Kevin's Watch

[I'll leave the title untranslated.]

[This is copied from Facebook, where references to certain individuals are simply understood. No account of these people will be provided beyond what is available in the occurrent text.]

What are the most important words a man can say? The most important words a man can say are, "I love you," to those whosoever he loves.

Now, the reason why I thought Chicago was not destroyed on Halloween was because the book I bought on Halloween, The Familiar Vol. 5, REDWOOD, builds up to this sudden, ultimate explosion, the shockwaves from which reach every character somehow. I mean this is supposed to be a literal supernova kind of event, but Xanther is appalled by the destruction and so through sheer force of will divides her reality so that the explosion is sequestered in some unworld outside of physical fact. Meanwhile, IRL, I was so horrified by the thought of that cult of ultimate darkness and what I believed they planned to do---and in fact they did do it, but because of *my* pure will, *I* divided the actual world so that Chicago was not annihilated, in the end.

In the mental aftermath of coming to this conclusion, I started to proceed to an even more intricate hyperdelusional state. You might ask, how can somehow believe something crazier than that they have the power to negate nuclear explosions by wishing? Well, I'll tell you. Once upon a time I read a book called THE CITY AT THE END OF TIME. Earlier--or "later," haha--Facebook accidentally displayed its calendar for me as set in the year 192,000-something AD. So... "What if," I wondered, in more words than those and these, after all, "I'm not actually living in the year 2018 AD? What if it really IS 192,000ish AD, and I'm in some weird simulation, where I'm being tested because of this weird power I think I might have? What if all those times people weirdly, randomly approached me and told me I was important and the Savior and the Chosen One, or that I was being recorded or on candid camera or monitored by the FBI and the NSA--what if that one time when Gus..."

So, superinterlude-split-second time: what DID Gus say, eh? Well, when I first got in with the good crowd at DQ, back in the days Before, we'd had this social game we played where we tried to match each other to characters from Harry Potter. Later, when I was even further on the in with those folks, they played the game for LOST due to my obsession with the show, even though they knew less about LOST than I'd known about Harry Potter. (Well, they knew less IF they were not part of the 192,000ish-AD simulation, haha...) Accordingly, while I expected to be matched to Jack, the hero of the show, my friends instead said I would be Jacob, the man who guards the Island. This was like how they'd said I'd be Dumbledore (though when we played the game for LOTR, Gus did always claim me to be "so Frodo"...*), so I mostly accepted the verdict, even if the weight of that "mostly" defaulted to my overestimate of Drew Wilson's valor (I assumed HE was Jack, then). ---However, eventually, Gus learned that in a prescript for the season 5 finale (in LOST), the Man in Black's name had been given as "Samuel." And for whatever reason, he then paired me to the Man in Black, i.e. the demon in the show, the final adversary. I felt bad about it, like, I must be doing something evil that I don't realize is evil, or there's something way, way wrong with me, that Gus can tell, that I don't understand. But now anyway the way he paired me was to call me "Samuel."

*[Coincidentally enough, of course, Frodo is paired with a Sam of his own.]

The guy who plays Jacob in LOST plays Satan in SUPERNATURAL, then. Jacob and Samuel are brothers, just like the archangels Michael and Satan or, then, for that fucking matter, Dean and Sam. (Coincidence-note: this is why Jacob at Safeway reminds me of Dean, more or less.) Now, on the assumption that I'm in some kind of holographic plane, or whatever, I then decided that I must, in fact, be Sam, from SUPERNATURAL, because Dean was clearly Dean, in the first place, and so...

Now, what do I mean by, "I must, in fact, be Sam"? I meant, as it turned out, that I thought my entire life had been set up around eventually getting me to watch SUPERNATURAL and "fall in love with" that one character and so on and on--that my mom's fascination with THE X-FILES was actually a reflection of the fact *that my parents were working with Eric Kripke, the creator of SUPERNATURAL and a prominent writer for THE X-FILES, to prepare me for the day when I would meet Dean.*

Like, I am not being metaphorical at all in that statement. I literally believed my parents were working with that guy, on a cinematic project along the lines of THE TRUMAN SHOW. Technically, I assumed they chose Dean and me when we were very young, and then created the show SUPERNATURAL as a conduit for the two of us, in the way of naming the character of Dean in the show, after Dean in reality: which meant that when they sent my Chicago friend my way, they would have to get me to believe that my name *should be* "Sam."

Just in case this doesn't sound absurd enough, I didn't settle for, "Oh it's just Eric Kripke." No no no, dear audience. On the assumption that the evil cult is a representative of Apollyon, the demon-god of the apocalypse of destruction in Christianity, and that I had or channeled the power of the Spirit of the Lord, to protect an entire city from Apollyon's wake, I catapulted myself to the conclusion that the plan in question (somehow still possibly in the year 192,000-something AD) had been conceived primarily by the Jewish intelligentsia, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, as a way to try to prevent Apollyon from destroying the Earth. Like, basically, Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political scientist who analyzed the Holocaust the most acutely, also said that theatrical productions were the only inherently political form of art, so to politically try to save the world would require an argument via cinematic power: so, drumroll drumroll...

Not just Eric Kripke, then, no. Given the extreme role of Mormons in my superdelusional theory about my life, I thought the coincidences in my life involving BATTLESTA: GALACTICA (originally a show created by a Mormon) had such special significance attached thereto that the theme of "following a song played by a higher power, inside one's mind," because it was "not to mention" a theme I planned to put into the films I independently intended to make one day, I referred back to the movie CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND and the song my mom had played so much, from that movie, while I was growing up. Wherefore it couldn't just be Eric Kripke (whose uncle or something is the elite Stanford philosopher Saul Kripke, a Jewish man to boot...): but it was Stephen Spielberg, and George Lucas, and J. J. Abrams, and Mark Z. Danielewski, and Terry Brooks, and Brandon Sanderson, and L. E. Modessit(sp.?) Jr., and Greg Bear, and so on and fucking on... Everyone then, including, somehow, everyone around me personally for that matter.

Or it was at least enough people--on the Darknet? in the year 192,000-something AD? on Judgment Day, in retrospective observation of all history in the physical light of eternity?--for me to think, okay, well, here's what I've got to do:

The demons want me to write the ultimate book of darkness. The book that inspires the destruction of the world. The Jewish-Mormon-Catholic-Methodist-whatever alliance, knows this, and they want me to choose love's true power over the darkness of Apollyon. So, my choice was: find Dean, or become Sam, thought not Sam as he is in the show, technically, but Sam in the show as the demons wanted him to be. Satan's Vessel, the instrument of destruction par excellence.

In fact the choice was even worse: either become one of the Two Witnesses, or become the Antichrist, from the Christian Book of Revelation. Literally.

Of course a lot of me was like, "Heyo Kristian, just wait a second... or a minute... or an hour...? Like, um..." At the very least I kept telling myself, "God never commands us contrary to reason, and acting on absolute panic is acting contrary to reason, so God might be commanding me to go to Cedar City to find Dean but He is not telling me to go there on the fly."

And then I went and watched THE TRUMAN SHOW.

For those of you who don't recall, way back when I tried walking to Dean's house in Manchester, I got it into my head that I needed to "watch out for red trucks." I literally believed that red trucks were like little Eyes-of-Mordor for Apollyon, so Apollyon was sending red trucks around town to keep tabs on me or whatever. And then of course about a month after trying to walk to Dean's house, I went to Chicago. Now, when Truman realizes he's being filmed, his friend in a red truck follows him around and then Truman tries to escape on a bus to Chicago. Having managed to already more or less convince myself that every single book or movie or show or song or whatever, that I'd ever read/watched/listened-to/w/e, had to do with Dean and me, it was an entirely easy step for my mind to take, after witnessing Truman's plight and triumph, to the conclusion, "Are you ready, Kristian? Are you ready, Player 2? [Dean was Player 1...] Yes I am. Here we go."

So:

"Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered," I made my way to Cedar City. Actually, not very difficult to get there,* except emotionally. Do you know how I convinced myself to do it? I got another white-gold ring, the kind I like to swear eternal vows on, and promised on the ring, "I wish I *would* go to Cedar City to find Dean, right now." Because although I had a theoretical confidence that I was being filmed anyway just for the sake of this scenario with Dean, I also knew that when I swear vows on these rings, for some reason my subconscious accepts that as sufficient subjective input to override ordinary, objective reluctance towards doing what I've promised to do.

*[Surprise! You know how I griped so much about the ride to and from Chicago and how I'd probably never do such a thing ever again? That was supposed to be a trick. Even back then, I suspected I might be under observation of an irregular kind, so I decided that if I did end up going to Cedar City and I wanted to be kind of covert about it, I'd go through an elaborate process to secretly take a bus there. Eventually, I went through the process of half-faking a plane ticket purchase (if the ticket would have worked I'd have used it, but I sort of knew when I bought it that it wouldn't work if I tried to use it), among other things, to throw the "observers" off my track.]

[To be continued...]

Part 2: To Go Wherever Dreaming Goes

There is a legend in the Jewish religion about 36 individuals who are the exemplars of justice on the Earth. They change from age to age as they live and die and pass on their purpose through the generations, and it is rumored (within the rumor...) that they know not who they are, or at least not who each other would be... or least of all, at least, they ought not gloat over their status.

I thought I knew who I was, so I guessed that I wasn't one of the 36, but I thought I was in a class of my own like theirs. Among Mormon beliefs is the doctrine of the Apostle John and the Three Nephites, but unlike the 36 these figures are supposed to be immortal, hangers-on in history from the direct days and nights of Christ. To be sure, if Dean and I had ended up being the Two Witnesses, that would have been the class in question; however, as events unfolded...

