Aug 30

 As it turned out, yesterday ended up busy.

Hazel popped up in the afternoon asking if I was going swimming. Yes. Can I tag along ? Yes.

So we did that, I didn't swim much as I kept Hazel company for the first time in the pool. Six lengths if that. Also an odd thing. Last Friday I did 925m and finished with a sub 30 second sprint. Yesterday I tried the same sprint, holy hell, super harder. 31 seconds.

What the hell. How can I vary so hard within 3 days ? It really smells like the whole on / off - how well is my system doing at the moment thing. Anywho.

Hazel spent a lot of time getting ready after swimming. Girls. Pfft. I don't mind. But I do find myself spending acres of time waiting for others at times. We were literally the last ones out of the changing rooms.

Afterwards we took the mutts for a walk. Hazel struggled towards the end. A lot of excercise. I was however good. Rawr. The benefits of my swimming I think.

Anywho by the time that was all done it was early evening.

Got back. Thought of Ares. Melancholy right back where it started.

So no. The swimming - and company - did not shift the melancholy. Albeit. It shifted it whilst I was busy. When I became unbusy it came right back. This is pretty much expected. I know this happens. Two different animals. One in the light. And one in the shadow. Whos in control depends on what you are doing.

I'm gonna go swimming again today. Get a proper bout of swimmery on. After work.

Ok.

Crazy.

I talk sometimes about me being crazy. I tell people are crazy. People to a lesser or greater extent struggle to take me seriously I think.

Mmm k.

Here's an example. Not of anything particularly crazy - by my scale of things. But fairly.. fucky. I think. And this isn't even what I mean when I say I am crazy ( I mean proper bounce off the walls out of my head crazy, not bizarre thoughts crazy ). But still. Example :

I am aware of the greater expanse of time. I can feel it pass. I can feel its affects across years across decades. I can see everything in motion, changing, decaying. Everything is like sand disappearing between your fingers. You cannot hold onto anything. It is all horrifically impermanent. And it hits me. Like a train. Not some academic pondering. This is me riding a sea of perceptions that shift and bend sending me on weird trips. Sometimes it feels like swimming against a tide of sand. Exhausting. Flensing. Horrible. It's more than being aware of being mortal. It's being aware of everything being mortal. Of time being so short. I will look at a photo. And it drags me into that moment when I am experiencing time like that. As if I was just there. I can do that. I Can remember what I said. What I felt. How that was taken. As if the click of the button was just a second ago. It was just a second ago. And then I am 10 years in the future. And I can feel the weight of it. The sorrow. The slipping away of everything. I cannot express how heavy it is. How hard it is to keep your sanity in that torrent of awareness. I am jumping back and forth. Aware that everything is like a second away from being gone.

Sometimes I think I start to slip between the cracks of reality. Not seeing the day to day life of things. Not the whats on TV. Whats for dinner. But the shape of all things. The atoms in the door - held in place, vibrating faintly, no such thing as a solid object, just collections of energy obeying rules and placements, but time.. will make them flow together. The life of that bit of wood. Its travels. The arc of a tank of petrol, the prehistoric tree, the compression without bacteria. The gloop. The drilling. The refining. And weirdly in my fucking car. 

The hum of all those things stacked up on top of each other. A vibration. That keeps that illusion just so. It is an illusion. It's our perception of what the universe feels like. But. It's just a picture. On a TV. In your head. But sometimes it feels like I can almost.. touch.. that vibration. Everything goes.. slightly.. out of time. The world turns by a small amount of degrees. And suddenly you can see the stage. It's not convincing anymore. You can see the framework that holds the picture. You can see behind the stage. The behind the curtain that the wizard of oz lingers behind.

Time becomes something else. Not a tick tock passing moment. It's something you can see. In order. That you can go forwards and backwards through. Sitting there. Like a library. Which gives you the most enormous perspective of all of it at once. The whole bigger picture. The meta. And you can feel and see how everything else sits with that time. At right angles. Pieces. All pieces. The complete illusionary harmony that we typically see breaks into its component pieces. Like looking at a map from overhead.

It's .. a peculiar.. place. I don't know. Crazy. A deconstructed perception perhaps. Related to disassociation. But not. Work hard at it enough, and you can unglue the pieces, break the harmony of everything coming together as a seamless whole into .. separate feeds of information. And information that you normally discard. A breakdown in time perception. Of. Where you are.

This is not as wacky as it sounds. Your brain has a very loose association with passing time. It fakes it. Runs everything through a simulation ( Which are you are not aware of ) before presenting you "reality". Except it's not. At all. Check out Chronostasis and Saccadic Masking. Google it. Run a simple test on yourself with a clock. And watch your rock sure perceptions of reality be anything but.

Tip of the iceberg.

There's a lot of waffle that goes on in eastern philoshopies. About nirvana. And different states of conscious. And meditation. And yada.

Sometimes it feels.. very.. similar.. if not the same. Disembodied. Floaty.

A tiny voice in me says, maybe one day, you'll figure out the last lock, and just.. disappear. In a flash of energy.

Like a shitty Harry Potter.

There are - at least - two different places I inhabit. One is the grounded world. Here's some groceries. Here's a traffic light. The other. Is a different world. Blurred. Nothing hangs together. There is no spoon. You can see the edges of things. How it's all weirdly crammed together. So. Odd. And there is soooo much sadness in that space. I couldn't tell you why. But it feels like a tragedy. A prison. That we are all locked in.

Odd.

Just crazy things. A cautionary tale about thinking too hard for too long perhaps.

Or you know, maybe the Matrix is starting to break down for me. Either or.

It's not machines though. At least. Not what I know as machines. There is no machine quality to it.

I often wonder about higher dimensions. And how you would perceive that should you suddenly be able to start pushing at those boundaries. Or trip and fall slightly off kilter. The 2d person - a shape on a piece of paper. Walking around a 3d table top. Unaware that the tabletop is 3d. Sits on a floor in the Z axis. The 2d person only knows X and Y. Their whole world is X and Y.

What if they fell off the table.

What if you lifted them slightly, so their 2d perception extended into the Z. What would they understand of what they saw ? The would see bits of their X and Y world, but odd. Off kilter. At some crazy angle that they couldn't describe. And stretching into it. Something else. A thing they had never perceived like that before. A Z axis. Traversible. Like X and Y. How. Odd.

I think our world is exactly like that. Extra dimensions we cannot perceive - where gravity originates from. Where many quantum effects derive from. Those things that we cannot explain within our 3d world. That have a magical quality that we cannot form rules for. And yet. Push out another dimension. or 8. And then it makes sense.

Mmm.

I don't lean into. It's not somewhere I particularly enjoy going. I don't think busting out of the simulation would be rewarding. Probably horrifying.

And in any case. 99% I'm just probably nuts.

Right ?

Right.