I have a topic and an anecdote and a video, And at first, i thought they were separate, but then I realized they dovetailed rather nicely.

The anecdote first.

One funny thing about my recent game of Trivial Pursuit with Badger 1 was that I kept having to stifle the urge^[1] to help her when it was her turn. Give her hints and such.

That’s how happily helpful I am, as well as how little competition means to me. I would happily help my opponent because helping people means far more to me than winning any sort of friendly competition.

Things would be different if there was money on the line.

But I have never been comfortable with “winner takes it all” situations.

Which leads to the video :

I can’t possibly explain how much that song means to me. It expresses things about myself that I thought only I experienced. It’s almost like I wrote it.

Except i don’t know or understand myself well enough to do it.

Which brings me to my topic.

There has always been a very deep and mysterious and sensitive part of me that my irrationally rational mind didn’t understand and couldn’t access and therefore feared, yet I also understood that it was incredibly and deeply important.

In fact, I felt quite helpless against its depth and power, and that scared me, but still, I sensed that I needed it badly.

Now that I am learning to overcome my “rationality” and accept the irrational as valid and important, I can see that this was my Mars in Pisces deep connection to the intuitive and the unconscious that made for a poor fit with all my ego-brained bullshit that it was like a foreign resident in my mind.

I remember one other instance where something grabbed me in that way and in that case I don’t really know why.

It was when my sister Anne was listening to this song :

I was passing outside her room when I heard the song and something about it grabbed me. I sat down on the stair and listened to it, not knowing what was happening, but knowing it was something profound.

And for months afterwards, the song would pop into my head and repeat and it soothed me in a way I did not even remotely understand.

And I am still not sure what about it gave it that power. I mean sure, it’s still one of my fave Rush songs, but it doesn’t have the impact on me that “Winner Takes It All” does.

It’s just another Rush song.

My best guess is that I was taken by the strong sense of freedom and liberty in the song. It soars in a way my rational mind could never provide.

Transcendence is not rational. The rational can only reach the heights by climbing the stairs. It has no wings to fly nor can it generate the winds of inspiration to ride.

Stupid fucking rationality.

It’s clear to me now that my salvation lies with that deep mysterious Mars in Pisces part of me, It connects me to the deep emotional irrational heart of all things, that primal pulse that drives all life, from the amoeba to the ape.

The id, in other words. But not the grunting humping pooping id. Something far more profound and powerful yet simple and true.

It’s what I have always admired in people I consider to be spiritually superior to me. Their sense of connection to something far greater and more wonderful than our silly little selves with our silly little lives.

There is no doubt in my mind that such people are much, much healthier than I. They are connected to something transcendent within themselves that operates outside the confines of the rational and the real and therefore can serve as a source of renewal and reinforcement when the real world just isn’t meeting our needs.

This, in turn, gives the emotionally whole person what they need in order to go out into the world and get those needs met for real.

It’s like the emergency fat reserves of emotion.

It’s also the source of the mysterious rebalancing force I wrote about a while back. That strange X factor that inputs the emotions, or at least their cognitive tags, that our mind needs in order to regain a balanced healthy state.

This process is known to the layman as “healing” or “getting the fuck over yourself”.

I’m working on it.

After all, why should I be a fool who plays by the rules? Who says I can’t just arbitrarily declare myself to be happy not because I have a reason to be happy, but because I choose to be happy? Why can’t I hit the reset button and reboot my emotions when life stops being fun?

So like, fuck the rules, man. I am he who walks through walls. The one who can see and act in dimensions and ways that are outside reality for most people and hence make me seem like a fifth dimensional wizard to them.

I am the maker of rules, not the follower of rules. I am he who sees not just more of the chess board than others but the chess players, the audience, and even the light outside the window of the room in which we play.

And most of all, I am he who knows that it’s all just a game.

So to hell with reality’s rules. Consider me to be metaphorically flipping the table. From now on, I play by my own rules, and if those rules interfere with my thriving, I will change them without pause or regret.

Because this is my game, and its only mission is to make me happy.

Anything outside of that can go fuck itself nightly.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.