Calling in from Outer Space
to speak the speak,to say the say.
Drifting, boundless,
flailing scream,
unable to catch
but afraid to release.
I have just smoked weed for the first time in like a year. I sneaked a little without asking (sorry, bro 😬).
I am currently listening to a translated Chinese novel. I have learned that my Safari can read the pages for me. I no longer have to worry about going blind from reading a phone screen. This is good.
Thank you for the book Kevin. I’m pretty sure I picked it up 🫦 but I will check when I am able to pull myself together enough to do so.
You know. Sorry.
I am trying not to sound like an asshole. Like, a whole transcript of smooth words flowed through my brain… but now I’m sitting at the keyboard and the words shift in tone.
In my head, I am naturally breezy and pleasant.
When I let my brain do the thinking, I end up sounding like a jerk.
No explanation.
Right now the Brain Thinky Thoughts are running through my head, but I’m letting myself ignore them. My fingers fly across the keyboard and the words appear on the screen, and I am reading them with you.
Does anyone else feel like that?
Sometimes I don’t think I’m the person controlling the body.
I’m here, but it’s like standing in the background, watching a movie from the inside. Able to say "Hey, that’s stupid, don’t do that!" Able to seize some semblance of body control when things start going off the rails. But mostly standing in the background, watching.
I don’t know how to describe the thing I have. In my head. Like, when you live with something, you don’t have to name it with words.
It lives in your head! The mental illness.
When you try to put it into words, you release like a cloud of what other people would describe as nonsense. Incoherency given form: loud words you can’t hold back even after you realize you’re speaking nonsense.
Mental illness is a bitch.
And that’s not saying that mental illness is a woman. That femininity is instantly tied with mental illness in your mental rolodex of "words-that-have-concept and sound" you store in your head.
"Bitch" does not mean female. It’s a genderless term when applied to a human being.
"Bitch is a term applied to animals.
Therefore, when used toward a human, it can and should be used for both men and women. And, just like "fuck" it, it is the tone and context by which it is used that gives meaning to the term; whether conversational filler or an insult.
So like, by that terminology, it can be understood that mental illness is a horrible and terrible thing. And it can be something bubbly and fun.
I am by nature a melancholy soul. Too inside my own self.
I guess I must seem like a ghost in the crowd. Eyes distant or jerking back and forth with frightening intensity as I twitch and hum in place.
I realize I look like a freak.
But you don’t know what wonder my brain is producing.
I’ve been told before that marijuana isn’t healthy. Isn’t good for me.
I’ve stopped smoking for like a year now.
This is the first time I’ve smoked in a year.
And I hate to admit it, but I’ve nearly stopped writing as well. Not to say I haven’t been creating. It’s just that it’s in a format I’m unable to share with you.
Because it’s all written in mental health shorthand. And I haven’t been smoking. Haven’t been anything but myself.
Harper Kingsley
Ko-fi: HarperWCK
Paypal: HarperKingsley
Medication lies me straight, but flat. Marijuana lets me put my thoughts into words that I’m able to share with other people, but also makes me paranoid as fuck. And me alone… well. (Sometimes I can hold it together; sometimes I’m an airhead. Sometimes I sound like I’ve got a handle on a situation when I’m only really remembering half the words. The concept–the overarching theme–of the conversation and I’ll barely remember it happened later. Though parts will have laser like focus.)
And all the time, mental illness is smiling at me. The way she does. And we’re having a good time.
Medication doesn’t take the mental illness away. It just lets me pass through the crowds of people and keep up while walking in the same direction. Able to make turns and to dodge. But it’s like I hyper-focus? I get so frazzled while so consciously aware of myself that it’s exhausting. I become too exhausted to write.
I can keep a linear chronology of events–the things that have and have not been done–and that’s really helpful. Because mental illness makes it so that things that just happened sometimes feel like a long time ago, while things that happened a long time ago sometimes feel as though they happened yesterday.
