It was shaped like us but little and soft. It was emitting a high pitched squeaking noise. Some of us laughed at the ridiculous sound. Something about its smell was making my mouth water.

As we came up to investigate it held up a little hand for us. The largest of us, Red, obligingly started chewing on it and it started squeaking louder. Red made a euphoric gasp and frantically bit half its face off.

I rushed forward with the others to quell the agony in my stomach.

My god what a meal it was. I lay in a hypnotic slumber feeling increasing strength coursing through my muscles. With the beat of my heart my thoughts bounced through a dream of devouring more such creatures. I wanted to eat their faces off. So vaguely like our own but disgustingly different. Weak. Weak little things that deserved to die for being so weak.
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At the Rape of Nanking the Japanese were disgusted by the Chinese, disgusted with how meak they were. They lined them up and they didn't do anything to defend themselves. Just stood there while the soldiers started killing them. This disgusted the soldiers to greater violence.
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Constant fear of pain. So constant you don't even notice it. But you equate being wrong with pain and you're in constant fear of it. Thus you close your mind to never be wrong.
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One day a journalist talking head finds that he can no longer lie. The next day he's suddenly pulled off all his work for other people who are just performing better. Shortly thereafter things 'are just not working out' (trouble with his TPS reports) and he's let go.
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Unreal of spaceship, life reduced to clear absurdities. The bell rings and everyone spins around with a flourish. Tiddlywinks with fear, sweating, vomiting. Fear is a constant. 3 hours sleep daily. Every day a competition to survive. People regularly have to be released into space. ("Private property is essential to a free society!" and similar capitalist stupidity.) Simply no place for them that isn't owned by others. The people marionette to survive. The president is actually an alien as is revealed in the end. And this is the hell he's devised.
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Trying to defeat the ugliness by turning it into humor. But then every little monkeyish ugliness in your head pops out as questionable humor that would otherwise have been concealed.

Everything that's wrong. Everything that causes you stress. You try to turn it into something funny. Something that is unexpectedly wrong and thus causes a momentary overload which leads to all stress sliding away and being replaced by euphoria. But, all you're really doing is thinking things that are expectedly wrong are actually unexpectedly wrong.

Your humor doesn't go over too well.
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Tortured to force the support of the status quo. Finally agrees and turns into marionette. Finally, "I'm nothing now. I don't exist."
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Bunch of people in hell. All panglossians. One day, one dares to see the truth. One person becomes Real. And immediately kills self. (Symbolic simplification.)

chop chop, tick tock
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hell analogies... they're the way forward. But actually just about everything already is a hell analogy, it's only necessary to reflect privately upon it. Still, want to write a book called 'Hell'. A bunch of stories only slightly connected where Hell is more noticeable.

I enjoy life so much better if I just think I'm already in a sort of hell. Nobody's trying to turn hell into utopia or worrying too much about how awful it is and why can't others see? Why don't they try to do something other than just accept that this is how things are? If you recognize that this is hell and not utopia and never can ever be anything remotely like utopia and that all the things that would make "life" "meaningful" just don't exist here in hell, then you can get down to the just managing to survive without getting too particularly worked up about all the crap you're constantly put through.

I have actually gone years at a time doing exactly that in the past. Believing an evil god was trying to kill me was living as if I knew I was in hell. It was a happy time. Believing that the dog eat dog world of capitalism is the best of all possible worlds is a sort of belief that you're in hell. Many are managing something like that. Perhaps the very ability to not have an imagination comes out to being about the equivalent of living as if you believe you're in hell... Happy enough.
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Missed my run Saturday night as I was too tired from my 15 hour day. Missed it again Sunday as I was delirious from my 15 hour day. Finally ran today, Monday, further and faster than ever before. Maybe starting to push things too much. But I very much want to go a bit faster than I am. Dips haven't improved last few times. About 23. Although bodyweight is closer to 245 than 235.
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Went out Friday night with D and husband. D doesn't have any coherent designs on me. It's just when she gets drunk... She pinched my ass while I was playing pool. Finally occurred to me Sunday night that that was highly inappropriate behavior on her part.

I just want to occasionally do something other than sit home alone reading, etc. I figure eventually her husband will get pissed at me. I outweigh him by 100 pounds but he'll probably break a beer bottle over my head or something. So far he's been a really nice guy though. But I hear like so many, he occasionally gets into fights when drunk.

Never ever have I gotten into a fight while drunk. I wonder why I'm not affected in that way. I don't think I've ever even been angry while inebriated(sp).

