Came across this marvelous song recently, and it got me thinking.

I love that song so much. It’s so full of hope and courage. It’s positive, but not in a rainbow farting reality denying hippie way. It’s a song that says “If we stand together before the night, we can make it through to dawn together. ”

That’s a kind of positive message that makes sense to me. Psychedelia never has. Don’t get me wrong – I am totally down with the whole groovy, free love, flower power vibe.

But I have never cared for the whole drug thing. The “better living through chemistry” thing. I wouldn’t deny anyone their bag or anything, but to me, it seems like it just turned a lot of people into mindless lotus-eaters who couldn’t handle reality and therefore had very little effect on it.

So to me, in a sense, the big crash after the big high that happened in the 1970’s was the best thing that could have happened to the Movement. It let people jettison the Cloud 9 con and get real. People had to leave Cloud Cuckoo Land, and that was a hell of a comedown for a lot of people. But it resulted in people having to come to grips with a lot of things that the hippie crowd just didn’t want to deal with, man.

Of course, I might be biased, because I was born in 1973. My life from birth to age 7 was in the 1970’s. I absorbed the decade on a cellular level, and anything from that era can trigger enormous waves of nostalgia in me.

It’s entirely involuntary. And not entirely unpleasant.

Not entirely pleasant either. For reasons that definitely come from Crazytown USA,. I mistrust nostalgia intensely.

For one thing, strong feelings of nostalgia give me a feeling that is too similar to one of my reality-shaking attacks of intense deja vu. I hate those. They make me so confused and I feel like I am going to loop back in time and lose everything I have gained in the intervening time, and have to live it all over again. I get dizzy and faint and nothing feels real, and that terrifies me to my core and shakes my sense of reality entirely.

And I hate that.

So there’s that. There is also the promise I made to myself while I was having a pretty shitty childhood that if I ever thought that this was the best time of my life, shoot me in the fucking head because it sucked.

And I haven’t changed my mind on that. I had a very bad childhood. Not as bad as some, but no kid should grow up as alone as I was. It’s a wonder that I came out as sane as I did. Such isolation and bullying often produces entirely unstable individuals.

Thank goodness for the entertainment industry And the stabilizing influence of a middle class upbringing. And being so god damned smart, I suppose.

The jury is still out on whether that was a good thing. On the one hand, having such a strong intellect is a huge asset when it comes to regulating your behaviour, and my extremely pragmatic mind anchored me to reality in so many ways.

On the other hand, being locked away in my ice castle did me a lot of harm, and kept out the warm emotions I needed so very badly. I am still thawing out from that. I might have been better off in the long run if I had been forced to deal with my emotions instead of freezing and studying them in order to try to make sense of the world.

Nietzsche was right when he talked about how life must be lived to be understood, instead of killed, stuffed, and studied like so many butterflies in someone’s collection.

Fascinating image, says my mind. Fuck off, Spock.

A name for part of my problem just popped into my head : detached id. The id is still there – it is our primal animal selves – but it has been disconnected from the core psyche by a retreat into pseudo-rationality in order to escape negative emotional realities.

This makes someone like me fundamentally unbalanced – polarized – by this flight from deep emotion. Nearly every deep drive is replaced by cold curiosity and frozen fascination. And they make very poor substitutes.

So what happens? The pain of this disconnection makes us retreat even further from our emotional selves and the problem gets worse and worse.

I’m on the path to recovery from this fundamental error. I can look behind me and see how far I have come from the frozen and fearful human wreckage that I was for two decades. I am far more connected than I used to be, and I am also a lot more confident.

Those two things are – not to be cute – connected.

But I can also look ahead and see how far I have to go. I am still pretty scared and fragile. I feel like I am still somewhat of a timid creature tiptoeing through life, ready to bolt and dive into his burrow at the slightest provocation. It will take some time and dedication and a concentrated effort of will to push myself into all the experiences it will take to lose the fragility, find my inner core of strength, and feel comfortable in my own skin.

And a lot of that will come from building my career as a freelancer. This weekend has shown me quite vividly how merely blogging could never be enough for me again. with no episode to write, I have way too much time on my hands and it becomes a burden, and I begin heading in the general direction of depression.

Even though I have a video game to play that I am thoroughly enjoying. It’s just not enough any more. It occupies my mind and makes the time go faster, but after a while the restlessness and dissatisfaction start creeping in and time becomes a burden.

The thing is, I have stuff I could and should be doing. I’m just not there yet. I am still stuck in the “work and play” mentality, where there are the things I have to do, and once that is done, it’s playtime.

The road out does not go in that direction. The two must become one.

Only then will I learn to truly be alive.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.