Suddenly, it’s not stars anymore. Rust-brown corrugated steel, or some kind of metal. It blankets the sky. But I realize it’s not the sky. Not anymore. I, the block I’m standing on, the garage, the dogs, the old cars in the back lot, the telephone poles, and dozens of people. We’re all standing inside a mammoth warehouse. A huge container of some kind. As if God had just sliced off a huge cube of reality cake out of the earth, and transported it into this box, air, dirt, people, and all.

It’s not God at all. It’s a ship. A giant ship. The sky-high ceiling is bustling with robotic winches, cranes, and snake-like arms with three-fingered grasping claws. I squint, and can see strange giant humanoid silhouettes swaying to-and-fro behind smokey glass, near the top of the chamber. They must be the ship’s occupants. The aliens. I’m trapped. There’s no way out.

One of the snake-arms darts down from the ceiling, snatches a person from the street, clasping him around the head and shoulders, and yanking him into the air, with a whirring noise. The man screams, but I cannot hear him. The arm glides rapidly across the ceiling, far above our cube of dismembered reality, and unceremoniously dumps the man onto a small platform some distance away. It looks like a little performance stage. A place where you might see someone give a rousing podium speech, or do a standup routine. But it’s not.

A skeletal wall of gadgets and contraptions glides over in front of the platform. Whirring, clicking, clanking. Bits and pieces of the wall reconfigure themselves. A series of snake-like tubes coalesces in front of the man. They curl down in front of him his chest, as if they had faces with which to see him.
In unison, they all begin ejecting bullets into him. Time slows. I can see each bullet penetrate his chest. Cloth fragments, flesh chunks, bone fragments, blood and mucous droplets. Slowly expand from the platform, like the ballet of a supernova star, expanding into space.

Another machine meticulously captures each fragment into a clear spherical container. The man’s corpse collapses onto the platform. The machine shovels him into the sphere as well. The sphere floats off into the metallic sky, and disappears behind the smokey glass. More shapes drifting behind the glass.

More snake-arms descend from the ceiling. More people are pulled away. More blood. More gore. People scatter, but it’s no use. This goes on for some time.

I panic. We’re being used for ballistics experiments of some kind. I have to find a way out. There is no way out. Where to go? I duck into the back of one of the automobile husks rotting behind the garage. I can see others scrambling to find shelter. The garage hicks hide in the cars with me. Where have the dogs gone? The aliens took them alive. How odd. They stand at the edge of the block now. Guarding it. Like Cerberus at the gates of hell. They’re keeping us from exiting our little slice of home. They bark and growl and bay. They’ve been possessed.

One of the garage flunkies gets out of his car. What is he doing?

He climbs onto the roof of the garage. He begins shouting at the top of his lungs. What is he shouting? I crane my neck to listen. He’s telling a story. Why? What is it? The history of the imperial colonization of India. The British invasion. The Indian slaves, serfs and indentured servants. He names them. Tells about each one. Describes their lives separately, and together. Offers sweeping grand visuals of the British push eastward, and the destruction it wrought.

The aliens stop. The whole warehouse goes silent. The shapes behind the smoked glass settle and still.

They like stories! They love this story, in particular! Why? I don’t know. I have to find a way out of here, before the man on the roof runs out of story to tell. I bolt from the car, scramble to my feet, and make a mad dash for the edge of the cube. The dogs are there. They seem other-worldly now. They’re not real dogs anymore. They’re distorted. Larger than before. Huge haunches, heavy spiny fur. Dark orange eyes. Blood on their fangs. The aliens are feeding them the remains of the experiments. I scramble up a tree near the edge of the cube.

Where to go? How to get out? Even if I do, how to get back to Earth? Why was I even here?

I wake.

Near as I can tell, freedom is simply the willingness to give up on two words: “should” and “shouldn’t”.

The truth is, morality would be a very small part of our lives if it weren’t for the fact that our lives are so saturated with the effects of evil. All around us, we’re surrounded by stuff, and put into circumstances, that would never happen in a world where only one moral rule existed. The only valid moral rule. The principle of non-aggression.

From the very day you’re born, there’s some adult there ready and waiting to hurt you – slap your ass, carve up your penis, stick needles in you. And for most of us, the suffering and indignation only escalates and accumulates from there. Brutalized and tortured in early childhood, manipulated and coerced in primary schools, bullied and indoctrinated in college.

All along, learning that life is a process of struggling to escape the clutches of tormentors, only for the slim opportunity to become one ourselves.

That’s not freedom. It’s not even escape. It’s just repetition.

Five years ago, I wasn’t really sure what freedom was, but I knew I desperately wanted it, and had wanted it badly for a long, long, long time. Some people think freedom is an end in itself. I don’t think so. It’s a key means to an end. The ultimate end. The attainment of happiness. Something I also desperately longed for. But what I needed freedom to do wasn’t what I thought, at first. At least, not consciously.

I didn’t need freedom to get a new home, or a new job, or a new laptop, or a new way of thinking even.

I needed freedom to be honest with myself. I needed freedom from the tyranny of ten thousand should’s and should not’s that were loaded onto my mental hard disk as a child, and that I grudgingly carried around with me, for decades. I needed to know that I could be gentle and kind enough with myself, to safely honestly admit a few essential truths to myself, without getting terribly hurt.

Truths like:

* I desperately wanted love in my life.
* I had yet to experience any genuine love in my life, at all.
* I didn’t know what it even felt like, let alone how to define or explain love, but I very much wanted to know.
* Until that moment, I’d not even loved myself enough to try to find it.

