let’s make a deal! i’ll type something, and blogger will post it, regardless of what is in it. deal.

just like that, summer is over. the only thing we need now is for it to get dark around here at 4:30 which is pretty close to about a month away, but it’s time for a change of weather, since this summer didn’t really get it together to really be a summer, we might as well have the cool temperatures and rain. just hold out for one more weekend on the rain, please? i’d really like to go climbing in the great outdoors.

so how are things going on your front? holding down sir, thank you very much. i’ve been reading like crazy the past week, as i finally managed to get that bolus of infinte jest through. i don’t feel like an inferior reader anymore and went through half of on the road reading for about 5 hours. that book certainly reads different now than it did 8 years ago. nothing really life shattering though, just fun to read again without that sense of dread, of feeling like i have to set aside a huge chunk of time because it takes a half hour just to get warmed up again.

my body feels well again, i feel well again. one thing i remember very distinctly from infinite jest was the idea of feeling emotions. whereas most people can moderate their emotions, there are the extremes of feeling nothing, and feeling everything. even people who have feelings in moderation tend to swing from one extreme to the other, how far just depends on how you’re wired.

feeling nothing would entail just that. nothing interests you, and you don’t want to do anything, and that paralyzes you. this is pretty bad, but isn’t terrible, you can still function in society, even if it does take effort to do it. feeling everything though, you experience everything, can’t filter it, can’t turn it off, and that paralyzes you. so in one instance your emotions are off and you can’t turn them on, and in the other your emotions are on and you can’t turn them off.

it describes this inability to turn off as ‘the blackness’, and tries to describe it as just that, something black, something so horrible as to render you immobile, frightened all the time, doing anything to avoid it.

i feel like i get both sides of this from time to time. something triggers it, and it just happens. i wonder if there are pockets in my brain, which are mostly used for chemical storage. not intentionally, but with all the growing my brain has done, and genetics and what not, maybe there are natural places for chemicals to eddy, like a river cutting through the earth to reach the ocean. it isn’t going to be a straight line, and places for water to collect will form. these chemicals eddy until a huge downpour of something comes through, and purges the cavity, allowing these previously held chemicals to flow free wherever gravity and intramolecular forces to react as they can and will. and they eventually break down and are respired, and the cycle starts again.

all these cycles i see, all these common occurrences and what do i do with them? mostly point and say, ‘gee wiz, isn’t that neat?’ i wonder if there’s anything else i can do though? predict what’s going to happen? maybe a little, but i can’t see it making that much of a difference. seeing that train while you’re tied to the tracks only let’s you know when it’s going to hit.

the key is to get untied before you can even feel the train coming, but untying yourself is tough when you have no idea where to start, and you’re left to your own devices.