Today it was very warm outside. I went out and worked on my tent again. I took down the two practice tents that I originally tried to build, and I rebuilt them, merging them together into one big thing which isn’t shaped like a ‘tent’ at all. The tent has an irregular shape which is fitted to the trees and the ground around it. I could not have planned it in advance and then carried it with me to assemble it. It was shaped depending on where things were in that particular location. It’s held up with ropes tied to the trees.

I used a tiny little stapler to staple the pieces of vinyl together. Originally, for the first two tents, I had been poking holes through the fabric with my knife and then tying the pieces together with the twine by threading the twine through the holes. It was meant to be temporary. I felt more confident this time, and I went out and bought the tiny little stapler (a stapler is something that I might use once every five years, if even that often, and so I’ve gotten rid of any previous staplers that I used to have). If I have to, I can still undo the staples in the future, but it will just be a nuisance.

This tent is a semi-permanent tent. It would be a hassle to take it apart and try to carry it somewhere else and rebuild it. It isn’t meant to be an ultralight backpacking type of tent.

I was glad to see, when I came back to visit the tents today, that neither one of them was filled with a pool of water. The tents are vinyl, but I did not have them completely enclosed. They had open holes on some of the sides. This new, merged tent, which contains the fabric of the two practice tents, plus some extra fabric that I just bought, still has to be tested against rain. If I leave for a few days and come back to find it filled with a deep pool of water, then something needs to be fixed. It’s likely that the roof of this new tent will collect water. The practice tents were still tent-shaped, meaning they were triangular, with a pointed top. The top of the new tent is not pointed, but not flat either, and it’s angled, but it’s very messy and irregular, as the fabric is wadded and wrinkled, and so the wrinkles will collect little pools of rain.

The whole thing is messy and sloppy. That’s one reason why I’m glad that I don’t have a ‘tent expert’ standing over my shoulder telling me what to do and how to do it. My tent is going to be a mess, and that’s the way it is. I will gradually fix it as I go.

That was my attitude about it. It doesn’t have to be perfect from the very beginning. I will just keep fixing little things as I go. I always know that I can do this.

The people who are attacking me, they don’t think that way. Whenever I’ve fought battles with them, in the past, about my way of doing things, whenever I’ve had conflicts with them while trying to do something, the conflicts often have to do with the fact that I’m doing something which hasn’t been pre-planned and isn’t perfect from the beginning. I have faith that I can make something which is imperfect, and then work out the problems later. But *they* often acted like that was an extremely bad thing to do, and they would attack me and trigger intense anxiety and cause me to become totally frozen so that I could not even take any action at all. They would put images into my head, images which were totally wrong, and they would want to force me to follow that ‘plan.’

With the tent, they were giving me this horrible image of some kind of tent that resembled a big carnival tent, except I was supposed to make it smaller, and I was supposed to be adding pieces of fabric onto the sides in a particular way, and it was supposed to be all neat and tidy and symmetrical. Whenever they were forcing me to see that image, I just got hopeless and gave up. But today when I was building it, I just started putting the fabric up and adapting it to the situation as I went. It is, as I said, very messy, irregular, asymmetrical, and not at all ‘tent-shaped.’

Something happened today which was kind of upsetting. It happened whenever I blew my nose and wiped it on a bunch of fallen leaves. I just started digging under the leaves, afterwards, out of curiosity to see the soil. I like touching the soil of the forest. It is made of wet, crumbled, decomposing leaves, with a sweet smell. I wanted to see if there was anything interesting in the soil under the leaves, anything like live insects or worms or ants or sprouting plants or roots or seeds, anything at all.

While digging, I turned up half of the abdomen of a dead yellowjacket. It was still preserved, not decomposing, still recognizable as a yellowjacket.

I suddenly realized that it was a stroke of genius to start building my tent in the middle of January, but it had been unintentional. I didn’t consciously think to myself, ‘Hey, I know! I’ll build the tent in January so there won’t be any yellowjackets!’

But when it gets warm, there are going to be yellowjackets. I am upset about that. I forgot that yellowjackets even existed. But now I remember.

I’m not afraid of very many things, but I hate yellowjackets. When I was a teenager, my friend and I were out in the woods climbing a big tree, when all of a sudden she said ‘I just got stung.’ I didn’t understand what could have stung her, and I was afraid she had gotten bitten by a spider. But I looked down, and there were these ‘things’ that were flying around her legs. She started screaming and jumping up and down. And they started stinging me too. We both ran through the woods, *BAREFOOT*, as we had both taken off our shoes because we were climbing the trees (I can’t remember if we abandoned the shoes on the ground or if we managed to pick them up in time to carry them while running away). We ran through the woods barefoot and we didn’t even feel the sticks and the rocks and the sticker bushes (and actually, on my most recent trip to West Virginia, during the hike that gave me giardiasis, I ran barefoot through the woods several times during the hike, so I know it’s possible – there were hardly any sticker bushes at all).

So after that, I was really scared to go into the woods for a long time. I gradually learned that there are some seasons of the year when yellowjackets are not active, but I was still scared for a while. We also had these really annoying spiders that would make webs directly across the path, right at face level, and so I was scared of those too, but those weren’t as bad – it’s easy to just walk along the path, swinging a stick up and down in front of you the whole time you’re walking. I’d just carry a ‘spider stick’ and swish it up and down to catch any webs that I might accidentally not see in time. And after you had destroyed the web, the spider wouldn’t do anything to you. But yellowjackets are inescapable. If they start going after you, you can’t just run away. You have to get into some kind of enclosed shelter, or you have to jump into the water, and stay underwater for a while. And if there isn’t any water nearby, then that’s really bad. I don’t know how far they would chase you, and I don’t want to test it to find out.

