Don't tell me who won before we know who won.

 November 4, 2020, Wednesday, the day after election. I don't want to turn on the news, receive news feeds, nothing. Not until we know, for absolute certainty, how the electoral college will vote December 14. I don't care who won in this state, that state. Polls are meaningless, as are educated guesses. I have enough anxiety in my life. Too much. Don't jerk me around, play with my emotions. I don't know how I'm going to cope if Trump wins, and I can't even think about that. I'm registered as Independent but the sad fact is, the US political system is so stunted that voting Democrat is the only way to vote against Republican. Although I've got to admit the Lincoln Project gives me hope. They're Republicans against Trump. 

Anxiety. Constant, mind-warping anxiety. If it's not that it's depression. Fuck my life is meaningless! Okay now I'm babbling. Just don't tell me anything before we know, for absolute certain who won. Biden, great! Trump, I'm living in the woods with my two cats and am never coming out again. 

It's what cats do.

 This morning my Easter and Ladybug, mostly Easter caught a mouse. It's what cats do, I know, but I hate the playing part. It got so I couldn't take it anymore and promptly terminated the poor little guy's existence. 

That didn't help my depression. didnt make it worse either I don't think. Cycling between that and anxiety, which lately has gotten severe. I don't know how much longer I can take it. 

I still love my cats more than I like most people, always will. RIP Ladybug's brothers Snowball and Dude. My four cats, my family. 

Trade my depression for cancer.

4:30am Right now I wish I had cancer instead of depression. Then there would be an end.

6:45am I'll be fine if I can just crawl my way out of this black pit. My cats Easter and Ladybug are a big help but not enough I'm afraid. I can't stand to spend another day in darkness. Goddamn hydrophobia, I haven't showered in days. Chalk that up to benzo withdrawal. 

 I'm not going to write this out so if anyone out there turns this idea into a short story, or even a best-selling novel without giving me credit, fine. And if any of you are familiar with the novel/AMC series adaptation "NOS4A2" by Joe Hill, that'll help to understand my story idea.

Years after the events of NOS4A2, Millicent Manx discovers the hood ornament to her father's Rolls Royce, Wraith model. It was where she dreamt, buried in the river near where the Wraith exploded overhead as it was crossing the disintegrating Shorter Way bridge at demonic speed, killing her father. She limped her way back to... Home? Halfway house? She's injured from previous suicide attempts, a tragic but common condition of some of the children brought back from Christmas Land.

The hood ornament is eventually bent back into shape just from Millie's obsessively polishing it over many weeks. Then one day she sees "her" Jaguar, a vintage sports car. She easily knocks the Jag ornament off with her dad's wraith one, sets it on the hood, fusing it with the car. The passenger door opens for her. Soon after the owner plops himself down behind the wheel, slams the door before noticing the girl. When he yelps in shock at her the car starts without his key. She smiles lazily at him as it pulls into gear, then casually talks about that poor girl that died in the seat she's occupying, an unfortunate reaction to the roofies he slipped her. "What was it like fucking a dead girl?" she asked him. She now knows the crimes he committed with this car because after all, it was Millie's car all along. He screams "WHO ARE YOU??" then notices the impossible, that they're on the road where he dumped that girl in a ditch over a thousand miles away. Slowly a static blizzard overtakes the scenery. He's vaguely aware of her talking about the other three girls he drugged and raped with this very car, the "passenger" that's now becoming healthier, more beautiful...

They stop at the end of the road. Static blizzard fills the sky, extends down to the road all around. Beside the road is one lonely sign, "Christmas Land ahead." Millie gets out, slowly walks to the drivers door which opens for her, the mummified body of the man falling out. She slips her hand under his right armpit, easily lifting him and throwing him into the static, vanishing forever. She gets in, makes a 3 point U-turn and drives back to the physical world. 

Her mission is now to find the former children of Christmas Land, bring that place back to life, make it into something bigger. This is where the bulk of the story is, with teenagers and young adults who were taken from their former lives throughout the 20th century, occupying the inscape of Christmas Land created by the mind of Charlie Manx where they existed as happy little immortal monsters then suddenly dumped here in our 21st century when Victoria McQueen destroyed Charlie while rescuing her son. btw I don't care about grammar or overly long multi-compound sentences I'm just sitting on my bed scribbling this out thankyouverymuch! There are some very personal stories to be revealed. One in particular is a 19 year old dying of the cancer that was killing him before being rescued by Charlie in 1954. Going along with Millie will save his life but he refuses. He's in his bed at the home of his adoptive parents, petting his best friend, a Maine-coon cat. He always adored cats, until Christmasland. That was a time when, like all of Charlie Manx's other children, he would have happily lit this very cat on fire and laughed with delight as it thrashed around, eventually dying. And besides, how many people did they kill with their Scissors-for-the-Drifter games? No, he's staying here. He's dying, but he's also saved by his humanity.

