my point of view, such as it is

CAUTION- Graphic content.
Strong warning on triggers for rape and violence.

I know y'all know I strongly discourage comments because I'm weird and you're all cool to never comment even though that's an option, but this post has comments turned off. This is the first time I've ever put all this together in one place with real names and searchable linked content. I'm still not capable of getting through convo about this event, but at least we'll all know now where my head is sometimes.

Three years ago on pinky blog I started blogging through a daily depression trail that starts every April first through my entire adult life. I started questioning why, and you guys watched me uncover and start dealing with a repressed memory. Today is the first day I put together the bits and pieces and deal 'out loud' with what happened.

This is Julie Ann Jackson. She lived on 816 N. Watson Ave. when I knew her in school. She was my best friend from the fifth grade. Her hair was naturally golden, and she was slightly chubby in a very pretty way. I considered her my only real friend (because that's what aspienado does, one real friend at a time) even though she was very popular and had lots of friends.

Aside from biting my hand when we were ten because I was being so bossy that she had to find a way to make me shut up, she was always kind to me, and every time I showed up near her, all her other friends moved over. I never thought about why, but I knew that was my place. I know now that she knew I was different (I'm autism spectrum), and she elevated me to an intellectual status dismissed by everyone else, including my family. I was the only one in school that could keep up with her on all kinds of testing and reading material, although I never bested her at anything. She was one of those true MENSA types with a very easy personality, and she spent time not only including me, but teaching me how to draw horses and taking turns writing stories that we passed back and forth in classes. We attended all the sports events together, and the only times we were apart was for being in different classes or activities. Because of her, I actually had other friends in my life that I probably wouldn't have had without her.

My family moved to another state right in the middle of the ninth grade. I've written about how hard that was, the day I left I didn't even get to say goodbye. Thankfully, Julie loved snail mail, and we sent off letters to each other 3 times a week like clockwork for at least four years. I did get to go back the summer after graduation and visit, and she gave me the royal treatment. I was family to her. She escorted me around showing me off, took me to her house, drove me around talking about college and friends she had and her boyfriend. I was as out of the water as a Vulcan fish with my Asperger's, for those of you who know Spock history, but that didn't phase her in the least, and I let her do all the talking and leading me around while I just soaked her in. She had grown up while I was gone, and she was beautiful and charming and didn't miss a beat. After I went back home we continued writing to each other as she started college and my family moved again. I had a big box full of all her letters the night I got the phone call.

I've written in several places what that night was like, but I'll keep it simple here. Emotionally I almost instantly went into hard shutdown. For those of you who've never experienced that or know anyone who has, I very literally chopped off my emotions right then and there. I didn't cry. I didn't feel. I didn't talk about it. I hung up the phone, ignored everyone, and went back to bed. The next day I took the box full of letters outside and burned the entire thing without a second thought. I didn't feel anything doing it. I didn't reflect. I didn't have a reason.

Nearly everything that happened over the next several years was the result of that hard shutdown. I went through a bad marriage and became an alcoholic. I wound up in a big city underground of drug dealers. I met people completely off the grid doing despicable things, and I talked to people who witnessed or lived through atrocities that would make most people very sick. I didn't blink an eye.

After I stopped drinking I started turning my life around, went to college, remarried, raised kids, had jobs, met people on the internet and finally started having 'friends', although much of it went badly very quickly. I never questioned that until one particular friend stopped talking to me, and without warning I spiraled into an abyss of despair that lasted for months. I felt so desperate to understand why this was happening and why I couldn't keep friends that I started seeing a psychologist, and have spent years learning how to see myself objectively, how to assess and make goals and plans to reach my goals, and how to deal with feelings. I'm not just autism spectrum. I have a complicated diagnosis that includes delayed response, which means I just don't deal with my emotions.

So by 2015 I'd been working on all that with my psychologist for eight years. I still didn't know what the real reason was for that particular depression in April, and I didn't yet realize I had displaced it onto the friend I lost that woke me up out of that hard emotional shutdown. Somewhere in 2015, one of my sisters delicately brought up my friend's murder, saying they'd been afraid to tell me it was showing up on the internet, and she was right, I was absolutely terrified to click around and find that pain. I started going through a series of little shutdowns over and over between 'waking up' to more and more ability to feel in real time, and I guess all the stuff I should have processed through years ago started processing, and believe me, putting off dealing until later doesn't make it any easier. When I finally started remembering and as I was slowly able to start reading about this very famous case, all the feelings and emotions swept over me as fresh as they should have from the very start. I was making up for 30 years of lost time processing through all those emotions.

