johnpalmer

If I loved you, I’d do it, so I try to do it, and it doesn’t work, so I try again, and it still doesn’t work, and I get into a rage with myself, summoning all of my adrenaline, and I still can’t do it, and I want to throw a tantrum, just throw myself down on the floor and scream for a while, but it doesn’t do any good and leaves you with a sore throat. Hey, eventually, you try everything, and I do mean everything. Slap the wall, that hurts enough, to wake you up for moment, and you can hope you stay awake, but you never do. It didn’t even work for your parents, once the fear and adrenaline rush of a spanking wore off, so why would it work for you, when you know how noisy and whiny your stupid brain is?

I have to do it now, you see, if I loved you, I’d do it, but not “someday,” I’d do it now, you see, right now, and sure, the best time to plant an oak is a hundred years ago, next best is today, but you could have been too exhausted the whole effing hundred years! You can’t wait for your body to get better, you have to live your life, with other people, now! If you don’t, you’ll die, so….

 

If you were to follow a political blog named "WTFGhost" you might notice an eerie similarity that I have no intention of discussing.

Taxation Ain’t Theft FAQ

Q: Is taxation theft?
A: No.

Q: NOW WAIT A MINUTE, something libertarian something…
A: LALALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU I HOPE YOU’RE NOT SPEAKING

Q: …but Ayn Rand….
A: LALALALALALALALALA GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!!!

Q: Okay, I think taxation could be seen as theft, and I feel you’re blithely dismissing my concerns.
A: That’s better, questions, I like answering them, speeches, I avoid them. No, what taxation is, is the natural basis of a monetary unit. In the US, you need dollars, and only dollars, when you pay taxes. If the US government didn’t collect taxes, there’d be no natural market for dollars, and a dollar wouldn’t necessarily mean much. Since some people will need dollars to pay taxes, they will always be willing to sell for dollars. Viewed this way, then, the goal of taxation is to help “form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and, secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.” Taxes going out should result in those other goals being met – payment in taxes gives you good government. Republicans say “good” government is a myth; they tell other lies, too.

Q: still, doesn’t the government demand that you pay taxes, eventually using guns to drag you to court to defend yourself for tax evasion?
A: Generally, until you’re buying and selling in dollars, you’re not doing much that’s taxable. There are property taxes, but, protection of property takes money! There’s no free lunch. You could homestead, and pay only property taxes, and live off the land, and minimize your taxation. Or you could live like almost everyone else, and engage in economic activity, which means some portion of the money you come across will be taxed. But remember, your taxpaying allows you to make demands for services, including “tax relief.” If you want a real libertarian-land, maybe Musk can make an orbital libertarian colony where you conduct business in bitcoin, and then, with no dollars going through your hands, you won’t be tagged for taxes. It’s only if you’re going to play the game, that you do need to ante up. Oh, better hope Musk doesn’t raise your rent in Libertarian-land….

Q: Don’t some liberals say a high sales tax picks the pocket of the working class person? That’s saying it’s theft!!! Mwah hah hah, I rub my hands in glee!!!
A: Dude, you look like you’re checking for hand lotion after a yank session. Okay, yes, taxes that are regressive are bad for the poor, and often times, they do “pick the pocket of Peter to pay Paul,” but that’s an argument about how to tax, not an argument that taxes are inherently unfair or “theft.” If everyone needs (guess) $30,000 in taxable goods and services to have a happy, comfortable life, then a worker making just over $30k is sacrificing to pay the tax, uncomfortable, because of taxes, you see?  While a worker making $300k is only “really” forced to pay sales taxes on 10% of their income. That said: rich people should be thought of as high rollers in the casino, while you’re enjoying the free entertainment and buffet. People who think it’s fun to put $10k on one roll of the dice mean you get free drinks, of reasonable quality, while playing the dollar tables; businesspeople who put a lot of capital on the line, and succeed, should rake in money by the boatload, but their taxes should also mean we get good healthcare, childcare (most importantly, schools), protection from criminals (including those who unjustly have a badge!), and a belief that there’s a social safety net, so, worst case, maybe you need to live in the cheap part of town, and eat ramen, while you get back on your feet.

Q: If we cautiously posit that maybe society should provide things like “healthcare,” why should the rich be punished with higher tax rates? Isn’t that class warfare?
A: American workers are the most productive – that is, they earn the most money, for their employers, per hour – in the world, period. The money from that productivity has to go somewhere. If an undeserved amount goes to the rich, then perhaps they should be taxed, to reduce that injustice, but, so long as more earned income = more after tax income, one can’t call it “punishment.” Not honestly.

