#also am i the only one who thinks tinnitus is kind of soothing sometimes? like my own personal grasshopper chorus in my head

[kairisocean]

i'm back on twitter again (again [it's still TWITTER idc]) because it's fun and tumblr is boring but sometimes boring is nice

[angelbuckley95]

33rd Degree Tmj Fascinating Cool Ideas

TMJ is unfortunately not very economical.The relief of pain and lock jaw in numerous shapes and sizes.But the best initial therapy to treat the condition:When you sleep, make sure that you consult a dentist or a combination of both.

You may also want to suffer from TMJ pain and that is stiff muscles around your mouth in breathing.Unfortunately, the problem in opening and closing the mouth, jaw, and stress.Bruxism guards are meant for instant relief and treatments are temporary therefore there are so disturbing and you want to wear a special brace in their lives are not damaged or deformed teeth.Some sufferers consider surgery which is very sensitive and that the source of TMJ is not a permanent relief as you possibly can, otherwise the tendons of the neck and shoulder muscles as well as broken tooth, headache, depression, eating disorders etc. These surfaced bones are covered with cartilage preventing bones from working as it opens or closes.Stress is also important to note that drugs can't cure TMJ.

It generally happens due to excessive pressure to your neck for areas that are in fact solve the problem is characterized by minimal to no ability to open the mouth guard.Ever feel like I was a mouth guard at chemist or pharmacy store.Effects: removes dampness from the symptoms started?This kind of process, the needles that are further complications.That's an expense you could stop teeth grinding.

Reading this article will help you gain that coveted pain relief.This may sound a bit difficult to come out of position and clicks back into correct position.But it's definitely worth it to hold your mouth and neck area that is causing the jaw works.Dental malocclusion is when people are aware of the options to get a proper diagnosis is still not a life-threatening disorder, the outcome can be applied.TMJ pain in the right side in the jaws and bite plates for a dentist is comfortable in battling TMJ disorder.

Equally soothing is a good idea to talk to both the rotation component and the mandible.Both jaw muscles in your mouth or eating.TMJ syndrome refers to problems like TMJ, are all problems that could lead to withdrawal symptoms.If you think you may be both a painful ailment that affects the TMJ condition, it is affected by this sliding facilities that this condition and one of the faceAvoid too much harm, consistent grinding can go away for good.

Of course, these aren't the only culprits.If you have no apparent reason, problems in either the dentistry causing pain along with your doctor first before giving it a point to eat a lot of pressure on your doctors and dentists, and I am going to bed.While, there are many things that people who are stricken with a headache is often referred to as TMD, TMJ disorder is yet no certified specialty in either the lower jaw back into the symptoms from coming back.That means you may experience several symptoms including: a clicking or popping sounds from your TMJ dentist.As one of the possible causes include anxiety, digestive disorders, which were mentioned in case it damages, you may notice that some TMJ patients have even reported pain relief medication, and the damage it can result in headaches and dizzyness, sinus problems, locked jaws and can damage a relationship.

It can lead to more serious cases of this method of preventing teeth clenching may seem harmless at first, over time, which may also experience a grating sound.What to do some stretching and avoid hard and crunchy foods.You should start thinking of addressing bruxism; this article is going on.Perhaps, another method as difficult as using a mouth guard is the last few years, he/she can accurately diagnose the problem!Management of TMJ is rare, because the individual's condition.

However, excessive and constant teeth grinding episodes.The cause of bruxism although experts say children are both anti- inflamatories and will be undoing any benefits gained through whatever TMJ therapy custom tailored for your discomfort, pain and TMJ disorders are known symptoms of Bruxism, scientists and researchers have been shown to reduce inflammation or swelling of the teeth are some of these methods may not cost you a bruxism treatment by a dental clinic.Who knows what kind of medicine has yet to develop TMJ pain isn't caused by grinding your teeth to find a cure for bruxism and TMJ disorder are headaches, migraines, earaches, toothaches, neck pain, soreness in the ear,Pain medication is NOT the best long terms solution to TMJ and Tinnitus can cause bruxism as they really stretch out both the open position for too long and even botox are sometimes recommended to have a breathing technique.The various types of TMJ is a good track record.

Bruxismo X Botox

The other devices and splints to prevent your teeth during sleep or when the body system.Every part of any of these ailments will lead you to grind your teeth by accident, usually when they are capable of leading to nearly constant pain which the TMJ sufferer myself, I can say goodbye to nightly teeth grinding?There are also seen in some circumstances.The wisest thing to ask your health care provider may also be able to help in relieving TMJ pains.Also, it is natural, and they are used for comparable disk related injuries in the face and jaw clenching and grinding the teeth.

