Philosophical Debate Versus Pragmatism

No intention of spending a lot of time here today.  I’m busy these days, you know?  However, not too busy to spend a little time here.

I’ve spent a good deal of time in my life dedicated too “philosophical” debate.  Now,  I don’t always follow the rules of philosophical logic.  I had that particular debate with a philosophy professor in undergrad.  It was always difficult for me to grasp why there had to be so many rules around reason.  In my opinion, the proponents of strict reason and logic were struggling against their innate subjectivity in order to hold tightly to objectivity.  A slippery slope indeed.

So lately, I’ve been wondering if my age old path of philosophical debate is worth the time.  Or should meaning be sought through practical matters?  Which is actually a form of philosophical debate.  But, we’ll let that go for now.  Should one (me) focus on intellectual pursuits or daily life?  Meh.

The System & Its Minions

I haven’t posted here in a little while, and for that, I apologize.  I’ve been busy working on my novel, Cydonia, and my Independent Digital Publishing House, Work Of Hart Publications.  It keeps me sane to work on “perfecting the pastimes I have harbored, based solely on the fact that it makes me smile if it sounds dope” [thank you Aesop Rock for the line].  But that’s sort of what this blog is about isn’t it?  Sanity, and how well I attain and maintain mine.

Well.  Today I am maintaining my grip by a finger, and that finger is getting tired.

My mood and mind shouldn’t be in such a poor state.  I’ve accomplished one of my current primary goals, finding employment.  I got a job at a “Luxury” Bowling Alley in Leesburg. [basically just means that the establishment has some regular lanes, a VIP lane section and a “high roller” suite.  In addition, there is a very nice lounge/bar, another bar that is sealed & ventilated for smoking and you get servers who come to your lane while you’re bowling to serve you food and alcohol – it’s a pretty neat place I guess]  So, job – check.  Next on the list, get through my court case and get back to my life. But wait…what’s this?  You mean the courts have decided to push back my court date for another month and a half for no apparent reason?  The nerve of some people.

I’m angry to say the least.  As a condition of my case, I have to see a pretrial officer once a week, which is a pain in my ass.  Not only does she count my medication like I’m a fucking child, but she “randomly” drug screens me [it’s not random, it’s every three visits].  The whole concept of “pretrial” is ludicrous.  It’s essentially saying “guilty until proven innocent”, rather than the other line they feed us in grade school civics and government classes.  It’s the biggest bunch of bullshit I’ve ever had to deal with.  Pretrial is honestly worse than rehab, and I believe I’ve expressed my distaste for how addiction treatment is handled.  I mean, if your success rate has been 10% for more than 60 years, wouldn’t you investigate different means of treatment?  It’s true, on average, one in ten will stay sober.  The other nine will relapse.  Of course the counselors say that research is being done all the time to find better methods, but they misunderstand the point.  They are seeking different techniques within the same context.  What is needed is a new paradigm of thought concerning addiction altogether.

But that’s not my complaint today.  No, today I’m knocking “The System” and the people who serve it.  The System I am currently concerned with, is the American Government [local, state & federal].  But I am primarily concerned with the global system, of which, America is just a piece, albeit a large one.

My issue is as old as this country itself.  We’re taught that we are free individuals.  We have glorious democracy, which makes everyone equal.  But it doesn’t.  What it does is make the appearance of equality.  Though at the end of the day, “they” [the system’s minions] don’t trust us.  They don’t trust us to maintain order among ourselves.  More importantly, they don’t want us to create our own order.  Because they, are nothing more than narcissistic egomaniacal children with power tools instead of the tonka toys they should have.

So, I am powerless.  They hold all the cards.  I can be jerked around until their heart is content.  Complete and utter bullshit.

Mind Manipulation via Neuro-chemicals in a Pill

Cognitive Dissonance… it’s when your beliefs and your reality don’t match, causing psychic strain.  It’s like trying to fully believe in two opposing ideas simultaneously.  It just can’t work, it’s a mental paradox.

What’s the point?  The point is that cognitive dissonance is stressful, makes you feel crazy.  That’s what my addiction treatment is like.  It is absolutely, determinately, absurdly, ludicrously painful to bear.

You see, I’ve got this problem.  I’m too smart, too clever.  Additionally, I’ve been educated in the way treatment works, the fundamentals behind the theories.  So I know that the counselors and doctors know that they don’t really know what they’re doing.  Ask any doctor to tell you why a medication works, how it works.  They can’t tell you because they don’t know.  What they do know, is that when they put certain compounds of elements in your body, the symptoms in question diminish.  And the really fucked up part?  That’s all they care about, that the medication has an effect on the symptoms they are trying to treat.  To hell with all the other effects these medications have, you know, side effects.

