Post-Somnis Post-Mortem

I’ve been thinking about the insomnia/catharsis thing that happened a few nights ago. I ‘blogged about it here.

I was thinking about how problems want to be solved. They’re like water seeking sea level; they’ll just flow there if you let them.

The first obstacle is the word ‘problem.’ The term is a value judgement, rather than an assesment of causes and consequences. For instance, in my ‘blog, I have the problem of not being able to sleep. From the perspective of wanting to sleep, insomnia is a problem. From the perspective of finding the cause of the insomnia, the insomnia is an opportunity.

Also, I would have been unable to go straight from frustrated insomniac mode to fetal-ball catharsis mode, without attaching the grief at random to one of the zillion thoughts that were keeping me awake. The intermediary step was required, in much the same way that (to extend the water metaphor) a cascading waterfall has deep pools along its path.

I think the insomnia was an attempt to process whatever bad feelings were inside me. The chattering frustrating brain was supposed to make me feel bad enough that I expressed those deeper feelings, except that it would take a years’-worth of sleepless nights to even make a dent in it, and more would have built up in the meantime.

The problem wanted to solve itself, and it took quieting the mind in order to get to the place where that could happen. To some degree of success, at least. I’ve felt really good for the past couple of days.

Some ‘blogs I make in order to read them again much later. The last one was an example of that sort of thing.

Some ‘blogs I make because something’s on my mind, and this is an example of that type.


The other night, David Letterman had a top ten list: Top ten signs Ari Fleischer doesn’t care anymore.

Fleischer is the slimy paid liar white house press secretary. He’s announced that he’ll leave the post in June, which makes me very, very happy. He’ll likely end up making his money by passing himself off as an expert on Meet The Press or something, however, which makes me unhappy.

Anyway, this top ten list was funny to me, because I obviously dislike the guy immensely. And items like this went over well with the audience:

9. Qualifies each statement with, “…but that might be the gin talking”

8. Gives monosyllabic answers to press questions, then goes back to his Gameboy

But when it came time for 7, the crowd turned on Dave:

7. Doesn’t try to hide the fact that he’s accepted a position with Al-Qaeda

There was moaning, and even a couple of boos. I was, of course, waking up the neighbors with laughter. Then Dave got to 2:

2. Keeps hitting on Helen Thomas

The audience turned on Dave at this point, and he said, “I think you people are taking this a little too seriously.”

After that, the number one sign that Ari Fleischer doesn’t care anymore (that he refers to Bush as ‘President Bonehead’) got a few laughs, and there was Dave at his desk, trying to mop up after a bombed top ten list.

So of course, I had to ask myself, is it just taboo to joke that anyone is aligned with al Qaeda? Some of our representatives here in Washington state have been critical of the Bush administration’s warlike ways, and have been branded ‘Osama Bin (Patty) Murray’ and ‘Taliban Jim McDermott.’ Is there some kind of double standard here?

Or do New Yorkers (where Letterman’s show is taped) have a tender spot where Washington conservatives only have callouses?

Another Happy ‘Blog

Note: If you want light reading, skip to something else.

Laying in bed trying to get to sleep, I kept thinking about overwhelming things. I’d almost be asleep, and then I’d start thinking about something from the huge list of things I need to do, which would be followed by something else from the list, and so forth, until I was overwhelmed by all of them (a process which lasts only the smallest fraction of the most split second you can imagine). Someone listening outside my window would have heard me go to bed, and then every 3-4 minutes, they’d hear some kind of growl of frustration, or me saying something like ‘Why the fuck do I have to go through this?’

I began to see through it, though, to the thing this process is protecting me from. There would be the occassional glimpse, as through a door that’s slightly ajar. The real thing was a sort of agoraphobic silence, and past that, a deep, deep sadness.

My time doing meditation let me say to myself: there won’t be any more talking. No language inside our outside my head. The chatter evaporated, and there I was in the agoraphobic silence. I hung around there for a while, observing how quiet. Any stray word seemed like a shout. The phobic part went away, and the agora part became inviting.

And, from this metaphysical staging area, I dove into the deep, deep sadness.

Sometimes, being sad is like puking. You know you have to do it. You try to put it off, you use palliatives, you think that maybe you can just wait it out. Not a chance. Your belly is full of alcohol, or poison, or whatever, and you must induce vomiting in order to stay healthy.

So that’s what I did. I decided to ride that emotional state of deep sadness wherever it went. I spent a bunch of time curled up in a fetal position, frozen and gasping and sobbing, all muscles tense, as if I could squeeze the sadness away from the inside. This is also an austim trait; many autistic folks are calmed by pressure and restraint of their body. Some ignorant psychiatrist who happened on the scene would have given me sodium pentathol or something, and thus prevented me from doing the healthy thing. You don’t give someone with alcohol poisoning an antiemetic, do you?