Fresh and raw. Unimportant. Cutting wounds made by words that feel as though they were just said.
I think the medication is supposed to make my brain keep an order of events while numbing the sharper edges of my imagination.
Like, my mental illness is disorder. Time is a mess in my head. I can look at something and my brain will produce a whole story. Just, a complete lifetime of events that becomes richer and stronger the more I look, the more items that are added to the story, each clamoring with their own backstory of how they ended up in the room.
And like, there are a lot of stories in my head. I see something or smell something or think something… and my brain feeds me a whole story.
I read stories and watch movies and TV and consume other peoples’ creations. And it all adds to the stories my brain is constantly creating. Giving words to the images my brain is feeding me. Because while it’s not like seeing events, it’s like an unfolding of a whole life. And I just don’t have the words to describe what I’m knowing.
It’s hard to explain. It sounds chaotic and frightening when I try to explain it to other people, and that’s a failure of words on my part. Because you don’t know how amazing it all is.
I’m not sure if my brain produces dopamine when I’m consuming media, but it’s definitely doing something.
When a story is unfolding for me, even ones created by other people, I enjoy it. I can’t stop until it’s done because knowing the ending is pleasurable. Satisfying. Needful.
And having to stare at a screen to consume the content… It hurts my eyes sure. But it also means that I can’t do anything else while it happens.
Trapped by my mental illness. Standing or sitting while staring at a screen in my hand. Consuming the words with my eyes.
And like, I realize that listening to the stories isn’t much better for other people trying to talk to me. But it lets me do other things at the same time. Washing dishes. Folding laundry. Getting up to go to the bathroom.
So I’m glad of finding out how well my phone reads webpages to me.
Sometimes I wish there was a technology that let me share my thoughts with the world. Not all of them, but the ones that I want to share.
So when a story unfolds you’d be able to hear the words that I hear as a story is instantly transported into my head.
It’s like, other peoples’ content is laid out for me in real time. It can take hours or days, but it’s all linear and requires a lot of focus on my part. While the stories I think up myself are instantly experienced. Those little fireworks of dopamine rather than the slow fire of reading or hearing the stories at 1x speed.
So being able to vocalize or write down my stories is hard. Because I experienced it all in one burst, a flood of words, and what I write down or talk about later is only me trying to describe the story I experienced.
And I’m sorry about that.
That you can’t see what I see.
And it makes me wish there was a technology to share my words with a thought. And I know there’s similar concepts out there being tested and manufactured right now, but they’re not developed in ways that I want.
The technology isn’t there yet.
And I’m not sure I’d be willing to use it if it was ever really made.
Because we’ve all been taught and proven that people with money can have a "trusted" company break the law at their crazy whim. And I’m just not ready to put my brain in the position of having to deal with a billionaire forcing through "updates" that cause the machinery to freeze and shut off. Not when that machinery is connected to my head.
It’s unfortunate that rich people have ruined all the fun things in life.
"Well yeah. They’ve made it illegal for me to drain my car oil right next to the ocean like they used to do in the 40s and 50s when I was a child or unborn" is NOT what I mean.
I want and support laws that prevent murder and desecration, that protect the lives and safety and environments of animals and human beings. Laws that are supposed to remind people that the planet is shared property, no matter what some individuals and groups try to tell themselves and others. Laws that protect everyone no matter who they happen to be.
I’m talking about the real fun things that are being ruined by people with the money to make things miserable for everyone. Because they want to.
Like, selfishness is bad enough. Rich people paying money to not get in trouble or to keep from going to jail is always annoying, especially when they do the kinds of things that deserve punishment and public recrimination. Rich people paying to put their kids in expensive schools and paying for extracurricular activities while blocking the public from using the local swimming pool or the public library is the next step beyond selfishness. And it’s gross.
I’m talking about rich people using their money to change the rules in their own favor. Or at their own whim. Throwing in religion and free speech and whine-crying about how the majority of people don’t want to do whatever nonsense they’re trying to force down everyone’s throats.
