I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Edgar Allen Poe

The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
- H. L. Mencken

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
-Bertrand Russell

What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
-James Branch Cabell

August 23, 2013 - 12:06 p.m.

Dangling Imaginary Conversations

I didn't get nearly enough sleep last night so I'm not at my best. There was no good reason too. I started a stupid project after 1 AM and it took forever. I made a survey of how many John Platt's On Your Radar acts you've seen which mean posting the acts and pictures of them. I did the first 52 on the list John gave me. I thought it would be a fun simple way of promoting the series. But it was not simple.

I should probably have coffee first but I'm going to try and tough this out.

What the hell did I do yesterday? Oh right nothing. I went to the bank to get my rent money. Then I tried something new. I walked from the bank in Brooklyn Heights to Altantic Terminal. I had no idea they were so close. I thought it would be a nice walk. I should have walked all the way home, that was another four miles or so.

I had dinner at Smash Burger, I hadn't tried that before. The burger was nothing special but I liked the garlic fries.

I figured out some stuff with my phone. I was able to download the pics from it onto my computer but I don�t' know why Picasa couldn't import most of them. just the most recent. I think it has to do with if they are on the card or the phone.

I set it up to ring by playing a clip from Pesky J. Nixon doing Talk About Heaven. I also uploaded some new music onto it. I'll have to try listening to it next.

I'm feeling a bit isolated. I've gone days without having a voice conversation with anyone I care about. When I have a real place to live that's not so bad. I sit, watch TV, read, and listen to music. I find all those things hard to do here. I have to sit in the common room to watch TV and that means people I don't want to talk to will talk to me.

Let's see if this can go anywhere. It's something I've been thinking about for a while. I'm actually happy that I forgot who I was originally talking about. Well not talking, you'll see.

So first the preliminary. I have conversations with people that aren't there. No that' doesn't make me crazy. I don't talk out loud. I just run through how I think the conversation would go. It's always been a good way for me to approach things. It forces me to hear how my thoughts and feelings would sound to another person. Sometimes the person is a friend. Since I started therapy it's often with my therapist. Very often it isn't one person but you My Gentle Readers. I bet some of you do that too. I bet lots of people do it. Yet I've never seen characters in books do that. I never heard anyone else talk about it. So I'm asking you, do you do that?

So I had one of these mental conversations and said, "He's funny and bright but he sometimes has trouble dealing with people." I have no idea who I said that about and I'm not sure it's even a man but I do think I used the masculine pronoun. But the thing is that could be half my friends. That could be me. Part of me is actually pleased when my friends do something socially awkward, even if it is to me. It reminds me that people can still love me even when I act like a social dolt.

And the thing is that so many of the best people to talk to get socially awkward. At least they are interesting. I'm much rather talk to an awkward person with something to say than a perfectly mannered person who just says what everyone else does.

That reminds me of something else I thought about on my walk. This has bugged me for years. There's a group of musicians that were friends with each other. I was not enamored with their music with one exception. As I go to festivals and NERFA and lots of other places where musicians gather I found myself talking to someone in the group. He was talking about the others. He thought they were all great EXCEPT for the one person that I liked who he felt was so inferior to the rest. And thinking about that I figured out what was going on. The others have much better voices. Their music is more polished. But the thing is that they have nothing to say either musically or lyrically. The one I liked had original thoughts, an original viewpoint. And of course the person without that couldn't appreciate it. It would be like someone in the 60s saying, "Dylan is fooling himself. He'll never be great like the Chad Mitchell Trio." That one line of us explained so much. He was not even Salieri that could see that he lacked genius and Mozart had it.

OK I'm not going to go into how I was also having an internal rant about my old boss. The only reason is that I can't remember the zinger that I thought of that I should have used 15 years ago. OK I thought of it and I'm still not going there. There's no point. she's dead. I didn't say it then but I should have. No I will say it. Because when you get in this situation I want to encourage you to say it. It isn't a zinger. It's just pointing out the enormity of what someone said.

She fell behind on paying me and owed me thousands of dollars. Then she's say thing about how happy that she is that she could afford various luxuries, Which of course she couldn't. But that isn't what made me furious. It was when she called me cheap for forgoing something because of the price. If she had paid me I could have afforded it. What I should have done is point out how incredibly insensitive and downright mean it was for her to say that. And I could have added that she did things like that all the time and other people couldn't help but feel the same way about her.

If she had just had that conversation in her head first she would have never said it. It really is a good practice.


I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.





Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018



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Horvendile August 23, 2013
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