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rder and more efficiently than i have at any point in my life i am also signing up for two classes next spring piano and physics 3 i have had no withdrawal symptoms nor have i relapsed into an ocd frenzy my anxiety is no greater than it was before decreasing the medicine my head is clearer and my mind seems to be working much much faster i get the impression that i m waking up from something as if i ve been away and have returned i feel as though i have a personality again i feel like myself but without some of the darker parts 4 i feel less empathetic but more eager to help other people which is a bit strange 5 the first week off the medication my dreams were horrific i mean really horrific i dreamed of violence and murder and guilt since then i dream about game shows and japanese robots and dead family members and all sorts of randomness but i haven t had any more nightmares even contexts that could be scary turn out more benign 6 i have less patience with my friends family and coworkers i expect fast responses or i quickly get bored to the brink of anger everything is moving fast and anything that slows it down is an annoyance 7 i am confident to the point of hazard but not in a physical way i pick arguments i am jumping into issues in a reckless way i have lost my fear of almost everything at least in terms of social interaction i still wouldn t ride a rollercoaster i m not insane 8 my ritualistic tendencies are still there and i don t fight them they exist in a benign state up to this point i don t mind counting i m not checking myself for tumors i m not checking my doors for fear of burglars but i am caught in a frenzy of repetition that quite honestly is not unpleasant all things considered i like my life right now i never realized how heavy the medication could be that i was living my life on autopilot if i ve learned anything in the last 10 years it is this all feeling is better than no feeling emptiness is the enemy even depression is a positive by comparison if i die tomorrow let it be with full awareness of what i am leaving behind i would rather meet the cold wind with exposed skin and raw nerves than never feel it at all if i am predisposed to extremes so be it i will accept whatever comes and if it is more than i can handle i ll always know that there is a ripcord but you can t fall through life with the parachute open because it s just fucking boring so i ll take terminal velocity all the way down be well fight back burn your comfort zone to the ground standard posted by josh posted on october 26 2014 posted under family philosophy culture comments leave a comment the heritage problem mine is a culture like an antebellum home it sits graceful and squarely proud on miles of cultured lawn meticulously preserved its majestic corinthian columns always have the smell of fresh paint and just outside the scripted signature planted into the ground names this home heritage the interior is much the same the great wooden staircases and floor to ceiling paintings are a skewed imitation of aristocracy as if someone decorated based on a second hand account of versailles it is wealth imitating older and greater wealth culture imitating older and greater culture but the whole world knows that heritage is full of basements and attics dark and full of cobwebs containing all manner of secrets and savageries my family has lived in the american south since at least the 1790s the french side of my family arrived a little later and settled in louisiana the scottish side settled in mississippi in or around philadelphia that is all to say mine is not an outside perspective at least not geographically the last five generations of my family were born into and helped to shape the culture and environment in which i now live and attempt to raise my son and it is exactly because of my son that i now confront the problems of race in mississippi how do i raise one of the next generation of southern men how do we make them better than ourselves how do we move the culture forward the problem is this whites in mississippi are racists blacks are racists conservatives and republicans are racists liberals and democrats are racists even the non racists are racists the antagonistic nature of this place is in the roots and in the water anyone born in mississippi soil has its heritage written into their dna i consider myself about as progressive as mississippians come and i know that i am a racist i don t intend to be i take steps not to be but the tendency is there and i admit that intellectually i do not discriminate but it is in my nature to do so even if i hate myself as it happens each generation before me feels less guilty about this nature my grandparents were unabashedly and quite blatantly racist i will share a family secret to illustrate this point edgar ray killen infamous kkk member and primary organizer of the freedom summer murders was at my great uncle s funeral a whole generation of men on that side of my family died with very dark secrets that still echo around family gatherings so the bar being set so low i suppose i can say that i am an example of progress i am not actively trying to murder anyone attempting to change the power structure and more than that my wife and i both seek to be a family that is inclusive of everyone we know that the more time different races and cultures spend around each other the more they find in common the difficulty is that the culture separates them even the public schools are mostly segregated in a small town that is about 50 white and 50 black the opportunities for kids of different races to interact are almost nonexistent put another way it is like we have new software but are forced to use the old hardware and so even if we had a perfect grasp of every concept which we don t we still could never use stone tools to make an airplane the old systems persist great cultural barriers scouting for change like patinated bronze watchtowers atop each stand our grandfathers and so we wait for them to die but how many generations will it take before that legacy is gone and even then can we separate the blood from the water standard posted by josh posted on october 25 2014 posted under philosophy culture comments 1 comment roche limit a loyal little moon for billions of years it is drawn inch by inch towards its partner a loner as well its partner lives far from the starlight but burns with a fierce heat from within our little moon so long a part of this chance pairing has grown tidally locked ever baking on one side and forever frozen on the other and so it has been for a third the life of the universe but today something is different something has been stretched too far the force pulling our little moon to its partner has become greater than the force that holds the little moon together it has reached its roche limit all at once it crumbles pulled apart its debris orbits its former partner a beautiful ring formed out of the detritus of a relationship doomed from its onset by inevitable attraction for weeks now there has been something i have been hesitant to admit especially to myself but it is true that something in me has reconfigured itself into an older design the five month grace period the most determined compassionate and productive of my life has slowly evolved into something else that thing present as long as i can remember is too strong to be avoided with exercise or scheduling strategies it is fundamental