Never been one to let the carrier drop

So, I think we managed to achieve some genuine personal growth this weekend.

Historically, at Lemons, my driving style has been to stay out of everyone’s way – this basically means yeilding the line (the most optimum path through a curve) – in fact just staying out of it at all times. This is not exactly a way to race, although it does make for a nice sunday drive in a racecar.

However, on Sunday, I came up behind the Snipe, and had one of those character defining moments.. I seem to recall my exact thoughts were ‘fuck it..’, and I dropped to third and passed.. and then (since I was up to mid-4th gear speed anyway), I rode out the course in top gear, holding the line about 50% of the time, tires protesting at every turn.. I probably took 20 seconds of my average lap time. I went from sunday driver to apprentice hoon.

(Also.. my team won the top prize at Lemons, the IOE!)

Morever, on the way back from the race a van tried to occupy the same spot on the road I was. Now, I’ve always had no problem doing evasives in this situation, but historically it introduced a emotional state similar to a panic attack. This time.. I was amused.

From my experiences running from the police, I know deep inside me is a genuine racecar driver – anyone who can drive a Honda Oddessy at 120 mph through US 101 without so much as scratching the paint clearly has what it takes to be a hoonatic in terms of driving skill – what I lack is the confidence and emotional/mental configuration to believe the line belongs to me as much as it does everyone else out there.

Numerous times in my childhood this was a major problem as well – I failed to assert myself or understand that my point of view and needs and wants were just as valid as my parents’.

Lemons pics at http://www.sheer.us/stuff/Lemons-Buttonwillow-2015/

So, I financed some of the upgrades to the house on aa 1 year same as cash plan, assuming that interest would accrue only on the unpaid balance after one year. Judging by the 6750 in interest I just got hit with, i would say that in fact interest has been accruing the whole time and possibly on the original purchase amount.

I really, really want out of this system. I understand that I can not win. I do not want to play any more, I am requesting a exit.

I feel so old, and tired. I’ve recorded a track a day, and I’m not sure if any of them are good enough to pass off to Tory. I feel enslaved, like I have no choice but to work for another 30 years at a job i’m increasingly tired of, and I feel sometimes like i’m trapped in a world of idiots.. things could be so much better..

aand yet, I should have more gratitude for what i’ve got, because I do have a lot. A lot of friends, a job I don’t hate, the freedom to explore musically with some amazingly powerful tools.. and the hope that humanity will get it’s collective shit together. Looking at ffacebook, it’s clear everyone cares about something, at least.

it’s so strange.. in another age i might have been sage or luminary, but here and now, i’m nothing very special.

i haven’t been persuing self-growth as aggressively lately, and I think that may be part of why I feel old, and tired. Or maybe it’s trying to keep up with a puppy with the strength of ten puppies.

Today was my birthday, and 44 people commented on my wall.. plus got to have sushi crack with Bruce. I have to remind myself to look at the good stuff sometimes.. and there certainly is a lot of good stuff…

I was pleased at the amount of positive content that was in the most recent set of superbowl ads. I don’t think corporate america is going nearly positive enough, but at least they are heading in a positive direction.

As far as whatever happened to break my neural net.. I don’t want revenge. I just want it to stop being broken.

So, I’ve been researching.. and yes, building and testing out.. transcranial electromagnetic induction. For those of you who haven’t ever played with or read about this, it is possible to cause neurons to activate by surrounding them with a powerful moving electromagnetic field. Since this is obviously not something that takes a lot of technology to make happening, of course I’m playing with it.

However, after reading the wired god helmet article, I’ve started to ask a question that I think could go somewhere awesome. What would happen if you took a EEG rig on person A’s head, and after running it through some signal conditioning used it to light up a TCI rig on person B’s head, and vice versa. I am curious whether I am on the verge of machine assisted telepathy here, or just brain damage.

So, last night I spent several hours testing framebuffers in my mind. The visual interface for the first step of this was just seeing large numbers rotating.. and man, were there a lot of skips and glitches.. me and my partners in crime did some rewiring, I can now visualize numbers 1 through 30 rotating smoothly, pan them X, Y, etc.

And, lo and behold, last night’s dreams were extremely gorgeous visually. There’s something just *satisfying* about fixing something and then having it work.

Next step: my assemblers and ALUs.

We also are going to take a serious whack soon at removing the lockout on lucid dreaming. Yes, believe it or not, there is a lockout on lucid dreaming for “ethical reasons” – there’s a part of my mind that was convinced that dreaming about sex was immoral.

Have I ever mentioned how much I wish I had never met anything resembling a religion in my youth?

ANother thing to sort out.. whenever I visualize affection, especially from someone female, I end up seeing them stabbing me. I know where this comes from.. a pattern match filter programmed as a result of some random scary violence I experienced as a child.. and I am really looking forward to finding and removing it.

To me, it is unspeakably badass that I’ve reached the point where I can hack my own neural net. I’m curious how far this is going to go. I would love to be able to rev my alphas and betas all the way to the end of the dial with nothing vibrating or falling off..

I also haven’t needed any drugs to sleep for several days. In fact, my use of seroquel has changed a lot – now, instead of taking 100mg at a time to sleep, I take it in large doses every several days to activate a seroquel peak.. I’m not sure what these are yet, although I do know I hallucinate *copious* amounts of text during them.. thousands and thousands of pages of it, each for a few milliseconds.

Well, I’m not sure how much I slept last night. Not a lot, for sure. On the other paw, I do have someone to keep me company. I think Lazarus Long is the one who said no one ever died from a sleepless night with good company.

I’ve been undoing a lot of neurological wiring.. or patching around it, as the case may be. You can’t really ungrow neural connections, but you can grow neural connections that patch around the neural connections you wish you didn’t have.

The other week I went on a rampage and assembled all my arguments against Christianity in one place. Oh, man, did that feel good. My deconversion is well underway. I have my own spiritual operating system of sorts.. and it seems to run pretty well. I need one written in the desert by people who thought you should stone people to death for feeling sexual attraction a little differently than you do? No I do not.

This time I felt something bend. It had been so frustrating to me for so many years.. I couldn’t get it to load, compile, and run.. but I couldn’t get it to unload either. It was just stuck. This time.. it unloaded. We got one crowbar under one absolute falsehood in the book, and then suddenly I could read it and see all the stupidity, all the ignorance, all the things the people who wrote it didn’t know.

Is it all my fault? Everything that’s ever gone wrong in my life? Is some of it mine? None of it? I know that knowing who’s fault things are doesn’t help any in fixing them. But I still.. I don’t know. Part of me wants to say I wasn’t given the tools I needed, and I had to go find them myself, and that I don’t think my parents should have had children. Another part of me thinks I warped my experience of reality through my persistent negative self image, and that I could have been handed exactly what I needed and still not gotten it.

Someone bought ‘Secret Garden’ on my kindle account. It wasn’t me, but I’m reading it anyway. Interesting.

Part of how i learned I can hallucinate text was if i take a large dose of seroquel I will hallucinate thousands of pages of text, jumping around too quickly for me to grok.

i definately get the sense that doing this occasionally is good for me. I couldn’t tell you exactly what it’s doing, other than making me sleep a lot.. but it’s definately part of my repair process.