I arrived in Cedar City at the eleventh hour: again, literally, because it was 11:01 PM (according to the bus ticket). This was also, then, the 23rd hour, so, yeah: but Dean was not awaiting me at the bus stop, and I knew not where to look, certainly not in the midst of the dark lightning storm on the distant horizon.* So I consulted the pattern of stories in my memory and thought, "Well, in one of The Familiar books, something important is supposed to happen at a Super 8 IIRC, so..." I got a room at the Super 8, which also had the distinction of being the nearest hotel to the bus stop, after all.

*[An omen of dire portents, I judged: the night I left the Chicago area, a storm of kindred spirit had wracked the sky far from the road.]

There, I proceeded to reflect on my argument for my theory about Dean, my life, whether it was 192,000-something AD or the end of time or who knows what. Then I fell asleep after thinking hard about Dean and me, together, and by "hard" I mean two things, then, just so you know, like, I thought if I focused on my attraction to him, it would help invoke that very Law of Attraction that Dean claimed, long ago, had brought us together.

Morning arrived with a BYU broadcast I put up on the in-room TV. Near the end of the broadcast, the speaker said, to his own audience but, I felt therefore, to me specifically as well: "You will find that all the little coincidences in your life, that led you to where you are, weren't so coincidental after all," but that the will of the Lord fixed this destiny for them--and me.

Like Sarah in LABYRINTH, then, I opted to get to my feet and just start walking, towards anything. I copied down phonebook info about two addresses listed for the surname "Henrie," since that was Dean's new(ish) last name after leaving Washington and I assume moving back in with his foster-care family whose surname was "Henrie." I also got the info for the local plastic company he worked for, but I didn't want to harass the locals themselves in their place of residence or try to find the plastic company building in the midst of all the other company buildings scattered around the industrialish district in town, so I proceeded to follow an otherwise totally arbitrary circuit around Cedar City instead.

First I went what the Visitor Center map* indicated as east. I came to the first edge of the near mountains, and it struck me: that dream I had long ago [on December 22nd, 2009, around 10 PM: yes, I remember all those details with such exactitude], the Dream as I called it even, as it was divided into three stages, each with its own location, corresponded, at last, to what was happening, as I had felt all that time ago and had tried to work out for myself since.

*[I arrived in town on a Saturday night so had a Sunday in the land of the Latter Day Saints to work out my salvation first, wherefore I ran constantly into the obstacle of various services being closed altogether, or at least earlier than on average.]

For the first part of the Dream was in the dire house from HOUSE OF LEAVES, Danielewski's first book. To either my right or my left I had the walls closing in, literally, because the house in the book changes its internal structure just like that, killing people in this fashion at times, and so anyway I sprinted from the collapsing hallway, to the entrance room, out the front door. ---The correspondence, then, was supposed to be the sense I had at work on one hand, and at home on the other, that these two halves of my life were not working out correctly, that indeed the situations were "closing in on" me*, so that I had nothing else to do but to either wait and die, or run like hell. I chose to run.

*[At work, I was having serious problems with my immediate management, and at home I was cycling through not only the superconspiracy set in 192,000-something AD, but fluctuating lesser conspiracy theories, too, which is what happens so much: my roommates have to deal with someone who thinks they are doing things, extremely weird and complex things, for either extremely good or extremely evil reasons, so that I treat them like they have to live up to the standards of the Apostles of Christ.]

After escaping the dark-blue house, I wandered an empty suburban thoroughfare for a while. It was sundown and an incline in the landscape appeared to my left. Correspondence: wandering Cedar City, especially towards nighttime.

Finally: I go up the incline and realize I'm dreaming, take control of the Dream, reshape its form (the only successful lucid dream of my entire life): after a nova of crystal water plashes across the atmosphere around me, I am in a vast field, mountains on the horizon. By the time I'm in Cedar City, I "realize" that the streets leading to the incline leading to the field crowned at the end with the summits of starlight, are the empty streets from the Dream, that now I'm there in the place where---

---I met him.

---Except I don't meet him in Cedar City, do I?---

---Only I met him in the Dream, did I?

---So again, I keep walking and walking, *not* realizing that I'm getting sunburned, wishing my intuition would kick in, feeling it kick in: "I should go to the theater," I decide.

Like I said in part 1, by now I'd reached a level of delusional belief where not only a relatively minor entertainer like Eric Kripke, but an infinitely famous fellow like Stephen Spielberg, was supposed to be in on the joke/test/game, so I figured the reason Jaime got me a copy of READY PLAYER ONE was to help me stay on course, which translates into: "I should watch the movie based on that book," as I hadn't done so yet.

And it's a stunning fucking movie, for sure.* Dean doesn't show up while I'm watching it, though; he's not in the lobby when the movie is done; I start wandering again, unsure. "Maybe the three keys in the story from the movie..." I begin to speculate.

*[The magical world-shifting scenes I instantaneously and absolutely mapped to the stage in the Dream where everything transformed into telestial liquid.]

"Maybe they're the three special treasures I brought with me": my autographed copy of the book THE WAY OF KINGS by Brandon Sanderson*, my newly bought copy of NAUSICAA OF THE VALLEY OF WIND by Hayao Miyazaki, and the white-gold ring. "If I place each treasure in a different place in town, to make a sort of supertriangle, that will open the door," or unlock it, or whatever, I hope. However, it's getting later, darker, and I don't want to spend the funds I have on another hotel room, yet I have to find a place to rest for the night since it will take another day of walking around Cedar City to go to the locations I can think to leave the treasures at.

*[A Mormon, with a million coincidences to his name moreover as well.]

So, to rewind again: while homelessly waiting for my tax return last year, I took the bus in town a lot, and one evening I was awaiting the bus, downtown, when a total Hobo Jesus manifested unto me. He had trouble concentrating like a sober person would, so I figure he was drunk, stoned, both, or something else, who knows (except Actual Jesus haha!) but at any rate he ended up telling me that he was from Utah, knew the Cedar City area, and that if I was ever there, I should look for something he called "the Drummer's Circle." Since he seemed drunk I further figured that if I made it to Cedar City, the place to follow up on this lead would be a bar.

Now I must remember once more: I'm in Utah, so in a town 2/3rds the size of Bremerton, with an airport in it to boot, a two-hour drive from Las Vegas, there are, nevertheless, but two bars. That close at 1 AM. That are obviously not going to be tailormade, either one, for a gay crowd. So, one of them was named "Toadz," the other "Mike's Tavern." Assuming that Dean corresponded to Dean, who corresponds to the archangel Michael, I opted to go to Mike's Tavern.

No, seriously, albeit I could just as well have flipped a coin or consulted some more spectacular trinket-oracle, I went with the whole names-of-SUPERNATURAL-characters logic again, to guide me.

Once at the tavern I place an order for Disaronno with straight lemon juice, but all they have is a generic Amaretto and some S&S mix. (I'd thought to copy the drink I had at my apartment, long ago on the night of the Dream.) A man from the pool-table section comes to the across-the-counter seating and notices THE WAY OF KINGS, says he tied reading it, asks me if he should, I say it's the best fantasy series (or author) I've probably ever read, maybe, and I somehow convey enough passion to apparently convince him with the force of the best and brightest LDS missionary, for he agrees to finish it now (a copy of his own, not mine, that is), and as he leaves he says, "My name's Kris," but I assume he says, "My name's Chris," so I don't want to be awkward and leave it at, "My name's Kristian," in case "Chris" is short for "Christian" instead of "Christopher," so I say, "My name is Kristian with a K," and he looks at me in alarm, murmurs, "My name is spelled with a K," says, "See you later," more audibly and departs.

The bartender has no clue what the Drummer's Circle is.

Eventually I am drunk enough to decide to call Dean's workplace and leave two long, rambling messages on the company answering machine. I do this after leaving the bar without meeting someone to try to crash at his or her place. Therefore, after my calls are done with, I find what seems to be an unused alleyway (there's a ton of paper and leaf debris piled down the way) to lie down in, though the cold gets to me after hours of trying to sleep and I end up marching to the other end of town to find a store open early enough (it's now around 4 or 5 AM, IIRC) for me to buy a sleeping bag from, after which purchase I march back uptown, or midtown I suppose, to the hill-mountains on the eastside then, into whose dawn-lit tracks I head to look for a secluded spot to rest at.

After useful, if wildly imperfect, naps, I wake to the midday sun, upon which awakening I discover the start of what ends up a week of sunburned, hence-peeling skin on my face. Frustrated to an extent, but unconcerned, with this specific problem, I call Dean's workplace again, to apologize for my intoxicated messages, and the person who answers me says that the usual receptionist isn't in today on account of her being sick so no one's heard my messages yet regardless. She chuckles a little as she talks, so I wonder quite if that's true, but in any event I am again left to wander in search, not of Dean directly, but of a way to send him a signal, if possible. So as the sun over town descends upon me for hours and hours of my white-and-black-clad walking,* I opt to head for the local LDS temple, that I'd seen the night I came into town, shining on a hill (literally aglow, with electric lamps all around), to deposit the first of the three treasure-keys nearby, on account of my having sent Dean a set of books, for his birthday, but lacking an address for him specifically, having sent them to the same temple to which I am now venturing.

*[One dimension of my delusions emerged from my stint as a homeless man, when the second of the three shady characters who approached me out there in the forest convinced me to wear white pants to replace the disheveled pair I'd worn my first month during the stint. Upon donning the new pair, a red-trucks-are-bad kind of thought came to me, but better: "When the time comes that I am clad in white, I will be ready to go." So to my later-pained surprise, behold, it came to pass that at Safeway I was given *20* sets of white shirts and white pants, along with a stark black jacket from Jaime and a black undershirt of my own, and black shoes from another two friends, so that the yin-yang/Rorschach getup I'd imagined myself in, was indeed my raiment on my true sojourn: that mystical "uniform for real life" I'd always spoken of.]

