Recently in analysis paralysis Category

to the extent that i am spiffy
to the extent that i am something special, after my own particular...
idiom, sire!
... idiom,

i owe it to years upon years of repression and self-cloisterification.

my formative years, meaning all of them up until last year, and probably next year as well, were spent a-playing video games, where the greatest joy was the freedom to try things without consequence, on account of if they did not work out as planned, i could always restore (you did hit f5, right?) and try it a different way.

i've never been able to decide if the real world works that way. i dont know if i'll have another chance to try things a different way.

sometimes i wonder if i lived my earlier years on the assumption that when things began to really not work out, i'd get to hit f9 and try a different strategy.

on the same website:

this

and

this.

man, that dangold writers' block has been nasty these past few weeks. more than one post has gone three sentences into oblivion. let's see if i can manage better this time.

the secret to all good blogging is either high excitement or deep depression. that's nothing new; since the dawn of literacy, fancy writin' folks have been drawing on emotional extremes to bring home the bacon (or obtain whatever it is they're after by writing).

lately, where "lately" can be measured in terms of my relative blog silence, i've been pretty happy, with an ever-present "nagging something" somewhere in the upper registers. but both the happiness and the nagging something were too low-level (which is not a bad thing, necessarily) to induce good writing (okay, maybe it is a bad thing, then).

but eventually, i have to write. if i want to keep on thinking of myself as a writer, i must write. if i want to think of myself as a brewer, i must brew; as a climber, i must climb; as a lifter, i must lift, as a whiner, i must whine. even if the result is not the brilliant top 1% of posts that i want to write and you want to read, silence is self-perpetuating and -- much worse than potentially boring -- guaranteed boring.

i deleted (well, put in a delete order which will be processed later) an album from my music collection today. this is rare, because 1) i had not finished listening to it all the way through yet and b) i deleted it for the lyrics, not any technical or melodic shortcomings.

for me, music has been, for the last decade or so, a primary means of exploration. a method of manipulating mood, a tool for programming my own mind. and it works. m83 is now making me happy, and it made me happy even via substandard (hah) headphones back in the "bad old days" of 2 months ago.

aside from mood manipulation, music ties me to my own past. in my own brain, very little evokes the past so fully as a piece of music, a few notes or a bit of harmony, that i listened to at a particular time or place. the pet shop boys take me back to my high school reading spot, m83 takes me on to a plane, and beethoven puts me on the road to my wedding.

the wedding, hm? of course this post leads there, and i'll get to it. but first: the deleted CD.

this blog is largely a chronicle of my awakening into a new something-or-another. human being? spiffy person? drab, self-obsessed gen-X type blogger? i dunno. what i do know for sure is that there's a big difference between what i am now and what i was a month before the blog came into existence.

lately, my behavior (as recorded and unrecorded in the blog) has been largely characterized by self indulgence. most anything i want, i do. and the more i do it, the more i realize i can do it: the less all things seem out of reach.

with a little reflection, i realized a while back that i'm finally living my high school years. back when i was actually in high school, i was determined to ensure that those years were not the best years of my life, and i guess i followed that same plan all through college and most of my post-college. i may well be in those best years right now. "right now" certainly beats the pants off high school.

this, of course, is where the tension between what i want and what i'm doing comes into play. and this, of course, is where my finger hovers over the delete button (metaphorically, that is. it's more like a "close browser" button).

back in the day, i used to suspect i had an emotional on/off switch. i figured i could probably become an icy-hearted stonefaced SOB if i put my mind to it, with very, very minimal effort. i didn't really want to find out if i could, though, because i didn't much like the implications (which, of course, i had explored fully in thought experiments). i figured that if i could turn off remorse, compassion, pity, and this newfangled thingy i was provisionally calling "love" (while gathering more data), i would prove to myself only that these feelings (which i was rather getting to enjoy) are just as illusory as the engrossing sense of "being there" that i get every time i hear "DJ Culture" or "American Girl".

