Ain't Nothin' Wrong

Hi, I'm Tom, I'm here to talk to you about death...

Seriously. After last night, deep in thought, withdrawn from the external world as if in a trance, I finally got to the root cause of my anxiety and neurosis. It's basically this - If I refuse to live, I can't die. Remove myself from the equation by making things as easy, comfortable and non-confrontational as possible and there's no way I'll snuff it whenever my time comes. No amount of reading has ever touched upon this before, although without it I probably would've never even bothered asking the question. And there's a hypothesis to go with it, which I have also tested, quite literally without my conscious knowledge.

About two years ago, I underwent a hernia operation. I had withdrawn from my friends, family, everyone. I even put my girlfriend at the time through absolute hell, and I regret that to this day. She deserved better. That aside, I harbored an irrational yet very "real" fear of death, even though the risk of the operation was minimal. I took that insignificant risk and magnified it to ludicrous proportions. I stopped living, so how could I die? Needless to say, I survived the treatment.

For weeks afterward, I was feeling fantastic. Despite sitting on a couch, immobile for 10 or so hours a day and eating mush, I was quite possibly having peak experiences listening to new records and watching old episodes of Black Books. It was bizzare. But why?

When I gained enough strength to walk again, I was talking to strangers fearlessly, taking risks i'd have otherwise shied away from and became the life of the party. I thought I'd cheated death somehow - that I'd slipped under the anaesthetic and woke up in some fantastic dimension where pain could not befall me and the rigors of life had been ground up and thrown away. I was peaceful, calm and loving. Then, as reality and irrationality caught up with me, I more or less returned to old habits again. Live inside a protective web of denial, forgetfulness and abstraction, and reality can't ever catch up with me.

Now I'm conscious of this fact, Its time for the heavy lifting to begin.

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Crackling With Power Below

Where do I begin?

After a week that relentlessly dragged on, Catch and I took it upon ourselves to see the Bill Hicks "tribute" show, Slight Return at the Comedy Festival. Done with consuming the only food in town that should have been condemned by the Department of Human Services but wasn't, we strapped ourselves in for a night of intricately crafted mannerisms, vituperative angst and freewheeling social commentary, delivered in what was only thought to be the inimitable Hicks style. His arrogance wasn't misplaced, he was damn good at what he did. Catch and I decided to kick on to the Arthouse. However, we elected that $12 to see Fuck...I'm Dead wasn't worth the price of admission. So a short trip up to the Queensberry Hotel was in order.

After settling into a few beers, we ventured upstairs where a few patrons were sitting, seemingly minding their own business. We drank on, reminiscing and talking shit as we do. Then a few more people showed up. None took any notice of us. Then even more. Music started blaring. A couple had started to hand over presents to a certain individual...We had crashed someone's party by stealth. After quickly rectifying some irrational thoughts, I decided to make a night of it. Luckily, we introduced ourselves to some of the crowd, posturing ourselves as if we belonged to the fringes of some social group and eventually the Birthday Boy himself. (I even bought him a drink! His name was Tim.) I had to feign some memory of my high school days, as people I apparently shared four years of classes with recognized myself and Catch, surprised to see us at Tim's 21st.

Yeah, and so were we!

I'm discontinuing the "numbers game" after a rather in-depth and insightful conversation with Erin. BUT! Here's my final score:

23/0 (With 13 days remaining.)

Also: Get your hands on this week's copy of Buzz Magazine! Whoever wrote the article on the front page is a genius! (I hope I don't get sick...but I'm on my way, unfortunately.)

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http://twitter.com/crushtor

Leading You Astray

Take this sentence - "talk to your dog as if it were cheese." It came to me in a dream. You probably have experienced such things yourself. It appears as an essentially meaningless phrase. If you have no dog it becomes invalid. If you have never spoken to cheese before, it becomes invalid. Your mind cannot reconcile what is not there, or what has not been experienced. It can only give approximations, inferences, verisimilitudes, etc. Although we do this all the time. This is an example of a map without a territory. A lot of people I've talked to navigate territories with invalid maps. A conversation between an acquaintance of mine who had misread a verbal map I had given her long ago was re-read back to me, which I quickly realized did not reflect the territory.

This act and this act alone, cemented firmly in my understanding after months of searching and learning, the nature of the subjective experience and the consciousness of abstraction. I feel as if I am making remarkable epiphanies every day.

[12/0 of 100 - 16 Days Remaining]

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http://twitter.com/crushtor