Tuesday, December 02, 2003

The thing I think I love most about blogging is that I have immediate platform free access to any and all of my previous blogged thoughts. I was just going to write tonight about the fact that it is probably abnormal that while most people are relieved and feel comforted to go INTO the warmth of a seventy degree house (I kept having to strip layers, not really knowing why, until I saw that Jaime, warming herself by the heating vent, had turned the thermostat "up a notch" from 60 degrees to 70 degrees) FROM a brisk 38 (31 with windchill) outside, I had the opposite exuberance, stepping outside the door to eyeball her to her car (eyeball, as in watch, under a huge pea coat and gloves and a thrift store hat, not ogle) and feeling as if I was at last stepping past the threshold, into my hospitable world. When I talk to my friends about normative behavior, versus their expectations, regarding communication, I should recognize that my own autism, my own Aspberger's manifest, is my inability to understand why people react so strongly to cold. Cold wakes me up. Lets me breathe. Not all the time, the same way people who like heat are sometimes just plain hot. Although heat doesn't bother me, unless the heat is stifling, like blankets over two already warm bodies. I hope I can convince any future women, whether for a night or a life, that they need to trust my body to keep us both warm, throw off the blankets, turn down the heat, and let me wake up early enough, as I did with my family home when I had my morning paper route, to turn the heat up before she awakes. THAT statement itself is worthy of analysis, as if my body responds to the time I felt most comfortable and comforted, those years in eighth grade through highschool, when I was out early in the cold, alone, thinking my thoughts, dropping papers behind every door, swimming myself to exhaustian, making up my own logarithms and theorems, writing myself until pen nubs numbed. Which touches on the thing  that Bill touched on today, the thing, the zinger I've been waiting my therapist to throw me this whole time, the unanswerable, one of the cores I don't really have an answer to - which is how I feel about my brother. Which is hard to answer, except some displaced, projected anger for ruining what I saw as an idyllic world of inattentiveness, building my own safe little world for me while folks were otherwise focused, until the troubles really began with him, and I realized how much I truly hungered for that nod, that bit of parental recognition, that maybe I got in some ways before and missed, more than I cared admit. In the big picture, and this is probably an Odeipal/Electra complex, I blame him somehow ultimately for some of the neediness I still find in me, not connected to him directly, but in the absence of what I feel, in my own mythology, which is both fictitious truth and truthful fiction, I needed from my parents somehow to form me as a full and complete adult human being. That all the feelings of want and longing and inadequacy, through various indirect channels, all point ultimately to him. So I guess I'm pretty pissed. Generally. And I'll be able to recall this stream of conciousness, probably even just using a few choice, specific terms in Google, to see if I've written of this before, if this is a documented path and process I can reference later, like a well documented production or general contracting schedule, of which good software and Web development is a combination of each - engineered creativity, as I like to say, unsure anyone really, really knows what I mean, even though they nod anyway, each and every one, whenever I say the phrase. As I can with the idea that the entire idea of heat and cold and controlled environments weakens humans, makes us more beholden to an artificial environment, more beholden to exploitation and concentration of resources, for our creature comforts. Dan Fiorentino, who works at the restaurant, every morning pours a bucked of ice water over his head, which immediately and temporarily raises his body temperature so that he ends up killing off unfriendlies and bolstering his ongoing circulation. Saunas and ice cold baths. The strangely consistent documented phenomenon of feral humans delighting in running outside in the snow, rolling naked, no sense of discomfort, monks meditating in extremes of chill. This entire cycle of air conditioning and heat deprives us of our body's natural ability to protect itself on so many levels, opening up expanding ripples of fortitudinal dependencies, from the colds that require medications, to the food that gives us comfort, to the displacement of community, to the fossil fuels we consume to enable our every expanding consumption, to the cycle of damage to the atmosphere resulting in future further dependence on an artificial atmosphere. This is probably scientific fiction already written but what if we were simply some advance virus sent in by superior beings to essentially terraform a planet to their desirable habitat. I don't quite know what that would be. These beings live millions and millions of years, but deplete the planets they live on so completely that they must rehabitat in systems that orbit a sun every million years or so, giving them enough time to enjoy a planet before the sun itself burns out. And send their little viruses, knowing that our population will eventually overtake, overrun the beautiful oxygen rich world and turn it into, I don't know what - methane, with a protective thin ozone layer and atmosphere. And if every thousand years or so a prophet would come among them, having gained some insight into the real "picture" and tried to frame it to the rest of the world, in ways that they could understand. Only to once again be subsumed by the dominant culture of consumption, until the situation was too late. Again. And the viruses, again having evolved to that level of conciousness that at least allowed them interstellar travel, identified a future potential habitable planet, for themselves, and ultimately the "aliens," again. Which may explain a lot about religion, including the idea of reincarnation, that we are really simply repeating a past, our destiny, as spun by the Norns, determined through some Calvinist tautology, or karmic, as if we are forever, as a species, repaying some past crime. I was watching Jans try to feed Fiona root beer today to try to calm her, and another man in the restaurant volunteered pouring sugar in some water (in a styrofoam cup, with a plastic straw) and stirring it and then drinking it as a way of distracting (read teaching) her for a few minutes and realized how deeply the most unhealthy and damaging things we do to our bodies routinely are related to oppression (products harvested or produced by poorly paid people), exploitation (of resources, of governments, of those things held in trust by all, controlled by few), and, ultimately, unsustainable economic practices (profiting the few mounumentally in the short term, whose heirs to that bad karma, end up making videos, ala Paris Hilton (wondering if this will get me any hits?), or otherwise living lives of some vapid search for meaning. Sugar. Beef. Meat in general, anymore. Wheat. Corn. Anything mass produced, as if mass production, the ability to feed more and more people crap and treat them with pharmaceuticals when they feel like crap, further strangling all of us with the yoke of profit over people, that ultimately leads to our flight, or doom. Or salvation. From that endless interstellar cycle of misery. This makes me very interested to see the small leap it takes to see how L. Ron Hubbard formed his own religion. 11:52:04 PM