I’m feeling haunted today.

All this goddamned noise in my head from all the crazy shit I have swirling around in there. Ghosts, banshees, pltergeists, and revenants, all running around and screaming like the kids in a 60’s cartoon.

Were kids really that horrible back then? If so, then…. what the fuck, man.

I remember being taken to (dropped off at?) a few kiddie matinees when I was a wee tot. They were bedlam. Kids running around screaming, throwing their popcorn and soda all over the place, nobody but me paying attention to the movie. The noise level was such that it made it hard to hear the movie. It was total chaos.

I would sit in the front row all by myself, hunched down like a zoo animal hearing a big truck going by. I was in the front row so that I wouldn’t be surrounded on all sides by the madness, and I would just stare fixedly ahead at the screen until the madness was over and Emery, the owner-operator of the theater, would open the door into blessed summer sunshine, and I would be let loose from Pandemonium.

Come to think of it, even to this very day, I feel a sense of great relief when the movie theater door is opened. Granted, that doesn’t necessarily happen at your local EverythingPlex any more, but when it does, I feel like I just got out of jail, and that’s true no matter how much I loved the movie.

Fast forward to my days in elementary school, and I have more or less the same reaction to the chaos around me on the playground. So much noise, so much chaos. I would find someplace at least somewhat quiet, and stay there a lot of the time.

I was terribly shy as well, so even when I wasn’t being bullied, I was too timid to do a lot of things. Even getting up on the monkey bars so I could go hand-over-hand across the part that was like a horizontal ladder, which I totally could do and quite enjoyed doing, required a monumental fight against inner demons that I could neither understand nor explain to anyone else.

In fact, it honestly would not have occurred to be to seek help. I didn’t even grasp that I had a problem of the sort that people could help with. Life had, even at that young age, taught me that asking for help from anyone was always a losing proposition. I wouldn’t get the help I wanted, and I would come away feeling rejected, dejected, and depressed from having opened myself up to someone only to have them dump a dirty ashtray into me and close the lid.

I knew I was different from the other kids. That was made painfully obvious to me every school day. I didn’t know why they did what they did, and I had no friends that would have helped me learn, so I spent recess and lunchtime surrounded by kids but utterly alone amidst the chaos and cacophony.

It was the kiddie matinees all over again.

Later in life, I wondered why Emery put on those matinees. They were total nightmares for him. He was clearly frustrated by and scared of the kids, and I can’t blame him, because so was I. The cleanup must have been like cleaning up after an incontinent elephant, and as I recall, the ticket to get in was pretty cheap too.

My guess is, it was some kind of tradition held over from the days of the poodle skirt and malt shop, and if he had tried to stop doing it before it was time, he would have had an army of pitchfork-wielding parents at his doorstep (which, come to think of it, was only two doors and a street away from my doorstep) filled with the righteous fury know only to parents who suddenly have to take care of their children for two more hours a week.

This is what makes teacher’s strikes such tricky business.

Nevertheless, the matinees stopped very shortly after I experienced them. Couldn’t have been more than three years. And I trust you can see why.

Good riddance, if you ask me. Oy.

Then again, it was at one of those matinees that I got to see Star Wars in the theater like three times, so they weren’t all bad. But those times, I was with my siblings, and hence, insulated.

So I dunno. Maybe I was destined not to fit in. It would have taken a serious consciousness upgrade for me to have been able to see what was go on around me clearly and then move to make things how I wanted to be. I would have needed to be able to grasp that I was different, understand that difference, decide to learn to fake enough normalcy to get along and have friends, and essentially locked a big part of myself away.

Not sure that would have been the choice I would have made. But even if I had chosen the other path, the lone wolf elitist path, I would have at least been able to make some sort of peace with myself.

Instead, I was just a heavy, soggy bag of emotion and problems, impossible to respect and prone to biting the hand that feeds me without even realizing it, and so nobody wanted to (or could) deal with me.

But what can I say? For all my overweaning intelligence, I was just a kid. Locked away all alone in my own little world, I couldn’t do anything but struggle through every day. Always looking for something but somehow never reaching a conclusion. All my energy went into dragging myself through the quagmire of boredom and terror every day.

At that early an age, if there is nobody watching you and seeing that you are in trouble and intervening… it isn’t going to happen. And every child, no matter how unique and/or difficult, deserves to have someone like that in their lives.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Sounds like a great chapter title, doesn’t it? Or maybe a sequel. Chipmunks 3 : The Conflict Within.