My tent is made of clear vinyl. The voices who suggested it to me said that was so that it would be possible to ‘see the spiders.’ However, I have a feeling that that’s actually a ‘joke,’ and they’re referring to me as a spider because I’m creepy and because I have hairy legs. That’s been one of their jokes in the past, and, depending on my mood, I sometimes don’t mind being jokingly called a spider, whenever they say things to me or give me mental images. They use the ‘jumping spider’ as a symbol to mean that I’m harmless, because I’ve always been fond of the jumping spiders ever since I read a National Geographic article about them a couple decades ago. Anyway, I guess I will be able to see if there are any spiders, by looking through the plastic, but it will also be possible to see *me*, but I don’t care that much.

It also lets in sunlight, and it creates a warm little greenhouse in there. I won’t like that in the summertime, but it would be nice in the winter. I can just open the doors or windows or holes or whatever they might be called, if necessary.

I like my tent because it is so small that I have to crawl inside it. I don’t want anything bigger than that! And houses are so huge. A huge house makes sense if you have a dozen children, but nobody ever does, yet the houses keep getting built bigger and bigger and bigger, even as our society has fewer and fewer children. I can’t even express how annoyed and frustrated I am about the hugeness of houses, about how, for some reason, it’s taboo (or possibly illegal? possibly against the zoning laws or building codes or something?) to build a teeny tiny hut that’s so small that you have to crawl into it and all you can do in there is lie down to sleep. Yeah, it would be illegal. You’re probably *required by law* to build a house that has … wait a minute, no, that might not be true. The Amish houses don’t have electricity. It’s legal to build a house that doesn’t have any electrical wires in it. I had been about to say that it’s probably illegal to build a house that doesn’t have any utilities of any kind, such as electricity or water or toilets.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a community where all the houses were tiny sized and none of them had any utilities of any kind at all? But the community itself would have some way of doing those things, like, you would carry your chamber pot out to the dumping area, whatever that might be. Maybe they’d have a porta-potty and you would dump your chamber pots into the porta-potties. Or you could do all that other elaborate stuff like composting toilets and all those things that environmentalists talk about, but I was just thinking of something that could be done in a quick, temporary way in a community that wasn’t completely settled yet, where nobody had had time to build the composting toilets or whatever else. I’m thinking of it that way, because I’m imagining something that could be built, quickly, something realistic, something achievable, something that could be done with a low budget, with less borrowed money. Whenever you’re first starting a community, you have to compromise on some of those things for a while, until you are settled and you have enough money and time to do it.

You might get in trouble for violating fire codes. They would worry that somebody would start a fire and all the houses would burn down one after another. That happens in slums and shanty towns where the houses are all practically on top of each other. I was thinking of some places in South America where the shanty town houses are like that. It’s an image I’ve seen in several movies, and also on Rick’s web page with his photos of Lima, Peru, which, for some reason, were never completely uploaded, and he has only the captions but not all the photos, and it sounded like he was miserable there anyway and his heart wasn’t in it, and he said the pollution was so bad that it made you physically sick to be in the city.

Anyway, I always just assume that anything I would ever want to do is illegal.

So. I was afraid I wouldn’t get the tent project done during my vacation, but in reality, I did a bunch of work at the very last minute, since I assume I go back to work tomorrow. I now have to observe the tent and see if it’s filled with pools of water the next time I go there, although actually, that won’t be so bad – I could fix leaks at the moment when it was raining, if I were in the tent.

I also started the purchase of the bicycle, and have to finish it, in a few weeks, when I’ve finished earning the money.

My food costs are still too high, and not only that, but it will be even harder to go around town through the drive-thrus when I’m riding a bike. I’ll have to go to restaurants and do take-out or sit down. Ideally I want to make my own food at home, but I can’t light fires in the woods, and I might or might not try to set up some kind of cooler for storing food – not yet, though.

Actually, that is *not* ideal – I don’t want to make my own food at home. I don’t like inefficiently preparing three elaborate meals every day for myself, or for myself and a husband. I like the idea of some kind of group cafeteria arrangement, where the food is cooked efficiently in a large batch, and where people take turns cooking, so that you don’t have a million separate houses with a million separate individuals each one of them painstakingly cooking their individual meals. It would be some kind of cooking cooperative.

Anyway, I did get some stuff done during this vacation. And the practice tents were worthwhile even though I took them down and rebuilt them into something else. I had to learn how to handle the fabric.

Now as it gets warmer I will have to solve one new problem after another. I will be constantly surrounded by poison ivy, bees, ants, spiders, and other unknown and unexpected things. It just reminded me of that folk song that I heard once on the radio many years ago. I heard the song, and had a delayed reaction to it – I heard most of the song and I only responded when I was near the end, and I hit ‘record’ on the tape player and I got the last verse or two, but not any of the beginning, so that last verse is all I remember. ‘Life is a toil and love is a trouble / beauty will fade and riches will flee / pleasures they dwindle and prices they double / and nothing is as I would wish it to be.’ The beginning verses of that song talk about how each season of the year brings some new dreaded problems, like muddy floors during the rainy season, and that kind of thing. ‘Housewife’s Lament’ is the song. I’m not sure who sang it, but it was sung well in the particular recording that I heard.

So was the vacation a success? I’m going to say yes, it was. Vacations help me finish projects much more easily than I can while working.

Eating *almost* nothing but McDonald’s chicken nuggets for most of her life didn’t make Stacey Irvine get fat. She was malnourished and anemic and sick, but not fat. Look at the picture. She is of average weight and has a relatively healthy looking body. You can see the dark circles under her eyes, and you can tell that she’s not healthy, but no reasonable person would describe her as being fat.

She would love the Weston Price diet, I’m sure. Someone should show her that she can enjoy things like liver and other organ meats instead of just muscle meat. Then she would be able to continue eating a mostly meat-based diet but she would get a lot more vitamins and minerals. It is possible to eat a diet that has very few fruits and vegetables in it, but only if you choose the right kinds of meat.

Another interesting thing that this news story proves is that McDonald’s chicken nuggets are actually more nourishing than you might think.  The first thing that we think of, when reading this article, is how *badly* nourished she is.  But think of it, she ate that her entire life, and only started having major problems now.  It sustained her all that time.

