Final Flag

I should really have been capitalising all words in the title. I may go back and edit previous entries.

Last night was my first sleepless night. My body is exhausted, constantly attempting to drag my mind into unconsciousness but I’m still fairly energetic.

At this point I’m pushing at the final wall between elevation and hypomania, so countermeasures will need to be employed. Maybe. Actually I’d rather not impede anything, rather prepare those around me for what may come, have a strategy we agree on so that the wrong things don’t happen. Let’s do it that way.

What did I do with my time – I consumed a lot of random things. Text, video, image, I kept looking for new, unfamiliar things to process. Pretty much all night.

Work runs on an extremely reduced subset of rules and they’re very far from interesting. If a unique problem arises, that’s a good thing and I address it immediately, however the dynamics have more or less completely settled and processes are automatic. The whole thing creates minimum value stimulus which leaves a lot of spare CPU cycles to spend on all manner of things.

I wonder at that. My framing for a low state is that I’m slower and have fewer resources available to process input, which may still be true in strict regard to processing input, but now I’m of the mind to say that those resources are diverted elsewhere. They engage a semi-autonomous interpretation module that runs almost entirely by itself. A few things are beginning to fall into place with regards to some of the things I perceive when on certain medications. Nothing is lost, things just move.

I will say this for not sleeping much or at all. That insulation, as per work and iteration and interaction, has a momentum. It begins to carry through to my sunlight time activities and I start ignoring those around me, if not implicitly through behaviour, then mentally in the pool of subjects to dissect. Most of that dissection occurs outside of work hours though a fair amount still happens within the building, I guess. That’s not important.
I’m paying particular attention to family at present, and Rok is family. Those are people I’m ensuring I keep in contact with, keep interacting with and keep supporting, encouraging and contributing in as many ways as I can. I’ve mentioned anchors before and they are certainly those. I enjoy the time I spend with them and the fair degree of safety that is guaranteed, the behavioural allowances afforded me, and they enjoy the time they spend with me, in particular but equally importantly, the kids do too.

I have to make a conscious effort not to lose touch with all semblance of humanity. Part of this is self-serving, as with everything. Other people are mirrors. They show me the humanity in myself and keep me grounded. We are the same, regardless of my unreasonable capacity for process and output. We are made of the same stuff. The same blood flows through our veins (both literally with my family and figuratively with the friends and micro-communities around me).
Secondly, other people are complex instances of awareness and worthy of affection and intimacy.

FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK.

I’m glad I can spring that sort of shit on myself.
No matter what – no matter what state I’m in, that will always be true;

Other people are worthy of affection and intimacy.

Everything, then, becomes an exercise in patience for me. I have to exercise stupendous self-control to slow down and move at other people’s pace. It’s frustrating. It is immensely frustrating. You may think I’m over-labouring that point but from my headspace, I’m not exaggerating at all.
Aside: that’s probably why I get along with the kids so much and by association, their parents. The kids have no perception of abstracts and their parents barely have the time for them nor the luxury of mental energy with which to digest and develop them. Hugely reductionist in some ways, yet all of that energy is poured into these beautiful children and their amazing – truly amazing growth and maturation. I do actually believe that they iterate faster than I do, even elevated as I am. I suspect Ethan occasionally stutters not because he has any oral muscular development yet to occur, but that he’s iterating at light speed and his body just can’t keep up. Cut from the same bolt, you better believe it.

Where was I.
Petulance really is the right term for it. I’m millimeters from stating ‘It’s not fair’ because it isn’t. The slowness of interaction, the complete lack of intimacy on any level other than the most cursory, the lack of stimulus and the lack of exploration, discovery and development is infuriating. I don’t care if I don’t get to utilise the highest functioning philosophical mechanics in discussion, I’d be happy developing non-verbal languages (that reminds me) and developing behavioural patterns that form dialects of intimacy. That is the point.

Really.
That’s the point of interaction.
Everything else is entertainment – I can iterate as much as I want on my own in my private time. When we come together as people, yes, we have survival tasks we have to perform but surely by now we’ve all established some muscle memory to increase CPU efficiency. Whoever wrote the Myst book (Rand Miller?) said something about the worlds they were creating/linking to that for culture to develop, you need a certain amount of free time. If a species must devote all energies into surviving, there is no time for culture. This is certainly true of our history given the inversely proportional development of cultures and sub-cultures (and meta-cultures christ almighty) in comparison to how arduous our survival skills are to successfully execute.

Culture is something that eventually doesn’t stick. All of it disappears due to evolution and extinction. That’s a beautifully encouraging thing. Sure, at points it may generate artifacts (tie-in with Creatorless Artifacts after the culture has long gone) but the culture itself disappears. A culture is a behaviour set. It’s a set of emotions specifically tied to an interactive dynamic. It lives in all communities, micro and macro (you remember I bias towards micro-communities, yes? Good), and it constantly evolves. This means that even between two people, a culture changes and it only exists in a given instance once. That is amazing. That is part of an ultimate lesson in not having things live and last forever. Things grow, change, erode, evolve, multiply and explode, decay and disappear entirely. Blah blah true beauty is transient, yes, but it is. That is one absolute truth, regardless of how much it’s been abused.

Cultures are supposed to be about more than just surviving. What I’m observing at the moment is that many sub-cultures are all about coping – about processing external events, experience (data) and ultimately stimulus. A great portion of many modern cultures is dedicated to resistance and combat, along with that, a perverted sense of threat evaluation. A portion is dedicated to tracking – usually of other cultures. This is interesting now, because I’m thinking that while many of these cultures purport to be free of classical prejudice (gender, racial, age), the dynamics have just shifted to sub-cultural xenophobia. There is much dedicated to defining what ‘we’ are, what ‘we’ ‘aren’t’ and what ‘they’ are and why it’s bad.
I don’t think I’ve ever written it out specifically like that. There’s much more to it but I don’t think it’s necessary to discuss right this minute, nevertheless these are part of the fundamentals that precipitated my abandonment of all macro-cultures.

That’s a deeply personal thing. I don’t know whether macro-cultures are bad for everyone else, just that I won’t participate in them.

I need to go and get some lunch. I have no idea whether I’ll be back. Perhaps I should choose something else entirely, for as long as I’m talking to myself.