There won't be a Christmasland in this story. Instead there's another inscape already existing long before Millie starts out on her quest. Let the reader assume it's built by a secret society that's been waiting for someone like Millie to come along, giving it the final solidity it needs with human occupants. It's really a place formed unconsciously by individuals scattered throughout the world, an emergent phenomenon they all unknowingly created with psychic abilities they barely knew they had. Millie stumbles onto it, she and her recruits, makes it real, turning what could have been a village into a nightmare-scape. What this particular inscape started as, eventually gets turned into, I don't know. Anymore than I know how this story concludes.  

I'll leave all the rest up to you. I highly recommend reading NOS4A2. That might help you to flesh out this story, imagine your own conclusion. 

Useless machines are impossible

 I got a kick out of watching this 34 second "Another Advanced Useless Machine" video on YouTube. It's worth a chuckle:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nqk_nWAjBus   This got me to thinking: If I had the workshop and engineering know-how to build such a one-joke device, would I even be able to do it in my spare time? Can I build something that is pointless, isn't worth anything beyond making an occasional person chuckle for a few seconds? I don't think I can. This is a waste of time! my mind would be saying, over and over again. All this effort, my skills, my tools, my resources would be devoted to... this pointless, useless thing! Then I'd give up and do something else. What else? Doesn't matter. Hell, I'd be more comfortable wasting my time watching random videos than that. 

That is wrong. I think that is why I haven't written fiction, drawn pictures, or painted compositions for years. Is this the foundation of my creativity block? After all, it is rather pointless, isn't it? I'm not aspiring to be a famous painter, writer, artist. I'm just doing it for me. If others find meaning or entertainment in my work, fine, but that's just incidental. I'd be doing it because it satisfies my creative desires. I'd be doing it for me. 

That is wrong is what my mind keeps repeating, over and over again. Selfish!!! Not in words but in the silent background. That judgmental critic that is always there. 

I can't afford CBT, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. There's no nearby Buddhist sangha that meets nearby that I can join for meditation practice, a form of CBT in its own right. I've been trying to build up my meditation practice but the best I can do is sit there listening to New Age music. I need to be with other people for that. 

This judgmental mindset has to leave. I have so much in my head that needs to get out there. My whole life it's been like this. I'm dying inside, it feels like. 

California wild-fire smoke

 If the wildfires in California we're ignited by the pyrotechnics from a gender-reveal party, then why isn't the resulting smoke either blue or pink? I think someone's been wrongly accused.

edit: if the baby is gender-neutral, then nevermind.  

Ryan Sutter's awakening. (mirror)

 http://www.talkorigins.org/origins/postmonth/mar04.html

Awake for the First Time

Post of the Month: March 2004

by thelodger

Subject: you've changed my life. thanks, I think.

Date:       31 March 2004

I have had a most extraordinary last two weeks and I owe much of it to this group, or more accurately, the talkorigins.org website and I'm writing to say thanks.

I have been raised my whole life as a Jehovah's Witness and (therefore) an old-Earth creationist. I'll be the first to admit that I've not always been the world's best JW, but I had always felt that when I was being good I was at least standing on relatively firm ground. My upbringing and books like "Life - How Did it Get Here, By Evolution or Creation?" taught me the complete absurdity and hopelessness of the evolutionist, secular humanist view of how we got here. The arguments presented seemed to make sense and I was satisfied that my questions were being answered honestly and meaningfully. It's so strange then what has happened over the last few weeks.

It started simply enough. My wife and I were discussing the Flood and the promised Paradise Earth and we wound up postulating some rather difficult questions for ourselves. Questions like, "If all the animals were originally herbivores (as the Bible says they were before the flood and would again be in the future), wouldn't that have disastrous environmental consequences?" "Wouldn't one-celled life and insects continue to have a role to play in the food chain? If so, wouldn't at least some of it be carnivorous or parasitic?" Once I started thinking of questions I couldn't stop (and more importantly, I couldn't think of any rational answers). A few days later some friends came over and we all got to talking about the Ark and the Flood and pondering some of the same questions. Now, these friends are JW's and I have no reason to believe they have abandoned "The Truth" (as it's referred to in the organization) but one of them sent me a link to a document on TalkOrigins about the flood a few days later saying that he thought it was interesting. Interesting didn't even begin to describe it. I was blown away.

