The Diary of Mr. Chimney

[Mr.Chimney]

18-May-2014

By all rights, today should clock in as awesome. I got breakfast at a new (to me) and delicious place with a friend of mine; we went book shopping and I picked up a reader on fascism, a book discussing the rise of sprawl in Los Angeles, and one of Will Kymlicka's works. Combined with the stolen tomes, I now sit at 9 books to read. I've got three going at current - thankfully, Piketty is getting more interesting and the books I have picked up all seem interesting. Maybe I should capture my thoughts on a text by sort of reading it to the Internet. A walk through a book, as it were. It would be certain to ruin somebody's day. I can imagine a whole nobody being interested in such a thing, especially from some random guy. I'm really glad that I can hide in books. Tomorrow is a holiday, so I plan to sit outside tomorrow evening with the wine and cheese (don't worry, both of these items were the cheap versions and yes, we did have to budget for it. Woo hoo student poor!) and read by candlelight. That sounds divine.

Fortunately, Mother was in Las Vegas, meaning that I have been spared the pressure coming from there. This special time ended today. I'm going to get bummed if I think on that too much so I'm just going to focus on having an okay day tomorrow. It's sad that I have to think so hard simply about having a day that doesn't utterly suck. It's so hard. I have all these nice things but I still feel detached from it. One day I'll be a real person and enjoy things like real people do. One day.

Also, my teeth are starting to hurt because of cavities. I should really get that treated but I can't afford to really and I don't know any dentists here in Newtown. So I guess I'll just deal with it. Uuugh. I want cocaine again, which is odd for me. Fortunately, my one contact for the stuff is taking time off from the stuff. At least until the end of the month. We'll see if the craving is still there. It probably will be. At least I can be brutally cynical with the guy and he responds honestly and academically. He calls me on my bullshit and I grow because of it. Book suggestions, crazy anecdotes, baseball commentary - it's like a douchier version of what I want to be in the future. Just roaming. Preferably to the music of the end credits of Kirby Super Star's "Revenge of Meta Knight", but I'll take what I can get.

There is much to be terrified of but today at least the clouds broke a little today. Lord help me. I don't know how the world allows me to exist but it does and I'm here and people care about me so I just have to make it work. Which I'll do. Somehow. *sigh*

[Mr.Chimney]

20-May-2014

The weather today was tolerably longsleeves. Girlfriend and I went for a walk and played Scrabble at a grungy-looking cafe in Chinatown before carrying on. I managed to avoid buying food today by having old hamburger for dinner. Victoria Day was yesterday and we had Red Velvet Cake and burgers - that was dinner today too. Work sucks, yada yada. I need to get more weed and I also need to finish the books I've stolen so I can steal more. I love reading and when I'm stressed I love shoplifting. The result is a horrendous cycle which covers my finances from weed expenses (my mother routinely sees my books because we are embroiled in constant legal battles with my father and I am too intimidated by finances to prepare them alone), gives me a ton of reading material, and throws down on a shitty chain and its shitty houseware bullshit. Wait - why am I not supposed to do this again? I wish I could read for a living.

I kind of resonated a bit with the newest podcast. A lot of the symptoms the guest described matched ones I'm fairly sure actually happened. I also super-appreciated Paul reading stuff from the forum on this episode. It feels validating in a way. I actually got the inspiration to do this from the time he read my survey. Girlfriend was listening and she started crying as Paul kept reading. I didn't understand why Girlfriend was so upset until it all suddenly clicked. I listened to it again and I realized that I was, indeed, Fucked Up. With this tremendous self-diagnosis, I wrote Paul an e-mail where he told me to come here. I did and I am and it's neat to sort of think that someone could be following up on me. This is the longest (almost) contiguous record of my existence I have ever had. I don't know when I will have the courage to read it or what sort of drugs I will need to be on in order to feel okay with what I've written, but that's okay. I'll get there. I also need to do the Paypal thing so I can donate. Paypal scares me though...and I don't know why. I seem to recall them sending me $0.04 or something and I just freaked out. Once I can relax a bit more I'll try it again and see what I can do. Maybe GIrlfriend has an account I could use?