In case you'd like to know more you can -click this- and read an article of interviews with the medical staff who saved Colleen, the person who survived. Here is a good quote from one of the nurses.
One of the nurses in that operating room called me to say Guzman's crime was as vivid to her today as it was 30 years ago. "I remember every detail, because it was so horrific," she said. Doctors and nurses spent nearly 12 hours trying to save Bush's life, and that nurse said the experience taught her about strength and fight and survival. "It changed my life," she told me. "I made a decision that night that if anything like that ever happens to me, I'll fight to the end."

The official true crime book Escaping the Arroyo (which I have not yet had the muster to read), has a Facebook Page, and you can find author info on Amazon and her dotcom.

This crime story was also featured on Investigation Discovery. I still can't bring myself to watch that.

Here comes the graphic part. This is the part I live with in my head now that I've put nearly all of my pieces together.

This last week was Julie Jackson's death anniversary. On April 5th I kept triggering into a memory of my dad and a sheep. You see, I've seen a living body stabbed. I'm about to tell you a story about saving a sheep's life, and after that I'm going to get really rough. I'm making sure you really want to be here reading this... It's ok to stop if you want.

When I was around ten or twelve I think, making my next sister down about 8-10 and my brother 5-7, Dad found a sheep loose in the alfalfa field. Sheep will gorge to death sometimes, but my dad was able to force her out of the field and up a little hill before she flopped over gasping for breath. He ran to the house, called us kids to follow him right now, and as we arrived was already commanding us where to sit on different parts of that sheep, to hold her down at all cost, don't let her move at all, and we obeyed immediately because we had been taught like that. As soon as we got square on pinning that sheep down (who, incidentally, wasn't moving much at all because she couldn't), Dad whipped out his big knife and plunged it into her belly, then dropped the knife and pulled the wool apart on both sides of that big hole and barely got his eyes shut before he was sprayed all over with the vilest smelling stomach spew you ever saw. He never once let go of keeping that wound open while us kids were instantly working very hard to keep that sheep down in one spot, because naturally every instinct in her body would be to fight whatever punctured her.

After that was over, which didn't take long, we were almost too cramped to stand up because we'd locked her down so hard, and Dad was just nasty. The sheep got up, shook off like a dog, and trotted off, feeling much better. We had to hose Dad off, and we didn't get an explanation until that stuff was off his face so he could talk.

It's not very often you see someone stab something out of the blue, and it's probably even more rare to see children help hold a living being down to be stabbed. We didn't whine or cry or question. Our dad could do anything in our eyes back then, and even if we didn't like doing what we were told, we did trust him to know exactly what he was doing.

And that is leading to this. (I know, you're thinking that wasn't graphic, but if you get queasy or cry easily, you do need to leave now.)

I grew up helping butcher sheep. I know how to hold a very heavy body down, how to drain its blood with a little nick, and how to keep it from automatically thrashing while the blood drains out. This is very important if you don't want the meat bruised up and you want all the blood out. Blood will spoil much faster than the carcass and must be gotten out so that the meat doesn't spoil if it has to sit.

Since I sat on sheep and helped skin them from childhood, I know what blood smells and feels like, I know how heavy dead body parts feel (especially the head), I intimately know how bodies feel while they are dying with all the tiny little muscles twitching for awhile, all the jerks and gasps and groans. All these things are automatic reflexes a dying body does, desperate for oxygen, working hard trying to increase blood flow. When the brain is still alive and the body is dying, the nervous system comes on full blast trying to stay alive.

Imagine what it must feel like to be raping someone while you feel all that happening in the other body against you. Imagine being able to smell the blood gushing out all over you while you keep stabbing. And it's not just blood. What we see on TV shows and in movies is so clean compared to real crime. Being stabbed in different places pops open different kinds of fluids along with the blood. Imagine smelling bilious stomach contents while raping someone. Imagine smelling intestinal content, being slimed with it and blood while you're raping someone. Imagine the jerks and gasps and groans going on all over the body while the eyes roll grotesquely around, all the smells and sounds and all that slime...

Imagine being all done and staggering back to the open the trunk of the car to start over on the next person. Imagine finally being satiated and driving off, thinking no one would ever find your mess out in the desert like that. Imagine someone actually living through being stabbed 30 times and crawling up the side of an arroyo to a highway. I grew up in the desert southwest. I can imagine a bloody slimy body being caked with dirt and grime and full of weeds and ants by the time it got to a highway, and I can imagine how terrifying that would look to someone stopping at the sight. And that was before cell phones. All that time that passed. All the grit and work and waiting it took to LIVE. And hours and hours of repair with a medical team. All that recovery. And then living with the memories the rest of your life.

I emotionally shut down when I got a phone call in the middle of the night. I never thought about any of that because I just couldn't go there. I had already grown up with so much experience with death, with seeing and smelling and hearing and feeling death.

