Wow. I have absolutely nothing to say tonight. There’s just a void where the ideas should be, with the occasional tumbleweed a-tumblin’ through. I don’t even have anything as interesting as yesterday’s Vancouver Sun saga except that she was there again today.

I didn’t grab one. No crossword.

Oh well, I will just start typing and assume something will emerge. It usually does. After all, if you’re gonna fly, you have to trust your wings, right?

I got that from The Get Down, which I just finished. Great show, Seventies nostalgia, etc. Trusting my wings is not something that I have ever been able to do. Not in the sense intended. If I was to trust my wings, at least in my existing mode, it would be because I thoroughly examined and tested them and found them to be trustworthy and sound.

If I couldn’t do that, I would never have the nerve to jump out into the abyss. And that sounds intelligent but life does not always furnish the opportunity to thoroughly reason out and thoughtfully inspect things before you are to trust them. Sometimes, you have to jump off the cliff without knowing for certain that you even have wings.

I’ve talked about this before. About faith versus knowledge, about never stepping on a road without knowing exactly where it leads, about losing your heart by embracing the mind to the exclusion of all else.

I’ve been thinking about that ol’ emotional override switch again lately. You know, the circuit in our brains that lets us push our emotions to the side and act on the products of our intellect instead. Without it, we would not be human, we’d be no more than amoebas, helplessly acting on every impulse without restraint or consideration.

But it, too, can grow cancerous and malign, and I think the real addiction for people like me is that ability to avoid dealing with your emotions. Intellectualizing is merely the base cognitive act of turning everything into food for thought and thus activating that circuit. The more intelligent the person, the stronger that cutoff circuit is, and hence the easier it is to fall into the habit of doing that with everything.

And it fools you because it does a very good impression of dealing with the issue, but it’s nothing of the sort. It’s the avoidance of dealing with it by focusing only on the intellectual component of the equation, ignoring the vastly more important emotional component.

It’s escapism posing as reason. It’s no different than letting your bills pile up unpaid because you don’t feel like spending the money, so when the bill shows up you just throw it out. As if that solved anything.

Sure, it solves the immediate problem of being bummed out by a bill. But we all know that it is a childish thing to do and solves nothing in the long run. Yet billions of it treat out emotions the same way.

It’s a very particular form of spiritual weakness and one for which I have yet to see any sort of religious or mystical solution. I suppose “be here now” is the closest thing, but that says nothing about dealing with and expressing your emotions as they come and not suppressing them except when absolutely necessary.

Yet some people do it by natural instinct. These are not necessarily intelligent or wise people. It’s more like the beauty of simplicity : these people are immune to this sort of error because they are not capable of it.

I find it hard to put myself in the shoes of someone who acts on most of their impulses and doesn’t worry whether what they say, feel, or do is “right” or not. I pride myself on my emphatic gymnastics but that mindset is so alien to my own that all I can think of is what it was like to be a child.

But even as a child, I was weirdly rational and reasonable and thoughtful. Maybe when you are born with an outrageous IQ, it dominates the rest of the mind through its sheer strength, without even trying.

Then again, in my case, it probably has a lot more to do with people expecting me to get over being a little kid way, way before that was happy and being reasonable and thoughtful seeming to be how to do that.

Plus, of course, there is the eagerness to have the “right answer” all the time. That easily turns into the desire to make the “smartest” choices and show the world how I was too smart to fall into the errors other people did.

Talk about outsmarting yourself. So confident was I that I knew better than most people that it did not occur to me that there might be a reason why people did the things that seemed stupid and pointless to me, a reason I just could not see. They were following social instincts that over-intelligent me filtered out as noise, and the thing is, we need to actually follow those instincts if we are to develop into psychologically well adjusted and functional adults. If only I had been more willing to follow my heart and, quite frankly, my penis a little more, I might have gotten in more trouble, but I would probably not be stuck trying to go through my teen years at age 43 either.

I was such a fool.

Then again, I was severely fucked up in the cabeza, so what do you expect? So much social damage at such an early age. My social antennae never stood a chance. There I was in my icy world of the mind, never knowing that my “solution” of withdrawing into my mind was killing me.

After all, if your response to stress is to withdraw, and withdrawal makes your life worse, causing you to withdraw even further… what chance do you have?

I am still locked in that cycle. That’s why it gets so hard to concentrate when I am stressed sometimes. My mind is trying to withdraw past the pint where I can keep any kind of information or chain of logic intact.

And hey, if I had an alternate dimension that operates outside of time so I could retreat into it, spend as much times as I need, and then return to the exact instant I left without even having aged, that would be okay.

But I don’t. So I kind of need a new way to cope.

The first step is learning how to overcome my despair.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.