I'm excited for the neighbourhood garage sale in town this weekend. GIrlfriend and I need a floor lamp. And a clock. And probably some stupid novelty thing and a bunch of books that will make Girlfriend sad. Garage sales provide all of the above and an excuse to go out for breakfast! In all honesty, going out for breakfast is important to me. Tomorrow is Girlfriend and my usual day for breakfast and I look forward to it, the gym, and looking into more writing fuel tomorrow. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't. *sigh*

Gah. I sound like a chump. But I told myself I wouldn't erase things that weren't errors or poor structural choices. So there it is.

[Mr.Chimney]

21-May-2014

Nope. Nothing important about today. But I did want to get something off of my chest, so here's that instead.

As I listened to the show at work today, I realized that the descriptions of pains and tensions felt in life were part of made the whole thing feel...profound, I guess. The metaphor that hits home really untangles emotional knots. I suppose what I mean to say is that I'm going to play the "I'm supposed to feel X" game until I get too sad to continue. Shall we?

I'm supposed to feel "lucky" to have been born in Canada, but I don't. Instead, I feel morally and socially compromised. Canada treats the Indians with utter disdain and leaves them to live in rotting houses. If the Tea Party had any brains, they would point to Canada as an example of socialism gone wrong. It isn't hard to find: the Government of Canada forbids Indians from building on reserve lands (which they must live on to be considered "Indians" by Canada) but refuses to spend any money on building anything themselves. The result makes rural Bosnia look like a happening place. Everything is a fraud in this country - the propaganda is intense (there are more flags per mile in Canada than there are in the United States, I'm sure of it), the services oligarchic and mediocre (ask a Canadian about Bell, Air Canada, or VIA Rail and you'll get an unstoppable raging tirade which will certainly disavow you of the "polite Canadian" trope), the social controls strict (mentioning a disinterest in hockey is unwise in Canadian bars), and the prices insane. People keep telling me how "lucky" I am that I'm not living in Namibia; this argument sets me off even more than writing this stuff down did, so allow me to stand aside and allow Andre Gorz to explain the relativity of poverty, including cultural poverty, in a beautiful and not rage-ful paragraph:

"To be poor is to be excluded from the dominant lifestyle, and this lifestyle is never that of the majority, but of the 20% of the population whose privileged and ostentious consumption dictates the style...a person is poor in Peru when she or he has to go barefoot, in China when she or he has no bicycle, in France when she or he can't pay for an automobile...

As [anarchist Ivan] Illich says, 'poverty modernizes itself. Its financial threshold keeps rising because new industrial products are presented as bare necessities even while they remain out of reach of most people'"

- Andre Gorz, Ecology as Politics, pp. 58-59

Yeah. Fuck you, I'm allowed to be unhappy about the state of the politics in the place I live even though I'm not busy getting shelled right now. Fuck. That pisses me off. Fuck Canada, I'm done with it for now. Next:

I'm supposed to feel proud of my convocation in a few weeks, but I'm not. Instead, I'm feeling upset and forlorn. Political science has been my passion since I received the Communist Manifesto at age 12. Though I may have grown out of my overly Marxist phase fairly quickly, the interest and the desire to be left alone with books stuck. My schooling did improve my knowledge base tremendously, but it also fomented a deepening resentment of Canada in particular and pedagogy in general. I felt like the only person doing the readings and I practically carried a few of my upper-level classes. Why I did this I know not now; with how I feel now, I'd have let them all drown out of spite. In first year attractive women would approach the then 300-pound me and ask for help by way of flirtation. Out of frustration I told one such woman doing this to me that I knew that the flirtation was a ruse and that I was offended by the supposition that I would need to see breasts before I offered to help. As she started getting more and more embarrassed, I continued my tirade by suggesting that she simply buy me lunch and I would help her out if she cut the act and promised to never act like that again. I don't know why I recall that story. Just one of the reasons why I'm not looking forward to convocation. It feels like most of my class half-assed it and the rest did it as a deliberate launching pad into either the bureaucracy or law school. I really feel like I'm the only person that went with an interest in theory, and that dashed my high-school hopes of being able to talk to people who could reply with something other than "stop with the smart talk". Of course, I have a collection of friends that I can talk to and appreciate from my undergrad days, and on the whole I would rather have done it than not, but it certainly was not the Hollywood experience that I associate meaningless ceremonies like convocation with. Convocation feels like an ersatz whitewashing of the ups and downs of basic university life.

