Trying out a folding keyboard I got with this tablet today. Still nowhere near full sized, but the keys give me physical feedback and it is laid out like a normal computer keyboard, so that makes it better than the virtual keyboard right there.

Plus, typing on the virtual keyboard makes my fingers go all flat, and that is annoying and painful.

This just happened : I am typing away when movement on the floor of the part of the mall outside my window catches my eye. I look,  and see a small black sphere roll in a straight line then come to a gentle stop.

“Oh shit!” I said to myself. “The Locknar has finally found me!”

Luckily, this turned out not to be the case. Good thing too… I’ve been hiding from that thing for 20 years!

I look around to see, in a perfect tableau of universal childhood trauma, an adorable little girl in a frilly pink dress holding a half-full bag of gumballs, with various other colors of gumball on the floor around her.

And just as I look, I can see her look of astonishment start to turn to distress. I immediately started working out the logistics of going to help her,  but I was too slow. A nice lady in a floral print dress stopped to comfort our little preschool princess in distress.

So it turned out to be a heartwarming story of human kindness,  with a strong visual for the beginning.

So where was I? Oh right, habits and compulsions.

As I write this, I have half a White Spot BBQ Chicken Sanwich in front of me. This is a good thing, because I have ordered thee Chicken  Caesar Wrap like eight weeks in a row, and I was in danger of falling into a deep rut.

And I trying to rid myself of that kind of thing.

See, I have recently become aware that I have a host of small compulsions about the way I do things that serve no purpose and therefore are unnecessary restrictions on  my mental flexibility.

As themselves, they aren’t a problem. But they are part of a larger problem, and tackling them will be good practice for overcoming the larger problem

I call them compulsions instead of habits because when  I evren think of defying them, I get this terrible feeling of doom. As if something terrible will happen if I break the pattern.

That is exactly how people with OCD describe their compulsions. It is this feeling of doom that negatively reinforces the compulsion.

I didn’t see my little quirks as compulsions for a long time because I do not match the media image of a compulsive person. For one, I am a lifelong slob. And when you spend most of your time alone, there is nobody to notice and comment upon the fact that you do things the exact same way or via the same rule every single time, so it all fades into the backgrround of your life.

Its your normal.

But now that I am cognizant of the problem, I am doing everything I can to stamp out these little compulsions. I am through with being ruled by fear. And I am determined to free my mind of all the dead weight in my mind. Those compulsions were taking up valuable mental CPU cycles. Freeing my mind of them leaves my mind open to develop more healthy and productive habits.

Like, say, getting things done, instead of just fucking around.

The most important thing, though, is to build up my ability to say “no” to my emotions, especially fear. That is as good a definition of willpower as any. I want to develop my ability to do what I want to do regardless of the often meaningless fluctuations of my emotions.

It’s a vital skill. Without it, we are as helpless as leaves in the wind. With it, we can face the whirlwind and plot our own course through it.

See? That was AIR imagery. I’m breaking all the rulea.

Something something FIRE.

Well I am getting silly, so it must be time to go home. Seeya when I get there!

<-->

Hmm, not bad. Wrote almost 700 words in that White Spot.

I didn’t exactly love their BBQ Chicken Sandwich. It was a big ol’ mess. Chicken, BBQ sauce, coleslaw, tomato, and a bunch of other stuff. It’s like they tried to stick a whole picnic between two slices of bread.

As a result, the flavour was all over the place, as was the sandwich, because it was very messy to eat. And that’s something almost impossible for me to forgive in a food. It would have to be something I really, really like in order for me to endure he potential mess every time I took a bite.

There were several good sandwiches in there somewhere. They should serve them separately.

I also tried their new summer treat, Tangerine Sorbet, which I automatically hear to the tune of the Prince song “Raspberry Beret”, to wit :

It was a Tangerine Sorbet
The kind you find at a Yaletown store
Tangerine Sorbet
And if it was warm, she wouldn’t eat much more

The moment I saw it on the menu, I knew I had to try it. I love tangerines and I am pretty fond of sorbet as well. Way better than that wimpy gelato.

