Never been one to let the carrier drop

1) 100% of all subnets happy to be here and hoping to help the ball club. PERFECT OR FAIL
2) 100% uptime. Maintenance cycles done online.

I believe Christianity is a dangerous neurolinguistic virus that damages the people who believe in it. I wonder often, as I work on removing it from myself, should I be helping my friends who are also infected? And yet, they insist it is a great thing for them. So I don’t. But I know that had I been fully infected I would have insisted the same thing, because of fear of God.

Christianity is based around a threat. The core tenant is, believe.. and profess to believe.. that Jesus died for your sins.. or be tortured for all eternity. That’s a threat.

I could spend days and days listing all the unhealthy, life-denying, insanity-causing beliefs that are part of Christianity, but I won’t bother. It’s been done elsewhere, and better than I ever could. So instead I shall return to my day job.

How did I end up so broken? Well, not believing in abundance would be part. Letting irrational fears get the better of me would be another part. From my CE, my mother was paranoid and also didn’t want me to be anywhere near a girl, my family was willing to threaten me with violence for trivial offences, my sister was randomly and scarily violent, and most of my childhood is a black hole. However, that’s from my CE. I know now that probably none of those things were true, except for me. But by the time I was 10 I wanted to die, and by the time I was 16 and my parents were trying to pull me away from Vicky’s party (where even though much was going wrong, I felt safe and also, duh, near Vicky who I was in love with even if I had no tools to tell her or even to really know how to tell her) and my mind found a impressive level of signal crash. I wanted to die. badly. I would rather die than go back with them.

But that wasn’t a option, because Sheers are not wired to die. I do suspect, however, that it was both caused by a lot of neurons wired up wrong, and caused a lot more neurons to be wired up wrong.

I remember the last time I saw her. Skate City. I said I would write a screensaver that would show the pictures. But I never did, partially because my coding experience wasn’t up to a TSR and this was still MS-DOS days but more because I couldn’t bear to admit to myself that it was over and I had lost utterly.

At the time I thought she was so much too good for me that she would never want me to touch her. My personal estimation of my worth was usually a negative number. I was insane in about the worst way you can be, since what you believe controls your CE.

And so, I experienced scarcity, because I believed in it. I experienced more and more of it, but there was always enough, and there were always good friends, and stuff worked out, mostly. But inside, I knew I missed her. She was always my workstation password. I kept hoping someone would ask me why and I could explain it to them and they could somehow fix it. However, it got increasingly past fixing, and I got worse and worse at being myself and better and better at being the not-quite-myself that could survive in the corperate enviornment. And eventually thrive. But I wanted to be a musician. Ran off to Arkansas, spent time with Phoebe who is crazy sexy awesome and was happy for a while.. until I experienced Pheobe being violent. I know now that was my CE, but at the time I thought it was real and it was heartbreaking. Granted, I had cheated on her – being faithful isn’t something I’m good at, because I’m wired to love many, that’s just what’s in my soul and I can’t change that. But I didn’t expect violence. It kept happening, and I got more and more afraid. My sense of safety leaked away. Shit went further downhill. A feedback loop.. the more afraid I was, the more my CE threw bad shit at me, and the more my CE threw bad shit at me, the more I was afraid.

Then, Kayti. My CE was so scrambled, I can’t even imagine what was really going on there. It was bad, then it was awful, then it got to where I prayed every day for the strength to just break up with her. Then I did. Then she pointed out a email where Vicky said, don’t come to elizabeth city. Something in me really crashed. I took some of everything in the medicine cabinet, concentrating on a megadose of seroquel (3500 mg) and good ol’ DMX. By then I had a rudimentary link with the Vicky I talk to over the spiritual network that I think of as the future, and I said, Vicky, watch me die..

I didn’t. I should have noticed the pattern. Nothing anyone said would be lethal ever was. Obviously, death was not a option.