Of course, I'm only going because my mother guilted me into it. My stepdad (hereafter, Dad, as differentiated from father, who is my estranged biological father) even said "she spent so much money on you..." as a try at guilting me. I cannot really speak to either of them about this because my mother wants the photo-op Kodak version of my university life rather than the quotidian one (which consisted of basically being permanently stoned reading stolen political philosophy textbooks in a filthy rotting apartment on the wrong side of the bridge, working out until I puked and then planning my next gym session later that day, squandering money on take-out and electronics, and sitting in class feeling utterly alone). She tends to want the sanitized version of everything and that really bothers me. It feels like she is trying to delete my real past. I know...or at least I hope she wouldn't do that to exploit my leaky memory...? Convocation means whitewashing and submitting to being a propaganda tool for a pathetic bush-league school which pushes things I utterly despise as core doctrine. It irks my very soul but I'm being forced into it. I'll think of some way to exact some petty joy out of the thing. Things have always been this way, and they always will. Probably. Working on it.

I'm supposed to feel grateful that my biological parents paid for much of my schooling, but I'm not. This arrangement has left me connected with my father, a man I utterly hate and wish to never see again. We have been in protracted legal battles for the entire time I was in school. What money I make goes into the constant legal battle over the appropriate number of lemons a university student should purchase (true story: I got accused of extravagance because I bought two lemons. This is really how petty these proceedings are). It's exhausting and horrible and I honestly think I would rather have gone into debt. I can't believe I'm saying that, but I would pay a pretty penny for a guarantee that I would never see my father alive again. Of course, this in turn makes me feel like a horrible person because I am putting monetary valuations on a human being with a family. So I wasn't good enough for him - he has a family and his craziness is locked up in a small town way off the beaten track. Why did I countersue him for schooling fees? Oh, right - mother's suggestion. I have a suspicion that my mother isn't over the abuse she suffered at the hands of my father and that she is using my fear of debt and loathing of my father to drag him down with his own temper. This began, by the way, almost 6 years ago. 6 years of court, folks. I have more legal experience than early law students. There are so many overlords and puppet masters and foggy Geneva night-scenes in my life story.

I'm supposed to feel relieved to have a long-term full-time job contract with a wage above minimum, but I'm not. It instead makes me resentful. My job is almost like George Jetson's, only the commute to work is an hour-long bus ride on a ridiculously-crowded bus and the boss is a Russian Kazakh whose command of English is suspect at best. And none of the nifty future shit. If George went to work on a more boring version of the set for Blade Runner, that would be about right. It sucks and all it does is pay the bills, get good weed, and slowly evolve into money for a Master's program. Meanwhile, I keep stealing books and trying to find a way out of academic isolation. This job is about as academic as gorilla masturbation techniques and it may as well be just staring at a wall until midnight. If this is the cost of living like I do now, I'm not sure why I don't take one last crack at the old suicide bat.

