Pot-Healer

Choosing the title is always the last thing I do. The number-one mistake anyone makes in writing is believing that the first thing that comes to your mind will be a good way to open. You always have to just get started and then go back to the beginning and fix it. The beginning always needs fixing.

Unless you’re writing a stream-of-consciousness blog, then it doesn’t matter.

But I do have to go back and give this post a title, like all the others. And that’s what I’m referring to. That’s what got me started with this waste of three paragraphs in the first place.

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This whole blog is the front line in my fight against the internet distraction machine. That hungry beast is probably best visualized as a parasitic brain-sucker, feeding off your brain waves and making you a hazy-minded zombie in the meantime. You don’t just pull this monster off your head, you get rid of it by focusing very hard on some task and completing it. Divert your mental energy to something useful and there is none left over for it. It simply starves.

You have so little time and there’s so much more you could be doing. You have to focus on those things. Every day, five percent more work. It adds up. It gets more done than you realize. You’ll dig yourself out of that hole faster than you think. You can really shred all that horrible nonsense and get closer to the place you want to be.

All of this devolves into free-writing so I’ll just let it go:

You think you can escape bullshit. You cannot. It’s crazy to try to escape from bullshit, which is everywhere. You can escape from your own bullshit, though. You can pay attention to the excuses you make for yourself and stop making them. You can listen to your own thoughts and put a stop to the useless ones. You can align yourself with something better. You can stop drifting and propel yourself toward something. That’s the point of all of this, after all.

Keep resting your mind gently against the problem. Remember it always, think of it often, and you’ll gradually crack that safe. It will open for you if you are patient with it and with yourself.

Patience with oneself is hard but it is the only way to sustain effort for long enough to get something really important done.

I’m doing the thing again. I finally got up early so I can actually give some proper attention to the thing I’m supposed to be doing — writing. I still regard that now as “the thing I’m supposed to be doing.” I don’t know why life is so much more bearable for humans when we have a thing we’re supposed to do, but it is.

This blog for me is my heartbeat. Its sole purpose is to just keep going, so I cay say every day that I at least wrote something. I really should write down more, even small pieces during the day.

I should do a lot of things.

I should keep up that schedule I keep trying to make for myself — that daily list of “shit I have to do — and get it all done. I can get a lot done today because I didn’t drink last night and I feel relatively fine. I can haul a lot of junk out and get it all to the dump. Clearing things out is the name of the game for me lately, out of my physical space and also out of my mind. There’s too much floating around in there, too much clutter and fog when what I need is space and clarity.

I repeat myself a lot when I’m just writing. I think maybe we all do. It’s no matter because no one will read this. It’s just exhaust, it’s output. It’s just a thudding heartbeat. Nobody minds how fast or slow it goes.

I’ve got this impulse to do some free writing, like I used to do. So I’m going to do that now and let the italics be my excuse:

Dead weight and a lively conversation, sunlight bouncing off a killer fight that you have no business adjudicating… Word salad from the brain of someone who’s not supposed to be senile yet. You can really get yourself into the shitter if you need to, can really screech about something that is not the matter when there is no point beyond what you have told yourself. You can screech all you like about the weight underneath you and make light of something that lies at the bottom of a deep gravity well. But you cannot joke about the possibility of life on other planets or the point of keeping yourself alive long enough to see something beautiful. You have to understand that you might not live long enough to understand what the point of all of this was — you might just have to strain yourself less deeply and keep it all together the way you wished.

The point of writing that sort of thing by hand in the past is gone, but I did improve my handwriting a lot. Maybe I should keep that up for that purpose alone. I can dump all that paper in the recycling, though. It can go on to convey information of some value; for me the only purpose was to absorb a ton of garbage from my brain.

Recycling the electrons that this blog is made of will be just as easy. You can stretch it as deep as it can go and never have to worry about it. You can keep yourself going as deeply as you care to. Words, words, words… No one cares because no one reads it and it does not matter. All of it is matter — matter does not matter. The screech comes to a halt.

The point is just to go, and to keep going. If you get traction, if the muse comes back to you after all the time you’ve spent cheating on her, it will be while you are sitting faithfully at your keyboard ready to take down what she has to tell you. Otherwise you will be struck by no important ideas while you’re driving or showering or swimming. It’s like John Cleese said: you have to keep your mind resting against a problem in a kind but persistent manner, and then the solution will come to you. But you cannot do that unless you are actually working on the problem, you cannot do that unless you’re actually trying to solve it. If you fuck off and give up then you will solve nothing. You have to be working. You have to rest against the problem like a dog waiting to come inside.

