Hello and good morning.
It’s Thursday again and time for another of my traditional Thursday blog posts*, though nowadays that’s embedded among the blog posts I write on all the other work days. I haven’t written fiction in quite a long time, and the original reason for this (Thursday) blog was to promote my fiction.
But heck, it’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve even so much as picked up a guitar‒though I keep looking online at these parlor style acoustics, because they look like they’d be a good size for convenience and such. But it’s just a bit of a pipe dream and a distraction to look at them.
There is no lapcom involved in this post today. I didn’t take it with me when I left the office last night, but there was no more “reason” for that decision than there had been for the fact that I brought it the day before. There were causes, as there always are, but not reasons.
Although, now that I consider it, I did feel that yesterday’s post was a bit too long. That didn’t consciously enter into my decision-making when I chose not to bring the lapcom, but I did think about it earlier in the day, after posting. Most, if not all, of what happens in most decisions we make is unconscious, or subconscious**, or whatever word you might want to choose. So I can’t rule out that there were actual reasons for me not bringing my lapcom last night, but whatever the facts of that matter might be, there were, and always are, causes.
In any case, yesterday I fell prey to my tendency to write quite a lot when typing on a lapcom or other regular keyboard, because it’s so fast and easy for me. It’s faster than speaking for me, and it’s certainly faster than using the “smartphone”, even not counting all the typos that occur when using the latter***.
I continue to toy, from time to time, with trying to type a tome using Google Docs. But its interfaces, while okay for writing blog posts, don’t feel quite right for writing fiction, at least not for me. It’s probably a stupid notion anyway. I don’t really expect ever to write any more fiction. That’s not a good thing, but then again, very little is.
I’m actually getting irritated that my lapcoms and my desktop computer at work are beginning to show some signs of their ages, and I fear that they may need to be replaced soon. Worse, my smartphone is getting a bit laggy, and I cannot upgrade it to the latest operating system so I can no longer use my banking app on it.
But I really don’t want to go through the hassle of getting and setting up a new phone (or computer). It’s so irritating and so uninteresting. I actually had the general, vague hope that I would not live long enough to need to upgrade my computer(s) or phone again.
Honestly, the constant displacement of entropy that comprises the process of staying alive at so many levels is just dreary and almost laughable.
Speaking of laughable, I’ve been thinking about trying a personal experiment: I’ve been thinking about trying to go without laughing for a day or a week or something along those lines****. I just wonder what effect that would have on my experiences.
I tend to overdo it with jokiness, and I tend to partake in a lot of comedy of various kinds, almost in a desperate way. It could even be be considered an addiction, or at least like a substance abuse problem, including its own abstinence syndrome: I used to have the experience that, after reading a Dave Barry book, I would crash and feel quite depressed and morose for a while, as if in withdrawal from laughing so much.
Perhaps laughter is one of my means to try to hide from reality, to hide from the present, to try to hide from me. I haven’t committed to the idea, yet, but it does intrigue me. Most of my literary heroes do not spend a lot of time laughing. And I have few, if any, real world heroes, but such as I have, though far from agelastic, are not prone to joke about a lot or get giggly or silly, like I do.
Those facts may be irrelevant for me, of course. I am a unique snowflake (just like all the other snowflakes), and I don’t necessarily have the same attributes as those I admire, especially fictional characters. But it is intriguing as almost a kind of fast, but one in which I would abstain from laughing rather than from food or water.
I’ll keep you posted on my effort (probably). If you want to give me your input, you’re welcome to do so. In the meantime, I hope you have a very good day. Don’t stop laughing on my account.
TTFN
[P.S., a thought just occurred to me, because the words of an old ABBA song (misheard, as I just realized) started going through my head: If you think that there’s nothing you can’t do, that anything is possible, then all the troubles that continue in the world are implicitly your fault, because you could have solved them. After all, there’s nothing you can’t do. To be fair to them, ABBA was actually singing “there is nothing we can do”, which I had misheard and misremembered as “can’t” for decades. Indeed, their song goes pretty well with parts of this post, especially the song’s first few lines. Who would have guessed?]
*I almost said “my traditional Thursday podcast”. How’s that for a weird mistake? I’ve certainly toyed with the idea of a podcast at times, but that requires more time and editing and so on than my little five-minute or so snippets of audio. But I do like to listen to podcasts, at least about topics that interest me. Perhaps it was a Freudian slip.
**I accidentally typed “sunconscious” here, originally, and it seems like kind of a charming word, so it’s a shame it doesn’t really mean anything. But one certainly doesn’t want a conscious sun, as the dubious Doctor Who episode “42” tried to warn us…or something like that.
