d also occasionally doze off in the early evenings. Blake used to joke about how he’d come home in the late afternoon and find me napping in my chair, with a book open across my chest and a hockey game on TV. He said it was creepy, because if I woke up, I could tell you not only what was going on in the game, but also what the book was about. I sometimes wonder what he must have thought on nights when he woke to go to the bathroom at 3 at 4, and my light was still on. He and I might talk about it some day, if ever we get drunk enough.
In any rate, exhaustion is a relative thing, and a word that gets terribly overused. Everyone has the occasional long, hard day. Where you haven’t had enough to eat, and you’ve been on your feet for hours and hours and hours, and it seems like everyone in the world is set on making things difficult for you. Those sorts of days where all you want to do is just sit down, have a drink, and relax before you pass out for the night. For most people, that’s what exhaustion means. And from a semantic perspective, the word does fit.
But most people (ultra-marathoners being the only consistent civillian exception) never realize that there is a point where you get so tired that you literally lose control of your own mind. Where you no longer have enough energy to reign in your own thoughts, either to focus on some task at hand, or to avoid thinking about painful, embarrassing, or dangerous things. Your thoughts just start flashing in all sorts of directions. Like when you have conversations with someone, and you steadily move from one topic to the next to the next, passing along the crystalline links between concepts and memories and topics. It’s just like that; your mind moving from interconnected idea to idea. No big deal, except when you get too tired, you only have limited control of which direction your mind is going in. And as you grow still more tired, you lose even more of the ability to focus your mind on any give topic. The random jumps between thoughts and memories and subjects speeds up, until it’s going so fast that the ideas never really take recognizable shape except at random intervals, and swirls hither and yon across your lifetime’s worth of memories and knowledge and feelings and ideas. It’s all of them, and you’re just along for the ride. You become a maelstrom of uncontrolled thoughts and feelings and memories.
The nights are the worst. There’s nothing to keep you busy or to distract you from yourself, and your mind runs wild. There are some things you can do to slow it down or otherwise get some relief. If you put on headphones and turn the volume way up, for example, the music will get so loud that you won’t be able to hear your own thoughts anymore. If you do it too much, you’ll do permanent damage to your hearing (I did), but it is a few minutes of peace. Which is like air to a drowning man. Because there are, in comparison, times where your mind is like a hurricane, swirling and raging without any real form, but with infinite energy. At its very worst, you literally cannot stop it: Stupid little things – a casual word from someone, a song on the radio, or even nothing at all – can start a cascade of thoughts and memories that can overwhelm you, and you use what little energy you have left to avoid being swept away on the whirlwind. Memories surface out of the storm, and become… more than just memories. Not like flashbacks, since you never really lose where or who you actually are, (the only hallucinations you get are usually visual and incidental, where you catch a sudden glimpse of something that can’t possibly be there) but they still become more than just memories. You can’t stop them from coming, and while you don’t re-live the event, you do re-live the feelings. Where the memories involve you making a bad decision, you watch as your mind goes through all the events that follow, and all the pain and loss that can follow even a seemingly incidental stupid choice. With a mind and memory like mine, that means possibly rolling through years of consequences, compounded by additional bad decisions along the way. Usually, a different, parallel part of the maelstrom in your head will coalesce into images of what great things might have been if you had only made slightly different choices. That’s always a treat; thinking about the good things you missed, lost, or otherwise fucked up though chance, ignorance, or simple stupidity. You rail against it, try to bring your mind to focus, try to push away the painful memories and broken dreams and stupid decisions, or at least try to keep them from overwhelming you. You usually will succeed, to one degree or another. Usually well enough to remember who and where you are. But you’re still there, threatening to break loose again, and there’s no way to make it go away. No way to turn it off. Nothing to do except wait for the storm to pass, and hope there’s still a little of you left when it does. Nowhere to escape to, except to take a deep breath, and to keep on keeping on. Keep moving, so as to not lie down and become one of the fallen.
