2014
Four people I knew passed on this month. The first: a friendly acquaintance from decades ago, one of those undefinable connections that happen from time to time, after sharing a couple car rides. She… had yet to celebrate her 54th birthday.
I drove her from the university where both of us were studying to Cleveland, east side, where both of our families lived. She was a senior, I a young freshman. Around five hours in total passed together in the car pretty much discussing pleasantly across a wide array of topics, one of those surprisingly satisfying encounters fixed in time. I hadn’t seen her since. She was a lovely woman, dark eyes profound and active. A very successful career as a CFO in various S & P companies but… no partner, no children. I wish I’d known her more.
Next I read of the end of my/our, a different friend, ex-literary agent. He, to, passing on before his 60th year. I was sorry to hear it, even though he’d done my friend and I a disservice years before.
Near the end of the month an old…more than family friend, she was a smiling mountain flower from a place that a large part of whatever makes me, belongs to. Hers was an unexpected, blow of an end, fast. Still splendid, a true mountain girl who had yet to pass 80.
Three days later on the eve of the 31st, my father died, or at least what remained of him. He was 84.I loved him (my throat quivers writing the words) in the sense that he and I were mixed into one thing. He was the only other element of that family capable of loving, at least a little.
(During the month not one but two dishwashers broke down permanently. Maybe household electronics have different sort of lives and deaths.)
At the same time some…very heavy consequences, aka a landslide of shit, from the past actions of a couple of villains. As villains usually do, they, to, considered themselves heroes, demi-gods really. Like Persius. (Poor Persius, even though he, to, was something of an asshole at times.) Anyway. I went off the tracks for a few weeks (update 2025 - after a lot of other shit-stuff to follow… I went off the tracks for years,) then let myself slide into hibernation before returning to any kind of affect. (In the meantime one of the villains died rather horribly but karma-justly. The other I used to think I’d kill with my bare hands not out of vengeance but justice. A lifetime borne. Now… I don’t care anymore.)
The point of it, what connects villains to hibernation to life to death and dishwashing machines….hibernation, freeze behavior: if you could accurately measure the pathways in my and some others brains you’d probably find some parts relatively well connected to other distant parts. The pathways between are like roads. Some roads in which representations of an I-me outside of context, a me that affects and which is expressed - the doing - in real time, this moment, not connected to different times or to unexpressed temporal representations - aren’t there much. That lacking results in a sort of strong tendency toward descriptively a motivated fundamental nihilism.
Probably you’d also find that a specific road connecting an older part of town, so to speak, down low, to other parts with in turn other roads in a more modern part where… politicians and bureaucrats live, as it were, and that representation of me-I outside of context delineated by real time… doesn’t have much traffic. So… when a context outside is full of shit instead of following a road that might lead that I-me outside, I tend to hibernate.
An opposite you would likely find in those two villains: the pathway of their own expression, socially, always filled with loud traffic. Psychopathology.
It’s not that I haven’t done creepy-ish things, even crappy-ish things - though more, idiotic things. Even dishwashers,from a certain perspective, do rotten things sometimes. But there are important differences.
Dishwashers don’t maintain self representations across differing times. They aren’t autonomously alive, have no agency and as such cannot be described as conscious. They do what they do, express themselves and that’s where it ends. One can’t expect that they’ll wash the ill-fitting oval plate unless an external factor, you, change the plastic dish-rack set-up to make the dish fit within. You bring varying representations from differing times. You’re alive. You have to represent the plate and the mesh without any you - to create an integrative expression. That which some could call consciousness.
Villain-psychopaths are similar to washing machines. They create narratives in which self-representations are always present, dislocated from other times, in which their actions are always justified to themselves because they maintain no alternatives, no other times save this eternal present. (Ie, no timeless stories in which empathy can find larger meaning beyond being a tool to use in the present like a screwdriver.) In that regard they are also more dead than not as in they in a way die as soon as they cant find themselves in the present, become lost, rageful, with a very limited conscience. As such, they create integrative information distribution curves always increasingly tied to the present and to themselves. And, following, resources or systems that correspond to the same (as in concentration and hoarding.) That correspond to death. Rather than changing the plastic dish mesh - they shatter the plates. A rather expensive and repugnant way to live. Today we are living in a Western system dominated by dishwashing machines. Maybe we should end that.
Summertime.
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