I'm supposed to feel pretty okay with my body, but I don't. Food is one of the fastest and easiest ways out of bad mental places. Good food brings me to better memories and forces me to stay in my body to enjoy it. The problem is that the consequences of this stay around for longer than the taste does. My parents both display unsettling behaviours, including bringing up recent weight changes in conversation and showing off smaller and smaller clothes. I also am always too fat. It's just for my health that we're concerned, dear. We have a history of heart disease, you know. And we pay for your gym membership. You need to go more often, sweetie. Change your attitude and go to the gym. You'll feel better. That happens and then I get on the exercise train and I always have to avoid falling into a rage-filled meathead mode where the gym is all I think about. I lost almost 90 pounds in 4 months through extremely unhealthy exercise techniques (including going to the gym twice in one day); the discovery of restricting food intake took me from a pretty fit if a bit flabby 200lbs to a positively ghastly 165. This was with daily gym sessions, too. My hair was falling out and had become like straw, my tongue tasted always of iron. What more, my face was frighteningly gaunt and I was often sick. I switch between uncontrolled consumption and ludicrous self-punishing gym routines over the course of about 6 months. I'm just getting into an unhealthy gym phase and I'm trying to take it slow and easy today. Despite that, having the water shut off prevented me from going to the gym today and that really bothers me.

I'm supposed to feel galled to action by the continuation of my mother's abuse towards my kid brother, but I don't. Instead, I feel utterly exhausted. I keep getting clawed back into my own darkest nightmares by the law and by my alter's unwanted whispers. I need my mother and I live a huge distance away from Hometown. I can't do anything and I doubt I have the energy to do anything even if an avenue existed. I'm a horrible person. Every one of these has resulted in me feeling worse and worse about myself. I can't keep holding this many things up. I just want to smoke weed, read political philosophy, and live the student-poor life until I too get called out of the waiting room and into AdultCorp. I want to enjoy the things I have lined up and focus on getting the next few shots angled. That's why I'm writing this stuff down, really. But knowing that nobody is going to do anything anything about kid brother's abuse except me just exhausts me. Even thinking of everything I have to juggle behind-the-scenes is staggering to me. No wonder I have hypertension and chest pains. Twenty-three and my heart already wants to give out. I can honestly say that I can't blame it.

I think I've decided that I want real therapy now. Holy shit. I'm going to go try and finish a chapter of my bathroom book, a stolen number about the reattenuation of land use in Detroit and the consequences therein for future urban collapses before I start crying from fear and falling asleep. Hugs...? Please hugs. I don't bite, I promise.

[manuel_moe_g]

{{{{{Mr.Chimney}}}}}} many internet hugs to you

Your feelings are valid. You are a good person. Please take care.

[Mr.Chimney]

Thanks, Moe! The hug is much-appreciated.

22-23-May-2014

This all bleeds together, so bear with me. The reason I'm not at work today is a beautiful one and in some way a hilarious metaphor for my life. It began yesterday after work, when some of my coworkers and I went for a drink. The phrase "went for a drink" to me usually means sitting over a pint, maybe two over the course of an hour. I leave these sorts of sessions with a desire to take a leak in an alleyway but otherwise just fine. One of my coworkers however had a different idea and proceeded to buy us all booze (which is not cheap - Canada, remember). I am a bit of a lightweight with alcohol and I don't drink often. You can see almost immediately where this goes. Take the bus home, walk with coworker to his place, realize that I am idiotically drunk in an unfamiliar neighbourhood in the dead of night, waddle home using some sort of mental bullshit power, and then trip on the stairs and wrench my shoulder. That's me - handed everything I ever needed to go batshit insane by a wonderfully kind person, then swinging and missing at the big insanity board and contracting some little shit-problem instead which is just as crippling but not nearly as interesting. I'm still recovering from the hangover and I can't actually eat anything so I'm kind of hungry, very dizzy, and rather queasy. And my shoulder hurts. So there, me - I have a damn good reason for not wanting to stare at a glowing box for 8 hours. Instead I am staring at a glowing...no. No self-destructive beatdowns.

I'm too sick to keep writing, so...at least this is not abandoned, right?

[Mr.Chimney]

24-25 May-2014

I forget why I didn't write yesterday. Yesterday was a big yard sale day and it was pretty awesome. In fact, the whole weekend was pretty awesome. I am really having a hard time writing for some reason. Tonight was a party which was also lovely. I helped Girlfriend quite a bit with the party organization and I'm mostly basking in the glow of that all having paid off. The glow is probably coming from the new floor lamp from the garage sale. Or my forhead - I practically turn to leather in the summer. It's kind of gross and I hate the Sun a little.

