A simple tale of a man, BlueSky, and a cat of debatable intelligence.
It really does illustrate two parts of my nature that don’t fit together super well.
There’s my sweet, soft, sensitive side who genuinely never meant to hurt anyone and who should have thought about what he posted before he posted it. My saintly side, who wishes nothing but love, understanding, and harmony on all of humanity.
And I like that guy.
But there’s also my “come at me, bro!” side who really, really loves to get in the kind of trouble I got in because boy, do people come at me, and I get to counterpunch without guilt (but not without restraint) and really get some much needed release.
Because as patient readers know, I know I have a very combative side. A side of me that wants to fight. The side to whom combat sports appeal, in theory at least, as a way for people like me to get that aggressive energy out.
Instead I have video games. Not much of a substitute. I mean, I do get to combat and defeat evil a bunch in them, but it isn’t much of a physical release, you dig?
Now being a civilized and responsible person, I have kept this fighting side of me on a very short leash. I avoided the trap of thinking that just because I feel the strong urge to fight that the world has volunteered to be my sparring partner.
I could have easily gone down that route. Maybe if I had been born into a much rougher and more physical family, I would have ended up as one of those guys who goes to cars and gets into fights every weekend.
Sounds unlikely given what I am like in THIS life, but I can totally see why they do it. Our society is short on official, acceptable ways for young aggressive types to test themselves against one another like mountain sheep butting heads.
In fact, it occurs to me that we don’t acknowledge that phase of life at all. Between the ages of 18 and 25, young people are going to feel the urge to seek challenges to throw themselves into as a way of channeling that youthful aggression and as a way for them to find their place in the social hierarchy.
Not the official one, of course. The primitive one. The fact that such reptile brain nonsense has no place in actual modern adult society does not keep those instincts from rising and making young people do foolish or even dangerous things in order to satisfy these primitive instincts.
Hence the ages between 18 and 25 being the “crime years”. The vast majority of crimes are committed by people between those ages.
We’d be a lot better off if we acknowledged the difficulties of that phase of life like we do with childhood and the teen years and made sure that young people had plenty of non-criminal ways to test their limits, scrap with each other, take risks, and get their butting heads energies out of their systems.
As for me, like I said in the vid, maybe I should find some forum somewhere where I can “get into trouble” in a non-destructive sense and find verbal “playmates” I can wrestle with and vent some of this latent aggression.
It would quite honestly probably make me saner in the long run. I talk about all my latent anger like it’s all from bad things that happened to me that I couldn’t react to with anger at the time, but maybe a lot of it is just plain reptile brain urge to compete.
Come at me, bro.
More after the break.
Locked away in a cell
That’s where my crazed and fever’d id has been for all these years.
All because, at some point, my ego, my intellect, staged a coup and pretty much cut the id entirely out of the equation.
So no impulses, no instincts, no motivation, no desire, no drives, no motive force, no stuff of life, no living breathing wanting needed raw and bleeding heart tissue at the core of my being. No passion, no joy, no celebration, no wanton abandon, no running free in the sun, no acting on impulse (what impulse?), no falling in love, no pursuing my lust, no human connection, no feeling of presence, and very, very little warmth.
Because where the hell would that warmth come from? I turned my furnace off a long time ago. And it sure wasn’t going to come from outside of me, not with my issues.
People love me. This I know. But I can’t always feel it. I have to comfort myself with the knowledge that it’s there for me if I can tunnel through my numbness to find it.
I think at this point I am afraid to be alive. I have been this cold creature who emits more warmth than he can feel for so long that to a very old and sick part of me, being alive, with desires and drives and such, seems like insanity. Chaos. Bedlam.
It seems like being “out of control”. And part of the hegemony of my intellect is a deep and primal belief that being out of control means death, or worse than death.
It all comes back to not being able to step on a road if I don’t know where it’s going. If I can’t predict the end then I can’t begin, or at least, that’s how I have been.
And that is profoundly and stultifyingly limiting. There has to be room to explore and that means having faith in your own ability to handle whatever you come across.
You don’t need to control outcomes if you can handle the unexpected. It’s a matter of not needing a straight smooth road if you have good shock absorbers.
And I am pretty sure I can only get those by going out into the world and getting the sort of experiences that will toughen me up.
Even if that’s just online.
I don’t want to be a hothouse flower any more. I want to be hearty and strong and able to survive any climate.
And that means going out there and getting hurt.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.