lots of quantity, not much quality

12:09 PM 11/6/10

I'm trying to wake up and get ready for work. I took a little bit of St. John's Wort last night just before bed, and I also took a little bit this morning when 'they' woke me up at 7:00 or so. I open up the pills, pour out the herb, and eat a little finger-dab of it, so that I don't get too much. But I had enough this morning that it made me sleepy and I haven't wanted to get up out of bed. So I'm using Vivarin.

I don't like using all these drugs. But I have fallen so badly that I can't help myself. There is so much to do that I can't do. I don't like it when the drugs change my personality. I *do* like it that they make me able to do tasks and projects that I normally don't have enough energy to do, like work on my computer. And also, the one project that has been blocking all of my life - the storage unit full of contaminated belongings.

I haven't been writing about Curtis much now. 'They' have been talking to me about him. They 'try,' quote unquote, to make me go and look for him and try to deliver a letter. But I know they're not really trying. Whenever they decide to force me to do it, they will. They won't have to 'try' and 'fail' to make me go do it.

They've been saying stuff in my head to make me think that he misses me and he wants to see me. They reminded me about the time when he gave me a raw green bean to taste, and it was wonderful. It tasted and smelled like the garden that my parents had when I was a kid. They made it sound like he would give me something like that again, something small and special. But the two times when I've seen him, I've been having a panic attack, and couldn't stay long enough to have a conversation.

In a way, the drug makes me need him less. Again, this reminds me of Edward the vampire in Twilight. The hungrier he is, the harder it is for him to be near Bella. I have had exactly the same thing happen. Whenever I am hungry, literally and physically hungry, when I feel needy in any way at all, it's very scary for me to be near Curtis (or I should say, 'it WAS scary,' in the past tense, back when we worked together). I felt so needy, it made me want to hug him, and I'm guessing it's an instinctive need to nurse, to breastfeed. You know that it isn't socially acceptable to do that, so you get very scared because you really, really want to. But you don't consciously remember that that's what you want. You just know you want to touch someone, but something bad would happen if you did. But the drugs make me more numb and less needy, and that used to make it easier to be close to him without fear. The less I needed him, the closer I was to him. And often, if I would get something to eat, I would calm down enough that I could then go talk to him.

I don't know what 'they,' the voices, will force me to do with him in the long run. Will they keep trying to make me maintain a relationship with him, even though he isn't my neighbor, and he isn't my co-worker, and I haven't been invited to go see him in the outside world - after I got the email from him that said he didn't want us to hang out together? I don't know what 'they' are going to make me do.

Also, I don't know *when* they will make me deliver my letter to him. I have one, and it's ready to go. I tried and failed, once, last week, but only once. I didn't try again. I worked on a couple of other things that required me to get up early in the morning, like making a phone call about my car that still needs to get its bumper fixed. It's like I can only do one small project per day, and if I have some other project or task to do, then I can't do the project of stalking Curtis.

I was looking for something on Flickr.com the other day. I don't recall how it started. But I ended up re-discovering the existence of the safety settings on the search results filtering. I forget what it's called. Safe, moderate, or restricted. I was on SafeSearch. So I changed it to 'restricted,' and then started looking at naked pictures and everything on Flickr.

I remember what I was doing. 'They' wanted me to take naked pictures of myself, and I wanted to find out how to put them on Flickr. They won't be on eagledove9, because that's the one my parents are looking at. I wanted to find out if there were any rules that forbid you to put naked pictures on Flickr. You can do it, but you have to label them 'restricted' so that people won't see them in the safe search.

Anyway I found pictures labeled 'thin' (as in, skinny) and 'boy' or 'youth' or something like that, so I ended up looking at pictures of skinny teenage boys. Apparently other people feel the same way that I feel about them. Some of these pictures were also labeled 'emo,' and those were the teenage boys with long hair. So then I saw other tags associated with 'emo,' and I saw the word 'scene queens,' and I didn't know what it meant, so I started reading about scene queens. I thought it meant gay men, but no, it's referring to females. The 'scene' is the social, cultural group of people who like a particular kind of music, in this case, emo. It was showing pictures of how they dress and how they style their hair and what kind of makeup they wear.

A 'scene queen' is a girl who becomes very popular in this subculture. I was looking at them and they seem to be the Sx/So instinctual stacking (Oscar Ichazo). Some of them were vegetarians. I found out that human skulls can be a symbol of vegetarianism. I've been wondering about human skulls. Human skulls are all over the clothing and jewelry. I started noticing them because Curtis has skull jewelry and pictures on his clothes. It occurred to me that I should be horrified by people worshipping human skulls, but I loved everything Curtis did, and wanted to understand it, so I became curious about who is using images of skulls, and why. He isn't a vegetarian, so it means something different with him. He likes symbolic images, like roses, and blood, and skulls, things that are in the goth or emo culture. I saw it on his MySpace page and, again, in his clothing and jewelry and his car.