Some, if not all, readers might notice that I am skirting quite elliptically around the topic of my attempts to find a clue in the mystery of Dean by getting a hold of, not him or his extended (extensive...) family directly, but institutes/organizations with which he was publicly affiliated. Now is not yet the exact time to state the reason for this, but I promise, in but a little while, this secondary mystery will be made clear.

Without further adieu: I place THE WAY OF KINGS, with not just an autograph but the saying, from the hallowed oaths of the story, "Life before death!" penned there by Sanderson himself: I place this, that is, across from the great temple,* on an ornate ramp for the sidewalk to the left of the road going up past the temple. I believe that this is what I should do, though it tears at me to leave behind as special a copy of a book as that, one my friend got for me out of other, more normal hopes for my life. "Well I'm gonna have to leave my second ring here anyway, too," though, I know (or hope?), so I accept my loss as sacrifice.

*[Modeled after one of the, if not just *the*, first handful of LDS temples, in Illinois IIRC.]

Where to now? The easiest massive triangle I can describe across the city, using the temple for one point and two commensurate structures for the others, would now, therefore, come from the temple + the theater that I already went to + the university. Having assigned the book to the one, I assign the DVD to the theater and the ring to the university, though I end up inverting that order in fact. (More on that later. (And as I write this now, I realize that it sounds really unrealistic, like, did I really think that I could open a portal or resurrect someone from the dead... by... doing...?))

Now the theater I went to on the first day had, like any regular theater, posters outside for the movies that were playing at the time so I happened to discover that a movie called LOVE, SIMON had just "come out," like sort of literally: a flick about a gay high school guy who comes out in an unfortunate way under unusual circumstances. On day two, then, I opt to watch this movie. (I even use "going back to the theater" to correspond to "retracing my steps as the key to a key from READY PLAYER ONE.") As it pans out, I am the only person in the entire auditorium, so I get to cry a lot, though to note I cried a lot during READY PLAYER ONE, too. Anyway, the film builds up to a scene where the guy publicly says he's waiting for his mystery man to reveal himself at last (versus their online superpenpal-friendship) by going to a ferris(sp?) wheel after a theatrical production at school, to sit with the main character on the wheel, a scene resolved "at the last moment," of course. So, praying and weeping (of course...), clasping my ring like a tentacle of the Lord (now we've evolved into Cthulhu Jesus...), I convince myself, "Okay, this is it, he's gonna show up now, when the movie is over..." He does not show up.

Back to the bar, though now this is just to drown out my sorrows. I mean, I don't leave the DVD in the auditorium, and I'm not even sure why I don't do that. Instead, after getting not quite as drunk as before, I call Dean's work yet again, this time to leave my number, and to apologize/explain myself some more. Then I go to the hill-mountain to look for my sleeping bag, but it's dark and I'm drunk and I pace the lower slope of the landscape for a grip without luck, seeing deer skeletons and cactus groves but neither the fulfillment of my lost Dream nor the place I left my half-camp reposed. "Back to the store," I opt for, thinking to take the directish route to Providence Center (the mall district at the southern core of town) instead of the rounded main road down there; however, by now I suppose the local police might be wondering why this strange outsider* is wandering their land day and night, for several days and nights by now, as they stop to talk to me on my walk, expressing the belief that Dean might not have really been named "Dean" but that maybe I'd been scammed somehow, though as I know in fact he did not ask me to do anything such as go a thousand miles to find him I know this wasn't due to a scam, exactly. Anyway, after concluding that I am not a threat to the community, the officers also express the belief that I am not on the right road to the store and they redirect me to... that very long road that I'd expressly intended to avoid tonight.

*[Unfortunately for me, it just so happened that a pamphlet at the Visitor Center reported an upcoming production, sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints itself no less, as part of Cedar City's Shakespeare/related atmosphere, of a play called "The Foreigner," whose circumstances as described were easily mapped by my delusional mind, onto my life.]

I trudge the long, sad road, increasingly less certain (haha!) that this absurd* quest is working out. On a whim I set the DVD down in a random street-accessible part of the university, with my movie tickets for READY PLAYER ONE and LOVE, SIMON pinned by a sticker on the DVD, to the case, and the words "DEAN BROWN HENRIE" printed on the upper ticket, facing up, my idea being that if the wind doesn't disentangle this thread(...), then soon enough, come daytime, someone will find the DVD and then wonder who this Dean character is supposed to be--if, that is, of course, the finder didn't already "miraculously" know the fellow. And from there...

*[I had known in advance, actually, how absurd this all would have to be, but I also actually spent about a year to now, explicitly believing the following declarative sentence to be true: "The more absurd an idea is, the closer to truth it is in this situation; so the most absurd idea possible, is the one that must be true."]

I waste more money on another sleeping bag and a coffee energy drink for the morning ("We drink way too much iced coffee," Simon says in the movie), head back to the eastside highland, and lie down in the thrashing bushes and grass closer to the road than my prior site (I don't intend to go stumbling up the slope in the dark), whereupon I proceed to drift in and out of focus as the wind howls forth from the sky beyond the mountains, surging across the city's edge like a tide, haunting me, encasing me in the awe and dread of the Holy Spirit of God (wind being a symbol of this entity).

By morning, sadness has dethroned enthusiasm* within me, and besides a spontaneous wish to go to Angel's Landing (quite a ways out of town, at Zion National Park or something), I feel myself emptied of almost all hope. Having told the police the night before that I would leave town today, but having no real will to leave the sun-blasted hill-mountain on which I am resting, I realize that if I just wait here, with no water or food, with only a supercaffeinated drink and a pack of cigarettes to dehydrate myself even more with, then for all my walking these last few days and all of how sunburned I am, and for all of how many tears I've shed from the hotel to the theater to the temple and all besides, then, well... and... Dean's workplace--former workplace, I now instantly enough learn--calls.

*[Two other "Dreams" helped guide me to this adventure, one of which I will now report. Simply enough, over half a year ago, I asked myself how I would feel if I actually ever did just up and run off to Cedar City, and soon enough had a dream where I did just that, assuming within the dream that the situation was real, and feeling excited as fuck about it. I reminded myself of that "Dream," the day I left for Cedar City; it came half-true; but it was too late, in the end, when I also reminded myself that in that "Dream," I never actually had reached Dean.]

(To be continued...)

Part 3: Journey Before Destination

"Dean used to work here, and we... have no way of getting a hold of him... Are you okay? If there's anything you need, please call us."

Voicemail end...

Dean's birthday is February 26th. In 2016, on that day, I went to the theater in my hometown to see two movies. In 2018, before I decide to go to Cedar City, I decide to send some books to Dean for his birthday, to help me decide whether to go further. When I am in Cedar City, on my second-to-last day there, I see two movies in one day, in memory of my earlier attempt to magically reconnect with this guy. But am I too late?

"The only person with that name, in the area, near Beaver [a town near Cedar City], is dead," the officer of the temple had told me, after receiving my shipment of books in Dean's name and wondering why in heaven and on Earth someone had shipped books like that to an LDS temple. The officer also said that this indeterminate "Dean Brown" was an older man, so maybe he wasn't the one I was thinking of; but I supposed maybe not, too.

Wherefore now...

The sun transcends any red truck as far as a facsimile of Sauron's Eye could go. My training for such conditions, my time as a homeless man, tames me more, calls me to just lie there in the sun, waiting either for Dean to decide to appear at last, or for my life to end under the fiery light, for had not HOUSE OF LEAVES explicitly promised, "And if you should lose yourself, at least take solace in the absolute certainty that you will perish"? And besides, I think, I can't go back: I have the money but not the desire at all, not even because of the people or town I would be going back to so much as what I would go back to within myself: the man who was foreordained to damnation's final dishonor, he who would be the ultimate mortal emissary of untruth. At least, this is a reason I give myself, for giving up, for doing nothing anymore but waiting, tired, so tired, my heart a ridiculous, perfect fusion of hope and despair, life and death, journey and destination, creation and the emptiness of nothingness.

One recurring explanation I tried out for my supposed supernatural powers, revolved around a particularly mystical application of exotic quantum physics concepts. Because of the "observer" theme in my transdelusional theory, I left my hometown without telling anyone in advance on the ground that Apollyon might be able to listen to me, through them, and if he knew what I was up to, he would "observe" the Schrodinger's City to which I was going, so to speak, and collapse the wave-function of Cedar City before I got there, and so then I would arrive in the universe where Dean had already died, after all.* Of course, if I was always being filmed, I wasn't sure how I would be able to avoid being noticed, and I wasn't even terribly sneaky, as it turned out, in my means of leaving my hometown, but anyway... I gave everyone over there the silent treatment for days, oscillating between, "They already know where I am anyway," and, "If they don't, they shouldn't, not yet..."

*[Besides the Miyazaki film I brought with me being my favorite film of all I've ever seen, the reason I brought that with me was due to my advance suspicion that Dean might be dead. But you know, my immediate judgment on hearing that wasn't, "Well, that's how that story ends," but, "Well, I guess I'm going to have to resurrect him from the dead, literally." Since Nausicaa is resurrected at the end of the movie occurrently in question, I figured it would be a strong source of signiconic power [a Danielewskian concept], that I could somehow actually channel like the Force or Stormlight or something. It didn't help, of course, that a Safeway coworker of mine was able to spontaneously guess my intent on this score, a month before I set off to Utah: I figured, again, "I'm possibly being filmed," except this had to be in the year 192,000-something AD, since I hadn't even written down, "I plan to bring Dean back from literal death," I'd only thought it to myself, so the "observers" for the film about Dean and me had to have access to technology with which to read my mind. Classic schizo stuff I know, and knew, but again, I thought that if I came up with a ridiculous enough theory, God Himself would be so entertained by the joke that He would make it come true, for such unfailing love is the reason this world was made, is it not?]