Finally, when my sinuses were clogged with snot and I couldn’t breathe very well, I pulled myself back. Whenver stuff like this happens, I’m amazed at my ability to switch my emotional states on and off. I can’t deal with the world, because I can’t turn off the overwhelm, but I can turn off sadness when I don’t want it any more. Unfortunately, this reflex comes into play with more happy states, too, so I end up tossing the emotional baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

Went to the bathroom, washed the face with cold water (BC always said to wash your face with cold water), blew the snot out. Spent a while pacing the house, feeling the afterglow of intense feelings. After about 15 minutes of that, it was time to return to some old distractions, so here I am at the computer.

No doubt this sort of experience sucks, but it’s an undeniable part of who I am. Some people say I have problems with delayed gratification. The irony is that I have problems with delayed emotional response, since my first-impulse emotional response is usually not appropriate around normal Earth humans. If I want to keep having any kind of meaninful relationship with them, that is.

I’d like to say it’s the first blossom, but it’s actually the second. The first one wasn’t nearly as photogenic.

In a previous ‘blog, I told the tale of freeing myself from an old, old craving for a motor scooter. In his responses, Sejanus offers opinion as to why I am wrong about these conclusions I’ve reached. He essentially says that what I describe as a culture of gimme-gimme consumerism could also be described as a culture that can deliver what I desire when I want it, and how could this possibly be a bad thing?

Now, I’ve had a similar set of arguments a number of times, with a number of people. I’ve explained, in cool, unimpeachable logic, the seemingly endless boundaries of US consumer culture. I’ve elucidated the US consumer culture’s danger to the rest of the world, as issues ranging from the simple (waste creation alone) to the complex (IMF, biodiversity, climate change). I’ve argued this many, many times and felt the sting of noncomprehension from the small-minded and slow-witted. In fact, I’ve been literally jeered at and taunted for expressing my ideas about the country in which I live (that’s why they call ‘em reactionaries). But the fact is that I’m trapped here with you in this culture, and cannot escape, even if I were to run off to the far reaches of the globe, where the US’ presence is felt even if only as a disconcerting hum you hear at night when the wind has died down and the people have gone to sleep and the howler monkeys are dreaming of low-slung branches full of fruit. The hum is still there, connecting me and you and everyone else on this doomed world.

And the other fact is that I refuse to make it easy for people who want to deny me my own exploration of what it means to be an American.

So if you want to argue with me about my experience of living in this country where people judge each other’s emotional state based on which brand of clothing they put on, where the GDP justifies anything and everything, where government props up failing airlines but cuts back benefits to the families of the servicemen who just fought and died in Iraq, where people think TV is real, where we’ve given our minds over to whoever tells us the best story, where the urge toward individualism is stifled at every turn by people who believe themselves to be rebels, where identity is packaged and sold as easily as sunglasses and a pair of shoes, where beauty and truth are forgotten terms… If you want to argue with my experience of all those things, please be aware that if I entertain the presence of your tired apologetics within the sacrosanct boundary of my ‘blog, it’s because I think you have something to learn.

My desire to own a motor scooter did come from the culture where I was raised, and you can’t convince me otherwise. I can defend my thesis, but why should I go to the effort?

If you want to discuss what all this means, please use the comment box below. If you want to drag me from ‘human’ back down to ‘consumer,’ just so you can feel good about your own lot in life, please find something better to do with your time.

I’ve been reading a book called T’ai Chi Classics, translated and with commentary by Waysun Liao.

I found it this way:

I went for that massage a few days ago, and had what’s called a ‘release.’ A big one. Like, a tremendous one. As in, I laid there on the massage table weeping for a while.

I ‘blogged about another release I’d had, but this was different.

The newagers say that the body stores grief and other ‘negativity’ in the form of, say, poor posture or chronic disease. I don’t buy into that. My belief is that releasing these points of tension creates a sensation for which the mind must somehow create a meaning, and most mind/bodies seem willing to connect the release of tension with grief or sadness or old memories, or ecstatic bliss. Emotional states seem to be a sort of middle-state between sensation and understanding, a place where bodily sensation can be buffered while the mind figures out what it all means.

Anyway. My friend the massage therapist (in training), by doing her work, showed me where my nerves go, what muscles are connected where, and how they all interrelate, within the span of an hour. I felt her getting closer and closer to pin-pointing the Real Deal Place, the lint on the velvet on the throne on the dais in the great hall in the castle of the city that is the Seat Of My Abdominal Problems. A shooting ecstatic pain. I told her while I was trying to breathe deeply and keep from twitching, “That is a singularly unique sensation.”

