Category Archives: experimental

Home Cure for Anxiety

Set the timer for twelve minutes.  Pretend the computer keyboard is a musical keyboard and blow.   The chords, as you know, are harmonies, instant, under your hands just like that.  Then there are the notes you can play against them and where you can put them.  

Oh, perhaps it is better, you think, to play an actual musical keyboard. There, you reason, you can put your fingers and hear the sounds you imagine, you try to describe.  Music, ineffable as that breeze suddenly blowing the sweat off your clammy face.

Well, there is a point to that, whereas here, where I tap like the fingers-afflicted victim of RLS, the bebopping leg shakes that can’t be controlled, as mine can’t be now, we are flying without a chart, without a map, without an audible clue, rhythmless and bluesless.  Such is the nature of this anxiety I am attempting the home cure for now. There is the best way to deal with it, and then there is the way we are capable of dealing with it in the given moment.

I have to say, it’s amazing the energy with which my right leg is pounding away.

That said, the rest is to be expected.  Sustaining a dream takes a remarkable, and/or, idiotic temperament, particularly when you can’t get others to really see the dream you dream.  That’s the hard work of the dreamer, to prove the dream is more than vapor in the mind of the person who dreams it.   How to show the focused excitement the living embodiment of that dream brings forth?   Hmmmmm.   How to control ze uncontrollable tapping of this right leg of mine?  It’s the damnedest thing.

I am waiting to hear, waiting to hear, waiting.  And because I’m in this holding pattern, waiting to hear, my leg has gone insane.  Lucky for the neighbor downstairs the foot is clad in a soft rubber croc, thus no tap tap tap on the ceiling.  Ah, now the RLS has miraculously stopped, and not a moment too soon.

A beautiful young woman, very talented, described her panic attacks the other day.   She begins hyperventilating and can’t stop herself.  The more fearful she gets, the worse it gets.   She sees a therapist, but so far, the attacks continue.

There is a merciless force at work in the universe, along with life-giving things like good music, kindness, love and hope.  Better to give hope, have it, share it, than to dwell on the merciless force always at work.  That force is busy whittling away at the life of an old friend who hopes to live to see his 58th birthday, this Friday the 13th.   It is busy eroding all of us, unless we tap into the forces that give life, and even then, it’s an iffy proposition at best.

Get Walkin’

Sekhnet bought me a brilliant device that clips on a pocket, smaller than a pinkie.  It measures steps, calculates miles walked, has an altimeter that ticks off how many flights of steps, or their uphill equivalent, you walk.  It’s pretty motivational, I have to say.  We playfully compete against each other and can see each other’s stats on-line.   I cling to the slightest of leads over her in steps this week, and I see, to my chagrin, that pacing around the hovel today only netted me 1,747 steps, less than a mile.  I climbed no stairs.

Now the clock is counting down, it’s after midnight.  I’ve been nursing a bad cold all day, holding it to my breast, suckling it on hot soup when it was not gurgling out my nose, rattling in my chest.   Feeling a tiny bit better after all that and then I see my time to walk has passed.   And 29 steps on the device.   29 friggin’ steps.  0.01 miles.   So I have to go for a walk, just up the Avenue, around the hill at the corner, down to Broadway, back up the hill, down the Avenue.   3,000 steps, get me started for tomorrow.

“What are you prattling about, man, with 7:01 leering on the timer?”

Hmmmm.  Yes.   What, indeed.  I am trying to get this heavier than air aircraft to fly.  It’s said to be theoretically possible.  People tell me I’m insane.  Maybe they’re right.   Then I notice the clothes of one of their children, spattered with blood, a certain haste to kick them behind the chair.  A guilty look, picking the teeth, wiping the mouth then hiding the napkin, eyes flashing wildly from side to side, laughing too loud.  

“Cannibal,” I think to myself, swallowing hard, “and, yes, I’m insane.”

“You hang out with people who eat their children, man,” points out a shrewd one, as though it were obvious what kind of person that makes me.

