Books: Part 6

Ok, when I wrote the first “Books” post I was planning it to be an interesting one off entry. I realised that I’d need to split it up when I was getting to the end of explaining what I was going to do and it had already taken up over 2,000 words. Now 2,000 words is nothing if you’re talking about an introduction to a book, but for a blog post I think it’s quite a good point to stop. I generally stay within the 2,000 to 5,000 word range as a rule, I think that’s the sweet spot because it’s long enough that you have to take a good five to ten minutes out of your day and give it some time, you can’t just breeze through one of my posts in 30 seconds and forget about it, but it’s not so long as to actually change anyone’s plans either. You can read one of my posts in one go, and hopefully it gives you something to think about but ultimately you can then simply move on with your day. Although I think my posts are better enjoyed in the evening, with no further plans ahead.

I then realised after the second post in the series, which was the first one where I really actually started talking about the books I own, that this would take a lot longer than I originally expected. That is, if I wanted to actually say more than a few words about each of them. The problem is I’ve now reached the sixth part, and have not even covered half of the books I own yet. So I’ve decided this part will be a “lightning round” where I cover a lot of the books that I don’t have a lot to say about and hopefully that pile that needs sorting will be a lot smaller by the time I’m done. I’ll say now that you shouldn’t expect anything insightful or interesting from this particular post, I’m just kind of trying to get through these books now because I kind of backed myself into a corner with this whole idea. I do think that I’ll have one or two posts in this series after this, maybe even three, which will be more engaging though. Here’s hoping.

The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham

This is a short novel, set in an alternative post-apocalyptic London during the early 20th century. The premise if I remember correctly, is that some kind of alien energy field hits the earth one evening and everyone who sees it is blinded. Which is most people on the planet. Then after that these moving hostile plants which for some reason are named Triffids spawn into being and begin hunting people, and I think consuming them as well. The protagonist of the novel keeps his eyesight thanks to some kind of plot convenience that I don’t remember, and the novel follows his journey through the city and eventually to a farmstead in the countryside.

My uncle gave me this copy, years ago now. I enjoyed reading it at the time, but that’s it. I don’t think there’s anything to be gained from going back to it. Even if it’s just a case of going back to a familiar story and familiar characters, there are other books like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings which are far better if you’re looking simply to escape into a good story. There’s no reason for me to hold onto this, so I won’t. I wouldn’t say it’s not worth a read, but it’s not worth having a physical copy of it in this day and age.

The Big Big Big Book of Tashi by Anna and Barbara Fienberg and Kim Gamble

This is collection of 14 short stories for children, small children. The author and the series, the characters and so on, are Australian in fact not british. See my uncle lived in Australia for a years, I think possibly for as long as a decade maybe even more than that. He didn’t move back to England until I was a few years old, maybe four or five I’d guess. I don’t recall exactly, being four or five years old I don’t remember much from that period of time. I imagine he must have brought this with him when he came back, as a gift. I know he bought it for me, and I know I’ve had this book for as long as I can remember.

The books are about this boy whose name I forget, and his friend Tashi who has these many fantastical stories to tell about his life before emigrating to presumably Australia but basically a generic western neighbourhood that could be anywhere. So the actual stories are mostly set in this fantasy land with monsters and magic and so on, but framed within a more normal/ familiar setting. Anyway as much as I did enjoy this book as a little kid I just don’t see any good reason to hold on to it. It’s going to have to go.

Europe: A History by Norman Davies

This is one of the longest books I’ve ever read, maybe the longest. It’s pretty clear what it’s about, a book that supposedly covers all of European history from pre-history through to the fall of the soviet union. One of the positives about this book is that it does make the effort to include a lot of eastern European history that might be overlooked like the history of medieval Poland and Lithuania, Kievan Rus and the Eastern Roman Empire/ Byzantium. It moves chronologically of course, but because of the scope this means a lot of moving back and forth to switch to a new region especially during the early middle ages when things were the least connected.

The problem is that the book is just incredibly dull, I actually didn’t finish it if I’m being honest but gave up towards the end while reading an absurdly long chapter on Napoleon. It’s quite clear where the author’s interest lies, it was about twice as long as the chapter that covered almost an entire millennium of roman history. Perhaps author is the wrong word here, the first thing he says in the introduction is that there’s no original work or research that was necessary for this book. Not that it was just a compilation of other historical works, it was a retelling in his own words, but everything in here could be found somewhere else. The list of citations/ sources at the back is huge, they alone make up the length of a short novella.

I’m not sure whether to keep hold of it or throw it away, because I don’t like to leave a book unfinished, but it’s been years since I gave up on it and I remember almost nothing outside of the major events of the period I was up to. That is outside of the particular periods of time which I’ve read other things about. Speaking of which the book just didn’t go into nearly enough detail in the areas that I personally find interesting, pre-history and into the bronze age, classical Greco-Roman history and dark ages Britain. I think I’ll hold onto it for now, and if I haven’t picked it back up within a year I’ll just give it to the charity shop. After all I did originally buy this there, before my current job I volunteered at a second hand shop for half a year and it was while there that I bought this. I’ll probably take it to a different one though, I don’t ever plan to return to the shop I was helping out ever again.

The Lamb and the Butterfly by Arnold Sundgaard and Eric Carle, The Unicorn and the Sea by Fiona Moodie, and The Fire Children by Eric Maddern and Frané Lessac

I’ve decided to group all of these together because whatever I might say about one applies to all three. These are books for very small children, basically toddlers. They’re picture books so I think that in this case the illustrators are just as crucial as the authors which is why I included both names. Upon opening these books just for a quick flick through I’m hit with this warm feeling of familiarity, these are probably the first books I ever read. In fact they were probably there before I was even capable of not just reading but speaking. I remember I had quite a few more like this, but for whatever reason these ones have remained in my possession while the others have been lost along the way. It’s a shame, there are others I remember more fondly even than these and I do wish I could look through them one last time. I can’t even find them online based on the hazy memories I have though, and anyway even if I had them I would be making the same decision I am going to make regarding the ones I do still have. That is, I will finally be letting go of them.

boom! by Mark Haddon

Now this isn’t the only book by this author I have a copy of, I also have The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time but I think that one might lead to a more interesting entry in this series so I’ll leave it for today. boom! on the other hand is another children’s adventure book, following the theme that will run throughout this entry. It’s not even one I remember particularly fondly or well either. I don’t know why I have held onto it for this long, but it can certainly go now. I do however have a particular memory associated with this novel, which I wouldn’t mind having written down so I won’t forget about it.

It’s actually of the first time I was unable to fall asleep, when I was maybe 9 or 10 years old, I don’t quite know. A better way of putting it would be to say, my first experience of insomnia. Now I have pretty mild insomnia, it’s not debilitating at all and most nights it’s not a problem. A few nights a month though, and often all in one go, I’ll have quite a lot of trouble getting to sleep. There’s been a heatwave here over the last week in fact so it’s been worse than usual actually, but hopefully next week should be cooler. Also my dad is leaving for a few weeks, and I always sleep better when the flat is empty apart from me.

So one summer evening I decided to stay up late, and I was reading this book at the time. At the time I had just got rid of my bed, and had yet to build the new one so I was sleeping on a mattress on the floor (kind of like I do now, although this was in my old room) with the door on my right hand side as I was sat up in bed. I started reading under the covers with my torch, and after a short while I heard my mum go to sleep. I kept reading for quite some time after this, but eventually I realised it must be really late, maybe even midnight! So I decided to go to sleep. Yet I wasn’t able to, I closed my eyes and turned from side to side but nothing would do it.

I remember after some time I started to worry that it would always be like this now, I knew that my mum had always suffered from insomnia as she often had to take naps in the afternoon after getting home from work because she hadn’t slept enough the night before. In a way I kind of saw it as part of the process of growing up, after all she was the main adult figure in my life and she had it. I’m surprised how quickly I just accepted this fate, and luckily I was wrong and it’s not anywhere near as much of a problem for me as it was for her. I must have fallen asleep eventually, but I do remember feeling groggy and miserable the following day. Not an especially interesting story, but it’s one I remember well.

Esio Trot, The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me, George’s Marvellous Medicine, and Danny the Champion of the World by Roald Dahl

I’m sure everyone is well aware of who Roald Dahl is, I loved these books when I was little and I used to have quite a few more of his books but they have also been lost along the way. Just like those picture books I talked about, when I see Quentin Blake’s iconic illustrations I’m taken to a very familiar and comforting place. There is just no good reason for me to hold onto these though, and so they also have to go.

