Should I go for another one, right now, hot off the heels of having just finished one vomit right before? Can I do 2000 words at one go? Of course I fucking can, I’ve definitely done it before when I argue with people on Facebook. (Lol, Facebook arguments.) But those are about a subject, those are just raw emotions- that’s it, emotions are what you need to carry something. You can’t move forward if you don’t feel. You gotta feel something and then feel that feeling (lol, what?) and then the words will flow and you don’t even need to think about it.

Anyway I wanted to explore that idea of safety- what is up with that, anyway? Safety. It’s not something I think about. I’m 22 years old. Why is safety an issue or priority? I’m broke, so I’m not financially very safe. I’m a smoker, so health obviously isn’t my number one priority… although I do try to exercise and drink water and sleep well. I don’t want to get flabby and skinny and strength-less. I think it’s important for a young man to be strong, and even more so for an older man to be strong, and I think that’s partially why I’m going for the run right after I finish this- because I think it’s important to have some degree of power. Now, I’m going to run and I know halfway through my run I’m going to get tired and I’m probably going to stop and walk for a while- but I’m going to try, anyway, aren’t I?

The point of all this mess is that it’s startlingly clear to me that even after all the time and energy I’ve spent philosophizing, I still have a lot of mess to clear up. I spent my time on the periphery, flagging this and colouring that and arranging this and that- but never actually get to the heart of the matter. I’m reminded of the way I used to play SimCity as a child- I used to arrange everything nicely in a superficial way, but the city would inevitably die, because it wasn’t built for life.

Build things for life! Heh. Sounds like I’m trying to create soundbites where there might not be any. Fuck me there was a thought in my head that I had to put out which isn’t coming right now. Pause.

I lost it, but I think it was something about prioritization and getting to the heart of things- the heart of things seem to always evoke a certain pain and discomfort, you’re going to have to make difficult decisions and you’re going to have to confront weakness- I’m reminded of Louis CK talking about how he observed George Carlin throwing out all of his old material, and how that forces you to dig deep, and eventually you get to a stage that is so sincere and real that people simply have to listen and pay attention and clap and give you some sort of adulation for it because nobody else does that- few people do- to dig that deep. For a moment while I was thinking about standup comedy and extrapolating that to writing, it occurred to me that the same thing should happen with writing- we should discard the often-travelled road and move on to the uncharted, the unknown.

(Suddenly I’m thinking about desire paths… you know those paths that end up forming because people walk off the pavement onto the grass, until eventually there’s a new path altogether? think about desire paths in our brains… and how all art ought to be built, to some degree, on desired paths.)

Fuck me, what am I saying? Now I’m really kind of upset at having lost a thought… it was clear and lucid, I swear. But I’m also kind of amused that I’m 640 words into the searching of a thought that will probably come naturally to me while I’m running later. Such is the nature of thought. We can’t force these things we have to allow them to come at us from the side. Urhhhh.

I guess it was something about intensity- something about having to throw yourself into something deeper than you normally allow yourself, and there you will face a whole new battle, a different kind of insight. AH I think I got it- I wanted to talk about poker. I was playing poker with my friends and I was practically watching myself make strange calls and raises- I have this oddball habit that destroys me, where I’m short stacked and I get frustrated and I start raising like crazy in the hope that other people will be intimidated and just back off from the pot- and people are almost always able to identify my bullshit, and they almost always actually have a better hand (for some reason I only ever do this when I have a shit hand, and I’ve run out of patience and I’m like MEH FUCK IT) and this is the single, largest source of my poker failures. If I could eliminate these 5% of hands that I play, I would probably see a huge jump in poker profits- because I almost always lose money in the same kind of hand, same kind of situation- I just can’t stop myself.

So the question that bears asking is- how do you stop yourself from something that YOU KNOW is destructive? I’m reminded of how, in those moments, I’m practically a spectator. And I feel a sense of empathy for anybody who’s ever lost control of themselves, in anger or frustration or maybe even lust (this is some dangerous fucking ground here, because you don’t want to be caught sympathizing with abusers or rapists)…

and I think there has to be a solution, because yesterday or the day before I said something stupid to a friend and another friend got angry and upset and started attacking me personally- and I apologized without retaliating, and he withdrew and apologized as well later on- and I know for a fact, given our past history, that if I had taken it personally (and I was kind of taking it personally- but I went up and had a shower and a smoke and I controlled myself SOMEHOW- I really don’t know how I did this) he would have flared at me, and it would have been justified, and we would have had a really ugly argument. Instead, I managed to cut my losses, he apologized too for over reacting and we had a nice moment.

There are some strong parallels between this, my poker losses, and my bad habits like sleeping late- in all elements it feels like I’m not entirely in control, and yet, somehow, I am… it’s convoluted business. The question is- how do I learn from how I stopped myself from something, and how do I translate that across domains- how do I use that insight (which I am not yet fully aware of) and exploit it to modify my behaviour in a way that I deem best for myself?

I will first have to explore the nature of the insight itself- how did I stop? Why did I stop? My feeble explanation is- it’s something that I’ve thought about many times, and I agreed entirely that I was in the wrong, and I was tired of all the times where we got embroiled in nasty stuff afterwards- so it was a mix of awareness and life experience I guess… so maybe there is no magic bullet solution- I just need to keep thinking about it, and play more hands and reflect about it, keep writing about sleeping late, and sleep earlier and write about that too, and maybe hope that the desire path will form inside my head without me forcing it. Because that’s what a desire path is about, isn’t it? It’s out of our control. And when we understand that, we can sort of control it… without controlling it. Hmm.

Heh, 1330 words. And I thought I had nothing. Almost tempted to start again. But past experience at 3-in-a-row-vomits tells me i should just go for the damn run now. Diminishing marginal returns and all. (That said, I never actually attempted 3 in a row the way I just did- I would get distracted on Facebook etc in between, each time.)

FUCK it’s run time! Bye