The days between the nights are not so bad, but still can be tough. Things are happening and there are people around, to remind you that the world is still there, and going on, and that you can go out into it and be distracted from what’s happening inside your head. But still. You never know when you might need to suddenly walk out of class, or leave work, or cut a conversation short, because you feel your mind taking a turn in a direction that would make being there… awkward. Where you suddenly have to leave… wherever, because you can literally feel your mind crumbling, and people wouldn’t understand that you just need to curl into a ball in a quiet dark place for a while. Close friends are tough to come by, since you show tendencies (or warning signs, as the case may be) of pretty much every common diagnosable psychological disorder. Manic-depressive? Check. Depressive because you have no energy, and because you can’t shake it when your mind seizes onto dark thoughts. Manic because your mind will occasionally seize onto a happy or active idea, and you can’t shake that either. Obsessive-compulsive for the same reason: your mind will either get caught on one track, and come up with images - in graphic and horrifying detail - all the consequences that might arise if you really did turn the gas on when your hand bumped the stove while you walking out of your kitchen this morning. Or just as often, your mind might refuse to focus on anything. ADD? Got that too. There are times in conversations where you literally cannot stop yourself from talking, even though deep inside your head, you know that you’re saying the wrong things that you shouldn’t be saying. Which does tend to sour people on you. Empathy is difficult as well, since when your mind can focus on someone else’s pain or problems, it does it to such a degree that it becomes your pain or problems. And when you can’t focus, you can’t focus AT ALL, and no matter how much pain your friends are in, nothing they might say or do will stand out from the maelstrom in your head. Lots of things just fade into grey, even things that you rationally know you should be paying attention to and dealing with. ‘Moody’ is a descriptor you become very familiar with.
And then night will fall. Everyone else will go to sleep. And the demons will come. I might have mentioned it before, but the nights are the worst.
After it’s happened daily (or weekly) for a few days (or weeks) on end, and after you’ve relived essentially every dark event and dumb decision you’ve ever made – which leads to a remarkable level of self-awareness, by the way, since the analytical parts of your mind are running just as rampantly unchecked as the memory parts of your mind, which memories give plenty of material for analysis – eventually you start to despair over the energy that you have left, and over expending it to keep the maelstrom under any semblance of control. You wonder if the exhaustion of keeping your mind in check is not worse than simply relaxing and letting your mind go.
Sometimes it’s very easy, tempting even, to let the whirlwind rage out of control. To run before the wind instead of reefing the sails, just to see where it goes. Can insanity really be worse than all the pain from keeping it at bay? There have been times in the midst of alcohol-induced… well, I guess psychosis is as good a word as any, that my mind was running in all directions at three AM. All the angels in heaven singing in their choirs, all the demons in hell chanting and pounding their drums, the wind is raging and rain is pounding, and I can’t hold a thought in my head because every book I’ve ever read, every song I’ve ever heard, and every face I’ve ever seen are flashing through my mind all at once. Joys and fears chase each other around the forest that I’m missing for the trees, and I’m cutting trees down for fuel to keep enough light that – hopefully – the worst of the Dark Things don’t come. It’s chaos. Pure chaos. And it rages within your mind.
But an amazing thing sometimes happens.
There is a flip side to chaos, as any theorist in that field will tell you: patterns spontaneously coalesce from the storm, as the random yet specific memories and emotions come momentarily flying at you and cutting through you, carried by the currents of formless thought, will run into a similar thought, and click together for a few moments or minutes. What is amazing is that those spontaneous patterns, usually frail and fleeting, sometimes grow so vast that the entire maelstrom solidifies into an organized whole. Like a grain of crystal being dropped into a super-saturated solution. There are times when all a lifetime’s worth of thoughts are dancing and joking and laughing and fighting, when a sudden idea will flash across the swirling chaos like a comet; an incidental thought, seemingly at random. But all the books and songs and faces and memories will pause, look up, and see it. And be impressed. They get in line behind that thought, adding the weight of their reality to the wake of comet’s tail. Slowly at first, but then with greater speed, the angels’ song, the harmonies and melodies, fall into synch with the devils’ chanting and drumming, until you can’t tell them apart. All the competing impulses and compulsions find counterparts that arise from the dust, and align so perfectly with those counterparts that hopes and fears find a perfect balance among themselves. Your thoughts and emotions cancel each other out, leaving only you behind.
Your thoughts align, and for one second the universe as a whole unfolds before you and crystallizes in your mind in eleven dimensions. The weight and volume of every thought and memory come together, and take a single step forward as a combined and indescribable whole. You see everything you have ever seen, you know everything you have ever learned, you ARE everything you have EVER been. You see it all in a flash of lightning-light, and the thunder is a single beat of your heart as the entire universe of your mind comes together, and suddenly makes sense. Every thought, every memory, and every emotion come together, and – as one – crash into you and through you like a freight train.
It’s there, you see, and it’s gone – all in an instant.
The crystalline pattern of everyone and everything, rather than fracturing back into random thoughts and memories, instead collapses completely from its own weight. Like the funnel of a tornado suddenly disappearing into nothing from a change in the wind, your thoughts dissolve, and fall into the dust from whence they formed. There is sudden, deafening silence. No more angels. No more demons. No more swirling thoughts. No more raging emotions. You find that the storm has spent its energy, and your mind is utterly still. In that moment, your mind, running wild and unchecked, devours itself, discovers itself, and comes to rest.
