A delusion of reference

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

For my entire adult life (minus one year), I have liked the show SUPERNATURAL a lot. Enough to where after LOST ended (Ended?), it was the only show I wanted to keep following, and the only one aside from CRIMINAL MINDS that I have taken the time to catch up on via Netflix (catch up on, that is, since I lost regular access to cable or the like). In fact it was within the last few months that I skimmed through seasons 6 through 9 of the Winchester drama, which has proved... fortuitous.

Now one of the two brothers at the head of the show, I've perpetually had this celebrity-crush kind of attitude towards as a result of seeing him perform thereof. The one in question is Dean Winchester, played by Jensen Ackles. The first guy I ever fell in love with I personally thought looked like Mr. Ackles, though the only person I ever shared this opinion with, who had a chance to compare the two, disagreed with me. I also was able to stretch the logic of my (lack of a) love life to compass the guy I fell the hardest for of all, over the last ten years--compass him, that is, with a delusion that Dean could be used as a symbol in my emotional imagination to refer to him by. And so it has gone (I even connected my current general manager's car being an Imapala to this damn scheme of things).

Several weeks ago, I was trying to come up with a way to get some weed (I apologize), ran into some shady dude on the walk home. He offered that a friend of his could fulfill my wish but as I followed him down the road, he kept twitching or whatever and abruptly asked if I had asked for "white or green." FYI: white = meth, which I realized Mr. Extraslim Shady was on, and I found myself dubious about where the situation was going. However, I persevered in my hope that I might get to go where I wanted to, so put up with my displeasure at the context and kept following the tweaker.

We ended up sitting in a Very Creepy Place, almost a Blair Witch region, in a local park, waiting for a call from Mr. Extraslim Shady's hookup. The tweaker tried to prove that he was also an expert rapper, and started drinking some alcohol he got a hold of, which I thought would level him out (but most certainly did not, as you will and I came to learn). As patiently as a clam (I suppose) I sat there, wondering whether I should just invent an excuse to leave on my own, when as if out of goddamn thin air this other fellow appeared to my right, sat down across from me and the Satanist (as the tweaker-rapper claimed to be). He started smoking some weed and I figured I might as well ask him if he knew someone I could buy from, that this was the perfect shot I had to escape whatever pseudo-doom I faced if I continued hanging out with Mr. Extraslim Shady.

Unfortunately, Mr. Helpful was really very, very helpful, as in nice, as in after we left the demon druggie behind and scored some green, he took it upon himself to prove to the demon that we weren't lying about caring about his well-being--prove this by having the two of us walk back to the Very Creepy Place to smoke the demon out too. And this didn't calm Mr. Extraslim Shady down either; it probably, if anything, intensified his four-days-awake hallucination-laden psychotic break, and when Mr. Helpful left and I tried to follow him, it was so dark that I lost track of him and found myself being followed instead by the Satanist tweaker.

Hours passed as the demon rapped his madness at me, spinning around and growling and hissing, saying the word, "Kill," repeatedly, rushing up to me and circling me, stalking me, staring at me. I wasn't sure what the best course of action was at that point, alone in the dark park with a man who might as well have been possessed by one or more devils. So I went and pretended to be an in-the-know angel, to give off the vibe that I either couldn't be killed or wasn't worried about getting killed regardless. I also maintained my Eternally Patient demeanor and finally escaped when at long last Mr. Extraslim Shady's equally disturbing (and known-to-me) friend gave him a call and picked up, the two of them driving off, leaving me alive and thinking, "The hottest guy I have ever met just smoked me out while I was trying to survive this stupid fucking encounter with a drunk methhead. Wtf!" I swore I would figure out a way to meet up with Mr. Helpful again.

