If that were the actual meaning of the statue, couldn’t they have just written it in a sentence instead of making a whole statue to symbolize it? They could have just written the words on a piece of paper saying ‘Modern day thinkers are just mentally masturbating. They are unable to accomplish anything useful. Therefore, I feel cynical about everything. The end.’ But no, it had to be a statue.

I’m not sure that’s necessarily the official meaning behind it, but that’s what the voices were saying.

“Modern Day Thinker”
Mark Pilato
A gift of Blake and Linda Gall

The library’s new armless brass statue makes me feel annoyed, angry, and frustrated every time I look at it. I do not feel aesthetically pleased.

They have a new statue on the landing of the stairs. It’s a woman made of brass. It’s meant to be an imitation of the old, broken Roman statues of people, the statues that don’t have arms anymore. I could be mistaken, but it’s my understanding that those Roman statues originally had arms in the beginning. They lost them over time because the arms were fragile and they broke off. I don’t recall ever reading about them, but I assume that’s what happened.

But now, I’ve seen it parodied on cartoons on television, and that kind of thing – something you might see on Scooby Doo, cartoons from my childhood. It is a ‘familiar phenomenon,’ something that exists in cultural awareness, that there are a bunch of famous statues from Rome that have their arms broken off. So cartoons would sometimes parody those statues as a joke. That’s how I first learned that they existed, actually. I saw the parodies and I thought ‘Why are they imitating statues without arms?’

This annoying brass statue is made of a material that is durable and unlikely to break, even if the building crumbles down around it and the archeologists have to dig it up a few hundred years in the future. It could easily have had arms without fear that they might break.

However, somebody somewhere *told* somebody that ‘ancient Roman statues are beautiful.’ Ancient Roman statues are the official definition of aesthetic values, somebody told somebody, and so, we must imitate them, including their brokenness, so that people will *recognize* that they are an imitation of something which is the definition of aesthetic beauty. If the arms weren’t broken off, people might not recognize the ‘symbol’ that represents something familiar, the well-known phenomenon of ancient statues with their arms broken off. Broken-off arms are not, themselves, aesthetically beautiful, but they have popularly come to symbolize something that once was beautiful before it was broken. (Actually, phrasing it that way makes me understand it a little better – but I don’t want the statue to be meaningful, I want it to be beautiful!)

That’s just it. I don’t want to argue about what are the meanings behind the statue. I want to look at it and see that it is pleasing to the eye. I don’t want to argue that this brass copy of something which was once beautiful, but is now broken and lost, and which now only symbolically represents something beautiful, is an interesting statue because of its having that symbolic meaning. I can feel myself fighting against it right now. I don’t want to see it that way.

Is the statue supposed to be controversial and deep? Is it just someone’s attempt to make a familiar copy of broken Roman statues? Was it chosen because someone is too stupid to judge for themselves what is, and isn’t, aesthetically beautiful, and so they chose something which would symbolically suggest something recognized as ‘officially beautiful’ so that people wouldn’t need to take the trouble of deciding for themselves whether or not it was beautiful?

The woman’s head is lifted up to the sky. Her smooth, flowing lines reach upward… until you get to the chopped-off arm. The arm juts out just beyond the shoulder. It looks like an Iraq war veteran. Do I want to be reminded of Iraq war veterans with their arms and legs amputated, every time I look at this statue which is struggling to be beautiful, reaching to the sky without arms, without legs?

Perhaps it wasn’t amputated. Perhaps the arm is a bud which is just about to grow. Perhaps this person is in a liquid, developing state which is moving. This is suggested by her left side, which is smooth and melted looking, the arm fused against her body. She doesn’t look like she is in any pain. She looks like she is in motion.  (After looking at it again, I noticed that her left arm flows downwards so that her hand is touching her groin.  I hadn’t seen this erotic aspect of the statue until just now.)

I might be able to make peace with this statue if I imagine her as a budding, growing, flowing, liquid creature, something alive, flexible, changing, moving, somewhere between a liquid and a solid.

I don’t think I will see her as just an amputee anymore, or just a copy of a broken old Roman statue. She is something else.

I went on one of my long random drives today, and I also drank several cups of coffee. I’m not sure why I wanted coffee so badly that I decided I should have it. I know that I’ve quit coffee many times in the past and I’ll be able to quit it again whenever I decide to, and I also know that it’s easier to quit it when the drug residues aren’t on my clothes. So, because of the coffee, I’m extremely verbal. Someone recently used the word ‘hyperphasia’ to describe what happened to him whenever he drank coffee. That’s a good word.

While I was driving, I was having a big ‘discussion’ about why we buy land. Why do we have property rights? What do they actually accomplish? What do they fail to accomplish? What would happen if we abolished them, and who is ‘we’ in that scenario, and what does it mean to ‘abolish,’ and who enforces that abolishment? And it all came around full circle to the realization – as always – that the dreaded scenario has already occurred, that we already are living in exactly the situation that we claimed we were trying to prevent, and that the very thing we wanted to stop from happening, is exactly what the current system causes to happen.

Before I get into that, I was also going to mention that I finally checked out a library book. This should help stop me from going to see so many movies. I forgot that there was a taboo on books, and I forgot the reason why there was a taboo. I had a taboo on checking out library books because the last time I did that, it was in the middle of the very worst contamination at my apartment, and I set the book down onto the carpet and it got covered with ephedra residue, the worst of all the residues. I had to then go back to the library and explain to them that I had ‘damaged’ the book, and I wanted to buy them a new one. I offered to go out and buy one, but the library lady told me that the library could just buy it themselves and that I shouldn’t worry about it. But I wasn’t happy about that at all, and I really wanted to buy them a copy, but for some reason, the lady discouraged me from doing that, and I forget the details. So I felt guilty for ruining the book. I refused to give it back to them with ephedra on it.

After that, I forbade myself to check out any library books, and I also severely limited the books that I bought over the next few years, although I bought several Schaum’s Outlines of Bookkeeping and Accounting, several of which were ruined and thrown away, while I was finishing up all those assignments. Other than that, I bought very few books, and I refused to check any out of the library.

So I just got ‘Harry Potter.’ I didn’t get anything that required me to learn or to study, because I don’t want to start up a learning project only to abandon it in a week or two because it’s unsustainable. I got something which was purely entertainment, and it wouldn’t matter if I abandoned it. I’ve read it several times before, but it’s always enjoyable. I like to read the same books over and over again. This is something that differs between people. There are some people who love to watch the same movies, and read the same books, over and over and over, while there are other people who like to move on to the next book or the next movie as soon as the first one is done. If I find something that I enjoy a lot, then it’s re-watchable, re-listenable, or re-readable, and so I will do it over again a hundred more times and not get tired of it.

I read the book for a couple hours last night, instead of watching a movie, and when I woke up this morning, I had this feeling that I had recently been watching one of the Harry Potter movies, and I was confused, because I don’t have the DVD or a DVD player right now – the DVDs are all in my closet in West Virginia. I realized it was because I had been reading the book the night before.

I’m not that worried about contamination now. The book might possibly fall onto the floor of the car, but I’m trying not to let that happen – although the car is such a mess right now that the book might actually slide off one of the piles of junk. So I have the book inside of a plastic bag, in case it does slide down onto the floor.

Yesterday, I did work on setting up the tent in the rain. I didn’t work on it today. Yesterday, I sort of got tired and had to leave anyway because it was starting to get dark and I think we’re probably not allowed to park our cars there after dark – most of the other parks have made me leave if my car is parked there after the sun sets.

So I partially set up the tent, but it’s all wet and sagging and shabby looking. As I walked away from it, I looked back at it. It looked sad and pathetic, like a piece of garbage, like a big plastic bag that someone had thrown away. I wasn’t happy about that. It might encourage someone to go get rid of it because it looked like garbage.

Whenever I was buying the vinyl fabric that I was going to use, I chose the clear, see-through stuff. The reason that I chose that particular fabric was because ‘they’ suggested it. I was already familiar with that particular type of vinyl and I didn’t have any chemical sensitivity reactions to it. It was the same stuff that I had been using on my car seat for a long time, and I didn’t have any problems with it. So that was why they suggested it.