The truth is, they [the Doctors, Researchers, Pharmaceutical Industry] don’t know what effects these psychological drugs have on your brain.  They know that the meds can ease depression, anxiety, mania, schizophrenia, etc., but they don’t know how and they don’ t know what else they’re doing to your brain.  My counselor tried to give me the run around yesterday, explaining that the new medication I’m on [which I’ll get too shortly] has been thoroughly tested over the years and all of the effects, both the expected ones and the side ones, are known and overall harmless.

Really though?  What if these kinds of drugs, mood drugs, are altering neurotransmitters and their pathways?  Oh wait, that’s exactly what they’re doing!  So what if these changes become permanent after the medication is stopped?  And what if those neural changes get passed on too further generations?  And what if the effects aren’t exactly what we thought they would be?  Dumb people, sorry, I mean average globally ignorant people, assume that kind of change would be a good thing.  Erase depression and anxiety from our genetic code, right?  Because the doctors and scientists have convinced you that these conditions are the result of chemical imbalances in the brain, actual physical diseases that were inevitable in the individual.  But what if they’re wrong?  What if the chemical imbalance is secondary, not primary?  A symptom, not a cause?  If that’s the case, then these meds that are rewiring the brain aren’t fixing something, they’re breaking something.

Generations down the line [perhaps even happening now], every child born could have an irregular brain and die.  It could destroy us.

Or more likely i think, we all become drones, hooked on our Soma [A Brave New World – not the actual drug Soma], relying on it.  Makes us so much easier to control.

Anyway, I had a more passionate rant about this and about my feelings toward my life at the moment earlier when I started it.  Now the urge is gone, so I’m gonna leave this be an bitch another day.

The Reality of Emotions: Addendum To S.O.C. Post

A couple weeks ago [?] I wrote a post concerning emotion on my main blog S.O.C., this one.  It was a speculative and theoretical analysis of  current therapeutic techniques taught for the management of emotional states.  Idealistically, I stand by it 100%.  Pragmatically, ideology leaves something to be desired.  Case in point, my current emotional state.

I hate to admit it, but I’m not doing well emotionally this evening.  I’ve had to face myself a lot lately and the process is really starting to get to me.  Overused maybe, but emotional roller coaster is about the only way to describe how I feel right now.  Only, the coaster never goes up, just twists and turns in a relatively straight line that I might classify as shitty.  A continuum of shitty.  Varying types and degrees of feeling shitty.  And, being the internal locus kind of guy that I am [reliant on myself for my reality, as opposed to blaming my environment for my problems and/or successes], it’s a roller coaster of my own devising.  Which naturally makes the ride that much more shitty; I know I’m the one responsible for its creation.

The root cause of my current case of the multi-layered blues is the critical look I’ve been taking at myself, my life and my problems and the acceptance that I did this.  I created the person I am today, and I hate him.  Granted, over the last four months or so I’ve been working on righting some wrongs, making some amends and forgiving myself.  But I’m still that guy deep down.  I have to give myself some more credit, because 3.5 – 4 months isn’t a very long time in the case of sobriety, so I ought not expect my whole world to have changed.  It took me a good 12 years to get to this point, I can’t honestly expect to rewire my brain in a matter of months.  But that’s not the problem really.  I know that it will take some time to get myself, my self, my mind and my conscious awareness/consciousness to a stable place that allows me to move forward at a more me appropriate rate.

My problem is three-fold.  (1) Relates to something I shouldn’t be doing – dwelling on the past.  While (2) relates to a social construct that my ideology denies, but my programming accepts [mostly due to environment – childhood; especially with my family, the good ol’ U.S. of A. and the particular area that I live; redneck republican misogynistic good ol’ boy mentality], that being, social roles within the household.  I’m not contributing and therefore feel as if I’m letting my family down.  And finally (3) is a brain problem – I know I have at least a dozen, if not more, applicable classifications in the DSM, but fuck, so does everyone on the planet.  That’s the point of that stupid book, regardless of how benevolent its creators pretend to be, labeling anyone and everyone with as many mental disorders as possible so the psychiatric meds can flow.  I’m talking about a specific brain problem right now though, which is the inability to control, observe or learn from my current emotional states.  They are just too intense and quickly oscillating from one to the next and back to gain any sort of control.