So all week long in my head, I have been there with my best friend. I have been feeling her body being violently punctured, I have been smelling her life fall apart into slime all over a nasty person's raging body, I have been hearing the squashed grunts and gasps and wheezes, and feeling every muscle strand in her body straining for oxygen as her blood drained out, the muffled frenzied thrashing being held down for the rape as her consciousness slipped away.

I cannot stop crying.

Friends, when I give you a heads up that it's a bad week and beg you not to take me personally if I fail, please understand hell is filling up my head, and I can barely hear or see you over the pain I am in.

Here are all my posts with the tag #sadness.

I have to run out the door. If there are typos I'll fix them later.

my runcible blog

So I've got evidence that Pinky blog is being mirror accounted in at least one other country, lol. 😂😁 Whatever floats your goat guys. I know curating isn't enough, right. Just slap copies up and go to town with it and stuff. Right now it's more important that some of my words just get spread anyway, so I'm not too bothered. It could all end with dirty nukes and grids going down and who knows, some of my Pinky wisdom might live on somewhere.

Meanwhile, two of us came home with broccoli this week and now I'm working on gastric stack overflow. Today's menu includes a cheesy rice pilaf full of mashed up broccoli, with a slight hint of onion. I use several kinds of cheese so it's super yum. If I had leftover bacon I'd throw that in, too. One time I did that and stirred bits of cream cheese in, that was heavenly.

I just did a thorough research on Edward Lear because The Owl and the Pussycat crossed my mind awhile ago. Of course, that'll never show up on a social media scoring system. Klout keeps insisting that I'm a Stephen King expert for some reason. Confession- I'm well read and I've never opened a single Stephen King book in my life and rarely watch related movies or television show episodes that he's somehow involved with. I've watched Under the Dome, but other than that, I very rarely stop to check out anything his name is on. A few friends of mine are die hard Stephen King fans, so I'm very well aware of his remarkable history. I did see Lawnmower Man but apparently all he gets credit for is the title, lol. And I guess this is odd because anyone who gets to know me eventually compares me to Stephen King for some reason. I'd like to turn that back to Edward Lear, but since I don't often share my prolific penchant for limerick (the majority wind up incredibly yet tastefully naughty for some reason, and I'd rather not become known for that), no one ever says I'm the next Edward Lear. That sort of makes me sad.

From Runcible-Wikipedia- "In Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age, Runcible is a code name for the Young Lady's Illustrated Primer, an educational computer."

From The Diamond Age-Wikipedia- "Society in The Diamond Age is dominated by a number of phyles, also sometimes called tribes. Phyles are groups of people often distinguished by shared values, similar ethnic heritage, a common religion, or other cultural similarities. In the extremely globalized future depicted in the novel, these cultural divisions have largely supplanted the system of nation-states that divides the world today. Cities in The Diamond Age appear divided into sovereign enclaves affiliated or belonging to different phyles within a single metropolis. Most phyles depicted in the novel have a global scope of sovereignty, and maintain segregated enclaves in or near many cities throughout the world."

You might call that prophetic, since that is a bit depictive of what the U.N. has drawn up in their Agenda 21, but perhaps it's merely an idea that has been intended for a much longer amount of time than we think, since Agenda 21 was heavily discussed and officially drafted several years previously. It would appear a work of fiction materialized after an agenda arose, so one could suppose this particular fiction might be a function of intention. I often look up whether an author's idea came before some kind of official documentation of something. It's interesting how often fiction actually comes after fact and barely anyone notices. Another book by the same author titled Cryptonomicon carries in its description "With this extraordinary first volume in what promises to be an epoch-making masterpiece, Neal Stephenson hacks into the secret histories of nations and the private obsessions of men, decrypting with dazzling virtuosity the forces that shaped this century." Really? He published after Agenda 21 was drawn up. It's not that big a leap to carry that into fiction. Actually, he seems a bit obsessed with the same kind of conspiracy around Nazi code that many still do nowadays, but now we know more and it's not that cryptic once you stick a toe into the weird stuff. It's been all around us this whole time, but as long as our minds are trained onto fictionalized television, we continue to believe our lives and even the world are spectacularly mundane.

Interestingly, diamonds are the top commodity in Minecraft, one of the most popular digital games in the world where players learn to co-op and create sustainable lifestyles against a number of challenges. I hint of the cultural crossing over in my article Atlantis.

Anyway, my point comes back around to Stephen King possibly already writing what was put into his mind by others in the first place. The monarch cinched it for me. Whether King wrote the actual predictive programming or not is irreparably smeared for me now. He may not be a genius so much as just another person fast tracked into success by a group using him as a tool. He is well known for being a self confessed blackout writer, which some blame on trauma or alchohol, but is also explainable with programmed alters, like pop stars today are unabashedly revealing. Basically, he was the Lady Gaga of the book world long before 'dark' became mainstream.

