Or what passes for mine, anyhow.
While I often spill my guts and then poke them with a stick on here, I rarely talk about the rest of me, so I figured I would take a stab at it tonight.
After all, who can truly appreciate my delicate and soulful musings about the tender bruising of my artist’s soul my cruel, cruel fate without a little context?
And besides, I have absolutely no idea what the heck else to write about tonight.
It happens. Sometimes, there is just no water in the well, and you gotta pump mud for a while.
Been suffering from one of my more annoying little symptoms lately, namely the one I call “temporal dislocation”. This is when I have moments, usually upon waking but not always, when I lose track of where I am in time.
This afternoon (as it turned out, it was afternoon) I had a total attack. That is when I wake up and have absolutely no idea where I am in time. All I knew was that it was daytime, and I only knew that because I could see the sunshine streaming into my window. But as for what time of day, I could not have told you. It could have been morning, noon, or twilight, as far as I could tell. I had no memory of what had happened that day, which is what I usually use to break the spell. I think about all the things I remember happening then pick the one that seems most recent and use it to deduce what time it is, more or less accurately.
There I go, deducing reality instead of experiencing it again. No wonder my thinker is such a muscular beast. I use it for so many things.
This time, I had to actually get up and look at my clock radio to center myself in time again. (I deliberately have it so I can’t read it while lying down, in order to prevent clock watching and the insomnia it causes. )
Once I looked at the time, the day’s events (such as they are) slotted themselves into my mind and I was able to center myself in time once more. I felt like I had just barely recovered from a particularly hard crash of the powerful but unstable operating system of my mind, and let me tell you, that is not a very nice feeling at all.
I used to think that my deep down worry about being only very thinly connected to reality was irrational. Just another self-made spook to torment myself into lassitude and despair, right?
But confronted with shit like losing all sense of time and not being able to access the memories of what you did that day… along with all the other strangeness in my dream and sleep life, and my variable mood, and my generally unstable inner life… it really makes me think about just how sane I really am.
And how close to the void of madness I am dancing on a daily basis.
An argument might be made that if I have not gone crazy yet (and I mean serious crazy, as in rubber room crazy) then I am not going to go there any time soon. I am well past the onset age for psychosis and schizophrenia, and not yet in the age rage for senile dementia, so medically speaking, I am not in a risk group and should probably just relax about the whole thing.
But that is certainly not how it feels. It feels like every moment of every day, I am clinging to sanity with bloodied broken fingernails, and if I was to let go for even a second, I would fall screaming into the void and be faced with my absolutely worst nightmare : being completely locked within my own mind and at the tender mercies of my personal demons.
I have no illusions as to what would happen next. I would be in my own personal Hell, the kind you can never get used to or escape, and the only cessation of agony would come from when, eventually, my catatonic body finally dies.
And after all this time, the worst part about making sure that does not happen, about maintaining the sort of iron discipline that such a vigil demands, is that I am so tired, and I have been doing this so long, that letting go is so god damned tempting.
Just let go of the rock and my sanity, and leave the real world behind for a while, and leave it to other people to take care of this stupid broken bloated body while I take a reality vacation and, hopefully, emerge saner and strong for a while.
But that’s the rub, isn’t it? It would be a hell of a risk to take. What if I never come out? What if I am locked inside my skull forever? And we are back to the Personal Hell scenario again.
At least, I suppose, I would find out how much people really care about me. If I wake up in a hospital, they cared enough to dial 911. If I wake up in an alleyway in the Downtown East Side, it means they basically just put me out with the trash.
Why is it so easy for me to imagine that people do not truly give a shit about me? There must be some reason they put up with me. Yet it is much easier for me to imagine that they don’t really care and only barely tolerate me and any moment they could decide I am far more trouble than I am worth and just abandon me to my own pathetic devices.
It must be that I am afraid to believe they care, because I have been failed by the people who supposedly cared so many times in my life that I just can’t trust people any more.
At least, I can’t trust them to be there if I need them.
How sad is that?
We all lose track of what time it is while we’re asleep, so don’t worry, that’s normal.
Usually there’s a vague sense of what general time of day it is, but weird sleep patterns can screw with that.
Once, back around 1996, I went to sleep at my usual 4:00 AM, then inexplicably woke up two hours later. The clock said “6:00.” I felt rested so I assumed I’d overslept and it was 6:00 PM. That meant I’d slept through the time I was supposed to call my friend.
But it was 6:00 AM, and when I called his house, I woke up his dad. And my now-ex-friend never forgave me. Still hasn’t, AFAIK. Certainly hadn’t when I saw him at the high school reunion a few years later.
I was thinking earlier today about your thing of looking around an object instead of at it, and then deducing the object, and I realized that that’s how most people listen to speech.
I realized this because earlier today, my mom was washing her hands in the bathroom and I was outside the bathroom starting to walk down the stairs, and I said, “Is my student coming at his usual 8:00 PM tonight?” and due to the tap running and the stairs creaking, I’m sure she only got “Is my…usual 8:00 PM…?” Yet she understood perfectly and answered.
That’s a positive example. However, it’s usually negative, because usually, people extrapolate what they think I’m saying rather than what I’m saying, and they jump to the wrong conclusion, and then I have to test them to see if they were really listening or not.
People also do this with the written word, which is the ultimate insanity. You can’t make it more clear than by writing it down, and yet people gloss over it and react as if you’d written what they assume you’d written.
And the hell of it is, in a sane universe, this would make them look like idiots. But they just insist that you meant what they thought you wrote, and not what you actually wrote, and blame you again.
And, synchronistically, I was rereading an old Opuntia today, and Dale Speirs was talking about how when you’re fossil-hunting (I refuse to call it “fossicking”; that’s a gross word), you have to look over the same patch of ground several times, once per type of fossil. Your brain can only hold one pattern-recognition-mode pattern at a time. If you’re looking for skulls, you’ll tread right on top of the trilobites and not even notice.
He ties this in with car accidents (a driver’s mind edits out a car that is there) and the difficulty of proofreading (where we do to ourselves what I was complaining about above).
It was more than just not knowing what time it was… it was a profound feeling of total dislocation. It was horrible.
He never forgave you for one accidental phone call? What a dick!
Even when someone is right when they guess the rest of your sentence, it’s very annoying. Better to let people finish. After all, they are not media generators, there for your entertainment, where you can just change the channel if the show gets boring. They are people, with feelings.