Perfectionism is a type of arrogance, I’ve decided. One expects perfection from oneself because they’ve tied their work to their ego. They see in their work a reflection of themselves, and can’t stand it if that reflection isn’t as perfect as they want themselves to be. Every way in which their work falls short mirrors their own shortcomings, an imperfect job is a portrait of their own incompetence — when one thinks in this way.

Eric Hoffer said that the true creator creates something that is entirely separable from himself. A petty author will leave territorial markings all over their work; the work becomes a monument to the ego. This is the wrong way. The right way is to build something that is separate and complete, something that stands even if your name is removed from it.

A good example would be all the sayings and expressions we repeat endlessly, to which no author can be attributed. These linguistic nuggets capture such a permanent part of the human experience that they’ve taken on a life of their own as units of wisdom, no attribution needed. They’re so important that they’ve entered the public domain. The people who came up with these sayings created real work: something useful that exists independently of themselves. The work may not be perfect (“perfect” is theoretical) but near enough for humans. It is not a reflection of them. They may have done nothing else noteworthy in their lives. The work is separable.

Perfectionism is ego. Ego does not belong in your work. If you never feel that you deserve much praise when you get things right, you deserve no condemnation when your work falls short. At most, your work product is a snapshot of your skill and effort at that time — and to some degree your luck.

What should your goal be, then? Not the product of the work but the work itself. We like to think that we enjoy the beautiful, finished product — but we enjoy the beautiful, finished product because of the work we put into it. Also, that joy fades with time and the product is eventually taken for granted. The only enduring joy you can return to again and again is the work.

Of course, we all eventually become decrepit and senile and can no longer do the work. That’s when death is close. But that’s a topic for another entry.

Distraction is Hell. Distraction is the black hole which vacuums in all your precious time, swallowing it forever. It’s a hungry beast to which you feed years, in return for only a moment’s amusement.

It takes so long to grow up now. I could not explain to the previous hundreds or thousands of generations of humans what it is like to live without the hardships that formed us. We were suited to the world once. We changed the world, we removed all the pain that made us what we were — and in doing so erased our place in the world.

What happens when your psyche and your body are meant for toil and hardship, and all of that has been removed? You ache for it. You create it where it does not need to exist. It’s true that we play up minor problems and pretend they are monumental challenges, but something worse happens too: minor problems are monumental challenges to those of us who have faced nearly nothing. Our perspective is lost.

Our invented problems today don’t satisfy our need for something more important to be wound up about.

What am I doing? I’m sitting back comfortably and complaining about having nothing to complain about. Very 21st Century.

There’s plenty of hypocrisy in it, too. I could go somewhere harder and do meaningful work. I could face real problems if I wanted to, as could many other people. We don’t because we don’t want real problems. We refuse the medicine; staying sick is more comfortable.

7:21 AM. A fight breaks out. You can only handle dragging yourself along for so long. You can only deal with this crap for so long… I feel tired and isolated. I feel like I wasted a huge amount of time. Precious years. There are many more but you lost some. You cannot just continue like you have been. You cannot keep yourself together in this way.

Do you ever get tired of talking to yourself this way? I get tired of talking to you this way. Your whole scratch pad doesn’t have to be an endless pep-talk. You can try other things — if you can think of anything else to do. You can come up with a plan for squeezing yourself out of the stupid situation you got yourself into. You need to bill your clients, and you need to finish your work. You need to complete it all. You can’t keep trudging through the jungle like this. You counted on quitting early but that’s not going to happen. Now you have to try pushing forward and finding something worthwhile. You have to imagine that someone else is not going to judge you the way you have judged yourself. You have no idea of your own capabilities, you have no understanding of your most basic potentials. Pessimism has grown so deeply into you that you have no idea what you can accomplish.

There’s a certain faith you will need to have. If I am wrong, if it really was pointless and you never stood a chance, then you will have the comfort of knowing that you did not bend to fear. If you succeed, the purpose is obvious.

“But it sufficeth that the day will end, and then the end is known.”

