The Contents Of My Head

8AM
Sitting in a traffic jam on a freeway. I look over at the side of the road and see a lot of trash comprised mainly of cigarette butts. We know now what kind of poisonous chemicals are added to cigarettes and here are the remainders of hundreds and thousands of them. They break down in the sun and rain and the poisonous chemicals leach into the ground. It would be interesting if there was something like a spectrometer that could read chemicals on a camera screen—and the more harmful they are, the area would read warmer (red) like a thermal camera. What would the ground look like through this camera? Would it be a swath of red? The chemicals must go into the ground, and I suspect they grow into the plants nearby… which means that animals, at some point, are ingesting these chemicals.

8:30AM
Sentient beings: sentiency means that you are aware of yourself, that you are aware that you exist and are aware of your own existence.
Cats and dogs are sentient. They communicate with us, talks to us, tell us what they are thinking, what they want. They are aware of themselves as separate from us.
All mammals are not sentient, only domesticated ones: cats, dogs, horses—and almost all simians are sentient (tiny primitive ones might not be)—maybe bunnies…
Water mammals are sentient too, whales, dolphins.
Hive minds like bugs are not sentient.
Non-domesticated and wild are not sentient.

10AM
The myth of the “tortured artist” is a lie, but I do think that, generally speaking, a certain type of depression is conducive to creativity. But not necessarily. Let me rephrase that. Depression (obviously I am not speaking of clinical depression in which one is paralyzed) characterized as a struggle/ conflict within--or even without--oneself, is conducive to creativity. This struggle or conflict translates into movement, and by extension any kind of movement, anything that is yearning or struggling, any kind of emotional movement or thought movement, is conducive to creativity. Creation doesn’t come from inertia, creation doesn’t come from a state of rest, creation springs from MOVEMENT.

4:30PM
I am listening to Gary Numan sing a song called “Prayer For the Unborn.”

"So, I prayed...
But you weren't listening.
Making miracles?

So, I begged...
But you were far away.
Saving souls perhaps?

So, I screamed...
But she was very small
And you have worlds to mend.

So, she died...
And you were glorious.
But you were somewhere else.

If you are my shepherd
Then I'm lost and no one can find me.
If you are my saviour
Then I'm dead and no one can help me.
If you are my glory
Then I'm sick and no one can cure me.
If you light my darkness
Then I'm blind and no one can see me.

If you are my father
Then love lies abandoned and bleeding.
If you are my comfort
Then nightmares are real and deceiving.
If you are my answer
Then I must have asked the wrong question.
I'd spit on your heaven
If I could find one to believe in."

I learned that he wrote this song after his wife suffered a miscarriage. Usually this kind of “angry with God” stuff does not work on me. I find it sad that people ask questions like, “Why did God take my loved one?” Such questions seem so willfully ignorant and childish. “God” did not “take” your loved one. There was no “taking” involved. “God” did not do anything. Your loved one died. People die. They die violently, they die peacefully, they die suddenly, they die slowly, they die young and they die old. There is no “reason” for it other than that is what happened. Often it is hard to take, but take it we must. And if you try to find fairy tale answers—and there are a lot of them out there—you are only doing yourself and your loved one a disservice by not walking through and facing what has happened. You are only harming yourself by not being fully present to reality and to now.
Gary Numan has taken this a step further. He displays anger toward a deity that doesn’t exist and although he knows that, the anger is still there.
People who DO believe in the stories of god and religion, the lies, must continue to tell lies. When you tell a lie, or rather when you BELIEVE a lie, in order to believe it, you must tell another lie to prop the first one up, and on and on it goes.
A fantastical lie begets another fantastical lie—because you have to explain it somehow. Explanations for things that simply aren’t true require more and more elaborate lies until you have a whole system of dogma and a fairy tale that, if revealed to us from some other unknown culture, would seem quite bizarre and silly.
The words to this song though, are quite powerful in their simplicity. They are really saying, “If you’re IT, we’re screwed.” They are simple words, but forceful and they profoundly cut to the truth—I felt as though I had just been slapped when I first heard them. They are succinct, violent and slashing.

4:45PM
People get so uptight about gender roles and sexuality because they see them as rules. And if the rules are not there, they won’t know what to do.
If you accept the rules without testing them out, without seeing if they resonate with you, without seeing if they match up with what is inside you and your soul, then you have no idea what is inside yourself—and you have no idea who you are. In that case, you must rely on outside rules to tell you what to do, who to be, and how to think… just like religion. Gender roles are a kind of religion for people and they take it on faith. Otherwise, they wonder what to do because they have no clue who they are inside, as a human being. The unspoken situation that scares them is: if there are no rules, if gender roles are fluid, where do I fit in, what do I do, how do I behave? They do not have the answers to those questions because they have not looked inside themselves. They need to hear: never mind other people—what do YOU think and want? And I am sure that if they have not looked inside their own souls about this issue, they have not examined themselves about lots of other areas of life as well. What does it mean to be a man, what does it mean to be a woman, what does it mean to be a human being?
And here is the real, true issue: looking inside yourself leads to responsibility--a responsibility to yourself, to truth, to reality, and the idea that you are responsible for creating your life. And that is the most frightening thing of all.

9:20PM
I am fairly certain I have synesthesia—working on paperwork at home, going through the calendar, seeing the months, I see that the name of the month has a certain shape and feeling and the number of the month has a shape and feeling (August is 8 which is round and full, September is 9 which is jagged, October feels good as 10 which is the first month to have a double digit--and therefore is aged)—and where the months fall in the year corresponding to the seasons has a shape and feeling…and a color too. The seasons are quarterly and they have a shape and feeling of where they fall within the wheel of the year.
Months have color—in my journal, I use colored pencils to write the name of the month.
I think I have number form synesthesia as well as Ordinal Linguistic Personification synesthesia.
Synesthesia: n-- The subjective sensation of a sense other than the one being stimulated. For example, a sound may evoke sensations of color