Cars going past like falling elevators.

Spent a lot of today asleep. Still not really sure how much of that is voluntary and how much necessary. Certainly, I was pretty sleepy after lunch. Don’t know how much that means I needed to sleep, exactly. But I felt like sleeping, so I slept.

Maybe that is all there is to it, and I just just stop picking at that scab and let things heal for a change. But analysis is my primary mode, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

The cerebral outlook may have caused a lot of my troubles, but it is still pretty much all I have. As much as I would love to tell myself “Stop thinking about everyone and just LIVE!”, I don’t really know what that means. Not for me, not in my own context.

It has been a long, long time since I had the kind of faith in the universe required for that kind of relaxed attitude. I have realized that I have a very deep kind of paranoia that feels that I have to constantly be figuring everything out and using my mind to the fullest in order to be safe.

No wonder I stay home and do very little. Who could live in reality with that kind of demand on one’s mentation? Trying to process all of the potential information in actual live reality and understand all of what is happening around you is just plain impossible.

Normal people do not even try. They have, without even knowing it, an enormous amount of faith in the safety of their reality, and therefore are quite comfortable taking in and processing only the tiny percentage they need in order to operate, and they can, therefore, live happy normal lives without worrying about what will happen to them if they go outside.

I call it faith, but I am not claiming it to be unfounded. They are clearly right to assume their lives are mostly safe, and to relax their guard and do what they need to do at work, at home, with their loved ones, without the kind of deep paranoid fear that lurks deep within my psyche.

It;s not hard to see where that deep down animal fear came from. Bullying in my childhood turned me into a child who never wanted to go outside even at school. Inside the school I was fairly safe, especially if I was someplace with a teacher. A classroom, or even better, the library.

Outside, in the free flowing anarchy of the playground, I was anybody’s. If I was forced to go out there, I would find someplace to hide and hope like hell nobody noticed me. To be noticed was to be hurt. The only safety was in being ignored.

So, no friends, no “gang”, no safety. Just fear, hiding, and reading. At least when I was reading, I could get absorbed in the book and tune out the outer world that was so frightening and hurtful to me.

And that deep fear has never left me, and here I am damn near forty. I don’t yet know how to reach that scared little boy inside me and tell him everything is okay now. He can relax, and come out of his shell, and play with the other little boys and girls, and not be in danger all the time.

And that was just what happened to me at school. My home life had already made me used to being ignored. But at least before I was sent off to school (sans kindergarten), I had a babysitter. She was the one adult who paid attention to me almost all the time. She never ignored me.

But after I went to school, Betty the babysitter went off to her own life, and for a while, there was a friend of hers who my parents paid to be there when I came home for lunch.

Even that was too much, though, so instead my Mom started packing a lunch for me, and I ate at school, in the lunch room, with the other kids.

Weirdly, I did not get bullied in the lunch room. Maybe everyone was too busy eating, I don’t know. Or maybe bullying and the free-form physical, primitive play nature of the playground are interrelated.

Or maybe it was just because there was usually a teacher monitoring the lunchroom. Can you see now why I am pro-surveillance? A security camera on every telephone pole?

The animals behave when they know someone is watching.

The worst that ever happened to me in the lunchroom was a little light verbal bullying, which looking back might have even been an attempt to befriend me via verbal jousting.

If only I had understood then what I understand now. But some of us learn certain things really slowly.

Back then, I was far too scared and defensive and literal to understand when someone was genuinely abusing me and when someone was trying to engage me. I probably missed a dozen opportunities to make friends that way.

So I really have no idea how much of my childhood isolation was my own doing. Maybe all of it, or at least most of it. I was certainly not an easy kid to reach. Fear and intelligence (plus a certain creativity and willfulness and fierce independence) all combined to make me a rather difficult kid to deal with.

So most people didn’t. People have a remarkable ability to just decide something is too difficult and too weird to deal with and just edit it out of their minds. It just stop existing to them. After all, it is messy and complicated and hard to deal with, and they would have to slow down and really invest in it in order to deal with it at all, and they have busy lives and lots of other things to do.

So the most natural thing in the world is to just edit it out, pave it over, and get on with your life.

I was one of those things.