Now We Are Six and The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne

These might be the hardest of the books from my childhood to let go of, I’m still considering holding onto them. The House At Pooh Corner is the second of the two volumes of short stories featuring the character Winnie The Pooh and his friends, I did have both volumes once as well as both of the poetry collections but now I only have one of each clearly. Again, I’m not exactly sure what happened to the other books I had, but they’re gone now. Now the final story in the collection ends with Christopher Robin leaving Pooh and all the other animals of the hundred acre wood to go somewhere. It was never really clear to me where when I was a little boy, but I’ve since learned that the implication was that he was going off to boarding school.

The story ends with a touching moment between Christopher Robin and Pooh on a hill overlooking the wood, in which Christopher Robin knights Pooh and then asks him never to forget him “not even when I’m a hundred”. Even when I was the age of about five or six and I didn’t pick up on the implications about where exactly he was going, I still remember this ending felt rather sad. Christopher Robin probably didn’t have any time for toys when he came back from school, so this was his way of putting childish things aside. Which I suppose is what I need to do also.

Now We Are Six is a collection of poems, many of them about Christopher Robin, Pooh and the rest of the characters. I suppose I got it wrong when I said in the second entry in this series that I had covered all of the poetry books I own. This particular copy is very special to me, it was a gift for my sixth birthday from both my uncle and his partner (a friend of my mother’s who he met upon returning to England) and it even has a little message from them on the inside cover. Again as with quite a few of the books I’m looking through today the illustrations bring out a strong feeling of nostalgia. I know I should let it go, as I plan to do with the other Pooh book and all the little kiddie books I’ve sorted through, but I really don’t want to. It’s difficult because I’ll have to simply throw this one in the rubbish, as my name written on the note at the front means I can’t give it away. I’ll just hold on to it until I can think of what to do, it’s very small and doesn’t take up a lot of space.

Ubik and Time Out of Joint by Philip K. Dick

Another pattern might be noticeable in this entry, in fact across this entire little series of posts. Both of these were gifts from my uncle, in fact because his memory isn’t very good he actually gave me two separate copies of Ubik. One quite a few years ago now, shortly after I read The Time Machine the first time and mentioned that I was looking for more science fiction to read, the second copy was a gift either last Christmas or the year before that. I loved it at the time, in fact I was considering reading it again just as a recap for the post I had planned to do in this series which was all about Philip K. Dick. I’m currently in the middle of reading something that I don’t want to be distracted from though and while I am reading quite a lot these days because the heat makes it impossible to do anything else I think it’ll still be a little while until I finish it.

So instead I’ve decided to just write a short bit about PKD and the books of his (and one about him) I own rather than giving him a whole post. I will keep hold of my copy of Ubik though and probably re-read it some time soon. Maybe I’ll have more to say about it in another post, not part of this series but just a standalone thing like I did for Travels in Nihilon. I’ll keep the newer copy, it’s got a nicer and more appropriate cover, it has better quality paper and binding, the pages aren’t faded and yellowed, etc. Time Out of Joint on the other hand I read more recently, maybe a year ago now or so. I didn’t like it at all, I’m not really sure what the point to any of it was. See Ubik brings up all these ideas about death and how reliable our sense of perception is and I don’t feel like Time Out of Joint really asks or answers anything.

The book is about a simulated environment of sorts, and I’m sure it was one of the earliest explorations of that concept, but it’s been done so much more interestingly since. Kant and his concept of the Thing-in-itself is name dropped as well but I don’t know if it’s actually something the book explores or really says anything about at all. It doesn’t feel like it, the book seems very straightforward unlike the other PKD books I’ve read (Ubik, A Scanner Darkly, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), then again I don’t know anything about continental philosophy so maybe there is some real substance to be found and it just went right over my head. I’ll keep hold of it as well for now, but I might change my mind at any point and just throw it. I don’t think I want to read it again, I didn’t really enjoy it. It’s certainly the least enjoyable of all the PKD works I’ve read so far.

A Life of Philip K. Dick by Anthony Peake

This is an interesting book, at least the last section was kind of interesting. It’s split into two parts, the first part takes up most of the book (about three quarters) and it’s simply a biography. It’s interesting enough if you’re interested in the man, and he is an interesting man, but this book came to me (as you can guess, as a gift from my uncle) a bit too late. See by the time I got this, I think the Christmas before last, I had lost most of the interest I had in the man who remembered the future. Even the stuff in the second part which talks about his genuinely impressive insights into the future and his many weird interests I had already read a great deal about already online over the years.

I’m not sure whether to hold onto it or not, speaking about him in this post has made me think about perhaps reading one of his novels that I haven’t yet. I’ve been reading a lot of fairly dry history lately, and maybe a sci-fi novel will be a nice change of pace. I always meant to read his last book The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, which supposedly explores a lot of his weirder theological/ esoteric ideas. Maybe it’ll be worth holding onto this book for now.

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

This is a book that you’ve probably heard of if you’re part of the /polit9k/ crowd who mostly end up reading these little blog posts I write, as 4chan and specifically those boards are the only places I’ve ever linked this blog to. Naturally most of the visitors I get come from there or through the wordpress reader thingy, but for a few months I didn’t get anyone from the reader. So I bought this book right after starting my job actually, with my first month’s pay I think or maybe the second. I had heard that it was le relatable doomer novel, and frankly that’s quite a mischaracterisation. It’s certainly an interesting read, although I didn’t like the way it was structured at all as it was kind of all over the place, but that’s fine.

The book is semi-autobiographical, it’s a work of fiction with made up characters but heavily inspired by the events of the author’s own life. It’s split into three main sections, which are set during a different period in the life of the main character Oba, each one a decade or more apart from the others. Then around this is a short intro and outro where some other character talks about finding out about this main character and his life through some journals left behind by him. The thing is though that Oba is not a modern “doomer” by any stretch, he’s basically just a sociopath. Not a Patrick Bateman or Howard Roark big shot corporate type sociopath, but similar in that he has seemingly no regard or care for the suffering if others.

The seeming difference is that his inability to sympathise or relate to anyone is something that is a curse rather than a benefit. I’m not sure if it is a difference though, maybe the community focused “collectivist” culture of early 20th century Japan played more of a role than any moral character of his own. Perhaps someone similar would just go on to fit the “sociopath” archetype that we’re more used to if he was raised in a modern western city. I know this is kind of a cope that a lot of unsuccessful people cling onto, but it is undeniable that being uncaring and willing to step on other people gives you a huge advantage in life. That is, you will find it much easier to achieve your material goals.

In fact that’s something to think about isn’t it? Oba’s feelings of alienation are considered relatable and “oh he’s just like me” by a lot of robots and incels which is why this book gets suggested a lot, but he’s not like them at all. In fact he’s the very opposite, but rather in a culture like his it’s people such as that who are the ones that struggle the most to get by. There’s a lot pseudo-scientific talk online in the circles I’ve been around about “alphas” and “betas” and a lot of people have done a good job of pointing the broscience out for what it is. However I think the terms are used figuratively more so nowadays, an “alpha” is a collection of characteristics and attitudes, it’s a feeling. In the past in these circles you would hear the term “alpha male” but now it’s just “alpha”. “Is X alpha or beta?” is a an example of how the terms are used now.

So what exactly is it that defines “alpha” and “beta” as the terms are used today? Well it’s difficult to say, there’s some quality that can’t be described with other words otherwise we would have kept on using those. I do think that one (1) of the many themes represented is care. Visualise a spectrum, at one end would be someone who cares for others entirely over themselves, and at the other end vice versa. This is one of many measures of “alpha-ness” or the opposite, in that whatever point along the line it is where your care for others exceeds the care for yourself is where you can be classified as “beta” at least in this one regard. I suppose the idea behind having these themes all lumped together under the terms “alpha” and “beta” is that if you’re “beta” in one area of life you’re probably “beta” in most others also. So the value is in showing the connection between these traits.

Now I could get even more sidetracked than I have been in talking about why some people are more one way or another when it comes to this. I’ll leave it for you to think about on your own though, you can probably figure out my general thoughts on why from what I’ve said in other posts. My point here is that Japan appears to be a “beta” culture, you could say. In that emphasis is placed on putting the needs of the community before those of your own, rather than the “alpha” culture of the occident. So Dazai’s feelings of alienation might be relatable but he isn’t. I’m not the only one who feels like this, I’ve seen quite a few threads about this book on both /r9k/ and /lit/ in my time and a lot of people express a similar feeling.

