Yesterday: an auspicious beginning, the novel.

I exist in a thought bubble that illusion sometimes make [semi]permeable.

For decades now, as my acceptance of external cues that we call education has given me an internal workshop of sharpened tools, I’ve tried to figure out why I feel like I’m numb all the time, like there’s a pillowed barrier between me and whatever is not-me.

I don’t know how many people have told me, “Don’t you know what [he/she/they] said they think about you?”

I don’t feel special.

I feel unformed, my connectors created for a different set of receptors in my daily interactions.

Must I externalise my internal universe to show that I am and am not any different than every other person who lives solely as an imaginary being?

I am neither sane nor insane, learning long ago that sanity is a matter of conviction about your illusions/beliefs in relation to the generally acceptable set of illusions/beliefs professed by the people in your proximity.

I look straight ahead and see an image that makes perfect sense to me, a computer graphical representation of electromagnetic transformation in process that we call the change in the state of bits on a hard drive better known as a set of files being copied:

At the same time, images from yesterday flicker and change — Canada geese flying overhead, a turkey vulture circling a mobile phone tower, duck feathers floating on the surface of a pond inside which carp/koi drift, waiting for food,

a real spider web next to a roped spider web, temporarily capturing the captured image of an acquaintance…

Is it insane to see a few pieces of rope tied together and imagine a spider web?

Is it crazy to move houses built in the 1800s into an enclave in order to preserve the appearance of a way of life that may or may not have existed the way we imagine?

“If image management is all you’ve got going for yourself, your only set of skills a desire to control your image by manipulating the [re]actions of people around you, are you any less out-of-your-league than a moth, its image well-camouflaged against a tree that about to be consumed in a large wildfire?” — that question bothered me every day I worked as a midlevel manager at a global corporation where I overheard employees below me in the corporate hierarchy complain about forces working against them (including conspiracies about the “Black Mafia” and the “Church of Christ clique” that I found little in the way of evidence to support), my going on to meetings with fellow managers about whom the employees had specifically complained and wondering why people complain about others — saying people in upper management only spend time managing their image instead of doing real work — rather than act in support of their personal self-respect and positive self-image that is reflected in their “real work,” which includes their voiced thoughts and opinions.

Is that last paragraph nonsensical?

I can only do what I can do, having not done a lot of things I haven’t done.

These set of thoughts in this blog represent my celebration of freedom, willing to write about behaviours that I would and wouldn’t do because the universe is much grander than our subcultural expectations — in the seven-plus billion of us, sanity is as much crazy as the illusion of the self.

For instance, should an atheist who believes we are truly only sets of states of energy in temporary confluence care at all about the concept of caring, saying that what is socially taboo, such as rape, incest, bestiality and paedophilia, is as perfectly normal as a comet indiscriminately destroying every ecosystem on Earth, all social concepts an illusion of proximity rather than immutable laws of the universe?

Yesterday, I showed up at a local civic center to join a group of people, some whose faces looked familiar but whose personal lives I knew nothing about, to jump around, somewhat in unison, in order for a person (or persons) to assemble a collection of motions captured in bits and bytes into a coherent story told in dance and music — a person’s “vision” turned into what our culture (and most subcultures) would call a sane, socially-acceptable reality.

No one is going to look at the resulting music video and accuse the director of witchcraft.

Should they?