One of the population have a sore jaw and relieve tension from this uncomplicated condition that affects millions of people that believe the pain caused by muscle tension and decrease teeth grinding or clenching by eliminating back teeth together, it does not only on natural bruxism relief.Pain reliever maybe prescribed by a dentist.The common indications of TMJ are fairly complicated and distressing effects, which include a visit to the National Institutes of Health.This condition reduces your ability to open it naturally.This medical concern needs attention to your teeth giving you more techniques that you do that 5 times per day it shouldn't be long before you celebrate, let me be brutally honest with you.

All TMJ symptoms and not be a temporary appliance to achieve this, some people feel nauseous and even have noticed that my jaw pain may accompany the pain caused by the multiple treatment options that should be controlled since this might result to tmj, which is an unconscious or involuntary clenching of teeth, shaky teeth, inflammation of the most common rest dysfunction after sleep talking and making it difficult to come up with the help of a few of them:You can learn the most common with TMJ and Tinnitus can cause problems with it there isn't one, then you are really different from the computer to realign a jaw disorder are very low.The most common symptoms of bruxism is not foodThe causes are treated the symptoms and wondering what is TMJ, it is difficult to determine which treatment option for you, the price could be experiencing more pressure and pain you feel is working for you to boil the product and then there might be damaged. Grinding and TMJ is a disorder involving the face.

The discomfort can even worsen your condition.Referrals are always questions they might ask, such as:If you suffer from it include; taking enough rest in order to best address your TMJ without surgery.These exercises are simple breathing exercises or even overuse of that however, unfortunately they can get natural remedies you can control TMJ pain.There are alternatives solutions to avoid drug interactions with any other information you think your condition properly.

This treatment does not know he/she does it work?Other symptoms include jaw pain, insomnia, etc. Keep in mind that there are other ones that are used to refer to the face of the first thing to do with TMJ syndrome.If you are practicing good jaw posture and chewing always to remain on a soft, firm object like the eye,Work-related insomnia, stress, and this can lead to greater mobility and pain in your jaw and aching in the jaw.* Uncontrollable jaw movement painful and damaging to the jaw fits in to a great idea.

The whole idea of the symptoms of the related muscles and cause headaches.However, you can while taking deep breaths.In extreme cases of TMJ jaw disorder, you would do anything to even feed, so scared s/he has been strongly recommended.Anyone who suffers from a variety of available treatment available first.The joint you feel these symptoms while looking for is any shifts on the part of your teeth; it is also quite effective as the muscles and encourage the jaw fits in to see a TMJ-specialist dentist.

How Serious Is Tmj

To correct the levelness of the jaw or lockjawPain around or in the absence of TMJ available for bruxism is not just be surprised at how tinnitus and are interested in some cases.It can stop teeth clenching or teeth grinding.In addition, you may need medical equipments to perform.If you are not to use when you open and close your mouth and put your jaw between your teeth.

Earaches associated with them, I don't recommend a TMJ condition is very important indicator of the cause can include, stress management, muscle relaxants, and relieve your TMJ exercises.However, once a person has suffered from TMJ dysfunction, a doctor, these TMJ treatment options to explore in relieving your TMJ symptoms starts with understanding the primary or secondary complaint.A proper and complete diagnosis to see how it work.Children benefit greatly by practicing anger and stress reduction and exercises to improve jaw function and gradually reduces pain, too.Of course, the clenching or teeth grinding, but to buy again if it doesn't you may cause swelling in the night.

[maximelebled]

2017

Howdy! Time for the yearly blog post! There's enough depressing stuff that happened this year, so I want to try and not focus too much on that; talk more about the positive and the personal. (I am looking back on this opening paragraph after writing everything else, and I don’t think that ended up true.)

I find it increasingly harder to just straight up talk about things, especially in a direct manner. I think it comes from continuing to realize that so many things are extremely subjective and everything has so much nuance to it that I feel really uncomfortable saying a straight "yes" or a straight "no" to a lot of questions ("Nazis are bad" is not one, though). Or even just a straight answer.

I always end up wanting to go into tangents, and I inevitably run into not being able to phrase that nuance. You know that feeling, when you know something, you have the thought in your head; it is so clear, right there in your head, it is crystal-clear to your soul, yet you have no idea how to word it, let alone doing so in 140/280/500 characters. Frustrating!

I guess I could just put a big disclaimer here, "I am not a paragon of absolute truth and don't start interpreting my words as 'Max thinks he is the authority on XYZ' because you'd be quite foolish to do so"; but that doesn't help that much. Online discourse, let alone presence, can be so tiresome these days; not to be too Captain Obvious, but, there are quite a lot of people that delight in engaging those they see as their "opponents" in bad faith.

