Retrospective, Perspective

Many years ago when I’d first become ill, my world view was fairly distorted but hella interesting. I once told a friend that I found shopping malls too sterile and clean, that they were monuments to the illusion of sanitised humanity, hiding all the ugliness and raw hate that was at the core of our being.

That was pretty creative.

I’ve been through overly optimistic periods in my life during which ‘everyone was inherently good’ too, and I’m fairly certain that isn’t very interesting at all. It’s necessary, I think. You have to give it a go. You spend as much time and energy distorting thoughts and shifting perspectives as the former and while the results are fairly mundane, they’re rather beautiful and delicate things that look amazing when they’re finally smashed.

So now I feel I fall somewhere in between. Hurr hurr – old people spend so much time discussing balance. Fucken oath we do.

The way I read the behaviour of others changed significantly when I stopped saturating myself with popular broadcast media. After a while you realise just how much the cultures you interact with come from someone’s pitched ideal of it. Language changes. Idioms, syntax, phrasing and framing. Then emotional vocabulary and etiquette also change. People’s exaltations, their incredulity, their shock and formal disbelief, all play out according to previously scripted events. It doesn’t happen organically, it happens via prescription.

I marvel at why one wouldn’t be aware of that happening, but I guess when your exposure is at maximum, both directly from the media itself and then secondarily through others’ imprinted behaviour, you may not stand a chance.

If there’s one tiny thing that (some (oh dear lord only some)) geek/nerd cultures get right, it’s that affectation is always conscious. Yeah, that may not really be a thing I can say about all geeks and nerds and I’m all the more glad to say that. Fuck that culture. It’s a dynamic that emerges in fairly specifically developed individuals and it’s clear enough to anyone astute what the differences are between unconscious cultural adaption and conscious specific inclusion.

Then there’s the immensely complicated development of dialect that develop between two or three individuals. An input is given, both have a simultaneous reaction (laughter) and both know why the other is laughing without any discussion at all. It seems like a simple dynamic but when it happens, there is actually a richly textured instance of stand alone complex at work. I rather like this idea. I like a small selection of individuals developing a culture and a dialect, and then them being able to process communal operations as individuals without any direct contact with the greater community/culture. A sequence of complex examinations, iterations and interpretations is carried out with lightning speed, separately in several individuals, then the same output is generated in each. That is some super cool shit right there.

There’s more to say but my head’s not exactly right, there are people in the room and I’m more or less just trying out the new stick I requested from IT (keyboard – low profile, naturally).