There are people who try to eat extremely strict vegetarian diets that are poorly planned, the ‘junk food vegetarians,’  the people who completely avoid eating all meat, but who also aren’t eating healthy fruits and vegetables either.  I’ve read stories written by people who decided to stop being vegetarians, people who described all the health problems they had. Some of them ate a very poor diet for many years.  I don’t know the average number of years that they continued eating that way.  But 15 years seems like a very long time, for this girl in the news story. I’d like to compare the number of years that this girl survived eating this way, versus the number of years that the ‘junk food vegetarians’ go until they collapse and go to the hospital.  (Most of the stories that I’ve read end that way – somebody eats a horrible diet for a very long time and eventually collapses and goes to the hospital.)

I’d be curious to know about this girl’s health problems in general, the chronic problems she had before she actually collapsed.  We don’t even know for sure what triggered the collapse.

I also realized that hugging him won’t make him go away. I know, that sounds amusing, but it’s true. I could probably hug him as many times as I wanted to, and it would not bother him, and I could even do it deliberately, with the assumption that I would make him feel gross and he would avoid me, but he would continue to walk over to me and start talking to me every time he saw me. He would get used to receiving hugs, and he would enjoy them. The ‘gross someone out so that they will avoid you’ technique will not be effective. He isn’t going to be bothered by physical contact.

By the way, this isn’t the same guy as the ‘creepy library guy’ who I mentioned not too long ago. This is a new person.

While interacting with him, I feel as though the thing he needs from me is physical contact, but he doesn’t need my thinking ability as much. We are both thinkers, and he is able to think on his own. (This is the semi-dual type of relationship.)

I meet a relatively large number of ILEs, and occasional LIIs, but I swear that I hardly ever meet delta NFs. I’m not even sure that the two IEE twins that I’ve seen are IEEs – I’m not absolutely sure. I haven’t interacted with them enough times. The bookstore guy, I just was sitting in a chair nearby while he was talking to an entire group of people and teaching them how to use the Barnes and Noble ‘Nook’ device. He was clearly a Ne type, but it’s possible he could have been an ILE, not an IEE, and it was many months ago and I don’t remember what exactly he said and did that convinced me he was an IEE.

I have accidentally found another semi-dual, for the zillionth time, and now, I feel affectionate towards him and I feel that he would welcome physical touch. I don’t want to have another semi-dual relationship again. I have already had too many of those. I hate being vulnerable and not being able to resist a relationship that I know will not be good for me.

It’s interesting ‘socionically.’ I can actually feel the awareness that he is ‘Si-valuing.’ He likes a person who is able to initiate physical touch and is able to notice what’s going on in the real world. But he doesn’t really need my thinking ability, and I can feel that, when I’m talking to him.

He’s reading books about physics, those books that are a mixture of physics and philosophical speculation, things like ‘A Brief History of Time.’

******************
I’m having trouble with the tent because the murderers have been corrupting my mental images. I try to make an image of what I want to do with the tent, and the murderers are putting this stupid, useless image into my head instead of letting me do what I want. Their image is getting in the way of what I want to do. I don’t *need* someone to give me a mental image of how I should build my tent. That’s the whole point. If I needed it, I would have asked for it. The image that they’re making is wrong, and it’s not what I want to do at all, and it’s making me feel frustrated and hopeless. I’ve partially bought my bike, which is a little bit of progress, and I’ve built two small practice tents that are not quite what I want them to be, but the tent project is stalling because of all the interference with my visualization.

The supposed LII guy said hello to me at the library. ‘They’ suggested that he might be just another SLI, and not an LII, and that I could have made a mistake. I don’t need another hyperphasic SLI in my life! One hyperphasic SLI (myself) is enough.

I am still affected by drug residues, and I’m still living in my car, and I am still at risk of the too-intense, too-clingy, too-desperate, too-creepy behavior. When this guy came up to me, I felt affection and had a desire to hug him again. I hugged him the last time, after our first conversation, whenever we said goodbye and went our separate ways. I don’t want to over-hug someone who I don’t know very well, because I don’t know whether he thinks I’m gross or not. I was sitting at a table out in the main area when he saw me today, and this was the second time I’ve seen him, and so I never hugged him today, and in fact, I sort of almost shooed him away, because I had just been on the verge of getting up and leaving and going to go eat something (which probably indicates there was a puppet incident going on, an attack: if something happens when you are ‘right on the verge of doing something,’ that means they were giving you a forced urge, at that moment, and then they forced somebody else to do something to you that would cause you to decide one way or the other what you are about to do, and do it.) Anyway, so I told him I was just about to leave. Last time we talked, he told me that he had difficulty with social transitions, and I assume he means things like, the moment when two people decide that they are going to separate from each other, and that kind of thing. Last time, I had told him I was about to see a movie at 7:00, but he kept talking and talking and not looking at the clock, and I actually left AT 7:00 and was late (which didn’t matter, because it was Dragon Tattoo, which I had already seen so many times I’ve lost count), and, during that time, I chose to accept this, because sometimes socializing is more important than going and seeing a movie alone. So, today, whenever he didn’t seem to know how to stop, I had to actually say ‘byebye,’ in a childlike voice, while strongly desiring to hug him again. And then I got up to leave, finally, as I had been just about to.

So I might hug him sometime again if the location is better, or if the ‘angle of attack’ is better – today, he approached me from the front, and stood with my desk between me and him. I don’t want to stand up and then move towards him to hug him, while carrying my netbook and its cords in the other arm. That was how I hugged him last time, a shallow one-armed hug, while holding a netbook and cords in the other arm, (this is amusing, I describe a hug as ‘shallow,’ which is different from a ‘deep and penetrating’ hug, which is not meant in a sexual way, but rather, a hug where you touch most of your body against the other person and have time to slowly absorb the hug, instead of quickly leaving.)

Yes, I was, in fact, handling something contaminated earlier today – I removed some cardboard from the floor, and felt myself having a reaction immediately afterwards, and I tried to wash my hands, but it was one of those stupid automatic faucets where the water temperature could be described as ‘lukecold,’ and the water won’t stay on very long, nor does it come out at a very large volume, but instead is just a thin, low-pressure spray. I hate those faucets. I used to not care about washing my hands, but now, because of drug residues, and because I’m taking baths in the sinks in public restrooms, I now am extremely annoyed about lukecold water-saving automatic faucets, which I have always hated, but which I hate even more intensely now.