But I digress. My food is ready.

yes, I'm still feeling festive (facebook joke)

Click for tweet source

Fiber installation has officially begun. Crews are all over my subdivision clearing brush and limbs.

Click to see Macy's lineup

Surgery scheduling seems to have stalled over something. Maybe they noticed I'm a complicated mess.

Click for easy to load and read info on route, street closures, lineup, balloons, floats

I have decided to commit to a literary challenge and review, starting this weekend. Yes, Lexx stuff. I waited 15 YEARS for this book.

Click for new balloons announcement

In the meantime, lurking the medias, playing on Mo Creatures (I put up a Festivus pole at my player shop yesterday), and slapping myself back from pressing that big red anxiety button.

the mighty pen

I started this about an hour and a half before midnight two nights ago.

I should probably be paying more attention.

I only found that because I couldn't keep a game server up and wasn't quite ready to pull my brain off the screen yet. As far as I can tell, a specific something kinda boomed in a particular couple of areas that was most likely Lexx related. Oh, nothing, just deep underneath the surface mining ores 'n stuff, glancing up...

I've started asking this question of a few people around me in real life and online- If you knew you could make $100,000 over the next 2 years, would you let anything stop you? And then when I move on to Would you let your depression stop you?, the response instantly lets me know they know exactly what I'm talking about.

I believe I am capable. I believe I have worthy material. My stats let me know once in awhile that other people think that, too. I have things to say that have garnered interest from nearly every country on the planet, some of the most specific hits coming in on posts leaning out over that not-quite-saying-it edge on religion and politics. Well, today it may have been about fandom freedoms and politics.

I don't share all of what I really think on blogs. As I inch closer and closer to hard copy print merch, it's becoming more clear how much impact I could possibly have. Original intention was to have impact, yes, but originally, I never even dreamed of how much impact just a few blog posts could have.

I love author bios. It's cool finding out that Orwell was unimaginably ill with tuberculosis as he was writing 1984. It's comforting finding out that a favorite book here or there took ten years to write. It's weird wondering what a generation or two after me would say if I ever really did make it. It's horrible thinking it will all go to the grave with me if I don't get this done.

I haven't been this emotionally and physically drained in years. Fatigued, yes. More crippled and suffering, yes. More sick and afraid, most definitely. But too tired to care... never. I don't recall ever reaching this point before. Even when I got close, anger would always push me back onto my path. I'm too tired to be angry any more.

Revenge is best served cold. I'm beginning to see a new interpretation of that. I think it's often meant more like a well-planned revenge works best when the temper flaring is out of the way. I'm wondering now if it could also mean revenge is best served when it is no longer even cared about. I'm noticing a new freedom growing in my mind. The tireder I feel, the less I worry about consequences or perfect timing or the money that's gone into it. By the time I get this done, I'll be so worn out that I'll still be a completely normal person living a normal life trying to get back into an occasional live tweet, like what I did never even happened. Big deal, right Neal? Oh yeah, that book thing. I'll be more concerned about how far behind I'm dragging on a TV show or whether I can keep up with other players on a game server.

Now it is today.

And I don't have much to say. Scratch that, I have reams in stack overflow. I've been writing on anything and everything I can lay hands on when tech is down and I'm spread thin across the maps. Back to school pens and spirals are my Christmas, all boiled down.

I'm to the point where I don't believe any author that actually manages to write on any kind of schedule at all has enough family life of some kind going on. #fam When I arrive to my deathbed, I definitely won't be regretting that I didn't stop continually over and over in the middle of paragraphs and sentences and thoughts to respond to people I care about on all sides coming to me for anything and everything.

The love is so very real. I hope to God I get this done.

back to conspiracy school

You know how you wake up on a Thursday thinking it's Monday? No? Nevermind.

Yes, eight days since I posted here last. Many things have happened.

• @bonenado cleaned out a thriving black widow nest full of thousands of hatching babies from under Bunny's slide. Innocent childhood joy, gone. She also went to the fair and saw lots of cool farm animals and hit the carnival rides. Aaaaaand a few days later she fractured her arm about half an inch above the wrist when a climbing adventure went all wrong. Turns out gravity. Yeah, we're learning basic physics. They don't teach you that stuff on PJ Masks. I blame Luna Girl.

• It's not all Bunny stuff. I had a stupid reaction to mustard and did a 4-day pred burst that resulted in a super sweet pain cessation while I was on it, so I had a really fun day out shopping with the kids for the first time in months. That, in turn, is resulting in Bunny being super thrilled that it's all about getting her own super cute bathroom remodel upstairs. Wait, it's about Bunny... hm.

• I didn't want to throw away some strawberries (that I bought for Bunny), so I invented a new pie that is barely being nibbled and will wind up in many more ingredients being thrown out, as well. Hey, go big, right. I'll leave you to wonder how it all got purple. There's cream cheese in there, though, so maybe it's ok. Oh, someone ate more, surprise.