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I would tell myself that there are no rules when it comes to this scratch pad, but I hate it when there are no rules. You have to play tennis with a net. Constraints provide resistance, and resistance engenders effort. A rule, even just one rule, creates focus. So the only rule is to stay on target and try to write something that means something. It doesn’t have to mean much but it can’t be garbage.

I’ll struggle a bit in this regard — which is the point. The point is that you will not always have something to say, that your relevant thoughts will not always be at the front of your mind and you have to draw them there. The way to do that is to sit down at the keyboard and keep going, just keep going until you figure out what the hell you’re driving at. Nobody else is going to do that work for you. There’s no one else in that Venn diagram overlap area, people who both care and are able to do something about it. You’ve got hardly anyone who cares at this point. They’re all busy with their own lives, as you should be. That’s your problem. You’ve been able to do just about anything, and as a result did nothing.

Wrap up your old projects. They take only a limited amount of time. They only require effort. Anything that requires only effort should be done.

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You are too serious. Life is either not a big deal, or it is such a big deal that it must not be wasted by taking it so seriously. If these years are so precious then they are too precious to be spent stressing yourself about every small thing. You have to balance it, like everything else. The real enjoyment is in the effort; the purpose of the effort is enjoyment. Hard work does not have to be without fun.

9:05 PM. You don’t know what you’re doing. Ever, really. But that’s okay. It’s as OK as spelling out “okay” instead of typing OK.

Just type the first thing that comes to mind.

You don’t know which way is forward anymore. You don’t know the way back to the place you wanted to go. You’re stuck in the machine now, and there’s nothing else you can do to get it together. You can’t get yourself out of it. You just have to explore it and keep making noises until you find something… I’m really just typing now with no idea what comes next. I’m just exercising my fingers, really. Just practicing typing. May as well. Nothing coming to mind. I have ideas at every possible moment of the day except when I actually sit down to write. Then my goddamn brain goes blank. Then everything just comes apart and there’s a wall of nothing.

How do I keep going? There’s nothing here. There’s nothing to put together. It’s all empty space, just full of dust and endless crap. I guess that’s how it is most of the time, though. Do you just keep adding to the same file? Maybe having a file for every month is better than having one for every day. That would get tedious. That would get really tedious. I could write a script to start a file for me. Sure. That would waste plenty of time. There’s a job for you: coming up with ways to waste time. I’d probably find a way to fuck that up as well.

You get close enough to the end of it and then you get closer to the point that you can taste the victory — you just start making up sentences because you want to keep typing but have nothing to say. Nothing, nothing, nothing… It’s just nice to say something at all.

I might be feeling a little down tonight. Can you tell?

You’re out of time. You have to work every night and every morning until you can’t do it anymore. If you have to give it all up completely and just fucking die in the end then fine, but in the meantime you have to give it absolutely everything you have.

You may not be able to do this for very long. You might have other responsibilities, and that may be a good thing. It may be better for you that you pick up and leave. It may be better that you don’t return to this point and have to say something — you may not remember how. You might just skip past all that good stuff and land right in the shit.

Everyone imagines they want the hero’s life, but they don’t. The hero’s life is tragic. The hero’s life is full of more suffering than they want to go through, full of far more hardship and compulsion. Duty. Doing something worthwhile requires a lot more than most people want to put in. Including maybe the hero himself — the quest is something he has to do, not something he wants to do. Maybe he’s more ordinary than we think. Also, this is why Elysium is the end of the story — there’s no more story to tell. There’s nothing further. Heaven is an ending. That’s what you want, an ending. Continuation means hardship, it means suffering with bits of satisfaction here and there. Mostly a climb with little base camps here and there. None of us can sit still for very long and call it fun. Eternal rest is Hell if you’re awake for it.

The only way out of this would be if you could change your own neurology. We’re hard-wired strivers and sufferers. Take away hardship and dissatisfaction and we don’t know what the hell we’re doing, we lose track of which way is up. Suppose you could alter the human brain so that we’re content most of the time. You’d probably have a sedentary species that did very little. It would probably die out. What the hell would they even do? I’m bored just thinking about them.

No, you can’t do those things you dreamed about. You have nothing that interesting or insightful to say. You can just talk to yourself. Do you think you want to push yourself deeper into this chasm? Do you have any sort of plan for getting out of it? No. But writing this is something. It’s not nothing. The world keeps spinning. There’s more work for you to do tomorrow. There’s always more. You can always push past it all and make yourself do something clean and easy. You can always just find a way to make your living doing whatever.