That’s fine though, in fact thinking about it perhaps it’s more valuable for robots to read this book than to read a novel which features a primary character who is more like themselves. That would in a way be a kind of self pandering, this on the other hand allows us to see that perhaps in a different time and a different place it is someone quite different who is “disqualified from being human” as the more literal translation of the title goes. So I would actually say that this book does a better job of describing and capturing this aspect of the human condition than both works that as I said may feature more relatable protagonists in a similar situation, but also the same book back in it’s own context when it was originally published. I’ll hold onto this one.

Peter Pan by J. M. Barrie and Peter Pan in Scarlet by Geraldine McCaughrean

I was doing so well, keeping it concise, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ll end this post with one last quick one. Peter Pan is a story we all know well I’m sure, the tale of the boy who wouldn’t grow up. This was one of those books I read over and over, the “official sequel” Peter Pan in Scarlet I didn’t enjoy as much and I remember almost nothing about, but I still have it here for some reason and so it must be mentioned. I think the irony in holding onto a children’s book which is about the necessity of growing up (in part) is clear to everyone, so of course I will be giving both of these books away.

Link to Part 5

Link to Part 7

Addenda – First year

I’ve been doing this blog thing for almost a year now, and I’ve written some things that I think require further explanation. I’ve also changed my opinions on some of what I’ve written about, and just outright said things I wish I hadn’t. So I’m going to try and go over as much of that as I can. I don’t know if this’ll be comprehensive, there might be things I forget to cover just like how there are things I forgot to include in other posts (which btw I will also try to put in this one if I remember), but I’ll try my best. I’m not going to go in chronological order, or any other order either, I’ll just be talking about things as I’m reminded of them. If I’m still writing in a year, I’ll probably have a whole load more things like this bugging me so there may some day be a part 2 to this as well.

Ok so first I want to talk about this particular post which I wrote in February, it was kind of about this book Travels In Nihilon, but I got pretty distracted so it’s about a whole lot more than the actual content of the book itself. In particular there are two things about it that bug me, and I want to talk about here. Firstly I just said a lot about things that I know very little about, and that’s fine but I feel like maybe the way I wrote that post was in an authoritative tone which is undeserved. Not the stuff about nihilism, I think I made it clear that I know I’m uneducated on the subject and I was giving an outsider’s perspective on it. I’m more talking about what I said about Plato and his ideas. I’m not a philosophy student, I’ve read a couple of philosophical works including a translated copy of one of Plato’s dialogues but that’s it. I just feel like I didn’t make it clear enough that I understand that I don’t really know what I’m talking about when it comes to this stuff.

Which is important, I am fully aware that to anyone who actually knows about this stuff I look like a moron. I know this maybe seems like a small thing to worry about, but I worry about small things what can I say. I’m also planning on starting to read more philosophy in the near future, and I expect I’ll maybe realise how much I’ve misunderstood some major philosophical concepts. Which kind of leads me into the second thing, something that I’ve talked about in loads of posts but I know that I definitely did in this one. Which is the distinction I’ve noticed between more official definitions of words and the way they’re actually used by “normal people”. In fact it came up in the last post I wrote, only a week or so ago.

I don’t actually think I’ve changed my mind about any of what I’ve already said on this subject, though I do have some more to say, the only problem is that I naïvely implied that this was some unique insight or perspective of mine. To give myself some credit, in that very post I did say that I think this idea is probably not something only I notice, but even that is stupidly short sighted. Of course people must have noticed this, it’s not in any way a profound or undocumented thing. I think it’s just a cope, and any long term readers of this blog will be aware of my crusade against “copes”. I think that it’s so easy to become convinced that any kind of slightly interesting thing we think of is “new”, but realistically there’s thousands of years of scientific/ philosophical/ anthropological and linguistic literature.

I don’t believe that we’ve reached a point where there’s no new ideas, of course not, but we’ve reached a point where the random epiphanies of the man of the street have all been documented, chronicled and expanded upon enough. The new knowledge will come from response and research, it will build upon the work of others or on complex observations, there will be no more philosophers in one sense of how that term is used. This archetypal image we have of a figure who is completely out of the loop and yet has these world changing ideas, is a thing of the long gone past. There isn’t going to be another Heraclitus or Thales of Miletus, you or I are not going to be someone like that.

Just look at the increasingly complicated language of philosophical writings over the centuries, a lot of people use the term obscurantism to describe it and say that philosophy today is all just word salad jacking off with no real purpose. I was even convinced of this for a while, but now I just realise that there’s so much that has been said that needs to be reconciled and I kind of understand. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to grasp any of it, or if I’m too much of a low IQ brainlet, but I’ll give it a go. This isn’t some kind of defence of ivory tower academia either, I never went to university. In fact I didn’t even really have a formal education after the age of 15, I stayed in education after that for a couple years but I wasn’t really there. I dropped out before I actually dropped out. I’m just saying how it seems to me that the pursuit of knowledge has evolved.

Now speaking of this language problem, I think in talking and thinking about it in the past I didn’t realise quite the extent of the situation. See in my mind there was simply this distinction between the official or “true” definition of a word and then it’s devolved or degenerated usage as I viewed this change at the time. Thinking about it more though, it goes so much further than that. In a way almost everyone has a slightly different definition for most words, for a number of reasons. I mean take the context in which we learn a new word, we learn it in relation to other words. Words come in sentences after all, not as standalone items. This, you could say, colours how we view this particular word and it’s meaning. You’ll always have this personal baggage attached to certain words that no one else will.

I said in that same post that it seems to me there are two kinds of word, those that describe purely material things, like table, tree, foot, etc. and those that describe less tangible things like fear, essence, even a word like home. Now I know that it’s like a pseud calling card to dichotomise things like that (in my view there’s two kinds of X) but there is a distinction here. When two people meet, like when the European settlers first went to sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas, they point to these objective things as the starting point for trying to understand one another. In fact there’s even an African country (I think Senegal) today which means “boat” in the native tongue, because that was the first word learned by the visitors. You have to learn a new language with these sorts of words, and then when you can communicate that way and you have a foundation you can learn more abstract or conceptual terms from there using these words as the context.

Again I’m not a linguist, nor have I even been able to even learn another language, but I don’t see how it could be any other way. You have to have a basis, how can a word like “fear”, for example, be explained without some reference to those things which make one feel fearful. Yes those things also might be abstract, the distinction isn’t perfect it’s more like the colours on a rainbow, and I’ve used this metaphor before talking about something else and probably will again as it’s very applicable. There is clearly a distinction between any two colours on the spectrum that lie next to one another, but at the meeting point you don’t find a hard line you find a blurry inbetween stage.

One of the words I chose for my example, “table”, is a good example of this. It’s a man-made object, it’s not something that just exists to be described with a sound. Even though it does seem there is a universal understanding of table-ness, tied up in the word is this mental image of the building of a table and the idea of the purpose of this thing that we made. An apple doesn’t require a defence, it doesn’t need to have a purpose it simply is. We built a table though, and that must be justified. Still I would consider it in the first category because you could simply look at a table, make a sound and we could all agree that that sound means “table”. It doesn’t need anything else, so the closest I can get to a hard distinction is to say there are words that require other words and there are those that do not.

Anyway I mention this distinction (which I admit is imperfect) because words that are solidly inside the “simple object” box are impossible to have this change in definition happen to them that I’ve talked about before, and translation is something I’ve been thinking about lately. An apple will always be an apple, and not only that but that makes it far easier to translate as well. There is a perfect substitute word for apple in every language except for one spoken by people who have never seen an apple before. It’s this second category that is vulnerable to this misuse, but there lies the problem in my thinking up until this point. See why assume that the older definition is the right one? Let’s say that a word’s original academic usage is completely forgotten, and the newer colloquial usage becomes universal rather than just widespread. Dictionaries describe it in this new way, and so on. Is everyone using the word wrong? What about if one person finds an old dictionary which does have this older definition, now that there does exist one example still of the older meaning of the word, now is everyone wrong? I don’t know.

