Not Just Me

I tend to be on the paranoid side.  Maybe I smoked too much dope when I was younger, or maybe I'm not smoking enough dope now.

Have you ever felt real paranoia?  That totally unfounded sense of fear?  I have. It's a pretty funny story.  Well, actually it's not much of a story, and not very funny,  but I was much much younger--don't point the finger of blame.  One of my more honorable citizen type brothers came over to my house one evening just because he knew I had it and wanted to try it out.  "This stuff does nothing."  He could barely walk and talk.--Anyway:

I was living a pretty upright snooty suburban life but still knew of several roads of access to the venerable weed.  A "friend" had a "friend" who was a Chicago cop and he merely requested some which he was freely and generously given.  It was the first time that I saw someone had actually used those decorated rolling papers.  All red white and blue like the fourth of July.  Big doobies, little narrow twists, a baggie full.  So, here I was in this "social situation" and we lit one of the chubbies.  I swear to you, it was something else.  Cher said she didn't like to smoke weed because it always made her feel paranoid.  People should study how that stuff lights up certain areas of your brain, especially different parts of the brain in different people, because in this group, I was the only one who got that feeling.  I had to be firmly "hugged" and reassured until the feeling began to pass. And I remember it very distinctly.  It was far from the first time I had used it, but it was the first time I had that reaction.   I had the good sense to never try LSD.

I think it hit me so hard because it is a tendency already present in my brain.  I am really going the long way around here, but I might as well make it worth your while. The summer after the twin towers attack, I would not go to Great America.  When anyone I knew was going I was a little nervous.  You people who make up the entire rest of the world have no idea what it is like.  It is a constant battle to not let these ideas and fears control my life.  And sometimes when I am a little too close to the edge, they do get out of hand.  I mentioned to someone that I would not go there because I knew when the next attack came, they would go for a place with a large number of people.  And I was convinced there would be a second attack.  Still am. The person chuckled over it for several years. Probably still is chuckling away.

So I have noticed this thing on the internet, a place where  I spend way too much time,( a thing which, incidentally, I am also trying to ratchet back on,) that I will post comments and do all the little captcha things and boom, my comment goes in the dumper.  My very first thought was that I was being selectively blocked.  I have been called out on my "comments" more than once.  I thought that because it seemed it was a certain circle of people I liked to interact with.  Then I noticed it in other venues.  Some of them I just dropped out of, took them off my subscribed list.  I am too much into this stuff already so that was a good thing, but then someone remarked that they found a bunch of my stuff in their spam folder and I became aware that it was always a wordpress blog,  I am a google blogger.

I used to have a wordpress blog, but it was stupid, got no traffic, produced no results so I just let it go.  So I tried to open that back up and copy my posts into it and it wouldn't let me sign in or register because the name was "already in use."  Yeah.  By me.  So I was signing in with twitter which always worked, but doesn't give me that nice little red click-through to my beloved blog.   As I have stated before, I will not bother commenting if I know it won't bring me blog traffic.  If my sign-in doesn't link back to this blog, forget it.  I usually don't have anything important to say anyway.  Don't flatter yourselves.  It's just for the blog traffic.  (JK).

Then I noticed that people were saying they could only sign in from certain computers, or they always showed up as anonymous if the sign in took.  Contacting wordpress customer service is like falling down the rabbit hole.  You can only go through forums.  One I tried to link to said this forum is no longer accepting entries.  So, WTF.   Maybe George Soros bought WordPress.

I am going to continue to try and just wean myself off this.  I know that is heart breaking for some of you, my more devoted followers.  (Please notice tongue in cheek here guys.) "IT" has already filtered out remarks I have made, with a great deal of humility and gratefulness, to people who have been kind enough to comment on my own google blog.  But it is better for all of us.  It is bullshit.   There are controls coming into place here that are going to be used for other reasons and they are already using them. We are just guinea pigs with our puny little ego blogs.  Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are all going to fly out the window.  The window is open and our words are already being  shagged toward it.

Yeah.  I am paranoid.  I have this theory that every folk myth, such as centaurs and fairies, are somewhere grounded in reality or they wouldn't be so persistent in every culture. (More on that later.) Like the small dark pictish people used to ride their dark little horses bareback, holding the mane, and it gave rise to the tales of the centaur.

OK.  I already know and have back-up documentation that I am nuts,  but seriously, do you think all those movies like Eagle Eye and The Wire and Sleepers and Sneakers are all just figments of peoples imaginations?  Be happy with that.  For now.