Q: I guess there’s no point in asking, but… aren’t wealth taxes different?
A: Wealth taxes are the same as property taxes, and if you have a billion dollars in USA stocks, you do have an interest in the USA doing nominally well.  Further, just cash, invested in stocks, can generally earn a huge amount of money; a tax on wealth, that is significantly less than expected growth,will only slow growth of wealth, but wealth would still grow. If someone had a huge family farm that pushed them into wealth tax territory, there’d be financial services firms who’d structure a way to keep tax payments from touching the farm. And if not, if someone has to sell a few acres from a farm that’s valued at tens of millions of dollars, it’s sad, but not as bad as parents needing to sell blood to get school supplies.

 

What does anger feel like to you, a normal person? Well, first, let’s pause. Lots of us have played the mental game of “what if we all saw different colors, but we all agreed on their names?” So, we agree what “red” is, but we see different colors, when we look at the same picture… cool concept, right? Well, it’s true. Our color vision is biological, determined by the rod and cone cells in our eyes, and the odds are vanishingly small two people have precisely the same quantity, and same arrangement.

I want you to use that same kind of thinking, and realize we don’t actually know what anger feels like in anyone… except ourselves. I now know what anger feels like in me, but first, I had to learn a lot of what it wasn’t… because neuro pain can mimic anger. As nearly as I can tell, neurological pain can trigger emotions, including anger, spontaneously, but maybe I’m wrong. It’s still so nearly-direct that I can’t interrupt the emotions, and, after a lifetime, you’d be surprised how few I can’t interrupt. (Well, I’ve never tried to interrupt love, for example. Lust/new-partner-energy, yes, but that’s not love, it’s just a nice flavor that you often experience in love. So I can’t say I can interrupt any emotion.)

That means some children, who are told they can’t control their anger, who are being blamed for being in pain. If they control their angry actions, then, they’re not being the least bit naughty, unlike a child who is too quick to take offense, or too keen to nurse grudges.

There’s another obvious way neuro pain can lead to anger; it can cause certain emotional responses to become painful. Let’s say you’re being scolded or nagged; it might literally hurt. And you’re allowed to protect yourself from that kind of pain, but, obviously, the first protection is understanding that the pain is telling you a lie. What the other person is saying isn’t causing injury, even though it is very much causing harm. That means you’re never allowed to use force, to protect yourself from this pain. You are allowed to say “I need to have this discussion another time” (and must faithfully follow through), to protect yourself from the pain; you’re allowed to leave, to isolate yourself, however you make yourself feel safe, and, if someone refuses to let you leave, you do have the right to use minimal force to overcome improper restraint.

These two things mean that some children are treated very badly by the default assumption that, at age appropriate times, children will control their anger to age appropriate extents. Children are taught that “words can never hurt me,” but, emotional reactions can result in real, neurological pain symptoms, so, “words can never hurt me,” is a really despicable lie, to those particular children. And oftentimes, children who can’t stop scowling are shamed, as if anger was easy to switch off. Well, for most children… but for some of us, being treated poorly for being unable  to control our mood, means bullying us for things we really can’t help. Don’t get me wrong, everyone has to learn to control the actions they take as a result of emotions, most especially anger. But if you get me to stomp my foot and walk away from another young child to defuse a playground spat, you can’t dis me for the foot stomp, that was a healthy-to-me expression of frustration. Keep in mind, children, least of all, know what is a normal human emotional reaction, so sometimes you need to chase down clues about whether their experience is normal. Hopefully, with more people thinking of pain as a possibility, we’ll soon see a reduction in what we thought were childhood mood disorders (and, of course, childhood behavioral problems).

The next place where anger comes into play with pain, is, obviously, some people are said to have an anger management problem, when their problem is an inability to handle the additional challenge of managing neurological pain that can turbocharge anger. Pain relief might make their anger management trivially easy.

Due to my neuro pain, I’m constantly aware that things are taking more time, effort, and energy than they should, and sometimes, the frustration is so great, I just throw a tantrum, simply because it hurts too much to hold it in… but I only do this in isolation. Tantrums are ugly, especially in grown people, and some people just can’t handle seeing that much raw emotion. To me, that I’m expressing great frustration at, e.g., an oven means it’s harmless, but to other people, that much emotion can’t possibly be harmless, it can’t possibly be that you wouldn’t direct that at people. Don’t get me wrong, that’s a not-unreasonable precaution, but, again, I only tantrum when alone, which especially means, never at any living creature.  

The things I want to emphasize here, is, this is compassion 101, for people. If you know some people get hurt, and it triggers emotional states, you can find ways to work around those complications. If you know someone has a harder time with a task than others, you show a bit more patience, while still enforcing those boundaries that must be absolute.