Most words we have today are derived from other words, or have older definitions that are lost. Many words derive from other words in entirely different and older languages. So it seems that as long as an older definition exists somewhere, there will be people who hold it in higher regard. I’ve been doing this, but why? It clearly doesn’t stand the test of time, the public at large is modifying it for a reason surely. These same people like me will say that the language is being dumbed down, but maybe that’s just a cope. Maybe the word is made more effective, more useful, through this evolution. I imagine that this process has probably sped up considerably in tandem with the increase in literacy/ education among the general population that has happened over the last 150 years or so.

I suppose it doesn’t matter though, because like I said to a much lesser degree the meaning held by any two people using this word is also going to be different. Words carry certain connotations for some people that they don’t for others, because of the context in which we learn them and hear them used later. Sure you’ll get these people to agree on a standard definition, or at least the definition they hold in their minds is incredibly similar, but it’s not a perfect match. It never can be, we will always be talking past one another to some degree. The more abstract a conversation is, the more this will be the case. It seems like all words are in a state of flux, there are these larger definitional changes that take place on a societal level but this happens because of the constant but very minor changes that happen every time someone new learns a word. Perhaps this broader change is in fact just the result of this smaller process, after enough time has passed.

There’s a lot of other stuff to get to though, so let’s move on now. I think the next thing I want to quickly go back to is a post from the very early days. From the very first month of writing actually, a period which when compared to the later stuff just bugs me. See that first month has more posts than any other, but I didn’t even start the blog until half way through the month almost. I was writing constantly, I was trying to distract myself by writing about what I was trying to distract myself from. Which seems counter-intuitive when I say it like that, but it made a sort of sense at the time. I kind of regret that entire period, but at the same time it’s was very honest and it’s what kicked this entire blog off so I’m also glad for it.

The post I linked is the second to last post from that month, and the entire idea behind that post was that I would “ride a train of thought” as the title says and so I didn’t really talk about anything in particular detail but rather breezed through various things I was thinking about at the time. I started it though by talking about one of the things I had been talking about all month, which was this possibly accidental message from someone I hardly knew and expected never to hear from ever again. There has actually been some update to that situation, which was that it was made clear that it was definitely still her using the same number, but I didn’t mention it in another post because frankly I’m very embarrassed that I ever cared so much about this. I really am kind of mortified every time I have to go back and read one of the posts from this month that were about this (other than the first, which on it’s own I’m quite happy with), I don’t like that it’s recorded and potentially someone I know could find it and see how pathetic I was being.

That’s why I haven’t talked about anything to do with any of that stuff since, other than to express a kind of regret. Again though only a kind, because I understand that if I hadn’t have written those posts I wouldn’t have then gone on to do what I’ve done since with this blog. Which is nothing special, but I’m happy with it. I’ve been thinking a lot about what the point is to any of this, what is the value to me writing any of what I’ve written rather than keeping it to myself, and I think right now my position is that it is a good insight into the life and mind of someone like me. After all there are quite a lot of people out there like me, and sure I’m an individual and I talk about my individual experiences and thoughts but I definitely fit a type.

Since I’ve started spending more time on /lit/ and less time on /r9k/ I’ve come across the posts of this minor board celebrity generally known on there as London Frog. The name is given because every thread he makes uses a picture of le sad facebook frog (like the one in my profile for this blog) and because he lives in London and often talks about his aimless walks through the city. He’s supposedly been posting since 2015 or possibly earlier than that even, and every post follows a very similar format. Some speculate that he is performing an elaborate multi year long troll job, but I think he’s actually presenting an accurate depiction of his day to day life. He has a sense of humour sure, the long running gag that every binge he engages is in will be his last being the best example of this. I was actually thinking about writing a whole post about him, and I may still at some point, but recently someone decided to start compiling all his posts.

Here’s the link to the first two volumes, the guy doing this says he has enough to make two more and maybe he’ll go back through the archive for the older posts as well, so I will either come back to this post and edit in the links to those when they’re available or I’ll include the links to everything when I write my full post about the least famous frog in London. Here’s volume 1, and volume 2, they’re definitely worth a read even if reading them all together like this isn’t quite the same experience as encountering his newest post as it comes out. I’m not sure if he is happy about this collection, I’ve not seen a single new post from him since the first volume was posted a couple of weeks ago. Hopefully he’s still around, and will post more, he’s an interesting character.

Anyway my point is that whatever the value there is in reading London Frog’s collected posts, or My Twisted World for that matter, that exists here as well. I expect that my writings will only ever be seen by a small group of people, but hopefully some of them will gain an insight into what life was like for a certain subset of people in the early 21st century. I think in particular from my posts, the one common theme that you get that you don’t get in the other mentioned projects or writings is the constant confusion or uncertainty. At least it’s not as prominent a theme, there are other more prominent themes in those other works in turn that aren’t so well presented here.

I’d say that feelings of anger and resentment are what you get from MTW, not just because of his actions but you get that feeling throughout the work itself. The killings are part of the work though, as I’ve talked about before. MTW is one single document, and in part it exists to justify this act of rage. LondonFrog makes short posts n an anonymous imageboard, and he deliberately seems to not just repeat himself in action but he literally reuses stock phrases over and over and has done for years. It’s a perfect way of expressing the feeling we all have that life is going nowhere. See I talk about my feeling of resentment sometimes, and I talk about my fears about how I’m wasting my life frequently, but those things are much better presented by these other works.

When I try to read my posts as they would appear to someone else, I think what stands out most is doubt. There’s the self doubt of course, and there’s the constant second guessing and suspicion about what other people are doing or “what they really meant” and so on, I often talk about how I’m not sure my own feelings are reliable. In reading back through my own writing I’ve noticed this is present throughout, whatever the subject I talk about I find it impossible to say anything with conviction. I had to make this very post because in one case my qualifying statements about my lack of trust in my own point of view were still not enough for me to feel comfortable.

So that post, “Riding a train of thought”, is notable because it’s the last time I spoke about that situation. However, I said in that post that I didn’t regret sending the second message I sent. The one where I asked why she messaged me in the first place. I feel quite differently about that now, I do regret it. I never should have sent that, it actually led to a pretty awkward situation and even if it hadn’t it was just such a stupid thing to do. I should have moved on and stopped thinking about it as soon as my first reply got no response. I just don’t understand why I cared so much, of course it’s easy to look back in hindsight and be more detached, but I’m just disappointed in myself for being so weak.

Ok, now I want to talk about this post from a few months ago. In this case I actually do have some new information/ experience that has changed my perspective, but even before that I had regrets about my wording. I’m talking specifically about calling my co-worker a thot, I just feel mean about it and also I was wrong. Now that word is used quite differently by different people, as are all of them I know I was just talking about this, but the personal definitions seem to diverge particularly for this and other “internet-era” slang terms. So I gave a description of what I mean when I use it in that post, if you need to know.

Now recently there’s been some changes at work, and now a few days a week because it’s getting busier two of us have to work the same shift. Which means that instead of spending a few minutes with my co-workers at a time I now sometimes have to spend several hours with them. I mean I’ve only been given this shift twice, and once was not planned, but I will probably have to do it again. Is it because I make everyone else uncomfortable that I’m put there less than everyone else, and they don’t want to work with me? I don’t know, but I’ve certainly considered that. Anyway one of the two shifts I had was with this girl, and naturally we were chatting to pass the time, and I just remember thinking that I was probably unfairly harsh in my judgement of her.

I don’t remember the specific moment, or even what we were talking about, but I just remember that at some point I was reminded of that post and I felt kind of bad about it. See there was something I was going to say in that post but I forgot to include it. Which was that I probably would come across very similarly to how she came across to me, if I could see my interactions with my co-workers from a third person perspective. Of course the smalltalk I have with them is boring, it’s fucking smalltalk. I can’t realistically expect to get a good impression of how interesting or thoughtful someone is from the kind of very brief interactions I was having with all of them until this change. So I’m saying that now, I should have said it then. Unfortunately this happens a lot because of the way I write these posts. I don’t really draft or plan them out it’s more of a thought dump, in fact it was an anon who first described them that way. I have bullet points in my head that I want to cover, but often as in this case I forget some of them.