and so, as Fate would have it, i got to test out my theory. it turned out i was right: my emotions, my feelings, my desires, my plans and dreams and hopes and my very world view are just as silly, fleeting, and imaginary as every other thing that's ever come to pass, and eventually passed, in this wide world of ours.

this came as no surprise to me, but i spent little time reflecting upon it. i was too busy.

busy-ness is where it's at. that's what dr. pangloss found out. that's something i learned from questioning, so many short long months ago, what made me so different after all from the first girl i ever dated. that's what i found out. busy-ness. i'm busy now. oh boy, am i busy.

not too busy to stop and think, though. not too busy to listen to the lyrics.

Lily Allen sang into my ears today, the first I'd ever heard her, and she sang about things I've never done. Things that I want to have done -- though not necessarily things that I want to do. Experiences I never had, and never will have, but things that I wish I'd had nonetheless. (What I need is a past-injection, a memory syrup like the one Rufus Sewell gets in Dark City, an invented past that contains all the many things I regret I never knew I could have done.)

One night in May, a few hours short of exactly one year ago today, I split into two people. I killed off another "new me" and became a pair of "new me"s.

Much like Neo and Mister Anderson, one of these people has a future, and the other does not.

About five days from now, it will have been a year since I realized I was not, as I had thought, a hopeless loser with no prospects other than the application of symbol manipulations to transform technical minutia into limited wealth into shiny new toys. i realized that this was not the case, that, indeed, i was a desireable swimmer in the gene pool, in more ways than i thought, and to precisely the sort of fellow swimmer that i would hope to attract.

in fact, at the time, as now, it wasn't a "sort" that i was interested in: it was 203.

Today, shortly after I meaninglessly raised my right hand to secularly affirm the veracity of the correction that the clerk had made to 203's misspelling of my middle name, shortly after we walked out of the govt building with our marriage license, 203 asked me if I had cold feet. I answered that of course I did. How could I not?

I suppose this rambling post is a more fleshed out explanation of what I meant, since my immediate answer was clearly not comforting. That's okay though. Marriage isn't about comfort.

as i marked for deletion the album about picking up dudes in bars and breaking up and being a young urban dating person, i put my finger on what i'd been beating around the bush at, and what troubles me slightly as the date approaches. a year ago a couple hours from now, i became a person who could happily have entered "the dating scene", and who probably would just as happily have left it shortly thereafter, but who, in time, would have found someone with whom he did not experience an experience deficit. someone who could have gone out and partied hardy, in every conceivable way, to make up for all the lack thereof that my bitterly stodgy twenties left me with. a person who would have taken the radical transformation i had just begin into a whole new, sorely overdue and unexplored region.

at the same time, i became the other person, the person who took me into an equally unexplored reason, a person who saw (and sees) everything i want and need right in 203, and didn't and doesn't want to toss his current, amazing relationship aside to eventually find out that it was the best possible in all possible worlds.

fear is failure, it's been said. failure, properly observed, is learning.

so i found myself today, and especially this morning, marriage license in hand, especially this afternoon, listening to the details of things i'll never experience, faced with the finality implied by the seriousness with which i will take my wedding vows, able to see clearly the cloud of writer's block that hung over me, the sadness at closing of doors, the machinery of life grinding away and producing the one thing that i always feared, the thing that foolishly kept me out of mainstream life (and all the horrors it has to offer) for so long: the small deaths along the way to that final grave, the little commitments that hem a soul in and remind Him that a life is too short to do all things.

and perhaps it is from this fact that i can draw more empathy for my fellow humans: the sadness that we must all share knowing that things could have been different, and the anguish in wondering whether different would have been better.

that is one of me. the other of me, the me that went and signed the marriage license, belongs to a happier crowd of fellow humans, the optimistic, idealistic believers in happiness. the other me counts myself lucky for having skipped all the inefficiencies of dating, and dumping, and doubting, and other d-words involved in ending up by circuitous path exactly where i am now: with the person i intend to spend the rest of my life with, believing that i could not have done better, and happy that i did not do differently.

