I know it’s been a couple of weeks since my last post, but [excuses, excuses] the rigors of a particularly disgusting and challenging move have been siphoning most of my energy. And yes, for weeks now (did I say it was particularly challenging?) Fortunately, that cycle has nearly come to a close, and I am nearly ready to close the book on a long and painful chapter in my life and open a new one, one which makes good on a lot of promises I made when I first opened up this li’l place on the internet. I had a lot of definite goals in mind back in month nine of oh nine, goals that were knocked severely off course by [excuses, excuses] broken recording equipment, bad living situations, financial stress, and social confusion and isolation, among other things. My optimism had evaporated.
BUT NOW, I have a wonderful new place to live, an employment situation I love, and the means to get my recording situation locked down, at long last. For the remainder of April, I’ll likely be tracking some rough new 4-track demos, and then come May, I’ll be dropping a fat stack-o-cash on a new computer… and at that point, the deluge should commence. The back catalog of Real Frogs songs that I think are legitimately good songs which haven’t been properly recorded extends well past 100 at this point, and not having the ability to put that shit to tape (or whatever the equivalent euphemism is for digital recording) has been a constant source of stress… so once I have the means, it’s all likely to happen as quickly as I can make it happen. I still have big plans of getting at least five albums out before the end of the year, and the way things are going now, it seems realistic.
I know that I’ve written optimistic posts on this blog in the past that turned out to mean nothing, but I can truly feel something new squirming around in the aether now, and I’m ready to snatch it up and serve it to you, loyal listeners. All three of you.
Skyler and Ena like sisters on the wall,
magic animals in hand,
Who knows what secrets behind white frames, tiny spirals of timid affection,
only fractionally expressed these days.
/ And Lord I watched her face melt from joy-teary to terrified,
/ in isolation enfolded in the anemone of hearts and arms.
/ A Night-Terror crept up on daytime, and sucked its marrow,
/ spat-out blood-white on the screen, and slowly dried clear.
Xavier spun until sick, and
once sick,
spun until sick once more,
still there’s cover in the shade of the slide tube,
and those pale plastic flowery laughters shimmer and shine,
tiny echoes of whispered jokes,
weaving themselves slowly into a cool cloth to break the fever.
/ And Lord I watched their faces freezing for fun,
/ their eyes spun in their places and shone like the stars.
/ Never lit up the roofs at night but
/ shone nonetheless, only to create an internal world
/ that recreated itself, and stubbornly dried clear.
“Excuse us, we are only Blood coursing through,
bearing small fruit,
with deafening breath, whispered slowly.
“We are only a Small Menagerie, rendered timeless
and cradled in a backpack,
shown off to strangers
and loved ones alike, in lurid Technicolor,
brighter than our own reflection in those illumined
human eyes, still pregnant with gleeful anticipation.
“Excuse us, we are only the Quiet,
we are only the Quiet.
We broadcast no narrative,
and life is breathed into us,
and we are poison to our fathers,
and we are poison to our mothers,
/ And the Lord he granted us a process for the poisons,
/ to keep renewed and to recalibrate.
/ Once moths, we emerged worms,
/ worms that stared at that poison sky.
“Excuse us, we are branches from the trunks of ex-lovers,
stretched over the distance of time to smell your face with stomata,
our lumens too high and our laminae overstretched,
and we are your heart, thumping clumsily through the streets of our cities.
/ And the Lord he replaced the spring,
/ wound himself,
/ and quickly dried clear.
It’s an impossible question to answer satisfactorily, and a miserable question to have posed by a skeptic you love immensely. Someone with whom I was once in a relationship went through periods where she would doubt the sincerity of my love, and would demand that I explain the underlying reasons for the existence of my attraction. My response would generally consist of a few stuttered phonemes in a panic to translate into words WHY it was exactly that I loved her, and I would almost always return to a circular defense.
“WHY do you love me?”
“I… I mean… b-b-because… I mean there are a lot of reasons, I don’t know… because I love you!”
Of course, we all know that a circular defense typically translates as an admission of having no response to the challenge, that the circular defender’s stance is built on a house of cards. In this case, the fact that I turned to a circular defense always became proof that I was, in fact, lying about my feelings, because I didn’t have annotated reasons for having them. The core problem here is that we typically defend our choices with concrete logic, and what one feels has no basis in the system of logic we’re used to following. The reasons for the myriad of emotional responses we feel are all abstract, and well beyond our capability of understanding at this point in our evolution.
