TinYAP 035 — Cultural Warfare

Are we going to be punished?

We dared to draw a line in the sand, a line we have avoided drawing for three years because we did not understand such a line might ever be there or what it might turn out to be.

Now It seems as if Tina stands on one side of this line while we stand on the other.

Cultural Warfare is an ugly business often disguised by the presumption that anyone who does not wish to fit into society must be mentally ill.

Now we do not deny that we are mentally ill, any sane person would be mentally ill in this world, it is, after all, a mad, mad, mad, mad world…

<Yes, this is not another paradox, just another example of how things really are…>

No matter whose camp you choose to join, you must follow the rules, know the enemies, and kiss the holy asses.

Or else.

After all, even pacifists must have enemies; just ask anyone who is not a pacifist, they often hate pacifists and wage their wars without regard for pacifist objectives such as peace.

We would rather never drag the random world up to our ear.

Once upon a time we owned a telephone.  Our telephone brought us mostly grief.  Then we went broke and we consequently ‘lost’ our phone.

Now we are still broke, but Tina wants us to have a phone even though we have discovered that we do not want another phone because it has been a relief not to own a telephone.

Who would we call that we would not upset?

Who would call us that did not somehow upset us?

<shakes head>

Nope, we do not want a phone, not even Skype.

Tina has beaten us with invective, whipped us with anger, lashed us with frustration, and still we do not want a phone.

We do not think it should be regarded as our duty to own a phone.

Tina, who has complained and complained about how loud our tv is has the volume cranked up now to interrupt us, so we are being punished.

Doubtless she will find other ways to punish us, we can only fear where this may be headed.

We refuse to own a phone.

Will Tina waste money buying us phones we must then either lose or break?

Will she blame us for wasting her money if she dares to insist we must have a phone by purchasing a phone for us?

We do not want a phone.

Why can’t it be that simple?

We cannot stand the pain we hear in people’s voices; the more we talk with anyone we love the more pain and stress we must bear on their behalf.

We cannot stand the pain we feel in our heart, knowing that our private worlds are nearly entirely closed to anyone but ourselves; a phone may only fruitlessly remind us of how we have wished we could share our worlds with people we love who never seem to have the time, the patience, nor the inclination to come visit in our worlds, were we able to show them the way.

Nor do we want to hear from the many rude or random strangers who may arrive on the crescendos ma bell’s demanding ringtones.

We once thought we wanted to talk with our families, but we no longer ever hope that they will call.  If they cannot write a letter, then they certainly do not need to call.

If our inability to adequately reply to their letters sometimes perturbs them, then so be it.  We refuse to be caught in the middle between people with contentious information objectives.  We will take no sides but our own, even if this means we must hold ourselves hostage, speaking with no one but ourselves.

We cannot escape our pain, but neither do we have to share it on demand.

We feel better without a phone.

Shouldn’t that be enough?

So why is this a matter of cultural warfare?

Well, it is a local cultural paradigm that everyone should own a phone.  People automatically assume something is wrong with someone who does not own a phone.

But what if not owning a phone is really the right decision for us?

We may later change our minds, nothing is ever completely written in stone.

<whetting our chisel to continue>

We have not asked Tina to give up her phone.

We try not to make Tina a casualty of our war with her culture.

Cultural warfare is a game played over the generation gaps in family dinner tables.

Cultural warfare takes people hostage within their own families.

Cultural warfare is a dirty business because it is used to justify any number of crimes.

Here in the good ole USA, that’s really quite a few crimes.

America is the motherland of the very worst cultural warfare games, some evidence for this has been securely locked away in our prisons.  We have the highest rate of incarceration per capita of any nation in the world, and that is without even counting our mental hospitals, thank you.

Is this really, then, the Land of the Free?

Only if you choose to believe the cultural warfare hype and tripe.

If we believed we had a society we belonged among with whom we were able to participate then yes, we might want a phone, but only if we could trust that our phone would bring us more joy than sorrow, more happiness or relief than pain or stress.