But first, we have to wake up to how head dealing with lots of neuro pain are affected in ways both striking and profound, and they might need an entirely different treatment paradigm.

This is everything I know about my "unwinding," my rough hypotheses about the fascia, and how blood flow could affect consciousness. 

I used to say it feels like my body is all tangled up, as if there were strings connecting me together, and the strings were tangled. I’m now 95% sure that what I’m feeling is bindings in the fascia. The fascia is like a sub-skin suit that connects disparate body parts, and, can form adhesions, so, Occam’s razor suggests that “it’s the fascia,” is the right hypothesis for me. Nevertheless, it is possible to feel a string-like connection between two indirectly connected body parts, and, it is possible to have a sensation that you’re unwinding a string or thread (or thick copper wire, or a tightly coiled spring…).  It just means the fascia traced a line (that might curve, like a string), rather than doing anything involving surfaces.

My horrors started when I tried something called “cat stepping,” but cat stepping wasn’t the cause of the problem; it merely uncovered the problem. If you’ve seen a cat walk, they put down the front of their foot first, then drop the pad of the foot. Cat stepping is where you put down the ball of your foot first, then drop the rest of it. When people walk, they tend to do the opposite; drop the heel, then let the sole flop down. It seems (at first) like it would be slower, to cat step, but it isn’t; it quickly becomes natural. One great advantage to cat stepping: if you’re about to step on a Lego™ block on the carpet, you won’t put your full weight on that foot, before realizing something’s wrong. It also allows you to walk much more quietly, and get a feel for the surface (does it feel like squeaky wood? do you feel a branch, that might SNAP when you step down?). But the miraculous thing is, it forces your legs to do what they’re designed to do, in terms of distributing your weight, keeping you balanced, and using the right set of muscles, at the right time, without any (excess) jarring.

In fact, one day – and I must confess, I’d been using my medical marijuana to the degree that THC certainly could have played a role! – I realized I could feel how my legs weren’t set correctly; they didn’t fall into the right neutral position. In fact, my entire hip was twisted around itself, like I was walking heel to toe, with my left foot in front. At other times, with and without Mary Jane’s help, I’ve been able to directly engage my position-and-motion senses: kinesthesia and proprioception, and maybe a couple-three others.

Now: short form, I believe that the fascia provides the position-and-motions senses, and, further, I’m so smart I am sure the fascia is a living analog computer that turns a command from your brain, into a command to a bipedal form. That “form” is your body, if you’re perfectly aligned. The bipedal form is something I call “the homunculus” if your body is mal-aligned, as mine is. I often say that I imagine Simone Biles and I have similar masteries of these senses, her, because she can use hers, and maintain it in pristine condition (like a rarely driven Classic Car) and me, because I’m rebuilding mine like a bad engine in a Classic Car you really want to drive a bit before it goes to that great junkyard in the sky!

As a side note, with all respect to Ms. Biles, my hypothesis suggests something interesting. During her first Olympic appearance, she dropped out of competition, with a case of the “twisties,” which she attributed to mental health. Now, I understand what she means: you need to be in good condition (mentally) to fully understand your body and how it all fits together. But I think what happened was, she got tweaked, just a bit, and had neurological pain. The pain interfered with her normal senses, giving her the “twisties.” The pain was also a background buzz in her skull, which made her think “mental health,” and not “physical cause triggering neurological pain.”

There: I’m done talking(bragging) about the hypotheses I’ve formed from my recovery!

Anyway: cat stepping taught me that one can feel one’s body, and almost “see” how it fits those x-rays that show a “tilted pelvis.” But it also engaged all of my muscles in a certain way, that broke some central binding in my body, and ever since then, I’ve been doing the “unwinding dance.”  I’ll feel ill-at-ease, just like you do, if you ever feel something funny in your elbow, shake it out, and it clicks into place. It’s the same “ill-at-ease” sense, but, where yours was a caress from a lover, mine is often like “NO SAFEWORD STOP NO MEANS NO!!!”

Um. I say that, not to make light of the betrayal of the human compact that is rape. I use that example for three reasons: first, it’s like when a lover keeps trying to pleasure you to the point that sensory overload makes it painful. So, in that sense, it’s like calling “no safeword stop” all in a rush. And second, this is my own dearly beloved body doing this to me – if it continues, it will feel like a massive betrayal, because I laid down the red line of “no means no.” Everyone knows, next step is the cops. Except, you can’t call the cops on your body, and you can’t even call the docs on your body, unless your pain is medication-controllable, with the drugs permitted to treat it. Okay, and to conclude, the reason I used “no means no” is that the person (i.e. me) is so out-of-it they’re calling out everything they know to stop the act/scene. If they wound a sensitive partner with “no means no” they can assure the partner that it was reflex; and if they anger an asshole, they can say “don’t touch me again,” and there’s no need to change emotional intensity.