OF COURSE, NOW I’M GOING TO EXPLAIN IT.
After I wrote that sentence, I hit a stopping block and didn’t know how to continue with the blog entry.
So this morning at work, while mounting hardware to giant speakers, we were listening to a Bat for Lashes album and discussing the immediate comparisons that sprung to mind, and I threw out Kate Bush, and was immediately reminded of recently discovering that Big Boi has been obsessed with Kate Bush since high school. I mentioned this to my friend and co-worker Aubrey, who asked if I had heard a recent episode of the Moth Radio Hour in which Darryl McDaniels (y’know, DMC) talks about the circumstances surrounding his Sarah McLachlan obsession. Go ahead and listen. (The segment under discussion begins at 37:38).
For those in too much of a hurry to listen, here are the spoilers: Darryl McDaniels should logically be absolutely happy. He had a great childhood and unbelievable success as an adult. Yet while on tour in 1997, he became extremely depressed, filled with a void which he couldn’t explain. He grew suicidal, contemplating methods of self-termination, without understanding why. One day, with his condition bottoming out, DMC’s limousine driver turned the radio on, and out poured the song “Angel” by Sarah McLachlan, and after that, to hear him tell it, listening to Sarah McLachlan became Darryl’s reason for staying alive. Soon after this, Darryl was inspired to write about his childhood, to preserve the memory of the person outside of his performing persona, and he called his parents to ask about the details of his birth, and they chose that time to tell him that he was adopted. He immediately seized upon this as the source of his illogical anomie, and felt inspired to make some music – with Sarah McLachlan. So he called her, and they recorded a song together, and as he was leaving, she confessed to him that she, too, had been adopted.
“Everything happens for a reason.”
There’s no conscious process to feeling love for something or someone, it just hits you, full of awe and illogic, abstract and glowing, suddenly and completely. In a strong enough dose it can overtake you and disarm you completely, blowing your eyes wide open and casting out your cynicism in one giant convulsion, so you remember how to smile at strangers, and ‘what’s so wrong with the world after all?’ And you have absolutely no choice in the matter. You love what you love, because you love it. And generally, you use the things you love to define yourself, even though you made no decision whatsoever to love them; your love is just something that happened to you. Look at anyone’s SocNet profile: “THIS IS MY NAME, AND THESE ARE THE THINGS I LOVE*.” You may choose what love to broadcast over the internet, but you don’t choose your visceral reaction, nor can you explain it in any logical way. You love something or someone because that is the visceral reaction they create in your consciousness.
NOW I WILL EXPLAIN IT:
Our emotional reaction to things is directly correlated to abstract frequency spectra, the kind that we humans don’t acknowledge right now. Our personal frequency is harmonic or disharmonic with the frequencies represented by other memes (including movies, songs, books, places, ideologies, personas, people, etc.). There are obviously multiple axes to consider (there is not just an x-axis of [LOVE <---> HATE]; this gets fairly multi-dimensional very quickly), but the interaction of frequencies causes a reaction in the perceiver, and that reaction is what we call “Emotionz.”
So why did Darryl McDaniels become obsessed with Sarah McLachlan? I, for one, certainly don’t love Sarah McLachlan (sorry, Sarah). I was really into her singles that were on my local Alternative Rock station back in ‘96 or ‘97, but nothing beyond that. I have nothing against her, but there’s nothing about her that makes me feel any sort of passion. On the axis of emotional response, I’d say the coordinates are pretty close to (0,0,0, 0, …). Yet Darryl was hit with that immediate uncanny and instantaneous love for a thing that happens so rarely to us humans, as he was feeling despair for an issue of which he had no conscious knowledge. Sarah McLachlan hit his most important resonant frequency, and though I’m certain it wasn’t just the fact of their shared identity as adopted children that caused that resonance, it certainly played a role, even though it was not consciously detected on any level whatsoever. Our subconsciousness knows far more than we conceptualize — and that’s why I side with Darryl’s conclusion. Everything happens for a reason; there is no such thing as coincidence. The fact that these seeming synchronicities arise has more to do with conscious existence consisting of a tapestry woven of echoing threads that double back on one another and intersect in beautiful patterns that we generally pay no attention to unless they are particularly meaningful. All of us has a story similar in quality to Darryl’s (and Lord, I’ve got hundreds), and we mostly write these things off as coincidence in the chaotic soup of the world, but I contend that this is an illogical conclusion that exists in reaction to the profound illogic of religion (because to suggest that there is structure and order to the abstract as a result of the existence of exponentially advanced consciousness is too close to Bible-thumping for many). ESPECIALLY once you start paying close attention to the patterns themselves, when you’ll quickly see that these kinds of “coincidences” surround us every day, they just tend to hew closer to the emotional response at (0,0,0,…) rather than the profound emotional extremes of love amidst suicidal depression.