An anonymous number calls me as I wait in the mountains. Hoping it's Dean, somehow, I answer it. I hear the man say he's with the police and that Stephen came in to the office trying to file a missing-person report, and my reaction is, out loud, "Stephen's in Cedar City?!" But as the conversation continues I realize the officer is in my hometown.

Wave-function collapse...?

From this point on, not much to say. I ended up calling the Cedar City police to tell them that Jaime was coming to get me and that I was dehydrated from my quasi-suicide attempt in the wilderness so I'd be in town getting water and maybe going to the movies again while waiting for Jaime. This was after the night after my hometown police called me on Stephen's behalf; she'd called me in the morning, she was very determined to come get me, that I shouldn't just give up. I thought, well, I don't know... I never know... Why did Dean leave without saying goodbye? Didn't I offend him or hurt him, if he would do that to me? For he was the best of all of everyone I've ever known in my own life, I swear. Maybe I'm wrong about that, objectively, but I don't have any subjective evidence that I am. ---Anyway, between these phone calls there was me awakening in the middle of the night, delirious, determined myself not to give up, at least not quite then: I was so fucking thirsty that I got right up and started marching towards town, though since I'd told the police I'd be way, way out of town by then I only stopped to try the fountains in this place Canyon Park by the central-street bridge into Cedar City before discovering that municipalities in the Utah outback have sufficient reason not to leave water pumping into park fountains in the middle of the night [the mountains being interlaced with desert, after all] and proceeding to drink from the river that flows on the eastside: the river half-red with the clay drawn with the water, that is, that tasted faintly of iron or copper or something to me, water I threw up within an hour of getting back to my sleeping bag. But by then I'd made enough stupid decisions for drinking ruddy water to be, at the least, a kind of sufficient punishment for my anterior unreason, like, I just had to get some water into me, and since it wasn't toxic or poisoned, even if impure, the river was all I had going for me if I didn't want to wander into a gas station in the middle of the night with half the skin on my face sloughing off from the murderous sunlight.

Besides that: that day I went to the movies twice, first to see I CAN ONLY IMAGINE, which is about a Christian rock song about a guy thinking about what it would be like to meet Christ at the end of time or all, just so you know--and I did know the song itself already, to boot--and two hours after that movie got out I went to see LOVE, SIMON again, "retracing my steps" again, and there was just me (and God, haha) in the auditorium at the matinee time, but this time I saw the gay-guy flick with about seven other people sitting in the rows behind me, "All the queers in Cedar City," one of them joked. I can only imagine that I am not only the only person who would ever go to see these movies on the same day as part of such a strange journey away from "home," but see these two such movies *for the same reason,* namely out of hope that Dean would just happen to finally be there, for the film I was watching, whichever one, and then for me, as I was there for him, after all (did I do the right thing to go looking for him, after all--isn't it right for people to have looked for me?).

And: the last night in town. Sleeping-bag Land, back higher up the second or third hill-mountain down Central Street, across the eastern bridge. When I left the theater, the wind had picked up so apocalyptically that I thought to myself, "The Windy City had nothing on this." In Sleeping-bag Land, the sky itself transforms into the wind, no rain (ah luck!) but still, have you ever felt vertigo for the sky? Like that sense of falling over an edge, when you just look at an edge, except you feel this directly into outer space: that's what I felt, lying in the rocky fissure in the hill-mountain, a dessicated tree before me and the cataclysm of the atmosphere submerging me in a sonic ocean, the music of the city and the land, their spirit, and I have to confess again: it was so beautiful there, I would have loved to stay there way longer, maybe not "forever" but maybe "close" to that, if that sounds possible at all, so to speak. It wasn't even the specific environment (demi-desert) or the size of any buildings or names or facts or the red river or the manifold hotels (so, so, so many hotels) or the lighthouse or temple at night, or even that great, utter wind, or anything else so much, except that I kept trying to feel what it would be like, kind of, to be Dean, living there way longer, knowing those streets even more than I did--though to be sure I walked as if to hell and back in Cedar City--knowing the flow of things from the inside, the way the university culture mixed with the church culture and the southern Utah St. George/Zion National Park/Las Vegas proximities, and other things besides, so much, a constellation of glory, with a diadem of mountains and pure starlight, the wind a chrismation unto itself, a baptism of the Spirit par excellence, to those who would listen, yes, but I had to listen, to wait, to hope, and so I just hoped that by the time Jaime got there, Dean would have too, and she'd get to meet him there, which would save a decent amount of time later, or rather would have saved such time, since I did assume though that if I met up with Dean and it all worked out, more or less, he'd go back with me to my hometown for a few days to help settle my affairs there and then we'd return to Utah, and then start the next Dungeons and Dragons campaign on the list, "The Two Witnesses and the Holy City," though what that city would be (besides Chicago) I had little clue.

I left my second ring at the theater in the end, after the LOVE, SIMON showing. I almost got a little blank booklet kind of thing from the local branch of Deseret Books (the LDS Church bookstore) as a souvenir, but changed my mind on that score.

He never showed up. I don't even know if that's surprising or not. Like, I depended on a way-out-there theory to justify doing this specific thing, so shouldn't it be no surprise, even to me, since I knew how way-out-there it was, and depended on its being so, no less, to try to justify myself? And yet I am surprised it didn't work at all. Like, the most closure I could read it into is: well, if he's dead, I probably know that now. Or, I as good as know it, since at this stage my inability to know what happened to him is tantamount to him being dead, or whatever.

Due to my previously inadequate geographical knowledge of the Cedar City area, I had long imagined that Dean's post about being at Angel's Landing coincided with the probable very date of his return to Utah. Knowing better, I realized that when some of Dean's friends, online, had replied to that post with questions like, "When did you move back?" or, "Why didn't you tell anyone?" or whatever, it could just as well have been after as much time as I had spent so far away from the same town Dean left behind. Now I was clearly not even actually as close to Dean as those respondents to that one post, so it is clear that he would not have had any more reason to inform me in advance of his intentions than he would have had with respect to those respondents, whereas the people around me do have an expectation of me, to explain where I am going, to them, as much as possible, so maybe it's not the same thing, but I felt like if it might have been, then with the hometown police having already gotten a hold of me, it was okay for me to tell people back in my hometown where I was, and even, then, that I had given up, and what that meant under the circumstances...

... because guess what, if Dean killed himself, and it had something to do with me, then I sure as fuck am not ashamed of what I did in going to find him (if I had any chance of stopping that--or if I at least had once had the chance to, a chance I'd lost to homelessness or the absurd job at Safeway or whatever), and how I went, unannounced and willingly, if necessary, to my own death; no, I'm not fucking ashamed at all. I don't care. What does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul thereby? Only those who do not seek merely to live will find life for themselves and others anyway, as it is.

:::TERMINUS:::

Dear Mighara, I haven't read what you've written here yet, except for the very beginning and and some sad sentences at the end... I will go ahead & grapple with reading some of it at some point.
I know you want someone to do the courtesy of hearing what is on your mind.

But first I want to say: YOUUUURE HEREEEEE!
And I am glad.
I've missed you.
The Watch has missed you.
And worried about you.
I can't say I worried about you, because I'm never supposed to worry, so I can't. <-- HAHAHA, not!
Yes, I worried about you.
Your return makes me rejoice, whatever state you come here in.

Yeah, I just say so many strange things, thinking they make so much sense, I base incredible predictions on what amounts to Kantian poetry and it's like... I don't know, after all, though. I just don't know. I hope it is good for me to say things here... I mean, like, I felt, after my last-posted insane notion of course obviously did not come to pass in any way, shape, or form, that it would be worthless for me to say anything anymore, because really, who was I to say that anything I said had value, then and now? My only defense became this entirely weirder train of thought I rode over an infinite number of cliffs, right into Cedar City in the end, or there and back.

I don't quite know whether the following sentence is true: "During this time period, I must have suspended my use of objective reason and evidence virtually in its entirety, or almost so, or something like that at least." I filtered my ideas about what was actually happening in the world outside my hometown, through the books/shows/etc. coming in from the outside, like, these are the problems going on in the rest of the world, even if those places are close by, and... well... In honor of The Wheel of Time, I referred to this magical structure as "the Pattern," and in order to find a religious explanation for it, I opted for, "It's some form of some gift of the Holy Spirit, to know the Pattern."

To some extent, I did reliably tell myself: okay, so all this that I'm theorizing, so extremely, is arguably probably false, but, so is a lot of what I'm told a lot of the time, ordinarily, anyway, like I am in a trustworthiness vacuum, seemingly, even as pertains to me in myself, for had I not just spewed forth gibberish at times, unrelentingly? Or, if not quite gibberish or bullshit or lying at all, still, some form of defiance of actual understanding, in the service of an image of miraculously transcendental intuition.

Mighara Sovmadhi wrote:Yeah, I just say so many strange things, thinking they make so much sense, I base incredible predictions on what amounts to Kantian poetry and it's like... I don't know, after all, though. I just don't know. I hope it is good for me to say things here... I mean, like, I felt, after my last-posted insane notion of course obviously did not come to pass in any way, shape, or form, that it would be worthless for me to say anything anymore, because really, who was I to say that anything I said had value, then and now? My only defense became this entirely weirder train of thought I rode over an infinite number of cliffs, right into Cedar City in the end, or there and back.

I love you for saying this paragraph!
Especially the metaphor in, "this entirely weirder train of thought I rode over an infinite number of cliffs"...

I know what it's like trying to decide "should I say this or not?" obsessively.
Life's rough. Life's confusing.
And words sometimes seem like things people expect to crazy-powerful.