God, His Son, or Their Spirit, or my own schizoish mind told me to do this: go back to the Very Creepy Place and leave a bunch of notes for the Mormon (I forgot to mention that) stoner, notes based on the Mormon fantasy author Brandon Sanderson's writing. Weeks later, I was sitting in the park again, looking over wreckage of stick sculptures I'd made in honor of Mr. Utah (I forgot to mention that too)--this goddamnedly sexy bro had, that is, himself prettied up the Very Creepy Place by arranging logs and branches and what-have-you to give the place a cozier feel. Only by now both his and my handiwork had been handed to the ground in ruin (Ruin). And then... lo! He just fucking walked up to me again, sat down, smoked me out, and talked to me for hours about philosophy, history, religion, his life in foster care, a brutal experience of mine in grade school, and whatever. It was fantastic: he even said he'd found some of my notes and was trying to decode them or something. I kept prompting him to leave, that it was time to leave, because it was getting so dark and "I don't want to be here when whoever keeps trashing the place shows up." But Mr. Utah told me not to worry, he didn't think anyone was coming. By the end of it I couldn't tell his face from Adam's, it was so nighttimed out there, and he still was in no hurry to leave my side. But at last I convinced him that I had to go home, and that he had to go home, and we stumbled away, blazed as hell, and I was really happy, he'd said to me, "I've been hanging out with just my nephews lately, I want to find a guy to have an intelligent conversation with," and he'd also said something that I immediately thought, "He didn't say that," because of, even though I knew he'd said it, he wasn't inarticulate by any means, nor too quiet to understand. I knew he'd said what he said, but I was so surprised I lied to myself that I didn't.

You see, after the first encounter, I'd gone on Facebook looking for Mr. Utah, and my #1 strategy involved searching for people with one of two first names. Option A was "Jason," in honor of Dante Alighieri (don't ask me why haha) and a gay porn story I'd read years ago ("Operation College Quarterback": this relates to LOST indirectly, btw, but again don't ask me why).

Option B was true, in the end (again, also, the End). Since I didn't know Mr. Utah's name, right before we walked off in different directions, I turned to him, he shook my hand, and I said, "I'm Kristian, by the way."

"I'm Dean," he said. I started laughing a few minutes later.

The fundamental question of the ethics of the situation: is it delusional of me to think that after ten years of never holding hands, kissing, or getting laid--I still have all three of those v-cards in my deck--I have had my prayers for romance answered? That the Lord told all the butterflies in my private universe to flap their wings just right, so that the hurricane of affection would finally make landfall on my heart? Or am I just fucking lucky?

"Choose your own adventure," they say.

[Avatar]

Don't run down luck. Just don't ever count on it.

--A

[peter]

Lady - you're taking too many chances.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I'm not a lady haha! I'm a guy. This whole story is gay as hell if you didn't notice.

Also, I know it was probably deliriously ridiculous of me to follow the tweaker to the park, but I have serious anxiety issues so I justify my stonerness easily. (Although there is a serious contradiction in accepting the anxiety of wondering whether I'm going to be murdered, just so I can get a hold of something that wipes away my anxiety...)

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Don't run down luck. Just don't ever count on it.

--A

IKR? Usually, when my subconscious comes up with a strategy for dealing with guys like this, it doesn't seem to pan out. OTOH, if for the entire rest of my life up until that day I hadn't done what my subconscious told me to on this count, I would never have been in the exact place at the exact time to run into either the twacked out demon or, consequently, the LDS angel fellow.

[JIkj fjds j]

The fundamental question of the ethics of the situation: is it delusional of me to think that after ten years of never holding hands, kissing, or getting laid--I still have all three of those v-cards in my deck--I have had my prayers for romance answered? That the Lord told all the butterflies in my private universe to flap their wings just right, so that the hurricane of affection would finally make landfall on my heart? Or am I just fucking lucky?

"Choose your own adventure," they say.

You mentioned SUPERNATURAL, and seeing the reference to BUTTERFLIES, I just couldn't resist opening the Favole Tarot.

Queen Crosses, VIII Justice, VI Butterflies, (Queen Flowers), Ace Butterflies, IX Crosses, Ace Masks




I'm calling this the Butterfly Spread.
The middle card = the past
The middle three cards represent the present
The Butterfly Wings, 3 left and 3 right = possible futures

("Choose your own adventure," they say.)

What I find interesting is that all the cards are reversed, except the middle and middle-left. There's also some very interesting patterns rippling through the butterfly wings.
As for any Supernatural messages, unfortunately, they're beyond my capabilities to interpret at this time.

WYSIWYG My 300th post.

[Sorus]

I'm the sort of person who will fixate on something to the point where I can see connections everywhere. With that in mind, I do believe things are more interconnected than most people give credit for, though I have experienced a lot of weird coincidences in my life.

[JIkj fjds j]

The connections can be as simple as narrative. Each card has characteristics that will interact with other cards. And depending on how they reveal their meaning in relation to a question can tell a story.