But I looked at a couple other types of vinyl that were next to it. Some of them had printed ‘doilies’ on them. Doilies are those lacy flowery things that people will put on their tables and other pieces of furniture. Some of the vinyl had that, and some of it had checkered patterns, and that kind of thing. I looked at that, and imagined using it for my tent, and I found the idea so amusing that I was very, very tempted to buy one of them instead of the clear stuff. I came quite close to doing it.

Looking back at the sad-looking piece of trash hanging between the trees, I felt that maybe I ought to have bought the patterned fabric instead. It would have sent a different psychological message. I need to protect the tent against potential vandals. If somebody walked by and saw a miserable-looking piece of trash, they might get angry at the person who was littering, and remove the trash. But if they saw a pleasant-looking tent with colorful fabric or doilies or patterns, something homey-looking or feminine-looking, they might actually laugh at the idea of someone building a little tiny tent in the woods with colorful vinyl, and they might leave it alone. Then again, they could have the opposite reaction, the ‘asshole’ reaction, and say ‘Someone took time and effort to build this, so I’ll destroy it just because I can!’ They might actually be *more* tempted to destroy it.

These decisions reflect my judgment of human nature, my judgment of the type of people who live in this location, my judgment of the type of people who will be climbing on that mountain. I have to decide what they will do if and when they encounter my tent. First, I’m not putting anything there that I’m not willing to lose. I will probably carry my laptop around with me in a backpack everywhere I go, for instance, instead of leaving it in the tent. If anything happens, the potential vandals won’t destroy anything that really matters. The ‘vandals’ might also be government employees who decide that I’m not allowed to put a tent there. Either way, someone might possibly take it away or destroy it.

I might actually go back and get some of the feminine looking decorative fabric and put it on my tent just for a laugh. I might.

So this is why I was thinking about property rights. And I don’t want to go into the whole thing that I was thinking about and talking about while I went for my random drive today. But the conclusion that I came to was this: At the moment when property rights really matter the most, that’s the exact moment when they take them away from us.

We want to have property rights to protect us against somebody who wants to take over our land and use it for something else, right? I want to claim this piece of land so that my neighbors can’t walk all over it, build things on it, chop down my trees, dig holes in my backyard, and so on.

But what happens when the government decides that they are going to build a highway over your land? Or what happens when a big corporation makes some kind of special deal with the government so that they can get an ‘exception’ to the rule of your property rights? Suddenly, you are forced to give up your land to somebody who wants to do that very things: chop down all the trees, build something over it, dig holes in it, and so on. When property rights really matter the most, that’s the exact moment when we lose them.

You imagine yourself holding on to your little house, while the highway comes to an abrupt end and can’t be built any farther, right above your head, because you said ‘no’ to letting them build the highway there, and your property rights are protecting you against that highway. That’s the exact opposite of what happens in reality. Whenever somebody demands that they get your land so they can do something with it, the government is able to make ‘special exceptions’ to the law of property rights so that they can take your land away from you.

So what is the point of buying land at all? Why do we buy a plot of land? Who exactly are we protecting it against? Small-scale vandals? Do they really exist? Are those small-scale vandals really out there, waiting to trespass on our land and spray-paint our houses and dig up our flower gardens? Would they really do that if we didn’t own our plots of land and if we didn’t have the right to call the police on the vandals?

It depends on where you live! In some places, our neighbors are a lot nicer than that. Why would we even need to buy, and protect, a plot of land, if we lived in a place where we were surrounded by nice, cooperative neighbors who had no desire to vandalize our land? If we lived near a group of people who all knew each other, who all were able to negotiate with each other, why would we need to protect ourselves against them? There are only a small minority of assholes who want to go around and do things to other people’s land. Most of the people are agreeable, and they have no desire to do anything to someone else’s land, or someone else’s flower garden, or whatever. Most of the people don’t go around stealing your vegetables.

And if someone did, you would still have to find them and call the police on them, which wouldn’t necessarily protect you against them. You’d have to catch them first, and you’re still the one responsible for catching them. You still have to pay for your own videocameras to catch the vandals stealing your vegetables in the middle of the night. You still have to pay for the bear traps that you set around your property (yes, bear traps, those things that will snap shut and break your leg and trap you there) whenever you need to protect yourself against more dangerous attacks, or whatever method you use to protect against anyone who is trying to hurt you or steal from you. The police still don’t really protect you. If you need active protection, you usually have to pay extra for it.

Other libertarians have written about this before. I was just going over the same conclusions and understanding them more deeply.

So now, I just need to judge the character of the people who will be hiking around in the particular piece of woods that I’ve chosen. Are they the type of people who will report me to the police because I’ve put a tent there? Are they the type of people who will laugh at the sight of my doily-covered tent, and then keep on walking, with a smile (assuming that I actually do go back and get a patterned fabric instead of the clear stuff)? Are they the type of people that will slash the tent with their machete, and open up my bags of clothing and scatter the clothes around in the woods nearby? What will my neighbors do? What kind of people are they? These are the judgments I have to make, when my house isn’t officially protected by the law, when I don’t have a door with a lock on it, when I don’t have streetlights.

When I talked about ‘What if we abolished property rights?,’ the only answer that I could think of was that in that scenario, ‘we’ would have to be ‘the citizens,’ and ‘we’ would have to have a revolution against the government, in which we took over physical control of the government and prevented the former government employees from physically doing their job, because I could not see any other way that this scenario could possibly happen. It would require a revolution, which would be physically dangerous for everyone involved. I don’t see any other way to abolish property rights and land ownership.

I followed the scenario as far as I could imagine it, and I asked questions like ‘What if someone wants to take over your area of land and cut down all the trees, or dig a hole, or build something on it that you don’t want?’ That made me realize that that situation already exists. There’s a name for this exception to the rule – something about ‘for the good of the public’ or ‘public use’ or something – there’s a special term for what it is when the government takes control of your land to build a highway over it. That is the very situation that we are supposedly trying to prevent whenever we are buying a piece of land and expecting that it will be protected against other people trying to do things to it… so the dreaded scenario already exists, and our property rights have failed to protect us against it.

In the movie ‘The Descendants,’ which I said was kind of boring to me, they mentioned this ‘Anti-Perpetuity Rule,’ something that existed in Hawaii, which required a group of people to give up the land that was entrusted to them. This was one of the subplots in the movie. I became curious about the anti-perpetuity rule. This idea is connected to the idea of land ownership and taxes, why we aren’t allowed to just buy land and then sit there and do nothing with it, but instead we must ‘do something profitable’ so that we can afford to pay the taxes to the government. We’re not allowed to be unprofitable on our land. We’re not allowed to be inactive or to just sit there. As a result, some people fail to pay their taxes and their principal and interest, and they get their land taken away from them, foreclosure.

I found this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_against_perpetuities. It’s very hard for me to even read that article, and it doesn’t tell me much about the reasons behind it, or the theory, or the overall concept, or the consequences of it (okay, yes it does, I just wasn’t done reading yet). It’s hard for me to connect it to what happened in the movie. It doesn’t seem to resemble something that I was thinking of, which is the concept of land ownership being forced to ‘change hands frequently.’ It doesn’t seem to be the same idea. I had this idea that sooner or later, there was going to be a law requiring people to give up the land they had purchased, and requiring them to step out of the market to buy land, so that other people would have a chance to buy the land, so that there would be less competition for land ownership. I’m not saying I agree with that idea, I’m just saying that I have a feeling that sooner or later, somebody is going to make that law. It seems stupid enough that it just *has* to be real. I’m sure that sooner or later, someone is going to make this stupid law. So a person will be forced to sell their land, and forcibly prevented from attempted to buy any land anywhere after the sale, so that everyone else will ‘have an equal chance’ to buy some land, to keep the land prices lower. I can just imagine this happening. I was thinking about that scenario while I was driving, and it seemed believable.

