One of my peculiarities is that certain high frequencies REALLY bug me.
Basically, if you have ever nerves jangled by someone scraping their nails across a chalkboard or rubbing a balloon, you know the response I am talking about, you know the response I’m talking about.
Feels like someone threw a bucket of ice water on your nervous system.
Mine just covers a wider range of frequencies than most people’s. Pretty much anything up high enough can do it. Squeaky brakes on a car or bus, a loose bearing on a fan or in an AC unit, desk bells, certain musical instruments, certain vocalists, and so on, can all make my poor nerves jump like a startled cat.
That’s why there are certain bits of music where, quite uncharacteristically, I must recuse myself from all judgment because there is no way I can be remotely objective about music that causes me physical pain.
I’m sure that soprano diva’s voice is as beautiful as you say and that piccolo solo was every bit as breathtaking, but I will never know.
And I get the feeling that this phenomenon has informed my taste in music in ways I was not quite conscious of until recently.
There’s definitely been vocalists I have detested for reasons that have nothing to do with their talent or persona.
Their voice just bugs me.
All in all, it’s not like it’s ever been a big problem for me. It’s just one of my many vaguely autistic-like eccentricities.
I’m so weird.
Joker or Colbert?
It occurred to me recently that I have attributes which don’t quite work together and that at some point I am going to have to choose one over the other.
Basically, there is my anarchic trickster side, that wants to set the world on fire with my blazing arrows of purest truth and shatter the walls of delusion with which people hide from their own rank hypocrisy, and the side that really wants people to like me.
As you can see, these two are not exactly compatible.
Yet I don’t feel like I can abandon either entirely. When one is denied it will inevitably find a way of asserting itself, often at the worst possible time.
Now obviously, so far in my life, I have heavily favoured people liking me. My raving ideologue said has mostly stayed under wraps, coming out only at random moments when I get WAY too into an argument and start giving speeches.
It’s so embarrassing.
Brilliant playwright Tom Stoppard had the same problem. He said something like (I can’t find the actual quote) “I can never decide if I’m a siren or a clown. ”
In other words, does he want to sound the alarm about the dangerous of the world, or just makes people smile and laugh?
I feel that. And yet I know that my journey to connect with my id and the stronger parts of my personality is going to make that budding demagogue in me grow stronger and stronger and therefore harder to control every day.
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it any more.
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More after the break.
Acting on impulse
“I admit I grabbed her ass, Your Honor, but as you know…
Big revelation : you have to act without thinking at least some of the time.
Because even the biggest and baddest of brains only has a finite amount of energy and CPU cycles so shortcuts are absolutely necessary.
Otherwise you end up like this :
Love that song, even though it (unsurprisingly) tends to cause the very neurotic mindset that it describes in me.
Makes me feel seen.
Anyhow, I am increasingly of the belief that part of the symptoms of depression et al is due to that exact kind of running yourself ragged, cognitively speaking.
Because we intellectual types try to solve everything via thinking and computation, we overstress our excellent intellects and are constantly in a depleted mental state as a result. Running along a jagged edge of broken consciousness, we end up driving ourselves into the ground like a car that stops for fuel but not maintenance,
We can avoid this trap only if we evolve to the point where we are willing to admit to ourselves, others, and God that sometimes our instincts and emotions know something.
That it is entirely possible to make correct choices without deliberate, conscious thought and that it is therefore okay to go through life without necessarily thinking through every decision with the full force of rationality.
That’s Level 1. Level 2, which is much harder, involves learning to forgive ourselves when we make a “mistake” that we would not have made if we had “just taken a couple of seconds to think about it” instead of flagellating ourselves and calling ourselves stupid and vowing to never do anything without thinking about it first again.
It’s not your fault. Life is not turn based. It happens in realtime, which means the time for making decisions is always limited and making said decisions swiftly is the only way to keep up and not end up way behind the others.
That means you have to learn to trust the “fast but sloppy” circuit of the brain at least some of the time. You do not have the option of staying in your ivory bunker and treating life like a game of chess.
Not if you want to be happy.
Because happiness is out there, in the world, as a part of things. All you get down here in the bunker is stale air, flat water, and canned entertainment. No matter how carefully you recycle, it’s still the same shit in a new box day after day.
You need emotional nutrients, prepper, and they’re all out there in the world, among the rest of humanity.
So you’re going to have to go out there and get them.
And yeah, that kinda sucks, but it could be worse.
After all, it’s not the end of the world.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.