I'm not traditional in the way I use Tarot. That's why I like the Favole. As a matter of fact I joined an online Tarot community so as to learn how to read the cards. I was mainly concerned with having fun and playing Tarot games. Geez, was that a mistake! Tarot traditionalists take it all very seriously. I was PM'd and asked if I would kindly buzz off!

But yeah, sometimes the cards behave very strangely. Even if you only play games like Black Jack, Poker, Gin Rummy, etc etc etc. I'm sure you'll know what I mean.

[Vraith]

I do believe things are more interconnected than most people give credit

Everything is connected. Literally. [[except Kevin Bacon. He's the illusionary connection that proves the reality true]].
The problem is our minds can't see the literal, only analogy and metaphor---so we're all like really shitty electricians...we KNOW there is a reason the blender stops whipping our smoothie when the AC comes on...we just don't know why/how. So we unplug the toaster.

[Avatar]

Well, in certain senses things are connected. But we are also geared to expect, look for, and find connections, so we also imagine them when none exist.

--A

[peter]

Then Guy, you are still taking too many chances!

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Everyone has their own attitude towards risk, allegedly, so evidently I have a relatively high tolerance for danger haha. I'm actually surprised sometimes that I haven't gotten myself killed.

@Vizidor, this Tarot stuff is interesting, seeing as how there's a huge connection (pun somehow intended) between that subject and... Dante. And what I told Mr. Utah about Dante...

As per the general theory of connectedness/synchronicity/what-have-you, I look at it like so (hence the butterfly reference): chaos theory is more or less true, so is the Six Degrees of Separation sociological thesis (a la Kevin Bacon too, haha!), and finally if the universe can be accounted for mathematically, and if mathematical functions admit of unrestricted composition (when they are to form a totality), well... OTOH, to play devil's (or angel's?) advocate against myself, I do have a knack for reading into everything, like if the guy's name had turned out to be "Kevin" I would probably have been able to make something of it. In fact, here's a list of names that would've made an impression on me:

• Drew
  Wilson
  Nathan
  Anderson
  Frederick
  Jason (again)
  Jesse
  Peter
  Sam
  Tom (haha!)

Probably others, too, if I thought hard enough about it. On yet another hand, though, here's a ranking of how surprising so-and-so name would've proven to be, with "Dean" ranked with the rest:

• Drew: 10 out of 10
  Jason: 10 out of 10
  Dean: 9 out of 10
  Jesse: 9 out of 10
  Wilson: 9 out of 10
  Nathan: 8 out of 10
  Sam: 8 out of 10
  Kevin: 7 out of 10
  Peter: 6 out of 10
  Tom: 5 out of 10
  Frederick: 5 out of 10
  Anderson: 2 out of 10

So... again... anyway... questioning the intellectual justice of my belief that I was destined to meet this Dean dude.

[Hashi Lebwohl]

There is no such thing as destiny, or Fate, or "it was meant to be"; those are delusions we tell ourselves afterwards by making connections between things which were completely unrelated.

Serendipity, on the other hand, is a real thing--you can wind up being in the "right" place at the "right" time and, by a lucky roll of the dice, stumble into a situation which winds up being very positive.

Life is all one big casino. Sometimes you may beat the dealer, in which case you had better cash out your chips and enjoy your winnings, because ultimately no one beats the house.

[JIkj fjds j]

We've been having a real topsy-turvy summer this year. One day sunny, next day rainy, sunny, rainy, sunny, rainy, sunny,,,,,,,, If I were a crazy person I'd swear we've been oscillating through two identical universes.

Picture of the Sun, two or three days ago.


Picture of the Sun, two or three weeks ago. What Sun ?

[Avatar]

Life is all one big casino. Sometimes you may beat the dealer, in which case you had better cash out your chips and enjoy your winnings, because ultimately no one beats the house.

Can I get an amen? Agreed Hashi. People don't get what they want or deserve, they get what they get.

--A

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

@Hashi, what is the concept of destiny, though? To go to Vizidor's commentary for the start of the answer, to have a destiny would (a) to have one's life organized in a narrative form, and then (b) for that narrative to lead to an Ending. One's destiny would be the End of one's life, in the teleological sense. Now if God exists, God would make it possible for us to have a destiny if God was writing the narrative of our universe, for She might plan the End in advance (in fact, perceiving all of linear time at once, He would project the whole of the timeline's content at once from Itself, at least as far as She was deciding that content). God would be the Author of Coincidence, the One Who regulated the inputs into the chaos-theoretic functions of the physical-mathematical order, Who set the parameters of the Big Bang or whatever.