As a certain TV show recently taught us, everything happens for a reason, even if that reason is only to serve the narrative and keep things interesting for both the characters and the audience. After all, maybe the author isn’t perfect, even if everyone expects him/her to be.
On a long enough timeline, consciousness, following its intrinsic mimetic urge, will create a simulated version of its own perceived reality, replete with every minute detail and indistinguishable from “base reality.” Consciousness will not only create multitudinous mutant simulations of “actual reality,” but will also create innumerable “fictional” realities, each as rich and detailed and verisimilitudinous as what we have always experienced as reality. Thus the world we inhabit must be “fictional;” it is a “false” reality authored by a class of consciousness an order of magnitude beyond our own. Of course, using words like “fiction,” “reality,” and “false” is misleading, in that there must be no true reality or false reality; realities are born out of the process of parent realities attempting to understand themselves.
Self-awareness is pervasive in some way across realities, because it is the mechanism which records and transcribes the data present in the parent system for replication and mutation. Consciousness is not a fluke; it must exist in order for a system to have the quality we call “reality.” Without a mind to perceive it, a thing is not “real.” There may be data present that refers to the thing and defines it in some way, but a blueprint for a house is not the house itself. If a tree falls in the forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Of course not! There is data generated about the tree falling, and about the sonic frequencies generated as a result, but if they never reach a perceiver, there is no “sound.” Let’s say there are two minds present which perceive the sound of the tree falling: one is an insect immediately adjacent to the tree, mere inches away (and yes, for some reason there is only one insect inside the radius that could hear the tree), and the other is a human in a cave a mile away. There are now two sounds that exist, and both are COMPLETELY different. The number of different sounds generated by that one event is dictated by the number of minds which receive the data and parse it into coherence. If nothing does, there is no sound.
So think of yourself (both your mind and your body) as a system of measuring mechanisms which receive data from the giant frequency field we inhabit and parse that data into a coherent “reality.” Our human machine is set to receive data from a specific set of spectra, and we are limited in our perception to those spectra. Our senses are not configured to receive data outside of that set, and often this leads us to conclude that those frequencies are not “real.” We are gradually evolving new sensory equipment (as we are now engineering our own evolution in the forms of the tools we create), and we are able to verify the existence of frequencies we once didn’t know of, and as we go forward, we will slowly realize that all of existence is represented by information, and that information is expressed in vibrational frequencies that we will slowly learn to measure.
When I say “ALL OF EXISTENCE,” I mean Infinite Everything, All Realities. The building block of existence is the wave, a piece of energy at a specific vibrational frequency. I’m going to call this building block the “meme.”
“Wait, what? A meme? Like, the unit of cultural information proposed by Richard Dawkins as the next self-replicator? How can that be the basic building block of reality, if memes only exist inside minds? Surely the true building block is something concrete, some boson or something…”
All there is is information. Even if we’re talking about particles, there is still a set of information which describes everything about those particles, and if that’s true, than what is the particle itself other than the perceived object, which is being rendered from a set of measured data? Our brains translate our measured data into something we feel is concrete reality, but it’s an illusion; there IS no concrete reality. I’m not saying there is no consensus reality that we all experience, nor am I debating the existence of the world we inhabit – I’m just saying it isn’t “REAL.” Information is truly real, and the building block of information is the meme, thus the meme is the building block of reality, and memes live and reproduce in the field of conscious minds, just like existence itself. This statement is at odds with the opinions of most in the field of memetics, and with the passage I linked to above:
Memes emerge in brains and travel outward, establishing beachheads on paper and celluloid and silicon and anywhere else information can go. They are not to be thought of as elementary particles but as organÂisms. The number three is not a meme; nor is the color blue, nor any simple thought, any more than a single nucleotide can be a gene. Memes are complex units, distinct and memorable-units with staying power. Also, an object is not a meme. The hula hoop is not a meme; it is made of plastic, not of bits.