That Wikipedia page actually seems kind of interesting, but also hard to understand, because it’s hard for me to concentrate in the place where I’m sitting right now. So I might read more about it later. But I really want someone to connect that concept to property rights in general, the phenomenon of land ownership. I wanted to go into more detail about the idea that maybe someday, there would be a law requiring people to sell their land and let other people use it, after a few years had gone by, and nobody would be allowed to hold onto a piece of land for very long at all, so that everyone would get an ‘equal chance’ to temporarily own a piece of land. Actually, how is that different from renting an apartment? But it would apply to all land, including things like farmland, and factories, and rock quarries, and places where people had significantly changed the land, grown something, chopped down trees, or built something there – they would be forced to abandon it, and as a result, nobody would want to invest in building factories or whatever anymore. I can almost imagine this happening for real.

Another idea that I was trying to understand was this: What would happen if some rich person just bought a bunch of land, then kept it untouched forever, and handed it to their children, and their children, and their children, but refused to let anyone trespass on it, refused to let them build tents there, refused to let them grow food there, and so on, while the rest of the world was starving, and no one had any place to live, and nothing to eat, and they really ‘needed,’ quote unquote, that land. Sooner or later, someone would decide that ‘public need’ was more important than their property rights, and they would declare the property rights to be null and void in that situation. And I imagined, what if they were either 1. paying no property taxes to the government at all,’ or 2. paying taxes out of their own pockets, just because they were rich, or just because they were able to earn an income elsewhere, but not from the land itself. They could afford to just keep the land and use it ‘unprofitably’ and pay the tax out of their own pocket, or they would be in a scenario with no taxes at all. Sooner or later, someone would declare that they could no longer keep the land, and somebody must use it to farm crops or to build houses on. Or whatever. Sooner or later, someone would decide that ‘public need’ was greater than their property rights. And that already happens, but usually with things like highways.

When I think about these things, I’m taking a ‘devil’s advocate’ position. I don’t necessarily agree or disagree with any particular scenario. I’m just wondering what if this would happen. I’m skeptical about the benefits of ‘owning’ property, and I believe that the spirit of property rights is already violated by the government. As always, when I talk about anarchism in the abstract, I always come around full circle to the realization ‘We already have anarchy. A hostile tribe has already taken control of the entire planet, and the only way we can remove that hostile tribe is by risking our lives in a physical fight against the hostile tribe, which few people are willing to do. We have anarchy. The end.’ So that is why I made the decision to go live in a tent in the woods on a piece of land that I don’t own.

Hyperphasia….

But anyway, the tent is partially built, but not usable yet. And it’s all wet and soggy and there will be a bunch of rainwater in it the next time I go there. I got sort of discouraged the last time when I was building it.

There’s something that I was imagining. Whenever females try to do particular types of tasks, there is the likelihood of an experienced, knowledgeable male standing there looking over your shoulder and criticizing how you’re doing it and saying ‘No, don’t do it that way, do it this way,’ and then they will jump in and actually start doing it *for* you instead of letting you struggle to do it, and then you never learn. That happened to me, over and over, throughout my life, and it must have happened to a lot of other females too. It tends to happen a lot with outdoorsy type activities such as setting up a tent. I have never learned to do anything physical, and I don’t have confidence at doing those types of things. I can just imagine if a man was there advising me and telling me how badly I was doing it and how I shouldn’t be doing it the way that I am doing it.

I didn’t like the Girl Scouts. I wanted to join the Boy Scouts instead. I thought that the Girl Scouts were doing useless things and not learning anything real. And I recently read about the Girl Scouts to try to dispel that belief. But it turned out to be true. The Girl Scouts really don’t learn the hardcore hiking stuff that the Boy Scouts learn. They don’t teach them to build a fire, find their way out of the woods without a compass, and all that other stuff that the Boy Scouts (or Eagle Scouts) learn. They might learn a tiny fraction of it, but they don’t learn anywhere near all of it. The Boy Scouts are clearly very different from the Girl Scouts, and they are not just a male/female version of each other. The Girl Scouts don’t teach me anything that I ever wanted to know. When I read about them, they really did seem to be as bad as I had always thought they were, and I confirmed my original feeling.

There needs to be a *real* Girl Scouts, something that teaches girls to do the stuff that is really difficult.

I had a conversation at work recently. Somebody said that a particular employee was able to roll the burritos really quickly, and I said, maybe it was because he had long fingers, because there were a lot of things that a person could do more easily if they had long fingers. I don’t know for a fact that this particular person does, or does not, have long fingers. I was just guessing.

I was thinking of the time that I tried to learn to play the guitar, many years ago. That was the first time that I noticed that I have unfortunately very short, stubby little fingers, that I can barely reach my fingers all the way around the stem of the guitar, and that I cannot stretch them very far, or put lots of pressure onto the strings, to go from one chord to another, with particular chord changes, because of how short my fingers are. This was very frustrating to me, because I knew that I had the skill and coordination to actually play the guitar, if only it were the right size for my fingers. It was not stupidity, it was not lack of skill, it was not lack of focus, it was just the short fingers that prevented me from playing the guitar very well.

After I made that comment at work, the conversation of course went to the ‘Ha ha, yes, there are a lot of things you can do with long fingers, blah blah,’ and I knew it would go that way, but I had wanted to have a sexually neutral conversation about how awful it was to be stuck with short fingers and to be handicapped at doing so many things because of it. I can’t throw a football! I never could. I was in gym class, decades ago, struggling to throw a football, and everyone else could do it, but not me. I couldn’t put a spin on it. The football flew end over end. This was because my tiny fingers could not even reach around the football far enough to spin it while throwing it at the same time. The football would have to be smaller. There were other balls that I could not throw very well because they were the wrong size. I couldn’t throw a basketball very well, and if you think about it, you have to grasp it a certain way with long fingers, and spin it. I couldn’t throw a softball very well, and softballs are very large.

I’ve also read that women’s shoulders are shaped differently than men’s, our bone and joint structure, which is another reason why women can’t throw. It’s really true that women can’t throw as well as men, in general, but there are some women who are an exception, and it varies.

So it seems unfair to me that I was stuck in gym class with teachers who didn’t understand that I couldn’t throw a football, and I would *never* be able to throw it, and they made me feel stupid and incompetent because I couldn’t, when it was only because I have short, tiny fingers that can’t reach around the ball to put a spin on it. Women, or small people, should get taught how to do different sports and activities that small-fingered people are able to do, so that they won’t feel like a failure for the rest of their lives.

So there is actually a legitimate reason to separate men and women, with physical tasks, and teach them to do different things. But there isn’t any reason why I can’t put up a tent by myself. I just feel insecure doing it, because I’ve never done anything like that before. My parents would always put up the ‘real’ tent without letting us children do very much, when we were young, although I vaguely remember that I would hold the stake in the ground, or something, while somebody else pulled on various strings and stuff. People always would jump in and do things for me if I was struggling. I remember Mom didn’t like to watch people struggling with a task, and she tended to jump in and do it for them. (No, this isn’t all meant as a big gripe against Mom. She was only one of many people.) It’s much harder to do a task now while I’m simultaneously being electronically zapped, too, which makes it hard to visualize anything, and I’m sure that was interfering with the work I was trying to do, too. Without that, it would have been easier. But it also would have been easier if I had had lots of previous experience with doing challenging physical tasks outdoors, such as building large objects or fixing things. I would have felt more confident and more knowledgeable in general. When I tried to put up the tent, I felt easily frustrated, insecure, and unsure of what I was doing.

Anyway, I didn’t do anything today except drive the car a long way, talking to myself, and drinking lots and lots of coffee after having withdrawn from coffee for several days. That’s not really progress. However, I also have book to read now, which I can do instead of watching movies, because I became aware that there had been a taboo on books for the past several years, and I had gotten out of the habit of checking books out of the library because of the drug residues. I’m not as worried about the book when I’m just keeping it in my car.

I think I’ll go ahead and post this. I’ll probably remember a few more things after it’s posted and I reread it, but oh well.

It’s raining endlessly here today. I looked at the weather forecast, and they’re expecting it to keep raining for at least a couple more days, although it might be slowing down by this weekend. I know from experience, and from meteorology class, and from reading books about weather, that stratus clouds like this tend to just keep raining and raining forever. The whole sky is white, the ground is foggy, and the clouds and fog make it impossible to see the hills.