I’m ineffectual at the moment.  Unable to manage myself.  No will one moment, lack of motivation the next, crying for no reason, just depressed, hating myself for the person I’ve been and the people I’ve hurt, chastising myself for not being proactive in a time that requires the effort and a host of other states that I refuse to define any further.  What can one do?  Snap out of it?  Wait for it too pass?  Force a happy attitude and do the ‘fake it till you make it’ rouse?  Try it.

No, there is only one course of action right now.  Not a goddamn thing.

-Rusty

Bored…

I’ve learned over and over that boredom is the first step to relapse.   And I’m bored.  I find myself thinking of being inebriated somehow, not even necessarily on opiates [though naturally that would be preferred].  I won’t allow myself to do it again, simply because it doesn’t lead to anything worthwhile.  But I’ve got no motivation to do anything.  I’ve got a book I should be working on, but I’m not.  I’ve got a portrait I need to be working on, but I’m not.  I’ve got a job to be finding, but I’m not.  Even my new hobby, metal detecting, has lost its luster.

Can’t really understand why.  I am about 4 months sober, and they say junkies experience post acute withdrawal around this time.  Lots of urges, cravings, lack of sanity.  The only problem is, I’m not technically sober.  I’m not using illicit drugs, but I’m still on

opiates.  So my brain doesn’t know that it has ever been entirely sober.  It knows that habits have been changed, it knows that I’m not out on the street copping and banging.  But its opiate receptors are still filled with buprenorphine [in the form of Suboxone, those tablets over there, though they aren’t really prescribed in that form anymore; nowadays they are convenient sublingual films that are supposedly preferred by clinical trial patients.  But I liked the pills better.]  as in morphine, the root of heroin or non-synthetic opiates [as opposed to opioids, like vicodin, percocet, dilaudid, etc.].  My brain is still a junky, regardless of what my consciousness knows to be true.

I’ve got all that information, but it doesn’t help.  Not in the slightest.  I’m still bored.  Bitching and whining isn’t helping though.  That’s pretty much the same as getting high.  Useless.  That’s my story.  Bitching and whining.  Waiting for someone else to fix my problems.  That’s not going to happen.

Okay then.

-rusty

In A Slump? Clinically Depressed? Death A-Knockin’?

I’m typically a pretty upbeat kind of guy.  I’m a very ‘spiritual/religious/metaphysical’ person, which often includes a positive outlook.  I’m not New Age spiritual; none of that “Love and Light” bullshit.  That kind of lifestyle is a fad and a very pathetic one at that.  The personality disorders these people have fill up 1/3rd of the DSM.  I know I’m being very judgmental and patronizing toward a group of people who really pretend to do good.  Oops.  I did it again.  [Sorry for the Britney reference, it was entirely coincidental]  However, I’m a little justified in making these statements.  I have a lot of experience with both the “spiritual fad” type people, as well as the authentic occult students [whatever realm of study with which they identify].  I spent three years working at a metaphysical bookshop and met all kinds of people, and believe me, a real spiritual student is a world apart from the New Agers.  I’m going to move on to my topic now, but I have one more thing to say: My distaste for New Agers is a direct result of the bad name they give legitimate spiritual practitioners.  People think we’re all whack-a-doos, psychics [which they don’t believe in], hippies of one form or another, absent-minded and just plain ridiculous.  In reality, the true occultist [the word occult just means hidden, as in hidden knowledge or wisdom, and has nothing to do with cults] is just like any other person, they don’t worship Satan, they may not believe in any god, they often find god in themselves and nature, but the most important point is that for an occultist, god is a subjective experience for the individual and no one else can know that reality.  *On a side note, I have a travelling Bodhisattva statue on my dashboard in my car for safe travel.  If one more person gets in my car [or if I catch them doing this anywhere] and says, “Oh hey!  I love your Buddha!  I’m so into Buddhism,” I will smack the shit out of them – (1) That is not the Buddha.  I mean, we are all the Buddha, but that is not the Buddha that inspired the spiritual path we call Buddhism.  (2) That is a Bodhisattva, this one is Maitreya.  A Bodhisattva is a being who realized his/her Buddha Nature and achieved what we call enlightenment.  However, instead of transcending this reality and moving along the wheel of Karma, they chose to stay and help every single entity in the cosmos achieve enlightenment as well.  (3) Learn the story of Gautama Buddha, the “real” Buddha.  (4) Pick up a copy of Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse – It’s not about the Buddha [though the Buddha makes an appearance], it is a story that is very similar to Gautama’s. 

