I apologize.
I’ve fucked up, and I’ve only now just realized that I am, for the complete lack of any better word in the severely limited English lexicon …
retarded.
Maybe if I was born Russian, or even German, god forbid, there might be a better word.
But, as a retard (sorry), I don’t know one.
Again, many apologies, both too late and far in advance. It seems my idiocy in terms of self-knowledge and emotional understanding of the human mind and heart could fill a wall of encyclopedia volumes.
In fact, it’s taken me 73 years to even begin to figure out, only ten minutes ago, something critical to my lack of success in interpersonal relationships:
Close friends, lovers and family members have always been incredulous when … upon explaining to me that they constantly suffer through a nonstop reel of internal dialogue that can’t be shut off … I look at them dully and can only utter something that negates their entire worldview:
“Not me. My mind is totally blank much of the time.”
Despite an apparently universal phenomenon being present in literally every other human being I’ve ever met, I continue to insist, after scouring my memory for clues for five seconds, that my internal realm, while conscious, is largely blanketed in utter audio and visual silence.
Which is, unfortunately for everyone who knows me, true. Especially when in the presence of other people. Does this sound problematic to you, dear reader?
Let me begin to dig an even deeper hole for myself.
I do have what I imagine to be a “creative mode,” which I can turn on and off, like a fucking light switch. During these discrete time periods I can, while blocking out all extraneous input from other humans or critical environmental data (like, say, a lightning strike, a baby crying or a tear forming in a loved one’s eye), dedicate my attention 100% to the creation or sensory enjoyment of visual art, music, or writing, investigating some tantalizing mystery or solving some pressing, real-time, current issue. While sitting quietly alone or failing to pay attention to others in a room with me, when the internal silence is interrupted without external interference, it’s usually by an internal piece of music I’m constructing, or by an internal essay or story being kicked around.
That’s great for being a newspaper editor, or a computer programmer, or learning how to play the fucking piano.
Not so great for helping people to love you.
For example, I may be driving home in a car with the family. No doubt there’s a blank, Chauncey Gardiner look on my face. My lovely wife will scowl and say, “what are you thinking?”
“Nothing, actually.”
Or, “music.”
Am I hiding some dark secret? Thinking hard about something or someone else? Fantasizing about some former love?
Nope.
Of course, my response is routinely rejected out of hand as “Impossible! Nobody is like that!”
Which is usually when trouble starts.
Because, when my internal voice intermittently does rear its ugly head to speak up, it has a fucking potty mouth, which is a different problem … particularly when my fresh, unfiltered thoughts suddenly emerge from their prison and reach my tongue, pen, or keyboard, without warning or prior consideration.
That may indeed be happening right here, right now, as I sit furiously typing away with my fucking thumb while sitting on the upstairs toilet, away from prying eyes.
Shit. Reset. …
I vaguely understand the oft-repeated concept that humans are not computers … but if we were, this outdated, info-overloaded computer would lack a random-access-memory buffer zone … probably something related to what they call “Tourette’s,” whatever the fuck that really is.
As another critical issue realized far too late in the game, my lovely wife and I have confirmed during a massive argument that we do not share my unhelpful, possibly cruel and undeniably self-serving opinion that “syndromes” are bullshit and that the psychology and psychiatry industries have wreaked far more harm than good, personally, societally and historically. The expression of this obviously unhelpful opinion, which should have been kept entirely to myself, has had the unfortunate effect of further estranging me from the fading possibility of total oneness with another human being. It also most likely will alienate me from many of you.
Again, I’m sorry.
But if the palliative prescriptions of Freud, Skinner, Rogers and their intellectual progeny have advanced the state of humankind any more than the ultimately destructive constructs of Christianity, Judaism, Islamism, Hinduism, Buddhism and every other misbegotten “ism” we murderous apes have come up with to suppress our baser instincts, it’s news to me.
But again, I digress.
Pause …
… If you are a subscriber deeply offended by any of the above and would like to unsubscribe, feel free to do so now. It probably will only get worse from here.
…
My short-term buffer problem is most likely something more closely related to the fact that I stuffed far too much crap into my insufficient head far too early, thanks to having learned to read at four, and having read the whole fucking World Book Encyclopedia series, A to Z, plus annual addenda volumes, by the time I was 8. That’s a load of antiquated, thoroughly debunked pre-boomer horseshit there, taking up space that if empty could have been used to at least remember what I ate for dinner last night, and with whom.