Disability Aside: A partner must endeavor not to say things that will be overly hurtful, but, if one’s mind is broken, so, too is the filter. The things on one’s “don’t say” list tend to spill out first. It’s the riddle/paradox “don’t think of an elephant.” With good filters, you can meditate on a cheeseburger, and not think of an elephant, but with broken filters, you think of an elephant instantly. And if your think/speak filter is broken, you may well say “elephantelephantelephant.” So, I try not to say “no means no” if a partner simply overpleasures me; but if I try too hard, I’m that much more likely to say it. When I fail, I beg forgiveness, and ask to invoke the rule “may my mind-blowing pain please override your hurt feelings? I know it’s not always possible, because for some, those words, from someone this close, is intolerable, even if accidental.” (My rules have been criticized for being too wordy, for some reason.)

So, rounding back to the subject matter, already in progress: I feel ill-at-ease, and you might think “it can’t be that bad,” but, just as pleasure can be horrifyingly, emotionally betrayingly, bad feeling, so, too, can the “ill-at-ease” feeling. Sometimes, I feel like I’m a tourist, like I’m in the movie “Being John Palmer,” because my body’s demands that I shift this, or that, is so strong. Most of the time, though, I don’t feel anything but the overwhelming sensation that I call “unwinding.” Seriously: my quality of life is modestly negative.

Before I move on, I need to explain “bindings.” As nearly as I can tell, there are correlated bindings, and maybe, singular bindings. It’s possible they’re the same sort of thing, but, restricted to one body part/location. A correlated binding  needs to be broken by apply some pressure at each end of it. If I have a correlated binding between one wrist, and the same elbow, I might need to hold my elbow steady, and manipulate my wrist, to get a satisfying “click” of release, and relief. Can I have a singular binding, just in the wrist? Sure, but, you see what I’m saying? The only reason a binding is “correlated,” is, there’s two body parts, so, maybe all bindings are the same, but some are very small.

My normal horrors continue when a new bloc of unwinding happens because a binding in the fascia is broken. Along with the painèrelief that comes with breaking a binding, I feel something else. Sometimes, it’s barely a pulsing in the muscles, of joints moving closer to neutral alignment. Other times, it’s an immediate sense that I want to peel apart yucky-sticky stuff; as a bonus, sometimes it feels, if I don’t unwind quickly enough, I’ll get a terrible cramp. Oftentimes, it does feel close-enough like a string, to me, but it is the fascia, which is a sheet under your skin so, one side is on your chest, the other side is  on your back, they’re connected through your belly and shoulders and neck and TMJ… you see? From the tips of digits, to the crown of the head, you have a fascia, and it can be tangled up like a pair of badly fitting knit thermals that got wet, and badly tangled, and now you’re having trouble walking. Trust me on this! But yours is probably fine. Probably. (Good thing I don’t sell quack cures here, eh?)

Looping back again: first, you break a binding, usually a binding that’s at the core of two icky-sticky sensations. Having done that, you’re guaranteed a bit more unwinding. Still, remember: eventually, unwinding resolves to a “shake out your elbow/wrist/shoulder, and feel naught but a straight arm, and pain relief.” For normal people. And for me, maybe, someday. Right now, breaking a binding may trigger symptoms of a focal seizure, but, at the least, will make my brain feel noisy, and foggy… which is also a symptom of a focal seizure. I seem to have very slow seizure capability. I need to talk to my doctor, and some researchers about that.

Moving on: because of the fascia, unwinding happens naturally, sometimes; I assume that the body just unwinds when you’re not busy using the body for other things, but, for most people, the amount of unwinding they ever need is small. For me, the unwinding can take hours, often, all of my waking hours. You can put pressure on unwinding; I can’t help but have the feeling that it helps me get back to neutral alignments sooner, but I don’t really have proof, just a desperate hope that I’m healing my body, and not just senselessly causing myself more misery.

Because unwinding is immiserating. At its baseline, unwinding doesn’t feel bad; my inner 6-year-old loves the Silly Putty™ quality of unwinding, and thinks it feels neat. It’s just, no matter what else, it feels as if it’s taking up mental bandwidth. In my case, it feels literally like that, because enough unwinding pain will cause temporary aphasia. Bandwidth is a transmit-receive term, “here’s where your communications can go,” so, when I have more pain, I have lowered communications, just like there was noise in a transmit-receive situation. E.g., I’m writing this in between batches of aphasia caused by my pain.