You can always just check out. That option is always there. It’s not something you have to plan for. It’s not something you have to think about, really. If it comes time, you’ll know. The idea of keeping yourself together may get too hard and you might have to just shove off to the next place.

You have nothing but silly ideas and silly notions. Silly and pointless ways of hoping that you can make it past some sort of normal life… Nothing will really work out for you if you keep yourself going like that. But you never know what will happen. You don’t know what will come of this if you keep working. If you really have nothing to lose then you have to reason to pull your punches. You have no reason to scream into empty space, you have no reason to flog yourself before the altar of the Great God Humility. There’s just you and the world, and some day it will be nothing because you will not be in it. As it was before, and as it will be for an eternity after you die. I don’t see the point in quitting early when there are so many other options.

All you can imagine and all you can think of is physical labor, that’s all that really comes to you in this imaginative space. That’s what you want to do. You should try it sometime. Maybe you’ll like it, who knows. You think you would like the life of the longshoreman so you have time to be a philosopher at five in the morning. Sometimes all you need are those little moments, and a little scratch pad so you can write down what you think. The rest of it is the life of a monk. The rest of it is the life of asceticism. You have to bring the fight within and just deal with it as best you can. The rest of it is just nonsense.

You can’t keep yourself going and keep the fight up and keep it all together… This is just free writing now. Just typing practice. The real story ended a while ago, didn’t it?

Doesn’t matter. Just keep typing until you can’t anymore. You feel like quitting but you can’t. That’s the situation you’re in, in every regard. You can’t quit. The party never ends.

Just how great do you think you need to be to get paid to write? You don’t need to be Bill Shakespeare. You don’t need to do anything but keep yourself from drifting off into bullshit. (Some people will pay you to write bullshit, but you should never become a whore.)

The only salvation is work, really. The only way is to lock yourself in a shed and get used to sitting down and writing. That’s what this is, that’s all that any of this is. That’s why you sit down and grind this out and don’t stop until you absolutely physically cannot anymore. Quitting early or quitting only when you have to — the difference is basically nothing.

That sad symphony is all you’ve got. All you have ever produced came to nothing because you did not work. That is the only difference between you and the others who made it. You are now massively, irreparably behind. In ten years you’ll get to where they are now. You will never catch up. There is no catching up; you cannot pause time. You cannot go back and fix your stupid mistakes. You have to live with them. You have to move yourself forward and just make what you can of your fuck-ups.

Light a fire, they say. Light a fire and sit on it. Find motive somewhere, anywhere. Find motive in the fact that there is just a little light left. You can find a point somewhere in all of this. There’s nothing else really to get at.

Was this as exhausting to read as it was to write? What pointless garbage. I can’t write anymore. I don’t mean that I cannot write anymore tonight, I mean I have lost the connection between myself and what I put on the page. On the screen. Whatever. There’s nothing here, in all these words. This is the most I’ve typed out in a long time and there’s absolutely nothing in it.

How do you recover from self-sabotage?

“A man struggles against himself even as he pursues his goals…” Something like that from Eric Hoffer. He knew what he was talking about. I wonder what he was on about. In what way did he sabotage himself? Maybe multiple ways. Great people were flawed in ways that it’s sometimes hard to appreciate. They are all very life-size when you look at them up close. It should give you encouragement.

Where the hell do these people get their optimism? Where does this assumption of self-worth come from? I don’t seem to have it. I don’t seem to get it.

Each of us succumbs more to either fear or laziness. The ancients were wise enough to consider Sloth a sin but what about Cowardice? No mention, and that’s probably the worst one. Greed requires ambition and cunning. Wrath and Envy at least stir one to action. Lust and Gluttony at least involve some sort of activity. Sloth is dreadful because it’s just nothing. But Cowardice… A coward recognizes the right action and does not take it. That’s unforgivable. That sin leads to far more suffering in the world than the others. The sloth perceives nothing and does nothing. The coward perceives the evil in the world and does not move to stop it. He recognizes what is good and does not do it.

Why? Short-term self-preservation. He thinks he can just hunker down and wait, and everything will be okay. Someone else will take the risk, or maybe time will resolve things. Someone else can do the fighting. He let his world come to ruin because he was afraid.