We have no evidence of any society we might feel we might genuinely belong among; we have friends we love, yes, but we are not really any parts of their lives, nor does it ever seem likely that we may ever really become so.

Nor have we any evidence for trusting that owning a phone will ever bring us greater joy than sorrow.

The intensity with which we have felt our love for so many, many people has not been reduced by an iota by our missing phone.  Nor do we wish to study which is worse, the pain of never being called or the pain of wanting to escape an unwanted call.  Either way a phone is sure to bring us much pain and stress but little or no relief.

So for now, no phone; if circumstances change, maybe, but not now, nor anytime soon.

Give us time to continue to mend, we are still on our road to better health; a road which has so far been challenged by more pain than we know how to bear well.

Meanwhile, we may still regard this as a matter of cultural warfare.  If we say that phones are a huge waste of time we may offend a lot of people.

That, right there, is part of our evidence that phones are a part of an ongoing process of cultural warfare.  If we were mistaken about what a huge waste of time phones may be, then no one should be offended.  It is people’s reflexive, reactive cultural defense mechanisms which are really being offended.  Whenever we trigger one of those puppies it is typically a reliable indicator that we have identified another cultural holy cow.

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al…

 

TinYAP 033 — Where Are We?

You might think it should be a simple matter to know where we are, but sometimes it is not so clear as we might like.

We have mentioned Shutter Island in earlier posts, so perhaps you are now familiar with the dilemma of the protagonist of that story.

We identify with that character strongly.  It is easy to believe we are in a very similar situation, it is easy to believe we have been locked away for ‘the good of society’ or ‘for our own protection’.

Of course this is absolutely true in a metaphorical sense; we keep ourselves isolated by habit, a matter that has caused us a lot of stress and grief in the past, and which may still do so now.

Shutter Island is a very scary story, as we may have already mentioned…

We sometimes tend to be solipsistic in our views; part of the terror of Shutter Island is that it reinforces our sense of our own madness and makes it seem more possible that we are alone in our own minds with no other company than ourselves.

How or why this may have happened we cannot say, so let us begin with what has happened?

We sometimes seem to believe we may be in some sort of vast hospital, mental, or other…

We do not always believe this, however when we do, that hospital might seem something very futuristic, or somehow in the future of the present moment, 201306222055 PST.

Here, we appear to be in our apartment, a modest 2 bedroom affair we share with Tina and Sid.

If Tina and Sid are real persons, then all is well.  However, in the hospital Sid and TIna are some sort of fictions we have created in some of our minds.

If we are truly psychotic, as we believe we are, then it is reasonable to believe we may really be in a mental hospital, and that neither Tina nor Sid may be real persons.

So how far back might our trail of hallucinated people lead us?

Also, if so many people in our life have really been hallucinated, then what might have happened that required us to build such an elaborate escape mechanism as we must then presume our current apperceptions to be?

One possibility might be that LSD is responsible.

We have certainly used quite a lot of LSD.

Of course, we have always thought LSD was more helpful than malign.

Given the degree to which we feel as if we really must be insane, perhaps we were mistaken about that?

One reason we might believe we are really locked away in a mental hospital is that it might explain the difficulty we have talking with anyone from our past, even though mobile phones have sewn the world together more tightly than ever.

So where did our madness begin?

Have we always been mad?

We have noticed that our memories are always suspect; we have seen how false memories may seem to arise in other people, so we have to believe that we can create our own false memories as well.  Of course, if we are mistaken about our perceptions of other people’s false memories, wouldn’t that have to be because our own memories are then somehow mistaken?

So it seems we may have left ourselves some sort of dubious, complicated way ‘out’.

Anyways…

One thing we must wonder if our hospital perceptions are true, is did we kill someone?

We can imagine a long trail of bodies, a very long trail indeed.

We have already admitted to killing our father, albeit we believe no one finds the story credible.