Although I slowed down with “learning” for a bit as a teenage anarchist, I remain plagued by the continued existence of vast swathes of internal core memory that were commandeered by having to memorize the structure, laws and procedures of the entire American and New York State public welfare system, circa 1974-1982, which no longer exists on the planet.
Every time I successfully implant a new core memory snippet through my overstuffed frontal cortex, something in there either gets chopped into smaller pieces and crammed into crevices between dried-out synapses, or drops out the back. Spewing things out of my head into a semi-organized series of “essays” seems to make a bit of potential room for fresh information, but things are definitely getting harder, so I’d probably better hurry.
What follows from this point forward is me, hurrying, and what has to suffice as “paying attention.” Again, feel free to exit here. It’s not going to be pretty.
The purpose of this piece started out to be my obviously overactive ego making a bunch of lame excuses for being a potty-mouthed essayist, and attempting to reassure any remaining “subscribers” that I’m not nuts or satanic-adjacent. Right now I’m not so fucking sure that I’m not, along with every other scumbag of my species. Shit on planet earth is seriously fucked, possibly even existentially, and as old as I am, I still have a draft-age son and a grandson or two to worry about hiding from the draft board if things go further south.
As I’ve surely written before, I am on record on this and other “platforms” “blathering uselessly into the surveillance panopticon” about my insufficiently misinformed opinion that 21st-century humanity is ensnared in the possibly suicidal web of a mafia-esque, multi-generational imperial construct that’s been fomenting conflicts and profiteering off of them and every other convenient disaster and fucked up belief system since the days of Byzantium at least.
And right now, today, despite the almost universal recognition that something is terribly amiss with the planetary power structures and the ever-present abyss they are once again drawing us into, no one … no one, including me and, respectfully, you … has a fucking clue how to stop the killing and destruction and defilement of earth’s surface and atmosphere and start supporting human life, prosperity and thriving, worldwide, for every godforsaken, sniveling, undeserving asshole as well as for every insanely overprivileged multibillionaire bunker-dweller …
… not to mention get going in earnest with launching this fuck-assed human project into the cosmos in an attempt to secure a more semi-permanent place in the terrifying distant future, or, god forbid, allow some or all of us to live for fucking ever, like vampires or zombies or that patched-together pissed-off arctic dude in the recent Frankenstein movie.
… Goddammit. Breathe …
The main thing I notice popping up all around me in the current, and crumblingly expendable, central imperial node of North America, where I live, is blowhardy, jackbooted behavior reminiscent of the Brown Shirts of the Weimar Republic (look up what happened to those assholes as soon as Chancellor Adolf announced himself Führer … he rounded up all his former tough-guy enforcers and had their scary freedom-loving, xenophobic, “deplorable” asses summarily executed and replaced with even more heartless automatons in spiffy uniforms).
We have a government, no matter which bullshit party is in power, involved in the embargoing, droning, assassinating or overreactive carpet bombing of every nagging problem bequeathed to us by our pompous, shortsighted imperial forebears.
On the now permanently sidelined far left, we have only a continuous spate of tepid, newly-mouthed, self-destructively Chamberlain-esque appeasement behavior, siding with the trumped-up scary extra-national bogeymen recruited as permanent foils long ago by the global mafia empire’s deep-state geniuses before any of us were born.
We must either bomb the lot of them back into the first millennium or lie down and hope they don’t come over and lop off our gentle peace-loving heads with scimitars. That’s the dichotomy we’re currently offered, whether it’s false or not.
I’m pretty sure there’s another way, but none of the boot-licking toadies we have running the ship are remotely capable of figuring out what that might be, and none of the ragtag “resistance” warriors crowding the streets with silly costumery, indecipherable memes and infantile slogans can be trusted to take their place at the helm of this sinking ship
Again, it reminds me of what was happening starting 100-odd years ago in Europe. Not good. Especially if, as I suspect, it’s a playbook being run by the geopolitical descendants of the same imperial/financial overlords that manipulated the first two highly profitable world wars.
One of these days, that playbook is going to stop working.
…
So now, we’ve veered far from the original intent of this “essay,” if that’s what it is. Maybe it was just a way to clear my fucking head out a little bit and get back to thinking about nothing.
After all, in the words of the Bee-Gees, it’s only words.
Peace. I mean it.
Just watched that film so best I read this. If it’s half as good, it’ll be wonderful!
Fantastic rant! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