Headclean - OR - The Wonders of Sleep Deprivation

Try this:

Deprive yourself of deep sleep. Repeat for nearly 3 years.

Be amazed at the total collapse of your well-being and mental health.

Having just found an interesting way of getting some sleep (moving to a quieter suburb, to a flat that actually gets natural light) I am rather shocked to find that my rather poor mental state of the past few years was certainly not helped by moving to a dark and noisy flat. Sure I was stressed a bit before I moved there, but not long after moving I suffered a fairly nasty nervous breakdown (it sounds better than 'psychotic break' but not by much). At the time I remember telling people that the new flat was a bit noisy and dark, and that worried me a bit...

Having moved somewhere quiter, lighter and all to myself, I am feeling much, much better. I have also started to discover there are friends I haven't spoken to for nearly 3 years now, which is Not Good. All that will be rectified, much fun will be had by all.

And this thingy is likely to get wierder as a result. You have been warned.

On the Meaning of Life

Syn posted an intriguing piece a day or two ago.

Go and read it.

See? Neat.

People used to do this all the time.

Walkabout. Sabatical. Sweat-hut. Vision quest. Djemma. Peregrination. Hadj. Pilgrimage.

Restoring of the spirit by going somewhere; largely only for the sake of going.

Us modern people are above all that; we have road movies and anti-depressants.

I don't think Syn is being ridiculous; she DOES have something to complain about!

For some of us, our soul/spirit/totem/whatever has started to discover that modern ciivilization leaves a lot missing. We feel lacking of center, balance, harmony. The others who haven't had this feeling really scare me.

Syn lives with one of the most centered people I know - to say Bear is down-to-earth is almost tautology, he is the very definition of it, and I greatly admire him for it. I think perhaps this has a lot to do with Bear's "Nope, no adults here" view of life.

Having spent most of last night at work (security guard? no. surgeon? no. astronomer? I wish. architect.) I could really do with a hadj-TARDIS. Though Syn's idea that it takes life off the end means I wouldn't have much left. We would have to pay for it somehow though, otherwise the universe would become unbalanced.

I remember reading somewhere (Red Dwarf rings a bell...) that someone beleived that somewhere in the Multiverse a civilization had developed a method of translocating all their shit, fears, sadness, anxiety, and just all general bad juju onto us humans, a lot like the way we just flush the toilet or throw out the garbage. Which is a scary though, maybe it is actually us doing it to ourselves? That's pretty much how market-driven western "democracies" are run - if you have plenty of money you can pay people to take shit for you; if you don't, you get shit.

The previous paragraph is a classic case of Newtonian thinking, I just noticed. Action-reaction. Cause-effect. These days it seems that the Multiverse might not actually run that way; it is likely to be somewhat more 'quantum' than what we perceive. Schrodinger's Cat might not just be alive, it might also be a frog. Follow this line of thinking and you quickly end up with a God/Gods. Stephen Hawking called this 'knowing the mind of God', which I think most people interpret as meaning omniscient/omnipotent. I wonder if he meant "knowing your center", "being at peace with one's self and the Multiverse". Yuck. That all sounds terribly New-Age, but there you go. Dammit, I'm an architect, not a poet. (Syn however might be - "scrambled eggs from the chicken of life" is sheer genius. I keep trying to think of what the Chicken of Life would look like. Large. Round. Feathered.) That other great philosopher of our time, Buckaroo Banzai put it so perfectly: "No matter where you go... there you are."

I feel somewhat comforted to get this rather random train of thought down into bits, though I wish I cold type as fast as I think. My thinks are usually long gone before I have a chance to get near pen, paper or keyboard.

Ok, everyone, back on your heads.