I am going to have to go out in this weather and do my project. If I had known that the rain would stop soon, I might have just waited for it to stop, but it isn’t ever going to stop, and I can’t afford to wait forever. I knew it was possible that something like this would happen, but I was afraid that it would be snow. Thankfully, it’s only rain. It would have been much harder if it had been a big long-lasting blizzard. I’m not sure I could have gotten to my camping/squatting site in the snow.

So now I’m just mustering up the will to go do it. I have to set up the tent-like object – I might jokingly call it a TLO, Teelo, or something like that.

I have to accept that the rain will never stop, and that I only have this one week vacation to get this project started. I realize I won’t get it completely done this week, but I have to start it.

This is analogous to breaking out of prison, for me. If you had only a brief opportunity to break out of prison, and it were pouring rain that day, would you skip it just because it was raining? No, you’d do it anyway, because you weren’t going to get another chance. That is how I’m viewing this situation. Every vacation that I take from work is a brief opportunity to make progress in my life. I can’t ask for too many vacations from work, partly because I need the money – my food cost is still extremely expensive, and I’m spending a lot on gas, and movies, too – but partly because the managers don’t really like giving people too many vacations – it’s an inconvenience for them. I know I was asking a lot when I requested a second vacation shortly after having taken the two-week vacation in December.

Actually, it’s theoretically possible that you *would* refuse to break out of prison if the weather were too bad, because the plan is not to die. However, if you don’t care about dying, then maybe you would break out of prison no matter what the weather was doing. You might have to walk a long way in the snow without food or shelter.

Anyway, I really want to ‘break free’ from car ownership. It’s odd, but I think I will probably travel more, not less, after I stop using the car. It will change the pattern of my travel. I will find out the limits of how far I can go by bike (without the motor, since I don’t have that yet, but would like to someday). Beyond those limits, I will have to start taking buses. We don’t have many trains that are working in the United States, but people still use the trains in Europe. Rick also did a lot of hitchhiking when he traveled, but I’m not sure I would feel comfortable hitchhiking, unless I were carrying a weapon. I would probably try to get around on the motorized bike.

Breaking free from electronic torture would be even better.

But anyway, why does owning a car make me feel unfree? Right now, I still have to fix the damage caused by the accident. I have lost track of when that happened. I think it was over a year ago, in October of 2010. It was October. I lost my job at Weis Market at the same time that I had the accident.

I had some difficulties getting the insurance payment, and when I finally got it, we found out that there was more damage than the amount they had estimated, which meant that I could not fix it right away, but would have to call them to get more insurance money. There was one complication after another, and since I had lost my job at the same time, I needed money to pay the rent.

I had deposited the insurance money into my checking account, and the balance on my checking account gradually went lower and lower and lower over the period of months when I was struggling to get the insurance paperwork worked out and all that. I was struggling in general – it was impossible to get anything done, and I was probably being tortured and forcibly prevented from doing it, most likely. It is impossible to muster up my will to do any ordinary thing at all if I am being tortured, and I am being tortured constantly – ‘murdered’ is the word that I would prefer to use, but I won’t get into that now – I am being murdered constantly, soul-murdered – my mind is destroyed and my consciousness ceases to exist during the attacks – and as a result of all of those things, I gradually spent the money that I had gotten from the insurance, without yet fixing the car. I didn’t get a second job again, but instead continued working at only one job, so I wasn’t able to save money.

So I lost all the money that I had been given from the insurance people. It wasn’t a huge amount of money. It was like $1200 something. I think it was $1234, actually, because that was a memorable number. It wouldn’t take long to get that if I had a second job, but right now, I don’t, and I don’t want one. I want to finish my self-liberation projects first, before getting a second job. If I get a second job, it will be harder to take time off, or to have any free time at all, to do my self-liberation projects. I was able to finish the project of getting rid of all my stuff in storage, and I am very, very … I don’t know which word to use – ‘grateful?’ Not ‘happy,’ really. Just grateful or something that I was able to finish doing that. I don’t like ‘grateful’ because it implies that I’m grateful to *somebody*. But I was able to finish doing that project, and I want to finish liberating myself from my car, too.

Anyway, I don’t *want* to save up $1234 to start fixing the car. And also, I don’t know, it might have been so long that they won’t do it anymore. It was over a year ago. They would have to start fixing it and call the insurance company to get the rest of the money. I have a feeling that it’s too long ago and they won’t do it anymore. So I would probably have to pay the $1234 and also whatever additional money would be needed, and they believed it would be a couple thousand dollars, because the car was damaged underneath – I got rear-ended, and you can see the crushed bumper, but some kind of ‘pan’ under the car was also damaged. The something pan.

I don’t want to spend thousands of dollars fixing the car. I don’t want to spend several months working at two jobs, eighty hours a week, only to fix the car, and only to see another year of my life go by without my having children. And even after I fixed it, there would still be the inevitable future repairs. Eventually, more things will break down that will need to be fixed, and I don’t want to spend that money on them.

Without a car, I will be less spontaneous. I will be forced to think more about what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it. I view this as a good thing. I won’t be able to impulsively spend money as easily as before. If I weren’t being *murdered*, and yes, I am using that word, it would be much easier to make decisions about how I spend my money, and control my own actions.

Today ‘they’ suggested that I take online college courses, which would allow me to keep my children with me. I don’t object to that idea.

However, online classes don’t let you experience the social life of college, and the social life is the only real reason to go to college. College-educated people get married more than people who are not college educated. People socialize in college, and that is their sole reason for being there. That is what I have decided. College is completely pointless except as a social get-together location. That’s not entirely true – that’s exaggerated – the college professors are knowledgeable, and sometimes it helps to have a knowledgeable person who can tell you how to go about learning something, or who can tell you things that haven’t been written down in the books. It helps to have a structure that encourages you to do your work. But I still feel that the primary benefit of college is the socializing. I don’t even want to mention the ‘you have a piece of paper that tells people that you are educated,’ because that particular purpose of college is… distasteful to me.

Anyway, back to the car. I was saying why it makes me feel unfree. It’s hard to explain, but I actually feel like I will be less burdened and more mobile without the car. It would be easier to go to another country without the car. I won’t have to put it in storage somewhere or worry about it. I wouldn’t even need to come back to pick it up. I could leave and not come back if I wanted to. If I have very few belongings, it’s easier to do that.

I’m reluctant to go out there, but I have to. I have to start setting up the tent. I might get it partly set up today, and finish working on it tomorrow. Maybe it won’t be raining quite as badly tomorrow. It will still be raining but maybe not as much.

I’ve had some drug residues on me since New Year’s Eve when I visited my friend from McD. It’s mostly tobacco, but I recalled that he said he and his girlfriend had used antidepressants in the past, and I don’t know if they still do, which is why I’ve said they had ‘unknown/miscellaneous’ drug residues in addition to the tobacco. Whatever it is, it’s made me have a tendency to be angrier than usual for the past few weeks. I am just constantly angry for no reason, and after my experiences of the past few years, I know that this is caused by transdermal drug residues, and it isn’t just an ‘emotion.’ It’s true that I have plenty of reasons to be angry, but that’s not my nature. It isn’t natural for me to actually *feel* angry constantly all day long. I know from experience that that is caused by drugs. The murderers have been torturing me more than usual, or differently than usual, because of this anger, which they always try to provoke. I don’t know *why* they try to provoke anger and rage in the victims, but they do. Every victim that I’ve read about online has said this same thing, expressed this same rage, and drugs make that rage a million times worse.

And in the future, there will be some kind of project involving a shield that works. But I must liberate myself from my financial burdens right now, and do a couple of other things, and sell the car whenever I’m ready. Sometime after that, in the future, I will work on a shield. And sometime, I will talk to other victims, because I need to talk to someone who knows how it feels to be murdered, to have your soul destroyed, to have the hours of your life permanently taken away from you even though your body appears to be physically alive.

I saw ‘The Descendants,’ and even though it had 4 1/2 stars, I didn’t like it a lot, and found it somewhat boring and depressing. Other movies will get maybe three stars, but I’ll enjoy them enough to watch them over and over again. I watched ‘Twilight – Breaking Dawn’ several times, partly because I really liked the music. One person wrote a review where he complained about all the ‘filler’ time, where no real action was happening, and it’s true, a lot of time was like that, but during those moments, good music was playing, which was why I enjoyed the movie so much. I’ve liked the music from all the Twilight movies. I’m embarrassed to admit it when I like movies that I know aren’t ‘high art.’ But, I watch whatever is available.