Anyway, as long as I’m in the car, I’m at great risk of over-intense emotions and clinginess, which is why I did the exact opposite of what I wanted to do – I shooed him away after talking for only a couple minutes, and I escaped without hugging him or even attempting to hug him. His eyes are brown and very, very beautiful. I love to look at them. I don’t need a crush on a cute LII-SLI-mistyped guy with hyperphasia and an unknown psychiatric disorder (which he confessed to me during our first talk, but I don’t know what it is). I don’t know what kind of drugs he’s on. He has to be on drugs, if he has a disorder, and if he has hyperphasia and is vulnerable to forced puppet speech and puppet behavior.

If you hug someone who is the same type as you, you can feel a sensation of sickness, of nausea, the feeling of sexual arousal and incest. It feels wrong, but you feel the need to touch somebody anyhow. It’s not easy to get a good conversation flow that goes on and on forever, with someone who is the same type, which is why I want to avoid having a relationship with an identical, unless I have an IEE somewhere to interact with also – and I may have mistyped him, he might really be a SLI instead of an LII, and now I feel uncertain. I hate being vulnerable to this need for relationships, at the same time that I am trying to transition out of my car and get away from the constant, recurring drug residue contaminations that are inevitable as long as I’m using my car. I have to wait a few more weeks to finish buying my bicycle.

I’m typing this on the QuickPress, so I might have made some huge paragraphs without noticing them. I’ve also probably forgotten to finish some of my tangents.

So, the anti-hugging behavior of today (don’t be gross, don’t be creepy, don’t be desperate, etc, etc, etc) and the confusion about his type, and everything, all of this at the moment when I am still extremely vulnerable to weird and clingy behavior caused by drug residues – it gave me intense anxiety and self-restraint, mixed with affection and the feeling that I was happy to see him and loved looking at his eyes.

Oh well…. I’m going to try eating these jars of baby food that I bought. I’m blogging too much, and drinking a huge amount of coffee. I’m not done with the tents yet, and I’m not done buying my bike yet. However, the bike is partly purchased, for real, and I will have it in a few weeks. I’ve really done something.

QuickPress causes me to forget to close my parentheses, because I can only see three lines of what I’ve written.  I had several typos in this post.  I’ve had a higher-than-average number of typos in my recent posts, and for various reasons, I just ignored them and left them there.  I had some kind of typo in one just today where I said “I’” and then started a new paragraph, because I forgot to finish something, and had no idea what it was, afterwards.   And I’m leaving it there.

I’ve eaten jars of baby food before. It’s good, actually – I like it. But canned food’s vitamins get destroyed, and then, they have to replace the missing vitamins with synthetic vitamins, which are harmful to you in some ways (though I won’t go into it now). All the vitamins in infant formula are synthetic. I’d like to observe all my symptoms and experiences on this diet. (*Oops! Edit!  I just looked at some jars on the shelf at Wal-Mart.  They DO NOT have a bunch of synthetic vitamins added.  I actually bought a couple small jars and I’m going to try them.*)

That would be useful if you were planning to actually feed that type of food to your children. It would help a mother understand what her child is going through, why they are getting gas, why they are getting intestinal cramps, why they are getting constipated (synthetic iron supplements added to baby food probably cause constipation), why they are crying all the time, why they are restless and miserable, why they vomit, why they can’t sleep.

However, this doesn’t apply to me, because I’m not going to feed my children jars of baby food, or infant formula. Anything in the store which is specifically designed for ‘babies,’ I will avoid like the plague. If it says ‘baby’ on it, then I will never buy it. I will feed them normal adult food. First, I’ll feed them breast milk. When they want to eat normal food, I’ll give that to them, and there won’t be any jars of commercially prepared baby food.

I used to believe that people probably chewed up the food and then spit it into the baby’s mouth, which, I suspected, was the origin of the French kiss, where you put your tongue into the other person’s mouth. I’m not joking, I’m serious, I really have believed that maybe that’s how they fed babies. However, after reading some things that other people have written, I now believe that there isn’t ever a time period when babies are naturally required to eat solid food but are unable to do so because they don’t have teeth. If they don’t have teeth yet, then they don’t require solid food, the end. If they do have teeth, then they are capable of chewing. I’ve read about children who decided on their own that they were curious about the solid food that the adults were eating, and the kids took some off the plates and tried to eat it, without any difficulties, even though technically their teeth weren’t ready for that yet. They won’t be able to rip and tear large pieces of meat, but they would be able to just swallow the bites whole if you chopped up some meat into small pieces or something.

Anyway, the point was that I came to believe that there isn’t even any need for the ‘French kissing’ method of feeding babies. They simply do not need any of the things that are sold on the store shelves that are intended for babies.  There is no need at all to feed children ground-up, blenderized food during a time period when they don’t have teeth yet.

I’ve also read that teething is painless for children who are eating a primitive diet, and so, all the fuss about teething is a consequence of the modern lifestyle too, just like everything else.

But… maybe I should try the baby food diet, just for fun. Do they really expect you to feed your baby *nothing but* infant formula and jars of baby food? That’s a horrible diet.

I picked up a box of powdered formula on the shelf at Wal-Mart and read it. On the back there was a disclaimer saying that experts agreed about the benefits of breast milk. That disclaimer was written at the very top of the instructions. However, it was only a single sentence, and it gave no detailed suggestions about *how* a person might be able to quit using baby formula. Do you think that would influence an ignorant, poor, uneducated person’s choice to use formula (because it is, in fact, the ignorant, poor, and uneducated people who are using formula, while the knowledgeable, wealthy, educated people are using breast milk).