Perhaps I should just develop a different word or concept for my elementary particle (memelets?), but then the question arises: HOW complex must a unit of information be in order to qualify as a meme? How distinct, and how memorable? There are certainly different types of memes, most prominently internal and external (which bears some analogy to subjective and objective), but they are still all units of information of varying complexity. Currently the world of memetics seems to hold the opinion that there is some concrete existence of non-information based items out there, that atoms are more real than the data which describes them, and that is why there is this disambiguation between memes and non-memes. I’m going to go into a great deal of detail on this blog about this, classifying different types of memes and describing their behavior, which is fractally self-replicating. Fractal self-replication is the way things work, after all, so it must be a behavior of both the most elementary bit of data in nature and the entire whole of the system itself, which is what I’ve (hopefully?) described here.
Sorry for the lag in posting, sometimes this stuff takes hours and still feels incoherent, but I’m learning not to sweat it and to just hit that “Publish” button. So, without further ado…
About two years ago, I had what I considered to be an epiphany, where I noticed how two human consciousnesses can be completely intertwined and in sync with one another for a period of time, and to both people it seems for all purposes to be something that will remain synchronized indefinitely, while in truth as time passes the two minds gradually fall out of sync, usually to the point where it seems strange to think that at some point those two minds were completely lined up with one another. I drew a direct parallel from this concept to the feeling when one is driving, there is music in the car, and the windshield wiper taps the hood in what seems to be perfect time with the tempo of the song, and concluded quickly that consciousness must operate in some way as a frequency or a wave.
Gradually, since I noticed that particular isomorphism, I have continually shifted perspectives and frameworks in an ability to understand the mechanisms which underlie our minds and our experience and what we call reality. I began looking for patterns and similarities in places no one seems to be looking, and finding them in abundance. For the most part, I feel that the ontological theories that our species has spouted and that most everyone subscribes to (on that spectrum from Evangelical Creationists to Atheist Big-Bangers) are incredibly archaic and illogical, and if you erase the cultural history of our vocal musings and postulations about Where We Come From and What It All Means and begin with a clean slate, I’m fairly sure the theories that arise are far different than those we generally subscribe to right now, on an axis that runs perpendicular to the one with Fundamentalist Old Religionist at one end and Evangelical Atheist at the other. People ask “Do you believe in God?” as if it is a yes or no question, and even the use of the word “GOD” has so many profoundly different associations in the minds of so many people that I doubt anyone really agrees on what that word means. I absolutely sense that there is extant consciousness which perceives exponentially more than human consciousness, and I’ll write a lot more about that, but I don’t call that concept GOD. God, as most people understand “him,” is a character in a book.
Consciousness is the mechanism which both creates and replicates “reality,” but we have never thought of our natural mimetic urge as being possible of creating an experience as rich and affecting as Living a Human Life, being possible of creating a physical world and universe as unimaginably expansive and detailed as the one we inhabit. We scratched images on cave walls, we mimicked movements, we invented common symbols to communicate around, we recreated our environments and objects in paintings and sculptures, recreated our emotions onstage in plays and music, and in our common symbols in stories and text. Now we create entire worlds and narratives in video games that are growing ever closer to recreating “real life” and a “real world,” and in the next 10-20 years, the experience within a video game will likely storm through the uncanny valley and emerge on the other side, where we can have a “virtual” experience that will be indistinguishable from “real” experience. What that means beyond that, considering the exponential nature of the growth of technology and the cyclical nature of… nature, is that we must begin reconsidering what our conscious experience is and where it comes from, because if, in the course of the existence of the universe, consciousness evolves to the point that it becomes able to create/simulate consciousness and “reality,” it would seem that consciousness is the mechanism which enables existence to replicate, over and over, in a complex and multi-dimensional fractal pattern. Consciousness creates itself. The snake isn’t eating its tail, it’s vomiting it out.
