After days of having to fight to stay awake, I am now bouncing off the walls.
Try for the one in the middle next time, life. Sheesh.
Still, this doesn’t have to turn into anxiety. After all, the physiological symptoms of anxiety and exhilaration are exactly the same. The only difference is in interpretation.
So you know what? I’m not anxious. And I’m not hyper. Nor am I climbing the walls.
I am motherfucking SUPERCHARGED. (heavy metal guitar RIFF!)
Now let’s get some shit done.
So last week’s groceries came entirely via Instacart, and to be honest, I doubt the Ironwood Sav-On is going to get another dime of my money.
Real Canadian Superstore via Instacart is so much easier to deal with. Better selection, lots of things Sav-On stopped carrying ages ago, and no frigging $40 minimum order.
Look, if I was there in person, you wouldn’t be demanding that I buy at least $40 worth of stuff before you sell me anything.
And don’t talk to me about delivery, because you charged me separately for that too!
Fucking Jim Pattison.
Anyhow, I am through with them and their aggravations.
Instagram did screw up, though. I ended up with the full sugar version of one bottle of Canada Dry Ginger Ale and two packages of Voortman cookies.
I am diabetic. That is not an acceptable result.
But I logged in to Instacart today and told them about the snafu, and they immediately refunded the money for the products to my account.
Well. That worked out well. Faith in Instacart restored!
Still not feeling great.
I mean, it’s great to not be super sleepy all the time. But I still have a feeling like the moment right before your ears pop in an airplane all the time. And it’s wearying.
And my brain is still lagging behind too. It’s taking me forever to get these 500 words out because while the words are in my head as usual, herding them together and moving through the gulley to my mouth is running slow.
Congestion in the gulley, I suppose.
I feel like I need a flushing out of some sort. A nice deep cleansing to clear out accumulated toxins and gunk so I can reboot the system.
I suppose this is when some people resort to enemas.
Contraindicated with a vengeance for us Irritable Bowel Syndrome sufferers. Take the indication against using laxatives or firmatives and triple it for enemas.
Which is too bad. They seem kind of fun.
I’ll just keep running water through my system the old fashioned way : by drinking it.
I feel kinda blank deep inside at the moment.
Sorta painfully numb. Like when the Novacaine is just beginning to wear off after a root canal. It’s a numbness with an edge. A foreboding numbness.
Whatever. It’s only pain. Yeah it sucks but compared to things like fear and dread and that terrible sadness that feels like someone is very slowly ripping your soul in two, it is definitely not the worst thing out there.
And neither am I.
More after the break.
Feeling the twilight
Been down and up and emptied my very fully bladder again.
But I feel like I am getting somewhere. I think my mood pendulum’s arc is getting shorter and shorter, suggesting that some time soon I might stop swinging entirely and hang loose in the middle somewhere.
Still don’t exactly feel fantastic. Sometimes I wish I was a car so I could take myself in for a quick lube job and a change of fluids.
Been thinking about imprinting today. Tastes. They play a profound effect in our lives and we all acknowledge we have them – I like raspberry, you like mint – but we don’t question where they come from.
Only mental mutants like me think about weird shit like that.
At some point, we imprint on things. We try something and like it and somewhere a card with that thing’s name on it is added to your “things we like” file.
But the thing that I can’t seem to stop harping on is that at no point do you decide what you like. You decide whether you like something or not, but you don’t decide whether you like it or not.
And once it is there, that’s it. It’s a part of you for the rest of your life no matter what. There is no way in the world to turn the guy who likes raspberry into one who likes mint.
And yet, we judge each other as if it was a choice. We say someone has “good taste” or “bad taste” as if it was some kind of achievement.
It was, at best, sheer luck.
Because what does having “good taste” mean, anyway? That your tastes are most like the most people’s tastes, so that if you like it, so wlil they?
That would make sense but that’s not how it works, is it? The people that the public put forth as having “good taste” often have tastes that are quite unlike the public’s taste.
And they take pride in that.
The public is meant to disregard their own tastes and try to force their tastes to be the same as the critic’s tastes so they can impress a lot of other phonies and wear the false feathers of a preening cuckoo.
To me, good taste can be summed up in a single word : YUM! If it tastes good to me, then it is in good taste, and the devil hang the rest.
To me, the job of the public critic is to guide people towards other things they might like, not to tell them what they SHOULD like. What a ludicrous idea!
In that sense, the critic is a scout. One who has gone there first and gotten a quick impression of the territory so that you, the reader, aren’t going in blind.
Online marketplaces have almost gotten there. The admirable simplicity of Amazon’s “people who bought this also bought this” formula has largely usurped the critic’s role as a brave pioneed.
Yet the critic remains because for some odd reason – perhaps to keep things from getting too spooky – we do not identify individuals whose tastes most align with our own.
That seems like the next logical step to me. Forget analytical abstractions. In my life, the most reliable sources of new things I’ll like has always been people with similar tastes. So why not give us that?
The math is pretty damned simple.
Maybe they’re afraid this system would identify people as tastemakers and then the big corps would descender upon these “influencers” like hungry piranha?
Makes as much sense as anything, I suppose.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.