Perhaps, yes, they eat their children.  But they certainly don’t mean to eat them.  For God’s sake, man, you’re not saying they eat them because they want to eat them?!

“Of course not,” man says soothingly, falsely, “nobody wants to eat their own children, surely not.  But it would seem they are irresistibly delicious, wouldn’t it?”

I hasten neither to agree nor disagree, the walls of the cabin are sweating feverishly and there is less than three minutes on the timer.   I don’t like the way this cat’s looking at me.

“What?” he asks, innocent and evil at once, “I’m not a vegetarian.  Not a vegetarian like you, Hilter of the sea.”

“I don’t feel so good about eating fish,” I tell him, but he’s already one step ahead, the fork and knife glinting in his hands, napkin tucked smartly under his chin, ready.

I’ve got to get the hell out of here, I say to myself, trying not to look the obvious in the face.  I’ve got to get the hell out of here.

41 seconds on the clock, I see, and it feels like a year.  A year in prison, I’m telling you.  20 seconds now, like a month.  And now, counting the last ten and…. ah, the buzzer.

I’m headed out to the Avenue.

Comment from discussion of Jim Fallon’s talk on the psychopath’s brain

Oct 8 2011: This is just so wrong. “Brain Damage”? No. How about, evolution! I’m sick of ‘specialists’ trying to talk about us like we have brain damage or must have witnessed some sort of huge disaster in our lives to be void of emotion. Personally, I feel I operate on a higher level. Emotional connections are limitations to greatness and offer no positive effects to life. While it may make you feel better to consider yourself ‘normal’ and see me as a ‘brain damaged psycho’ all you are really doing is swimming through the pool of reality with your eyes closed. Maybe it’s just because those of us with this “brain damage” are able to set goals and don’t get distracted by petty emotional problems like the rest of you. Maybe time for you all to take a look at the evolution chart and have a good hard look at where you think it is headed, because human society no longer needs communities for protection from each other so the emotional ties are the modern version of the appendix; and as such is no longer required.

the video and the other comments are here

Hammering the Nail

“That did it, that was great, really hammered the old nail home, didn’t it, boys?” he said happily, no longer even conscious of the absurdity of talking to himself.  You have to talk to someone, after all, or you wind up talking to yourself after a while.   Pleasure unshared is only half pleasure, after all.   He had nothing against half pleasure, mind you, he preferred it to everything else, everything but shared pleasure.  

“Share this, wimp,” said the bully, preparing to nip the crippled man’s delight precisely in the proverbial bud.  Nobody celebrating around here — the bully’s credo.   The bully stopped, like an elk putting its nose to the wind, pausing to get the scent, as the crippled man smiled.

“Thank you for sharing,” said the crippled man.  The bully regarded him warily.  “I mean, which hell would be worse?   A hell where you are the only person, for eternity, or a hell where there is one other person there with you, for eternity.”

“That would depend on who the other person is, wouldn’t it?” said the bully.  

“I would say that’s right,” the cripple said cheerily.  “but if there were virtually any other sentient being alive with you, ready to improvise at any time, your torment would be less profound.   You’d be in a much more tolerable hell.”

“Except it would be ten times worse if that person died,” the bully said, thoughtfully.  It is part of the bully’s nature to fear and anticipate all of the worst outcomes.   Bullies are not casually made, an insane sadist has put in hours of hard work to hand craft each of these insatiably angry victimizers.

 “And you can stop referring to me as the ‘crippled man’,” said the crippled man, his jaw determined.  “I don’t have to tolerate that kind of abuse, even from my author.”

Have it your way, crippled man, of course you are correct.  

The crippled man doesn’t have to take any abuse.  Not from me, not from anybody.  He has only to write clearly; in short, punchy sentences.  

But, truly, no reason for any of it, except to reaffirm the trampled value of creativity.   Intense, collaborative creativity is needed in the world, now and going forward, more than at any previous time in human history.   The world will be irrevocably broken for human life very soon.  This is the time for action.  There’s no time to stall.