But only a little. Work tomorrow is bound to suck. Just...ugh. I hate it. I've hated every job I've ever had. When will I get one that doesn't suck? Probably never. Fuck.

[Mr.Chimney]

26-May-2014

It was too hot today. Since "too hot" is a qualitative metric which takes into account the opinions of such insightful meteorologists as advertisements, access to A/C on that particular day, and my personal preferences, this is probably mostly not true and most people would have enjoyed it. I have a cold and the coughing is doing wonders for my abs but isn't helping my mood any. Today was going to be very boring but I got my official badge of entry into the warehousing proletariat - the Ballcap of Mediocrity. I was putrifying in the warehouse as per usual when this hat appeared. My cynicism about this stupid hat became so intense that it actually became funny on its own. The thought of wearing this stupid hat in this stupid warehouse doing this stupid task was just too much. I couldn't even be upset about it, which means I guess I was pretty happy about the hat. Yes, world - this is the path to happiness. Forget self-reflection and all that stuff - just hate yourself so hard that you collapse like a black hole of cynical hopelessness and realize that, no matter how grody this hat is, it most certainly is not a singularity-inducing problem. It's like the mental disease made a mistake on stage and I got to laugh at it for a change. Certainly refreshing. So, go hat! I hope the Ballcap of Mediocrity retains its magical powers tomorrow.

I also wanted to share a defense mechanism that I have developed over the years. In some part, I would love to hear that I'm not the only person who thought this shit up. Like almost everything in my headspace, I named this Acid Armor after the Pokemon move (Muk learns it in Gen I; also, I continue to suck at naming things). It combines two elements of my childhood - intense social control and petty vengeance - and creates an isolating shield of awkward. The earliest form of it went like this: as I get riled up, I start subtly changing my intonation and posture from my usual laid-back self to much less palatable person (or at least, I hope it's less patable). That tactic ran into a problem when both of my parents started demanding that I act a certain way. I remember sitting in my mother's car and almost waiting for a grade after social events. If I had done badly, the car would be full of stormclouds until someone finally snapped at me. If I did well, I would still have to ask if I was okay during the gathering. They always suggested ways to improve.

Father had a simpler solution. He just screamed at me after events were over. Or so my alter volunteers. Take anything from that source with a grain of salt.

So what was a pedantic, bored, spiteful, petty little kid to do? I soon realized that I could make people cringe by saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. Naturally, this resulted in anger (or, presumably, screaming). But if you could imply the thing while masking it in a compliment or just petty conversation, it would have the same icy effect but I could never be blamed for it. This worked until I was about 12, when I was old enough to know better. The aura-dampening effect started to take on subtler forms - body movements and voice control are critical - and as I became more and more isolated in university I honed this to a precision tool. There is no meeting I cannot ruin. I can bring an entire room down in the right mood. In its current form, it's a reaction in places where there is a clear majority opinion upset with me (which happens) and it can be nasty.

Some examples of Acid Armor:

- When I worked at Starbucks, I was always angry. Teenagers would ask for hashtags and stuff written on their cups. When I was writing on the cups, they would always have their Twitter account thing (handle?) written beside smudges that couldn't be cropped out of the picture.
- I detest having my photo taken, so I will slap on the shit-eatingest grin I've got for every photo. Most people get the hint after one or two photos like this.
- My crowning glory actually comes from the beginning in one of the few memories I have of my father and I that I can confirm is true. We were in Edmonton for a conference and I had saved up to buy a stuffed animal at the mall (which is the most tragic tourist attraction since "World's 3rd largest ball of yarn"), but I left my wallet at my mother's house. I was...9? I offered to pay my father back for something like $15 but he told me that I had to learn from my mistakes and that he wasn't going to bail me out. This basically made the whole trip go from shit-show with a glimmer of hope to shitshow heap. It was like Satan himself had closed the only window in the hell that is being with my father. But, because fuck you, I found a $2 coin and was able to buy a plastic elk instead. I loved this elk and brought it to the dinner banquet for the conference. I started playing with it and someone asked me where I got it in the typical way adults make small talk with children. I said that I was happy to have it because my father wouldn't loan me the money to get a stuffed animal and the man (I think it was a man) looked at me with such deep pity and sadness. Something in me clicked and I knew that I had something with this, so I left my father's side and started showing people my new plastic elk which I got with my own money which was almost as good as the stuffed animal I wanted to buy but didn't have the money for. People started...looking at my father and, for the first time ever, I saw him on the wrong side of emotional blackmail. It was a fucking triumph.

