An image and/or thought popped into my head yesterday and it seemed pretty important so I thought I would capture it here.

You know. For posteriority, which is like posterity, only in hindsight.

The image is of a structure made of human bone consisting of a main, thicker horizontal shaft with thinner shafts jutting out of it at right angles. Attached to one end of the main shaft is a human skull of the scary variety.

All of this is floating in a black void, presumably space.

And the skull is screaming.

It is screaming because this entire structure exists for one reason and one reason only – to radiate all my pain out into the void, like some kind of demonic heat sink.

It came to me as such a clear and specific image that I knew there had to be something to it, and the more I thought about it, the more I was sure I should examine it here.

The first thing to note is how totally frickin’ metal it is. Kickass.

The second thing that I think is relevant about it is how bare everything is. That’s what all the bone is about, I think. A skeleton is a naked thing, after all, and I think that’s the key here because in being so absolutely exposed to the world, this structure both expresses my own deep and terrible sense of exposure and vulnerability (naked in the Arctic tundra) and it maximizes the surface area available for radiating pain.

Just like the aforementioned heat sinks.

The next relevant feature. and I think this might top them all, is that it feels good.

This is not the torment it would appear to be. By being there and raw and vulnerable and horrible while screaming my pain into the void, it is actually makes me feel better.

It reminds me of that time when I had the image of barren world with nothing but big rocks and broken chunks of concrete everywhere and a constant rain of thin dark grey ash everywhere and that image actually making me happy.

Downright ecstatic. in fact.

What kind of mind is soothed by such a desolate picture?

And what the hell does the ash represent?

That image is still there in my mind but whatever emotion(s) it connected to are long gone. I remember how happy it made me, but as of now, it is utterly inert.

This bone thing, on the other hand, still connects with something deep.

Another thing : the whole thing is utterly silent. Even the skull’s screaming. makes no real sound. More like… a sense of sound without actually hearing anything.

I get the feeling that I would get a lot more out of this whole deal if I could hear the screams, and maybe even make out what it’s screaming about, but I am not there yet.

Feels good to put the image into words. I rarely get things out of my head and onto the page with such thoroughness and clarity.

Hope that’s a sign of things to come.

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Pulling it out

Anyone know an easy way to increase font size in WordPress?

Anyhow, this is about something that was happening right before I got my food and started to blog tonight.

I was repeatedly trying and failing to beat this particularly pernicious boss ^[1] when I suddenly realized that the mere act of persisting at the task felt good to me.

It felt, in fact, like each attempt pulled some cramped up bit of energy from me and that felt good because it relieved mental tension.

And it was definitely a pulling sensation, as if the energy was string and each attempt pulled a bit more of that string out of the cramped cavity inside me where it had been hiding all balled and scrunched up.

This is not the first time I have experienced string-based imagery like that.

I wonder what THAT means?

Anyhow, the important part is that I was getting a psychological reward for mindlessly persisting at a task. No thought, no decision making, no careful evaluation of all the relevant variables, no cost/benefit analysis, just trying again and again and again like I was a freaking zombie.

This is not, to put it mildly, my usual modus operandi.

My usual method is to stop trying if I don’t see a way through. I either figure out how to solve the current problem or I stop trying.

And that’s not good. Sure, superficially, it seems logical, but that’s bullshit. It’s just a fancy excuse to give up if gratification isn’t already in sight, and that’s loser thinking.

And I am trying to rid myself of that.

So the prospect of gaining the hardcore persistence I have always lacked is rather exciting. If I can learn to just hammer away at things until I succeed, a lot of possibilities open up for me.

Like hacking away at getting freelance work till I get ahead.

Or grinding away at my bad health and bad habits.

Or persisting at online dating till I get me a man.

Or really, anything else in life that has failed the brutal effort-to-reward demands that depression puts on a person.

Not that I am going to put a lot of pressure on myself to make it happen again. We all know that shit never works.

Instead, I am just going to concentrate on remembering how good it felt to have that persistance tension pulled out of me a bit at a time.

Maybe I need to dial back on the constantly looking for the “smart” answer and trying to be mister smooth and clever who always “knows better”, and try to relax and just be another animal on this mudball called Earth.

It occurs to me that I have been using my mind as my primary defense against the world for a very long time, and it is stressing me out.

If I could just drop the act and trust in the world enough to feel safe without all that anticipating, evaluation, and mental masturbating, I could solve a lot of my problems.

It’s the only way I know how to live.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the only way I can live.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.