I had thought the thought processes that matter the least to you give out first when drunk. For me my eyesight and hearing usually give out first and I slur my speech. Do so many people secretly just want to go around beating each other up? If nothing else I know I wouldn't fight as well when drunk.
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Finally that one smearer actually criticized the way I walked from my car into the hospital Saturday morning. With a smile like it was funny. I was "shleping." I pretended it was funny and did an exaggerageted Jim Carrey drunk walk.

She's just like everyone else. Has both good and bad in her. Hardly trying to be an evil person.

The other smearer told me a story about how after working at a hospital for 15 years her boss brought her into the office one day and accused her of deliberately ignoring the boss when she walked past and said hello. (She didn't actually do this.) She got a written warning for this. She asked how in the world was she supposed to respond to such an accusation. She figured she could starting crying, burst out laughing, or do what she did, just with a stony face say, "I'll try to do better."

I told her something along the lines of crying would have worked better. Try to seem upset at least and apologize profusely. Make the boss feel that she had successfully brought her down a few rungs.

This "smearer" is of course also not some kind of evil lady. Far from it. It's just how people are. They mostly really try to be good.

Not quite so far out on the chopping block lately but so busy. I've talked of veganism lately just because it can serve as a simple analogy. I don't want to appear to actually be being interested in talking about veganism. For some reason I really want to avoid writing vegan propaganda. It is just meant as an analogy for moral questions in general.

Hell analogies somehow work a bit for me and I've more on paper than in this journal. They circumvent my issue with pitting people against one another in this attempt at a somewhat escapist creative outlet. But why exactly? And will it last? Analogies end up becoming ridiculous as they go too far. Too many things end up needing analogized. And also they are just misunderstood anyway. Like Kafka's Max Brod; his very good friend who even wrote 30 books himself and thought so highly of Kafka yet, hadn't a clue that The Trial was something other than a statement against fascism.

The analogy is supposed to help us understand a thing better. To help us change ourselves. But knowing that the majority of people who read it won't get it...

Why do I want to avoid writing what might even be misunderstood as vegan propaganda BTW? Is it just because vegans are so disliked? Or because in it's most simplistic form as a moral question it's too obvious? Too beyond the pale?

Before I wrote music I thought when I finally did I'd write some songs about vegnaism. I never did and now the idea strangely disgusts me.

It is amazing how little I know myself. It is scary in that I'm pretty damm sure most people are trying a lot less to know themselves, thus they most likely know their selves even far less. And this means being a slave to our unconscious. It means being machines; automatons. It means potentially causing lots of harm. It means existing less.

It requires the author to be "dismissed," once and for all, so as finally to come into existence, to be, to "assert itself as thing without author and without reader." What Blanchot dismisses here, with an irrevocable gesture, is not just the author, but the mirage – so stubborn, though – of a “communication” between the writer and the reader. The writer is alone, irremediably alone ("Khalvat dar anjoman, solitude in the crowd," posits one of the eleven rules of the Naqshbandi Sufis: that is the solitude of Kafka, again, never alone enough and yet always infinitely alone). Vain hope of writing with a wish to be understood, or of establishing any kind of human fraternity with the other; cruel disillusion of anyone who writes with the expectation of a response, an echo. The writer writes as Giacometti wanted to sculpt: so as to bury the sculpture (as Genet tells us), and "not so that it could be discovered, or else much later, when he himself and the memory of his name have disappeared. Would burying it be to offer it to the dead?" wonders Genet, thus putting his finger on this obvious fact: the writer, the artist does not communicate with the reader or the spectator, he communicates with death; the death of others (Foucault) or else his own death, always yet to come but beyond which he necessarily situates himself in order to write. The writer: the one who is always already dead. The reader, on the contrary, lives, and thanks to him the book, "unburdened of its author," lives too: the book, the text leaves the world of the dead, whence it comes (or comes forth rather?) to participate in the things of life. And that is how the noli me legere of the book gives way to the Lazare, veni foras of the reader, the reader who nonetheless, unlike Christ, accomplishes no miracle, but simply, by his free and innocent reading, his "light yes" offered with a smile, shows (and sees) that language too lives, with its own life.

http://this-space.blogspot.com/2009/02/reading-by-jonathan-littell.html

Hmmm, what was it I was thinking? Oh, no. I was thinking of personally thinking of every story told from the point of view of it being a hell. Secretively or openly. This doesn't necessarily mean pitchforks and lots of screaming. More like how Sartre's Hell is Other People play wasn't really any more or less a hell than the average story really. And was better than lots of people's actual lives.

