Pot-Healer

Hey, look. I’m doing it again. I’m slogging through the idiocy of each individual sentence, refusing to go backwards and erase the start of a sentence I fell out of love with ten words ago. Each paragraph is like a single day: there’s only so much you can get done, only so much you can expect from it. The good ones are unforeseen and you just have to keep going through them until you get to the good one. You have to keep plowing along to hit that vein of gold. Nothing good just falls into your lap, you have to trudge on and on and really get that thing together. It’s the long work, the hard work struggling through the boredom and feeling that this is never going to work out. That is what keeps you alive and running. That is what’s going to convince the deus ex machina to come out of the tangled fabric of causality and bump you up to the next level. I guess that is what they call faith.

I can’t tell if I used this word as a title before. Pretty soon I’ll probably quit doing one-word titles… Actually I can look at the URL and see if the slug has a “-2” appended. Everything can be determined computationally; it’s not a chaotic system like everything else. What the hell are they even wondering about? What the hell are they even thinking? What am I thinking writing nonsense in the middle of the afternoon just because it feels good? I need to get that bastard up and running and working so that I can feel like I did something right.

What does perfection mean to you? It means the end, it means the conclusion. It means nothing more to do. It means no more work, which means no more purpose. You need imperfection to stay alive, you need something to fix. Without work, you decay.

Spend the next five minutes writing. I don’t care what it’s about. Pull your head out of the phone and think about what you’re going to do this morning. I have to send an email, I have to write some stuff. Suddenly I find myself trapped by not being able to be specific about what I’m up to here… I need to migrate some servers. Set up the new one and dedicate myself to moving sites one bit at a time until all the tools are there. Get it all together and get it set right. I only need one server, I only need it brought together once. I just need you to bring it to me, bring it to the right place so I can set it down and screech my way through it. None of this makes sense but it doesn’t matter, you’re engaging your brain to your fingers and no matter how filthy that sounds it’s the right thing to do.

Write things down. Make a plan. Stick to it.

Fate led you to accidentally click on this and work on your project a bit. So do it. You have to do it. You were born on this Earth and now you have no choice but to do it. Click along with the keys, pot healer. Keep going as long as you can. It’s important just to move, just to do anything, even if every post is just you telling yourself to get up and do something. That is what matters at the end of all of it, that is what will keep you together so that you can get other things done. This whole collection can be a set of posts telling yourself what you need to do, and that is good. That is what you need. That is what you will do. Keep going, keep going, keep going. Fight, fight, fight. That is where you can get yourself. You can nail that Jell-O to the wall. You can pin that cloud down. “Fight” used to be your favorite word to write out in longhand, when you did this all by longhand. It almost felt like the point of the whole thing.

The theme here is always purpose. You have to dangle that carrot in front of yourself, you have to pretend it’s there even when it’s not there. You have to get up and forget that you dreamed about things falling apart; you have to get up today and put things together. That is all that ever matters, that is all that you can ever want from any of it. Keep going, keep going.

When you wait so long to post again, the UI has changed…

Doesn’t matter, though. New strategies are needed. Letting go of the need to make sense or satisfy any reader is the point here. This is where you can be more than imperfect, you can fucking suck. Just do it badly. This is the place, the temple of mediocrity. Salieri’s Sanctuary, where it’s okay to just be okay.

And it’s okay to not know what you want to talk about. There’s nothing really on my mind yet. The purpose of this thing is to find your way. You can sit here and talk all day about how it doesn’t matter that you don’t have a way forward yet. You can see the end and see the light and make it all up, fanciful garbage that seems like it was written by a poorly trained LLM.

You have your ideas though and you do have an easy way to work on your notes. You do know the power of spending a small amount of time on a long-term goal persistently, that single brick laid each day. As time slips by like nothing, the bricks add up and you soon have a structure. The structure encourages you and you can build more, you can see where it’s going more clearly and you can plan ahead. You feel that you have moved forward and you see the progress, you know where to go with it. It keeps you together and screams at the light when the sentences start falling apart, but it doesn’t matter because the point is to move forward.

That’s how we play this game. This is just the practice, the point is movement. The point is to keep typing. Will I be able to do this with a neural link? Maybe not. The tactile sensation is too important. Could a pianist play music with just their brain? The movement of the body is too connected with the sound, and it’s the same way with words appearing on the screen. That connection between you and the words is that important, it’s that crucial to bring the two together. It would be a good way for a character in a story to type, though.