You find the calm on the other side of insanity.
Not a lot of people know what I’m about to tell you. Or at least, not a lot of people know all of it. Blake was around for parts, but that was during a period were both of us were pretty caught up with goings on in our own lives – or in our own minds, as the case may be. It really arose from extended periods in my teen and early twenties where I didn’t sleep. At least, I didn’t sleep in the normal sense of the word. Even today, that people can close their eyes, drift off, and be totally under for six or seven hours at a time is a bit alien to me.
It started out as general insomnia, and to a certain degree, was self-inflicted. My family moved to a new town when I was about 16, which was not good for me. We had lived in cosmopolitan Silicon Valley. We moved to a small tourist town. Where we were, I had not many close friends, but a lot of friends. I knew some people there who were screwed up not only as badly as I was (which was not all that badly at the time), but who also were screwed up in the same way that I was. There was each of a blond girl and a brunette girl who seemed to find me non-repulsive. I had high hopes.
But in the new town, there really weren’t a lot of people worth knowing. Not many people worth talking to. The simple fact of the matter is that in addition to being a lot smarter than pretty much all of my classmates, I also had much broader interests than any of them – largely by dint of spending so many years in Silicon Valley. In Solvang nobody and nothing was really very interesting, so – aside from hockey – pretty much everything just became annoyance. Buzzing, which kept me from whatever book or project I was distracting myself with. So I started napping in afternoons, and staying up late at night. I LOVED the peace of the late night times. When the rest of the world stopped, and I didn’t have to deal with anyone or anything that I didn’t want to. Those were the best times in Solvang; when I didn’t have to deal with being there. I could lose myself in a book, or a re-run, or a music video, and forget about where I was.
But my sleep habits got REALLY screwed up over those two years, since I would not really sleep, but just sort of doze for a few hours right after school, and then for a few hours around dawn. Besides the sleep schedule, I’m sure it wasn’t healthy that I spent that much time alone. But I did learn a lot about myself. Easy to figure out what you think, why, and how, when you go a year or two spending five or six hours every night alone with your thoughts. It helps when you don’t have a whole lot of conversation going on even during those times where you have no choice but to be around other people. High school, for example.
When I went away to college, my sleep schedule remained fucked up, but I quit being quite so solitary. I had some suitemates who were okay. I kept up email correspondence with some old friends. And, of course, I was playing a lot of hockey.
But about half-way through college, I went through a period where I pretty much stopped sleeping altogether. I started having… nightmares, I guess the word is. Nothing really terrifying, though. Just things that made me not want to sleep. I remember one where I was walking through a forest, and then I realized that they weren’t trees that were surrounding me. They were pikes. And the branches overhead were people that I knew and loved, impaled on the pikes. I walked beneath the shaft that my brother was on, and he reached down and grabbled my shoulder. He said, “Please Matt, can you get me a glass of water?”
Stomach wounds make people unnaturally thirsty.
Or where I was walking through the aftermath of an endless medieval battlefield. Nobody impaled, just endless bodies (and body parts); anyone still alive must have screamed themselves out. My feet squishing in ground muddied with blood. And I was unspeakably tired, so much so that I could barely stand. I was wearing heavy armor, which made staying on my feet that much more difficult. I’d lost my sword, but that didn’t matter, since I no longer had the strength to lift it. I’d lost my helmet as well. Blood and sweat were trickling into my eyes, and I was too tired to lift a hand to wipe it away. For hours I stumbled and staggered through the fields of the fallen. Lifting one foot up, and putting it down (squish in the mud). Then the other (squish). Then the first again (squish). So tired. But keep walking. Keep moving. I will not stop. There must be an end to it, and however exhausted, I must find it. Keep walking. Keep moving. I will not stop. I will not lie down and become one of the fallen.
So I would quit sleeping, at least in the conventional sense. Sometimes for a few nights in a row, sometimes for a few weeks. Never knew how long it would be (or why) before I could close my eyes and find nothing but peace. During those periods without sleep, I never used any real amounts of caffeine or No-Doze or anything like that, just an endless stack of books, cable TV, and an internet connection. I’d usually doze off for a few hours after the sun came up, since I learned that I wouldn’t sleep deeply enough to dream. I’d also occasionally doze off in the early evenings. Blake used to joke about how he’d come home in the late afternoon and find me napping in my chair, with a book open across my chest and a hockey game on TV. He said it was creepy, because if I woke up, I could tell you not only what was going on in the game, but also what the book was about. I sometimes wonder what he must have thought on nights when he woke to go to the bathroom at 3 at 4, and my light was still on. He and I might talk about it some day, if ever we get drunk enough.