Mighara wrote:I don't quite know whether the following sentence is true: "During this time period, I must have suspended my use of objective reason and evidence virtually in its entirety, or almost so, or something like that at least." I filtered my ideas about what was actually happening in the world outside my hometown, through the books/shows/etc. coming in from the outside, like, these are the problems going on in the rest of the world, even if those places are close by, and... well... In honor of The Wheel of Time, I referred to this magical structure as "the Pattern," and in order to find a religious explanation for it, I opted for, "It's some form of some gift of the Holy Spirit, to know the Pattern."

Well, in the first part... about suspending use of objective reason and evidence... man, that's rough.
And by now I bet you can think of reasons why that would've happened, 'n stuff.

I guess one of the themes I notice is the big epic stories... well, there's a reason why those stories are so appreciated throughout history.
I think most people would like our lives to have that level of adventure, and life is a little boring, so we'd love to spice it up by discovering amazing powers.

Nonetheless, everything that happens in your life is significant.
Your life is significant.
No one else can live that life.

Your suffering is significant.
And it has a connection to God, and though it probably mostly seems to disconnect you from others now... suffering can connect you to others in a way that is incredibly powerful.

All of us have an opportunity to bless the wider world.
Nothing need be wasted.
Sometimes seemingly small and mundane actions will yield a good crop of gifts for many.

Mighara wrote:...arguably probably false, but, so is a lot of what I'm told a lot of the time, ordinarily, anyway, like I am in a trustworthiness vacuum, seemingly...

a trustworthiness vacuum... this is an idea I identify with too!
I said in my alarm, "All mankind are liars." Psalm 116:11

Hey, I've gotten through post #1, and it surprises me that your mom was really fascinated with the X-files.
And I was thinking about the game co-workers were playing assigning each-other characters from different stories... I was thinking about that group dynamic, and the sort of plusses and minuses...

Thus annihilation means, in the Buddhist philosophy, only a dispersion of matter, in whatever form or semblance of form it may be; for everything that bears a shape was created, and thus must sooner or later perish i.e. change that shape.

Therefore, as something temporary, though seeming to be permanent, it is but an illusion, Maya; for eternity has neither beginning nor end, the more or less prolonged duration of some particular form passes, as it were, like an instantaneous flash of lighting.

--A

"man, that's rough": haha, yeah, like, I felt like Mr. Reason, and then I think of how I'm making my decisions, and I... don't know, again. A whole city's worth of Schrodinger's cats, haha.

That story-character game was... it ended up being competitive in a weird way, almost, like, whoever ended up being the "hero" was of course, therefore, the "actual leader" of the group, at the time, or something. So initially it was my friend Josh who was paired with Harry Potter; and then when it came to LOST, since no one was ever conclusively assigned to Jack (I was the only one who voted for Drew, and no one else agreed with the vote on account of my being irrationally enamored with the man), it created this slight tension for some of us, some of the time (mostly, though, because of my obsessive correlation of Drew with Jack, haha).

General issues of honesty:

On the one hand, I saw a report once that said on average, people tell 200 lies a day. I don't know how that's possible, exactly; I mean, it's not mathematically self-contradictory in a philosophical sense, but I feel like it would take a lot of effort to come up with 200 false things to deliberately say, or whatever, even to oneself, each day, or something... Anyway, on the other hand too though, philosophically moreover, there's this concept called "the principle of charity," which says we ought to believe that most people's beliefs are mostly true or at least mostly within reason, on the ground that the meanings of words depends on the meanings of entire statements and other sentences, so that too much falsity on the sentential level, in a society, would spell the end of language altogether in that society; wherefore until we arrive in a land where all is as Babel again...

Yet it's also, then, that there's lying, self-deception, exaggeration, idle words, etc. but I feel like there's specific, similar category, that relates to schizophrenic/paranoid/delusional patterns of thought, and maybe it's just the category "delusional" but inasmuch as that word is itself an open question, as it were, I'm looking for something more... descriptive...

---
As for the illusions of life proceeding and dissipating... Ah, illusion... I feel like I could convince myself to still wait for this person forever somehow, though geographically there's really no way for me to do anything more extreme than what I've done by now.

How about an exaggeration of a cogent perception to an unhealthy extreme? Your initial perceptions and interpretations can be logical, but the schizophrenic tendency to free associate diverse and unrelated concepts can create, in your mind, an scenario both exciting and terrifying because of a natural dopamine response. Or, in simpler terms, you start out good but take it too far, because you don't have enough limiters. Please don't take that as an attack. Every time you write, I can see how difficult it is to contain the free association. The results can be both brilliant and destructive. I hope you find a way to limit the destructive side.

^^^^^^^^

What he said

Ive read lots of your posts Mig and you are a very interesting poster. You demonstrate a genuine desire to seek and explore concepts, ideas and arguably.. truths of a sort. Which is very admirable and its clear you are a deep well read thinker. Possibly even an academic I dont know. I find youre writing challenging to read and follow .. which is possibly a reflection only of my lack, not yours.

Khal made a good and affectionate observation .. and I would add .. is there a way you can introduce thoughts in smaller lots at a time lol so they are easier chunks to digest.

For me to read ALL of that text above ... with limited white space lol ... And I had started but got a little lost and unsure where we were heading .. lol

You have a lot to say .. and thats a good thing.. do you think you could ease us in .. well forget us .. ease me in ... lol .. if I have time later I will give the above narrative another crack lol

You know Ive been trying to introduce a concept lately .. its called plain English. Its a crazy notion that adapting language and difficult concepts to more simple forms enables their enhanced communication capability and ultimate understanding.

Call it crazy .. but the Australian government writing style guide has adopted this standard .. perhaps a not a little ironic ... as a benchmark for all public communiques. Or the KISS principle Keep It Simpke Stupid .. its a dinky Di genuine concept. You may have heard of it. Also it has been proven that a wall of text negatively affects readability. And that it is useful to include white spaces ie paragraphs and returns.

So why

Well elite professions like those of the sciences, theology, philosophy, law, etc .. retain an exclusivity over their use of specific language ..the language of science, Latin, Ancient Greek, mathematics, physics etc.

The challenge is in finding common ground and common means to reach the largest number of your audience with the highest rate of comprehension success.

So in other words .. the challenge is finding a simple way to convey complex meaning.

Its obviously not as simple as it sounds .. but highly worthwhile if you hope an audience will follow your meaning. Surely thats the goal of written communication. And it avoids having to clarify, reclarify and further address a bazillion questions from readers who may not have got your messaging after the first or second read.

Its an idea

@Khaliban: the most destructive aspect of this was my inertia near the end... I had originally planned to go about all this much more sensibly, and it galls me so much to know that my original plan would have worked out more or less perfectly (factoring out the Dean variable). Like, rent was way cheaper than where I live (375 a month versus usually 1000 a month, for a single-bedroom apt.), there were tons of places hiring, including fast-food places where they were offering 10/11 an hour (comparable to WA minimum wage), the Shakespeare stuff meant the town would've been great to work on film production and the like in... Not to mention, if I wanted to make a movie or something set in Israel (say), I was in the best place besides Israel itself to do so...

Anyway, having settled for the non-delusional explanation of things (Dean is dead), I am not reconciled to it, but that would have to be my next step, then.

@Skyweir:

You know those disclaimers at the end of almost all movies or in the prepages of almost all works of fiction? "Any resemblance to actual persons, events, etc. is coincidental," or all? Now imagine you one day decided that not just one example of the disclaimer is false, or a few of them---but all of them, that every story was actually secretly a coded message to some select group of people, who are meant to be the main characters for the story of the real world itself. Now, it's superarrogant to think this way, especially if I thought I was the main main character, so to speak; but to assuage my conscience on this score, I was like, "Well, Dean's way more handsome and all than I am so he's obviously the actual core main character, I am just going to be his best friend," or whatever.

EDIT @Skyweir, round 2

Here's another way to think of it, how I used to think of it (when I was 20 yrs. old and less than half the weirdness had gone down, haha):

There's a mental disorder known as Munchausen's(sp.?) syndrome or something, where a person falsely believes/maintains that they are physically ill in some way (an infection or cancer or whatever) and actually induces the illness to some extent, IIRC. The by-proxy version is where the disordered person covertly induces the physical part of the condition, in another person.

Now a Messiah complex is when someone delusionally thinks they're the Chosen One or whatever. A by-proxy version of this would be someone being treated like a literal Chosen One, by some other delusional person or set of persons. In my case, inner temptations to feeling exalted in some special way mingled with the religious illusions and emotional depression of various people around me, so that their "we need a Messiah, so we'll try to make this guy become that" feeling melded with my "I AM superspecial, maybe not quite the Messiah but maybe close" feeling, and... off to Cedar City I went.

Superbackground question: how did I get around the fact that I have extremely advanced theoretical knowledge of the concept of schizophrenia, delusions of reference, etc.? Because I kept thinking, "This knowledge SHOULD prevent me from crossing the threshold..." However, instead, I decided the following two things:

(A) The diagnosis of schizophrenia was itself fictional, meant to confuse people who were interacting with the Spirit/VALIS [Philip K. Dick's construct had a place in the full form of my theory]/w/e, or cover for them, or something like that.

(B) Therefore, all "actual" schizophrenic people were not actually schizophrenic. For example, I decided that John Nash was right: higher powers WERE messing with/involved in his life, for the EXACT reason he thought: his game-theory work played a role in the doctrine of mutually assured destruction, so it was actually pivotal to the fate of the Earth, etc. Since Nash died on the day that the first The Familiar book came out, I figured, "Oh no, Apollyon is trying to kill the people the Spirit was trying to guide," or whatever.

Accordingly, I also started trying to find a supernatural explanation for the lives of everyone from Dante Alighieri to Brandon Sanderson, how they were all part of this "invisible church" that God was protecting across history, to redeem the fallen churches we see divided from each other in our world, etc. And just so long as I wasn't singling myself out as the only/the main example of this "church" and its agents--as long as I didn't exalt myself too much, though I slipped over that edge when I read The Children of the Last Days and assumed that I was "probably" one of the Two Witnesses--I felt like I wasn't being too weird about it all.