The energy has changed, can you feel it? The fear weakens, its power diminishes. Its muscles atrophy rapidly from disuse, its grip loosens around my neck. I can breathe, and all I had to do was relax.

The specter of failure that I used to frighten myself into inaction was always an illusion, a self-made prison built for circular reasons. Fear feeds and devours itself, an uroboros of senseless suffering. Fear is the anticipation of pain, or of destruction, or of unhappiness. Fear’s growth and and its stranglehold on your soul rely on the lie that all pain is avoidable if you just stay within the box. Stand within the lines, do not venture into danger, then you will not experience pain. You will be safe.

There is no safety, there is only holding back. There is only inaction that will lead to the worst pain: regret over a life not lived. And the more you give in to the fear, the more you obey its dictates and stay within its boundaries, the more fearful you become of breaking free into danger. You forget what it was like to breathe. You forget that you are anti-fragile and that pain makes you stronger, that mistakes are required for learning, and that the only lesson you cannot learn from is inaction because all you can learn from that was that you should have done something, and that you wasted time you will never get back.

The mind must relax its grip on the body, allow it to breathe. You are not so breakable. Fear will always whisper to you, but you can train yourself not to listen.

The worst feeling is when you have nothing to say, so the post has to be about how you have nothing to say. There’s nothing to say about it, nothing that anyone feels like reading about. But this blog is not for reading, it’s for unclogging your brain. The writing — and especially sitting down and writing every single day — that is the part that matters.

So now that I have reassured myself over nothing, what do I say next? It’s too early. The idea that you have to do this right away in the morning is a myth. You’re not functioning yet; it makes no sense. I haven’t started thinking (or obsessing) over anything yet.

Time for some stream of consciousness nonsense:

I wonder what the deal is with people who won’t let anyone in. What is the point of dropping yourself that low if you won’t absorb some of the insanity around you? What is the purpose of coming into existence for a short while and leaving if you don’t take any of it in? It doesn’t matter whether it makes sense or not because you’ve told yourself already that it doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t need to make any sort of objective sense, you said so yourself. But it can make sense to you, and if there is no meaning behind any of it then you can at least have pleasure and enjoyment, and you cannot have that without assigning your own meaning to things. You are the microcosm, after all. You are the tiny universe created in a mind and you have all of the purpose built up inside you to release into the world.

So now what? Now how do we get to the point that you can navigate the world and gleefully tear yourself into the fold so you can make a difference? Why do I want to leave a mark on the unfolding pattern of matter around me so badly? Anyone who didn’t feel like doing that is gone and forgotten. We all become forgotten, though. There is a horizon to our influence. All you should care about is what is inside of that horizon.

The italics are unnecessary. I wanted to use them to demarcate the nonsense but it’s all nonsense, really.

The only part of your existence you’re aware of is this linear bitstream of characters, one word after another in a line. Conscious thought skims the surface. The depths are full of monsters; all of that is just animal experience. But up here I can breathe air and get a grasp on what I feel. Connection does not come the murky bottom of the pond, it’s made at the surface where you have actual thoughts.

The unconscious is overrated. It’s the conscious realm where you take in the vibes and make use of them.

I don’t need new beginnings. Every moment is a new beginning. I need a new future that stems from making the right choice right now. I need the strength to do the hard thing. I need the sense of urgency that leads in the right direction. I do not know what the right direction is, I cannot envision what the right future is for myself — but I know that if I always make the hard choice, do the thing I do not want to do, make the decision that will give my future self an advantage, that is the right choice. The future will become clearer so long as I move.

It’s what the pilot of that crashed plane said to himself in the Andes, walking every moment without sleep. “If I stop, I’m dead.” You freeze in place if you stop, fear grows and you get stuck in place. You have to keep moving.

The fear is the worst. The longer you remain in place, the more you fear motion. Time goes by and you forget how little there is to fear from exploration. You forget what freedom felt like and you get trapped in your little world, you get used to a self-made prison. Desire shifts from hope for a better future to just wanting to remain in your current state forever — which you cannot do because everything decays. It all falls apart on you sooner or later.