And it tasted great! The flavour was perfecto. But it was way, way too strong.

And yes, that makes me feel old. I used to be the kind of person for whom there was no such thing as too strong a flavour. I wanted everything amped up to 11. But that was a long time ago, and now, the combination of strong flavour and the richness of sorbet just made my stomach roll.

So my taste buds loved it but my stomach was like, no way, WTF is that? Nuh uh.

Well that’s it for today, daytime shoppers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Is there such a thing as mild ADHD?

From what I have seen in the media, t seems like an all or nothing thing. Anything less than the full set of symptoms is something else. And I have never emheard/em of a mild case, or half a case, or whatever.

And I bet the ADHD community wouldn’t consider me one of them. But I have been pondering this subject in relation to myself, and I am starting to wonder if I might be somewhere on the lowest end of that spectrum.

What got me thinking about it is the fact that when I was in school, I always had to participate in class in order to keep my attention on it. Too long without asking or answering a question, and I would tune out.

That need for a higher, more interactive experience in order to maintain focus sounds sort of ADHD to me.

And I figured out a long time ago that I could never do any kind of job like being a security guard where you job is to wait for something to happen. I could never watch security monitors for hours, or repeatedly patrol the same areas over and over again with zero going on. I would totally zone out,nbsp; and then something would happen, and I would get fired.

Again, I need stimulation in order to stay focused.

Another thing that has come to mind lately : I have never actually fallen asleep in class, at least not for more than a couple of seconds, but this is not because I am an especially alert dude. Far from it.

It was because I would focus on the instructor’s voice, and if I heard it cut off, I knew that meant I was falling asleep and I would jerk myself awake with a vengeance. In the process of developing,nbsp; gave me a fear of missing out type reaction when stimulus levels drop too low, causing me to panic.

I am positive that has something to do with my sleep problems.

And speaking of sleep, there is that problem I have going from a stimulating task to actually falling asleep. No matter how gentle the activity, even something as gentle as reading can make me incredibly anxious when I go from it to full stop in order to actually sleep.

So essentially, every time I try to sleep, I have an anxiety attack.nbsp; That is so fucked up. There must be a way to learn to emgently /empower down my brain, so that the energy of my mentally stimulated brain doesn’t turn into anxiety.

I don’t know if all these pieces form a puzzle or not. I might be seeing patterns where there are none. I might be trying to make one model plane from random parts from five different kits.

But combined with the echo stuff from yesterday,nbsp; one thing is clear :

I have a very weird brain.

More on this when I get home.

(—)

Another potential hyperactivity clue : my insatiable need for variety in some things, especially music. That might be more of a bandwidth than a throughput issue, but the fact remains that it is not the norm at all. Most people could be happy with maybe 500 songs. Some people could be happy with 5. But I have over 4,000 and that’s still not enough.

Why is that? Why is it that my mind retains the impression of music for so long after listening it that I feel like I “just” heard something when I hear it five days later? What drives this need for variety?

Hell, why do I need so much mental stimulation in the first place? I swear, I was born that way. i was obsessed with books, television, and video games when I wasn’t even in school yet. The need for mental stimulation, and a related need for low physical stimulation, has been with me for as long as I remember.

Why do I need this much stimulation? Why has it always been this way? What is it in me that makes me seek out stimulation of a high enough level to keep my mind engaged while living a life that keeps physical stimulation to an absurd minimum?

Is this just the normal side effects of a high IQ inefficiently used? Do a lot of high IQ people have the same problems as me? Or do I have some fundamental flaw in my brain structures that causes all this madness?

Or is it a body type issue? Maybe what manifests as full on ADHD in small-bodied high metabolic rate types manifests as something totally different in us big bodied slow metabolism types.

It manifests as hyperactivity of the mind. Which is what I have.

Again, maybe I am way off base on this whole thing and this whole thing is nothing but the diseased ravings of a deranged mind.

But I can’t shake the feeling that I am on to something that might yield a lot of fruitful insight if only I could wrap this oversized mind of mine around it.