Ok moving on again I will now be talking about a very recent post, Blackpill nights. Before I say anything about it I’ll just say that I did edit this the other day. I didn’t change or remove anything already there, I wouldn’t ever do that, I just added an image halfway through and an explanatory line about it. Now the problem I have with this post is that it kind of comes across like I’m trying to brag or boast. I’m not, but I am looking for affirmation as I even said in the post itself. See the point of that post was, well what I was just talking about, an expression of this doubt that is everywhere in my life. Because if on the one hand I have all these examples of women/ girls who were definitely interested in me, but yet I reached the age of 21 (soon to be 22) without ever even having kissed a girl, then clearly something doesn’t add up.

So I have all these anecdotes, these memories, but I start to second guess myself. Maybe I’m remembering completely wrongly, maybe these memories I think I have are false. My thinking was that by writing them down, and alongside a more current memory that I know for certain isn’t misremembered, I can stop this growing doubt. Because I’m willing to admit it, I do get an esteem boost from reminding myself of these things that happened. Because they did happen and I don’t want to lose them to this false doubt, and I know it’s a false doubt because I had this more recent memory. By having it recorded, and knowing that other people will see it, it feels more real and less like it’s all in my head. The funny thing is I actually decided not to include quite a few more anecdotes because I was starting to feel like I was being excessive or I was bragging. I’m aware that most people in my situation don’t have similar experiences, I even had someone tell me that they lost interest in reading my posts after that one. Which I understand, as unfortunate as that is.

In fact last sunday at work I was possibly “hit on”, or whatever you want to call it, again. This woman, who seemed quite a bit older than me got off the bus and came into the shop. She was wearing all this gym gear (she was a “personal trainer” I found out later) and she was asking me loads of questions and kept smirking and muttering things to herself. Now customers ask questions and try to chat often so I didn’t think anything of it, but then she asked when I close the shop. I answered normally, and she followed up with “so then you can go home?” and I said that after that I have to clean and stock up so not quite, at which point her demeanour changed slightly and she seemed colder. Now I can’t say for sure whether she was implying she wanted to “hang out” after I finished, but she did seem to have a similar demeanour and body language that I’ve noticed in cases where women were more overt about their interest.

The original title I had in mind for that post was “Blackpill’s a lie” (like the Ariel Pink song, Revolution’s a lie) and I think I should have stuck with it because that much better reflects what should be the real main take away from that entry. Yes I wanted a reason to share those memories as I said, but I wanted the stuff I ended the post on where I talked about my doubts about “blackpill ideology” to be the real point. After all that’s why I ended it on that, so it would be the last thing on your mind. Maybe you disagree, but I think that a slight change in the title while keeping the rest of the post exactly the same would have made quite the difference. I might not have even felt the need to bring it up again in this post.

I don’t think there’s anything else for me to say, I can’t think of anything right now anyway and this post is nearly 5000 words long already. I’m sure that as soon as I upload it I’ll realise there was something else I wanted to cover, that’d be just my luck, but it can’t be that important. Everything that has been really bugging me is dealt with now, I think. Oh, that’s right. I was messing around with the settings the other day and I found out that I could remove the e-mail address requirement for posting a comment. So now people can just comment anonymously without having to put their e-mail address in, not sure why that requirement was set in the first place but it’s gone now. Hopefully I might start to get some comments now, or not. Thanks for reading to the end anyway.

Maslow’s hierarchy of memes

It’s been over a week since I actually sat down to write anything, which is a shame because I was hoping this month would be more productive. Last month I only wrote two posts and both were on the shorter side, a couple thousand words each I think. But on Sunday evening as I got home from work I decided to have a quick shower, just with cold water to wash off the sweat, and as soon as I stepped out I noticed this vibrating/ whirring in my right ear. The noise was like the low hum of industrial machinery and the slight shaking you can feel when you rest your hand on such things was similar to the sensation just inside my ear. I was tired anyway after a nine hour work shift and so I just decided to play some vidya to take my mind off of it, and hoped that when I woke up the next day it would be gone.

Unfortunately, as soon as I woke I was met with the same noise and feeling still ongoing. In fact, I realised as I was boiling the kettle that my hearing was also somewhat muffled in that ear. I remembered that I had experienced something similar before a few years ago, and that it had lasted a few hours until I took a hot shower and rinsed my ears thoroughly, and so I did exactly that. Upon stepping out of the shower though, instead of the relief I was hoping for there was now a sort of high pitched electronic sound. White noise, like you might hear after a bump on the head, yet it didn’t stop after a few seconds but continued. At this point I kind of lost my composure, I was terrified that I had somehow developed permanent tinnitus. I frantically searched online for what it was I might be suffering from, and how best to relieve the symptoms.

After a while I realised there was little I could do from home, the few suggestions like trying to blow the air out through your ears by holding your nose and mouth closed or tapping the back of the head to stop the noise were all useless. The noise wasn’t the only thing as well, in my case as I said I seemed to be going deaf in that ear and it felt congested or blocked partially. I became convinced that it was ear wax build up, this was certainly a cope looking back because that seemed to be the most treatable possibility and believing it helped me to calm down somewhat.

I had to go to work again, I was on the evening shift so I was there until nearly 11 o’clock at night. I asked my dad to buy a solution containing hydrogen peroxide from the chemist which supposedly would dissolve the excess wax and restore things to normal. Thankfully with the knowledge that I could try this stuff when I got home, and the soothing ambient noise from vehicles and people outside, the shift at work wasn’t too much trouble to get through. Really the only time this experience was significantly bothersome for me was when there was silence, but unfortunately as I’m quite the shut in I probably spend a fair amount more time in silence than most people. The days off where I was at home the entire day were quite unpleasant.

I got home later that evening and poured the suggested amount of this solution into my ear, but it actually made things worse. My ears felt completely plugged up, and I could hardly hear anything. I rinsed the stuff out with hot water right away which helped a little and took a sleeping pill to help myself actually get to sleep with the white noise and rushing windlike sounds in my ear. The next day I wasn’t working, so I decided I would go to the see the doctor. I had another hot shower hoping maybe it would unplug the wax better but again it just worsened things. I had stood under the shower head with the affected ear tilted upwards and let the water flow through hoping it might clear things out, but instead it was like the night before just after using that solution. I had almost no hearing in my ear, I tried blowing air out like I had before, and tapping my head, and even pulling on my ear to try and get all the water/ excess wax to loosen. Nothing was helping, and so I got dressed and walked right to the doctor’s office without even waiting for my hair to dry.

My hearing was still gone practically in the one ear when I arrived, and so with that and my usual quiet/ shy demeanour there was some difficulty arranging an appointment. The thing is I haven’t been to see a doctor since I was about 14 or 15, so I wasn’t sure if I was still even registered at this facility. The first receptionist I spoke to asked for my date of birth and name, and said I wasn’t on the system, but that there was another place downstairs as this building was shared by two separate practices. So I went downstairs and there was another waiting room, and another reception desk, this room unlike the main one in the entrance was empty save for the two women behind the desk.

I went to speak to the one nearest, an east african looking woman, and she was very rude. Every time I answered a question of hers she made this strange expression, as if I was doing something weird. I know I can make people uncomfortable but it’s her job to deal with people so surely she’s used to people far more strange and/ or creepy than I am. I know that since I’ve had to work in a customer facing job for two years I’ve become a lot more used to being around “unusual” people. You’d think that working in the reception at a medical facility especially, one of the things you’d be trained for would be to help people feel at ease/ more comfortable, rather than to have the opposite effect. She was a nasty woman, and she seemed more interested in getting back to her chat with the other hag behind the desk than helping me.

Anyway, after going through the same process as I had upstairs and finding out I wasn’t on their system either I found out that this new second practice had only been here for half a year and so couldn’t possibly be the one I had been signed up with. As I said I haven’t been to see a doctor in over half a decade (and even then, it was not because I was ill but rather I was forced to go there by my dad in an attempt to humiliate me, luckily I was vindicated by the GP that day) and all I remembered was that it was this building which I had been to last time. I then went back upstairs and luckily there was a different woman behind the main desk this time.

Now she was much nicer than the other two I had spoken with, the first one was rushed and a little inconsiderate but it was busy up there in the main waiting room so I understand. Of course I’ve already given my opinion on the second woman. This third one was immediately able to put me at ease, I must have been visibly concerned at this point because in a very motherly way she asked me to relax and to tell her what the problem was. I explained that I was struggling to hear, which was why I had to tilt my left ear in the direction of whoever was speaking to fully hear them, and I told her about the constant noises. I then explained that I had been told I wasn’t on the system, and she said she would check again. As it turned out, I was in fact on the system, so who knows why I didn’t show up the first time. Maybe the first receptionist had misheard me when asking for my details. Unfortunately I couldn’t get an appointment that day, and had to wait until early Friday morning to actually see a doctor.