The real thing to fear is stagnation. Stagnation is rot and misery and fear. It’s the worst kind of fear: amorphous, free-floating, ready to take the form of whatever will stop you from leaving the little box it wants you to stay in. Anxiety is your brain constantly writing horror fiction about what lurks outside so you stay willfully inside your self-made prison.

Do the thing, always do the thing.

How many times do you need to learn that it does not matter how you retype the same idea over and over again — what is necessary is to just get on with it and do the actual project. Only that way do you actually make any progress, only that way do you really get anywhere.

What do you say when you have nothing to say? You come here, and you just type nonsense. Worse than nonsense. Nonsense might be interesting, this is the same dull motivational crap on repeat.

What can you tell me that’s new?

Many new things lurk in the depths of your mind, but you have to bring them to the surface somehow. The only things that do that are stress, exertion, pain, risk, fear — all the things you avoid are the things that make you grow. This is why it is bad for a man to seek comfort; he must seek whatever the next thing is. He must choose whatever is difficult.

It is the classic question of how to define a character: what does he seek, what does he avoid?

What difficulty does he seek, from what pleasure does he abstain?

Abstinence from empty pleasures may be more difficult than seeking difficulty. Doing is active, you set a goal and pursue it — but not doing means a constant worm in the back of your brain begging you to just do the thing and have some release.

But character is not all dopamine regulation, there is more on top of that. What makes a character decide to alter their own dopaminergic habits in pursuit of something worthwhile? There is always that extra spark that has no explanation.

Effort, effort, effort. That’s what it’s got to be, but it has to be organized. I have to zoom out sometimes and get an overview, I have to point my strength in the right direction. I have to go but I have know where I am going.

Every trip is a little death. I don’t want to be on my way, I don’t want to go. For a few days I’m trapped, unable to work on what really matters to me — and then I come home and I can’t work on what really matters. It’s too staggering, too imposing, too monumental. It’s the white whale and I’m just a tiny human on the deck of a tiny ship in the ocean. The disproportion is immense.

I don’t know where to put myself other than beneath its shadow.

Typing feels right, though. I know how to do this. Run, run, run. A waste of energy, maybe. Certainly directionless — but no movement is a waste because you end up somewhere other than where you were before, and only that way can you get any idea about whether it’s the right direction or not. Sit still and you will only be confused.

What is this feeling that I have to be somewhere other than where I am? It’s what the little ant feels when the parasitic fungus infects its little brain, inspiring it to climb upwards toward the light so that the fungus can complete its lifecycle. The spore of something greater infects your soul and moves you toward a greater purpose.

Two possibilities:

1. You will never be happy except by choosing a purpose outside yourself.
2. Choosing a purpose outside yourself is a way of escaping from what really matters.

I’m not sure which one it is. Probably some strange combination of both.

Years get behind you, and there’s nothing you can do about it. Make use of the time — you will lose it anyway. It’s less of a loss if you at least moved yourself forward.

Move yourself… Nothing else moves you. All other motion is just drift, but everything drifts around you as well and so that motion all cancels out.

Zero in, focus, laser-cut your purpose out of the plain background of everyday life with beams from your eyeballs. The purpose is yours if you can find it.

Sometimes I think long paragraphs are not for me. I get a certain rhythm going like a poem and I just don’t have anything more to say on one subject and need a new line. Doesn’t matter. I just want to get out of the habit of using all those goddamn ellipses. Those… things… are… indecisive… poison. Pick a punctuation mark and stick with it?

The problem is that I’m trying to carry on a conversation at the same time as I’m writing this. The flow isn’t even necessarily the point, although it’s nice to get into that state. No, the purpose is to push yourself forward when there isn’t necessarily a clear way. The point is to wade through the muck of a blank screen and find some reason you want to slam these keys early in the morning and see what you have before you. It’s a lot of laughter, it’s a bit of enjoyment that comes as a byproduct of imagining something on the other side of this swamp that you want to obtain.

None of it needs to make sense to anyone else. None of it has to come together for you, it just has to speak to you and sound nice to you. It can be a joke that’s only funny to you, it can be a meaning that only attracts you. Your personal meaning is a bug zapper tuned to the frequency that resonates only with you, drawing you and only you to your individual fate.

“All death is certain, the only thing is to live well.”

Too bad I have to end it on someone else’s words but there you go.