Was a way to get beyond my issues with not liking pitting people against one another. Writing as if already dead is something else entirely. But perhaps useful.

Right this moment is an actual moment to spend writing. I've had a back issue where sleeping is causing my back to hurt. I went to bed early tonight (9pm), by morning I've no choice but to get up because my back is hurting and getting up (so far) has made the pain stop. Today though it started hurting too bad at 3AM.

But I don't feel quite sufficiently dead enough to really write.

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http://www.strindbergandhelium.com/
I'm a sort of Strindberg. Although nowhere near like I appear here actually. But still...

I'm very lucky in that my wife is a sort of Helium. Very lucky all around in the wife I have.

I know who the monster is!

The two fundamental problems of this world are indifference to suffering and the misperception of indifference to suffering.

This video (or at least the original Twilight Zone episode) is an example of how little it takes to ruin things through the latter.

How much of this hell is a result of the former as opposed to the latter?

Hell story

So a visitor goes to the old christian version of hell. He walks about seeing all the people in their various predicaments. The funny thing he finds is that none of them realize they're in hell. This is all any of them can ever remember. This is all they've ever known. This is just life. And they might as well make the best of it. So they try to not think about many things. They pretend there's some reason to greet one another with a smile and so on. And they hurt one another as that is at least something to do.

And this visitor makes the mistake of trying to tell these people where they're at, tries to show them how horrible things are. Is it so surprising that he's disliked? Maybe it seems surprising, but think hard. Do you know of any other place where it wouldn't be the least bit surprising that he wouldn't be liked?

It is felt that there is something wrong with him.

At best he is surely inconsiderate to be pointing out these things which nothing can be done about. At best he's a real wet blanket that no one would want to be around.

But the visitor thinks that the first step to improving their situation is for them to jointly recognize that things aren't going so well and thus they need to work together to change things.

He finishes this short story with an impassioned speech along such lines.

To the reader what he says should be obviously true. But what he says makes perfect sense in reality also. And the unfortunate response he gets in hell should be exactly the same response that he'll get in reality.

A Bit of Hell

I can't use good grammar and so on when writing the following. I can't attempt to truly describe/explain all of the following. I could never really relate it. I could never give it justice no matter what I do. But this is a sort of experiment for me:

So long ago I went to college to become an engineer. I hated it. Knew this within two years of starting. Hated so many different things about it. My fellow students were the most unfriendly, boring, yet arrogant people I've known. The professors were basically the same. The work was cold, dead. My internship at Toyota showed me that at the end of all that hard work was a disgusting job doing the world no good.

I wanted to change majors. But I'm not good at quitting things. Plus I was screamed at that I was insane, etc by the few people I had any "support" from in this life.

So I got a BS in mechanical engineering and couldn't find a job. I could have looked somewhat harder. But I wanted to stay in the area as my wife had a great job. There were really no jobs in the area. So I went and delivered pizzas for a while.

And I got treated like total shit even doing that. Boss belonged in a mental institution. Went around screaming and yelling, slamming doors, etc. Had employees walk out all the time. Anyway even if it had been a pleasant job, of course I had to go do something else what with a BS in engineering. So I went back to get an MS.

Getting an MS was like from a horror film. The most disgusting lying idiot I've ever known was my advisor. I suppose... what? I should have tried to switch advisors...... But he was doing the one thing at the university I could stand within engineering. And that was the one thing that was basically not hardly typical engineering. Aerosol science. At least that was a way to get away from assembly lines and/or staring at a computer screen doing math, etc.

But he really had no clue and I was very worried I would get this MS and there'd be no job out there for my experience at all. It was a very, very, very stressful and unhappy time (much like the time before and the time after and so on.)

But I did get a job as a graduate student working at a national laboratory. (Does it matter which one? I don't think so. I think they're pretty much the same.) And my boss (no, it's not just me!) seemed to have serious "issues". But I felt so lucky to get a job offer at all that I took it. Turned out be very stressful dealing with this person who seemed to have issues with irrational paranoia. She would periodically get it into her head that this or that person was out to get her and then she'd do whatever she could to destroy them. I was worried that sooner or later I'd be the target. Also the work was at best useless.

Eventually she convinced me that I was doing such a wonderful job, that I was so certain to be hired on permanent, that I should buy a house, that we did go ahead and buy a house.

