Relatives

Several, in quick succession. So that's good-it is! And there's been rather a lot of fugue lately, so that's part of my absence. Whoops.

Nothing to be done about it. But I have been busy, don't doubt, like Josh and his Zeppelin. Hours in a tube, feeling field effects heat my blood, shift and push my tissues. Magnets, loud fucking magnets. Jesus, that's weird.

Saw a church today called Jesus Pursuit. Sounds vaguely...predatory? Like they're hunting Jesus through a jungle, or something. The least dangerous game. Also, put off some Mormons at the door recently with what I'd call a very cogent agnosticism. Yes, I'm an agnostic, rather than an atheist. Our motto's We Don't Know, and We Don't Care.

ANYWAY...

So it's been odd, full and weary and cold. But good, don't get me wrong. And this is great today, thrilling.

Futures

I think a lot about what makes people happy, and what doesn't. When I say "people", I'm extrapolating my own limited experience onto the tiny sliver of self that the Rest of You make available, so I would be the first to admit that my guesses are just that and that any and all of the things that I "think" and "express" should and do and will have "fucking" "quotes" "around" "all" "of" "them". 

Caveats aside-what makes people happy? What makes me happy? 

Other people, my usual answer, and the relationships that they provide/obtain. But time goes on, that answer gets more and more pat, and I'm questioning it. I think that the Rest of You are great, don't get me wrong. And good, objective, scientific studies suggest that the people who are consistently happiest are the ones that have the most/best interpersonal relationships. I get that, I'm subscribing to it. 

Time comes, though, and I think about unhappiness, and what prompts it. From my own experience, I feel like I have to pay attention to the places I interfere with those relationships, where I get in the way of my own being happy. Where I try to make the world what I want it to be, when I have expectations of outcomes and manipulate those relationships....that's where I interfere in my own happiness. Again, this is what I've been going on for a while now, and I'll tell you, it's been going OK. Better than before this particular worldview, let me tell you. More and more, as I get older and further up my own ass...I think about causality. 

Hang in there, I'm gonna try and tie this all together. 

CAUSALITY, the way everything happens. If/then or time or Newtonian Physics or Laplace's Demon or what-the-fuck-ever...we're all walking around with a reasonable metaphorical representation of how the world works. The moon draws up the sea because of the similarity of their natures, the choler rises in my body likewise and makes me angry and violent. The inverse square law defines the gravitational relationships between bodies of various masses. Rain comes when we propitiate Ishtar, my bike breaks down because I didn't propitiate Wheel-Woman. The big bang started the universe expanding, which led to gasses cooling and coalescing into stars, which further fused light elements into more complex heavier ones, initially through normal fusion processes then eventually in supernovae that seeded the Milky Way galaxy with the necessary diversity of elements to give rise to complex organic chemistry, then life, then sentience, then language and so on. God punishes sinners, lifts up the righteous. Karma's gonna get you, bad or good. We all have bloody thoughts, and lose control. Men are one way, women another. The spice must flow. 

One thing leads to another, the world of cause and effect. What my previous paragraph was getting at, and the thing that resonates and sticks with me, is that none of us agree on any of it. Everyone walks around with different models of the universe, each of them just as valid as any other. Language gives us tools to cooperate and seemingly agree, but ultimately my blue is not your blue, my giraffes are not yours. I don't interact with the "real" world, I interact with a model of the world that I taint and twist with the story I tell about it.  We're all telling different stories, all just stories that tell themselves.  And while I feel like a good and rational Transhumanist, a skeptic and a scientist and empirically interested...I have to tell you, my narrative can't adequately describe the Rest of You. 

I believe in Free Will, capitals and everything.  If I can imagine or understand or describe anything (I can, I've checked) then so can the Rest of You. I think people are engines of infinite risk, machines for making surprises. Marvelous and magical as this is, it's also a horror. 

One of the things that makes us unhappy is when that sense of how gets broken, when it becomes useless in the face of that (falsely) empirical world of the senses...that seems to be upsetting, is my observation. Narratives can be upset on purpose when we try to control each other, when we interfere deliberately in each other's causality. Lord knows that happens all the time. But it can also fall apart in the face of the impossible, since the impossible is only what we cannot imagine to be true. Think of all the people you know who have lousy imaginations. Think of all of their impossibles. Think of your own. And mine.