I’d like to see the formula banned completely, and for all of those people who are now helplessly addicted to it, due to the fact that their breast milk has dried out (since they haven’t been using it) and they now have no choice but to use some kind of substitute, those people should be helped by wet nurses, or they should be taught how to stimulate lactation – and all of their plastic dental fillings ought to be removed so that they can stop complaining about how it hurts their breasts whenever they try to breastfeed. Painful breasts are not a normal phenomenon, and they have a specific cause, and dental fillings or other plastic implants in the mouth are usually the cause. I first experienced painful breasts whenever I had a plastic orthodontic retainer in my mouth when I was a teenager, but back then, I didn’t know what was causing the pain.

Oh well, the baby food diet – just an idea. I’d have to make a documentary about it, like the guy who tried the McDonald’s diet and made a documentary.

I think it must be the weather, but all of a sudden, I feel better than usual today. For some reason, I woke up feeling stronger than usual and more willing to get up out of bed. The weather is beautiful – it’s warm, although I can’t see how warm it is by reading the thermometer hanging in my car, because it’s warmer in here than it is outside, as I just had the heater on while driving.

Last night, ‘they’ gave me an impulse to go to a particular grocery store and buy a couple of canned food items. I had read someplace recently, probably in Weston Price, that whenever some soldiers used to get their rations, they got corned beef and sauerkraut, or something like that, and how that was actually a pretty good diet. That’s the way that I like to eat. For some reason, I’m not really interested in starchy foods. I don’t like potatoes, and I don’t like bread, and so I almost never go seeking out either one of those things on purpose. I just eat them ‘incidentally,’ along with whatever I’m eating, because they’re usually included, but if I can exchange the french fries for some vegetables, I will, like at Long John Silver’s. French fries are almost always totally disgusting to me and I can barely choke them down. But I enjoy a meal that includes nothing but meat and vegetables, and probably some fruit, although I will often get cravings for something else later, and since I haven’t been cooking for myself for a long time now, I haven’t been able to thoroughly observe and understand and troubleshoot the cravings, but I would if I were cooking my own food. Cravings are a bad sign, a sign that you have done something wrong. You needed something and didn’t get it. However, they are also a sign that you have been exposed to drug residues, such as tobacco residue.

Anyway, so I got corned beef and cabbage. I had been picturing myself taking grocery store canned food on a long distance hike. One reason why I hesitate to go on a long hike, even after being inspired by Rick, is that I think the food would be terrible. At this time in my life, I don’t believe in eating grain – I don’t believe it’s good for you – and I would like to eat a lot of high-fat meats, especially during something as energetic as a long-distance hike, and even more so if it were cold outside and my body needed to produce heat. I thought corned beef and cabbage would be a possible thing to take on a hike.

So I ate most of it last night before bed, but I couldn’t eat an entire can of corned beef. I ate a good bit of it over several periods, but not all in one sitting. I didn’t have any bags of ice. In my car, I had originally set up a cooler and I was intending to get bags of ice whenever I needed to refrigerate foods overnight, but it turned out that the cooler was in a bad location which is very hard to reach, and also, it turned out that just putting foods on ice didn’t keep them cold enough – there had to be water mixed with the ice, which made it more of a nuisance than just buying ice alone. Then, for some unknown and unexplainable reason, the food tasted funny, as though some chemical had leached into it, even though I had it inside of ziploc bags while it was in the ice. I think it is indeed possible for ‘odors,’ quote unquote, to leach through ziploc bags. I’ve heard of it happening. Odors, obviously, are a chemical, and so, there must be other unknown chemical substances that can leach through ziploc bags. (Also, with my drug residue contamination experiences, I discovered that plastic often doesn’t protect objects against contamination – the drug residues often go right through plastic, which is why I usually got cardboard to put all over the floor in the apartment.)

So the food tasted weird after sitting in the cooler, and it also didn’t stay cold without water being mixed in with the ice, and also the cooler was so hard to reach that I was strongly discouraged from using it. So I’m not even trying to get to the cooler anymore.

And as a result, I just abandoned the little bit of leftover corned beef, reluctantly. Buying some canned food at the grocery store was an experiment suggested by ‘them,’ anyway. I don’t like to waste any meat. Wasting plant products is one thing, but wasting animal products is much worse, because the animals suffered. Plants suffer when we kill them, too, but they suffer in a strange, alien way that we are unable to empathize with, so we tell ourselves that the plants aren’t suffering. You would have to redefine what it means to ‘feel pain,’ because I’m aware that plants don’t have ‘nervous systems’ the same way that we do, although they do have a surprising amount of electrical activity in them (and I can’t remember where I read that, so don’t quote me, I could be wrong). We might not understand how plants feel pain, but they do possess life, and most people agree about that.

Anyway…

After eating the grocery store canned corned beef and cabbage, I started to ‘feel stupid.’ I felt this sensation of being unwilling to think, unwilling to expend the effort, as though there were some kind of barrier in my brain, some kind of mental fatigue.

The stupid head feeling, in the past, has been caused by several different things. Once, it was caused by the bisphenol-A exposure after I got my new plastic dental fillings, the composite resin ones. Other times, it’s caused by foods that have substances identified by the Feingold Diet as substances that some people are sensitive to. I didn’t know exactly which it was, last night. It could have been the chemical preservatives, or flavorings, or something. Or it could have been BPA that leached out of the epoxy resin lining of the cans. I’ll have to google that and see if ‘epoxy resin’ is the right description. (Oh, darn it, I also have to fix ‘Romans’ versus ‘Greeks’ with regard to the statue. Last night I started hearing voices telling me that I said Romans when I meant to say Greeks, and I agreed, it was wrong. – Okay, fixed.) Yes, ‘epoxy resin’ is correct, and there is controversy over the amount of BPA that they leach out. It bothers me that whenever I read about BPA controversies, the mainstream sources never mention anything about dental fillings, but dental fillings, in my experience, are the *worst*, and not only that, but the BPA never stops leaching out, although the levels decrease. I am still aware of BPA coming out of my fillings now even though I got them in 2008 or so. It interacts with St. John’s Wort somehow in my body, so that whenever I’ve been exposed to SJW, I now have specific symptoms, such as painful breasts, which only began occurring after the dental fillings were put in, and which are not caused merely by SJW alone, but only in combination, through some unknown process (either a chemical process in the body, or else a mechanical process such as bruxism of the teeth, teeth clenching caused by SJW, which might cause more BPA to leach out).