***You might almost think that word means “one who lats”, but of course it’s not that kind of word and has close kinship with “later” and its ilk.
****I.e., a period of time.
New vocabulary word, agelastic! I don’t know, if I were going to swear off something, it would not be laughing. How about try avoiding negative thoughts? Or at least ruminating on them repeatedly.
By avoiding the negative, one only makes it stronger, right? Maybe. I don’t know. Something like that.
Acknowledging the negative is just being honest. We all have wholesome and unwholesome thoughts. And they are really just thoughts! Why should you let thought bubbles push you around? But ruminating on the negative and unwholesome thoughts, rehearsing them, acting on them, etc is something different and not recommended.
Not recommended by whom, and on what authority? Are there randomized, controlled, double-blinded studies the demonstrate convincingly that it’s not good?
Not to say that you’re not probably right, of course, but I am just a negative person overall, and have more or less always felt that way–it’s part of why I’ve long tried very hard to be and do good and to be the sort of person people like and might want to be around and even help out when he was in trouble, but to paraphrase Heath Ledger’s Joker, look where that got me.
Well I’m just saying this based on my understanding of Buddhism. So…on no real authority. You’d be much better off listening to a real Buddhist teacher. 😀
The thing about Buddhism is that, even though it is searching for the truth (just like science), ultimately it’s about direct subjective experience. You can’t really measure a flash of insight, can you? Or quantify happiness or suffering. Of course you can study the physical effects of meditation, in which case you could design experiments and make measurements of vital signs and analyze that data (and that has definitely been done for mindfulness meditation).
Personally, I would stop trying so hard to be likeable. I have done that in the past and it didn’t really increase my happiness. What it *did* do was damage my self-respect. Of course, being likeable is one thing and being a good person is another. The latter is quite important.
Yeah, I agree with both your last points. I do try to be a good person, and I’ve succeeded for the most part, but it most assuredly is not my inclination. I’ve found the best expression of this fact for me in the Doctor Who episode “A Good Man Goes to War”. The bad leader says, after the Doctor says he’s angry, that the anger of a good man is not a problem, because good men have too many rules. The Doctor replies, “Good men don’t NEED rules. Today is not the day to find out why I have so many.”
Of course, that’s just a TV show, but it resonated with me a lot. I’ve never been inclined to be good, but actually tend to want to destroy…well, pretty much everything. But I don’ have the right to do that, of course, so I don’t do it.
It is entirely biologically plausible (and more or less demonstrable) for some individuals to be prone to destructiveness and negativity simply because of they way they are “wired”, and we know my wiring is atypical (it’s even been seen, albeit trivially, on MRI).
I do appreciate the Buddhist approach to internal exploration, and the studies of Vipassana and Metta meditators have been quite striking and fairly unequivocal. But I still get MORE depressed when I start to meditate with any regularity, and I’m not sure why. Possibly, if I pushed through, I would find equanimity with it on the far side, but I fear I might literally not survive that long. After all, my tendency to want to destroy things does not exclude Me, and I have the right to do that, so I am in some significant real danger of doing it in the pertinent situation.
Thank you for your conversation, no matter what.
Given your experiences, I’d say get a meditation teacher, if you can, rather than just dive into that ocean by yourself, which could possibly be dangerous. At the very least, there is plenty of guidance online from the likes of Thich Nhat Hanh, Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, and many others. I am learning all the time from these teachers. Dan Harris even has a video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKZ9sN3nL2c
Yeah, I’ve read his book and seen his video, and of course I’ve read everything Sam Harris has written about the whole subject and seen most of his videos and listened to his podcasts. I wish Sam Harris could be our species’s Surak.
Meditation is definitely not for everyone. If it made you feel more depressed afterwards, I’d say you’re one of those people. That’s separate, in my opinion, from you holding so fast to this negative image of yourself. Is it you *yourself* you don’t like or what’s become of your current living situation? I hope it’s not impertinent of me to ask that.
It’s not impertinent. I don’t just dislike what I have become, though I like this particular stretch of my four-dimensional form less than many other segments. But I have long found myself extremely annoying, probably partly just because I can’t get away from me, and I dislike many of my tendencies (though I am pleased with some others). Again, something like that.
Are you saying that you do good and are good and act like the sort of person people would like to be around only because you are in actuality a fully contrived, disingenuous, rotten human being? I ain’t buying it.
It’s more that I’m saying that I try to do good and be good partly because I feel so strongly many urges to do otherwise, and so I have very well-developed impulse control centers. Something like that.