I suppose it would be nice to find out that there is something physical wrong with my brain. Even if it can’t be fixed, it would, in that perverse way of thinking that depression engenders, make me feel less guilty about being crazy.

See? It’s right here on this MRI. See that blotch there? That’s a very important part of my brain, and it’s broken. Been that way since birth. Nothing I could have done about it.

Even thinking that way suggests I need to get my head examined. And I would love to get a thorough brain MRI to rule out the possibility of brain abnormalities.

Although, full disclosure, I am at least partially motivated in that by being such a huge brain science nerd and really wanting to see a 3D representation of my own brain.

I mean, how meta would that be? I would be looking at the thing that is seeing it!

Well, I guess that’s all I have to say about my weird brain. Tomorrow, I may do a video roundup.

Until then, be well.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, once more I forgot that this tablet isn’t on Shaw Open yet, and so I am once more sans Internet. Life for the absentminded truly is a comedy of errors.

Ha ha…ha.

Oh well. It is a lovely day and I am feeling good. Tried waiting for the bus but I got too impatient (and, not unrelatedly, hungry) for that shit.

It’s only two blocks, for fuck’s sake.

And that is the kind of thinking I need to encourage and reinforce in myself if i am to grow. For far, FAR too long, I have been too small on the inside, so small that the smallest of things became insurmountable obstacles.

But i am a man, not a microbe! And my perspective, not to mention my entire table of values, needs to grow and change to accommodate that fact.

I need to push some fucking envelopes in my life. Or at least nudge them a little . There is great wisdom in pushing things as far as they can go.

Because then you know how far they can go, and can set your limits just a little inside it. This gives you a far freer and more open life, free of unnecessarily restrictive limitations.

Everyone lives in a cage, but some cages are far, far bigger. And nicer.

So I want to learn to wander. Explore. Have ideas and follow them to see where they go. I have been a barnacle for far too long, and it’s time I unstuck myself.

And I say this knowing I will get hurt.So what? It’s just pain. It comes, it goes, and when it is gone, you’ve learned something.

Something along the lines of “don’t do that again”, I suppose.

I have lived under the tyranny of anxiety for far too long.

And in a way, it is my adaptability which is to blame. Whenever I get scared of something, that jagoff in my mind says, “hey, no problem, there are lots of other things to do. We just won’t do the scary thing. Ever.”

Not hard to see how enough of that shit can turn one into an invalid. The “never ever” list gets longer and longer, and the items get bigger and bigger, until you might as well be chained to the fucking wall.

Since I was in my early teens, I have had this strange relationship with windows and doors. ( Don’t worry, this WILL connect.) I would stare at windows and imagine climbing out of them. I would stare at doors and imagine them exploding outwards. I don’t know how many times I stared at the front door of my childhood home and pictured it being blown away.

But the doors weren’t locked. The windows didn’t lead to some magical new realm where my life would be so much better.

It was the walls inside I wanted to escape. Where is my door to that escape? Where is the window to climb out of so I can escape the tiny stifling constricting cage within?

I keep hitting the ESC key, but I’m still here.

Was good to finish “The silence speaks” last night. Hard, but good. That last chapter is over 1500 words long, and I started crying at around word 200. I was bawling my eyes out by the time I was done. I had to stop a half dozen times to gather myself together before resuming writing. It was a hell of a trip.

As usual, I feel vaguely dirty and ashamed after writing tear-jerking tragedy. Like I just took a big dump on a sheet of paper then waved it around for all the world to see. Like I am making some kind of grotesque spectacle of myself and everyone feels embarrassed for me and wished I would just stop and go away.

Okay, that last bit happens to me a lot, actually. Tragedy or no.

Of course, there is no logical reason for me to be any more ashamed of writing tear-jerking tragedy than anyone else. The emotion is genuine. Those were not crocodile tears I cried. And tragedy is a powerful form of catharsis. Women get that.