Anyway, so I had the stupid head feeling, and it was quite severe. Not only that, but when I woke up this morning, several places in my abdomen were in agonizing and unbearable pain. When this happens, I have to drink clear water. I know that from experience. Intestinal pain, which is not necessarily from gas, can come from other things, such as drinking pear juice. I learned that the hard way several years ago while doing a more official version of the Feingold Diet. They recommended pear juice because it has lower salicylates than other juices, but they didn’t mention that it causes extremely severe intestinal pain. If you drink clear water, however, the pain will quickly go away in only a minute or two. I don’t know the reasons why. Back then when I was drinking the pear juice, I actually went home sick from work several times because of the intolerable, unbearable intestinal pain, which I did not yet know how to fix. I was simply helpless with unbearable pain and could not work. I don’t know the technical term for it, but it causes some kind of water absorption imbalance. Don’t quote me on that either.

It is highly probable that infant ‘colic,’ which, as far as I know, only happens to babies who are forced to drink formula instead of breast milk, is the same as that intolerable intestinal pain that I myself have felt, and that infant colic might possibly be quickly and easily solved, in exactly the same way, by giving the infant some clear, plain water to drink.  And you should never, ever force them to drink infant formula in the first place.  It is absolutely horrible, and I would say downright evil, although not intentionally so.  It is evil through ignorance.  It is ignorance, with terrible consequences.  And whenever you try to explain this to people who produce and sell infant formula, they go into denial and they try to protect themselves, protect their livelihood, protect their conscience, and even though infant formula ought to be pulled from the shelves and never sold to anyone ever again, it continues to be sold.  And if something has a weakness, then people defend it all the more fiercely, as it is vulnerable and needs to be protected, if they believe that it has even a tiny fragment of value in it alongside the weaknesses, and so, people deny that infant formula is as harmful as it is.  The same sort of defensiveness shows up in people who defend vaccines.  They believe that vaccines still do have a tiny shred of usefulness, and so, they protect vaccines all the more strongly, because they’ve seen that vaccines really do have major weaknesses, and it’s hard to defend something when it has a major weakness, but you desire to defend it whenever you believe it has a shred of value.  People believe that infant formulas have a tiny bit of usefulness, too.

So I drank water, and the pain quickly disappeared. However, all of that experience reminded me that yes, commercially prepared canned food really is bad for you. That’s in addition to the fact that it gets cooked so much and processed so much that it loses a large amount of nutrients.

**************************
I tortured myself again yesterday looking at other web pages where Rick has been, but which he did not create himself. I read new things which I had never read before, which always causes an emotional reaction, but I read them again this morning, and became more familiar with them, and the emotional response was less intense.

Right now I am using Rick as a motivator, and to a lesser extent, his wife also. I read both of their pages and I feel this envy, this jealousy, this feeling that I wish my life hadn’t had so many disasters, this awareness that I am impossibly far behind and I can never catch up with them, that I never finished college, that I’m working at a fast food job, that I am the victim of a crime, that nothing in my life has gone the way I would want it to, that I cannot simply enjoy doing things that have no immediate purpose, that I cannot ‘have fun’ in any way, that every little thing that I try to do is a big huge deal, that I can barely function.

Rick will never care about any of the things that I’m doing. I’ve wanted to live in my car for over a decade now, ever since I first started realizing how hard it is to pay the rent, and ever since I first read about other people living in their cars and in recreational vehicles, full-time. I’ve also talked about living in a ‘squatter shack’ of some kind for a very long time now, probably all the way back in my MySpace blog, if I recall correctly. I’m finally doing some of those things, and I would wish that Rick would see this and understand how much it matters to me. He goes hiking and camping, and he is able to question the modern lifestyle, and he would understand why these things matter so much to me. But he is not going to be communicating with me, he will not be a friend or an acquaintance of any kind, he won’t be a boyfriend, he won’t be a sperm donor or the father of my children, he won’t be connected to me in any way, and I cannot get feedback from him about all these things that matter to me.

The only way that I get anything from him at all is by reading material that he has written on the web, and it makes me have emotional reactions and a desire to keep doing what I’m doing, to continue, to go through with it. It motivates me. It is painful and unsatisfying to ‘interact’ with him in that way, but right now, that’s all that I have.

I am not sure when or how I will disconnect from him and connect to somebody else instead. I feel uncomfortable at the thought of having a relationship with somebody else. I’ve seen several members of the Rick Twin Series – socionics has observed that people of the same type often look alike, and even though Rick himself doesn’t like that type of ‘visual identification’ based on physical characteristics, since, yeah, it is often used very badly, but even so, it is indeed true that people of the same type often look so much alike that they could be brothers. You can look at someone, and say ‘Oh my gosh, you look exactly like someone else who used to be my boyfriend/husband/best friend, whatever,’ and it turns out that they have the same personality type and the same willingness to be your friend, the same type of relationship with you. It’s usually the eyes where I’m seeing it, but I really am seeing the rest of the face being shaped the same way, too. There is an unusually short face, although Rick has a very high forehead (and is also very intelligent). I can’t describe how exactly the face seems ‘short,’ because I don’t have the measurements. Weston Price actually took real measurements of the faces, and the deformities. He could have described better than I can about which facial feature is which distance from which other facial feature, with respect to all the rest of the facial features.

The point is that Rick has socionic twins, they are easily recognizable – sometimes hilariously so – they look like a hilarious parody of him, a distorted but recognizable image, a mockery, laughable – and they are indeed the same type, IEE, which I discover after only a few sentences of talking with them. There is one of them working at Barnes & Noble, and he has this white colored beard patch on his chin, while the rest of the beard on his cheeks is brown, and I like the white whiskers. I have always liked gray hair and salt-and-pepper hair on men, and yes, when I was young I was dating men who were 20 years older than I was. There is another twin working at the bicycle shop, and I attempted to start buying my bike yesterday, which was going to be the next story that I was going to tell. I interacted with him the last time I was there not too long ago, and he said things which only an IEE could say. Bookstores and bicycles shops, places an IEE would love. I will always take note of where they were when I found them, so that I can more easily look for them in the future. It doesn’t help me much to just have a ‘general idea’ of things that IEEs might like. It helps greatly if I have specific examples of places where they are working.