Might we have also killed our mother?  It seems likely, albeit we can still ring her up on the telephone; that is, if that really is our mother on the other end of the line.

Our madness scares our mom, but according to her, she was afraid we would do something dreadful to her since our childhood.  She suggests mischief, mayhem, and murder, but admits few details aside from one clear notion that we might lock her in the bathroom.

Of course, we might not yet be locked away, that part may still be in the future.

We may never yet have killed anyone, those bits may only be in our imaginations.

Might we kill someone in our future?

Have we really ever killed anyone?

We do not know.

We remember killing ourselves many times; many, many times if things really are as we might like to believe them to be.

If, as we maintain, we can kill ourselves over and over, then it stands to reason we may have killed many other people as well.

There is often this moment on the long slide to suicide where it seems reasonable that if we hurt so badly we wish to die then we may as well make our life count for something more by killing someone else first, someone who might best serve the world as a corpse, some villain or monster who creates too much misery, pain or terror just by living.

But how much is too much?

If we can apologize for George Bush, Saddam Hussein, or the devil, perhaps no one really deserves to die.

In the end, we may only have killed ourselves, but we doubt it.

Nonetheless, we are pretty sure there are no circumstances in which we might be fairly tried for murder, unless, of course, we really are locked away in a mental hospital, in which case, whatever might be considered real by our doctors may indeed include murder for all we can know at the moment.

But who would we have killed? and why?

We suppose we might have been anyone; but of course, the one person we might be most afraid of having killed would be Alina.

It is far easier for us to accept that we might have killed our parents, than it is to accept that we might ever have killed Alina.

<Pokes at psychosis> ah but YOU are not telling are you pet?

So if we did kill Alina, then we would have to guess that it happened that afternoon when we merged with her and we shared each other’s bodies.

Of course, if we really did kill Alina then, then there is a perfect ellipsis around the memory; we remember we were never closer to Alina than in that extraordinary moment, we were naked together, but entirely chaste, another day drawing each other, only this time we were tripping.

We had certainly tripped before, presumably Alina had tripped before as well.

The day ended on a strange note however, Alina had become scared when our bodies seemed to get swapped.  She briefly acknowledged what had happened but then did not want to speak about it.

Understandable.

We were excited by what had happened, swapping bodies was something out of science fiction or perhaps fantasy, we were disappointed that Alina did not want to discuss it, but we did not want to make her uncomfortable so we dropped it.

Of course, if all of our memories are suspect, then perhaps Alina never really died at all?

There are times when this seems possible as well.

But it hurt us so very badly to lose Alina that perhaps anything we can put between ourselves and our pain is somehow reasonable?

But where do we go from here?

Can anyone really know?  And if so, how can we trust them?

We simply do not know.

Nor is this yet another paradox, but only more of how things really are…

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ad infinitum, ad absurdum, ad nauseum, ha-ha, ho-ho, hee-hee…

TinYAP 030 — Doubt, Doubt, Our Fevered Minds Shout

We live in pain every day, physical, emotional, and psychic torments that we can never escape from except through the machinations of the puppets in our minds…

There are those terrible days when our entire world can melt away to reveal another world, a world in which we appear to have been locked away in some phantasmal mental hospital for the past 30 years or more, a world in which none of what we may believe we have perceived can be trusted to be real.

Too often, the more we consider such a possibility the more likely it seems to become.

If we really can allow no one to be real to us, then perhaps we can escape the inevitable pain that must result from our relationships with anyone and everyone we love.

How can we really know?

We are afraid to approach anyone we once knew who might know what really happened in our past; albeit even if they did seem to know, could we trust them to be informing us correctly?

When Alina died it seemed as if we died with her.

Of course, we might have been in a world of trouble long before we ever met Alina.

… sometimes we must wonder if Tina or Kelly has ever wondered whether Alina ever really existed?

On the one hand, it is only reasonable for any of our lovers to wonder about someone they could never know; on another hand our speculation might be some effort on our parts to uninvent Alina in order to distance ourselves from the pain of losing her, pain that might return with each new person we fall in love with.