Why is unwinding noisy in my brain? I think it’s noisy because  the fascia and the brain have to coordinate how to move, because a bit more range-of-motion has been restored; my homunculus must be rebuilt.

Fun fact:if there’s too much unwinding pain, I’ll scream. Unwinding pain doesn’t need to make me scream to be bad. When I stand up, I experience more pain, and, my emotional state, and my cognitive abilities, both take dives. I believe unwinding pain can also trigger bad memories, in a manner precisely like PTSD flashbacks are described.

Unwinding pain also causes despair, both directly, and indirectly. I mean, I have to fight depression, because the pain keeps making me feel the emotion of despair, and I have to remind myself, it’s just the pain talking, okay? And then, on top of that, I have to remember that there’s no guarantee I’ll ever get better. At all. That’s despair inducing. “You’ll writhe in pain, to the point that you can’t do much of anything you want, but you’ll have bright moments, e.g., on rare occasions, you may have an orgasm, or a good meal, and of course, there’s always those moments when you break a binding, and you feel intense relief!” That’s a surprisingly small amount to live for.

Because unwinding pain can make me vocalize, I realize some folks could think they are “hearing voices.” I know how to handle unwanted thoughts or “voices” in my head, but not everyone is so fortunate to know when to ignore them, and when to use them only for rough guidance, not actual inspiration… and, when those voices are the true voice of the essence of John Palmer.

Earlier, I mentioned unwinding pain can mimic seizures. It’s true; I’ve had fish-floppy moments that could trivially have been diagnosed as a seizure, but which I can interrupt. I now know more about  this: it’s caused by spasms in my hips that cut off venous blood flow. My heart doesn’t get enough return from veins, so my body panics, as my cranial blood pressure drops.

One should not be able to interrupt a full fish-floppy seizure, not normally, but, as I said, maybe my unwinding merely mimics seizure activity. How would I know, I’m not an MD or DO! But focal seizures’ symptoms are very much like what I experience, and, I’m stunned to note both emotional responses, and muscle twitches being potential focal seizure symptoms/auras.

The most important thing, of course, is unwinding pain saps my bandwidth, and thereby takes away an essential part of John Palmer, leaving only a semi-human pod person who desperately wants to become “a real boy” someday. Sometimes, I can cover for the lack, though it increases spoon-spendage (“imagine all you could do in a day was measured by how many spoons are in your hand, okay? But you don’t have sufficiently many spoons to live a normal life…”). Sometimes, I can pull out all the stops, and cover for the lack, but, I won’t be aware of my limits… when I pull out all the stops, I’m ignoring all of my pains, so I’d better make this “one and done,” because I might be too exhausted, later, to finish up.

Speaking of “one and done,” I think this is a good start for discussions of unwinding.

Hey, folks. I’m working on a re-introduction post. I’m changing the nature of my journal from a person journal to an exploration of my disability, and what it means to live the way I do.

Here’s the thing: part of me is furious about my past life. I feel like a 1960s woman who has just met Gloria Steinem, who asked “but why does the pot roast need to be just like his moms, every single Sunday? Why can’t you make it your way, just once in a while?” and opened that woman’s eyes into marriage as an equal partnership. Maybe her hubby was really a decent, woke, fellow, but insisted on his pot roast his way, and never even thought about his wife’s preferences, but… if so, now, he’ll have a chance to show it, and realize that wow, he really didn’t think about her feelings *at all* sometimes!

You see what I mean? She has to have that bit of fury that he never thought about her feelings, so he realizes that, not only was he a lunkhead, but being a lunkhead hurt his partner. And there doesn’t have to be confession and reconciliation, necessarily, but, there needs to be that “damn right you should have asked me about how I like my pot roast!” component.

Due to my injuries, I am, for all intents and purposes, brain damaged. My neurological pain causes – get this – slow motion, interruptible, focal seizures that are externally controllable to an extent. Now, that’s me talking, okay, that’s not some MD told me that. But I learned the secret I’d been missing.

All my life, I thought a seizure disorder was something that was brain-internal. Even when I saw Emergency Department medical shows, with seizure control needed, I didn’t quite make the connection: sometimes, the brain seizes, because of uncontrolled input from the body. But I can control many of my “inputs”. I have a lot of pains I can cause in myself, and I can observe their effects.

So: my neuro pain is, in fact, one of the great causes of grief in my body. Neuro pain can cause all kinds of problems, from soi disant “psychological disorders” to neuro disorders. But there’s something else that I may have uncovered.

