Hell if I know.

That’s the thing… when you suppress almost every impulse for a long enough time, you get so far out of touch with your emotions that you don’t even Like each other’s Facebook posts any more.

Not even the one with the baby hugging the puppy at Burning Man!

But I am certain that the answer to that key question will open a lot of doors in me, and so I dig diligently like I am looking for gold or treasure.

And I am. In the form of sanity.

Thje hot and cold sides of my personality have to meet mingle, and unite. My goal is always integration in all things. I am a uniter, not a divider. I want everything to function as one gloriously efficient and healthy whole, without any more suffering that absolutely necessary, everyone in the place that’s right for them, and all working towards the same amazing future for themselves.

Brings a tear to my eye just thinking about it.

In order to enabkle this great integration, I have to make it safe inside me for me to want things. To have desiires and to act on them. To let at least a few impulses through the border gate without being thoroughly vetted by the logic police.

As it stands now, even the suggestion of doing that sets off the alarms in my head and makes me feel dizzy and anxious. Acting on pure impulse without trying to think it through and check for intellectual contraband, like non-obvious negative consequences and future feelings of risk or anxiety?

I am not exaggerating when I way my entire psyche is built to prevent that.

It’s like at some point,. I acted on impulse, and it went very badly, and I decided that the problem was acting on impulse and that therefore I would never ever do that again.

I am stunned by the sheer magnitude of that kind of overgenerelization.

It’s ;like that thing I have talked about before : when a child burns their hand on a hot stove, the normal and healthy reaction is to learn to be cautious around hot things.

The unhealthy.and  neurotic reaction is to develop a lifelong fear/hatred of stoves. Or cooking, Or kitchens. Or the color red.

The completely psycho reaction is, of course, to blow up a Bed Bath and Beyond.

And yet I think that very overgenerlization haunts the lives of a lot of intellectual types like myself. In order to obtain the sort of clear symbolic logic and abstract reasoning that marks an intellectual, a person must learn to suppress all the other things going on in their head. and focus entirely on the cold-circuit task at hand.

Thus, the act of developing that high IQ requires a great deal of suppression. And a willingness – even a preference – to live in a cold, cold world.

Sure, we intellectuals have our pleasures and our drives and our passions. But they are all driven by cold-circuit emotions like curiousity, the search for clarity, the drive for perfection, and so on.

These are all real emotions – I am not saying intellectuals are emotionless robots. Far from it. We have the same emotions as everyone else.

The difference is that intellectual’s drives come from that cold citcuit that makes us seem like aliens to others. Hot circuit emotions, like anger, lust, and jealousy, are inherently mistrusted and suppressed, and in general can only express themselves in an intellectualized form.

So an intellectual will have lust – and express it through writing, pictures, or bizarre fetishes that exist because they are based on existing symbols in the mind that are powerful enough to make it through the intellectual bottleneck at the border by generating such a strong and deep emotional response that it overwhelms all inhibitors and floods the mind.

Not going to post that song again.

As a result of this odd setup, any given intellectual can end up living a strangely mismatched life driven by a motely collection of intellectual interests and absolutely unstoppable compulsions and aversions, with nothing in between.

In other words…. they have a hot side and a cold side that need to be united.

Hey,I made it back to the point!

I’m as surprised as you are.

In order to figure out what I reallyh want, I will have to ease back my border restrictions. And that’s going to take time. I am too rigid for transformational change. I can only do the kind of incremental change that eventually leads to small transformational changes once things reach a certain critical mass.

Wow, my imagery is all over the place tonight.

I think I may be building to one of those transformational moments.I told me therapist that I felt like something large was detaching itself from the main body of my psyche, and that eventually, it will fall off into the void of forgetting and never be seen again.

I’m rather looking forward to it. I don’t fear transformation, I just lack the flexibility to initiate it myself. I am ready for it to happen because I have total faith that I will be better off once the floodwaters recede and I am birthed naked onto that strange new shore.

I’m a poet who is too lazy to put it into poetry.

I wish I could run one of those :tune up your PC” programs on my brain. Get rid of all the junk files. Reconnect unused resources. Defrag my memories.

Anyhow, in order for this big transformation to occur, a big p[art of me has to die, and I think that’s why I have been feeling like I am in mourning lately.

Part of me is going away, and while I hate that part of me and want it to die, die, die, it was still part of me for a long long time. So I mourn.

It’s like excising a tumour. No matter how cancerous and metastatic and toxic that tumour was, it was still a part of you and still leaves a void where it once was.

You don’t have to approve of the crime to cry at the execution.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.