This entry has taken me hours and a night of sleep to revise and phrase because of the sensitivity of its nature. I've changed the site name of this blog to Frumpter. This concept is more of a Rabbi's jape describing a person who doesn't know the limits of how strict he should be in his observance of the law, and so he goes overboard and becomes in his eyes holier than the Lord. In other words, it is a person who focuses on the details so much that he misses the goal he originally set out to accomplish.
I would have loved to keep the old name and to have all of my close friends read and give me feedback on the thoughts I have to share, but people either 1) were not reading the blog, or 2) were reading but found nothing of value, or 3) were reading but thought I was attacking them rather than discussing an abstract concept or philosophy. Perhaps it is better this way -- some things are better kept secret. Now, other than through the attempted hacker eyes of my friends, there is little holding me back from expressing my deeper thoughts. Yet my purpose in writing was to inspire my friends to think about their lives in a deeper, meaningful way. That goal is now dead because this blog is between you and me. My friends likely won't see this and I feel this is unfortunate.
Something has come up in my life which could shake my world if I took it the wrong way. Along my path of self-discovery, among the jewels, I have discovered a rotten onion. I have known the stink was there since my father and his father's time, but I could never put my finger on exactly what it was. I noticed remnants of it in me as a child, but then it went away, or so I thought it did. In recent days it has reared its pretty little head again and this has gotten me concerned. Because I am not so comfortable discussing it, I will use the exemplar of a friend.
I have a friend who is a very interesting individual. He sees the world, but he believes he sees more because the images his eyes see leave a streak of the image after he has looked away; this is normal you say, and I agree. But where he thinks he gets interesting is that this sensation of streaking is present all around him all the time visible to his eyes and often taking hold of his attention -- he sees designs and shapes and images that are literally not there. He doesn't mistake them as real entities in themselves, because they have the feeling of the streaking image. He suspects they are energy signatures, either from him perceiving magnetic or electric fields. Some might call it seeing auras, but he doesn't only see them around objects; he sees them wherever he looks, even if it is into thin air. I say all this is his imagination, and that his eyes are playing tricks on him. I also think it is likely that his eyes may just hold onto an image longer than usual, so the weird things he thinks he sees are really images that have not yet faded away simply as one does when a person stops looking at an object.
My friend also hasn't been himself lately. A few years ago there were a few traumatic experiences in his life that led him to make some acute compressions in his belief and faith systems, and as a result he lost people that were the cynosure of his world. The changes in themselves were healthy, but they were not welcome, anticipated, or pleasurable. He has been depressed since, yet he fools himself into feeling as if things are normal because he has gotten used to the crestfallen feelings. They stay in the background as an anchor holding him in an uncomfortable position and stopping him from moving forward. Yet he plows on and fights through the dragging feeling he has had for some time and makes wonderful progress.
The sadness isn't the only problem. There are a whole slew of problems and quirks that he thought were just weird parts of his personality. When he gets emotional about something, the feelings take him over, as if they reach around and take hold of his body. He imagines them as liquid swarms of energy that have hornet-like movements. They swarm and cover his body and he gets overwhelmed by the feelings.
The exciting part is that at will, he hallucinates that he can take hold of these emotions or conjure them up as if they were balls of electricity or flows of mercury, and he believes he can manipulate and move these emotions in a physical way (as if they have an existence of their own), meaning he believes he can project these emotions (he believes they are gross and manifest forms of energy vibrating at a low-enough frequency to be felt and impacted by his senses) onto or toward other people or objects to accomplish certain effects, real or imagined. This would go as far as him imagining he can look into the sky and make the clouds disappear with his thoughts -- To me this sounds hokey, and I wouldn't be surprised if this was completely imagined, yet he videotaped the experience to prove to himself that he wasn't crazy.
The emotions are not always bad feelings of sadness, boredom, lethargy, or fear of being off the destined path; they can be good feelings such as elation, giddiness, hyper-focused attention, ultra-fast thinking, and feelings of superiority and interconnectedness with the stuff of the universe. He believes people don't think with such alacrity as he does, and he knows his thought patterns are deeply matrix-ed, interconnected, and interactive with his conscious will as if they too have their own existed created by him, but separate from him. He searches for an idea just as a spider swings from one web strand to another. Every thought is linked to another thought; there are few original strands because most of his learnings are pinned to prior learnings. This is a strength because the speed at which he can scan through his indexed thoughts, but it is also a weakness because he lacks creativity in that most of his thoughts are unoriginal and learned through the countless books and chicaneries of information charlatans have imparted to him. People say you can sell him the Brooklyn Bridge, but he believes he has given a good faith search for the needles of truth in the haystacks of lies. The problem is that sometimes his thoughts get stuck and repeat just as an old phonograph sometimes does. This is easily fixable with conscious effort.
All of these factors, among many others reserved for future discussions, have made my close friend a quirky kind of guy. While he is highly analytical, I suspect that his thoughts are not as fast-paced as he imagines them to be. He explains that experiences and thoughts just feel as if they flow in a bearable fast-moving current because he mulls over everything and moves through the world slowly and steadily. It actually takes him a while to process certain factors that lead to his strong decisions yet the speed at which he implements and acts on his decisions create a spinning sensation for those around him. He notices this and laughs at the speed at which life can shift its pace. Further, the high-paced life and compressions he has been forced to endure through his chosen lifestyle has often made him stressed out to the point that sometimes he imagines smoke coming out of his ears because he feels that the engine in his head has been overworked. In the past this would make him moody to an extreme, marked by slick words painted with fire, but moments later he would catch hold of reality and realize his slip of the tongue. While this no longer happens with his actual tongue because he learned to stay quiet when he gets upset, it has sometimes come out in his e-mails to those who have scorned him. It is not uncommon that a friend would ask him "why the 360?” to which he would respond "you know me, I'm like a manic depressive or a schizophrenic, yet with one memory and lacking a medical diagnosis." He’s a steady stone in a large river with a strong current.
I don't know if this makes my friend an interesting character or incredibly controlled because the inner workings of his mind stay internal, rarely perceived by the outside oblivious world of drones. Yet he functions normally as a dynamic character making due with the highly-stressful lifestyle in which he lives.
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