Rest in Pieces, plastic elk. Your tragic end (and the probable emotional smack-down I got for such a stunt) was worth the memory of my father sweating in a swanky dining hall while a bunch of rich-ass people stared him down disapprovingly. On that note, I'm going to bed. Pleasant dreams!

[Mr.Chimney]

27-May-2014

Attention, world. The Ballcap of Mediocrity is indeed magical. I've discovered that it feels so stupid and makes me feel so unbearably toxic that I can only laugh about it. It won't last forever and I'll eventually hate and/or lose the damn thing, but for now the mighty Ballcap of Mediocrity just sets the tone for what feels like some Vonnegut-level bullshit. The world is a sadder place without that man's acid wit. Honestly, where did all the acid go? The really insightful presentations of quotidian tragicomic lunacy - Hunter S. Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, George Carlin, you know the type. I wish I could read one about today. Just bring Swift back from the dead and have him write a book about the Foul Year of our Lord Two-Thousand and Fourteen. I would kill to see what such a thing would look like.

Undergrad-level bush-league bullshit aside, today was fine. I wasted the morning, made it to the gates of the gym before turning around and going home due to anxiety, ordered pizza for dinner, and stared at glowing boxes. The cat is particularly whiny today too. I sat outside for lunch today and that really cleared my head. It was really neat to sit at a table full of people with hypenated identities (i.e.: "Italian-American") and hear them talk about things that they found tough here. One coworker just returned from Mexico and recalled times when he could visit more often. Another hasn't been back home in almost a decade and is afraid his command of his mother tongue is fading. I have always sat awkwardly with Canada and leaned on my little Dutch community to give me a sense of cultural belonging. It was an odd place to recall that, indeed, we are not alone in our feelings. We smoked our respective tobaccos and went back to work.

I need to do something tomorrow or else I will hate myself for it. The gym is a definite must - I also have to pay rent (goodbye, money...) and Canada's stupid expensive phone bills. Speaking of telecom, I may be off the grid tomorrow due to repairs. We'll see. I emailed Paul today and probably sounded like an enormous ponce. I hope what I wrote didn't make me sound like a complete narcissist. I just really feel like the diary is helping me a lot and I'm grateful that people are looking at it and that I can look at it too. This is the longest continuous narrative I have ever had and it feels like I'm going to be a whole person again someday if I keep this up. Thanks, all!

[Mr.Chimney]

28-May-2014

Depending on my mood, I had decided to discuss either the sexual punishment I inflicted upon myself as a teenager or my coping methods which put me in high spirits and make things all better. It was a close battle; I left the Ballcap of Mediocrity at home and went in late on a fake excuse which almost meant you got to hear about pointy things where pointy things shouldn't go. But I bought Girlfriend some DLC for Skyrim, found the aforementioned Ballcap, got some tea, and threw down the magical sounds of the very first video game I ever played (and a Happy Moment in my life, really), and...well, let's take a walk, shall we?