Anyway. I had given away my old bike for free, a couple months ago, while going through the storage unit. I gave it away because it was contaminated and because I was shutting down the storage unit. When I brought it to the bike shop and told the guy I was giving it away, he said, kindly, that yes, they would be able to fix it up and ‘give it some love’ and find it a new owner. The bike was a living thing that needed love, which was how I felt about it. If it hadn’t been contaminated, I would have kept it. Afterwards I worried about whether the guy had washed his hands after touching the bike, but there are some things that I just cannot control, some things which I cannot bear to try to explain to people, about the drug residues. There are some far-reaching consequences that I cannot keep to myself. I’ve had many contamination accidents that I know must have affected other people, for instance, when I was trying to use the laundromat to wash contaminated laundry, which was a disastrous failure. Everyone using the washers and dryers afterwards would have been contaminated…. and there are limits to all the things that I can control or fix. So I had to just not worry about the bike shop guy washing his hands after touching the bike.

The guy then said some things (during the first visit when I gave him my old bike) which were obviously forced puppet phrases, but which only an IEE would agree to say. It’s harder to force people to say things that are completely out of character for them, things which are completely meaningless or completely irrelevant. It’s easier to force them to say things that they might otherwise have said on their own. He said some things which were very specific and spot-on, as though he knew *exactly* what I was doing and why I was doing it, which is why I concluded that he was a puppet.

He was doing reflective conversation, what’s the word for it, where you empathize with someone, try to understand their point of view, try to put into words what emotions they’re feeling, emotional reflection. If you tell a therapist something, the therapist will say ‘So you did this because you were feeling XYZ and you wanted to accomplish ABC,’ and you respond by saying, ‘No, it wasn’t quite for that reason, it was mostly because of JKL,’ and so on, and that is how the conversation goes. Reflective listening or something. During that first conversation, the bike guy was doing that, and he said very specific words. He said ‘So this is kind of a “cleansing” thing,’ and a few sentences later ‘you’re “purifying.” yourself’ (or something very similar to that). The words ‘cleansing and purifying’ are very specifically, exactly, what I am doing, but most people would not have known that those words had any connection whatsoever to my situation, to a reason why someone would be getting rid of a bicycle. I hadn’t explained anything about cleaning up after drug residues, and I hadn’t mentioned anything about chemical sensitivity or the need to clean things, so he was getting these words out of thin air. I just said ‘It’s a really long story,’ in a sad, weary, exhausted tone of voice, the voice of someone who has suffered greatly for a very long time, the voice of endurance.

So I happened to have had the conversation with the Rick Bike Twin, but not the Rick Book Twin. I’ve never said anything to him other than ‘Do you know where they moved the Twilight books?’ while feeling ashamed about my lowbrow literary tastes.

Anyway, yesterday when I went in to buy the bike, or rather, to browse and see what the prices were, which ended up in an actual purchase – when I went in, the place was surprisingly busy. Several people were in there, holding their bikes, bringing the bikes into the store, which always seems strange to me, as I’m not accustomed to seeing people bringing their own used, muddy bikes into a store, which would usually be forbidden, but since it’s the bike store, they do it. I was self-conscious around them all. Some of the guys were kind of cute.

I am no longer confident about my physical appearance nowadays, for a variety of reasons, and I’m not going to go into all that right at the moment. It isn’t because I’m ‘old,’ quote unquote, because I know that I don’t look old – it’s mostly because of the dreadlocks, and also because of my mustache, although in the past I haven’t been nearly as self-conscious about that as I am nowadays. I chose those things for a reason, and I am keeping them, but I am aware that they do not necessarily ‘look good.’

So I felt insecure around a bunch of guys who were talking loudly, and there were nothing but guys in there. I haven’t bathed, some of my clothes are dirty, I was kneeling down in the woods and I got dirt all over my knees, and some of my clothes smell bad right now. I was not feeling confident around a big group of attractive young guys.

When I walked in, I looked straight into the eyes of the nice guy who I had talked to last time I was there. I felt hopeful that I would get to talk to him again this time, but he was helping the big group of guys.

A different salesman came and talked to me. I hadn’t been planning to buy something right then… but at the same time, I knew that I would definitely be buying something soon, and I said so, to the salesman. So he talked to me, and I didn’t feel as though he was an IEE. He was something which I felt slightly uncomfortable with. He was knowledgeable about bikes, and I felt a desire to show him that I was intelligent – he mentioned that a large wheel can go over a bump more easily than a small wheel, and I said, ‘Yeah, I can sort of understand that,’ while making a gesture with my hands to show a bike wheel going over a bump. He said ‘The angle of attack is better.’

Sometimes whenever I myself feel a desire to ‘show somebody that I am intelligent,’ it’s actually, in reality, the *other* person who has a desire to show me that they’re intelligent, and I’m getting my own feelings confused with theirs. I call this ‘I’m rubber, you’re glue, whatever I’m feeling originally came from you,’ and I’ve mentioned this phenomenon several times in my blog. I usually don’t feel many emotions at all, and so, whenever I do feel some kind of emotion, while interacting with somebody in a conversation, I can safely assume that the emotion came from the other person, and not from myself. But a ‘desire to show that I’m intelligent’ is probably a feeling that I myself am capable of feeling on my own, too.

Several times while I was talking to this other salesman guy, I saw the expression of distrust at the corners of his eyes. He was being nice and friendly, the way a salesman must be to everybody, but there was a feeling of strain, or anxiety, or discomfort, as though maybe he disliked me underneath the salesman friendliness, or distrusted me. My mom gave me the distrustful eye corners also, when I visited WV, at a moment when she disliked the way that I smelled, because, she has told me, she associates the smell of body odor with the guy who raped her a long time ago, and she rarely encounters that smell, as we live in a culture where everybody wears this toxic, poisonous substance under their arms, which goes through their skin and adds to their body’s load of chemical pollution. So mom feels distrust and fear and other negative emotions when she smells body odor, which is why she gets so upset about the fact that I haven’t worn deodorant for a couple decades now (although I went through a period where I was wearing something from the Tom’s of Maine company). I stopped wearing it during the same time period when Rachael and I began our experiment of quitting shaving, which was in the early to mid-1990s.