Well I admire that gumption. Good for you .. some would not go on such a venture. Im sorry you didnt find Dean.

I sincerely apologise for my own rambling blurb on narrative. Many times Ive been perplexed in a variety of threads where their meaning is a mystery to me. I reread what Id written after finishing your posts. Definitely comes across rude and arrogant ..


Are you settled somewhere now. Hope so.

I did come back and read all your posts .. there are parts that probably those that know you, understand or know your backstory .. will get, that I dont.

Glad youre back .. look forward to seeing you around
Cheers
sky

Well, to make an excuse for why I would continue posting after I found proof that I'm an utter fool---I mean, I have wild first-order beliefs like

• [a] Chicago will be destroyed on Halloween, by a cult of pseudo-Christians who will either smuggle/assemble a nuclear device from out-of-country using a Netherlands/South Africa connection of some kind, or who will somehow manage to hijack a Trident submarine.
  
  Entire cities have quantum wave-functions that demons can collapse.
  
  [c] There is a conspiracy afoot to destroy the universe, if possible, using the CERN accelerators.
  
  [d] There is a conspiracy afoot to take over the multiverse, in the form of nanobots small enough to travel through quantum wormholes and propagate throughout the entire multiverse.

and then second-order (beliefs-about-beliefs) beliefs like:

• [a] A 99.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999...%-probably-a-Facebook-glitch counts as material evidence that I am actually not living anywhere close to the year 2018 AD.
  
  In at least one special kind of circumstance (aside from absurdity itself), absurdity is a direct and overriding criterion of reality.
  
  [c] Demons can influence the beliefs of people who have sex outside of marriage [also a first-order howler]. Effect on me: I am superevasive with my roommates, in the otherwise most undetectable manner, because they can't have the faintest clue why I don't trust them [because they've had sex outside of marriage!].

I think maybe schizophrenia, if it is a real category of mental states, like an objectively integrated unit of processes with fairly discrete triggers or sums or whatever, would be comparable to cancer. Now, normally, it's hard to track the "growth" of this cancer, because usually such people confine the maps of the growth, the records of their increasingly complex theories, to things that do not quite lend themselves to preparatory analysis by outsiders, so to speak. However, as Khaliban has particularly noted, there is a "free association" element in my thinking that is at the heart of the issue (albeit if it's the only heart, I don't know, or who knows?), here, so, I feel like I can make the following excuse:

Posting a record of my thoughts, how they have formed into assertions like [a]-[d]/[a]-[c] in the above, in a relatively public place, will give some analyst, some slight, extra insight, into the phenomenon of the "growth" under discussion, because first of all the Internet lends itself quite well to a more tangible graphing of the growth in the sense that:

Let's say the schizophrenic theorist has a choice between focusing on self-expression using corkboard with photos and scribbled notes connected by nails and rubber bands on the one hand, or using a forum with various image-insert possibilities (even if unused) &c. If they opt for the latter, I suspect the traces of their thought-growth will be slightly more noticeable, maybe. I mean I realize that even all of what I've said in all the posts I've posted here together, all the superkaleidoscopic posts that is, is less than half of all my thoughts, my detailed "arguments," on these matters.

Like the Sam/Dean/Frodo/Michael/Jacob loop, not the only such loop at all, and not even just with respect to this one case (of the actual Dean), but that meant I had to later explain how the previous person I thought to be superimportant, *was* still somehow just as important as I thought but in a different enough way to allow me to reimagine some new person as occupying the role the other one was supposed to.

[But the "logical" requirements, or grammatical ones, if you will, for that dual/transoccupation of a role to be real, themselves involved a labyrinth-inside-a-labyrinth of other explanation, and it all flashed and flowed through my mind like a river of light, literally, as in I didn't even need to make any mental effort anymore to connect A to B to C to X to Y to Z to letters in every other alphabet under the sun, and fictional ones besides. The river already had the letters in a row, and the rows were moving of their own accord; the only choice for me was to close my eyes or not, and they were already open, so...]

I don't think a Trident sub could make it into the Great Lakes undetected. Besides, Chicago? I'm in Chicago. It's not worth destroying.

A quantum wave function large enough to damage a city would exceed local energy density limits. We don't have enough mass in the solar system for that.

The power output of the CERN accelerator is an infinitesimal fraction of the power generated by the sun in the time it took you to read this sentence. If particle collisions could destroy the universe, the first star to ignite would have done it 14 billion years ago. As far as universe destroying goes, CERN can't do diddly poop.

Quantum wormholes collapse in the presence of matter. You couldn't get an electron through, let alone a whole robot. And, no, you can't build a robot smaller than an electron. An electron is a point particle. Smaller than an electron, literally, does not exist.

As far as I know, my original dilemma was:

Dean stopped talking to me for some reason... So either I offended him, or something happened to him.

No evidence I ever acquired indicated that the first option was true; in fact, all evidence I had on that score seemed to be for the opposite.

Now, having spent X amount of time wishing I would finally meet a guy to actually go out with, and all that jazz, well, I didn't want it to be that "something happened to him," unless it was something I could do something about/make a difference to. If he died randomly, or killed himself because he felt abandoned by me, or who knows what, then, well, I didn't want that to be what happened, and did not consider it even faintly as true.

So I had to think of some other "something" that could have happened to him, and eventually I made up an explanation that would allow me to accept that he was dead, but only because the explanation for why he had ever been alive at all, and in my presence no less, also allowed me to believe, "Well, if I can protect entire cities from nuclear weapons, using magic power, then by God and Hell I should be able to bring one dead man back, no?"

Now, this all put me in a position of extreme potential guilt: let's say I convince myself that, to save Dean, I have to accomplish task X by time Y, and then time Y passes and I haven't accomplished task X: if I then accept Dean's death, I would accept it so that I felt to blame for it, as if I could have made a difference (e.g. by not alerting "contaminated" people of my trip to Cedar City). However, while Halloween was my main "deadline" for such a notion, I then flipped over from "it's mostly God and the angels and demons" to "it's mostly a cinematic hologram that Jewish directors are working on, inspired by God but not necessarily under His direct(!) supervision, so to say," since at least if it was the second scenario that I was in, then Dean's death could be reimagined as a "death" in a script, something for me to merely bypass by fulfilling the intervening space in the script.

For narrative consistency, though, I had adopted and would continue to adopt more ideas into the fold, though. For example, I could have settled on these two coincidences:

• The resident Port Orchard [my hometown] author, Debbie Macomber(sp.?), named the fictional form of Port Orchard, in her books, "Cedar Cove."
  
  Cedar City has a large theatrical-production sector/demographic/w/e.

... so as to "infer", "Some university-centered group operating between Port Orchard and Cedar City, is making a postmodern cinematic production, about Dean and me, etc." and this would have been fairly plausible, especially compared to what I ended up going with as a...

... well, explanation, again. Because on the side, or along the same line, or whatever, odd scenarios played out around me, involving other people telling me that I was being observed, tested, Chosen by God, etc. and aside from, "I live in a low-education region, where people are more superstitious, so they're misperceiving my minimal extra competence at tasks X, Y, and Z as evidence for me having transcendent powers," I felt like the reason people kept treating me that way was because it might be true after all. [I even had a "reversion rule," so to say: "Directly accepting these assertions would be arrogant, but if I accept these assertions and redirect them to Dean [as Player 1 or whatever], that will show that I am not believing these extreme claims out of self-aggrandizement or whatever, but because they are actually (if now indirectly...) true," namely no matter what people thought of me as far as my "powers" went, well, I was sure Dean had powers, and as long as I kept trying to express humility in relation to him, I was "exempt" from the charge of arrogance. [Although indeed I made it even easier for myself, by coming up with a whole slew of people, albeit all of whom I expected to meet personally with one day, who would be part of this epic team that was Chosen by God and the Jewish directors and all...]

But anyway, I like science, so I like the idea of coming up a falsifying experiment for all that, and the Halloween experiment didn't work out because I went and read that damn book REDWOOD, haha, but I figured, then, this Cedar City adventure would do the trick... And, like, it did and it didn't because now I think, well, he's gone, the answer I waited for forever, and turned into the answer to everything afterwards, too, is gone, and I know people like to talk about standing up for oneself or not investing too much in others, but I also think, like, do those people just not understand true love at all, or what?

And yet even if they did understand, why do they not understand in this case (and this goes back to something I believe true in a normal, horrible way: regardless of the progress, as it goes, that American society has made on the question of people who are gay/in a similar category/w/e, there is still a fairly common blind spot, at least in my area [which is near Seattle so...], such that "normal"/"straight"/w/e people, don't understand that "gay"/etc. people are capable of fanatical/extreme romantic ideation)? [Or do they?]

SUPEREDIT:

Wasn't sure if I felt like doing this, but then I came up with a ridiculous way to explain it, ridiculous because it was true, though, too.

OK, so how did I get from, "Some people were inspired by Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition to make movies for inspirational reasons," to, "This guy I met in a park one day, and me, we're part of some special plan those people have"? Because the first idea is just the history-of-ideas all over again, as it goes. It's true. People read books and are motivated by them, they refer back to them, etc. That's fine.

However, Arendt makes an otherwise disparate point in the text about the expressive value of science fiction. By fully modernized extension, her point can be made to include fantasy/"speculative" fiction overall, under her implicit rubric, if you will. Specifically, she says that scifi is an intellectually undervalued method of intellectual expression [not a quote, a paraphrase, but of the specific "argument"/train-of-thought]. Now anyway, therefore, I thought the chain-of-inspiration would be focused into these genres. I mean I had independent reasons to agree with Arendt's statement/evaluation, virtually identical or equivalent in content as those reasons may have been, to hers, though.