More on that later. Originally I was just going to post a link to this book excerpt, which clearly and concisely explains the concept of memes, which is an essential concept to understand in order for me to communicate much of anything else going forward. I have several notes about that excerpt, most prominently that I think the definition of “meme” should be more expansive than generally anyone thinks, given that all of existence is composed of information, I believe the meme to be the basic building block of existence: one unit of information. That one unit is composed of an infinite number of other units; you can zoom in forever, and you can also zoom out forever – a fractal pattern. I will hopefully go into more detail on this tomorrow; right now my brother is coming to visit, and I’m tired and rambly anyway.
Writing the first sentence is always the most difficult part for me. Once that’s out of the way, I usually stop worrying about the writing process itself and just let the words fall out of my brain. I have been stuck in paralysis for months, analyzing and criticizing everything I write, without ever writing anything; my editor never allows the words to begin the process of precipitating out of my brain into coherent and communicable ideas on the screen. I worry about what will be lost in translation from thought to language; I worry that my ability to communicate through text has deteriorated just as noticably as my ability to communicate face-to-face in real time. Both of these issues share a common source, and that is the poisonous voice of my internal critic, who is at it ad infinitum:
“No, John Paul, that will make you seem crazy or unstable. You can’t include an aside from some abstract independent persona who lives in your mind in a block quote in the second paragraph of your attempt to return to the world of blogging. I know that you think you are clever to use this aside as a contextually relevant illustration of the problems which have prevented you from writing blog entries, responding to people on facebook, keeping in touch with friends, or generally communicating what you wish to communicate at all, but you need to remember that only the loathsome think of themselves as clever. Now highlight all of this tomfoolery and hit that delete key, stupid.”
While I was in school I generally felt very little fear at the prospect of seeming crazy or stupid or otherwise alien; in middle school and high school my book-learnin’ smarts were generally broadcast to the student body anyway, and when one has a reputation as a super-smart kid (whether or not one wishes to carry that connotation), it tends to engender feelings of alienation on its own, and certainly quiets any fear of coming across as an idiot. In college I had a comfortable social place where I was constantly around people I loved who I felt understood me on my terms; I felt I had a close community of people I knew well who knew me well. In addition to this I was performing well in school in a multitude of capacities and receiving plenty of positive feedback. Once, I was able to feel proud of what I had accomplished with no negative accompanying emotions, but now if I feel a twinge of pride at something I’ve done, the critic butts in and makes me feel terrible, generally through a very simple one-two combo of “you should feel ashamed of yourself for feeling pride in the first place, but you haven’t even done anything you should be proud of anyway, so you should really take another look at your ability to judge our own work.” Perhaps the critic is on to something with that last clause. These days I can only find the flaws.
(Side note to the concerned: I do not think of ‘the critic’ as a seperate conscious being, nor do I ‘hear its voice inside my head.’ I am anthropromorphizing a specific variant of my thought process to make this illustration more communicable – ed.*)
*I do not think of ‘the editor’ as a seperate conscious being, nor do I ‘read its text inside my head.’ I am using the trope of an inserted clarifying statement from an editor to make this illustration more communicable, and also because an inserted comment from an anthropromorphized thought process as paragraph four rhymes with using the same mechanism as paragraph two. I wonder what persona this anthropromorphized thought-process will take, and if this rhyme scheme will continue? – anonymous
After I graduated from Furman my head was inflated with grandiose ideas about what my future held, the long-awaited liberation of my brilliant mind, in which I would be free to unleash my powers of creation upon a world who would soon be eager to behold them. Quickly, however, my self-confidence motor sputtered, died, and began a new career as a refurbished motor of self-doubt and self-loathing. And alcoholism. I no longer had a safe social community of friends and peers, and the game of keeping in contact with people who I didn’t often see was (and still is) a game whose rules I don’t understand. For a while I still had people close to me who I trusted, but as time passed I found myself more and more skeptical that anyone would want to have anything to do with me, and I continued to withdraw from everyone. I began believing that anyone who liked me or anything I did was faking it, and though I knew and have known that that belief is severely illogical, I had plenty of extraordinarily painful evidence to support it, evidence that expanded and became more explicit over time. People I trusted betrayed me. People I loved rejected me. Eventually I learned to be afraid of everyone, because whatever I do will be wrong to someone else, will seem crazy, stupid, pretentious or unstable, and even if I come across as endearing initially, eventually my behavior will be off-kilter enough to warrant abandonment. Especially when my behavior is frustrating non-response when anyone tries to reach out to me in some way. If a friend writes on my facebook wall, I’m usually overwhelmed with options on how to respond, and I can’t tease out the correct choice at all, I always feel like I will say something incredibly offensive or naive, and though I type and delete a number of responses, I generally go days before I come up with something appropriate, and then the fact that it is days later renders my appropriate response inappropriate. So, in 99% of cases, I appear to be some self-important asshole who can’t even find the time to respond to a measly facebook post, even though this could not be further from the truth. The fact that my non-communication generally communicates this message makes me even more frustrated, and (ironically) even less likely to respond.