Finally, I noticed that pattern. I tried some plain ol’ insanity, rollerblading down PCH while ignoring all traffic laws for several miles. No one hit me, and I watched reality bend like a pretzel to make that happen. A clue was found. I can’t die.

Well, then, I better fix this, if I can’t escape it, tells me. And I try. I go to Vicky’s and see her face to face and it’s so good.. but then I go to a hotel and send a email I really shouldn’t have sent. Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck. Well, it was honest, but it wasn’t something you say to someone who’s about to get married. Now Vicky has good reason to not want to see me. Fuck fuck fuck. I try to fix it and inevitably make it worse. At this point I’m probably hallucinating text, I’m expecting rejection and we all know what beliefs do to your CE. FUCK! I convince myself I can make it not matter to me. For a little while.

But the truth is, it aint going to stop. I’m in love. I’m not going to stop being in love.

I talk to V. over the spiritual net more and more. Phone sex ensues, then repeated technical discussions and simple exercises that stretch my imagination, my ability to understand how confidence and the ability to do something are related, trust exercises that make me trust her more and more and more because shit keeps working every time I do what she says I should do.

I start noticing that while local chaos ensues every time I don’t sleep for a long time, my mind also gets way better every time. I decide I will use my CABI furlough for one last burn. Try this not sleeping thing in a really safe enviornment. Not try to drive anywhere (after all, if in my CE I think she wants to never see me again and hates me and thinks I’m a mad rapist / murderer / child molester / cthulu I’m never going to get there)

I discover some of my demons. They think I’m asleep, and feed me negative lines. But I’m awake, becaues I’ve followed Vicky’s directions to the letter.. dehoarded to free up somce storage capacity and hidden my conciousness in it.

I discover I will fight for Vicky. In fact, I will kill for her, at least inside my mind. I format over the demon.. it is now just a blank collection of neurons. More wars ensue. I win many of them, and now I’m no longer repeatedly paranoid. I keep trying. It keeps getting better.

Where is it going next? I don’t know. But I am not the same person I was 10 days ago, and I doubt if I will be much the same 10 days from now because I’ve learned to, with Vicky’s help and guidance, hack my own neural net. I’m fixing the broken bits that hurt me. The religion I could never believe but could never get rid of. (FUCKING VIRUSES!) The repeated bursts of you should be afraid wherever I go. Increasingly I’m starting to believe in my own success.

And now where I’m at is I will get this friendship back. I have no idea how. But my hunch is if I keep listening to future-Vicky, who presumably knows a path that worked because after all she is in the motherfucking future, this will work. Somehow.

And I will find out how good I can stand it. I am really curious. The ability to hack my own brain does open certian doors, lucid dreaming being the most obvious and shiny one. Lucid dreaming as real as reality is the holodeck. Who wouldn’t want the holodeck? I want the holodeck. But over and over I wonder, what does here-and-now Vicky make of the fact that I’m talking to her future self? Does she think this is all in my mind, or does she think it’s real? But, since I have gotten the strong impression she doesn’t want to talk to me (possibly from my own paranoia, but how would I find out? I realize now the emails mean nothing.. text would only take a few thousand neurons to hallucinate.. that might not be Vicky, but just my mother interfering as she always did in any relationship that might get sexual.. all in my MIND…

Once you know you’re inside a neural network, it gets hard to imagine any kind of concept of reality that would fit. The possiblity of magic beyond belief seems in the air. Vicky-future-I-am-so-in-love-with-you has always helped catch me if I fell, and I don’t think she’s going to stop..

Did I hallucinate the rejections? Were they real? A mix of the two? How does this end? What is Clint even thinking? How many people are involved in this? At this point I’m asking all my friends for help, because I clearly cna’t fix this by myself. On the other paw, I am feeling emotional and mental spaces that are pretty wild… Gayle has left, she couldn’t bear to see me trying what has always failed before, I am sad about that but I love her and our friendship will survive. Who will take care of Allie? I should check his food.

