What hurt.
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?