Anyway, I saw that look in Mom’s eye, and in the eye of this salesman, although it wasn’t as extreme. I also saw it in the eye of the actor who played Martin on ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo’ at the moment when he says ‘Come in and have a drink’ to whats-his-face, the main character guy, the author, Miguel (spelling?), at the very end of the movie. Sometimes people have the ‘distrustful look’ in their eyes whenever they themselves are doing something untrustworthy. That actor was a very good actor, at that moment. He had found the author lurking around his house, and so he had good reason to feel intensely distrustful, and he made a very realistic and believable eye expression. He was feeling distrustful, and he was also about to do something untrustworthy in retaliation – if nobody minds me giving spoilers about the movie.

It is a sort of narrowing or wrinkling of the outside corner of the eye, in a particular shape which is different from the wrinkles of laughter.

It’s strange, sometimes I can read expressions on people at McDonald’s, and elsewhere, even if their backs are turned to me and I can’t see their faces. There is some kind of shoulder posture that radiates humiliation, and I see this over and over again in male ESI personality types. I don’t know if I can see it because they are my socionic beneficiary? The reason I say that is because I recently talked to an LII – a puppet, most likely, because he approached me and we had an unusual conversation a day or two after I wrote in my blog about ‘Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close’ and about how I had loved the LII boy in that movie. Anyway, while talking to this LII, I sometimes ‘felt stupid’ or ‘felt inferior,’ and I would try to explain something, but feel like he didn’t really value my explanation. Now that I know about socionic elements, I can say that he felt superior in his thinking ability, but he valued my sensing. Because the relationship is asymmetrical, the benefactor can feel superior to the beneficiary without really being aware of it. Sometimes they laugh at you, and it hurts, and they don’t know they’re hurting you. I sometimes accidentally laugh when an ESI says something, or I don’t take them seriously enough whenever they really are being serious with me.

Like for instance, an ESI lady at McD said something – I was getting a cup of coffee, and she said ‘Don’t take my coffee,’ and I thought she was joking, and I laughed, and she kept telling me not to take it, and after a minute, it finally sank in that she wasn’t joking, and she explained to me that she was out of the bags of coffee and needed more of them, and she couldn’t make any more coffee and needed it to give to the customers. I walked away and I found her a new bag of coffee and I gave it to her, to be helpful, and she had thought we were completely out of them, but I had just seen somebody carrying a new box of coffee bags up the stairs, so I knew we had some in the store and I knew it was right under the counter.

The point of that was that I could often read ‘humiliation’ in male ESIs, and I wondered if I were able to see that because I was aware of the asymmetrical socionic relationship, the signals that someone might feel ‘inferior’ to me in some way. I don’t like to say that they *actually are* inferior, and it’s interesting, those relationships go in a circle, all the way around. A is inferior to B, who is inferior to C, who is inferior to D, who is inferior to A. ‘They,’ the voices, suggested to me that it was like an M.C. Escher drawing of an infinite staircase, which goes around and around, seeming to go lower and lower, but circling around to the beginning. However, anyway, oddly enough, I am able to read this ‘humiliated’ emotion in ESIs even during moments when they are reacting to people other than myself. I am not the only person who triggers that emotion in them, and so, I believe that humiliation might be an emotion which ESIs somehow feel more often, or express and radiate more clearly, than other people, for some unknown reason. For whatever reason, that particular emotion is clearly visible on them, and it is a frequent and recurring emotion which can be triggered by very small things.
I’
Anyway… where was I? This was the guy who used the word ‘hyperphasia,’ the LII at the library. He told me that he had just been drinking coffee, which caused him to babble a lot, and he was talking spontaneously to me while we were sitting alone in one of the rooms in the library, a place where I had to go because other people were already using all the other plug outlets. The conversation was kind of enjoyable, and also kind of an anxiety-provoking strain, both at once. He was clearly an LII, able to see the essence of which belief systems I was talking about, and able to give it a name, put it in a category, and explain the reasons why it was Something-ism instead of Something-Else-ism, and able to describe the nuances of the distinctions between those two belief systems. I seem to encounter LIIs at the library more often than I expected – I thought they were pretty rare. But I don’t encounter people (males especially) who are clearly, obviously IEEs or EIIs anywhere near often enough, and I haven’t had any recent conversations with any of them.

Anyway, the point of that entire rant was: I have seen several IEEs who are part of the Rick Twin Series, which does exist, and socionics visual identification is real, and I’ve interacted with them and verified that yes, they are IEEs. But even so, I don’t like the idea of forming relationships with them. (The bookstore guy, I once saw walking out with someone who seemed to be a girlfriend, so I’m not going to try anything with him. I have no knowledge about the bike store guy’s relationships.) I just feel a barrier to intimacy, whenever I try to imagine myself forming a new relationship with a different person, in the local area.

I have to post this, because I’ve sat here a long time, and my battery is running out. Anyway, I don’t feel able to start up a real relationship, even though I am able to find occasional male IEEs, and I’m not sure what to do about that yet, but I’m going to just keep doing what I’m doing, focusing on moving out of my car, getting a bike, getting rid of the car – I need to make another payment before I can actually take the bike home and use it, so that project isn’t done yet – I just put it on layaway. I’ll just keep doing what I’m doing, for now, and then decide later what to do about the barrier to relationships.

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 Greek statues of people, the statues that don’t have arms anymore. I could be mistaken, but it’s my understanding that those Greek 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 Greek statues are beautiful.’ Ancient Greek 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 Greek 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 Greek statue. She is something else.

(After rereading this, I wanted to add that I still don’t really ‘like’ the statue.)

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.