i know that with time, the thing i've always been short on, the thing i've always had an excess of, the Mister Anderson me will fade into a memory, and the Neo will resurface as the dominant force. I know this because I knew that with time I'd get over a number of hard things that I had to come to grips with, and time, it seems, has passed, because i was happy to recognize just the other day that i have, indeed, come to grips with them.

there are so many ways to view the world, so many ways to live a life, so many ways to end up on a magic wedding beach. she and i have taken vastly different paths, and the contrast of those paths sometimes makes me uncomfortable, but still, there's no place i'd rather be in 18 days and 23 hours than on my wedding beach with my love and a ==POPE== to make me one again, and one, again.

i'm tired, my audio gear is at home helping to break in the new 225s, and things are going just not as well as they might be going today.

i'm in a reflective mood. that's good for writing and bad for everything else, i've come to realize.

i wondered earlier today, if i didn't have the difficulties that i had, but instead had other difficulties, would i be better or worse off? i suppose i'll really never know -- at the moment, the difficulties that plague me most pointedly are the ones i'll likely never conquer, so from here on out, i'll only be gaining difficulties, since it's a given that i have N permanent ones, and N + M is greater than N for all M greater than 0.

it occurred to me as i was bringing my lunch back to my desk that the combination of a sufficiently broad world view, coupled or replaced with a creative imagination, glued together with an objective analytical mind, is the deadly enemy of happiness.

the more i think about things "objectively" the worse off i gather i am. throw in a good dose of imagination, and i can visualize a universe of improvements to my life.

this thought, i suppose, was the culmination of this morning's grumbly ruminations, spawned from waking up too early, unhappy dreams (themselves born of the usual unhappies that flutter unstoppably through my mindscape now and again), unhappy allergies, and unhappy annoyances with my landlords and brewing setup (heh).

ironically, though, a dash of imagination, a splash of objectivity, and a hash of worldliness, real or imagined (and still, considering, i'm not convinced that one outshines the other), tempered by mood or will, combine and reveal the exact opposite of the conclusion i reached above: the more i think about things "objectively" the better off i gather i am.

how can it be that both are true?

it simply is. i may never be rid of my troubles, or at least, if i rid myself of some, the void will be filled with others. and yet, at the same time, i live a life of above average happiness, and so if i fail to reach some arbitrary level of joy above the above average level, that's not so bad overall, uber alles.

i used to think (really recently, on the cosmic sclae) that this was a "settling" attitude. now i think, perhaps, it is simply reality. it's an old truism that the more power one acquires in life, the less freedom one has. as a simple example, consider wealth. there's a sweet-spot, i suppose, but i'm not there. i'm hardly poor, but yet, to "get the most" out of my money requires constant attention, research, and careful tracking. and still, i'm just basically making it up as i go along. were i poor, i wouldn't have to worry about what effect the housing bubbleburst will have on the stocks in my 401k. at the same time, i'd be poor, with all the problems that brings.

i recently told 203 that life is too short for any person to do all the things they want to do. that used to be something i could say or think without a painful, internal cringe. that used to be something that didn't grate back when there really wasn't anything i wanted to do. and now, i have so many things i wish to do, and i'm so far behind, it's rather irritating. i'm not a patient person, and yet i've waited almost my entire life to have my life. and sometimes, more often than i'd like, when i consider 203, who occupies my thoughts with frightening consistency, i am reminded not only of how long i had to wait to find her, but of how much longer she didn't wait to find me -- because she didn't so much know she was looking for me, just as i didn't know i was looking for her, but she got started in the search a lot sooner.

and the irony of it all (second only to the greater irony that i find my poor little mind constantly deadlocked by such tangled twists of irony) is that, of course, these qualities in each of us are among the milieu of qualities that brought us together, and bring us together, and keep us together.