However, I'm a transcendental idealist, so I can't honestly infer, "God exists," from, "It was incredibly serendipitous that I met this Dean fellow." That would be a transcendental illusion I would be suffering from, were I to think such a thing. Therefore, it would be an act of intellectual self-corruption for me to think this way. Is there, then, some other way to think that meeting Dean was my destiny?

Deferring to transcendental ideality again, if I have free will, and if this power exists in part on some other plane of time and space (or in some other form of spacetime than the mundane cosmos), then I don't require a God to write my life into a story: I myself can call upon the world to be a story, or rather I can interpret (read: filter my experiences of) the world such that something was destined to take place. Either this would be the result of magical power that I don't believe in (I'm no "Law of Attraction" fideist), or it would be a matter of subconsciously (or even hyperconsciously!) making use of chaos-theoretic facts/Six Degrees of Separation-information to direct the world outside of my direct awareness, towards a certain goal. And in fact I do seem able to do such a thing. I said not to ask why "Jason" as a name matters so much to me, but I will forget that request and explain just why this thing is so.

When I was a lot younger, XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS was one of my favorite shows. I was quite struck by the image from the beginning of season 5 (I think it was) in which Xena and Gabrielle are standing before the rings of angels in heaven. I learned from the Internet then that the image had been copied from an illustration of Dante's PARADISO, a very historical illustration that is. And my parents possessed a copy of the INFERNO that I browsed periodically, wherefore I spent years and years using combinations like "Inferno1" and "Paradise0" as passwords for Internet accounts I had. But beyond that, the Catholicism of Dante's poetry had no discernible influence on me. However, many years later, I would feel that a certain circle of friends of mine had quite spectacularly betrayed me, and coping with this betrayal brought me to investigate the theology of treason, such that I tried to argue with my friends that their failure was extremely wicked, seeing as Dante listed traitors as the lowest of the sinners in Hell. But pursuing this argument brought me also to the PARADISO again, and at that point in time I discovered the figure of Ripheus the Trojan. Here was a man of perfect equity who had been abandoned in his darkest hour by the gods of his city, and what did I think of myself back then? (I really don't want to expect any of you folks to accept this statement, but I will make it nonetheless and if I could prove it to you, I would; I just hope that my attitude on this website showcases something of the virtue supposedly involved. The statement is: I am a very, very, very responsible young man, as in honest and generous and so on. So...) Also, the example of Ripheus was of a heroic pagan, saved by the Christian God, such that I finally had a Catholic explain to me how God could be fair in expecting everyone to believe on His Son's Name to be saved.

Because of Hannah Arendt's writings on political history, I had an independent interest in the moral role played in our world by Troy. So in Ripheus, and hence Dante, I had this whole serendipity thing happening for me, and I was quite struck (again!) by the role of Jason the Argonaut in Dante's epic poetry. This because in the first book I wrote, whereas originally, in my first novel, I named the character based on the fellow I was in love with at the time "Drew," later I decided to name him "Jason" (in honor of that ALIAS, a la J. J. Abrams (hence the LOST connection), inspired gay porn story I'd fixated upon over the years). And this was right before I found out the Dante-Jason connection, so you can imagine how my schizoaffectivity took this and went with it.

Eventually I would find out that there actually was a sociological connection between the Trojan War, the Vietnam War, the aleph numbers, and Dante, like a major one, a scientific function granted but, morally-speaking, very significant. So my interest in all these things would prove itself academically. However, I could never take this knowledge and do much good with it when dealing with other people, except in the sense that I knew how to do the right thing by them as well as I knew history, say. Now technically, it's good enough that I do good in relation to them, regardless of whether they do good in relation to me or to each other. It's good if someone is doing good for someone, period. Goodness in itself has to be able to reconcile itself with the good of all people, for that is ultimately what it is. Anyway, though, the particular thing is that there are these three forms of sin or evil or wrongdoing or whatever: there are these three problems in transcendental deontic logic, that is to say, that are more important than all others, in a sense.