In any rate, exhaustion is a relative thing, and a word that gets terribly overused. Everyone has the occasional long, hard day. Where you haven’t had enough to eat, and you’ve been on your feet for hours and hours and hours, and it seems like everyone in the world is set on making things difficult for you. Those sorts of days where all you want to do is just sit down, have a drink, and relax before you pass out for the night. For most people, that’s what exhaustion means. And from a semantic perspective, the word does fit.
But most people (ultra-marathoners being the only consistent civillian exception) never realize that there is a point where you get so tired that you literally lose control of your own mind. Where you no longer have enough energy to reign in your own thoughts, either to focus on some task at hand, or to avoid thinking about painful, embarrassing, or dangerous things. Your thoughts just start flashing in all sorts of directions. Like when you have conversations with someone, and you steadily move from one topic to the next to the next, passing along the crystalline links between concepts and memories and topics. It’s just like that; your mind moving from interconnected idea to idea. No big deal, except when you get too tired, you only have limited control of which direction your mind is going in. And as you grow still more tired, you lose even more of the ability to focus your mind on any give topic. The random jumps between thoughts and memories and subjects speeds up, until it’s going so fast that the ideas never really take recognizable shape except at random intervals, and swirls hither and yon across your lifetime’s worth of memories and knowledge and feelings and ideas. It’s all of them, and you’re just along for the ride. You become a maelstrom of uncontrolled thoughts and feelings and memories.
The nights are the worst. There’s nothing to keep you busy or to distract you from yourself, and your mind runs wild. There are some things you can do to slow it down or otherwise get some relief. If you put on headphones and turn the volume way up, for example, the music will get so loud that you won’t be able to hear your own thoughts anymore. If you do it too much, you’ll do permanent damage to your hearing (I did), but it is a few minutes of peace. Which is like air to a drowning man. Because there are, in comparison, times where your mind is like a hurricane, swirling and raging without any real form, but with infinite energy. At its very worst, you literally cannot stop it: Stupid little things – a casual word from someone, a song on the radio, or even nothing at all – can start a cascade of thoughts and memories that can overwhelm you, and you use what little energy you have left to avoid being swept away on the whirlwind. Memories surface out of the storm, and become… more than just memories. Not like flashbacks, since you never really lose where or who you actually are, (the only hallucinations you get are usually visual and incidental, where you catch a sudden glimpse of something that can’t possibly be there) but they still become more than just memories. You can’t stop them from coming, and while you don’t re-live the event, you do re-live the feelings. Where the memories involve you making a bad decision, you watch as your mind goes through all the events that follow, and all the pain and loss that can follow even a seemingly incidental stupid choice. With a mind and memory like mine, that means possibly rolling through years of consequences, compounded by additional bad decisions along the way. Usually, a different, parallel part of the maelstrom in your head will coalesce into images of what great things might have been if you had only made slightly different choices. That’s always a treat; thinking about the good things you missed, lost, or otherwise fucked up though chance, ignorance, or simple stupidity. You rail against it, try to bring your mind to focus, try to push away the painful memories and broken dreams and stupid decisions, or at least try to keep them from overwhelming you. You usually will succeed, to one degree or another. Usually well enough to remember who and where you are. But you’re still there, threatening to break loose again, and there’s no way to make it go away. No way to turn it off. Nothing to do except wait for the storm to pass, and hope there’s still a little of you left when it does. Nowhere to escape to, except to take a deep breath, and to keep on keeping on. Keep moving, so as to not lie down and become one of the fallen.
The days between the nights are not so bad, but still can be tough. Things are happening and there are people around, to remind you that the world is still there, and going on, and that you can go out into it and be distracted from what’s happening inside your head. But still. You never know when you might need to suddenly walk out of class, or leave work, or cut a conversation short, because you feel your mind taking a turn in a direction that would make being there… awkward. Where you suddenly have to leave… wherever, because you can literally feel your mind crumbling, and people wouldn’t understand that you just need to curl into a ball in a quiet dark place for a while. Close friends are tough to come by, since you show tendencies (or warning signs, as the case may be) of pretty much every common diagnosable psychological disorder. Manic-depressive? Check. Depressive because you have no energy, and because you can’t shake it when your mind seizes onto dark thoughts. Manic because your mind will occasionally seize onto a happy or active idea, and you can’t shake that either. Obsessive-compulsive for the same reason: your mind will either get caught on one track, and come up with images - in graphic and horrifying detail - all the consequences that might arise if you really did turn the gas on when your hand bumped the stove while you walking out of your kitchen this morning. Or just as often, your mind might refuse to focus on anything. ADD? Got that too. There are times in conversations where you literally cannot stop yourself from talking, even though deep inside your head, you know that you’re saying the wrong things that you shouldn’t be saying. Which does tend to sour people on you. Empathy is difficult as well, since when your mind can focus on someone else’s pain or problems, it does it to such a degree that it becomes your pain or problems. And when you can’t focus, you can’t focus AT ALL, and no matter how much pain your friends are in, nothing they might say or do will stand out from the maelstrom in your head. Lots of things just fade into grey, even things that you rationally know you should be paying attention to and dealing with. ‘Moody’ is a descriptor you become very familiar with.