my life, so far, has been like a firework -- a long, slow, uneventful ascent punctuated by an explosion of bright sound and fire. what shape it will form i do not know, and how long the explosion will continue, i cannot say. but i can say that the fiery streamers of this hopefully long-lived burst of life, and the shimmering glow of the wandering star that i have somehow netted, bring into sharp detail the dullness of the ascent. in contemplating the as-they-weres, i see so many might-have-beens, from the earliest pre-teen years right up to the late twenties, and as i wallow and whinge in irritating gen-X self-fascination, i see concurrently how lucky i have always been to allow me to reach this point of (probably (i mean, i assume (or imagine, if you will))) enviable happiness. and so i get the hodge with the podge, as i indulge myself, tiredly, with boring familiarity, in the realization that my past was lived not as Jean-Luc Picard, but as the far less interesting Jeen Luck Pick-erd, if you remember that episode where his heart blows up (and i know you do).

quoth The Dude, "that's a bummer, man."

i wondered aloud, some days ago, after having wondered silently, whether that thing which i accomplished, the only thing of note that sublimated from my dull, impactless expanse within this depressing or unexamined existence, would persevere now that my circumstances generally do not require its graces. in short, boring, non-fancy words: i wondered whether, now that loneliness is no longer my lot, not even the kind of loneliness that comes with proximity to (the wrong) people, my hard earned ability to conquer the ill effects of my own isolated, underutilized, anxiety-accelerated mind, would dissipate into the same nothingness that consumed my bachelorhood.

you see, i lived as a monk for a long time. i sort of planned it that way, even. it had benefits that paid off, but the obvious irony is that 203 conducted her own life in nearly exactly the opposite fashion, and yet she and i "ended up" in "the same place". that sort of realization might cause the honest introspector to suspect that perhaps "it wasn't worth it". of course, that same introspector might realize, were he to think a step further, that if he considers his present "worth it", then his past was necessary, unless he were to believe in fate, in which case -- and so on. it's a well trod and tired path that leads nowhere.

but again: from my years of isolation and inward "growth", did i accomplish anything, or is it all a sham i created in my mind to justify the waste of a decade of the only thing precious on this world?

(a note: i win either way. if it's a sham, then the very sham-creating superpower that i posess i gained from the isolation makes it "worth it", since a sham is a handy thing to have around. and if it wasn't a sham, then "it" wasn't wasted. clever, eh?)

i live my life as a narrative, because to do otherwise is boring to me. i dramatize my own life in my own mind because the alternative is to have to do things for myself. got that? i'm authoring my own life moments or hours or days before i go and read aloud from my script. or, sometimes, i go back in time and fill in the narrative bits that tie together the pointless sequence of events that make up my life.

i am pretty sure i don't experience sanity in the same way as others. that's okay with me, i think i prefer my sham, anyhow.

there's not a single thing i have to complain about in my love life since last may, and not a single regret that i have for the way my life has turned out since last december, but i still haven't gotten my acceptance around the facts of the world prior to those months. the past saddens me because i see now that i could have lived it otherwise, and because while she was living it otherwise, i wasn't living it with her. i suppose this is normal for folks who dont successfully marry their first love. normal doesn't make things easier, it just means i have silent company in my difficulties, folks that, presumably, could tell me how they cope. but i don't need to hear it, because coping is what sainttoads do best.

i can conquer any bout of anxiety, loneliness, ennui, or realization-that-she-had-a-life-before-me induced angst by recalling the fact that while i may be without her at the moment, there is no time in the forseeable future when i will be without her for more than a few moments. afternoons and evenings drag on, but they are not days, they are not weeks, and before i am faced with eternity, i expect never to be apart for more than weeks. days, perhaps, if desire never fades.

and yet, my old methods of coping had nothing to do with her. is it irony that my methods now consist of simply acknowledging that the cause will cease? the old method was to acknowledge that the cause did not exist -- now that there is a cause, my methods shift from self-reliance to extra-self-dependence, and thus, they are no longer "my methods". so what?

