Oh right, choosing to believe.

What I was trying to get at in Act 2 of yesterday’s blog entry was that the particularly potent bullshit of my previous “rational” stance fooled me into thinking there was only ever one way to interpret things – its way.

Its corrupt, unreliable, and hopelessly incompatible with joy and life way. Made all the more dangerous by being stamped as “objective reality” by a dim mockery of reason.

Miss me with that bullshit, okay?

Instead, I am developing a more flexible view of reality where everything is more open to interpretation. There are many ways to apprehend the same objective event, after all, and I will learn to pick the one that best suits my emotional needs.

That’s what healthy people do, after all, and while rationalist goons like my former self might snigger up their sleeves at healthy people’s “delusions” and “denial” and mock their ever so obvious to handle “reality”, they’re happy and strong and we are a sad and sickly lot, so who really has it better?

It’s clear to me that healthy humans have the capacity to shield themselves from reality’s harsher edges by looking at things from the best possible angle.

It’s only broken monkeys like myself who deny themselves this resource, and end up emotional cripples unsuited for life on Earth despite their knowing what is “real”.

Fuck reality. I want to be happy. And I am willing to take whatever steps away from the real world are necessary to get there, up to and including total catatonia, to get there.

So I am slowly learning to stop and ask myself, is there another way to feel about that? Another, more comfortable, healthier and happier way to look at it? Can I take that block out of the Jenga tower of my mind and move it into a more stable position?

I think before now, the overriding priority in my mind was to squish the contents of my memory into the most compact and interconnected form possibly by a kind of gravity constantly putting pressure on my rugged internal model of the world.

And that’s quite powerful. It has led to my being as deeply insightful and visionary as I am, and given me access to secrets both profound and profane.

At the same time.

But it leaves no room for mercy. Like all other aspects of my Brutal Truth Machine, it prioritizes a search for the truth as violent and uncompromising as the machine that yanks the skeletons out of factory chickens.

It’s a mechanically separated truth. And it’s no good for living.

So I am going to loosen the fuck up. There has been an uptight, intense, humorless, merciless monster lurking under all my wit and warmth and kindness all these years, and he seriously needs to chill the fuck out.

Sit down. Pop a brewski. Vibe to the music. And try to relax dude. Whatever you have rattling around in your skull, let it out, man. Give it room to run around and play and maybe air out your cranium a bit.

Because it’s getting pretty funky in there, to be honest. A good rinse would be good too.

Then, once everything is all fresh and clean and that cracked out squirrel that lives in your head has had its exercise and is ready for a nap, let it back in, and go about your day in a much healthier way.

There. Isn’t that better?

More after the break.

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Blood and Fire

Currently stuck in my head :

And that seems as good a springboard for tonight’s discussions as anything else.

What strikes me about a song like that, and female-orient folk-type music in general, as it seems like it comes from a much wiser and deeper place than my home planet.

These ladies do not have these ridiculous walls of dogmatism, stubbornness, phony machismo, emotional constipation, and all the rest of the male bullshit package making life more difficult for them. Often past the point of absurdity.

No, they deal with emotional, complicated, and irrational nature of life directly, with a mind focused on solving the true problems of people’s needs not getting met without being distracted by a lot of abstraction and pretention and other karmic noise.

And they express themselves. They put their emotions out into the world. That is a far, far healthier way to live than the spiritually suppressed male world where we swallow everything until we have no idea what parts of us are real and what are just calcified deposits of fossilized emotion.

I figured out at an early age that this meant women were, in this sense, “smarter” than men. Sure, there might have been a time when men had an advantage at certain forms of applied technical skills (cars, sports, computers) but women have always had the advantage when it comes to dealing with life and being happy and I know which skill set seems more valuable to me.

Because women deal with things. They get shit done. A friend is upset? They coordinate and comfort her with the rest of her friends. Another friend is having a baby? The baby shower seems like it almost organizes itself. Someone is going through a bad breakup? She goes to her friends and cries about it and vents about it and talks the emotions through and then she’s better and goes on with her life.

Meanwhile, six months later, the guy she broke up with is still an emotional wreck who can barely cope with life and spends way too much time at the gym trying to burn off the pain and the bar trying to drink it away.

And he keeps saying the same things about the relationship over and over to whoever will listen because he has no better way to express his feelings and thus cannot exit the loop he is in.

Yeah, I know which group I would rather be in.

Unfortunately, I have a penis.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.