And then night will fall. Everyone else will go to sleep. And the demons will come. I might have mentioned it before, but the nights are the worst.
After it’s happened daily (or weekly) for a few days (or weeks) on end, and after you’ve relived essentially every dark event and dumb decision you’ve ever made – which leads to a remarkable level of self-awareness, by the way, since the analytical parts of your mind are running just as rampantly unchecked as the memory parts of your mind, which memories give plenty of material for analysis – eventually you start to despair over the energy that you have left, and over expending it to keep the maelstrom under any semblance of control. You wonder if the exhaustion of keeping your mind in check is not worse than simply relaxing and letting your mind go.
Sometimes it’s very easy, tempting even, to let the whirlwind rage out of control. To run before the wind instead of reefing the sails, just to see where it goes. Can insanity really be worse than all the pain from keeping it at bay? There have been times in the midst of alcohol-induced… well, I guess psychosis is as good a word as any, that my mind was running in all directions at three AM. All the angels in heaven singing in their choirs, all the demons in hell chanting and pounding their drums, the wind is raging and rain is pounding, and I can’t hold a thought in my head because every book I’ve ever read, every song I’ve ever heard, and every face I’ve ever seen are flashing through my mind all at once. Joys and fears chase each other around the forest that I’m missing for the trees, and I’m cutting trees down for fuel to keep enough light that – hopefully – the worst of the Dark Things don’t come. It’s chaos. Pure chaos. And it rages within your mind.
But an amazing thing sometimes happens.
There is a flip side to chaos, as any theorist in that field will tell you: patterns spontaneously coalesce from the storm, as the random yet specific memories and emotions come momentarily flying at you and cutting through you, carried by the currents of formless thought, will run into a similar thought, and click together for a few moments or minutes. What is amazing is that those spontaneous patterns, usually frail and fleeting, sometimes grow so vast that the entire maelstrom solidifies into an organized whole. Like a grain of crystal being dropped into a super-saturated solution. There are times when all a lifetime’s worth of thoughts are dancing and joking and laughing and fighting, when a sudden idea will flash across the swirling chaos like a comet; an incidental thought, seemingly at random. But all the books and songs and faces and memories will pause, look up, and see it. And be impressed. They get in line behind that thought, adding the weight of their reality to the wake of comet’s tail. Slowly at first, but then with greater speed, the angels’ song, the harmonies and melodies, fall into synch with the devils’ chanting and drumming, until you can’t tell them apart. All the competing impulses and compulsions find counterparts that arise from the dust, and align so perfectly with those counterparts that hopes and fears find a perfect balance among themselves. Your thoughts and emotions cancel each other out, leaving only you behind.
Your thoughts align, and for one second the universe as a whole unfolds before you and crystallizes in your mind in eleven dimensions. The weight and volume of every thought and memory come together, and take a single step forward as a combined and indescribable whole. You see everything you have ever seen, you know everything you have ever learned, you ARE everything you have EVER been. You see it all in a flash of lightning-light, and the thunder is a single beat of your heart as the entire universe of your mind comes together, and suddenly makes sense. Every thought, every memory, and every emotion come together, and – as one – crash into you and through you like a freight train.
It’s there, you see, and it’s gone – all in an instant.
The crystalline pattern of everyone and everything, rather than fracturing back into random thoughts and memories, instead collapses completely from its own weight. Like the funnel of a tornado suddenly disappearing into nothing from a change in the wind, your thoughts dissolve, and fall into the dust from whence they formed. There is sudden, deafening silence. No more angels. No more demons. No more swirling thoughts. No more raging emotions. You find that the storm has spent its energy, and your mind is utterly still. In that moment, your mind, running wild and unchecked, devours itself, discovers itself, and comes to rest.
You find the calm on the other side of insanity.
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