I wasn’t willing to be honest with myself about any of these things, because I wasn’t willing to stop hurting myself for recognizing and desiring them. And I wasn’t willing to stop hurting myself, because I believed those parts of me – the best parts of me – deserved punishment for recognizing them, because they implied something that contradicted a lie I was protecting. The biggest lie of all.

That my parents actually loved me.

Worse, that I actually loved them.

Honesty, as a wise friend of mine calls it, is the first virtue. Without it, no others are possible. Virtue, as Aristotle described it, is not a single act or character trait. It is the effect of acting in the same ways, over and over and over and over again. Love is an organic involuntary response to the recognition of virtue.

So, to be honest with yourself – consistently – is to love yourself. To lie to yourself – consistently – is to hate yourself.

I had lived my life starving in a drought of self-deception, for decades.

Even so, freeing myself from the tyranny of this lie was the hardest thing I’d ever done. How can you face the chasm of 40 years of empty living, and not want to cling to that one thin branch of hope, that you got it all wrong, that really, everything is exactly fine and wonderful, that you just need wait a little bit longer for it to get better.

It’s the waiting-for-the-bus fallacy.

But I’d waited long enough. I decided that, even if the bus did come, I was going to take whatever came from walking anyway.

In fact, the bus never did come. Everyone I left sitting at the stop is still waiting there. Hoping. Wishing. Clinging to the lie. Trapped by their own personal enslavement to the idea that, if they just hang on long enough, love will show up.

Virtue is not just a shiny halo in a frosted painting, and love is not an arbitrary nymph. They are real things, like health and wealth. The unconditional love that should have been yours for the taking in heaping scoopfuls when you were a child is never coming. Leave the fantasy behind. Real love, adult love, present-tense love, must be earned, struggled, and strove for. Go out and get it. Don’t wait. Do whatever you have to, even if you know its going to hurt like hell for a while, to break the chains.

There is no politician or priest or even philosopher who can give this to you. Only you can give it to yourself.

Don’t you deserve it?

Still, I feel a constant tug, a yearning, a little niggling voice in the back of my head, constantly nagging, begging, pleading, demanding, exhorting me to start writing again. I can’t refuse it anymore. It’s driving me up a wall.

I’m not really a writer by trade. Not even by hobby. I used to write a little when I was a grade-schooler, and I had visions of being the next Isaac Asimov. But those days are long-gone, and since then I’ve been more focused on command-lines and compilers, than on metaphors and similes.

But something keeps pulling me back here, and I can’t quite figure out what it is. I have often stalled and defeated the urge by demanding a topic, an argument, a theme, or a purpose from this voice. But I’m not doing that anymore. He never goes away, and I never find out why he’s there in the first place. So, I’ve decide to just do as he asks, and try to be curious about what’s taking place as I do it.

I’m writing about why I’m writing about writing. It’s all very meta.

It might be good to do some catching up at this point.

I first obtained this domain name some five years ago, with the intention of telling you all about my transformation. It was going to be a lofty, well-constructed, highly organized, carefully crafted piece of self-discovery that generations of psychology students were going to pour over in master classes of the future.A lot has happened since then. I don’t care about the psychology students of the future anymore. I don’t believe in dissertations anymore. I don’t care about whether this blog has a “purpose” or not anymore. What I do care about now, is the fact that I crave the act of journaling, both privately and publicly, and I want to satisfy that craving.

I’m a very different man, than when I first fired up this domain. No, that’s not quite right. Actually, I’m the same man, only much more of that man is free to express himself, explore the world, and take risks, than when I first started. This is why a consistent chronicle could never have worked. It’s taken me this long to be able to put something out here, without the constant firestorm of self-abnegation I used to heap upon myself for wanting to do it. Not all is lost, however. I’ve dozens of personal journals full of scribblings from the last 5 years that may be good fodder for public discussion. The external transformations alone are evidence of that.

But it’s the internal transformations that are the most interesting. And I think that’s where the real value in a blog like this lies. My private journals are a rich source of fertilizer for posts like those as well. So, if you stick around, you may actually catch a few nuggets of what this blog was originally designed to be, after all.

The original “mission statement” can be read on the about page, but I’m not as wedded to that as I used to be. I still don’t believe that personal work like this can be made into any sort of “movement”, political or otherwise. Mostly, because the journey is so personal and so specific, that only a few broad principles can be generalized from one individual to the next. But also, because some of this work needs to be done in the absence of external pressures and influences, and it has to be completely chosen by the individual. Only 100% total commitment – and a fully conscious awareness of that commitment, uncluttered by equivocations or confusions from outside – will have any chance of achieving the goal (which is happiness – I’ll get into that in a later post).

My commitment to “becoming who I am”, as it were, has been just that complete (though at times during the process, the wall between success and failure was paper thin). I am now the happiest I’ve ever been in my entire life, and with the exception of two or three people, the happiest man I know. And now that I’ve reached the shoreline on the other side of the ocean upon which I originally set sail when I put this domain up, I think I’m ready to sit down and go over my ship’s logs, and make a full report of my travels here.

Even more fun, is the fact that I have a whole new continent to explore, and a whole new set of adventures to report on. For example, in September I am to be married. If I were to tell the man that launched this ship 5 years ago, that he’d have this to look forward to, I think he’d have thought I was nuts. You’ll be hearing more about that soon, too.

In the meantime, this will have to suffice for a first post, after a near two-year hiatus.

Hello, World.

It’s nice to meet you.