Anyway, why were human skulls associated with vegetarians? Some of the 'scene queens,' like Kiki Kannibal, are vegetarians. They believe that killing and eating an animal is the same as killing and eating a fellow human. They twist this belief in a way that says humans are evil, and killing humans is better than killing animals. It's a feeling of hatred for the human race. And I know if you asked them, they wouldn't say this, and they wouldn't admit it, and they would probably call themselves peaceful, and they would probably be anti-war. But I still get the 'hatred of human beings' idea from them. The hatred of self.

Years ago I wondered whether I would become a vegetarian. I decided not to. That decision was strengthened when I read about the Weston Price studies. But that's not the only reason. I decided that if I judged humans to be doing a bad thing when they ate animals, then I should also judge tigers, and sharks, because they are predators too. Why are tigers and sharks forgiven for eating animals? Well, duh, it's because they're 'unconscious,' and they have no control of themselves! But... wait... you're saying they're unconscious? But didn't you just say they were conscious, and equal to humans? Didn't you just say it was wrong to kill animals, because animals are humanlike, and they're conscious, and they have feelings?

So are they conscious, or not? Well, they don't have free will, or self-control. They can't make choices. Really? I disagree. If you raise an animal in a cage, and then release it into the wild, it will struggle and have great difficulty surviving. It has to LEARN how to hunt for food and survive in the wild, and it learns it when its parents, and its tribe, TEACHES it how to hunt and survive. Animals have to learn to survive just like humans do. A few things happen automatically without learning, but not everything. And humans, also, can do a few things automatically without learning them, too. We have instincts. So animals have to learn how to survive. They don't operate automatically just by instinct. They aren't unconscious. They have to make choices. They have to learn. They make mistakes just like humans do. Their lives aren't robotic, or automatic, or perfect and flawless and without mistakes. Animal lives don't happen automatically. They are complex. Like humans, animals have to learn, and make mistakes, and make choices. So in some way, they have free will, too.

So the tigers and sharks are eating their prey, but we forgive them. And they have free will. They are responsible for their actions. ('Fish are friends, not food!' from Finding Nemo.) But we forgive them. We can argue that we're more COMPLICATED than they are. Maybe their lives are simpler.

Darn it, I don't have time to explain all of this, because I have to get ready for work. I wanted to write it out, but it's a mess. And I'm writing a lot because I'm on drugs.

Anyway, the point was, I decided not to become a vegetarian. I decided that it was against my nature, because I decided that humans are a semi-carnivorous species, an omnivore. The other apes are, too. Bonobos and chimps eat meat. I don't remember if gorillas do. I think they eat a little bit. It's my nature to be carnivorous, so I forgive myself, the same way I forgive the tigers and sharks for being carnivores. It's a self-acceptance thing. I decided that humans ARE NOT 'different from' or 'better than' other animals. We are more complicated in some ways, and we can build objects that last a long time, and we can write words on paper that survive after our death, and we don't see that happening with the animals very much... but then, we're not looking hard enough. When we look hard enough, we see language in animals, and other forms of culture. If only I had time to write, I'd complain about the contempt and the superiority, the attitudes of the 'scientists' who study animals and think that they're different from humans.

Vegetarians say that animals are different from humans, but also, the same as humans. Animals are different than we are - helpless, weak, automatic, programmed, unable to make choices, not responsible for their actions. But at the same time, animals are the same as humans: they have feelings, they get hurt, we shouldn't eat them because it hurts when they get killed, their lives matter.

(Note, when I say 'vegetarians say' something, it doesn't mean that ALL vegetarians explain it the same way. I am writing this, but remembering that my brother is a vegetarian, too.)

Bonobos are using language in the wild. They make noises, but we can't imitate them, because their mouth and throat is different from ours, and the noises are too high-pitched and complicated in a way that we can't do it. They're not just making random noises. They're talking. I don't know why this idea bothers people so much.

Well, anyway, so I saw lots of human skulls on some of the vegetarian web pages. It's connected to the idea that killing animals is the same as killing humans, and maybe, that it's better to kill humans than it is to kill animals, because humans are inherently more evil than the other animals are. I think we should forgive ourselves the way we forgive the other animals.

I wish I could keep writing all day. My writing quality isn't that great right now. Lots of quantity, not much quality. I feel like sitting and typing because that's something I enjoy doing. It's just a satisfying thing to do. But I have to go to work.