On another hand we might be trying to distance ourselves from our fears that we may really have somehow killed Alina.  Perhaps she never killed herself, perhaps we killed her instead.

We can no longer be sure what is real, however as we listen to the story of ‘Shutter Island’ the portrayal of the protagonist’s extreme mental disorder feels very real to us and very personal to us as well, particularly in a metaphorical sense.  Shutter Island is a very scary story, particularly for anyone who might resemble a solipsist psychotic, such as we must sometimes consider ourselves to be, at least, in parts of ourselves.

For some 36 years now, Alina’s ghosts have stood like spectral shadows over all of our relationships, even with our newest girlfriend, Tina.

We have tried to consider this problem from Tina’s points of views.  Tina must choose what to believe and what not to believe with regard to what we may say about our past, there is no one Tina can go to who can reliably confirm or deny anything we may have said about our past.

Tina must answer disturbing questions such as ‘why do we have so few friends?’

Tina must ask why are our relationships with our past families so poor?

Tina must wonder why do our ex or our former step-children want nothing more to do with us?

There are no good answers to these questions that do not lead to finding us somehow suspect or unwholesome.  How can Tina ever be sure we were never a murderer or something worse?

It becomes possible for us to sometimes feel as if we have somehow murdered everyone we have ever loved.

Certainly we have murdered them in a metaphorical sense, in the sense that our relationships with the people we have most loved have all become so seriously estranged that we cannot relate to anyone we have ever loved without hurting both our loved ones and ourselves.

Our consistent isolation from our families, friends, peers, and various societies, have eroded our senses of who we may be, we have lacked any clear, reliable, externally sourced definitions of whom we may be that we may trust.

We have become a non-person, a tabula-rasa, a monster.

We naturally wish to believe we are a harmless, innocuous person; someone safe to introduce to your children, someone welcome to babysit them and tell them stories.

Of course, our apparent mental health issues may seem to rule out the possibility of such an innocent occasion ever arising with many people.  We cannot even be sure if we are someone we would trust with our own children, were we ever to have any.

We had told ourselves that we should never have children; then, in the nineties, we married into a ready-made family against all of our own best advice to ourselves, because we were lonely and had always wanted a family with kids.

We had a semi-idyllic life, half heaven, half hell; a life we could not sustain, a broken life we still could not heal.  So we hurt our wife and kids and eventually left them.

But before we left them, we learned to want to have our own kids, we learned that other parents are just as messed up as we were, if not worse.

So why shouldn’t we have kids?  Were we really protecting our kids from ourselves by never allowing them to be born?  Or would our children decide that the gifts of their lives were worth whatever prices we might later extract from them?

Are we grateful for our own lives and all the pain that has ensued?

Mostly we haven’t been very grateful; but then, one day everything changed for the better.

So how do we get back to those better days again?

Today we still hurt.

Today we wish we could hold Alina in our arms again to wash away all the hurtful things that have transpired from that terrible day she hanged herself until now, and still save all the best things in between, like Tina, Sid, our pets, and Megan.

So that is what we shall do, it may not have happened like that today, it may take us many eternities to get to that particular day, but there is nothing else we would rather do more.

It will happen that way, though we drag everyone we know through hell to get there.

It may be that we shall simply disappear one day; if so, we will not be found; just ask our ex, she complained that one day we stopped coming home, that the person walking through our door had become a stranger to her, someone she never loved and never would love.

We are sometimes sorry we are like that, but we do not yet know how to deliberately, agreeably, or decisively, change ourselves, nor do we trust that anyone else knows how we may somehow successfully change ourselves any better than ourselves.

We live in a scary state of affairs where whatever still passes for realities these days continues to erode away all around us.

C’este la vie…

Enjoy!

Love, Grigori Rho Gharveyn,
aka Greg Gourdian, Falcon, Chameleon, Roger Holler, etc., et al., ado…