That’s why women willingly go to movies that they know will be very, very sad. They know it will make them feel better in the long rung. They’re smart like that. Men, you have to trick.

So my feelings of guilt are not logical and have everything to do with my own emotions and my own process. To me, writing that sort of thing is (sorry if this grosses you out) an act of elimination. A lot of my own deep emotions end up on that page, and I guess it says a lot about me and my problems that I am then deeply ashamed of the result.

Like I am not supposed to have those kinds of emotions. Maybe some of that bad male programming sank in after all. I feel like tears and pain are something to be ashamed of and kept inside, in the dark.

Well that’s pretty fucking stupid. Crying is a vital part of our emotional coping mechanisms. It’s how we let emotions out. Without crying, things build up inside to the point where they squeeze you to death.

Then you explode like Mister Creosote. Well, not literally, thank goodness. But in some way. Anger, depression, anxiety, you name it. That emotional energy has to be burned, so burned it shall be.

Crying, to me, seems a lot better than the other options.

But it’s still hard. That’s why I need media to provide the stimulus. Ever since I was a boy with the unfortunate tendency to cry when he was angry (TOTALLY bully bait), the crying part of me has been deeply suppressed, no matter how sad I got.

Which is, in and of itself, extremely sad.

So I don’t know. Maybe I will learn and grow from my experience writing that last chapter and be able to access that part of myself more. Or maybe I will have to write a lot more tear-jerking tragedies before that pump is fully primed.

Or maybe I will cry on the page until I am all done.

It’s a lot easier to deal with rage than grief and sorrow.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, here I am at the Richmond Centre White Spot, coming to you for the first time via my new (to me) bigger tablet.

Sort of. Technically, I am typing this into a text file which I will paste into my blog later. I forgot to get the Shaw Open password when I was at home, so this device is not hooked up to Shaw Open.

You can bet I will fix that and quick, though. I love Shaw Open. It’s like magic. You go someplace and when you go to use the Net, you are already connected.

It’s so welcoming!

But what about the big question? CAN I TYPE ON IT?

YES! More or less. It is a little cramped, but I can type with both hands on it and that is the main thing. Hopefully, after that necessary adjustment period I mentioned before, it will be just like typing at home.

And that will make me very happy.

Oh, and I found out what kind of beast this tablet is. It is a Galaxy Tab 1 10 inch. So basically, i went up a size and down a model. Fairy nuff.

Oh, and the reason shit was crashing left and right on this thang was that the operating system was hopelessly, nay hilariously out of date. It was running a flavour of Android (Honeycomb^[1]) that doesn’t even exist any more. I had to download a 250 meg file to update it to nice modern Ice Cream Sandwich 4.2.

And I loves me some ice cream sandwiches.

To put that in perspective, the entire Android operating system is only 400 meg. So it replaced like 62.5 percent of the OS by volume. That’s a lot.

Anyhoo, everything is tickety boo now. A few things crash now and then, but that’s true with little tablet too.

Well, my meal is done and I am bored with being here. See you back home.

(—)

Je suis retourné.

It was a nice walk home. Walked there too, and I am proud of that. I was waiting for the light to change so I could cross Cook to the bus stop and I looked down Cook to Richmond Centre and I said “…fuck it. I’m going to walk. ”

And I did! Yay me.

It’s always easier to motivate myself to walk when I know I am going to get to set down (and eat!) at the end. I thought about taking the bus home, but seeing as I would have had to walk a block to the bus stop, then gotten off a block from home, I wouldn’t have gained anything but aggravation.

Still, it was good to have the option.

Switching to local weather, it’s been a very cloudy day for me today. I find myself drifting into deep thought a lot today. I don’t know how many times I drifted off while writing at White Spot, only to “wake up” and remember that I was supposed to be typing and/or eating.

I’m just glad I don’t have any heavy social engagements right now. I would end up drifting away while someone was talking to me, and that is insanely rude. And there is no point in trying to explain yourself to people. There is no explanation that would placate someone who is irate with you (quite justly) for acting like what they were saying was just too boring to bother paying attention to.