One cause of my neuro pain is, my body is twisted around itself. Well, that means I have pelvic muscle spasms that I happen to know, factually, can cause LOC, by cutting off the blood return from the lower half of my body. Well, sometimes, when I have a coughing spasm, I have blinks, in and out of consciousness. And sometimes, when I have muscle twitches, I have little bitty “blinks” of unconsciousness that no one would notice, unless they’d spent a lot of time in pre-syncope state, so they had a lot of experience there. You know, like me.

I think this combination of things is huge, because it’s two missed steps in medicine. No one really “gets” neuro pain, but, hey, I’m here now. I get it. No one would think that you could have a “blink” of LOC without missing a beat, but, hey, I’m here now.

What I’m saying is, my body can not only create a slow motion, interruptible, etc., focal seizure; if my muscles spasm, people would assume I’m in a full tonic-clonic (previously called “grand mal”) seizure, except, those ain’t never interruptible!

So, where’s the fury from? Well… I’ve been braindamaged, and treated as such. I’ve been confused, and treated as such. I’ve been weird, and treated as such. I’ve been in humongous boatloads of pain, and had to eat (excrement) to maintain abusive friendships because I was so desperately lonely, and so completely (I was told!) wrong.

And just like a 1960s woman, not all men. Not even the men around whom she feels a bit of fury, remember! The fury is just part of a feeling. Put simply, once I didn't see abuse, and now I do, and, like that 1960s woman, there are parts I need to shake off violently, especially those rapes I was supposed to ignore so as not to besmirch a "good man's" reputation.

Does that all make sense?

Listen, here’s my universal disclaimer: this is a disability site now, it might also be the occasional “fun John Palmer” site too, but, right now, this journal is a memory of some really horrible times in my life, so, this is about how one lives one’s life disabled.

When I’m spouting my own hypotheses, I’ll state that, but, I will make strong statements. “Neurological pain can be mistaken for Major Depression,” is a strong statement. “I’m not sure, but I believe neurological pain can be mistaken…” is a weaker statement. Weaker statements take too long, and they hide information that should be front and center. So there’s going to be some unsupported BS here. That’s a give.

DO NOT POST UNSUPPORTED BS THAT AIN’T MINE!!! (At least, not without a disclaimer.)

And, also, this is my place for unsupported BS, you can make your own DW if you need to speculate lots and lots. (I kid, of course, but, it’s always better when it’s your own place.)

If I post something I believe to be factual, generally speaking, you should trust it, but, my brain is broken. When my neuro pain hits me, I can mistake opposites (left for right, for example), or, remember a *dis*proven fact as a fact. When this is happening, by its nature, I’m too dulled by neuro pain to recognize it. CORRECT ME GENTLY, AND ONLY ONCE. There’s a saying I heard comes from Texas, in sports, “no one needs you to tell them they dropped the ball,” and that’s the principle here – if I posted something wrong, especially due to a malfunctioning brain, I don’t need someone to harp on it.

Rule for this space: I enforce kindness. But I must confess, I’m sometimes wrong, and unkind. Also, sometimes, I’m in a boatload of pain, and it’s excruciatingly hard to be kind. If I’m in that much pain, you feel like an enemy, and the only question is, whether I should strike back, or turtle up and run away. So essentially, I’m saying, “I’m an especially flawed human being, but, I discuss in good faith, and try to leave the world better for my passing; if you want to stick around, please be aware I don’t always live up to my ideals, but I always loop back to them, once the storm passes.

So imagine a memory is accompanied by an emotional maelstrom, where everything in your brain is of nightmarish quality, and the entire experience related by the memory now feels awful and horrible. If you've ever had a panic attack (or thought perhaps you had one), that's kind of what I am talking about, only, directly linked to a memory. Well, that can happen to me, and it's usually a bad memory. The thing is, it doesn't have to be. Let's pretend I have a memory of doing something nice for a child; a good example would be, I looked at mom, who nodded, and gave the child my last cookie, and saw that totally delighted look that only children display fully, especially from a minor treat like a cookie.

Well, if I have a bad pain flare, I can feel horrible, just horrible, that I enjoyed that memory so much, that I cherished it, that I was oh, so, effing proud of myself for giving up a cookie. It can be so bad, I don't want to see the child, or the mom, ever again. If I'm low on resources (which I've been for the past 2-3 years), I might panic to be near the child or the mom, because of the trauma (the neurological pain, and attendent emotional maelstrom) that accompanied me dwelling on the memory.