Still, what hath this to do with Jerusalem? "Well, I'll tell you." I just realized it, and it's maybe the stupidest thing, but it all came down to...

... that stupid question about why they don't just have the holy Eagles take the Ring to Orodruin.

No, I'm being flat-out serious here, I really got it into my head: these people, whoever or Whoever they are or are supposed to be, or whatever, well, they know there's a Mordor, or a Creche, or a Blight, or any of the above or whatever, and they know they need to get an agent in there, undetected, as part of the plan. [But where?]

Now, as part of the pattern I followed of intentionally using books as if they were a coded map for me, I had read this one novel Enchanter, and this was based on the ZORK-related game of the same name. I had not chosen to read the book when I believed in that pattern, exactly; rather, reading this book was one of the triggers for my full belief in the pattern. So, the problem for me, the "strange coincidence" of the text and my life, was that the protagonist in the book was gay, had a guy friend he was superclose with, they didn't "do it" but they'd hold hands IIRC and sleep next to each other with one's arms around the other or whatever, etc. but there was also this scene where the protagonist gets upset because his friend almost kills some helpless animal, and at that precise time in my life, I wanted to be superclose friends with some guy like the other fellow in the story, who just so happened to have gone hunting of late, to my pure chagrin then. [That was Drew Wilson btw.]

So now again, though, what hath... well, again, the pattern was so amorphous that when used as a rule of inference, it "allowed" me to jump (this is that free-association thing) from Enchanter the book to Enchanter the game.* And in the game, the plot had been: why not the Eagles?: because we have to send someone in, who the Enemy won't notice because he's so lowly, after all.

*[Moreover, the author of the book had been president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Association of America or something, so I was so for sure like hey, they knew...]

Such a plot point IRL required there to be a Mordor, however. So my supertheory required me to come up with criteria for identifying Mordor. Some I ended up literally adapting: there would be a tower with a red light atop it there, and in the distance a great mountain. However, no region on the Earth has a red sky like Sauron's land does, or whatever along that line; so geography wasn't the only key, morality was too.

Now, since Sauron, either as such or in terms of power-level(!), wasn't the Enemy in the IRL story, the moral question adverted not to a ring of corruptive power, but a weapon of destructive power. Nuclear weaponry, that is. From there it was but a little step to, "Oh, well, hey, that's right here," where I lived. After all, the shipyard features a tower with a red light atop it, and from various places in the county, Mt. Rainier is visible. The shipyard is obviously connected to the naval base, and the naval base is where the ultimate nuclear arsenal on Earth is stationed. Scientology, which might or might not be a strongly negative religious factor in the modern world, came from this region; major computer companies are headquartered and historied nearby: Terry Brooks lives in Seattle...

... so I "did the math" and got, "X = I live in Silent Hill," since by then I'd fused the story of the SILENT HILL games with mine. Why/how? Well, Apollyon is not a human-like figure, to my mind. He doesn't look like a man, or a fiery angel, or a hydra-demon, or an armored darkness with swords of inferno, or whatever like those things. No. I specifically told Dean that I had only felt like I'd had one "visionary experience" along the lines of some kind he claimed to have had or something, too. A vision of a ghost/demon/evil spirit, that is, I think was the particularity of it. And this vision was of Apollyon, because I had always thought, "If I wrote a story with this entity in it, what would I use as a point of reference for descriptions of this entity?" And the answer was that Apollyon looked like the city in my dreams, the infinite one, only all aflame, destroying itself forever if you will, and the shards of its destruction, the fragments of stone it sent into our space and time, when broken, unsealed its power here...

So the dark tower of Mordor, the reverse-side of Silent Hill, the ship of darkness in Event Horizon's theory of Hell, Labyrinth's labyrinth, the Shadowen fortress in Brooks' second Shannara series, and so on and on, all bled into one in me, as the image of Apollyon, the City of Destruction. By the time I got to The Pilgrim's Progress and read the story of Christian's departure from the City of Destruction, where Apollyon rules, well...

... but that meant there was a reason I would be involved in this plan, chosen for it, whatever.* The Directors, as it were, would have already conceived of this area as the IRL-Mordor (haha!), and would then need to morally test someone through this area. Why not me, since I would have approached the problem from that angle, or was approaching it as such, anyway? However, why just me, I also figured: why not a lot of different candidates for whatever position was in question? This was also based on LOST, wasn't it? J. J. Abrams was "in on it"? [Hence, when I read the book S., I concluded that the tale's tale of a group of writers who apparently chose a young man in some weird way to represent a political plan of theirs, was true, since hadn't I just decided that there was a group of writers out there, including Abrams, who were supposed to choose a young man in some way to represent their political plan?]

*[The use of the Trident submarines to execute the supposed plan of Apollyon, I referred back to a book called Lovecraft's Book, that I'd read at the time, where a Nazi offshoot tries to hijack a naval program in US waters, I don't recall where exactly; but it was "coincidental" because I had just beforehand gotten it into my head that Lovecraftian fiction, especially the original work, was part of the superpattern, and that neo-Nazis were entangled via Christian Identity or whatever [e.g. South African apartheid holdover attitudes or what and all!] with Christian Reconstructionism, the academic emblem of Apollyon par excellence--but anyway the story about H. P. Lovecraft has it that the Nazis try to convince the man to write a book that will inspire America to believe in Nazism--and my dread that the "demons" wished me to write a book, like the Ildatch of Terry Brooks' universe [the book of the Void's attempt to rape the Word(!)] synced up with this next synchronicity and voila, onward Christian soldier haha...]

So, umm, Mighara... I have a thing I wanted to say to you...

Back around January 2015, I was grappling a lot with my own mortality.
(I was diagnosed with breast cancer and was going through treatments.)

And in that intense time, I kinda flipped out.
Dissociation.
Having delusional thoughts.
Having paranoia.

Lots of things got really eschatological.
Like, when you realize that life - not just any life, but YOUR own life - is finite in a way you didn't before, all of a sudden you WANT so badly to know that your own tiny life and your own secret sufferings are somehow connected to Ultimate things.

I became obsessed with the number 3.
And 1.
(And 2, somewhat.)
I became obsessed with times of the day.
When it was 1:01, I thought NOW something amazing is going to happen.
Then pretty soon it was 1:02!
And then 1:03!!
You can just imagine how excited I was when it was 1:23.
And on it went.
I thought I could determine answers to questions I desperately wanted to know by using obliquely-phrased Google queries. (They were questions of the nature, "Is the life of this person who I care about going to turn out okay?")
I thought the premise of a popular computer game was a message about the battle for good and evil - known only to me.
When a family member wanted me to wash some lettuce leaves, I thought, "of course! Because 'the leaves are for the healing of the nations.' "


*sigh* I know there will be someone who will think I'm laughing at insanity like it's no big deal.
I don't know what to say.
I should probably go back and apologize to some people.. mainly my husband.
I was very, very fortunate; that episode was shockingly less of a big deal than it could have been.
I was kept so safe, in spite of so much potential for things to go wrong.

Mighara wrote:One dimension of my delusions emerged from my stint as a homeless man, when the second of the three shady characters who approached me out there in the forest convinced me to wear white pants to replace the disheveled pair I'd worn my first month during the stint. Upon donning the new pair, a red-trucks-are-bad kind of thought came to me, but better: "When the time comes that I am clad in white, I will be ready to go."

^ THIS! In that time... I would have had thought like that.
And indeed, I became obsessed with clothing and its potential symbolism.
Especially... since I was losing my hair, and I'd be wearing a scarf...
...You guessed it - I became obsessed with that semi-incomprehensible passage in the first half of 1 Corinthians 11.

Mighara wrote:...Now imagine you one day decided that not just one example of the disclaimer is false, or a few of them---but all of them, that every story was actually secretly a coded message to some select group of people, who are meant to be the main characters for the story of the real world itself...

^ That thing about stories... listen to what mine like that was, Mighara!
I was convinced that ALL advertisers were making slogans that had some reference to redemption.
"I was like, 'Pure Life' bottled water?!? Yesssss! They are pointing towards God, the fountain of living waters, and have NO idea they are doing that!"

Every single ad slogan seemed to be pointing to redemption. (And why not? it's a really sweet gig, if you can get it!)

And yet friends were able to reach out to me and pull me back from the edge.
I called one of my good friends (I'll call her "Lydia" because she is very hospitable.) and talked about some of my paranoid fears. (although they didn't seem paranoid to me at the time.)
The thing is... she is my friend.. so instead of dismissing me as crazy, (which would be legit, because I think I -was- crazy at the time) instead, she flipped through her own mental codex of experiences and... found a way to relate.
She was like, "Oh, I know something like that. A few days ago, my son had gotten a helium balloon. And one time I woke up in the middle of the night, and looked in the nursery and the balloon was at the other end of the room from where I left it. So I started worrying there was a burglar in the house who had moved it. I feel like if it wasn't the middle of the night, I would have been like 'oh, the air from the vent probably just blew it.' which is was what probably happened."

Even though Lydia WASN'T able to convince me that the fear itself was fairly unreasonable, she still helped me to solve a problem I had.
She helped me stop and think about the context & SITUATION when it most frequently came up.
And, like with her middle-of-the-night burglar scare, there WAS a pattern:
Every darn Saturday when my husband would leave to tutor, I'd be alone and start freakin' out.
So I started asking other trusted peeps to come over and be with me and the kids at those times.
That helped enormously.

I guess I should also admit to major flirtations with a belief in my over-importance.
I had that kind of thinking in spades.
I read a webcomic, and thought it had special reference to me.
I'd turn on the radio and thought the piece had special reference to me.
I thought maybe I had special revelation given only to me, and that would be my amazing role in redemption...
Or maybe it was that my weak state - my illness - would connect many to God through compassion & wanting to pray for me. (that one might actually be true!)