It’s mostly about Alvin’s cocaine addiction.

I’ve been experiencing a certain amount of inner conflict lately. My inner child is not getting along so well with my newly formed inner parent. I’m being very stubborn and unreasonable with myself.

Don’t worry, that’s not as crazy as it sounds.

It’s all because of that perennial conflict between “want to” and “should”. I have slipped into the “should” column lately, and once “should” mode kicks in, my inner child folds his little arms in front of his chest, pouts, and ignores the things he “should” do with a vengeance.

I swear, I was never this difficult when I was an actual child. Then again…. apart from gym and arts and crafts, nobody was trying to make me do anything I didn’t want to do.

And we all know how stubborn I was about those two subjects. So, hmm.

The first casualty of this inner war was my to-do list. I installed it on my main tablet (the big one) around a month ago, with an eye towards getting better at getting shit done. And it worked for a while.

But then the list filled up. And I stopped even trying to do any of the things on it. So now it just sits there.

I think I have turned the corner, though, and opened the door to doing more work on the self-discipline side of things. I don’t want to be the kind of person who lives a shitty life under shitty circumstances just because they are too lazy and/or stubborn to actually do any of the things that would make things better.

Things that are totally within my control, like how messy this room is, or how much I exercise, or how clean and neat I am personally. I have told myself that I didn’t have the strength to really face these sorts of things in the past, and it was true then. But I am stronger now, and ready to move into actually living life in the real world instead of just hiding from the world in my mental realms and letting everything go all to hell.

I’m in charge now. There is nobody around to blame for what I do. Sure, I still have psychological traumae, but those are wounds to be healed, not excuses to be deployed whenever anything threatens to disturb my freeze-dried inner universe.

I would say I have been nursing my wounds, but nursing sometimes heals things. I have been maintaining them.

After all, without them, I might have to face reality. Oh no, anything but that!

The thing is, I have never thought of myself as the kind of person who can’t face reality. I pride myself in my dedication to the truth, come what may, and that means not shying away from unpleasant truths, or living in denial.

And if you asked me about all this a year ago, I would have been able to spin a more than reasonable facsimile of that being true. I have all kinds of realistic, well thought out, pragmatic yet sympathetic opinions and observations about the world which I can deliver at the drop of a hat. I have vivid and accurate insights into things unseen by most, and I can totally convince people that I really have a good grip on things.

I can even convince myself, some of the time.

But when it comes to facing reality on an emotional and spiritual level, I have been a total coward. It’s easy for me to be realistic in the realm of the mind. I’m very comfortable in that realm, and I have pushed myself to see things as they really are for my entire life. I can say, truthfully, that there is no thought I won’t think, no realm I will not enter, no sacred ground where my mind fears to tread. Nothing escapes my analysis. I am determined to figure it all out.

That might mean I am being cold and cruel with myself, but it’s how I choose to live.

But all that is nothing but words if it never translates to actually doing anything. And that’s where emotion, spirit, and will come into play. And responsibility as well.

Growing up means accepting… not liking, but accepting…. that your time of being cared for and not having to worry about things is over and it will never, ever come back. Withdrawing from the world doesn’t alter this basic truth, and when you refuse to take responsibility for yourself because you’re not “ready”, it almost always means making someone else take responsibility for you instead.

And that’s not fair. After all, you wouldn’t want someone else doing that to you, would you?

And if you think “but that’s different!”, here’s the harsh truth : no it isn’t. It isn’t different at all. If you are old enough to vote, you have lost all rights to expect anyone to look after you. There is nobody who is “supposed” to be looking after you and your life any more. That phase of life ended when you became an adult.

Childhood ends. There’s nothing you can do about that. All you can do is make your adulthood more pleasant, or live, like I have, a sad pathetic life for twenty years rather than grow the fuck up.

And the older you get, the bigger a price you have to pay for clinging to childhood like it’s a right.

And that’s the kind of truth I have been burying myself in mental stimulation to avoid facing. I have been patting myself on the back for being some kind of fearless truth warrior while ignoring the truth that said back was turned away from the truth and that my eyes were squeezed shut.

Oh well. In order to go forward, your illusions must die, and the ones you love the most are the ones you need to kill most of all, because they are the ones keeping you from evolving out of your current problems.

You have to let go of your illusions and finally evolve. Only then can you be free.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.