It’s not that, honest. It’s just that sometimes, one thought leads to two thoughts leads to bigger and bigger thoughts and before I know it, my inner world has usurped my consciousness and someone is mad at me.

It’s one of the dangers of being a dreamer like myself. That rich inner world is stronger than the outer one sometimes unless you take firm decisive action to keep the borderline crisp and clear.

Most of the time, I am in no danger of drifting off on people. Talking with them and keeping up with the conversation takes up enough of my consciousness that no part of it wants to detach and go off on its own. The people I like talking to are the people who can do this on a regular basis because they are intelligent enough to have interesting things to say.

Yeah I know that makes me sound elitist. But that’s just how it is with me.

So most of the time, I am okay. But now and then, it gets really hard to stay focused. Clearly, some internal system needs to process an idea so big that it has to take the conscious mind offline to do it.

And it’s not about to wait till I go to sleep!

It’s hard to describe the place I go to when I drift off like that. I couldn’t begin to tell you what I was thinking about.

Its like my man Mikey of Suicidal Tendencies says in this video. I’m thinking about everything, and then again, I’m thinking about nothing.

Less mystically, my subconscious mental processes (which are legion) have multiplied to the point where they simply cannot complete without taking over all of my mental bandwidth. So when I drift off, it’s like falling asleep in one sense, and the exact opposite in another.

My inner eye is opening wide. The outer, not so much.

That’s why I consider myself a sort of odd duck mystic. A rationalist mystic, which I find pleasingly oxymoronic. A lot of my inner experience (and hence, life experience) can only be described in terms verging on the mystical. Despite my deep belief in science, reason, and evidence based reality, a great deal of what goes on in my mind is completely subconscious.

Consciously, I am just the guy using the deep supercomputer that is my mind. Or at best, the conductor of the symphony inside.

I guess that’s why when I tell people I spend a lot of time thinking when I was a very bored student in grade school, and they ask me what I was thinking about, I have no answer.

I was thinking about everything. But them again, I was thinking about nothing.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Probably in Silence Speaks form.

Yup. I made it.

I am sitting here at my favorite White Spot, waiting for my Chicken Caesar Wrap, and feeling good about being out and about.

Food is here. Yum.

I am a little worried about my health. I realized this morning that I have a vague burning sensation throughout my body. It isn’t very strong, but it is distinct and definitely new.

Sounds a lot like inflammation to me.

So maybe I have a long lasting inflammatory response to an excessively potent histamine reaction.

I definitely feel less healthy lately.

And antihistamines don’t seem to be helping. Perhaps the damage bis already done. The inflammatory response is fueling itself now.

I am probably overdue for a long hot bath with lots of scrubbing. Showers are great for day to day cleaning of scent zones, but if you need deeper cleansing, nothing beats a bath.

The problem is that baths are BORING. Showers are stimulating. Baths are not. So it is very hard to convince my stimulus junkie mind to fill the tub and relax.

I know that is probably a sign of something deeply wrong with my psyche, that I have trouble just relaxing passively. My own for of decadence, I suppose, this desperate need for high levels of mental stimulation. Arguably, I would be better off learning to slow down, relax, achieve inner stillness, and release all my tension and worry.

Christ that sounds boring.

My mind is like a shark, always moving, always hungry. Never fully satisfied. I suppose it comes from all that time spent being bored in class as a kid. It left me permanently hungry for something to do with this enormous brain of mine.

One of my thirsty dogs, I guess.

This hunger must be why I hated downtime when I worked for my uncle Sonny. I was happiest when the place was buzzing, because that meant I was assured that I would stay busy serving customers.

And o genuinely enjoyed serving customers. It was an inherently cheerful thing to me. It took a long period of sustained effort before I grew tired of it.

Well, the bill is paid. Time to go. See you when I get home!

(—)

Aaaand here I am, safe and sound. Well, as sound as usual, anyhow.

i really did enjoy customer service. I know that’s a weird thing to say in this era where “customer service” is considered synonymous with “indentured torture”, but it’s true. I liked doing it.