in some way and i realized as i worked myself ragged in an attempt to feel normal that my goal was to feel anything but some things are too big to escape we are bound to them we are partnered with them for life and our fates bound up together we have no choice but to learn to live with them we all orbit something something seemingly bigger than us or part of us a lover or potential lover around which our lives revolve a child a sense of duty the journey to advancement the quest for or prolonging of pride or praise the approval of a parent the fear of death in each of us there is something around which we base ourselves an imperfection around which our personalities can crystallize we imitate the thing or become its opposite but we are never rid of it it is the bedrock of our deepest selves i am somewhat aware of the thing that pulls at me it isn t obsessive compulsive disorder or anything else listed in the dsm well maybe it is mine is nihilism a sense of meaninglessness in all things a bored disgust with most parts of life because of this i spend my life trying to do the opposite of what i feel trying to find meaning in everything i do this to hold myself together under the weight of that most final of all philosophies i make it the goal of my generation to hold the line against this idea there must be meaning something more than the flickering flame of human life and understanding standard posted by josh posted on october 6 2014 posted under family comments 1 comment shadow boxing as a whole nature is wasteful aggressive indifferent it uses life as a way of preserving food it feeds the young to the old and the old to the young it marches forward and fills every habitable crack like water on pavement hedging every bet in the effort to hold its own against the onslaught of planetary cataclysms and extinction events and for several billion years now it has done quite well but on smaller scales nature is quite different individuals are cautious and flighty evolution has created all sorts of ways for creatures to settle conflict without actually fighting we would rather puff up or change colors or employ any other method at our disposal than actually risk doing harm to ourselves at least among members of our own species predators and prey have a different relationship i think back to junior high and just how many near fights i witnessed i don t recall many of these conflicts escalating to the point where anyone got punched in the face there would be a lot of cursing and two boys would push each other back and forth until someone backed down or someone broke it up the threats would escalate to the point of predicting murder but nothing ever really happened and when it did it was very anticlimactic and often the case that the whole incident was simply pushed forward by the hype of the crowd and ended as soon as they got a taste as my experience increased i learned that there are those people out there that like violence they talk about it and use it as a tool they intimidate and when that doesn t work they carry out the deed they fight and fight hard these people cultivate a whole persona based on the use of violence they develop reputations that eventually keep them out of harm s way at least for a time these are the alpha males i suppose at least in a darwinian sense they are quick tempered and unpredictable they also tend to be very emotional my father was one of these types as long as i can remember he has been larger than life he was an industrial mechanic a professional weightlifter and a generally hot headed bastard especially when i was younger i was terrified of him and thought of almost nothing else he worked very long hours and when he was home i made myself scarce i would be scared to death when my mother left me alone with him it s not that he was particularly violent with me i mean he was but not that often there were a few severe incidents but they were infrequent he was just threatening menacing in every way he was a bully whether he meant to be or not it was his nature and for most of my life i hated him for it lately since i entered my thirties and especially since i had a son of my own i ve wanted to get closer to my father in doing so i learned more about his own father my grandfather was a different type of animal entirely he didn t talk about what he would do or puff up in defense like most creatures he genuinely enjoyed inflicting pain he was a killer he was a cold and calculated predator who fought in the pacific and came back a sociopath he would tie my father in the barn stick his face in horse shit and beat him with a saddle strap once he left him there for days at thirteen my father left home and never returned at sixteen and living on his own for years my father wanted to buy a car for which he mostly had the money being so young he needed a parent to sign his father told him this if you want a helping hand in this life look at the end of your own fucking arm to my knowledge they spoke one more time between this moment and my grandfather s death the moment he died my father said of him if that man s in heaven there is no hell as i came to understand my father s hellish childhood anything he had done to me seemed inconsequential i forgave him once and for all and never looked back we ve become really close since then we take long trail rides on our bikes we go boating we avoid religion and politics and instead talk about space and the stock market i don t think i could respect anyone more than my father with a seventh grade education no close family and a closet filled to the brim with skeletons he retired at 55 a millionaire at least before the stock market crash he faces tragedy with a level of stoicism i can t understand and after a horror story life that would leave most people addicted to drugs or in prison he has found peace i see it every time he looks at my son and for the last several weeks every night when i go to sleep in my dreams we fight each other to the death every night i punch him and claw at his eyes as he tries to hold me down no one ever wins i always wake up before that but we are always fighting with absolute violence we are full grown men in the dreams he is always his current age and so am i i wake from this almost every morning furious and confused and then i talk to him on the phone and we are kind and loving and i find it hard to reconcile these two realities is it a sign of growing into manhood that we have to fight our fathers why after so long of dealing with the anxiety and fear and then truly letting it go do i now have to fight the battle i ve avoided for thirty years why now when there is no battle left to fight standard posted by josh posted on september 21 2014 posted under philosophy culture comments leave a comment material me the request couldn t be more reasonable tell me a story about when you were three my son asked me before bed the other night but i don t have any stories i have an image or two the truck with the big hook that i got for my birthday the little gas pump that would ding when you ran over it there is nothing left to remember no data to mine that entire year of my life has been reduced to those few moments playing with my truck driving it over the cord and listening to the ding the dry texas dust and my mother watching from a lawn chair outside a travel trailer from the next year i remember a great storm my mother and i were in the garden and the sky was black as night we were gathering something as fast ...