A lot of things that make me feel better seem very odd to me. I have a coffee mug that I got in Berlin (another and very recent Happy Moment) with the words "Held der Arbeit" (Hero of Labour) on it. It is modelled after the Starbucks logo, but mine has a handshake on the inside instead of that damn Siren (full disclosure: I worked at Starbucks and it almost killed me) and the aforementioned slogan replacing the words Starbucks Coffee. It's my favourite mug and it always brings a smile to my face. One of my former coworkers there came over to visit and remarked on how appropriate the mug was, and it felt fucking life-affirming. Things like the Ballcap of Mediocrity, or my coffee mug, just make me happy. It doesn't last forever but man is it nice. When I'm as moderately neato as I am now, almost anything with good memories tied to it will make me burst over with happy-ish feelings too. I'm currently just listening to music from my childhood. I stumbled upon the music for Super Mario 64's Dire Dire Docks (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cTl0ky4DcHA, if it matters) and now I'm just feeling warm and okay. I'm wearing the Ballcap and I smoked the weed and I have tea in my mug and a happy Girlfriend and some of the rare good memories with me. Music can bring me back to places, like Fatboy Slim does to Malta. Old games can bring me back to safe spaces, like Goof Troop for the Super Nintendo and my memories of Metje (Grandma) and I trying to beat the last level. I'm so rarely wholly in my body that the impact of these things when I am all here is amazing. It feels like a drug, really. My own happy memories are a drug that I can only sometimes get. I need a better Past Memories dealer, I guess.

But I'm usually not this giddy. In darker places I rely on a few other methods. Let me list 'em out and talk about them. Because why the fuck not? It's a diary. Nothing's keeping you here.

Geez. Sorry about that. Take 2:

Long walks form the backbone of my mental health routine. My most common coping technique is smoking marijuana and going for a walk with earbuds in. I just go for miles. I feel okay leaving myself to think while I'm walking because it satisfies almost all of my mental itches. It's at least some exercise. I can listen to lectures and things to not feel lazy. I can do errands on the way and not feel like a shitmop. And I can smoke weed and be away from everything until I'm sure I'm ready to handle it. Win-win-win-win. Walking and weed are the closest thing my fears and struggles have to a pause button. That's where I get the little inch of mental space to write this. Seriously - I look forward to walking home from where I get dropped off. I love every pedestrian-unfriendly curve and the hideous view of Stalinist turds across the river. The walk home is one of the best parts of the day. I walked 13 miles in Berlin and had one of the best days of my life. This is one technique I highly recommend.

Books have been my friends from the very beginning. If walking is a pause button, this is grinding against a softer surface to slow down. I rarely read for fun and have read very little fiction (whatmore, without academic instruction I rarely enjoy it) but I maintain a profoundly boring library of technical stuff. Tons of political philosophy with a collection of literature about Detroit and a selection of North American Indian Political Thought. Things that well-adjusted human beings wrinkle their noses at. I could be dead wrong, but I find very few people wanting to talk about things like the Cherokee Freemen or the conditions of urbanization in Los Angeles. I can only rarely watch television and stay invested in the characters (the only live-action show I have ever watched start to finish was Arrested Development) and I find talking about sports stressful (I do enjoy listening to baseball, though), so I usually feel like the only thing I can do is be "funny". I'm not exactly a standup comedian. I mean, really. You read this dreck, no? Anyways, I think feeling isolated in the things I like makes me feel like I have to perform, stressing me out further and making it harder to stay away from fugues and unstable memories. Books are my television, really. I hate that I feel like I sound like a pretentious ass-burglar for saying that.

Music establishes memories as true, reminds me of better things, and makes fugues more pleasant. I'm so glad I changed my mind from when I was 13 and wrote bitterly in one of those "Write about Yourself" exercises that "Music is another form of domination by the bourgeoisie" in response to an inquiry about my favourite music. No-one - not Stalin, not Mao, not Pol Pot, not even Mengistu Mariam - had a harsher statecraft strategy than I did at the age of 13. The things I wrote (which still exist - I burned a good portion of this stuff, and with good reason) suggested that the best way to function was to deny all sexuality, music, dance, ceremony, timekeeping, and to focus on shrinking urban centres and demand constant self-improvement. The mental illnesses of the population living like that...yeesh.

I'm running out of steam. I'll finish this on another awesome day. Love and hugs!

[manuel_moe_g]

I started Piketty's work Capital in the Twenty-First Century and so far I am finding a tragic lack of anything new.

That is too bad. I have had my eye on Piketty's book, because heard a lot about it.