This has nothing to do with one's normal picture of mental health. I'm not so mentally fragile that even giving a child a cookie can become traumatic. What I am, is beset by so much neurological pain that any action, but especially any meaningful, memorable, action, can become a nightmare.

Now, two sentences to make this a bigger nightmare for the empathic: it's only reasonably possible to survive this, if you know it's your pain lying to you, and that this is not your brain's fragility and inability to cope, okay, so if you don't understand that you're in pain, and that the pain tells you lies, it's easy as eff to die as a result of all this. And I only realized I was in pain, at all, after my pain had been worsening horribly for over a dozen years… not even four years ago, today, was the day I learned that this was all pain, much less that the pain was causing my brain to lie to me.

Good luck out there.

Have you ever thought about it, what it's like, when you can't speak up for yourself? When you simply can't form the words you need, so you look like a ball of rage?

Can you imagine the picadores who, if they find your weak spot, will go all "why are you hitting yourself John? Why are you hitting yourself?" only, verbally, knowing I can't counter them, even though I should be able to?

Can you imagine being vulnerable, in public? Like, at all? Especially if you have an abusive past, where it's reasonable and natural to think someone wants to hurt you?

Can you imagine when people mistake your difficulty speaking (and attendant frustration) for anger, or abusive behavior?

Can you imagine just deciding it's better to be wrong, always, than to try to explain, after trying to explain caused you enough pain for a lifetime?

It's like, I'm a Vulcan who can't engage in touch-telepathy, you see? Everyone knows that "everyone can talk." And no one thinks that talking malfunctions, much less thinks that brains malfunction. So the one thing that everyone expects to be perfect, will always be marred for me. Even if my touch is almost telepathic, and more than sufficiently empathic.

I had this interesting, sweet thought that, back in college, when I traded backrubs for companionship and semi-intimate talk and touch (nothing sexual - I was a perfect gentleman). If I had wanted to, I probably could have traded backrubs for very careful introductions to "dating for the man who is terrified, because his neurology is sure to betray him." I might even have gotten laid. It's probably for the best that I didn't, though. Probably would have been best if I stopped trying for sex with all girlfriends I met through 2003. But who knows that their neurology is going to deny them a normal sexual experience, one that would be best left unshared? Certainly not me - I was demanding some form of normalcy in my life, and I didn't get it, which sucks, but, my experience is vastly outside the normal range... don't think you're going to have my problems, unless you have severe, pelvic-and-below region, neurological pain. In that case, I do know some excellent monasteries, firewatch outposts, the perfect temperature for cold showers....

It's not that hopeless, but, while the neuro pain is there, my experience says that it can interfere with pleasure. That is not something doctors expect - even if Mr. Happy is droopy and sad looking, the right kind of stimulus should make him very happy indeed, even if he doesn't shed flaccidity. So neuro pain might put you in the realm where you need to figure out your own sex issues, with less help from experts than most people get. Don't give up hope - but if you have a dry spell, try to stop asking for help, before your partner hates you for asking. (Yes, kids, this is all in the realm of "ask your parents.")

If I can be with you, where words don't matter, then maybe you'll get to know me, and love me, but until then, I'm a bit like a blind person, stumbling, looking for the stones that are the correct color to present to my friend, or my beloved, and then, remembering which stone type is which, for fear of offense for offering the wrong color stone, or one that has become less shiny, though it still feels well polished.

Discussing fascism often means looking it up, and it's a complicated topic. I tried to distill what I've been able to glean into plain English.

So, what is “fascism?” If you search the web for a definition, you’ll see some difficult terms, and it might be hard to understand what, precisely, fascism is. Me, I can’t put that together, but, as a troubleshooter with an engineer’s impetus for understanding, I’ve tried to force myself into a defintion that seems to tick the right boxes. The one that I don’t try to tick is external affairs. Is Trump more fascist, or just the same, for saying “Canada only makes sense as a state?” I don’t know. Let’s ignore that, okay? Fascism often involves aggression – but we don’t really care about that, from the inside, where we ask “is our society fascist? If not, how far, or near, is it?”

The first essential component to fascism is nationalism; fascists believe that the true blooded people of their nation are special; they may have “mudblood” rules (ref: Harry Potter). Typically, nationalists will believe that their military is more valuable than other people – better to bomb a bunch of civilians, than risk one of the nationalist’s own! You can expect fascists to be horrible in warfare, due to this twisted belief system. Nationalists believe they are deserving of other special things, too, but what that is, will likely be determined by the economy. They certainly feel deserving of adulation, as part of a favored class, among citizens of lesser nations!