It’s rich people hiring local degenerates to involve themselves in local school boards and local governments that they otherwise wouldn’t have bothered with because they don’t usually vote or they don’t have children in the district.
It’s rich people destroying natural environmental monuments and shrugging and not being punished. Because "The kids decided to knock the rock formation off the cliff. They were worried about public safety. I decided to let them do it because they sounded so responsible and I’m not saying that because their parents paid me money to protect them and take part of the blame as the only adult that should have stopped them" combined with a bunch of money shouldn’t be able to wash away the horror of what they did.
It’s rich people collaborating to take over the government of a whole country just to get the right to tell people how to live. And never realizing that they’re putting complete monsters in charge of everything that matters in their own lives too. Because they’re so fucking stupid. And they don’t read real history books and they don’t know that one of the big things that happens when things go wrong in a country is that the rich people get their doors kicked in and their houses and money confiscated when their "super great for the country new government" turns out to be just another fascist regime.
We don’t need kings or emperors or czars or grand high mugwumps or whatever they want to call it when one family is forcibly put in charge of the rest of us.
We need a government that works. That cares about the people, no matter how stupid they are, while at the same time keeping the dangerous from oppressing the regular people. That protects the environment and supports the expansion of technology and provides medical care in all its forms for every person in an affordable way.
I mean, it’s probably not fair to charge everyone for medical treatment on a sliding scale. Because, while it’s helpful for people that can’t pay, if rich people were charged on the scale they would have to pay much higher amounts.
It’s not fair… But.
How fair is it that rich people use their stock in medical companies and hospitals to require high costs for treatments that other countries provide free to their citizens?
How fair is it that rich people can pay money to keep from going to prison… when they have stock in private prisons that they will never be sentenced to? To take over public punishment facilities and torture the inmates by denying medical care, education opportunities, requiring forced labor to replace actual rehabilitation programs while using money to keep their loved ones from ever being sentenced to those facilities?
Rich people have stripped the fun out of everyday life. Because they want to. Because they want to do what they want more than they care about public safety, and they don’t care about public safety at all.
So, I’m not going to trust a billionaire with my brain. With my health. With my safety. With my money.
Especially since different billionaires pulling different tricks for their own profits have damaged the laws that are supposed to protect everyone. Like, to the point of ignoring public safety to squeeze the most money out of their chicken farms and pork processing plants and sugar plantations. To the point of being able to shrug and not get in trouble for cyber security breaches as long as they send a "We’re sorry" letter?
Your brakes won’t work. Your airbag exploded. Your coffee was 300-degrees. Your brain has been fried.
"We’re sorry 🤷🏻♂️."
I want to share my thoughts with you… But I also want to protect my thoughts as well.
Even if the technology is created, it’s not something I want to mess with if someone with more money than sense can walk into a room and order the technicians to force-through "updates" and I don’t have the option to receive notification much less the ability to stop it.
Like, if someone has the ability to brick a device someone paid for… there should be laws to guide how and when they’re able to do it. Making negative comments about the owner of the company shouldn’t mean having your device switched off. Especially when it’s something that effects a person’s life and safety.
Being kicked off a website is emotionally hurtful. But having your optical device or your vehicle or your cellphone switched off on an angry whim should not be allowed.
People need to get where they’re going safely. They shouldn’t have to worry that necessary communications will be switched off or downgraded during a disaster situation.
A rich person should not be able to poke their nose into a deadly situation and waste everyone’s time just because they want to be part of the conversation.
Laws have been warped and twisted and made ineffective by rich people pushing their own agendas. And it’s more than gross.
I’ve been away in my own head and I wish I could share it all with you… But we’re stuck with my clumsy fingers and limited vocabulary to try and put everything into sharable words.
I try my best. But I know it’s not good enough. But you can at least catch a glimpse of a little bit of what my brain produces.
Coming soon.