so what. that brings me back to the beginning: was it all for nothing? i want, always, more. and more. and after that, more again. and why not?

inside, some corner of mind pays the price for smoothness of the rest of being. this is not me, i think: this is everyone. away far off in some dusty attic of what passes for consciousness, a tiny, shriveled prisoner twists chained to torturous eternity, folding and contorting himself that the rest of a man may capture some semblance of sanity, and function in life with a smile. this sad homunculus is the one that sees suffering in the world, and bears the burden of missed opportunity, lost chances, and unconquerable shackles of being. it is he that bends the mind to obscure and vanish the worries and the honesty that will consume and digest happiness. from him, i live. i can't be the only one.

the idea, needless to say, is a bit disturbing. but then, so are world events, so are life events, so are the events of the last five minutes here on this very couch. how else can one continue smiling but to embrace the sham?

this morning, while lifting, i had a thought. a (crucial) passage from a (fictionalized-autobiographical) story i wrote returned to my mind and i contrasted the pertinant emotional payload of the passage with my current situation.

of course, the current situation came out more favorably.

a couple months ago i'd sometimes/often make comparisons between my previous and current relationships. i do it far less frequently, now, which is proper, because my current relationship is not a reaction to my previous. the current one stands on its own merits, and would have had it come first. but i find that inevitably, i will draw comparisons. i don't particularly like that i do, because, even though the comparisons always come out with the unsurprising result of the present being more favorable than the past, still, such comparisons are unfair not only to make, but probably also to talk about. it gives the impression that i obsess about such things.

and so, to prove that i do not obsess about such things, i obsessively wrote a run-on sentence saying that i do not obsess. <golf clap>

anyhow, in the spirit of full disclosure, of which i am a great fan, here is the passage:

The kiss came to an end, but the embrace did not. Marcus held Oz tight against him, and put his head on her shoulder. Their faces touched, and he marveled at the warmth and softness of her skin. This time, though, the embrace was different. Marcus felt something new coming from Oz, and this new... emotion... was duplicated in his own heart.

Sadness, but not exactly. Heartache. Mourning. A strange feeling, Marcus had never experienced it before - either on his own, or directed at him. It was a sadness in the present, projected backwards in time from the future. A melancholy now, anticipating some sorrow or loss to come.

Like a mother's last embrace before sending her son off to war, thought Marcus.

Oz drew him in even closer, and the strange new feeling swelled to an unbearable intensity. Something terrible loomed just over the horizon. Something... permanent. Unavoidable.

The last, desperate, defiant embrace of two lovers trapped atop a burning building, thought Marcus. Two people who wish their embrace to last forever, but know that it cannot be...

(source)

yes, yes, i know. the writing is embarassingly melodramatic, but then, when i lived it and wrote it, so was i. here's the point: when Marcus held Oz, he felt -- he intuited -- that the relationship was doomed. now, in the context of the narrative, Marcus is actually a projection of Oz's mind ("a
sadness in the present, projected backwards in time from the future") and he is sensing that the relationship has already ended. in the context of my very own Real Life, though, the feeling was there just the same, only it wasn't time-travel-nonsense, it was intuition.

at the time i had the feeling, i didn't trust my intuition. trust is a thing that's best served cold. no wait, that's revenge.

sorry.

trust is a thing that must be earned. my intuition in such matters had not withstood tests, and so i gave my relationship with real-life-Oz the benefit of the doubt. i know this is true and not ex-post-facto memory shennanigans because i documented my intuitions and my distrust thereof in my Private Journal.

later, when i had more data, i came (perhaps foolishly (the very use of that word still fills me with negative emotions -- directed at myself. if the discussion that sprang from my use of the word "foolish" wasn't warning enough to me, i don't know what would be (i do know -- honesty))) to trust my intuition.

my intuition told me then that things wouldn't-couldn't-shouldn't last.

my intuition now tells me... different things.

it tells me that i am fortunate beyond my own comprehension to have stumbled into this new life i've got, and it tells me that i don't need or want it to end.

my intuition's been giving me nearly constant thumbs-up since early may.

