Spring

I used to take pictures of spaces. Constantly. I like to see how different things can look. I do not like to see them as something other than themselves, though sometimes that is what they appear to be, as in the case of clouds.

If you are remotely familiar with this record, you know that I hold in my archives thousands upon thousands of pictures of clouds. Many of them are useless, blurry and incoherent, taken while shaking. Some of them, however, are quite useful. They tell a story, a story about stories.

Most of the time, seeing things differently involves simply seeing a thing for what it is and sometimes absurd beauty is all there is.
Other times, it is harder to see beautiful, though you know it is always there.
The challenge of having a neurological framework that is prone to distortion and dysfunction is that the world becomes, at times, a very different place. Actually, I have recognized that the world stays the same, but that my view shifts. The same store on the corner is a gem or a tragedy on any given day. The store hasn’t changed. It stays the same. The way I see it changes and thus the store becomes something other than what it is.

To consistently reckon with the content of perceived reality is exhausting. However, we all have to do it to a certain extent.

I haven’t gotten to email myself as much I’d like lately. Though I have been emailing many others. I forget sometimes that this presentation offers a somewhat limited view of what my life entails. Click Mosaic.

This could seem to focus on the floor and on the dark corners. The parts of the room that nobody notices. It seems to me that the floor and the corners are fairly important elements in any space.
Corners hold walls; Floors hold us. Between them is everything that makes a room.

I once said: “My heart is a warehouse.”
Other people have probably said the same thing. Having a warehouse heart is not an uncommon condition.

Keeping track of a concrete physical world is a good thing for me to do. It reminds me where I’m at. Then again, and this is the double-edge of mindfulness, being aware of the world around you can be fairly distressing.

There are sirens over on Biltmore. Somewhere, somebody is panicking. It is still light in San Francisco. People are just getting home from work. Infinite stories are unfolding.

(Note that much of my distress seems to be oriented around people and what happens with them.)

I like the thought that, in all these stories, there must be some sense, some balance of truth as it tends to play out. Still, the means to the ends can be gruesome in times like these.

Nonetheless, even in the simplest things, there are hundreds and hundreds of stories.
That is beautiful.

The times I have been on antipsychotic medication (atypicals olanzapine, risperidone,and ziprasidone) I did not think about stories. The world stopped short about 3 inches from my face. Profoundly disconnected to everything but my medicated and sluggish brain, I watched it all go by with little more than detached interest. Trying to get through the day was a series of chores, doing things I cared nothing about. I didn’t believe in anything. Everything was numb. My head was filled with foam. I only wanted to sleep, I tried hard not to look at the sky, because I knew I would feel nothing.
Dopamine is linked to our ability to believe in things?)

(Well, golly, I didn’t find the article re: dopamine and a sense of belief, but I did find this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19642883 Thank you US Nat’l Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health for providing this valuable information that really makes no sense at all. (“We thus infer that levodopa (1) decreases sensitivity in perceptual-cognitive decisions, but only in skeptics, and (2) makes skeptics less and believers slightly more conservative. These results stand at odd (sic, it’s wrong on the gov.t site) to the common view that DA generally improves signal-to-noise ratios. Paranormal ideation seems an important personality dimension and should be assessed in investigations on the detection of signals in noise.” ) Hmmm…this seems to be suggesting that dopamine inhibits or curbs believe, at least in this experiment with L-Dopa. I thought that dopamine had a role in strengthening the sense of belief, based on our ability to experience reinforcement and pleasurable neurological rewards?)

Well, clearly someone doesn’t know

what’s going on around here.