And I never had the sort of “customer from hell” that people talk about. I had people who were a little cranky or curt with me, and I had the occasional chronic complainer, but no abusive assholes determined to take their inner pain out on you.

Why is that? I, of course, have a few theories.

For starters, there is the nature of the town I grew up in, Summerside, Prince Edward Island. If Smallville is a sleepy little town, Summerside is a walking coma. Compared to the big cities, everything there happens at 25 percent speed.

It’s one of the things that people from Away (otherwise known as ‘the rest of the world that isn’t PEI’ remark upon, and even state as their reason for wanting to move there when they retire. Our “slower pace of life”.

You can imagine how poorly it suited me given my drive for mental stimulation. It is probably one of the causes, come to think of it. Everything was just TOO DAMNED SLOW!

But what it lacked in speed, it partially made up for in calmness. In a small town, the social fabric is tighter, and that means that one’s inherent sense of what is done and what is not done is stronger, and in Summerside, temper tantrums at service people is simply not done. It would be considered rude past the point of comprehension. My home town is not the kind of place where you raise your voice in public.

Plus, word of your bad behaviour would get around pretty fast. It would be a high magnitude social embarrassment. Even cranky people don’t want that kind of humiliation.

Then there’s the nature of my uncle’s business. It was originally my grandfather’s (my uncle’s dad’d) business. It had been around for thirsty years when I was born, and had been the only place in town where you could buy a TV, a stereo, or a radio for all that time. This made it a local institution, and therefore it has a degree of respectability to it.

I rented video games to kids whose grandparents had bought their first radio from my grandfather.

And there was another factor : me. This is the tricky one, because it is hard to describe the function of my own personality in the equation without making it sound like the people who HAVE had those “customer from hell” interactions were doing something wrong. And that pisses them off, obviously.

All I can say is that I am friendly and personable person, especially when I have a role to play (like cashier in my uncle’s business). And I really enjoy customer service. So whatever part of the equation personality plays in our interactions works out well for me. I am a pleasant and likable dude, and that brings out the best (or at least, the better) in people.

So maybe other people really are doing something wrong, but not in the usual sense of the word. They just didn’t get customer service skills as part of their basic emotional makeup.

Or for all I know, it was entirely about my town and the business I worked for. Anyone would have done as well as I did given those circumstances. I don’t know.

But it’s not so outrageous an idea that there are some areas of life that some people are better suited to than others.

Maybe you never did anything wrong, I just happened to do a lot of things right.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Heya people! writing you a short note ftom the lobby of the hotel hosting the tail end of Vancouverfur 2015.

I have had a ton of fun, and I am pretty tired right now. In fact, I ead worried that I would need to sleep all afternoon in the car, even though I got to bed at a reasonably sane hour last night. But I feel betternow. I might even get some food.

Ixnay on the food. Today’s buffet is $25 and I don’t have that to spare. Fuck poverty sucks. If I got the buffet, I would have no money left to see me from now till Wednesday.

My budget is going to be very tight till next check. But in APRIL I will get a GST check plus, the sooner I fo my taxes, the sooner I get the yearly check, so spring should be much better for me.

The always radiant Felicity was kind enough to give me 50 dollars towards the application fee for VFS, or if that is not needed, towards the documentation I need from back home to get some proper ID, also needed for applying to VFS.

{EDITOR’S NOTE : I have covered this subject before in this space, but it came up again on Facebook today and I realized I had more to say about it, hence today’s topic. }

We humans are a tribal lot. We have very deep social instincts driving us to form families and tribes at the slightest opportunity. Given enough time, proximity, and shared experience, any group of people will become a tribe, whether it’s two families who accidentally end up vacationing together, an office full of co-workers, or soldiers at war.

Modern liberal consumerism obscures this fact by assuring us that we are all individuals, independent and free, who would never stoop to something as low and offensive as actually being influenced by the society you live in every single moment of your life, including this moment right now.

And this one.

And so on.