(incidentally, my intuition told me not to write this post, but i did anyways. ohs well.)

(incidentally, the thought, such as it was, that sparked this all occurred to me in a flash as i glimpsed my own bare belly. i imagined 203's touch on my belly-skin, and missed it intensely. from there, my mind riddled me the portentious question of whether i missed her or simply missed belly-rubs. the last time i answered such a question i answered it dishonestly, with much justification and hand-waving. this time, though, there was no hand-waving. i missed (and miss) the person, not the belly-rub.

but i miss the rub, too.)

every once in a while i go read something i've written and, if i've accidently left my humility in another room, i enjoy a momentary suspcion that perhaps 203 isn't all wrong in applying the b-word to me.

most often i only enjoy writing my stuff, but in that case, i really enjoyed reading it, too. "roaming undead"! ha ha! i slay me, with my +1 vial of holy water.

aha!

i figured out something that's been bugging me. i saw the word "patient" in an IM session and was enlightened.

as soon as i mastered the art of impatience, i was forced to become a student of patience.

and hence, my conflict.

sux2bme!

yesterday, while getting my haircut, the barber and i chatted up a storm, which is, in large part, why i returned to this particular barber. somewhere along the way she said something to the effect of "a busy mind is a happy mind."

i debated internally whether i really wanted to "go there". imho, the opposite is true. it's the beer-swilling std-swinging brainless party guys that are happiest, and i would never accuse those guys of having busy minds. you know the type i'm talking about.

no, us thinkly types, the ones with busy minds, are rarely happy -- unless we get our shit sorted out and figure out the happy-knack.

then it's the best of both worlds. i know how to be as happy as the happiest coke-fiend, for free, and i can code up a mean bit of C++, too. in fact, if i put my mind to it, i can do both at once.

anyhow, to the barber, i half-heartedly offered that perhaps the folks with the least going on upstairs are actually the happiest, to which she offered a counter that, to my mind, seemed more to bolster my argument than hers, having something to do with how she didn't mean happy, tv-consuming couch-potatoes, but instead, people who keep their mind busy by keeping themselves busy. i wimped out and conceded the point rather than point out that, at least in my case, i rarely find my mind so "busy" with whatever activity is occupying me that i haven't got time to think about 2 or 3 other things in the "back of my mind", at least one of which, quite often, is more a cause of worry than happiness.

but that's just me. and maybe that's my point.

ah.

i re-read before posting, for a change, and now i see that i am wrong and she was right. or, we were both right.

not "busyness" in my case. focus, concentration, singlemindedness, happiness, and someday, samadhi. but i think my point was (and is) that them's what already have very little going on can more easily than me achieve the singlemindedness that puts a grin on my face.

there. thesis, antithesis, and.. uh. that other thing.

something that was said in post 1 down here got me thinking last night and this morning.

"I think it would be infinitely more productive for you to not indulge this self-indulgent personal narrative any further by yearning after "the other", whatever that means."

the key words were "personal narrative". i tend to live my life like a personal narrative, and view it in terms of a story, with meanings and symbolism and all sorts of clever literary references and tricks.

you can hear it in the way that i tell and retell important stories from my life, infusing them each time with more meaning, more significance, more symbolic portent. you can hear it in the way i tell stories about me in the third person, the way i assign "roles" to figures (people!) in my life.

like jurgen prochnow in that silly john carpenter movie, i'm writing my universe as i go along. that became most markedly apparent, i think, when i started blogging and began doing things specifically so i could photograph them and write about them for the blog.

pretty soon, the urge to "do stuff" began coming naturally with no consideration of the blog.

but still, sometimes the best way to make choices is to think of how they'll look in the writeup.