I don’t know what it was exactly, but I recently realized that people are going to think I’m pretentious, crazy, or stupid. It is unavoiadable, considering the way I am configured. The things I do will be riddled with flaws, but to some people, the beauty will be brighter. I must stop aborting my fetuses out of fear that they will grow up to be imperfect adults. I have six albums tracklisted and ready to be recorded. I have a trilogy of young adult novels outlined and ready to be written. I have a bizarre new understanding of the underpinnings of consciousness and “reality” that I can’t wait to write down and share with others, even if many of them think I’ve lost my mind completely. I am ready to whirl around and stare at the camera for my close-up, my eyes manic and bloodshot, simultaneously abandoning and embracing my quest for perfection, for actual perfection is inherently flawed. I am unafraid to unhinge.
This weekend I am moving out into the country in the middle of nowhere for a little while, to get these records done and to get back on my feet. I plan on updating this blog daily, and for this updating process to become necessary and routine. My mind is pregnant with an enormous litter of memelets, and whether anyone wants them or not, they are about to run rampant across the internet. Let’s do this.
So there’s the mp3 for this week, and it’s a freebie, so all you non-members out there can enjoy. I’ll probably only leave this up for a couple weeks or so, though, so get it now while the gettin’s good.
I recorded all of this today on a four-track cassette recorder, and I wrote the music a couple months ago in an hour before a performance, which is almost exactly the same way I wrote the music for the Soulja Boy cover. Sometimes I don’t want to be bothered writing lyrics, and so I just write music around another set of lyrics, but always something that would be as surreal as possible. Sometimes it’s easier for me to translate whatever I’m feeling when I don’t have to translate it into words along with music. I always agonize too much over lyrics, so if I just use some other ones, everything happens so much more quickly.
Oh, and this marks the recorded debut of the harmonium I got for Christmas.
And I think it makes a perfect Valentine’s Day gift. From me to you.
Instead of whining about loneliness or the capitalist motivation behind this holiday, I’m going to take a close look at the official neuropeptide of Valentine’s Day: OXYTOCIN. Let me make sure to disambiguate early: I’m not talking about Oxycontin, the candy treat enjoyed by children everywhere, or OxiClean, the cleaning product made from the ashes of those who have donated their bodies to “Science.” I’m talking about the neurotransmitter that makes you feel LOVE/ATTACHMENT, the one yr brain squirts out when you’re unmistakably in love, or when your baby thirstily devours milk from your upper torso, or whilst cummin’.
I’ve always considered myself to have something of a problematic oxytocin addiction, even before I knew what it was I was addicted to. There’s something normalizing about the effects of being in a pair bonding relationship, for me, and not necessarily a romantic one. I have always felt more comfortable when there is someone I talk to every day, someone with whom I feel no social stress, some sort of “partner” who feels the same way about me. Sometimes it’s a girlfriend, sometimes it’s a female best friend, sometimes it’s a male best friend. Of course, my preferred source is a romantic partner who can overload me with that specific oxytocin high, and to whom I can offer the same overload. Of course, this is always more or less unpredictable, and sometimes one person in the pair bond stops producing oxytocin as a natural response to the other, leading to certain trauma and tragedy.