• Back to school shopping! That was exciting. I got an awesome new mouse, a cool new t-shirt, an actual real dress blouse (from China!), and new curriculum. I have a stack of conspiracy fiction books my dad would be thrilled to believe were true. I've been too busy minecrafting to actually open them, but they're there in case the bug bites. Oh, yeah, Bunny got stuff, too. I'm very envious of her lunchbox.

• Some of you are wondering if Papa ever gets anything. Bunny got him a unicorn shirt for his birthday, sweet.

• I may hafta do something really nice for him this weekend. We'll be married 24 years on Saturday. Maybe I'll harvest some extra punkins on Mo Creatures and buy him a Fortune III enchantment book. Too bad we can't get stuff like that in real life. I refuse to buy lottery tickets on general principle. He's been donating to wealthy winners for 2 decades now, but I think it should stay more local, like maybe donating to a chiropractor for all those years spent in college helping people recover from, oh I dunno, falling out of trees... We still debate over strength of will vs injuries and arthritis issues.
• 
  
• Wait, are we done bullet pointing? I need to run out the door, see ya.

In honor of both back to school and the poor souls who Facebook shamed, I think we should all take a quick education look at human education. Personally, I think flat vs round is blown apart with a big smash of holographic string theory that will itself eventually become quaint, but that's a whole silly blog post unto itself. I believe I hypertorused a cat once...

ixnay on the elfsay imstay

Stuff happened this week.

click for the thread

Wonder if that would happen a lot more if I'd boost this post. I've never boosted a post on Facebook, but I probably will once the book comes out. One of these will click to the twitter link, which already has over 400 impressions in less than 12 hours, the other will click to its new Autisable home.

And I really don't know if that had anything to do with waking up to a Google Alert that Janika Banks has been added to a German white pages listing on Denmark internet.

This is translated.

And I wanted to see if that's a real thing, and sure enough, comes up on page 3 in a Google search for Janika Banks. Brand new out of the bag.

A couple of years ago someone told me they were going to write up my Wikipedia page, and I laughed and said sure, go ahead. No one really has yet, but for some reason I've either been auto-boosted into legitimate search or manually entered by someone on a job or weirdly obsessed. I'm going with auto boost for now. There are so many automated info pages out there I could claim (traity was dumb, I had it for awhile and let it go), but that's way too much work.

Like I told a friend privately a few days ago- "If I don't get my crap done by end of summer, I'm an idiot. My launch platform has never been more visible."

So I get a porn boost right on top of #netneutrality, crack me up, and then I get a major Google Alert on top of my self-stim post. Never in any parallel dimension did I wildly dream of sex selling anything about Janika Banks. Wow.

:edit: Space Cowboy suggests putting pretty girls in vids to sell merch. Pretty sure some of us are in it for the actual music, so here you go.

Also, this is a thing. I have lifetime potential earnings of $33, crack me up. Bet that would change real quick if I could get some of my friends talking with me about Lexx and stuff. Anyway, you can get into this and click around, kinda fun checking out other channels. Very handy.

this is me not fighting on Reddit

yesterday

So I'm coming out of a negative spoon slug haze waking up from #napclub after going to an appointment and running errands and doing my grocery shopping in 104 heat index and the very first thought that hit my brain was someone on Reddit called me a blog spammer last week, because I posted *a* link.

Here is my comeback, because it takes aspienado forever to process, interpret, and respond- It's blog*whore*, nidiot. No upvotes for you!

Now I want the mug.

today

Was I complaining about sleeping too much? +_+ Kinda want that back... 3 a.m. feels way too early on a day where we might be up till nearly midnight with a very hyper birthday Bunny.

I am loving all these new adult coloring books. First The Bloggess announced hers, and it's really awesome, and now Lisa Frank. I don't care what anyone says about 2016 being awful, this is the year of the really cool coloring books. Plus the ones we already got from sploit!!! Latest one Lord of the Rings for @bonenado's birthday on Sunday. He also got a time machine...

I'm losing track, but we are good for coloring books. I may need those to get me through the holiday season without cracking this year. Oh, and let's not forget the new Harry Potter book.

I've decided I'm making a small pan of brownies today. I'll have cake around me all weekend and a single serve nacho binge won't feel like retribution. In case you're new, I'm allergic to wheat (yes, actually, among other things), and even though I've gone 5 years now without guacamole and lemon pie and nuts or peanuts of any kind and at least 2 years since I had to let go of pasta and pizza and sandwiches, it's still a little difficult being around cake. Nothing else bothers me. I can waltz through a restaurant and never once feel phased or envious, and I very rarely mourn or wallow about not getting to eat an old favorite something when I'm grocery shopping, but this weekend I may need to buckle under and allow a rice flour chocolate treat so meemaw won't get crabby and go to the dark side. Besides, it's easy to portion out and calorie count brownies. I'm really good with it and I trust myself.