And I went on the first vacation I had been on in over ten years. Went to Manchester, UK. Oh how I love the UK. So strongly feel I should have lived my life there. Anyway I met a bunch of fellow vegans there. I came back and signed the final papers for buying the house.

Literally the next day the knife was inserted deep into my back by my boss. I was accused of everything under the sun in a meeting with the higher ups. I wasn't fired. I was a graduate student anyway working on my third one year appointment. If I hadn't just bought a house I would have immediately begun looking for work elsewhere (should have done so anyway). Instead I hoped like all hell to somehow get back in this person's good graces. (but was it all a pretext? Was it really that the job required a security clearance eventually and I had traveled overseas and met up with a bunch of vegans, some of whom it turns out were anarchists?)

I got a surprise escort out at the end of my appointment. Officially "due to lack of funding." My one invention stolen.

Graduate students in very small scientific fields who get escorted out of their workplaces can generally kiss their careers goodbye. Which I slowly did over the next year while unemployed.

On top of it all (and this for me is the same as for so many others) what ended up being the worst part by far was seeing the great indifference that was shown to me during this time. An indifference that I would not and have not ever shown anyone else, yet was shown towards me almost universally. All my work colleagues. Past friends. Even the vegan group I knew online.

I suppose no one gives a shit about anyone online. I guess I should adapt to that social norm. But I haven't quite done so even yet.

How I was treated even by the vegans left me to feel that if such was the case, there was truly no hope for mankind. When even the supposedly most compassionate 1% act like this, what hope have we?

During this time the people who weren't indifferent to me were basically my wife and parents.

I suppose I take my wife for granted because sadly the sick way this world is, quite a few spouses leave after the loss of a job. Which is just horrific to me. Apparently some people justify it in their heads that they're doing the person a favor. To help them get out of their rut. Which seems quite horrible to me. I imagine such a person who thinks like this looking like a new character from hellraiser.

About like this:
http://citron-lim.wz.cz/pictures/hellraiser03.jpg

I've heard the following said by many ugly people but at least they're being truthful when they say it, "I don't care at all about anyone in this world except my family. To hell with everyone else, etc."

It's true I guess. And it's disgusting that it's true.

I do take for granted that at least my family cared. I am lucky that at least I have some family.

But it would have meant a lot to me to feel like someone else in the world really gave a flying whoop.

And there was this one lady I kept in touch by email mostly during this time. For three years we kept in touch. I suppose to some extent I made her into something in my mind that she wasn't. Because I so needed a truly good and intelligent person to actually exist in this world. Someone I could confide in who wasn't just putting up with me because they happened to be married to me or related to me.

So this person recently said to hell with me. With no explanation she blew me off.

It's the end of that period. The last tiny little positive thing destroyed.

All that was done to me before, I never cried. Because I could never let those evil people bring me to tears. But when finally the one person I had thought was good, did basically the same, I went ahead and cried. Was about two weeks ago. First time I cried (concerning real life) in over ten years.

It really burned up my mind.

On the weekends I work two 12 hour shifts as a nurse's aide. I went to work that next day and felt like I hadn't been there in months. I couldn't even remember one of my lesser used passwords. Also was tired as hell.

Made a very small mistake concerning giving a bath/not giving a bath. I did give the bath, but I just considered not doing so since they were going to be transferred soon.

Next weekend I'm getting an email from my boss. About some other patient that another unit had complained about being dirty upon receival. Long story short, with having a single bad day someone had immediately told on me to the boss about almost not doing something right. And now my boss (who I never see ever) thinks apparently I'm a bad employee. (At least that's my worry. To what extent who can say exactly? To what extent I'm getting backstabbed by someone, who knows?

So, I could follow a chain of ugly events culminating in being a bad nurse's aide. lol. I could reflect on how there's no particular reason why a person will necessarily ever be happy. How instead years and years of unhappiness can continue unabated. How it can go like this till the end.

But actually today was a good day. As my scientific career was destroyed I'm in nursing school now and I volunteered to do blood pressures, BMI's and blood sugars for a health day. I had a decent number of positive interactions doing that. And such things matter. Without such things I'd be sucked under eventually.

Those interactions just don't exist online.

And those interactions largely concern the amygdala. (Which is why they basically can't exist online.) The prefrontal cortex can face anything if only the amygdala can be kept decently happy.
Certainly these people who I had positive interactions with today, might have also treated me about as bad as I've been treated these last ten years. I would say it's highly probable they would have. Just don't tell my amygdala this. As long as it doesn't know, I suppose I can go along my merry illogical way.