Frayed Ends and Downed Power Lines

Previously: one loose end in my head got teased out, and like a pull on a knit sweater, I'm unraveling a bit. Don't hold me to any kind of standard on this post...it's experimental writing.

• I connect to joy when I can run with my own mind.
• If social psychology is right, we make everything up inside our own heads. (Corollary: there is no God.)
  
• If I'm not social, the only thing I can make up in my head is from memory.
• My memories aren't good materials.
• My way of being in the world doesn't reliably create a better life for me.
• The more I understand myself, the less I like myself, because the ratio of discovering bad to good is so...lopsided.
• The more I focus on my one special interest, the less I have left over to focus on hard and unrewarding work that seems to grease the way through the world: masks, fake personality, false fronts.

Spiller is deeper than he credits himself for. I'm back, again, at my original conversation with him about affirmations. Can an acupressure specialist with supplements and affirmations get done what I couldn't do by just trying and failing to repeat lies to myself to rinse my brain? Do I need to hook the new counselor into this? Get my brain washed? And why is that so bad? There's several passages in Infinite Jest that I'm thinking of, but I can't find any of them specifically right now:

• Gately deciding to surrender his head for a thorough brain-washing
• description of how various tenants got to Ennet House--wait, found one: "most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking...That 99% of compulsive thinkers's thinking is about themselves; that 99% of this self-directed thinking consists of imagining and getting ready for things that are going to happen to them, that 100% of the things they spend 99% of their time and energy imagining and trying to prepare for all the contingencies and consequences of are never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early-sobriety urge to pray for the literal loss of one's mind." Pp. 203-204.

I have sometimes envied AA people. Not for what they put themselves through, or are in thrall to, but because they have a group that won't kick them out, that they are welcome and will be relentlessly loved no matter what.

I think rereading Infinite Jest--maybe skipping the political sections and Subsidized Time--would be good for me now. I've just found these meaningful-right-now quotes:

• "That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused."
• "That God --unless you're Charlton Heston, or unhinged, or both -- speaks and acts entirely through the vehicle of human beings, if there is a God...God might regard the issue of whether you believe there's a God or not as fairly low on his/her/it's interest in re: you."

Epiphanies (this list will grow for a little while):

1. There are things I can believe by myself.
2. There are things I can believe if I'm with others who believe them.
3. There are things I need to believe that depend on #2.
4. There may not be anything that is finally true but my own mortality.

Ergo, there is nothing I have to commit to passionately and care about, but when I do commit passionately, it's because the thing I believe in, I believe by myself. I have a hard time when I believe in things alone that need other people. I have a different kind of hard time when I think I need other people to believe in things I can believe by myself.

Is that the problem?