Now walking home from the surgery, I did manage to clear my ear by holding it closed for a few seconds and releasing it so air rushed in. It didn’t stop the tinnitus symptoms, and it didn’t completely fix my hearing, but I was at least back to how I had been before taking the shower that morning. It was now merely a case of waiting until Friday, but there was already a niggling doubt in my mind that the doctor would not be able to help me at all. This slowly grew throughout the week, and because I couldn’t actually concentrate on anything like reading or watching things I just ended up spending my free time getting more and more freaked out about what was happening to me.

I remember that afternoon after I came home from the doctor’s surgery that I sat down in my room leaning against the wall for an hour or longer trying to convince myself that the sounds weren’t real and I could block them out. It’s funny because even though I spent a lot less time than usual wasted on distractions (mindless youtube videos, vidya, etc.) that week, just because it was impossible to maintain my concentration even for those things, my memory of the week is quite blurry. I know I had to work the Wednesday and Thursday, which I’m glad for because having multiple days off in a row in this condition would have been miserable, but that’s all I really remember from those days. I suppose I just didn’t do anything else, I worked and I worried.

Now speaking of not being able to concentrate, that takes me to I suppose the only thing I can perhaps have learned from this experience. We’ve all heard of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs before I’m sure, but the general gist of the idea is that human experience is layered. This is represented with a pyramid usually, and the various tiers in this figurative pyramid are essentially locked off until the conditions of the tier below are met. For example, the bottommost layer is usually said to be access to food and water or whatever else might be considered the most basic human needs.

In fact I’ve seen some people say that sex should be considered as one of the physiological needs that belong in that base layer, which would make for a good explanation for the malaise that is so common amongst self identified incels and robots and similar types of people. It definitely does seem to be the case that a lot of people in that situation who then get a girlfriend tend to notice an increase in motivation and mental wellbeing, the bitter irony being that it is having these qualities in the first place (as if you can just choose to) which is suggested so frequently to us as what we should do to try and fix our situation. I don’t want to get dragged down a tangent today though, I just wanted to make it clear that I’m aware of this.

Anyway, placed on top of the most basic requirements are usually the feeling of safety and security. So that would mean being surrounded by people you can trust, and rely on as well. I suppose being in an environment where you don’t feel in danger is part of this too, as is financial security so knowing that you can afford to maintain your circumstances for the foreseeable future. It goes on and on, with some variation because different people have different ideas about what is reliant upon what and so on, but almost universally the highest tier on the pyramid is this nebulous concept of “self actualisation”.

Now what I’m describing here might not actually have much to do with what Abraham Maslow was suggesting in the paper where he first talked about this idea of his, frankly I wouldn’t know. Rather I’m describing the pop/ folk understanding of this idea, which is really what interests me. It’s like what I was talking about in the earlier days of this blog a lot about how words have colloquial definitions that are changed from perhaps how the words might have been used in the past. I plan to do a follow up post to what I said on that subject fairly soon in fact. Scientific and philosophical and even theological concepts are similar, a few months ago I read this book I was given for Christmas by my uncle on comparative philosophy. The book was kind of “meh”, mostly forgettable but there was one part where the author talked about the difference between the official stances on the idea of karma in various eastern faiths and the kind of loose folk understanding of the normies of that part of the world.

That was very interesting to me. See most people in India or Bangladesh etc. haven’t studied their religious texts, just like how many Christians haven’t actually read the bible, so the idea that someone on the street you might meet there has of karma is what actually influences the culture. Far more people think of it in that way, a kind of pastiche of various ideas from both buddhist and hindu traditions. That is why I think it’s more important to think about the things people actually believe, and actually are trying to say when using certain words. It’s why people who are not native speakers of a language can miss certain nuances or a point entirely, because they didn’t have the experience of learning these words organically in conversation happening around you as you grow up. Or maybe I’m just making excuses for never bothering to learn another language.

I said I was going to keep this post on track though, so back to the main subject. As I said I’m using this idea of the hierarchy of needs in the way it’s used more loosely by society, which if you don’t know already, we live in. Now I’ve always had the idea of it in the back of my mind, it’s something people on r9k talk about occasionally, I remember being taught about it at school, it’s mentioned in some youtube videos I’ve seen over the years, this idea is just present in my life. This week really made it hit home though, I now really understand what it’s like to be lowered a tier on the pyramid, taken off the pyramid entirely in fact. I’ve been ill before of course, ill enough that I had to take time away from school and go to the hospital and so on, years ago, but I had my mind. I could read and watch and play, and concentrate. I also had the knowledge those times that the experience was temporary, and I was at a time in my life where not being “productive” in some sense didn’t make me feel useless and lazy.

This time though, as I said the concern that I would be forced to live this way forever slowly grew and grew in my mind until it was all I could think about. I couldn’t enjoy music, I couldn’t even write anything here as I’ve said. I was really starting to get upset that I wouldn’t be able to write any more posts here. This blog is one of the few things I both enjoy and feel good about, no I don’t think it’s perfect as I’ve said recently I kind of feel like some of the stuff I’ve uploaded was pretty bad, but the “Addenda” post I have planned should help me get over those concerns. I was seriously thinking I might have to stop writing these, which wasn’t a nice thing to think about. This blog has helped me a great deal, and I couldn’t stand to lose it.

I have more of an appreciation for my life, not that this is a drastic change I’m still unhappy about my circumstances and I agree with pretty much everything I’ve been saying in recent posts about how I can’t continue to live like this. All I’m saying is I’d take this over having to live like I did last week for the rest of my life. In fact while I’m reminded of what I’ve been saying more recently, particularly this post where I talked about the possible benefits of psychedelics, I have been wondering something. Assuming that depression (situational depression I mean, not meme depression) is in fact describing someone who is low down on the hierarchy of needs, perhaps psychedelics are in a way rerouting your brain somehow to make you think you’re higher up the pyramid than you actually are. Or, if not that then they somehow allow you to reach the higher levels anyway despite not meeting the requirements of the lower tiers. I don’t know, it’s just something I’ve been thinking about.

Luckily I did get better, I went back for my appointment and the doctor explained my condition, I apparently had what is called Eustachian Tube Dysfunction. She gave me a decongestant spray for my nose, and I took it as soon as I got home. It actually made the noise far worse at first, but I decided to wait it out as she did tell me to try this stuff for a week, and then that night just before bed I tried the ear blowing thing again and the noise stopped. It hasn’t come back, I’m still taking that spray although not as much as I could if I really needed to. I don’t think I need it at all anymore, but I’ll keep trying it until the week is up. I remember that night when I realised the noise was gone that I was happy to just enjoy the sound of silence for a while, you have no idea how sweet it is until it’s gone, but I did listen to one song. Congratulations by MGMT, the closing track from the album of the same name. It’s been one of my favourite songs for a while but in this moment it was particularly good.

I’m hooked on a feelin’, doo doo doo doo, and I’m high on believin’

I’ve been thinking lately about how I have used the term “oneitis” in my posts on this blog. See, “oneitis” is a slang term used mostly online to mean infatuation, at least that has always been my impression, and so when I started this blog and I was using chan terms more frequently out of habit I used the word oneitis withut giving it much thought to describe my feelings. It’s also useful because you can use it to refer to both the feeling itself “I am experiencing oneitis” and the object of said feeling “she is my oneitis”. Given that I don’t want to use any real names, you can understand the utility of the term. That’s probably why it became so widely used on 4chan as well come to think of it. I’ve been thinking over the last few days though that maybe the term has some value in it’s own right. That it in fact isn’t just a synonym for, but is in fact an even less meaningful and more shallow experience than, simple infatuation.

My experiences since starting this job are what have led me to this point of view, and most of those I have already spoken about here on this blog, again back in the early days about a year ago. The first post I made, other than the short introductory post, which I link to way too often is the one where I really talked about my experience of it the most but I actually think that what I said in this post is more relevant to what I’m talking about today. In fact other than a few slight, but crucial, differences you could say I’m mostly repeating what I was saying there. There is a good reason for making this post though, even if it is a little repetitive, which is that this new understanding I have shows a positive development I think.