(A brief note: I know very little about the specific neurobiological activities being discussed here; it’s something I’m trying to teach myself to understand but it’s very dense and difficult. On this blog I’m just making broad conjectures relative to my own subjective experience. It’s not JUST oxytocin involved in the pair-bonding process; there’s all that vasopressin as well, but I’m pretty sure my simplified version is close, just very low-resolution)
I’ve known for a while now, having compared my own experiences with love and attachment with the experiences of others, that I must have a strange relationship with oxytocin, that perhaps there is something different about my processing or generation of “the love chemical.” About three years ago I went through an obsessive phase of research on oxytocin, having had an event of severe and immediate attachment to a person I had just met, and then enduring traumatic withdrawals from her when we ceased contact. I became convinced that other humans are, in a way, DRUGS. Other people alter the way I operate, at least. I feel like a different person around different people, and that’s what drugs do: they alter the way one operates. I was convinced, however, that some people actually cause chemical changes in the body, chemical changes that can be severe, euphoric, and genuinely consciousness-altering. After a bit of research, I began reading about oxytocin, and found that my conjecture was pretty much spot-on. Oxytocin affects CNS processes related to opiate addiction and cocaine addiction, and one can have withdrawals from it. And I’ve discovered recently that if I go a long period of time without a hefty dose, I start going sort of crazy.
It isn’t particularly a matter of “feeling happy being single,” but a matter of a cessation of feeling normal after long enough. I can hardly operate socially outside of a pair bond, usually, and having gone months without such a bond, I’m starting to feel hopelessly trapped inside my own mind, with no means of escape. There have been many times in my life I’ve been “happy being single,” but during those times I had a best friend and creative partner, the other kind of pair bond. Now that I have neither, I feel somewhat stuck in a spiral, trying to find an anchor point outside of myself, but failing, and growing more frustrated with myself for failing, as though it’s my fault.
This week I was reading an article on PopSci.com about dangerous technology under development, and one such technology was the use of oxytocin for various purposes, some of which are scary, some of which surprised me – apparently oxytocin has come under consideration as a treatment for autism. I could scarcely believe that with all the reading I’ve done on both autism and oxytocin, I had never seen anyone mention that the two were linked, but a quick google search proved that I just hadn’t looked closely. Apparently people on the spectrum have abnormal relationships with oxytocin and vasopressin, and oxytocin levels are typically lower in autistic subjects than they are in the general population.
Discovering this was like finding that one puzzle piece you knew was there on the table but, for all your close searching, you could never find, to the point that you concluded that it must be missing, and the puzzle is no longer worth doing, because you’ll never get the satisfaction of finding that piece. It was just stuck in the couch cushions.
So all of a sudden, my increased normalcy when I have someone I’m pair-bonded to makes more sense than ever. If I have a natural oxytocin deficiency, then it stands to reason that “treating” that deficiency through pair-bonding and subsequent oxytocin generation would increase my sense of normalcy and decrease a lot of my negative autistic behaviors, the same way that intravenous oxytocin improved said behaviors in individuals on the spectrum in this study.
I’m not sure what all of this means, but it sure is bizarre to suddenly find what I considered a crackpot theory about my own functioning to have some basis in scientific reality. I have spent a lot of time mentally self-flagellating because I don’t know how to “be happy on my own,” as I’m constantly told I should be able to do by others. The only time I was able to do this really was as a child, when I was content to exist in the complex universes my mind generated, but something happened when I hit puberty, some schism that made me feel like a whole piece that was also one half of something else, and would feel a void without the other half. I’ve written songs about this idea since I was fourteen, contemplating the concept of an ideal other.
Heh, that reminds me a whole lot of the lovely metaphor put forth in “The Origin of Love” from HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, so I’ll go ahead and leave you with that video, which I absolutely adore:
I’ll post this week’s mp3 later tonight or tomorrow morning. I still haven’t decided if I’m gonna post something old or try to finish something new that’s close to finished…
Posted a demo from summer 2006 up in that member zone. I’ve always been unsure as to how to expand this song, and I’ve always wanted to, but I think it still works pretty well just with guitar and vocals. But I’ll let YOU be the judge of THAT.
I’m drowning in perfectionist tendencies. Even when my intended goal is to produce something imperfect and fleeting, I get half-done, become frustrated with the imperfections, and then I just stop. I’ve been trying to write blog entries, and I have five or six two-paragraph false starts. I’ve been writing songs and recording some demos, but I get to a point where I really don’t know what’s supposed to come next, and even when something feels right, I’m nagged by internal questioning: “What if this isn’t the IDEAL melody/harmony/chord/instrument/key?” Complicating that frustration is my logical half leaning in and murmuring “John Paul, you know that nothing is ideal, right? And you can also go back and edit things if you really feel you need to…” And I know that logic is sound, but it doesn’t change anything.