In a fascist society, you’ll see stratification. What’s that? Well… in the Old South, a man knew his place (or he’d better be able to survive a duel!), and every white was better than any Black person. That’s extreme stratification; in Nazi Germany, Nazi officials were above the law, and the little people could be crushed by it… sometimes literally, if you were Jewish, Romani, gay, etc..

Religion will often be used by fascists, often with a demand for a return to traditional values. In many cases, religion will enforce societal stratification; in the Old South, it was considered Inerrantly, Biblically, Truth, that Black people were put on this earth to serve white people, and this is one of the reasons it’s been so hard to stomp out racism in America. (Yes, I know, lying soi disant “conservatives” will now say I hate America, but they lie about everything, so why do I care?)

Note that fascists tend to consider religious believers to be suckers, even though a few true believers might rise up in the ranks. It’s just, if you speak about religion a lot, it fools people into thinking religion is important to you. Since people tend to trust the religious, et viola, as I might say, trying to say et voila.

Fascism includes militarism, because of course the biggest, best, fasci-est nation in the world needs a super-poweful military, and, this urging to return to traditional values means they also need police mean and nasty enough to “get the job done,” by breaking skulls, usually of undesirables, e.g., Black people, hippies, migrants, or any other disfavored group. Remember, stratification is part of the system, so there’s always disfavored groups. So, during the civil rights battles, some people were pretty fasci in America, right? They wanted cops to hurt people marching for civil rights – and I’m not kidding, there were people who actively wanted injuries, against peaceful marchers, hence, “fasci.” ObBeetleJuice, “Th-these are not my rules, see… in fact, I don’t have any rules.” I don’t make the rules, but you want the cops to crack skulls, you’re fasci. You want them to make arrests? That’s fine, if there’s a need to make an arrest, to protect peace (but not necessarily quiet).

All of this is some pretty nasty crap, but it’s not yet fascist. First, fascism is a capitalist ideology. Now, someone in the back is saying “but the Nazis used the word ‘socialist’ in their name!” Listen, just cause the cat had kittens in the oven doesn’t make them biscuits, even if you name ‘em after biscuits. Nazis were capitalistic. As a capitalist ideology, fascism sees regulations as flexible; it might be bad for undesirables if the government allows pig farmers to build massive pig farms upwind of said undesirables, but, to a fascist, people who are weak enough that they can’t prevent massive pig farms probably deserve to have massive pig farms built near them, even if some health regulations need to be “relaxed.” A “light regulatory touch” means they can ‘accidentally’ spray you with pig shit every so often, but they can’t laugh while doing so, because, if they laugh, no one believes it was still an accident, you see.

Fascism has regimentation in the economy, where you have to run your business the right way, or suffer. Journalism is a special target; to a fascist, if no one is reporting on cracked skulls, no one cares, so, shut down the reporting. But there can be other targets, and a recent example in the news is useful. (Keep in mind discrete examples don’t make a society fascist.)

Budweiser gave some beer to a conservative influencer, who is trans. Without question, there are some fascists in the US, and, the fasci-hated include transfolk. So there were boycotts announced of Budweiser, for hoping an influencer would do a podcast saying “...and it’s even better sipping on a cold Budeweider!” Sales dropped – but I think most of the drop was that it was all in the news, and it was easier to just grab a different brand of beer, rather than worry about what someone might say to you over your beer choice! A quick note: this idea, that one might not express certain opinions, for fear of being accosted, is called a “heckler’s veto” and it’s considered one of the free speech issues that needs to be considered. You don’t want hecklers to have a veto, and, in a society that’s far from fascism, they won’t.

For me, since I’m corny, I’d say that fascism is what happens when love is squeezed out of society. Cops have to be mean; so does our military; because everyone else is against us, and only we are the good people. “We,” being the favored class, of course. The meanness takes over religion, so it no longer teaches compassion, but mute acceptance of horror. There’s always enough people in the Favored Class to apply beatdown to the “lessers,” so, from the viewpoint of the Favored, there’s no problem. They think they’re winning the battle, when they’re hollowing out the heart and soul of the nation.

So, I messed up my cut tag earlier. Today, I was celebrating a good day. As I mentioned, I had a good self-statement that I sent to my attorney, and nothing succeeds like success. I'm using RSO, a potent form of marijuana for pain control (NB: which is legal in the state of Washington), and it's helping, and having a honeymoon effect.

And someone said that "we need to write something about the big bad fugly bill, like, Bad Bad Leroy Brown.

It was like waking up. My creative brain could write an utterly obnoxious filk song to the tune of Jim Croce's hit.

I doubt the copyright notice is enforceable - it was a social experiment to see what would happen. I happen to think the tune is quite catchy.