BUT I had this mental model of all God's goodness flowing through straight down directly to me, and then only FROM ME out to others... and then that was when I was like, "No! that sounds like megalomania." (using the 'delusion about my own importance' definition of the word "megalomania.")
And then I argued with myself - based on all kinds of good precedents and wisdom - "it's supposed to be going down to a whole bunch of people and flowing from each of them to many others."
But of course, that wasn't the end of all the thoughts like that... just one very important battle.

But good came to others in spite of my state.
I had a beloved cranky old mentor who was fond of the saying, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed is king." (he sounds very cynical, doesn't he? This life was not kind to him.)
One time, I was talking to a friend who was going to call him later that day. I asked my friend to ask for prayer for me & give him the message that... wait for it:
"I am confused about the number of eyes I have."
(^ As I thought through what message I wanted to give, and concluded that was the wisest, I thought this was some sort of hilarious prank on my mentor. Perhaps by angels! Who were perhaps those metaphorical eyes that I had!)
Later, I found out that the friend I'd talked to hadn't remembered what message I'd asked him to give! Happily.
BUT when he mentioned me to our mentor, that was one of the best moments in a discouraging conversation.
That was a moment when that world-wearied old man was able to take his mind off himself and look outward; he wanted to know how I was doing, and how things were going with my cancer treatments.
Quite a few months later, I e-mailed said mentor asking him to pray for me, and I still have his e-mail, which says: "my prayers and love with you..."

Awww, I want to go on, but if I do I'll never finish this post and it'll all be about me.
Lemme get back to you.

Mighara wrote:I had known in advance, actually, how absurd this all would have to be, but I also actually spent about a year to now, explicitly believing the following declarative sentence to be true: "The more absurd an idea is, the closer to truth it is in this situation; so the most absurd idea possible, is the one that must be true."

This I can understand thinking, though.
A lot of the things that people try to push as "normal" should be considered absurd.
Money as justification for why a person can mistreat another human being?
Making fun of people we dislike when we wouldn't make fun of them if they agreed with us?
Being anxious to model ones fashion style after someone who is high-status?

So sometimes it's easy to justify why the pursuit of an Epic Quest for Good is more important than ...taking care of yourself and trying to pay the bills.

and then, ahhh... there are the ways my mind tries to justify what I already have decided I want... tries to push through an agenda I have.
Mine did that in ways that were absurd; I am sure it will continue to try to pull stunts like that, though probably not as overtly-absurd.
What will we do?
I think... we keep finding the best wisdom we can and use it to correct and restrain those impulses.

One thing I want to say is just that.. I'm a lot like you.

Mighara wrote:Well, to make an excuse for why I would continue posting after I found proof that I'm an utter fool...

About this... Remember, a big part of the delusion you experienced - and the similar one I experienced - was about how all kinds of needed, world-saving good were coming straight from you and only you to all the rest of the world. (or me and only me, in my story)
Your reason to keep posting is so you can help others, AND so that other people can help YOU too.
It's mutual.
That's how love works, right?

Mighara wrote:He had trouble concentrating like a sober person would, so I figure he was drunk, stoned, both, or something else, who knows (except Actual Jesus haha!)

^ Also, I enjoyed this quip...

Blessings,
"Linna"

How about this as a good reason to post:

You can either keep it bottled up and let the dissociation get worse in an unhealthy feedback loop, or post here and we can tell you it's not that bad, you'll be fine.

@Khaliban: yes. I mean at worst, it's not like anyone *has* to read my posts. However, I want to confine most of my rambling stuff to edits to posts in the thread, so the thread doesn't get needlessly bumped.

That being said...

@Linna: there is some irony here, inasmuch as I assumed that you were connected to the supposed "Directors," in fact. Indeed, one of my coworkers had told me to read some specific webcomic, that pertained obscurely to the supposed scenario, that I ended up referring to you in particular, i.e. this random coworker knew that you knew whatever it was that was to be "known," and that this whole transaction was implicitly recorded in the form of the webcomic [which I never actually read in itself!]. [There were other reasons you were "in on it," I supposed: you were perhaps a high-clearance agent of the invisible church, or from a parallel universe in which the nanobots were inactive or good, or whatever.]

So I will also say, in lieu of another theory of reply, that the... strength, or resilience, of my delusion, hinged very heavily on this feature whereby I could never justify singling myself out too precisely as an agent of the system of good. Inasmuch as it was an external person and my fixation on him, that mediated the full intensity of this episode for me (as it had always been some guy I liked who I forged my theories and other thoughts around), I had a barrier, if you will, in there, one that had a positive effect (deterring arrogance on my part) and a negative one (the fact that I found a way to not feel arrogant, after coming to the kinds of conclusions I'd come to, reinforced the conclusions subjectively).

So, like, as far as my theory was concerned, if it was true, then actually I would have gone on to conclude that your entire set of mystical experiences must have been truer than it later might have seemed. [Don't put me in a room with other mental patients haha! I will just try to prove that they are all somehow correct! I mean didn't my ultraconspiracy theory depend on finding a way to make every other generic category of such theory, simultaneously true? There was a reason I started wondering a lot about nanobots, after all.]

Worse(...?), it wouldn't require a physical miracle for me to be a director doing the things the mythical Directors were doing. I mean I could self-consciously approach people I was making movies with, with this notion that by making these movies, we were fulfilling Arendt's writings (so to speak), and so on and on, forever and ever, amen. If the films were financially successful enough, then I would literally be in a position to simply pay for all those people to have the social power I assumed they would have to have to fulfill their destinies, too--the other people, that is, who my hypertheory coalesced together as the "team" that was required, in these latter days.

So in an unfortunate sense, if I ever were socially successful, at all, I would never be able to escape my delusional way of thinking, because it would have an absolute barrier in the way of it. I guess that's as good a reason as any to decide not to try to make money anymore, or whatever, not even at a normal job maybe; who knows...

[I think the confinement of the delusions of reference primarily to books, also stabilized it. Regardless of the actual explanation for my experience with an otherwise accidentally ordered sequence of books, because the books do tend to concentrate around certain themes, it is never too much of a thematic stretch for the theory to tether itself to them. And although advertisements couldn't be accommodated by this process, I did manage to refer the instore audio network, while I worked at Safeway, to the pattern, since the music we were getting for the store radio was being sent to us by a small company in Salt Lake City.]

EDIT ON 6/1/2018:

I have, for better or worse, decided to set up a GoFundMe with the designation "https://www.gofundme.com/saving-the-world-in-utah"; so, yeah...

Also, evidently Dean's alive, been posting or whatever on his FB, so, who knows.

Re: "The Horror of the War," I will re: that more specifically at some time, as it would be interesting to analyze (it = the story plus my memory of how I wrote it haha!), but for now I've not the time, I just managed to get back to this site a few days ago (it had been blocked on all the computers I had access to).

mighara wrote:@Linna: there is some irony here, inasmuch as I assumed that you were connected to the supposed "Directors," in fact. Indeed, one of my coworkers had told me to read some specific webcomic, that pertained obscurely to the supposed scenario, that I ended up referring to you in particular, i.e. this random coworker knew that you knew whatever it was that was to be "known," and that this whole transaction was implicitly recorded in the form of the webcomic [which I never actually read in itself!]. [There were other reasons you were "in on it," I supposed: you were perhaps a high-clearance agent of the invisible church...

Yesssss! I like this role!^ I'll take it!

j/k, j/k, j/k...
What I actually meant to say is...

Actually, back in October, I thought you might be viewing me in a specific role from one of those epic stories... and I thought, "oh no; he's going to be viewing anything I say as some sort of oblique hint about something unrelated in ways I can't predict."
So I was stuck in a bind I didn't know how to solve... and I sorta "clammed up."

...which caused me to not make a comment on a story I'd discovered you had written in the writer's subforum. (even though I thought it was some really engaging writing and I wanted to say something!)
And that is to say... I finally went and commented on it the other day.
(Please go look, if you have time.)

mighara wrote:So I will also say, in lieu of another theory of reply, that the... strength, or resilience, of my delusion, hinged very heavily on this feature whereby I could never justify singling myself out too precisely as an agent of the system of good. Inasmuch as it was an external person and my fixation on him, that mediated the full intensity of this episode for me (as it had always been some guy I liked who I forged my theories and other thoughts around), I had a barrier, if you will, in there, one that had a positive effect (deterring arrogance on my part) and a negative one (the fact that I found a way to not feel arrogant, after coming to the kinds of conclusions I'd come to, reinforced the conclusions subjectively).

This makes a great deal of sense to me.

mighara wrote:So, like, as far as my theory was concerned, if it was true, then actually I would have gone on to conclude that your entire set of mystical experiences must have been truer than it later might have seemed. [Don't put me in a room with other mental patients haha! I will just try to prove that they are all somehow correct! I mean didn't my ultraconspiracy theory depend on finding a way to make every other generic category of such theory, simultaneously true? There was a reason I started wondering a lot about nanobots, after all.]

I think that it's important to not "throw the baby out with the bathwater" and say, "oh, I should -never- look for anything useful among the ideas I came up with in that span of time, because they led to lots of conclusions that are false."
I think -some- of the ideas we had in those times may turn out to be truly useful... but identifying what they're useful for isn't to be done in a simplistic sort of way.
And also probably not without also drawing from evidence from places other than 'what my mind came up with in those crazy times.'
(Fortunately, there's a world full of evidence for and against various things.)

Still, it's all a little like being that Jackdaw in "The Magician's Nephew," after he awkwardly spoke when everyone else had finished.
He goes, "Aslan! Aslan! Have I made the first joke? Will everybody always be told that I made the first joke?"
And the Lion tells him, "No, little friend. You have not made the first joke; you have only been the first joke."