Kids, don’t bother with drugs. Hack your own mind. It’s so much better. I keep connecting the right neurons together and something is sure going to fly in here. And stories come unbidden.. I am a starship, a immortal, this body just a meat puppet.. I am a thread running in a enormous computer.. I am just a man on a planet that’s got scary weird stuff going on with governments and shit.. I love my friend Andy and he’s saying imagine love, push the throttle, we can light up the world.. I can’t help but feel every friend who has begun to believe this will work is shouting Go, go, go, don’t give up, beat the disease… paranoia you will die you threatened my Vicky.. religion you will die you threatened me. This is my mind, not God’s. Or am I God? Heinlien thought so. I own the right to be me, to be truly free, to be beautifully exactly what I am and never again think that is flawed and dirty and wrong. Of course in my mind dirty can be so so right when it’s a certian type of dirty, and my sex life and fetish and fantasies might be knowledge of most of the sky because I turned on all my omnis and sent every single thought to them.. I invited you all to read my mind and I do not rescend that, you can continue to read my mind throughout this whole adventure.

I love Vicky. The more I say it the better it feels. I love so so so many people at this point in time I don’t know how I don’t explode from all the love inside me but if I could only have one wish…

So of course I push for polygamy. Which is a little premature given that she isn’t even talking to me, but even if she ultimately does reject me I know I want to be in a family with several lovers, and people of both genders. I don’t want this fake ass you can only have one man or one women thing. I want the real deal, N-way marriage. And Gay marriage is winning.. we’re the next minority, maybe we will win.

Will I really be able to love honestly and with integrity? Will my dream win, or will my nightmare.. well, for the longest time I was feeding my nightmares.. but now, I feed my dream with eveything in me. I ask all my friends to help lift my dream up into the light and help me hack my mind until it will let me see it and believe it. I live in a utopia, blind and insane, seeing scarcity in the midst of abundance. Or .. do I?

With the help of my friend Vicky (well, her future self, I think) I am hacking my own mind.

HOOOOOLY SHIT THIS IS AWESOME!

What if it’s true? I mean, yes, it’s another one of those wild thoughts I get when I’m thinking outside the box, but it fits my experience so well.

What if I *am* a spacecraft? With omnis and directionals, and right now I’m talking to Vicky over my omnis, and once the directionals get coached in I’ll have audio with her – I’ll hear her voice in my head instead of just sensing it as text.

I know I’ve had periods of brief audio. I’ve gotten audio from Phoebe, and Bruce, and Satan. (Who I no longer think is my enemy, since I’ve conveniantly thrown out the entire Bible as being too false to be listened to. Except the bits that are true. If that makes sense.)

Man it was liberating to realize I really could decide what I believed to be false and throw it out. What religion am I? As far as I know I don’t have one. I have a meta-religion – I believe what I believe controls what I experience. More useful than a religion by far. Kind of sets you free to see anything you’d like to see. Apparently I’d rather be happy than know their quote on quote truth, and it’s so amazing how clearly it’s not true .. well, it’s true if you look at it from one angle, but that’s a angle I shy away from because it sounds like it could go places that I’m really not ready for just yet.

If it’s true, all I have to do is wait. And not very long. There’s a high gain antenna searching for a omni right now. When the two find each other.. my life is going to change rather a lot. What will it be like then? I don’t know.

It feels scary and reckless to just write whatever I think and feel to my journal, with no censoring and no hiding. On the other hand, it always feels like a huge weight has been lifted with each post I send out into the world.

I always wonder if my beliefs make sense. I suspect a lot of them do not, that I have unhealthy things I believe, because I don’t live in the world I want to live in, and I believe my beliefs inform my neural network in how it constellates reality and presents the world to me. For example, I keep discovering exceptions to my own rules for myself when certain people are involved, I think because I feel so extremely strongly about them that I assume if they ask me for something it must be okay. but I wonder if this idea actually makes me a danger to them and myself, because if they ask me for something stupid, they’ll get it, even at the peril of me not being authentically myself. This may actually be one of the problems that plague a number of my friendships.