You have to spend years on this shit before it goes anywhere. And you’ve sat on your goddamn hands, especially the last few years. You’ve not nearly done enough. You may as well do it now, as you have no other responsibilities in your off-time. Nothing else can really get you together. You have to take one last shot at fighting it out and getting closer to what you thought was a good world. Nothing will come together of its own accord. All matter in your universe is repelling and flying apart and you are the only one who can gather it and make sense of it. You are the only gravitation in this great empty space, the only coalescing force. There is no one else to do it.

No more waiting. Put it together and put out what you wanted to say. Say something, even if it amounts to nothing. Say what you can and let others decide. You always said it was up to someone else to decide whether it was worth anything, that all you can do is your best. You have not done your best so far and you know it. You’re afraid because your best might amount to nothing much. Nothing amounts to anything much. No one is remembered for very long; that is not the point. The point is to do it. If you’re going to be selfish and you’re going to at least get something out of all this then you need to get into the work. Work is the only salvation. Your problem is that you have nothing to struggle against. Your fight is with nothing.

I can only repeat myself so many times. You have work to do. You have work to do. You have work to do. You have work to do. All play and no work makes Jack a suicidal, nihilistic boy.

Two months will go by, just like that. You won’t even realize it. You won’t realize what happened. You won’t be able to recollect what you’ve done in that time. Everything blurs together because there were no salient events. You remember nothing because there is nothing to remember.

I woke up early feeling disturbed and I don’t know why. So much time has passed, and I’ve done so little with it. It’s all very haunting. It’s all behind me now. Those years are already in death’s hands, as Marcus Aurelius said. There is no point in looking back except to learn, and what I should have learned is that you cannot waste time. You will never get it back, and you cannot stop it. Life is a treadmill you have to keep running until you really truly want to quit.

You cannot just stop. Too much depends on you doing your job. Too much depends on you connecting it all. So much is left unconnected. I can’t finish this paragraph.

Do you want to keep this alive? Do you know how to do this right? I can keep going indefinitely, just typing and typing… None of it really matters in the end. I can put you to sleep this way with hypnotic writing. I can keep you alive if you want to stay alive, I can put you to sleep if you would rather just leave. None of it matters; what matters in the end is only what you decide matters. Your decision matters.

All logic loops back on itself. We humans are mere meat-beings who struggle to make sense of what’s going on. Our evolution did not optimize us for rational thought; it optimized us to understand story and infer meaning. We cannot live in a world of mere facts — facts must serve a purpose. Purpose is more important. You cannot escape this. This is what the simplistic atheist fails to understand: you cannot separate humans from purpose. All light comes in through that lens. Every fact is a piece of a picture — a picture you assemble to suit your needs. The human mind does this constantly and automatically; you cannot separate yourself from this process without becoming inhuman.

Our story-building minds were crafted by evolution. Story helps you survive. Understanding meaning and purpose are essential. You cannot be anything at all until you constellate the facts in some particular way. Facts are the atoms of meaning, and they have to be arranged in a way to create some greater organism. They are the building blocks of the greater picture.

You delude yourself if you believe that you are looking at the real picture, just the objective truth. This is impossible. No matter what, you’re looking at what you have pieced together to suit your own purposes. You cannot escape your own bias, you cannot evade the effects of assumptions so deep you didn’t know you were making them. But most of all you will always be caught up in your need to make sense of things. The purpose of purpose is to make sense of things.

You will never be a machine. The world needs to make sense to you. You will always have purposes. You will always build stories. The worst lie you can tell yourself is that you are looking at the real, objective picture — that is mistaking the map for the territory, and that is madness.

When I write, I often like to leave a hole in the shape of what I’m really talking about. Maybe it’s because I don’t actually want to talk about it, maybe it’s embarrassing or humiliating — actually this is often the case. But it might also be more entertaining. It’s more fun for the reader to put the pieces together, more stimulating to use one’s own senses to find the signal in the noise. Writing too plainly is like doing a magic trick that’s too simple, or not a trick at all.

I’ll argue with myself here, though. If the idea is that writing is creating an illusion (as in a magic trick) then the writer can also get away with creating the illusion of meaning. Others have called this “passing off obscurity as depth.” You can hide meaninglessness in fancy prose.

Maybe what I’m saying is that you need to be obvious enough that your meaning can be taken without having to mention it directly. Create meaning with more than just the words, but it should not be a mystery.