Today, I was running around doing errands. I just went to various stores looking for things that I might possibly use to build the tent-like object. I don’t want to buy an official tent. There are several reasons why I don’t want to. I’ve been inspired to be anti-tents because of reading about Rick’s ultralight backpacking experiences. He doesn’t use the kind of tent that has the metal poles and all the other stuff. He just uses a small piece of fabric whenever he goes hiking in places that don’t have a lot of heavy rain. I’m not sure what he uses whenever he goes someplace with a lot of rain. The piece of fabric is enough to block off a little bit of rain that might fall during the night. The goal is to carry as little as possible in the backpack.

I’m not hiking, so it doesn’t matter how much I carry. But still, I like the idea of a minimalistic, simple tent. I looked at all the other tents. They are just too huge. I don’t need all that space. I don’t even need to stand up. I don’t even *want* to stand up. I want the tent to be a tiny crawlspace, a little tunnel, which is so low to the ground that it will be hard for anyone to see from far away through the brush. Not only are the ‘real’ tents too huge, they also have these unexplained ‘layers’ and ‘panels’ and ‘flaps’ and things. Are all those layers and panels and flaps really necessary? Some little piece of fabric extends over the edge of some other piece of contrasting colored fabric, and it’s all complicated, and it’s some special design with some special purpose.

It’s the same as a pair of shoes. Have you ever looked at how unnecessarily complicated your shoe fabric is? The shoes often have hundreds of different little panels of contrasting colors and shapes, making it seem as though it’s some really special high-tech design with some special purpose, like it’s uniquely tailored to fit exactly on your foot, but in reality, they don’t fit any better (or they fit worse!) than shoes without all those little panels of fabric. The tents looked like that. I like something which is just made of one single, contiguous, continuous piece of fabric, without those little complex folds and things in it.

It’s supposed to suggest that the tent, or the shoe, ‘evolved’ over time. They added this extra panel because something was needed over there. They added this little ‘gutter’ on the edge of the tent to prevent the rain from dripping down, or something. Well, if I need any of those little evolutionary developments badly enough, I will add them on myself, but I suspect that I can survive without them, and if they were gone, the product (whatever it is) would cost a lot less. I feel that way about *all* products. I don’t like any kind of ‘design’ whatsoever. If something is just a plain rectangular box, I like it that way. I like computers to be like that too. Don’t get me started about how much I hate it when they upgrade Windows and change all the icons and everything, when they were just fine before, and you have to learn it all over again. I didn’t get Windows for the purpose of forcing myself to learn a whole new system every couple years. I got it to perform a function, which is easiest to perform if I can quickly and easily recognize what everything is and what it does.

Anyway, so I want to just get some kind of fabric to make my tent-like object. I did actually buy something today, but I’m not sure it will work, and I haven’t tried it out. I know it *will* work, but it might not be durable for very long. I got a particular type of vinyl which I know I don’t have any weird reactions to. Sometimes I don’t like the way a fabric smells, for instance, a bad-smelling tarp has some kind of toxic, petroleum-like smell coming out of it, and I don’t want to be sleeping on that. Those things weren’t made to be kept in contact with human skin for long periods of time.

That’s another thing. I went to Lowe’s Hardware just to look around and see if there was anything that I might find useful. I was overwhelmed with the hugeness of the store. In the past, I would have gotten a manic desire to buy everything and build everything, which is how I’m ‘supposed’ to feel when I walk in there.

But now, instead, I feel a negative feeling, I feel a dislike of all the unnecessary complexity. Our houses ‘have to’ be built a particular way, and it has to be the modern way, and it has to be modern materials, and that means perfectly-shaped lumber and nails and screws and metal siding and all that. We can’t build a house out of mud and sticks, because that violates the zoning laws, or the fire codes. Our modern houses have millions and millions of tiny little pieces that make up all the complex systems. Every little piece of plumbing has a unique, special shape. There are hundreds of different sizes of screws. You might choose something made of a special metal alloy instead of some other metal alloy because it has specific physical and chemical properties that you need.

Everything is made by the millions in a factory somewhere – usually China – by some automated process. If they’re able to make it, then they want to be able to sell it. They try to ‘create the market’ for something, create a need for it. There are many people out there who *want* us to depend on factory-made items instead of making anything ourselves from local materials.

A lot of these materials are toxic. Toxic building materials are a relatively new phenomenon, from what I’ve read. I know I’ve had reactions while handling various things that I bought from Lowe’s – I’m not blaming Lowe’s in particular, it’s the entire system and the entire economy causing this to happen – I was trying to use ceiling tiles a while back, and had horrible reactions to them. So I am very cautious about which types of materials I use for things. A lot of things weren’t meant to be in direct contact with human skin for long periods of time, and yet, there is no warning label that says that you shouldn’t be lying directly on a tarp, for instance, because of whatever horrible petroleum-smelling chemical is in it.

I said ‘What the hell?’ whenever I looked at a panel – I think it was a countertop, or something – and it said ‘melamine coating.’ Melamine??? Isn’t that the same poisonous substance that accidentally got into the pet food a few years ago, causing a large number of pet deaths from kidney failure? And they use that as a coating on countertops? Oh, I’m sure they would reassure us that it’s safe when it’s in solid form and when all you’re doing is touching it with your hands. But after my experiences, I know that a lot of things go directly through the skin, and I would not want to have a melamine-coated countertop or whatever it was at my house.

I just googled ‘melamine coated countertop’ and I saw some results that mentioned particle board. Particle board is another toxic building material. It emits formaldehyde fumes. – Yes, it turns out that melamine is indeed the contaminant that was in the pet food in 2007. They also say ‘cyanuric acid’ was in there, but I don’t know anything about that. Oh, it’s something added to melamine.

This is another reason why I don’t want to live in a house. Toxic building materials. Why should we be forced to build our houses out of this stuff, when we could just live in a much simpler house with less of everything? Just four walls, and nothing else. No perfectly smooth countertops or particle boards. But no, everything has to look a certain way, perfectly polished and smooth and modern looking.

When I was at Lowe’s, I picked up a book. I had picked up a book and read it for several minutes earlier today, actually. I was at Wal-Mart near the camping section, and I picked up an atlas of Pennsylvania, not an ordinary atlas, but a hiking atlas. It had a lot of information about trails and wildlife and things like that. I got very involved in reading it. The same thing happened when I picked up this book at Lowe’s. It was a do-it-yourself book about the self-sufficient home, or something like that, but I can’t remember the exact title. I’ve been reading about off-the-grid living for many years, but reading it in a book was much nicer than reading it on the web. Reading anything at all in a book is easier than reading it on a computer screen. It’s physically easier for the eyes. It’s also easier to flip through the book and glance around for things that interest you. I sat there for many, many minutes reading through that book.

Afterwards I was fantasizing that someone would write a do-it-yourself book, with pictures, of Primitive Arctic Survival. Or Inuit Lifestyle, or something. But it must be the primitive lifestyle, not the post-genocide semi-modernized lifestyle. That would be a great book for *all* indigenous cultures, not just the Arctic. How do they make their houses, their tools, their food, their clothes, their boats and carts and other forms of transportation? How do you do it? What’s the algorithm to follow? Do A, then B, then C. I want to know. I don’t want it to just be a book with photos of ‘all their cool stuff.’ I want it to be how-to instructions. First you cut along this length with a knife, and then you glue it together using this glue you made earlier, and so on. (I was watching a video about how to make homemade arrows with arrowheads made of flint, which is what I’m thinking of, but I want it to be in book form.)

That’s it for now. I will probably remember things I forgot to say afterwards.

I am exhausted today, and my head still hurts from caffeine withdrawal, and I expect it to continue hurting at least till tomorrow – it hurt for three days the last time I quit caffeine.

I got a little bit more useful work done today. I walked around at one of the places where I am thinking of camping. It’s going to be a horribly long bike ride to work. When I drive it in my car, it seems short, but I know I am going to hate the bike ride. If I have to, I’ll take the bus.