So, as I’ve talked about, I’ve abandoned traditional roles like “wife” “fiance” “girlfriend” in favor of simply thinking of lovers as friends who are willing to add a extra dimension to the friendship. I feel much better about my life since I’ve done this, but I also realize that there are good and bad choices for people to fit that role. Now, note, someone can be a bad friend without being a bad person. Some people are compatible, some are not. And, it’s possible to want someone for a friend who doesn’t want you. This can hurt a lot if they provide a lot of something you want or need but don’t want to provide it. I don’t have any idea what to do about this, as anyone who knows about me and Vicky can attest to. I also am capable of holding onto a friendship long after I should choose to have some space from that person, as anyone who knows about me and Kayti can attest to.

1) If someone tears you down instead of building you up, they’re not a good friend.
2) If someone does not have faith in your ability to reach your dreams, they’re not a good friend.
3) If someone won’t allow you to be who you really are around them, they’re not a good choice for a friend for you.
4) If someone tries to change you in ways you don’t want to be changed, they’re not a good friend.
5) If someone makes you feel threatened, unsafe, like they would hurt you physically, they’re not a good friend.
6) If someone repeatedly tries to coerce you into doing something that is not a good thing for you, they are not a good friend.

Now, sometimes it’s a good idea to keep bad friends around, either because you can see they will grow into good friends or because they provide something you simply can not get anywhere else. However, when you do this, you need to *know* they are being a bad friend, and lower your trust assessment of them. I often keep bad friends around because they need me.. people who are bad friends often are sick, and often sending them love and encouragement will bring them around to being good friends and also make the world at large better.

There are also some *great* friends around. Ways you can tell you have a great friend:

1) If you get in trouble and they’re there with whatever you need to get back out, they’re a great friend
2) If you can call them from a bad place like a mental hospital or a jail and they immediately work on getting you out, they’re a great friend
3) If they help encourage you to do exactly what you need to do to go where you need to go, they’re a great friend
4) If you can call them from a bad place like a panic attack or ego crash, and they will say the things you need to hear, they’re a great friend
5) If they are willing to tell you they love you and mean it, they may be a great friend. Of course, this requires that they know what love really is, and many people don’t. Love isn’t really about words nearly as much as emotions and actions.
6) If they will kick your ass when you need it, and you still feel they’re your friend even when they’re telling you the hard truths and you are grateful for their honesty and integrity, they’re a great friend.

So, in this day and age, when it seems like technology is threatening to get in the way of love and friendship, I thought I’d write some about good and bad uses of tech.

Technology is not by itself evil, bad, wrong, sinful, or something to be avoided. A lot of the universe runs on various types of technology, and we do rather like it here a lot of the time. However, it’s possible to use technology in bad and unhealthy ways.