Now, I don't think I'm a stupid person. I am a 30-year-old professional software developer with a 142 IQ. I read a lot. I consider myself educated, open-minded and capable of recognizing fact versus fiction and yet there I found myself realizing for the very first time that I had been blindly accepting as a fact something that was completely impossible. Perhaps some sort of flood happened in pre-history, but a global flood, the Biblical flood of Noah as described by Jehovah's Witnesses, could not have happened the way they say. It was so obvious when all the issues were laid out in one document and yet I had never noticed it before. For once, I felt stupid. I felt like I had been believing in Santa Claus (JW's don't do the Christmas thing, BTW, so it's the closest I've ever come TO believing in Santa Claus). I could have left it at that, but I didn't. If the "logic" given to me to explain the flood was wrong, I had to know what else was wrong too. Oh boy.

I went back to the beginning. In Genesis 3:15 is the first Messianic prophecy. Everything Jehovah's Witness teach about why we are here, the purpose of life, the reason Jesus came to Earth, the hope for the future... all of it, is rooted in the Garden of Eden, the Genesis account. I decided to re-examine, with an actual open mind, the question of Creation vs. Evolution (as I pictured it, rather naively). Could the chronology of the Bible, the location of Eden, the Genesis creation account, any of it, be reconciled with science? Did any of it, in fact, happen?

Now, chronology is vitally important to Jehovah's Witnesses. It's how they calculate the "end times" and why they are sure we are living in them. If the entire basis for all Bible chronology was based on a fictional story, everything started to go out the window. It all broke down. I dug out my "Creation" book and dug in and what I discovered made me sick to my stomach. The last time I read it I was 15 and it was incredibly convincing. This time I did the actual research. I looked up the references. I checked the quotations and examined the lines of reasoning and found... pseudo-science. Fallacies. Misquotes. Deliberately misleading re-writes of quotes. Argument through incredulity. Appeals to authority. Ignorance of evidence. Selective presentation of facts. Outdated information. This was worse than determining that the flood story was impossible. This was evidence that the religion I have been raised in was actually resorting to outright deception and taking quotes out of context and presenting as science something that is really just propaganda... and that I'd fallen for it.

See, JW's pay a lot of lip-service to examining the scriptures, researching your faith, PROVING that it's THE TRUTH, keeping an open-mind. At the same time (and I'm not making this up) they have a song that has the following words:

"We must act together as one
independance wisely we shun
harmony and one-ness of mind
bring peace of rarest kind"

I never felt right singing those words. Regardless, I always believed that my religious beliefs would stand up to scrutiny. I took comfort in that. I thought I HAD scrutinized them. That is what we are supposed to do. This is supposed to be a religion based on reasons for faith. To see that book for what it really was... that hurt.

Anyhow, after being basically crushed over the empty shell that is the Creation book I decided to take a serious look at evolution for the first time in my life outside of the writings of Jehovah's Witnesses. Oh. My. God. I never knew. I just never knew. I have spent the last week absorbing everything I can. I have downloaded the entire TalkOrigins.org website onto my laptop to read offline. I stayed up all night watching the Discovery Science channel the night before last because of a program on hominid evolution and I just kept watching every show afterwards. I bought The Blind Watchmaker and I'm almost done reading it. I have researched radioactive dating methods, transitional fossils, creationist arguments, abiogenesis theories and lots more and over and over and over again I have found a mountain of evidence, a mountain of evidence I had been informed didn't exist. I have found intelligent people who think for themselves, who (yes) argue and change positions and interpret things differently but who are firmly grounded in reality. The actual study of the actual world as it is, not the study of how a book says it should be and an obsession with trying to make the world appear to fit that model.

I don't know what this means for me. I know this... I am now, and on some level have always been, a secular humanist. I am suddenly comfortable in my own skin, like my mind is clear for the first time. I no longer know what role, if any, the concept of God plays in my life. It's certainly not the role that was there two weeks ago. Now that I actually understand the theory of evolution to some extent I realize it's not just a bunch of wishful-thinking atheists working on some quack theory and calling it a fact. I have developed a whole new awe and appreciation for the world I see around me, like I'm really seeing it for the first time. The geese outside my office looked like little dinosaurs to me and I got the chills. I'm 30 years old, my entire family, my wife and all my friends are Jehovah's Witnesses. If they knew for even a minute that I've conclusively disproved (for myself) all the fundamental teachings that underlay their (and my former) theology, that I had come to realize the fact of evolution (still hard for me to type that sentence...) and rejected the chronology of the Bible as impossible... they would probably never speak to me again. I don't like the position I'm in now. I'm scared. I have no idea what to do. I have no idea how to proceed. I feel like I just opened my eyes for the first time and I don't know what the next step is.

I do, however, want to thank all you long-suffering rational folks out in Talk.Origins land. You've put together a resource that has radically changed my life in the blink of an eye and I am grateful.

lodger