Btw, I use Hershey's 'best brownies' recipe from their Chocolate Treasury cookbook (1989), and seriously, everyone says it turns out better with King Arthur gluten free flour than regular flour, more fudgey with a crusty top, and no worries about xantham gum, those other flours don't work right.

Since that recipe is different from the other 'best brownies' recipes they have online, I'll write it down here.

Blend 1/2 c oil or melted butter (I use olive oil), 1 c sugar, and 1 tsp vanilla. Add 2 eggs, blend well (I use a spoon, works just fine). Combine 1/2 c flour, 1/3 c cocoa, 1/4 tsp baking powder, and 1/4 tsp salt, blend into egg mixture.

Bake at 350 in 9-inch square pan for 20 minutes.

Rice flours generally don't work well for me in baked goods, so I've pretty much stopped baking sweets at all (which makes controlling my diabetes way easier), but that brownie recipe is a great fallback for just in case.

Heat advisory has been ramped up to excessive heat warning, 110 heat index through Sunday. After today, I don't plan on leaving the house at all. I've gotta pick up Bunny's cake around 10 and then pick her up around noonish maybe. Papa will be the one taking her up to the pool and swinging outside and stuff. I'm sure they'll melt. I have a freezer full of freezy pops and a big bag of ice cold grapes, plus we already have some homemade ice cream. The recipe for that is super easy, especially if you've got an electric freezer.

Stir together 1/2 pint whipping cream, 2 cans evaporated milk, 1 c sugar, 1 tsp vanilla, and then I crush in one strip of oreo Double Stuf cookies, follow the directions on the electric freezer, then pour off into little containers and put into your freezer.

My side of a convo with Kai yesterday about Austin Powers, my pegasus on minecraft.

Chenopods are finally noted on pollen.com for my area. That's thistle. Lotta thistle around here.

OH, I need some Benspiration this morning. Yes, ~blogwhore~.

what the Pinky love letter all boils down to

I've been trying to put my finger on something this spring, not quite sure what I've been feeling until this sentence suddenly sprung into my mind- I am suffering a debilitating lack of angst in my life. I have lived with angst for so long that I am feeling fresh out of the wrapper and not sure what to do with myself through the days without it. I keep looking for direction and meaning, because whereas my purpose before was to keep doggedly plowing through the angst, now finding myself free of it leaves me not exactly listless, but possibly a bit unmotivated. I was used to using emotional misery as my go-to for motivation.

Don't get me wrong, there's still plenty of drama going on around me, although I endeavor to remain out of the middle of it as much as possible. I lend a hand here and there, sorting through towels to hand off along with the refrigerator in the basement to a person who was recently evicted and stepping into a new life, or offering Bunny sitting service when plans become jagged and emotions rise, or generally just getting the shopping done when specifics are required, even though I find breathing outside the house to be a real challenge lately. But these things don't cause me the sort of continual daily angst I've lived with since I was 19 years old.

My whole world has flipped. My heart, my head. I feel like the black chasm I struggled through every day since way back then just up and tipped over and dumped me out this year, and now I'm standing in a sunny grassy field dotted with little flowers and a nice breeze. You'd think this would feel surreal, but I know it's normal. This is the first time I have felt normal in quite possibly my entire life, but especially since I was 19.

This last January I wrote a sort of TV show review where I think about what was going on in a character's head, called f(x) where x = "reflection John". I got that because most of my previous 8 years had been spent in conversation with someone who wasn't really there. A relationship broke off, but that didn't prevent it from continuing in my mind. I came to rely on that connection in my head through everything going on out here in real life, as they say. I didn't worry about it because I am a huge Count of Monte Cristo fan, read the original Dumas work when I was still a teenager before I ever saw a diluted print version or anything in film. The most intriguing part of the entire story for me was how he survived prison, much of it being devoted to deeply thinking and learning everything he could whenever he got the chance. Our minds can get us through anything if we focus.

click

In my late 20s, about the time I plummeted into devastating crippling pain, Hawking was becoming all the rage, and again, I modeled focusing my mind as a way of dealing with the prison that was my body. I became so obsessed with thinking that I was able to get through many terrible days and nights without falling to suicide or other self harm, or cruelty to my family by way of dumping my misery on them.

Over the years I've had mental conversations with nearly everyone I've met, but no one stuck around like one person in particular. No one had ever bested me, challenged me, propelled me into deeper thought like another person daring to step over lines asking 'what if'. Another person wanted to grab the bit, take control, do more with the world than simply just accept it. I didn't realize at the time, but I'd found another prisoner tunneling under the prison cells our minds are locked into by society. And not just any prisoner.