Then she moved on to the lower back, the muscle groups that connect the floating ribs to the pelvis, and the pelvis to the thigh bone. I felt something white hot move from below my kidney to the tips of my toes, and all I could do was cry. Her fingers were the bottle opener prying the cap off a bottle of ecstatic sadness. Perhaps Jesus wept because being crucified pulled a muscle into alignment.

The feeling passed, and I could feel the blood flowing through my side. I could feel the muscles rubbing against each other. I could breathe deeply in a way I haven’t been able to for a while.

Later, I went to get some dinner at a restaurant next to a bookstore. Waiting for the food in my belly to digest, and being able to feel what was going on therein for the first time in quite a while, I went into the bookstore. I wandered aimlessly, and ended up looking at the spine of ‘T’ai Chi Classics.’

I’d done a little reading about t’ai chi in the past, as breathing exercises and internal martial art, more than dance steps. I sat in a chair and read a chapter on a whim, because it explains a lot about the relationship between chi and jing, which I’d never really understood. I think I get it now, and it was especially easy to understand after the bodywork.

I had a dream this morning. This is the second half of it.

I was at this old, old house that resonates with a couple of real-life places. The first is my grandparents’ old house in Nashville. It’s a lovely expanse of upper-middle-class built in 1919. It got sold while I was in my early 20s, and most of my experiences there were before my teen years, so my memories of it are that it’s a huge mansion with about a zillion secret places. That’s one of the places. The other is another from that side of the family, Echo Lodge, which I’ve ‘blogged about before. It’s a log cabin from about the same time period, built in what was then the rural countryside, but what is now the edge of encroaching suburbs.

So this dream house is about three stories tall, and has many layers of basement. I have moved out, but I’m visiting my old housemate there. She hands me a phone handset in disgust and says, “Here, you deal with this.” She’s wearing a bathrobe and is going back into the kitchen to make breakfast.

A man on the phone tells me that someone is going to have to pay the back bills for the utilities. I used to live in this house, so I’m worried that my name is still on the bills, even though I know it’s not. I tell him I’m not responsible for it, and I have no idea why I’m talking to him. He keeps insisting that someone has to pay.

Eventually, she comes back out on the second story balcony, and is watching me talk on the phone, sipping coffee and grinning. I have paperwork for the bills spread out around me. The man has materialized there on the porch, and is telling me that someone has to pay.

I see my housemate turn around and adopt a very serious pose. The man looks up at the sky. It’s gray and forceful. “It’s a tornado!” I say. None of us can do anything but freeze. The tornado starts pounding the house right next to where I’m sitting; it sounds like a really really forceful spray wash. The paperwork flies around.

Finally I break from the trance, and yell over the din, “We have to go this way..” My housemate knows what I’m talking about, but the man has to be guided. We go to a very steep stairway, that’s more of a ladder that’s an escape route through the walls of the house. It has raised rails, so we can slide down them without going step-by-step. We get to the bottom and we’re engulfed in blackness. The power’s out, and we don’t have flashlights or candles.

I imagine what it would be like to be trapped under there. My housemate and the man have run off, and I’m separated from them. I picture the whole house collapsed overhead, and me stuck in this dark place for days, groping around in the pitch black.

Then, somehow, I’m outside with my two friends. We’re in a dense fog, such that we can barely see each other just a few feet away. We’re looking to find a way back to the house to see what happened, since the storm is obviously over.

We pass a big green truck, parked by the road. It’s got places for masses of people to sit in the back, ostensibly to be transported away from disaster areas. (The joke my mind is playing on itself here is from ‘Soylent Green.’) The truck driver is smoking a joint and smiles at us and waves. (More green.)

We make our way to the house. It’s the only thing left standing, at least as far as we can tell in the fog. Whole sections of siding have been removed by the tornado, and by rescue teams. There are possessions poking out of these holes: lamps, oven mitts, furniture, money.

And there, on the balcony, is the owner. He’s on a cell phone. He’s arguing with an insurance agent. He’s saying that SOMEone will HAVE to pay….

Not exactly the music for today, since you can still download ‘Limehouse Blues.’ But… It’s a free thing, so here it is:

Allen Ginsburg’s ‘End The Vietnam War‘ mixed by DJ Spooky. It’s from Live Without Dead Time, a mix CD compiled by the aforementioned DJ Spooky, and available bound in the middle of the newest issue of Adbusters magazine.

I’ve been less and less happy with Adbusters of late. It used to be funny and hopeful with a cynical sneer. Now it’s all cynical sneer. I’m not looking for answers, but suggestions would be nice, Kalle.

On my side module, I’ve included a badge with a link to GeekCorps, which is an organization that will send volunteers to ‘developing’ nations to help them create their IT infrastructure.