Why it is never safe for me to speak

One of the key social strategies within group-oriented species is pretending to be friendly. The smile or friendly-sounding nickname is a gambit to achieve some personal goal. (Hey Buddy, bring that hammer over here, wouldja?) But the base reality is that this is a predatory universe, a feeding ground. Big eats small, strong eats weak. Those of us who take everything literally, like me, mistake the politics of laughing and smiling and back-slapping for people liking each other, for people dropping their mutual judgments and practicing unconditional acceptance. There are many of us who are so naive, but our numbers don’t help us much, because animal societies, including human, are controlled by concensus routine and groupthink in general. And there are more of them, and unlike us, they are organized. Their game is team sports and ours just gets us close enough to the sidelines to bark our minority rants for our own entertainment. We loners have no social influence and our way of thinking is automatically rejected.

And that’s why we who take everything literally never fail to fool ourselves into thinking that others are going to forgive us for telling the truth. Incident after incident later, 35 jobs later, 55 years later, I still don’t understand why the truth coming out of my mouth should make people treat me with ever-increasing hostility. Nor will I understand it tomorrow. I won’t understand it next time someone raises their fist or knife or chair or machete or flowerpot to threaten me with, and when I am salvage in a ditch by the side of the road with my adam’s apple cut out, I still won’t understand it.

I had some interesting dreams last night. The one I remember was going to an amusement park where there were underground water slides, in tunnels. Sleds were used to slide down the tunnels. When someone gave me my sled it was explained to me that it was not as fast as the others and I accepted that, assuming there must be a reason. Then about 15 feet into the tunnel, my sled stopped. There was no water on the water slide. The place was not actually operational, and I decided that my companions and I must have showed up at an off time. I went to the man at the desk to get my ticket refunded and at first he denied that they were actually closed, but I kept talking and pretty soon he admitted that they really weren’t open for business. I “remembered” that I had guzzled some booze in bed before closing my eyes to sleep, (that’s a dream within a dream) and said to the man, “I screwed up.”

I woke up with this thought already in my mind before I woke up: I am wrong. It is all my fault.

My Aikido teacher, Sensei Smart, once said to the class as a group that, “Everything that happens to you is your own responsibility, and that’s how you have to approach a problem, even if it’s not true.”

I’m not ready to advocate that or any other point of view, as usual I’m just trying to empty my brain.

I had an unusual day the other day when, late in the day, I was verbally assaulted by Haiku and pushed around by her husband Dodo who shouted at me and told me to go home. I was just looking for my guitar.

I had spent the day in town and instead of the usual routine of signing in to my computer at the internet café early and then leaving it on, with the meter running, while I ate lunch and did my shopping, I instead did all my running around and then ate lunch at the mall before going online.

I was feeling downtrodden, temporarily bored with my online hobby or escape mechanism (genealogy and other research) and it was in this frame of mind, walking around at the mall, that I realized that my habit of staring at beautiful women was degrading my self-esteem or personal power or whatever you want to call it. From the bottom of a depression I could see something I’d never seen before in all my decades of girl-watching. It became obvious to me. The first time I see an attractive woman my eyes have to keep moving. The second and third look make a hole in me from which my energy pours out. I do not believe that people can literally steal your energy or that you can literally give your energy away to another being. But it became obvious that I was degrading a part of my energy, I don’t mean getting it dirty, I mean making it unavailable for my own use. According to the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, what energy you use once is dissipated, de-focused, and relatively unavailable. It’s still energy, you can still write an equation about it, but it isn’t useful.

As I walked around the mall practicing the act of not staring at beautiful girls, my energy level picked up immediately. I realized part of the difference between a man who feels attractive to women and a creep. A creep is a creep because he feels like a creep. He feels like a creep because he is dripping unusable energy from holes in his energy field. With new understanding I observed the other men in the mall who ignored the beautiful women surrounding them on all sides. They probably took their ability for granted, but I could see that they walked with confidence and did not feel like creeps.

I am not pushing this concept as “true”; as usual I’m just trying to empty my brain. But what happened is that I felt relatively strong or powerful. When I got back to the internet I still wasn’t interested in my hobby so I stopped early and went home.

I didn’t realize that I had become totally ungrounded and was more or less a danger to myself. Give a cretin a shovel and he will dig his own grave. Shortly after I got home I heard Haiku’s brother downstairs asking to borrow my guitar, and I headed for Haiku and Dodo’s house to dig my grave with newfound personal power.

As I always say, power is addictive. The smallest taste of it does nothing better than to make you want more. If you don’t know what to do with it, you will destroy yourself trying to get useless little tastes of it.

I’ve already had one run-in with my wife this morning, there was no knife-throwing this time but it almost got physical.

I have decided that my only option is to stop talking. You can’t do that with children and I don’t have a problem with children anyway, and the problems they have with me are forgotten in minutes, hours, or days. The problems I am having with adults are going to get me killed and/or sent out of the country, even if they’re wrong.

If only I could keep silent.