longish

It’s been a very odd week. I’m just now getting a handle on it – I’ve sat down under a shiny new lightglobe, set a scotch on the narrow edge of my guitar case and decided that now it will and must resolve into some cohesive form, a series of forked paths emerging from the noisome miasma of work and a half broken, slightly altered mind. better living through creative applications of chemistry, agriculture and savvy marketting.

I’m having the strangest experience, one I’ve had rarely out in the real world. It’s honestly my fault for not chasing people around looking for it, asking questions and overturning rocks, but nevermind that. I’m getting this now, and it’s making me odd. Moreso. I’m so used to meeting people, speaking to them and finding (with gradually decreasing but never pleasant amounts of shock) that I have no real common ground. I was starting to think I’d slid mostly off of the Venn diagram that is the universe, folding inward on myself and remembering always to bite my tongue and lower my eyes and hope to muddle through alright, forgetting most of everything else.

It’s different to not having anyone to discuss your ideas with – I have those, a couple, and I get by alright for stimulating conversations. We don’t exactly constitute an intellectual elite, as tanks go we’re closer to fish than think (or panzer, or abrams. Distributed points on a theoretical plane, all the tanks we aren’t but might have been. I’m prone to in jokes only I get, I know, I’m sorry.) the few of us who’ve known, since we each were less than a third of our current sizes, that we liked ideas and words and numbers more than some. every year or so we get together and shoot the shit, eat and drink and talk about nothing and sometimes, maybe, there’s a topic that catches words at the right angle and I start firing on all cylinders, chasing thoughts down. That happens too rarely. Digressing, though.

What I’m talking about is someone having the same ideas as you. In tandem almost. Perhaps for similar reasons or with similar results … I’d like to know, but I can’t even speculate. I’ve just been reading the expressed thoughts of another person and, for what I think is the first time, recognising them as familiar. More than that … these are my thoughts, my words, the ones I used to describe myself and what I was thinking to all sorts of people, to counsellors when I was 14, to my parents, my sister, ex-girlfriends, friends, even some of the ones that made them pull faces and sometimes tell me that really I didn’t  think that, because they couldn’t understand it and thought they knew me better. To feel and think similar things, have laughed at similar jokes, read similar books and folded the corners on similar pages. There are parts of my mind that have been validated in the past few days that have been gathering dust for years. I’m not different, not singular, not unique. There is at least one person who would’ve gotten it, once.

This may, of course, be illusion and coincidence. The similarities I’m recognising aren’t so distinctive after all, there must be millions of people who’ve read and thought and felt these things. It’s an experience only really available through OD, for me. I could never comfortably get close enough to another person in the real world to hear these thoughts and recognise them. Which is probably a good guess as to why I’m only getting this feeling now, 20 odd years down the track – the streets could have been littered with such thoughts and I would never have seen them past my shuffling feet. Here I can relax and comfortably mainline someone else’s thoughts for hours at a stretch, laughing short shocked laughs and exclaiming at a screen that can’t ever judge me for being surprised that I’m not alone.

It’s the strangest experience, and an oddly uncomfortable situation. Naturally there’s an impulse to strike up a dialogue, to ask questions and puzzle things out. How can someone be like me but be so different, so much less … well, crap. I want to know how it’s done, how these thoughts can be marshalled and tamed. It’s all mingled with freedom and adventure and joy there, things that other people want from me and I want for myself, and a practical part of me wants to wring formulae from this in order to be better. My inner puppy is just running in circles yapping ‘friend’, nipping at me and demanding conversations of a sort that I never really have, talking too fast and being too strange, moving between ideas too quickly. To really let my mind off the leash and not bore anyone, not be told to have another drink, not have to watch carefully for signs of drooling and eyes glazing over. Back here in reality, I realise that this is A Bad Idea – inhaling someone’s roughly typed three year old thoughts then coming over all starstruck and gleeful, begging ‘be my friend, tell me things’ not only seems desperate, suspect and unusual to the point of being frightening, it is. Not to mention the fact that all this familiarity runs in one direction, there’s no reason to assume it will be reciprocated. So, rather than risk offense / disillusionment / restraining orders, I’m just drinking and typing this up, trying to be content with that. Yes.

This entry is just here because this week, my view of the world changed a little. I read some things here and became aware of some new possibilities. I’m not alone, I’m not fundamentally doomed to misery, there’s a person (ergo there are probably a number of people) that I might understand. Who might understand me better. One person typing and a website have offered me a feeling of closeness and connectedness that I’ve struggled without.

Which is interesting because, well, what are the odds?

Tattoo ideas (I still may never get around to getting it done, but I’m all for opinions on these ideas which I like. Naturally, I reserve the right to ignore your opinions completely. anyway … votes good, reasoning better):

• block letters between shoulder blades : DON’T PANIC (or mirrored on forehead for greater effectiveness.)
• Yossarian Lives.
• Ace of spades (symbol and letter only, not a card.

Gotta love an entry that charts descent into drunken stupor – from rational, to drinking, to ‘I love you, man’, to ‘we should get tattoos’. Fuck, my mind is an odd fish.