Now in “Finding my mind” I talked about how I was able to shut off this developing feeling. That by finding out that this new girl who had just started had a boyfriend already I was able to kill any developing feelings in the metaphorical womb. In fact something similar to this had happened before, which was why I only considered one of the two girls I talked about in that first post linked above to be “oneitis”, again as I have spoken about here before. I know this post is kind of a mess but bear with me, I have a point to make. See what this tells me is that the crucial element of this feeling of oneitis is not in fact feeling attracted to or some kind of “chemistry” or connection with a person but rather the idea that they could end up in a relationship with you. It’s a pipe dream, but that’s kind of the point. It needs to be feasible, but just out of reach so you remain in this perpetual state of anticipation.

Ok sure people cheat in relationships, but I do think that I would resist a woman in a relationship who was interested in me, hah! as if I’ll ever be in any such situation anyway. Not only that, but a lot of the people who do my job are foreign and moved here together. So that makes it harder for either of them to simply leave the relationship as they’re truly reliant on one another for paying rent and stuff like that I imagine. Which is actually quite a positive thing when you think about it. Maybe I’m too naïve as well, but I do think that most if not all of the people I’ve had any feelings for (or felt like I did, I’m not forgetting what I’ve been talking about) were good, and good people don’t cheat. Then again my whole point here is that I don’t actually know anything about them really, so perhaps not. The kind of personality I create for them certainly wouldn’t though, which says.. something positive right?

Anyway as I was saying, the crucial element therefore is not the person at all it’s the potential. It’s this idea you can hold onto however illogically that somehow a relationship is waiting for you. You don’t have to do anything, it’s just on it’s way. I think the analogy I used before was like that feeling you get when you’re waiting for something special in the mail. It’s ultimately a reason not to kill yourself, of course I’m being hyperbolic but when you think about it that is exactly what it is in a sense. You need to keep going for now, because there’s still this thing to wait for. It’s a reason to get up in the morning, a reason to go to work, a reason to cook and clean, etc. If it becomes impossible for you to maintain this fiction, then you lose these feelings for the person pretty quickly. At least that is what happened in my experience, because ultimately the person didn’t matter.

In fact in the other case, the girl who I did regard as my oneitis was not someone I even felt particularly attracted to. Neither superficially or because of who she was “deep down” or whatever meme you want to use. I talked in some detail about how I basically constructed an attractive personality and projected it onto her, because we barely spoke. I hardly speak to any of my co-workers as I’ve mentioned here loads of times, I’ve certainly gotten a fair bit more comfortable around them in the last year but I’m still pretty shy and reserved. Which again in it’s own way goes to show that the supposed object of my affection was really not very important.

She had to be there in order for me to have this feeling, but it could have been someone completely different and the same thing would have happened. That other co-worker of mine who I thought I was developing feelings for had only been there a few weeks, we’d barely shared a word. Ironically I actually get along with her fairly well now, and find her easier to talk to than all the other people I work with, and had I continued on to develop feelings for her it probably wouldn’t be that way. Not that she’s not a pretty girl, that’s not what I’m saying, but I’m just able to be sensible about things. She doesn’t know anything about me, and I don’t really know anything about her, it’s not possible for me to actually develop a real attachment without something to attach to. Even now, and back then I knew her much less.

So I think that there is a distinction, what we call infatuation might be considered shallow and fleeting but it is honest. It’s a response to an actual person, you do actually have to know a person somewhat to develop those feelings for them. Oneitis is like a simulation of the feeling we call infatuation, or more specifically the simulation of an infatuation that is not reciprocated. Yes that’s right, I believe that in some unconscious sense I (and I don’t think my experiences with “oneitis” that I’ve talked about are particularly unique) wanted these feelings of longing to continue in perpetuity, for the reasons I stated above. Something to eternally look forward to. The problem being that eventually this has to end, as the particular individual who you are using to give yourself these feelings leaves your life. Which is exactly what I was going through in that very first proper post I made, linked above.

Oneitis I have come to realise is like a drug, it’s a way of coping for lonely people, and it is mostly lonely people who are more prone to experiencing it. As I said it’s something that can be used as a motivating force, like a mild stimulant, and also something to fall back into to cope with loneliness or lack of activity. That’s what I think is important, that’s the purpose of this post distinguishing it from the others linked earlier. See, for a while I was going with the metaphor that it is a disease, something that you catch rather than something you can choose not to engage in. That is the intention after all of the term itself, oneitis immediately brings to mind other “itises” like tonsillitis, dermatitis, hepatitis etc. It’s by design that you consider this experience to be an affliction, and it is always unhealthy in the long run that is true. I don’t think it’s something that happens to you though, I think it’s something you can choose not to experience. That is, if you realise what I think I’m realising now.

When I think about my state of mind during the period when I first started this blog, it was kind of like what I’ve heard about the drug withdrawal process. I wasn’t throwing up or experiencing any real physical symptoms, other than being quite a bit more fatigued than usual, but my thought patterns are what I’m really talking about. I was reliant on this feeling of oneitis to keep me going. I could always comfortably fall back into these silly fantasies in my head about a lovey dovey hand hold-y relationship with this girl, which sure I realistically never expected to happen but I was somehow able to convince myself that I kind of did. Now I’ve had a clear head for a while, and I feel better for it. It’s shameful that I was acting and feeling that way.

In fact I have to frequently fight the desire to delete my older posts, in part because I don’t like the version of myself that is presented there. I wasn’t lucid, I wasn’t myself. There’s other reasons as well, I said some things that I don’t quite agree with now and I phrased and worded things in a way that I regret, basically I think that the earlier posts don’t give as accurate an impression of me as the posts from the last half year. I’ve also just improved my writing I think, and therefore those older posts don’t look so good in comparison. I know I can’t do that though because, as this very post is an example of, I still am talking about similar things and I link back to the older posts often. There’s a progression that I think is nice to look back over as I was talking about in another post recently.

I just feel like if any of the people I’ve spoken about were to see what I wrote about them (not that they will most likely, I’m a tiny anonymous droplet in an ocean of people) they’d think I’m a terrible person and be quite upset about what I’ve said. I don’t want to upset anyone, honestly. They’d probably be shocked that this person they hardly remember or think about gave them so much thought when I barely spoke to them in person. “Gross, he was harbouring all these secret feelings and I had no clue”. Of course, I’m an unusual case, I spend way too much time thinking about everything and I’ve probably written twice as much about Elliot Rodger than anyone I know in real life, but I understand why it wouldn’t feel that way to them.

Since that second linked post, I haven’t had similar feelings for any of my co-workers. Or anyone at all for that matter, but I’m a shut in so there really isn’t anyone else in my life right now for me to. In the last couple of months specifically I’ve been finding it much easier to talk to the people I work with, although yes as I said it’s still difficult and I probably still come off as very stilted in conversation with them, but it’s something. I don’t think that could ever have happened if I had this feeling, that I guess I’ll continue to call oneitis, for one of them. Or, more accurately given what I’ve been saying, for myself.

Books: Part 5

The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau by H. G. Wells are two of my favourite books. Both are rather short, you could read The Time Machine in an afternoon as I have several times, and The Island Of Doctor Moreau is not much longer. Now I could try to talk about the substance of either of them, because both are rich and worthwhile pieces of writing that plenty of people who are far more qualified and intelligent than me have studied and written about. Both are crucial in the development of what we would call science-fiction and incredibly influential. Themes and imagery and ideas from these (and all of H. G. Wells’ works, but these are the only ones I own copies of) books come up over and over and over again in other books and films to this day. However, those other people are far more qualified and intelligent than me, and I don’t think I have any unusual insights or takes either, so instead I think I’ll just talk about why these two books in particular are special to me.

There was a period of time at school where I had no real friends, during my second and into the third year of secondary school, so around the age of 12/ 13. There was a group of kids I would hang out with, and the two friends I have (maybe, I hardly speak to them but we did all go on a trip together last summer and were thinking about doing the same this year) to this day I met through hanging out with this group, but I didn’t really get along well with any of them at first. It was just preferable to be around them than to do laps of the building for an hour every lunch break. Anyway they liked to hang out in the library, and so being around books all the time I was reading quite often during that period. I was also borrowing books and reading every night at home, as I’ve tried to start doing again recently.