And it is thos obfuscation that keeps the average person from understanding the very water in which they swim. ^[1] We throw up our hands in surrender when trying to understand what causes people to do these of which we certainly do not approve, and which are sometimes downright contemptible, when the evidence is clear once you start looking at the subject clearly.

It is this very simple and extremely power tribal urge that lies behind so many unpleasant realities, big and small, in modern society. What we demand of certain people goes directly against this tribalism, and we should not be surprised that, as bad as the consequences can be, sometimes the tribalism is going to win.

I will start with a small example from everyday life. We have all, at some point, needed something from someone who works behind a counter, only to find that said person prefers to chat with co-workers for however long they please before casually sauntering up to the counter to give you the bare minimum of service while giving you the distinct impression that you wanting them to do their actual job is a major and unjustifiable inconvenience.

This is, of course, extremely galling, and has caused many a person to wonder what the proverbial fuck is going on.

Let the scales of individualism fall from your eyes, and all becomes clear. Despite the fact that, by all rights, those people are there to serve customers and are told, over and over, by their organizations to be “customer oriented”, the people behind the counter have formed a tribe and you, the customer, are the outsider “attacking” them.

This illustrates the overriding rule of all tribes, no matter how formed : No matter what, protect the tribe from outsiders. Whatever has to be done to protect the tribe is justified under the laws of tribalism.

So when you, the unwitting customer, comes up to the counter, you are the person from outside the tribe who is making them do something they do not want to do, as opposed to enjoying the relaxing intra-tribal camaraderie they had before you showed up.

This is why organizations continually act against their purported purposes. Against the tribal instinct, some set of rules and high sounding goals as customer satisfaction struggle in vain.

In fact, it is this tribalism that leads to customer service employees to grow to hate the customers. All it takes is a few tales of awful customers to get passed around and enable the tribe to go in the direction it wants to go anyhow : our tribe is good. The customers are bad. We stand united against them.

And yet, it doesn’t stop there. This organizational mindset permeates all of society. On every level, there is the struggle between fulfilling the overt role one has attained in society, and being loyal to your tribe, and more times than not, it is the loyalty which wins.

Doesn’t sound so bad, right? Loyalty is very important. It is a primary human value and those who do not show it are often punished quite harshly, either legally or socially.

But what if we are talking about a priest’s loyalty to the Catholic Church versus the legitimate concerns about a child-molesting priest? What if it’s a cop’s loyalty to his fellow cops versus allegations of police brutality? What if it’s someone’s loyalty to the politician and party for whom they work versus their duty to tell the world the awful things said politician does?

And that’s the word to focus on as a fulcrum for this discussion : duty. Duty to society is the opposite of tribal loyalty, and it is the foundation of society because it is only bulwark we have against corruption. Whether it’s a government bureaucrat, a UPS driver, or just the kid who locks up after McDonald’s closes, society depends on people who will resist the institutional mindset and deliver service no matter what.

Thus the role of the ethical traitor. The person whom we actually laud for betraying their tribe by coming forward with the truth and evidence to bring real accountability to the system.

It is very telling that these people should be so rare and valuable. That’s how strong the tribal urge is in the hearts and minds of the human race is. Ninety nine point nine percent of the time, people choose tribal loyalty.

And who can blame them? Not only does the tribal instinct compel them to protect the tribe at all costs, and not only do we all know that any form of disloyalty is punished extremely harshly in human society regardless of justification, but to act outside the tribe, for a human, is to step out into outer space. Our tribes are our universes, and anything that reaches outside that is that most dreaded of specter, the unthinkable unknown.

So go easy on those who behave in underhanded or even downright wrong ways in order to protect their tribes. Sure, it’s easy for us, sitting outside their various tribes, to insist that everyone should behave in the way that benefits us, the outsiders. And there is no doubt that, from a moral point of view, that is exactly how they should act.

But are we so sure that we would be willing to leave the warm waters of tribal familiarity (often known as “the feeling of belonging”) in order to swim into the icy and isolated waters of betrayal, perhaps forever?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a pretty big problem with the phone.