But I haven’t actually started living there yet. I just walked around. I found a sort of flat spot that was a little bit away from the path, but I could still see the path from there. I have this feeling of denial about that – I say ‘Nobody will look.’ It’s quite possible that somebody will, in fact, look. I just don’t want to go really really far away from the path if I’m going to be dragging my bike through the woods.

So I might try to put up some little waterproof plastic tent-like thing there, and put some bags of stuff that I don’t mind losing, like, some bags of extra clothes that are taking up space in my car. Then I will write a note somewhere in the tent saying that yes, I live here, this isn’t abandoned, and if you want to contact me, then write to this email address. Then, if anyone finds it and says ‘Whoever this is, they’re not allowed to live here,’ and gets all angry about it, they will know who to talk to. That might prevent them from just throwing my stuff away, or something. I wouldn’t put anything there unless it was something I was willing to lose.

So I think that’s how I will start. It will be just an extra storage unit that I’m not paying for. But sooner or later I have to start sleeping there.

I liked it that there were a lot of fallen trees on the ground there. However, it also made me anxious that there was one more tree that looked rotten and looked like it could fall sometime in the future. They seem to be mostly pine trees that are falling. I chose a spot that was far enough away from the one rotten tree that it might not reach, and if it did reach, it would be blocked by several other trees that were in the way.

On another topic, it occurred to me that it would be inconvenient to study a language if I didn’t have the CD player hooked up to my netbook, but again, I can hook it up when I’m ready to. So I might not be using it just to rent movies. I was thinking about getting CDs from the library, and had a desire to get one, but realized I couldn’t. I’m not firmly committed to studying anything right now, and if I did, it would be just a temporary whim and not a completed project. Also, since I don’t know where I’m going, I don’t know which language to study. Inuktitut isn’t available on library CDs everywhere, but French is, and I should probably learn French if I go to Canada.

I just feel bored and frustrated and would like to study *something*. I like challenges. But I don’t want to study anything that I’m not going to use, and I don’t want to start studying something and then abandon it later because I didn’t really want to study it or use it. Most of the time, those urges come from ‘them’ pushing me to do something while I’m under the influence of drug residues.

I’m finding it hard to think, partly because there’s nothing new to say. So I’ll just post this. I did actually do useful work today – I chose a potential spot that I am seriously considering, however, I know that I will hate the bike ride back and forth. It isn’t so much the distance as it is the hill. But it’s downhill on the way towards work, so that will be easier. The hardest part will be coming home from work. But anyway, I might have a place. I just have to start setting up the tent-like object and putting a couple of not-badly-needed belongings into it and leaving them there for now.

Last night I watched ‘Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.’ I had read a review, but I had totally forgotten what the review said the movie was about. I was doubtful. I saw the movie poster, and it was a picture of a traumatized-looking face covering its mouth and weeping. Then I saw that it was by the same people who made ‘The Reader,’ which was a depressing movie with a horrible ending, and so I expected I was going to be watching something like that.

But this movie turned out to be great. It was a sweet, lovable LII child, and his ESE mother, and some other ESE characters. His father seemed to be an LII too, and probably his grandfather as well. They all shrugged their shoulders in a particular way, which I thought was interesting, because the ILE at McDonald’s also has a very recognizable, noticeable, characteristic shoulder shrug gesture. I was amazed at the facial expressions that the Mr. Black guy was able to make (he was another of the ESE characters), the Mr. Black who was the ex-husband of the very first Mrs. Black that the boy had spoken to in the beginning. His facial expressions were subtle and constantly changing, but clearly visible and open, not suppressed, not hidden.

So I really enjoyed the movie, and didn’t feel depressed or traumatized afterwards.

I’m assuming that I’m on vacation right now. I’ve quit caffeine today, which is usually very helpful when I need to get big, difficult projects done that require me to be well rested and calm. I slept in very late, and then I spent the day playing my video game – I helped some Purbles choose their new outfits, and I uncovered the mysterious hidden tiles, but I didn’t manufacture any cake orders today, as that’s gotten to be too easy now that I’ve figured out the secret. The secret, for the cake factory, is: don’t push the ‘forward’ button. That counts as an extra ‘move,’ and so, new waxed papers will get dropped sooner the more moves you make. You want to reduce the number of moves. So, let the cakes sit there till the timer pushes them to the next station, and then quickly do every single thing to every cake that you’re able to do at those stations. If you get too many waxed papers built up, you can’t back up the cake to drop the new layers on top of it. Now that I’ve figured out that you mustn’t push the ‘forward’ button, I have all the time in the world to slowly make the cakes, and I never make mistakes anymore, and I’m guaranteed to win on the hardest setting.

But I still fail over and over on the hardest setting of the Purble Pairs game, because my short-term memory is bad. I’ve started focusing on only one small quadrant at a time, a box of four by four blocks, and that helps, but I still can’t win if there’s a timer running. So, that’s my video game story. That’s what I mean when I say that I’m doing things merely to endure the passage of time. The game is very simple and boring. Thankfully, it’s boring, because it won’t bother me very much when I stop playing it. I won’t be in the middle of a huge, unfinished mission, discovering amazing new worlds, the way I would if it were a third-person shooter/swordfighter game or something. If I abandon the Purbles now, their lives will continue on as though I had never visited them, and they won’t be upset about it.

After I finally got up out of bed, I cleaned the trash out of the car. This was a very big project, because I hadn’t been feeling well enough for several weeks, and so the car was filling up with junk and garbage and cups and paper bags and it was a huge mess. But I finally got the trash bags into the trunk. I’ll get them into the dumpster tomorrow.

I still have to organize a couple boxes and things in here. I have this box of ‘frequently used items’ in the passenger seat. However, over time, it became a box of ‘intermittently used items,’ and then ‘rarely used items,’ and then ‘a bunch of junk that I can’t even dig through anymore,’ and soon, if I ever needed anything, it was probably buried so far down in the box that I couldn’t find it under all the other stuff. And then, the box split open on the side, and everything is spilling out. So I need to get a new box set up, and get rid of stuff in the box that I don’t need anymore, and organize it again. This type of thing is a big deal when you live in a small car and you don’t have room for lots of junk. I already have too many bags and things in the back seat.

I was thinking about hunting whales. whales are the equivalent of the woolly mammoths. (Does ‘woolly’ have two L’s or one?) They are a very large animal that can feed a lot of people. And if you hunt them in a polar region, then the cold temperatures preserve the bodies of the whales without refrigeration, so the meat will last a long time. There are other ways of preserving meat, and I hope to someday learn how to preserve food at room temperature – that’s one of my long-term important projects, on my list of things that I want to know. Anyway, we can’t hunt woolly mammoths anymore, but whales will support the type of human community that would have otherwise been hunting mammoths.

Joe Paterno died, but I never watch football, and I never paid much attention to Joe Paterno. But the news media is here now, or at least they were yesterday, and there was a huge traffic jam. I don’t know what people were doing, whether they were just driving in there to drive past the statue, or past his house, or what. Someone told me they were leaving flowers at the house or something, if I recall. I don’t have much of a feeling for Joe Paterno, but it seemed strange to me that he suddenly got cancer out of nowhere, right after the big scandal that happened, and I wondered if somebody did something to him that caused him to get cancer, some kind of attack. I’m more inclined to believe in that kind of thing, because of my own experiences with evil people. Evil people really exist, and they really do stupid shit like that. They would think they were doing a good deed for the world by killing somebody who had some vague and indirect connection to somebody who was a pedophile, regardless of whether he actually had any responsibility at all or not.

This is only my first day, and I haven’t gotten anything done except routine maintenance and game-playing and resting and caffeine withdrawal.

I expect that by the end of this vacation, I will have some kind of tent-like thing in the woods, with some of my belongings being stored in it, and I expect that I will also have a bike, which might be tied to a tree near the tent-like thing. I won’t be getting rid of the car, and probably won’t stop using it yet. But I will try to start testing the bike and seeing how comfortably I can ride it to various places, versus taking the bus. I’ll have to learn how to ride the bus, because I’ve only ridden it a couple times before, and I don’t know where all the routes go or how much it costs.