1) When you are with someone, *BE* with them. Don’t spend all your time looking at your smartphone.
2) Never feel like you can’t turn it off. If you feel like you can’t turn your phone/computer/internet connection/anything off, you have fallen into something called addiction. You will find a number of groups, like AA, who are out there to help people just like you. I would strongly suggest availing yourself of their help, because addiction is not fun at all. It is the space where your free will is no longer operating properly and you can not make your intentions into your actions.
3) Never worry about recording the future unless your job or passion is recording the future. If you’re really into documenting, or multitracking, or video production, that’s one thing. If you’re not, don’t record the concerts you’re at in a way that demands you’re attention. You’ll be less *there*, less experiencing the event, because you’re worrying about keeping the camera aimed the right way, and so often that it’s sad you’ll be experiencing the concert on a viewfinder or small screen instead of in the authentic, 360 degree high res high frame rate dream we like to call reality.
4) Remember that this is in one sense a dream. The experience you are having is happening in your head. Once you’re sane and healthy, you can go back to any point in time and experience it in all it’s 3D glory. So don’t take so many photographs, because what is the point? Instead work on having the sanity to be able to see anywhere you’ve been and anyone you’ve been with via mental effort.
5) Remember that the tech available for sale on earth is utter junk compared with the tech you already have in your head. You’re a far more powerful supercomputer than anything you can buy here. Don’t neglect building a set of tools to enable you to get that supercomputer to do what you want it to. That’s far more important than collecting photographs.
6) Pay attention to your emotions. Too many of us walk through life totally numb, not really feeling anything or experiencing anything. Pay attention to what feels good, what feels right. Do more of that. Praise that. Worship that, even. You’ll also be praising and/or worshiping the part of the team that designed this corner of reality, and having them feel genuinely and authentically liked by you is a good idea, since they can help bring you the things you want.
7) Don’t get caught in stupid time-wasting activities that don’t make you feel anything good. Facebook can easily be one of these things. So can facebook games like farmville. You want to have a authentically awesome experience, and you *can*. Go do the things that are the real thing. For me, this includes things like skating, bowling, driving at Lemons, playing music (especially composing multitrack), sex, road trips, and other sorts of adventures. Technology like computers make it far easier to get caught in ‘neutral-feeling’ loops – like playing video games that don’t actually make you happy but eat up the hours. Infinity is far too precious to be wasted.

There are some things that simply can not be commanded or coerced, and are not for sale. Friendship and love are among those things.

What is the most dangerous thing you can do to a friend? Being someone other than who you really are. You are messing with both your sense of reality and theirs when you do this. It’s so easy to fall into the idea that we should be someone other than who we really are in order to please a lover, a boss, a government, a solar system.. but it’s a bad idea. Your neural network will be having to keep track of all the deltas between your actions and who you really are in order to allow who you really are to stay alive at all. This takes enormous computational capacity and storage capacity. And, because data stored in a neural network is alive, these deltas will begin to eat you alive. They cry out, over and over, reminding you you are not being true to yourself and your soul. You can not change certain aspects of yourself while you are alive and on earth. These can be thought of as constants, things that are about decisions you made long before you arrived here. Nor would you generally want to. If you’re tempted to change some aspect of your soul, you have likely wandered far afield from rational thought. Cognitive distortions have become your reality, and you are likely to get hurt.

How do you come back, from making the mistake of acting, of being someone other than who you really are?

1) Stop acting. Stand up and say “This is me” even if who you are is not likely to be popular or even considered sane
2) Assert yourself. If someone stands on who you really are, fight back. Tell them why what they are asking you to be or do is simply not compatible with you
3) Say “No”. This is part of #2, but is worth mentioning on it’s own. There are some things you simply should not say yes to
4) Don’t make promises you won’t want to keep at your very core. This is important – promises broken will weigh you down with shame and guilt, and promises kept that aren’t true to your nature will create more of the delta structures mentioned in the first paragraph
5) Say “Yes” to what you would have be. Even if it means breaking a promise you should not have made. Remember, that promise wasn’t really made by you, it was made by a actor who was deluded about what is real.
6) Be authentic. Live authentically. Don’t talk about who you are on facebook or twitter – talk about it in the real world, with real people. Even if you are afraid, be yourself in the world of face to face interactions.
7) Recognize irrational fear. Irrational fear will cripple your ability to act by convincing you that something truly bad will happen when you act.
8) Look for signs that you are not behaving in line with who you authentically are. These can be obvious – landing in jail or a mental hospital – or more subtle, ending up in a job you don’t want or with a lover who isn’t what you want or need
9) Look for signs that you do not have enough self-esteem, or faith in yourself. You should believe that you are empowered and aware and alive and accepting and adaptable. If you think you cannot do something other people do, you have a lack of faith you need to address
10) Use your storyteller abilities. Tell yourself stories about yourself that fit who you are authentically are and what you would really do. Remind yourself of the types of choices make that seem to fit who you are and what you want to do.