I am not sure when it started. I certainly don’t recall having any phone related issues as a kid.

In fact, like a lot of kids, I found answering the phone when it rang to be fun. It was exciting and sudden and I got to be all adult and ask who’s calling and if they wanted me to take a message or not.

This often confused the people on the other end of the line, because I was clearly a child and yet I talked like an adult and seemed quite self-possessed. So sometimes they would insist I hand the phone to “am adult” (grr) or “my mommy or daddy” (GRR!), and I would be miffed.

I’d do it, of course. But I’d be miffed while doing so.

But other times, they would accept that I was not an imbecile and ask for a specific person, and I was all too glad to go get that person because that was part of the game, as it were.

Taking a message was always tricky for the other person because of that whole “kid who talks like an adult” thing. They never knew what words I knew. But I always did my best to take down the message correctly and make sure the right person got it.

Occasionally, someone would be so bemused by my apparent age dysphoria that they would talk to me for a while. I was so-so on that. I am always more comfortable when I have a role to play, and so just plain talking with adults often made me nervous. For one thing, they talked to me like they would talk to a normal kid my age (understandably) and that always bothered the hell out of me because to me, they were talking in a weird and creepy and over-familiar and exaggeratedly gentle and slow way.

I mean, my parents sure as hell never talked like that!

Also, despite my precious perspicacity, I was still a kid, and they would talk about things for which I had no frame of reference and that made me very stressed out as well.

I know I keep saying this, but I was quite the handful back then. Through no fault of my own, I was hard to handle because I sent such confusing signals to people. Do I treat him like a kid, or an adult, or…?

So anyhow, I had no problem with the phone back then. But at some point, the phone became a problem for me. It ringing started to frighten me, not because I thought the phone would physically hurt me, but because it was so jarring and sudden and socially demanding that I developed the very bad habit of letting things go to voice-mail.

And even that wouldn’t be so bad, but then the phobia attached itself to the voice-mail too, making it hard for me to every check it because for some reason, that made me almost as anxious as answering the phone did.

I think part of the problem is that it is, on a simple-minded level, a problem that goes away on its own. The voice mail gets it. And if you live with others, they will eventually check the voice-mail and tell you about it in a warm, friendly, non-threatening way that does not provoke anxiety.

Obviously, I am not claiming this is right or noble or even in my own best interests. Phobias are never pretty. But in order to be overcome they must be brought into the light and confessed to, and that is what I am doing here tonight. As in :

Today the phone rang. I totally could have answered it. There was a phone not three feet from where I was. I could have just reached over and answered it. But I was scared. It startled me and I knew that if I answered it, I would have to socially engage with a random stranger (every social phobic’s worst nightmare) and so I just let it go to voicemail.

I am not proud of that. I am not enormously ashamed of it either. Lots of people let things go to voicemail all the time. As social crimes go, it’s fairly minor.

What bothers me is that it makes me impossible to reach in realtime, and that is just plain not good. It leads to great frustration amongst those who know me (who are the last people I want to hurt) and causes me to get information rather late, which can cause real problems.

So I do have legit reasons for wanting to correct this problem of mine. In this age of text messaging and ubiquitous
Internet, it might be a tad archaic to worry about the regular old telephone, but it concerns me.

And it doesn’t fit with the new image I am fashioning of myself where I am strong and independent and competent and all grown up. I will always face some troubles when it comes to dealing with reality simply from my physical problems, but there is no reason to take that to mean I suck at life and completely incompetent and will be forever the oldest and most helpless of tadpoles.

And if I am going to grow into this newer, bigger, better shell, I have to get rid of a lot of the petty bullshit in my mind. The stuff that has been holding me back for decades while I kept my head low and hid from reality.

I have nothing to be ashamed of. Depression had a hold on me for a long time, but that’s the past, which means it has passed. There is absolutely no reason the future has to be anything like the past. Every moment in time is a doorway to an infinity of possibilities, and if you don’t like where you are in life, MOVE, god dammit.

I’m getting good at this macho pep talks!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.