Life happens, the world turns, and people move on, but like an echo of Guinan in the Nexus, I took her with me. She didn't know I did. Over the years we've had many excellent conversations which I've treasured, but they are arguably not 'real', just as Sherlock's conversations with John in his mind were not 'real'. However, I deduce that a stream of consciousness is its own valid reality, and for me, those ongoing conversations have been an excellent survival skill.

Still, in real real life, as it were, I suffered the angst of not really having that connection. It was, after all, all in my mind. The angst ate away at me, lived alongside me, enveloped me, and everything I lived out in my mind was through an almost corporeal fog of angst. My soul ached for the real connection I'd once had. Well, I've got it back now. And now I've got a funny conundrum- I'm still having conversations with her in my mind and she doesn't know about them.

I am so glad I made Pinky blog. I started spilling my mind over into public journaling, and it grew into what I've dubbed a love letter. This was the only way I could think of to share what was in my mind with a very real person out there somewhere. I had no idea whether it would ever be seen or read, but like a message in a bottle, this note is still floating intact on the sea of the internet. My mind is readable now.

So I am learning something new- how to integrate my mind conversations into a real life relationship again. I guess a person could call keeping it all in my head a bad habit, because even though I could connect almost any time now in real life, I'm still doing much of the thinking myself, and the whole point to a real relationship is the symbiotic rapport that comes from more than one head.

I see my psychologist in a couple of days. This might be an interesting thing to bring up. Right now on Pinky blog, this is a monologue. Even if she speaks up in my mind, I don't speak for her because I don't really know what is in her real mind. Everything in my mind is based on what I had gathered from the past, what little new stuff I'm picking up now, and my own conjecture.

But the angst is gone. Vanished, without a trace. Nearly every day I poke around in my head to see if I can feel it, and I guess it's just not there. I wanted to make sure, because it could have been simply replaced with relief or elation or something else, but it's been a few months now and it's mostly just a curious absence of angst. I like that. Just still not sure how to live like this, but at least it feels good. So little in my life has really felt good.

Another thing that made me feel really good a couple of weeks ago was psyche guy saying something about my Poe style. That one still hasn't really sunk in, mostly because it's so terribly rare for anyone to discuss literary criticism with me, especially about my own writing (I really am different in real life than in print, I'm so easy to talk to in a real discussion), so I'm just letting it float above my head for awhile.

where were you last night?

Some dreams are as real as life to me.

I was in another country, making my way through a territory of very rich and very poor, looking for clues. I knew it was extremely dangerous and I had lost all contact with back up, but I was furthest in, so I kept going.

A dirt road used by a mining and construction company wound up a thickly forested mountainside, and I knew I stood out like a sore thumb to everyone walking on that road. Nearly everyone I met was walking. There were no vehicles other than a monster construction rig here and there, but most of those were shut down. Near the end of the road was a lush community hall, large and bustling with workers of all kinds, and as walkers arrived, they went looking for their areas to work. I couldn't help noticing there were a lot more children than I expected, also way better behaved than one would expect. Over a little time and sneaking around in and out of kitchens, large hallways, meeting areas, and staff areas, I pieced together that nearly all the workers in every capacity were more like slaves than anything, there for their lives, not because they got paychecks and went home at the end of the day, including the children.

I had to be especially careful of the children. The adults quietly sidling around were in a kind of acceptance where they could allow denial to cover their thoughts and just focus on their chores. The children were different- alert and ready to react, even though they obviously held themselves in check well enough. At one point, a little girl about six or seven years old dressed up in fancy clothes and expensive jewelry and makeup darted away from her little gang, grabbed my hand, and said with her head tilted and her eyes looking at me sideways, "It's further down than you think." She looked deadly serious for such a little girl, and I knew better than to assume I could talk to her. I only said, "What is, the depths of hell?", and she let go of my hand with an evil laugh, rejoined her little gang, and they continued on their way, one of the older girls quietly admonishing the one who talked to me. After that I felt marked, anyone younger than 15 glanced at me no matter where I was. Boys especially would make little taunts if they dared, because they didn't want to draw more attention to themselves, either. I got a little worried for a little while that one older gang of boys would jump me and knock me down. They kept following me around and whispering and laughing among themselves, but ducked back if I went near any place they could be noticed and get into trouble, so I got the impression they were bored and a little high strung with nerves while they waited for their work to begin.

All this time I was eluding being spotted by some very particular grown ups, ducking down behind rows of seating, dodging through a big coat closet, weaving through a busy kitchen, catching conversations from angles where I wasn't seen. I still have no clue what I was doing there and what knowledge I was gaining, but I felt some quickly growing concern that it was bigger and more immediate than anyone thought, and I had to find a way back out of there to get the information back to my own people. I didn't see how, though. I would definitely be noticed going the wrong way down the mountain, and I knew the woods were full of snipers.