I will probably see a lot of movies. I tend to do that when I’m on vacation, when it gets dark early, when I’m lonely and despairing and it’s cold outside. It costs a lot to see the movies. I can’t rent movies anymore – every single rental place has closed, and… I haven’t tried anything like Netflix, or one of those Redbox rentals, not yet – I’m reluctant to try. I don’t want to try something new which will become a new habit that has to be broken. I’d rather just not know how to do those things. I’d rather just not be signed up for anything. It’s best if I just occasionally go through phases where I watch a lot of movies at the theaters, and then go through phases where I don’t watch any at all. If I were conveniently and easily renting lots of DVDs and watching them on my netbook, then I might do nothing but rent movies all the time. I don’t want it to be convenient for me to watch movies.

My netbook actually doesn’t have a CD player on it. I did buy one, which could be attached, but it’s still in the box, and the box has never been opened, and I just have it with me in case I ever need to run a program that requires a CD or DVD. So technically, I could use that and watch DVDs on my netbook. But it’s a good thing that it hasn’t been set up yet and I can’t do it conveniently and easily. The box is buried in some bags and stuff in the back seat of my car, and I don’t know exactly where it is, and it’s a pain to go hunting and digging back there. So I will just go to the theaters temporarily and watch a lot of movies for a little while, and then go back to normal.

I’m sitting at McD just using the wifi and recharging my netbook.

I’ve been sick the past couple days with a head cold. It’s making me exhausted at work, and since work has been slow, I’ve been doing things like just sitting down on the floor till we get an order, or playing with the netbook for a long time while still punched in. I played games yesterday and finally got excused a little bit early.

Last night was horrible. I was having the ‘fountain of drool’ phenomenon, where saliva just pours and pours and pours out of your mouth for hours. It was disgusting and it made it impossible to sleep. I finally slept after I got so dehydrated that I couldn’t drool anymore. I think this drooling thing is connected to my plastic dental fillings, because it happens the most on the side with the fillings, and because it never used to happen to me in the past – it’s a new phenomenon. I mean, it happens when I’m sick, but the plastic dental fillings are the actual cause of it. I could be sick, without the fillings, and it wouldn’t happen, or at least, not as badly.

I was reading some random stuff on the net, following one thing after another, and started reading about Type 2 diabetes. I recalled that it was caused by bisphenol-A, bpa.

I want to remove these resin fillings, and I’ve been planning to do it myself, because dentists won’t do it – they will only remove a filling and replace it with a different one, and they refuse to leave any cavity unfilled. I will use my own drill, probably a very slow speed hand-cranked drill so that I am not at risk of hurting myself.

The hardest part will be trying to see which part is the filling, and which part is the tooth. I would like to stain, or dye, the plastic, so that it contrasts with the tooth. I’ve been trying to research the staining and discoloration of tooth-colored fillings, but it was hard for me to find information about what types of substances will stain them, and it probably varies with the type of plastic.

For the past couple days, I’ve been angry about the enormity of the damage that the murderers have done to my life. They destroyed something which could have been, at least, a simple friendship with Rick. Now I have to start all over and look for someone completely new, and somehow get into that person’s social circle and meet them in person. This might require me to move from place to place, and when the attempted relationship fails, move again to another town. How many cities will I have to move to before I find someone who becomes a successful relationship?

The impossibility of a good relationship is the main reason why I am interested in providing for my children myself. I simply don’t feel hopeful at all about being able to have a relationship with anybody. Most people are not intelligent enough, and they bore me, and I don’t admire them, and my feelings for them are lukewarm.

In the cities, I will be controlled by the murderers, who will force me to say the worst possible things to the person, in order to harm the relationship. Again, thinking about all this is making me very angry about the damage that the murderers are doing to my life. The only way to find intelligent IEEs is to go to the cities, because they seem to flee from isolated rural areas and go directly to ‘social centers’ where they can meet a lot of people. I *hate* cities, I absolutely hate them, and I never, ever, ever want to live in a city, but that is the only place to find intelligent people concentrated in one area. I simply cannot tolerate the city. I hate the concrete, I hate the asphalt, I hate the buildings, I hate the lack of grass and trees and soil, I hate the noise, I hate the car exhaust, I hate the presence of the murderers who will continue to attack me anytime I am within reach.

I have a conflict between my instinctive desire to escape from the murderers, versus the need to find an intelligent person who lives in a city. I don’t know for certain that geographic isolation will keep the murderers away from me. I just need to experience it, I need to go to an isolated place, I need to find out if it helps.

I also have a conflict between my desire to live a subsistence lifestyle, versus my desire to permanently save large amounts of wealth in the form of gold and silver coins. Gold and silver are not available in subsistence cultures. That’s the definition of subsistence. They are not producing goods and trading them in large quantities in exchange for ‘money,’ quote unquote, however ‘money’ is defined, and part of my definition of money is something that is able to purchase gold and silver, because gold and silver are the only real money. Copper, too. I just mean, precious metals, and metals in general, are money, and gold and silver are the ones with the slowest declining marginal utility. (‘Declining marginal utility’ – economic jargon – it means that the more of something you have, the less you want to get more of it. If you have 100 apples, you’re not really interested in getting one more apple. But if you have 100 gold coins, you are still interested in getting one more.)

Anyway…

…my conflict between wanting to live a subsistence lifestyle, so that I can feed my children without being ‘employed’ at a ‘job,’ and also, without having to study for years and years, or start up my own home business or freelance business which will also take years and years to become profitable – I want to avoid doing anything that requires many years before it becomes profitable. I know that I could support my children with some kind of home business or other ‘job,’ but it would be the type of job that I could not just walk out and get right away – I would need training or education. I would need to be able to have my children in the workplace with me, which means, a home business.

I am assuming that I will not be able to find a good relationship, and that I will be raising my children alone, as a single mother. I can’t imagine being able to find a relationship, being able to find anyone whose company I can endure, anyone who can agree with me about how to raise our children. I am imagining that I will have to get a ‘sperm donor,’ and I don’t want to get just anybody, I want it to be someone intelligent who I strongly admire. Even though I cannot be in a relationship with that person, I will be bonded with them in a way by having their children. We won’t live together, and he won’t support us financially. That is what I am assuming, because I can’t imagine that it could ever be possible for me to find a good relationship. There are so few people who I can endure, and in the cities, I know that I will be forced to destroy every attempted relationship because of the murderers making me do stupid things. Even without the drug residues, I will still be attacked.

The summary of what I’ve been thinking: Everything that’s happened to me makes me assume that a long-term relationship is impossible. I will have to get a sperm donor and raise the children alone, which means I must provide for them. I can’t endure the presence of anyone else in my life, but I would have been able to if I hadn’t been constantly attacked and tortured by the murderers. It is because of the murderers that I cannot endure even simple company with ordinary people. They constantly exhaust my social energy, making me desire nothing on earth except to escape from the constant noise (constant electromagnetic disturbances, disruption of my thoughts, etc). This is another one of the things making me very angry over the last couple of days, and I’m sick with this cold, which puts me into an even worse mood than usual, an even more hopeless and miserable and angry mood.

I’ve been reading about subsistence whale hunting, and I’m really interested in it. I had mentioned colonizing Antarctica. If we could establish subsistence whale hunting using boats made with primitive materials, we would be able to survive down there.

I don’t know exactly when my vacation is, but it might possibly start tomorrow. The new schedule isn’t up, but I seem to recall something about ‘the 31st,’ when I asked my manager about it, and I think he might have said ‘the 25th through the 31st.’ I will have to build the shack, and I would like to buy a bike. I am going to have to get a lot of layers of clothing, especially for my hands and my face, if I’m riding a bike in freezing weather.

The purpose of getting into the shack is to get out of my car and away from the drug residues, and also to stop paying for car-related expenses, such as gas and maintenance and repair. I don’t know how long I will be able to live in the shack before somebody says ‘Hey! You’re not allowed to live there!’ It might be a few months, or it might be a week. I have absolutely no idea. I’ve never tried this before. I don’t want to live in a ‘house’ anymore. I have had too many problems with environmental illness, from things like mold and also from my own drug residues and other people’s drug residues. I don’t want to fight the battle of arguing with somebody ‘You have to remove and throw away every one of your drug-covered belongings, and throw away every piece of furniture, and rip out the carpet, and replace it with an easily-cleaned vinyl floor.’ I just don’t want to waste my energy in that fight. I am just going to live in my own little shack instead.