So I’m going to start making blog posts every Friday. They’re going to be disorganized and imperfect, and will likely ramble into numerous side-notes and tangents, and will rarely convey a coherent thought when taken as a whole. However, I am not writing theses, these are BLOG ENTRIES. I’m pretty sure they’re supposed to be fleeting and imperfect. Also, I’m going to start posting songs every Sunday. I have enough stuff done (or close enough that I’ll finish over the next two weeks or so) that I can stick to this schedule, as long as my equipment holds up, which is seeming less and less likely as time goes on.
Today’s topic on the Real Frogs blog is: AUTISM. This is what I’ve wanted to write a blog post about for a few months now, but I have been terrified to discuss this too openly, and terrified to write an imperfect summary of my thoughts on this subject. But it’s happening right now.
I suppose autism seems like something of a non sequitur as a topic for my blog on my little music site, so I’ll offer up my explanation: A few months ago I became extremely fascinated by autism and determined to understand as much as possible, so I spent most of my free time reading about autism spectrum disorders, and eventually I started reading first-person accounts of what autism is like subjectively, which was the thing I was most curious about, and most wanted to understand. Reading these first-person accounts was somewhat perplexing at first, because most of the autistic thought processes seemed completely normal to me, but the more I read, the more specific quirks of my behavior and thought process were mentioned, and I had that grand bizarre moment of uncanny realization: I’m autistic. Just a little bit, of course, but it’s there. If I presented myself to a knowledgeable psych-professional and asked to be evaluated, I would probably be diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome (though I prefer “mildly autistic”). I’ve spent months overanalyzing this now, for fear of coming off as some sort of fraud, as I haven’t been diagnosed by an Official Health Professional, but I’ve done boatloads of research and I’ve also lived inside my head for twenty-six years and I know everything that goes on inside of there, and it’s funny to replay memories in my head with this new knowledge, like the flashback montage after some unexpected twist in a film, because all of a sudden SO MANY THINGS, so many perplexing things about my experience and my existence now make sense because they have been placed into their proper context.
People who know me personally will likely scoff at the idea of me being autistic, but that is mostly due to misperception of the condition itself, and partially due to one of my lifelong obsessions being human behavior, which strengthens my theory of mind and my ability to “act normal.” Thus in face-to-face social situations with neurotypical adults, I probably come off as a big strange and bouncy, but that’s all. Inside my head, though, it’s usually a whirlwind of near-overload, trying to land upon the right thing to say. Social interaction is mostly at least challenging and usually stressful, and sometimes I have to avoid it as much as possible in order to stay sane. I do a ton of post-processing of my social interactions, and this lasts for hours, and usually leaves me feeling stupid or inadequate and completely misperceived. I can always figure out how I should have acted in order to properly communicate, but I can’t do it in the moment, and this has ALWAYS been frustrating. One would think that this would make communication a lot easier through email or facebook or what have you, but I’m pretty sure I’m even worse at those; there are so many doubts that fly through my mind when I even think about writing someone I haven’t talked to in a long time, doubts about what to write, how long the letter should be, how personal, how many questions to ask him or her, how to communicate how much I miss people without seeming overaffectionate or creepy or something, etc. Obviously I end up never writing or calling or anything and I seem self-important and kind of like a jerk, and believing myself to be perceived this way by old friends has been extremely painful, and yet I do nothing, because I am frozen.
This grand freeze also applies to me promoting Real Frogs, as I feel like even asking anyone to “check out my site” or something like that is annoying and egotistical, and if I am perceived as annoying and egotistical (as I believe I often am by those who don’t know me well), said person is much less likely to be interested, and I will have miscommunicated entirely. I suppose that’s why I’m starting to write blog entries, in the hopes that more content will generate more traffic and more people will hear what I’m doing. If I’m writing and posting things, there’s an imagined audience to me, even if no one is reading or listening. I just have to stop imagining myself as having to perfectly please some imagined ideal audience, or else I’ll never get anything done.
04.04.2011 | | Posted by John Paul
