mangled moments in lost time - February 13th, 2008
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11:10 am
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the difference between mild depression and being at peace?
i find myself restful inside in some ways. i get home from work and take a nap. nothing calls to me to be done. the world is an outside thing that is hurtling on its own. we have a small time and then we die. how to spend that time? i'm 40 now and don't really have goals anymore. i don't care to do anything anymore. is that bad? i have my wife, my cats, my simple life. i get through work as a way of funding my existence. when i can't tolerate this anymore i suppose i'll do something else. food and sleep. after all i am an animal and these are my most pressing needs.
some things i'm doing at the moment and why:
started reading kaufmann's book on nietzsche because i love nietzsche and wanted to learn more about his life.
checked out holy terror, bio on warhol, because i continue to be fascinated by him although his artwork doesn't do much for me.
my wife and i collect postcards and old advertising trade cards. the imagery of the past always fascinates me.
we watch some movies and a little tv, but i feel like i'm running out of decent things to watch because i've seen a hell of a lot (worked at videostores for years with free rentals and overdid it). and i try to exercise quality control and limit the crap that my mind consumes. i see myself more as a squirrel than a cow. that is, something still slightly wild and less often factory farmed for its meat.
i still feel compelled to see the world although the expense and getting time off from work and arranging for our mentally ill cat make that troublesome. i've been to rio de janeiro (for but a week), london (just 3 days) and kenya (a couple of weeks)(and also a couple of mexican border towns (i live in texas) and vancouver if that counts). my impressions are that big cities are big cities with similar things to offer and bigger cities offer more and have more diversity. and third world countries or countries at least a few rungs down have even more fucked up shit going on. we have never escaped the law of the jungle but we like to believe we have, i doubt we ever really will.
might all this be labeled bourgeois? probably. i'm a squirrel on a college campus, not a squirrel in the country. i'm sure my heart condition has been partly responsible for my philosophical attitude. i haven't eliminated feelings of guilt or insecurity about the future, but then again i think that's fairly hard-wired.
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11:56 am
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mental screen burn
when i have bad experiences with people they leave deep impressions that just don't go away. perhaps this is meant to learn something from them so they happen with less frequency. nietzsche says that which doesn't kill you makes you stronger. i would always say that which doesn't kill you just maims you. i guess it is somewhere in between and you can determine where it affects you to some extent. we can be broken and irrevocably damaged by these experiences or we can use them to try to channel our actions and reactions to the world. i am definitely capable of over-reacting to a bad situation, or rather, reacting more than is wise. it can be a fine line between being walked over and pushing a bad situation with someone who can create an unpleasant scene that you will have to relive over and over again in your mind. you can't always teach someone else a lesson, nor should you feel you have the right to, but sometimes you just want the other person to know that you feel like you are being stepped on and it doesn't feel good. often there is too little consideration in the world. and we are all so fucked up that tempers can get out of hand.
two situations to illustrate this that hopefully won't make me look like an asshole. first one involves driving through a crowded parking lot. what i do isn't what everyone else does, but i try to get out of people's way and try not to waste too much of their time. i was trying to get through this parking lot of a grocery and having to wait for people walking through the parking lot. i would move slowly trying to get around people, obviously at like 1 mile per hour, but not just sitting at a complete stop. this man felt that i wasn't yielding enough to him or others i'm not sure and as i tried to drive sort of around him he yelled at me and went up and hit the passenger window. i wasn't going to hit anyone or even come close. i wasn't going to make any little old ladies wait for me to go by before i would let them walk to their cars, but i did want to navigate out of there in a minimum amount of time. what i would do differently is just try to gauge his reaction better and make sure that i am yielding adequately, not just not to hit someone, but being aware of people's concept of personal space. but still his inappropriate anger echoes in my psyche.
another situation which also involves impatience on my part resulted from always running late to catch our bus. we would drive to the bus stop, just in time to catch the bus or just missing it and sometimes i would run across this field and hop the fence to catch the bus at the next stop. anyway, one time we were running late as usual and headed to where we park the car for our bus stop. there was a car on the street quite literally going like 2 miles per hour. i waited behind them for a couple of seconds and then passed them (although this is not something that is generally done on neighborhood streets very often unless a car is letting off passengers or basically parked, waiting for someone. the person i passed felt threatened by what he felt was a car moving fast past him, possibly threatening his wife and child. he caught up with us where we parked and pounded on our car and yelled at us. later that day there was a note with candy apologizing for the over-reaction, but coincidentally we had flat tires twice in two months after this occurred and since we started taking a different bus our flat tires average back to once every couple of years again. what i would do differently? i don't know, i was running late for work. i could make myself wake up earlier to avoid this kind of stress in general, but i need every minute i can sleep in as i am a night person. maybe a tiny honk to remind the person that there are other people who are living on timetables that are affected by their blocking the road. generally the answer seems to always be: be better prepared and live like you have all the time in the world because there are people out there who will react badly to any perceived infiltration of their personal space.
one more example. i managed a goodwill computer recycling store. we never made as much money as the main office wanted us to, partially because the previous manager had hired more techs than viable and some of the techs didn't know very much and were overpaid. sometimes we would have people come in who tried to fool some of our not-too-techie or not-too-bright employees by telling them a $20 thing was a $5 thing etc. anyway, i must have been stressed out and bitched at for not making enough money and this guy tried to fool our cashier into thinking a $5 cable was a $2 cable. the guy did this on purpose because he knew what kind of cable it was and how much they cost. anyway, i sort of lost my temper with him and told him it was a $5 cable and that he shouldn't have done that. anyway that caused an ugly scene and he asked for my supervisor's name and number and i had a lousy supervisor who wouldn't have my back ever so it just sucked. lesson? the lesson always seems to be, "it's not worth it."
another example, because this after all is my therapist's couch where i let the shit hang out and the number of people who read this could fit on the head of a pin. i worked at this burger restaurant. yes a vegetarian (who's vegetarian because he loves animals no less) working at a burger restaurant. there was this guy who baked the buns and ran the bar upstairs who really disliked me for some reason. maybe i just affect people that way or maybe i am an asshole and haven't come to realize it yet. anyway, years later he came to this video store where i worked and i mentioned the bar he used to run and he was all nice. he went into the porn room and got his porn and came to check out and his demeanor had changed. he remembered who i was and that he didn't like me and the experience went from being ok to being, oh yeah, he hates me.
so occasionally you see these people who you've had the bad interactions with and you see their face and you feel a burning sensation, you sort of wince when you see them. and it all comes back. and any interaction you have with them is tarnished and it seems like the situation could immediately escalate to "the bad place" with them because that ground is so fresh in your mind.
life lesson: go live in a hole till you die.
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