Hello. I've been extraordinarily depressed since we bought our house November 24th, 2004, and many of you have noticed my writing going to pieces while I did.
Well, I'm on my way back.
I'm sure you remember:
Last night I had the strangest dream I'd ever had before. I dreamed that all the nations Had put an end to war.
Well, as a child of the sixties, born just before they started, these words have special meaning for me.
You see, I am a pacifist: I cannot kill no matter what the justification and don't believe in the death penalty. I am also an idealist; I believe in perfection and that it can be attained. I am also an atheist; I believe that personifying Nature into Deity is selfish. I am also a pluralist; I believe in your right to be a soldier, a realist, a devout Christian or a member of another religion, and to hold the corresponding beliefs tenaciously and to say I am wrong. Heterodoxy is comfortable for me.
As long as you don't pull my antennae.
Let me explain. The dream I had started when I imagined committing some unspeakable act against my Teri, my lover, my housemate, the co-owner of the apartment I am sitting in as I write this. Like many dreams, the hypnogogic portion is not remembered. A psychiatrist, who looked a lot like one I'd known, declared me to be a hazard to self and others, captured me (not exactly with a net), _drilled a hole in my head_, and injected medication into my brain with a little plastic bottle, splashing against my dura, explaining it was going to help me.
Now, I am already schizophrenic (I have a schizoaffective disorder likely induced by street drugs just after high school), and so figured no matter what this guy gave me, there was always the chance it might help some, and I'd already recognized I'd done something awful, so I submitted, figuring I would just fight out the effects of the drug rather than its administration. It was an interesting drug!
The drug gave the psychiatrist in the dream the power to suggest the content of hallucinations for me to experience. There were several, but I can't list them because at that point the dream went hypnopompic, and I soon awakened and told Teri about it. After months of depression, feeling impotent about not having all my tools and projects out and ready, growing depressed from the inactivity, getting angry at myself for having sooooo much "stuff", feeling guilty for taking up space in the apartment and even the world without showing anything for it (anything creative), I remembered, in the dream, something I had said to my therapist about hallucinations.
"I've never had a hallucination although I had experienced visual distortions with LSD, and I kind of work on the principle that it's OK for me to see you as a big green bug as long as I don't pull your antennae!"
So I am also a representationalist; I believe reality is mutable. If you've never tried LSD, don't try it; we need you the way you are, but if you have, you know what I mean.
I do not believe truth is mutable but I'm no Descartes and I just figure, like reality, truth has got to be whatever we can agree on. Like the mind-body dualism, most of us think of a duality between living and nonliving matter and figure one can't be transformed into the other.
I don't believe in this. Remember I'm an idealist so I believe in miracles, too: the transmutation of water into wine, the resurrection of the dead, and recovery from the most challenging circumstances. Teri has been shuttling me to Home Depot lately, for us to accomplish what would seem to be impossible: fitting two people and all their stuff into an apartment no larger than Teri's old apartment. (We do have a patio now, so all together it's a little larger.) I was in 400 square feet, in public housing, and Teri had a nice third floor two bedroom apartment of 700, so we were 1100 square feet, and now we are crammed into 700.
Realizing how important it is to me to be active with tools and in contact with "stiff" physical reality on a daily basis came after I realized it was a problem for all my stuff to be in boxes and unavailable to me. In the last two weekends, I have installed 80 linear feet of shelving using John Sterling Fast-Trak hardware here inside the apartment, and we have at least
40 more to go to get the storage we need. Finally, in the dream, facing a terrifying hallucination, I realized that I was ready to resume my work on self-reproducing machine tools, a gray area between living and non-living matter.So the plan I have is to see if I can use hallucination as a tool, to reassert my right to see the people I meet as big green bugs as long as I don't pull their antennae, and to resume work on self-reproducing machine tools with an emphasis on Usenet and web documentation this time, because finally the computer is in the same house as the tools.
To be specific, I intend to explore the ways in which bare DC motors fitted with suitable controllers can self-upgrade to various forms of machine tool as described in the post to sci.physics.research titled Symmetrical Machine Tools, explore the ways in which humorous answers to the intimidating questions that arise in conversations can lead me in a return to polyamory, and explore the ways these two efforts fit together. Having an utterly outrageous project to be working on is central to my character, central to my experience of other people.
Anything I've written since October 24th, the day we made the offer on the apartment, can be written off as stress-induced. I hope I haven't permanently offended anybody.
I am (mostly) baaaack!
Yours,
Doug Goncz Replikon Research Falls Church, VA 22044-0394