Moving on.

So, I’m typically a contented person.  People often mistake that for apathy or a bad attitude because I’m not always smiling and chatting up a storm.  But it’s really contentment; it’s not joyful or despondent, it’s just…content, a moderate mood.  I just am.  I’m experiencing the moment.  Something like that.  Sure I’m happy and sad sometimes too, but usually, I’m content and I like it.  Lately I haven’t been doing so well though.  I’ve got 107 days sober from a 10 year opiate habit, 7 – 8 of which was the grungy, hardcore, shooting up heroin multiple times daily, robbing people, stealing whatever, whenever, just to make sure you got your next hit kind of a habit.

The good old days when heroin was prescribed for all sorts of ailments, even for a cough!

But hey, they also advertised cigarettes to treat asthma…

But that’s not at all what heroin is like…

  I’ve got scars just like that.  I have to wear long sleeves to job interviews, to work, to family gatherings, basically anywhere that I don’t want society to know what I was.

And the cook.  Looks benign, but it’s horrible.  Your anxiety levels are through the roof.  On one hand, you can’t wait to get the dope in your                    body.  But on the other hand, you’re you’re shaking so bad because you’re already starting to detox that you’re terrified you’re going to spill your shot all over the place.  Then you’ve just wasted money that you didn’t really have to begin with and probably had to steal from someone somehow anyway.

Ah.  Shooting up.  One of the most efficient & effective methods of administering a drug.  I think smoking might  be a close second or maybe first.  And honestly, it doesn’t even hurt.  That’s one of the most common questions I get, “Does it hurt to have to stick the needle in all the time?”  No, you’re using a tiny needle, you barely feel it.  Plus, it’s a pretty quick process.  But, aside from the physical dependence and organ damage, this is the worst part of it all.  The needles you use are meant to be one-use needles, but that is never the case for junkies.  We use the same needle over and over and over.  And even though we swear we’ll never do it, we share needles also.  When your rig breaks or you don’t have it, and you’re dope sick, you really don’t give a fuck.  Imagine all the things that puts you at risk for.  But sharing aside, there are plenty of other health problems related to using needles like junkies do:

• The risk of contracting blood-borne pathogens such as HIV and hepatitis by the sharing of needles
• The risk of contracting bacterial or fungal endocarditis and possibly venous sclerosis
• Abscesses

Fun fun.  I’ve seen these things.  They aren’t pretty.  My dealer had such bad sores that he couldn’t hit his arm anymore and had to hit his neck.  He developed abscesses that were just f*cking disgusting.  But getting his next fix was more important than going to the hospital.

And the best part of all…detox.  Heroin withdrawal is one of the worst experiences you could ever encounter.  Alcohol and Benzodiazepine withdrawal can kill you [stroke], but heroin withdrawal makes you wish you were dead.  It’s awful.

So that’s my story for the past decade.  But now I’m sober.  I’m putting my life back together.  I’m being honest for the first time in years.  I’m humble.  I’m making amends with my wife [well fiance legally, but we’re married in my heart], my parents, the few friends I have that aren’t junkies.  I’m really trying to be a better me.  And all of that is going well.  But I still feel like shit.  Becca says I’ve been moody, not myself.  She has even accused me of being under the influence of something, not illicit drugs, but something.  Apparently I’ve been that “out of it”.  I’ve never been clin

ically depressed, but I’ve been in a funk just like anyone else.  And I know my brain chemistry is different and is readjusting [which can take 18 months to 3 years].  But something still just isn’t right and I can’t put my finger on what it is.

Well, I guess time will tell.  Until then…                     ↓

                                                               

[Those are cigarettes by the way]

&

I’m not a Christian by any stretch of the imagination and I don’t believe that a man named Jesus ever existed. The archetype of the Son/Sun or the Christ (the anointed one) is a different story and a powerful one. And so I leave you with this: the Sacred Heart; not the Sacred Brain…

Shadow…Alter Ego: The Journal Blog

I felt like creating a blog that allow me to just vent.  A place where I can say whatever is on my mind.  For the time being I’ve made it private, but I may open it up a bit in the future.  We shall see.

I will also be doing more to the theme and logo and all that stuff; you know, make it a little more “me”.  Until that time comes, I’ll just stick with the standard theme.  It is a nice theme.

I’ve got some other things to do, other posts to work on over at S.O.C., as well as some other non-blog related things to handle, so I’ll start posting here in the next couple days.