I have so much stuff going through my mind every moment of the day (including sleep) that it’s a miracle that I can get anything done.

It’s like a busy construction site in this skull of mine. Many loud noises all happening at once with no coordination or predictability. Dangerous tasks being completed with little regard for safety or caution. The need for a constant start of alert awareness in order to keep from suffering grievous harm.

And a foreman that scoffs at the very concept of safety and thinks only wimps take emotional considerations into account before deciding to act.

Real men plunge foward in pursuit of the truth no matter where it leads and no matter how much damage that path might do to me.

And I wonder why I never feel safe. It’s cause I’m not!

And I am not sure there is anything I can do about that. I find it hard to even imagine slowing down and thinking about the personal consequences when I am in pursuit of the truth. The very concept makes my head hurt.

I can’t slow down because then I wouldn’t know. And I have to know.

For some reason. .

The important thing is that so far, all I have been doing about all the noise in my head is to hide from it and refuse to listen. Do my best to just block it out of my mind.

That’s not a solution. It is, at best, a maladaptive defense mechanism. After all, if you had noisy neighbours, you would not be content to simply ignore the noise.

You would want that noise to fucking stop NOW. And that requires direct intervention with the risk of confrontation and spending an exended amount of time outside of my teeny tiny comfort zone.

That’s where the metaphor breaks down, though, because if I had noisy neighbours you had better believe that I would stay angry and active as long as it took to get them to STFU. The battle lines  would be clear and I would not relent until I won.

Trying to get your brain to be quieter is a much more complicated situation.

This whole issue came to light as I was fighting a difficult boss in the game I have been playing, Witcher 2 : Assassins of Kings.  Not only was the fight itself frustrating but I became increasingly aware that I was losing because I could not get myself to fully focus on the game and what was happening in it.

Even in the middle of pitched battle. my mind would repeatedly retreat from the here and now into its usual retracted position and thus break up the stream of sensations from the game and that was making me slow and confused.

And it was such a frustrating thing to have my mind refuse to comply with my will even though I was safe and enjoying myself that it really got me to thinking.

In a sense, the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking got me to thinking. Ah, the irony.

It made me realize how badly I wanted better mental discipline. In this case, the exact kind of discipline I want is a little tricky to define.

That’s because in many ways, I have superb mental discipline. My thoughts are highly organized and focused and my data bank of knowledge is very efficient and well maintained. When my brain is really cookin’, the whole thing works like a mighty machine, relays clicking away smoothly, numbers going up and down on mechanical registers, the whole thing run by a system operator with such superb skills that the whole thing is like a symphony of precision and order.

Until I have to interfacre with reality, at which point everything goes to hell.

That big old fashioned computer of mine is a whiz at processing what it has but is very bad at handling input in realtime. I get confused and overwhelmed by reality quite frequently and often wish I could slow things down so I could keep up.

As is, the whole system pauses to process all the time, and that is why I am so bad at handling reality because reality, funnily enough, doesn’t pause.

And that’s not even taking the emotional aspect of an escapist personality into account.

And I am fucking sick of it. I want to be able to sync up with reality whenever I choose to do so. I hate having this relentless inward tide pulling me back into my mind at any and all opportunities regardless of the consequences.

It was particularly bad recently. I was lapsing into reverie while talking to people, and that is never a good thing. I could tell people that I am not choosing to do so but I wouldn’t believe me if I was them.

And I would hate for anything to think I was ignoring them and saying they were boring and not worth listening to because of my lapses.

It’s just that sometimes the stuff in my head gets so intense that it takes up all the resources of my mind, with almost nothing left behind for consciousness.

And I can’t stop it. At least, not yet. I am giving serious consideration to taking another stab at Eastern meditation practices and other forms of mental housekeeping.

As far as I know, these practices, when shorn of their mystical trappings, are the most sensible way to get your mental poop in a group around. They are designed to calm down what they call the “monkey mind” – mine is more like a monkey orgy – and let the practitioner assert control over their minds by uniting thought and will.

It’s more or less what today’s “mindfulness” craze is about. Bringing people out of the mess of their modern minds into a world where they can be more in harmony with their surroundings and strike a healthy balance between the inner and outer worlds.

I see it as a kind of equalization of pressure. Right now I have too much thought pressure in my mind and not enough input from reality to equalize it and thus create a stable environment inside my mind.

I wish I could simply open a valve and create one pressure zone instead of two and thus let the system reach a new and better equilibrium.

But brains are not as simple as pressurized systems.

I will just have to muddle through the best I can.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.