Well, one of the books I remember seeing on the shelf was The Time Machine, and I loved it. I picked it up during the morning break, and then I skipped lunch later that day to read it for the whole hour, and finished it that evening at home. It was just an incredibly /comfy/ reading experience, something about the slightly antiquated Victorian English it was written in (the book was published in the late 1800s) along with the subject matter and the way the story was framed just made it a pleasure to read. The Island of Doctor Moreau was the exact same, and in particular that image of this lonely scientist on his own island thousands of miles from civilisation has stuck with me to this day. Both stories really draw you in to a certain time period, in a way that a book or film from more modern times with a similar setting cannot.

See H. G. Wells was alive at a time when we knew so much less about the nature of matter and reality, most of what we understand about the brain was discovered in the 20th century, the Rutherford atomic model hadn’t been proven accurate, and related to the subject of this book ideas on the nature of time were rather different from the scientific consensus today, etc etc. This period in scientific history is romanticised today not just by me but by a lot of people I think, instead of the sleek shiny white halls that come to mind when you think of a modern research facility, people see men with moustaches tinkering away with rudimentary devices trying to grasp onto some piece of the unknown that surrounded everyone. Reading these books really brings you into that world. In fact I believe that the main reason behind the appeal of the steampunk visual style/ aesthetic to so many people is because of this in part.

There’s a similar feeling a lot of people have regarding the age of exploration and the colonial era, in that there’s something very appealing about conquering and mapping out the great unknown. So a lot of people almost unconsciously gravitate to various superficial things which in their mind represent this time period. People love pith helmets, those long line formation style military coats, ships of the line, and so on. Not because these things are just universally visually appealing to people, even though it might feel like they are, but because of the context within which those things were used. It’s the same for the sciences in the 19th and very early 20th century, even if I’m wrong about this and most of the discoveries we kind of associate with this period were actually from before or after that doesn’t really matter. Similar to how so frequently in media portraying the late roman republic for example the legionaries are wearing lorica segmentata, even though that armour wasn’t developed until much later in history it doesn’t matter because it’s become such a huge symbol of Rome you have to include it.

In fact this kind of feeling, of a world which is still unknown and mysterious is one of the reasons I wanted to read Herodotus’ Histories. I can definitely say that I personally have a certain longing for a time when the world was still strange, and I know that there are at least some people who feel similarly. There’s this sentiment you see, on r9k especially, “born too late to explore the new world, born too early to explore the stars”. The thing is, I am self aware enough to appreciate that someone of my temperament and ability would probably not have been one of the great explorers of the past. I’m not a trailblazer, I’m a shut in.

Changing subject now, the idea of divergent evolutionary paths of humanity leading to the soft and passive Eloi on the one hand and the vulgar brutish Morlocks on the other in The Time Machine is genuinely disturbing to think about. It certainly is a particularly british idea as well I believe, as the class differences are much more stark than in other European/ western countries. I think there are real phenotypic differences between the working class and the rest of the population here, and I think that this divergence started during the industrial revolution. If you look at “anglo” populations in the former colonies like Canada, Australia, The eastern coast of the US, and New Zealand you don’t see this as much, as these places were settled before Britain industrialised for the most part. Of course all these places have since industrialised as well, as has most of the world, but I think the conditions of the industrial revolution in England (as it was the first) were worse for the workers than anywhere else. Other places didn’t have to go through all the experimentation that happened here. I could be completely wrong, but that is how it has always seemed to me.

I don’t think that H. G. Wells really believed that this trend would continue until two separate species of human developed, the Eloi and Morlocks are clearly there as allegory, but the point is well made. There’s a line in The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell (another book in the pile) talking about class in Britain or at least England, which puts it quite well.

the essential point about the English class-system is that it is not entirely explicable in terms of money. Roughly speaking it is a money-stratification, but it is also interpenetrated by a sort of shadowy caste-system

It’s so well put, and it’s something that you have to live amongst to really pick up on I think. Class, this shadowy sort that he speaks of, penetrates through to every area of life here. You develop a sort of sense for it, you can tell within seconds roughly where someone new you meet stands in this complex social order after a while. The one thing that seems to be causing a shift is large scale immigration, because these newer people even though a lot of them are from other European countries aren’t as attuned to it. As for those from “further afield”, they’re completely oblivious. They’ve also formed into a kind of underclass, which has it’s own effect on this ill defined structure that is of course hard to specify but clearly present.

This sort of thing is much more pronounced in the cities as well, which again makes sense if you see the industrial revolution as a major factor in the coming about of it. In more rural areas class is much more simple to understand, it really does just seem to be economic. The same goes for the other “anglo” countries, like Canada or Australia. Some people have nice houses and can afford to send their children to private school for example and others can’t, but the people are the same. When you go into a shop or whatever in a town in Dorset there will be both of those kinds of people but it’d be harder to initially distinguish them. You’d actually need to get to know these people to find out which was which, in London or Leeds or Sheffield you’d know immediately. Now of course in the countryside you also have the aristocracy many of whom have estates thousands of acres in size, but they’re a tiny percentage of the population. I’m just talking about the “normal people” you see day to day.

Now this system does seem to be ever so slowly breaking down, in part because of immigration as I was saying, but for several reasons. I really do mean slowly though, as I said I think in certain areas there is a biological difference between these “castes”, almost like the very earliest stages of the formation of separate ethnic groups. I think that it’s class intermixing is less taboo than ever before though, and so this could be reversed. Americanisation is another big factor certainly, a lot of the things that people use to define and divide themselves are now coming from a place where this specific kind of class division doesn’t exist. It is a slow process though, and in fact in a small way I might be a part of that process. My mum was from a pretty well off middle class background, and my dad was born to a very working class family. In fact I think that being in this weird in-between position is one of the many reasons I’ve always felt a little alienated.

Of my two close friends, one is quite middle class like my mother was growing up and my uncle (her brother) is today, and the other is from a more working class background. I don’t think they would have stayed in contact with one another if not for me functioning almost as a go-between in this friendship. All their other friends are from similar backgrounds from what I can tell. I’m always the one who has to arrange stuff between the three of us, and sure we all get along really well when together but there’s some kind of resistance before that point. I’m pretty much convinced I care about their friendship more than they care about mine, and certainly more than they care about one another’s. That’s not entirely because of class though, it only plays a role, but also because as I said they have other friends and I don’t.

Speaking of alienation though, I’ll try to get back on track with this post. So I’ve written before about how I’ve always had a romanticised view of the loner/ hermit figure or archetype. I can’t find the particular post to link, but it’s come up a few times. I think that in a way I always sort of knew I would end up quite isolated and in fact part of me wanted it to happen. Those kinds of characters, a perfect example being Doctor Moreau, always seemed “cool” and intriguing to me as a kid. I’m not sure why that is, maybe I admire those characters and people in real life who aren’t reliant on anyone else. Or maybe it’s because I already expected to end up alone and I was unconsciously forming a “cope” around it. “I may end up without any friends or anyone who loves me, but look at all these cool characters in novels and films who also don’t have those things”.

I just can’t say, but I do know that the character of Doctor Moreau, even though he himself isn’t actually present for roughly half of the novel, is the character of this kind I felt this about the most. I just thought he was fucking cool, this genius scientist who fled his academic position to do his crazy experiments on an island in the South Pacific (for some reason I always thought it was the South Atlantic until checking today), away from civilisation and other people. He does have his assistant Montgomery, and the beast people, but you get my point. There’s a part fairly on that is really memorable for me, and hopefully it’ll help illustrate what it is that appealed to me.

Just after the main character, Edward Prendick, arrives on the island. He’s taken to the compound that Moreau and Montgomery live in, the creepy implication that there’s something they need to protect against being deliberate I’m sure, and they take out a bottle of Brandy and some biscuits to share. The description of the apartment within the compound that Prendick stays in further adds to the /comfy/ vibe, old scientific books strewn across the place, a hammock, a chair by the window if I remember correctly. Picture it in your head, what you see is like an image that would be posted in a /comfy/ thread on /r9k/ or /wg/.

Now of course Doctor Moreau is not meant to be a relatable or sympathetic character, he’s not exactly the antagonist of the story but he’s clearly shown to be engaging in some rather cruel experiments which some of the beast people (the products of these experiments) resent him for. Nevertheless I did find myself drawn to the character, and I’ve re-read this book multiple times because I so enjoy his story. I will almost certainly read it again, this and The Time Machine, which is why I will be keeping hold of these two books and not throwing them away.

Link to Part 4

Link to Part 6