Sickness, misery, despair – that is all I have felt for the past few days.

I believe that cold viruses literally fall from the sky with precipitation. I was reading someplace about how disease outbreaks correlate with high levels of precipitation, but according to their theory, this was caused by the fact that precipitation caused flooding and caused the water table to mix together with sewage leaks and to overflow the sewage system. That might be partly true, and it is a good theory.

However, I notice disease outbreaks that happen instantly even with a small dusting of snow, which doesn’t get anywhere near overflowing the water systems. It happens before the snow has even melted. The snow falls from the sky, and huge numbers of people instantly get sick at the same time, even though they have not been exposed to other people who are sick.

Precipitation could contain viruses which have evaporated from the ocean. Viruses might be created out in the ocean, spontaneously. ‘Organic soup’ is needed to create self-replicating life forms, and they say that if it gets struck by lightning, that might be enough to give it the electricity that it needs. ‘Organic soup’ is out in the ocean – the entire ocean is a pool of organic soup. Maybe a new virus is created every time lightning strikes the ocean. Maybe the same viruses get created again and again, or similar viruses, because they come from an organic soup with a similar composition of substrates. Maybe it’s highly probable that a particular pool of organic soup will always create a Norovirus every time it gets struck by lightning, but there will be subtle variations in its DNA (or RNA, or whatever viruses have).

It would explain why entire cruise ships get the Norovirus while they are out at sea. The virus comes from nowhere, from nothing. Yet the entire ship gets it at once. It has to simply be out in the ocean. They say that oysters in particular locations contain ‘indigenous’ Noroviruses. Those indigenous Noroviruses have to be created from scratch, somewhere, somehow. They do not necessarily come from predecessors. Most people assume that the ‘creation of new life’ is long since over. They assume that everything in existence today came from a predecessor, from a parent, from something alive before it. But viruses might still be getting created every day from scratch, for the very first time, in the organic soup, the same way that life was first created millions of years ago.

And so… when the new viruses come to life, they evaporate along with the water vapor that forms the clouds in the sky. I would like somebody to analyze the content of the clouds to find out whether vaporized viruses really are floating around up there. It would make so much sense. It would explain so much.

Why was I talking about that? I have to reread.

I’m not sure what I was getting at. I’ve written that same theory many times in the past, and it’s what I believe. It would explain the reason why there’s an old wives’ tale saying that if you merely go out in the rain, you will catch a cold. Maybe that isn’t a superstition. Maybe it’s true.

Anyway. I’m just suffering through the passage of time until I have to go to work this afternoon. I’m writing, but I could be playing video games instead. I could just play Purble Place for hours and hours, but Purble Place gets boring after a while. Writing isn’t as boring for me. However, it’s boring for my readers, who are tired of reading about misery and suffering. It’s hard to spend a long time reading about someone else’s misery.

There was a big snowstorm last night. I noticed something which I had noticed before, several years ago, during a big snowstorm. I noticed this mysterious, unexplainable feeling of peace and quietness, and I didn’t know why. That was before I knew about the electronic attacks. Tonight, I knew why. The attacks stopped.

There is still a background noise. That background noise contains voices. However, it does not cause anywhere near as much disruption as another type of attack. There are many different types of attack, and each one feels different and has different symptoms.

The severe attacks stopped. I was able to sit there thinking, uninterrupted, with focus, for long periods of time. I could still hear the background noise, but it wasn’t disruptive. I know I would be better off without the background noise, though.

After the snowplows started clearing the roads, the severe attacks began again. Soon, I was being forced to fall asleep suddenly, and see images and hear voices and get completely distracted from whatever I was thinking, but only after the snowplows had somewhat started clearing the roads.

It suggests that the murderers really are driving around in their cars, as some victims believe. I don’t know what to believe.

If the silencing effect were caused merely by the snow itself, then it would still be happening the whole time the snow was here. The silence effect was temporary and it only lasted as long as the roads were all covered with snow and nobody could drive around.

This makes me hopeful that maybe geographic isolation really would be an effective countermeasure against most of the attacks, although the background noise attack might still be going on. I suspect that the background noise will exist anyplace where radio exists, and some of it might be intentional, and some of it might be unintentional (electromagnetic pollution, an unwanted side effect of using radio for innocent purposes).

It was nice to have a short period of time during which I could think clearly. I tried to think about Rick and about the reasons why I haven’t gotten married yet. Is it because I haven’t loved anyone enough? Is it because of all the other problems I’ve been having? And I am clear about the fact that it would be extremely unnatural for me to go looking for Rick after he had said ‘no’ to me. I have always taken the first ‘no’ as a permanent, eternal no. If someone says ‘no’ to me even once, then they are gone from my life forever. It is totally unnatural for me to keep going after somebody after they say no. That is against my character. No means no, for the rest of eternity. If you don’t *mean* ‘no,’ then don’t EVER say no to me, unless you want to be completely abandoned forever afterwards – don’t play around with that flirtatious ‘no means yes’ bullcrap. No means ‘goodbye forever.’

Rick isn’t able to accept the reality of my torture, of the fact that I am the victim of a crime. He doesn’t believe that I actually am a mind-controlled puppet who is not in control of my own actions. I could have possibly overlooked that, and I could have made it my separate side project to do research on mind control countermeasures, however, he has said ‘no’ to me very clearly several different times, not just because of mind control, but because of everything in general.

I don’t necessarily expect to find a husband who believes that I really am a mind-controlled puppet who is being forced to say things and being forcibly prevented from thinking, by people who initiate spontaneous attacks against innocent victims who have done nothing to them at all, except simply existing. There really are people on earth who spontaneously initiate attacks against innocent people who have done nothing to them. If you don’t believe that is true, then you are ignorant about human nature. It is real. It really happens.

However, if my husband didn’t believe that I am being attacked, I would go on and continue to do my research, as needed. It would be a hobby that he wasn’t interested in. It would be an activity that I was doing with my ‘other friends,’ somebody other than him. I would feel somewhat alone, still, because I really want to have my husband by my side in this war, but I will probably have to do without that support. It’s mostly women who are being attacked, not men, and so I will have to join with women socially to research the countermeasures, and it won’t be the same as having my soulmate supporting me. But if that is all that I can get, then that is what I will have to take.

There are times when I feel very frustrated about people’s disbelief. Don’t you understand that there are really evil people out there who want to spontaneously attack other people for no reason other than because they can, because they can get away with it? Haven’t you ever met any bullies, in school, or anywhere else in your life? Haven’t you ever encountered any sociopaths, people who would stab you in the back, people who lie constantly about everything?

Those people learned about the methods of electronically attacking and controlling people, and they developed those methods, and now they have advanced technologies that they use, technologies which have been evolving over all the centuries since electricity was first discovered.

But oh well. I only observed this morning that most of the attacks stopped, except the background noise, because of the snowstorm, and I had also observed a similar ‘peaceful silence’ many years ago during a similar snowstorm, but back then, I didn’t know the reason why. It is only temporary, only as long as the roads are buried in snow and no one can drive around.

My vacation will be very soon. It’s possible that I will get a lot of snow while I’m trying to build my shack. But I think I will have to just do it anyway.

Yes, if I had found a man who understood me, if he had believed me and interpreted it the same way I do (instead of, for instance, Peter, and another guy, both of whom are slightly tolerant of the idea that hearing voices in my head is caused by attacks from supernatural, evil spirits instead of humans using electronic weapons – but yet still they do slightly tolerate the idea that I am being attacked by something evil which is outside myself, and that is an important, key belief) – yes, if I had found that person, I might have already gotten started, I might have married. I don’t know if the hackers have deleted letters that people have tried to send me. It’s possible that I would have found someone but they were unable to reach me. I don’t know. I would have to find them using completely offline methods.

But for the past few years, I have wanted to get rid of the drug residues first, and that was the reason why I did not put all my effort into finding someone. All attempts that I made were forced, and completely unnatural and unsustainable.