Think of morality like a Test. A test is a set of questions that you can be graded according to your answers thereto. So the Test is life, considered from the standpoint of our ability to ask questions and therefore step back from the flow of the world and have free will of ourselves. Then "right" and "wrong" mean: actions that solve moral problems, versus actions that aggravate them. (The mere existence of a moral problem might or might not be right or wrong; I haven't thought about this yet enough to honestly say what my theory is.) The three worst sins, then, are the three actions that aggravate the three ultimate moral problems in life: the question of believing on evidence, the question of romantic love, and the question of atonement for other sin. For these questions are all interlocked as per their correct solutions.

Then romantic injustice in particular is the incorrect solution to the problem of romantic ideality. This is coercing or manipulating people to fall in love with other people who don't feel the same way. This is really, really wicked because it's the most emotionally hurtful thing you can possibly do to someone short of rape, torture, or murder. It might actually be more painful, seeing how much people sacrifice for the sake of love. I don't know. Regardless, that it is as painful as the RTM triad, yet not based on violence (even if it is physically imposed), is what makes it so diabolical. For corruption loves subtlety and goes to great lengths to conspire against the goodness it infects. Moreover, the corruption of romantic love can perhaps more easily than any other form of rationalization motivate victims to justify doing other evil things. That is to say, when my heart is as such broken, and my sense of romantic justice in my society as such offended, I will be much more likely to start making up excuses for doing the wrong thing, on such grounds as, "Nothing in life matters," or whatever. Arendt also posits a link between loneliness and totalitarianism that substantiates the existence of this issue, as Stephen R. Donaldson also does when he talks about Her. This is why the anti-gay marriage movement is such an invidious thing, because in general the failure to understand what science has now proven--that romantic love is not gender-oriented in the same way that sexual orientation is--so much as it showcases a failure to believe on the evidence (to even gather the facts together into view!), leads to an attitude contrary to the existence of certain romantic situations, which causes massive heartbreak in the subject demographic. (Perhaps one could make too much of the fact that gay romances stereotypically end in tragedy?)

At least, this is all what I told myself because of a situation I was in, in relation to this guy named "Drew Wilson." Unfortunately, I was able to draw "important" or "meaningful" connections between myself/my personal history of media interests, and this guy, too, ones just as substantial as the new ones, if not moreso--but nothing I did, no notes I left him, no prayers or "prophecies," ever came true of him. For now, this is in marked contrast to the current experience with this guy Dean. Of course, destiny or no, that Dean is responsive in a way that Drew was not--even if Drew and his friends are the ones who convinced me that he would be responsive--is sufficient reason to have an emotional preference (if you will) for Dean over Drew. There doesn't have to be a mystical or transcendental reason for that, and that's enough to like Dean--still from the standpoint of romantic idealism, granted, but still.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

Little did Mighara know, he was about to be proven quite wrong--and right--again. And he had faith in faith *and* reason, then.

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

I was browsing Dean's timeline, for I had noticed he was friends with this one fellow (we'll call him "Topher"), my first roommate's best friend, and one of the people who played such an integral role in what happened between me and Drew Wilson. I wondered how these two people would have met. I figured it was just a small-town effect kind of thing, or maybe they'd gone to a party together, or whatever.

However, on Dean's timeline, it showed that a matter of weeks before stumbling upon me in the midst of the forest, he had been hanging out with *most of the people at the center of the circle of friends I had* from the Drew Wilson phase of my life. For example, the person who had gone so far out of his way to convince me that Drew would be with me one day: this man was sitting right next to Dean in one of the pictures I saw on Facebook. And these were the people Topher had been hanging out, when things went quite far into hell back then--which explained how Dean knew Topher, more or less.

Several days ago, one of my coworkers was handing people their food there, when suddenly she burst into the kitchen, gloved up, and told me to go give the guy at the window his order. No one has ever done this for me before at this job (it's a thing we do here, though, for our single employees, late at night--treat them to some odd eye-candy experiences, at least). I'm like, "Okay," and go to the window, and it was Topher there. And my coworker didn't know him from Adam until I went back into the kitchen, muttering, "I know that m%&$%^er!"

[Linna Heartbooger]

Mighara, I am so sorry.
That. was. cruel.
They took what they knew about you and used it to produce misery.


I dedicated a song to you.
It's sort of a modern-day riff on "Lean on Me."