May 8

 Struggle bus ! Woop woop ! Struggle bus !

A general air of struggle over the last few days. It's weird though. It blips. For a few hours I will be eh, ok. And then I wont be. At points in the last few days I have bit bottom hard. Super. Fucking. Hard. Very bleak. Suicidal. Big yikes. Don't worry. It's just.. thinking.

And then. I will blip out into merely... numb.. or miserable. Or some shit. Ha ha.

It's fun. And exciting.

The world seems often .. just a little bit off to me. I can't. Quite. Relate. *Everything* is off. A road. A tree. A car. Driving. A plant in a crack in the pavement. A piece of litter. How someone parked. It's all. Off. Surreal. It all feels.. perpendicular to where it should be. A weird sense of alienation.

Hmm. Not good. Some serious mental fuckery there. Forms of disassociation.

The only way I can really explain it. Is. You know when you attend some social function. Whatever. A meeting. A BBQ. A party. Guests. Whatever. And there is possibly (?) that moment when everything stops ( in your head ). And it's suddenly not that anymore. It's just some weird thing. Let's say. You just drift off. Into your own space. At the very least. You aren't engaged anymore. You pick up a sense of being there and yet not.

It's like that. Kind of.

But hardcore. And with everything.

It's not pleasant.

Because it legitimately feels like you're losing your mind. Losing your grip on reality.

If I think in such situations. I can come up with monstrous indepth dark analyses of shit. Which just doubles down on alienation and misery. All logically consistent inline with what I see and experience.

But. I think. I've realised something.

To stop doing that.

That I can't trust my conclusions from that data - because the data itself is flawed, twisted. And yes. It makes sense and cross checks all very logical. But it's working on a darkly warped picture. And unsurprisingly, all the derivatives from that are dark and warped.

So. I feel it start.

And then I stop. Wait. It's no good breaking this down. Analysing it. Thinking on it. Because this is just you on a bad day. Bad input. That doesn't make it true. That doesn't make your conclusions true for all of it. Yeah, it's true for the input. But the input is wrong. Because I see shit, and can tell you to 3 decimal places why it is shit, and how it got to be that way, doesn't mean to say it IS shit. Just that I can do logical self checks pretty good.

There's an old school saying in IT stuff. Rubbish In, Rubbish Out. It's a bit of an IT joke varying on the different forms of stack you can get FIFO ( First in First out... or a queue in other words... ) , LIFO ( Last in First out.. or a top down stack in other words.. ). It's kind of archaic these days. Such things have been almost meaningless at the high level of computing that goes on now ( it's still a thing way down deep in the crunch, but, few if any humans ever see it anymore ).

Anyway. Rubbish In, Rubbish Out.

If your input is shit. Doesn't matter how cool the program running on it. You're gonna get shit out.

This gives me something of a rational Get Out Of Jail Card. An excuse to stop thinking and processing. I cannot do that just because something is harmful to me. Or makes me miserable. ( Well, I can, but it can feel like a cop out, a weakness, pathetic... something my internal dickhead critic can use ). But. There's a very good reason there to stop bothering if the input data is crap. And. Here's the thing. I can smell when it's crap. It feels... off.

As I said. Everything is out of line.

Which is probably a good point to disengage the brain. Switch off. Stop. Shit coming in. And like putting diesel into a petrol car, it's gonna do you no good burning through that stuff. Just better not to bother at all. Drain the tank instead. Don't burn it.

Uh huh.

Still. It doesn't relieve the whole, ooh, I am losing my mind feeling. But maybe I can stop extra shit occurring off the back of it.

Something I have learned is that having "shit tinted glasses" is a thing. The same as rose tinted glasses. And it's part of advice I sometimes give to people who I think would benefit from it. Don't take your shit tinted vision too seriously. Take it with a pinch of salt.

But. This is the first time I have.. connected the dots... and realised that analysing and thinking heavily when you're in that kind of place, is .. unhelpful. It should be a no brainer when you think about it. But it's taken me this long to figure, huh, oh, hmm. It's not about ignoring objective truths for the sake of subjective happiness ( which is absolutely the secret to happiness ). It's about figuring out whether your initial data is already hopelessly subjective in dark twisted ways. You're Not As Objective As You Thought. Which is not just about whether you can objectively approach a problem - let's say you can - but is *also* about whether your initial feed, your raw brain data, is not already subjectively infected. An altered state. You can very much argue that anything you perceive is already hopelessly subjective. Sure. But. Eh. There are some ifs, buts and maybes there. A piece of math is a piece of math. No matter if you're left wing, right wing or colour blind or not.

I take a lot of pains to be objective in my thinking. But I think I need to take a look at the signals I get in. Because they are wrong. "Wrong". They're already twisted before the intellectual bit of me gets to work with it.

Uh huh.

Hmm. We shall see how we do with it.

Moving on.

Food wise. Ill wise. Meh. Not great. I am struggling to pin things together. And. I had a small case of eating the same thing in the evening - no ill effect - then eating it for lunch... and it *did* have an effect. Timing is a factor after all ? Sometimes ? Meh.