Fortunately, some kind of warning siren went off, and the lush community building (very large, built right into the side of the mountain, everything in there screamed of money to burn) emptied out, and as I made my way back through the wide entry (reminded me of a convention center at that point) I didn't worry so much about standing out because everyone was headed the same direction, mostly children, still in their little groups, very orderly and quiet and frightened. We all headed back down the dirt road.

I was piecing together by this point that the girls were have supposed to have been part of the entertainment for a very large underground business meeting, and while some of the youngest boys were probably meant for the same, the older boys had other jobs, like gofers on up to heavy lifters and carriers. A few of the older boys had bikes, and one of the biker boys going by me stopped to pick up a couple of small silver tablets that had been dropped in the dust along the road, just smaller than a hand. They were obviously worth a lot, like a krugerrand bar, only a little bigger and heavier.

Some of the younger girls became a little frantic when they realized they were simply going back, which was understandable. They clearly only had the bigger girls to calm them, likely taken away from their parents, or even sold, but I didn't have time to worry about that. I had to find a way off that dirt road because heavy trucks were coming up, and if I were caught I'd probably be interrogated to death. I was thrilled to notice part of the road went over a lazy river, and I remembered the little girl saying "It's further down than you think." At that moment I felt a little hand again, and without even looking around I stepped up to the edge of the bridge and gauged the distance. It was a very long drop, but there was a deeper spot in the river we could plunge into if we pushed off hard enough. Without hesitation, me and two little girls, all holding hands, leapt off the bridge as hard as we could.

The water was warmer than I thought it would be. I've been in an icy cold river on a camping trip that took my breath away, but this river wasn't that cold. I knew all we had to do was relax and push up from the bottom when we felt it at our feet. Just relax and hold my breath. Don't worry about anything, push and float up. I could feel us floating up. It was taking a little longer than I thought, maybe I should start kicking a little. I was still holding hands with one little girl, and I couldn't tell if she was still holding hands with the other. I tried to look up and see how close the surface was, maybe about two more feet. Suddenly I lost my control and breathed in a little breath. I knew that meant I'd drown and started thrashing for the surface before I could start coughing, but in that very same moment I was also very surprised I wasn't feeling water in my lungs and didn't feel a compulsive coughing coming on.

I woke up and took a big breath. I was lying in my bed. I wasn't drowning and there wasn't anything else going on.

I do this once in awhile, maybe several times a year. I dream I'm someone else, and it's all very real. When I wake up I'm very surprised to find myself 'back', because I had no thoughts of myself or my life here during the dream. It took me a long time to figure out I'm not me as I know me in dreams like these. It's like I'm inside someone else watching everything that happens. I generally don't question anything or try to change anything because I'm not aware in the dream that it's not me. Usually what ends these dreams is my self awareness filtering through. I was holding my breath in my sleep because I believed I was in the water. I breathed in my sleep and believed I would drown. I've actually drowned several times in dreams like these, so I feel like I know what it feels like to drown. I know I didn't drown in this dream because what I felt was me breathing in my bed, not in the water. Whoever that person was in the river, I hope she got away. I usually never learn anything more once I have awakened. It's like I've put a book down or turned a movie off, and I can't pick it back up or turn it back on.

Being an observer in dreams doesn't mean I know what's going on. Mostly, I just remember stuff that happens, details along the way, but I have no memory or even a clue why I was infiltrating an underground meeting in another country, or what happened to cancel it and evacuate the building. I don't know anything else about who I was, like what my name was or what I actually looked like, but I'm pretty sure I was a woman this time. I got a strong sense of being under cover, but I didn't think about why during the dream. I only thought about each next move that had to be made. You can tell when my awareness starts filtering into this dream when I have my own memories about being in a much colder river. If I truly do experience another person when I have these kinds of dreams, I have often wondered if my own memories or fears filtering back in confuse them.

I've been having dreams like this all of my life. I remember telling my mother when I was still very small that I exploded. I wasn't able to tell her at the time that I didn't understand how I could explode and still be here. I tried to tell her I was a man. I think she was very disturbed when I tried to tell her my dreams, and I just learned to stop trying. I can still see that dream in my mind as clearly as I did then. I wore a suit and carried a case, I tried to get away, something went all wrong, I exploded. I was very surprised when I woke up and I was a little girl again.

Consider this post a teaser for my book. I'm sorry it's taking so long to get it out there.

By the way, there's a big Chuck watch on the 27th. My own tagged tweet is so buried I'm just grabbing the latest one at the moment. Click the snip to follow the Chuck Movie account. Sorry, I have no other info about where this is showing or what the plan is except this facebook group, which is closed, so it's up to you to dig. Good luck to Chuck fans, I'm not holding my breath, but I agree that was a cool show.