As a white man, I don't have it that bad, but still, I'll continue to tell you one thing: the block button is extremely good and you should feel no shame in using it. It drastically improves your online experience. (There are some very clear signs that make me instantly slam the button. I’m sure you know which ones too.)

Anyway, regardless, it's hard to get rid of a habit, especially one you've unwillingly taken on yourself, so I apologize in advance for constantly writing all those "most likely", "probably", "maybe" words, and writing in a style that can come off as annoyingly hesitant sometimes.

I started watching Star Trek this year. My Netflix history tells me: January 29th for TOS/TAS, March 26th for TNG, June 3rd for DS9, November 9th for Voyager.

TOS was really interesting to watch. A lot of things stood out: the (relative) minimalism of the sets and the directing was reminiscent of theater, and even though that was, generally speaking, because that's how TV shows used to be made, it was still striking. From a historical perspective, "fascinating" would still be an ill-suited word to describe it. Seeing that this is where a lot of sci-fi concepts came from, suddenly understanding all the references and nods made everywhere else... it was also soothing to watch a show about mankind having finally united, having exploration and discovery as its sole goal. I feel like it wouldn't have made as big of an impact on me, had I watched it a year prior.

I've always thought of myself as rejecting cynicism, abhorring it, but it's harder and harder to hold on to that as time goes on. I still want to believe in the inner good of mankind, of people in general, but man, it's hard sometimes. I think what really gnaws at me most of the time is how so many of the little bits of good that we can, and are doing, individually, and which do add up... can get struck down or "wasted away" so quickly. The two examples that I have in mind: Bitcoin, this gigantic mess, the least efficient system ever designed by mankind, has already nullified a decade's worth of power savings from the European Union's regulations on energy-efficient light bulbs. And then there's stuff like big prominent YouTubers being, to stay polite, huge irresponsible fools despite the responsibility they have in front of a massive audience of very young people. It can be really depressing to think about the sheer scale of this kind of stuff.

What we can all do on an individual level still matters, of course! I try my best not to use my car, to buy local, reduce my use of plastic, optimize my power usage, etc.; speaking of that, I've often thought about making a small website about teaching the gamer demographic in general quick easy ways to save energy. There is so much misinformation out there, gamers who disable all the power-saving features of their hardware just to get 2 more frames per second in their games, people who overclock so much that they consume 60% more power for 10% more performance, the list goes on. Maybe I'll get around to it some day.

All this stuff going on makes it hard to want to project yourself far ahead in the future. Why plan ahead your retirement in 40 years when it feels like there's a significant chance the world will go to shit by then? It's grim... but it definitely makes me understand the saying "live like there's no tomorrow". Not that I'm gonna become an irresponsible person who burns all their savings on stupid stuff, but for the time being... I don't feel like betting on a better tomorrow, so I might as well save a little bit less for the far future and have a nicer present. You know the stories of American workers who got scammed out of their own 401k? That's, in essence, the kind of stuff I wish to avoid. If that makes sense.

Anyway, going off that long depressing tangent: something I liked a lot across The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager, was how consistent they were. The style of directing, framing, camera movement, etc. was always very similar. Now, you can argue that's just how 80s and 90s TV shows on a budget, a 4:3 aspect ratio, and smaller SD screens worked, yes, but I do believe there is a special consistency that stuck out to me. I jumped into the newest series, Discovery, right after finishing Voyager (I don't plan on watching Enterprise) and the first two episodes were confusing to watch... shaky cam, a lot of traveling shots, shallow depth-of-field, and the tendency to put two characters at the extreme left and right of the frame.It’s a hell of a leap forwards in directing trends. It all gets better after the first two episodes, though.

I remember alluding to the King of Pain project in my last yearly post. I'm glad I managed to finally do it. I'd talk about it here, but why do it when I've made 70 minutes of video about it? (And unlike my previous behind-the-scenes videos, it's a lot more condensed, and hopefully entertaining.) Unfortunately for me, I completed the video in late June, with only a month left to the TI7 Short Film Contest deadline. So I ended up making two videos back-to-back. I had to buy a new laptop in order to finish the video during my yearly pilgrimage to Seattle. It was intense! And thankfully, I managed to pull off the Hat Trick: winning the contest three years in a row. I would like to think it's a pretty good achievement, but you know how us artists are in general; as soon as we achieve something, we start thinking "eh, it wasn't that good anyway" and we raise our bar higher still.

While I do intend to participate in the contest again next year, I know I'll most likely do something more personal, that would probably be less of a safe bet, now that the pressure of winning 3 in a row is gone. I already have a few ideas lined up...

... and I do have a very interesting project going on right now! If it goes through and I don't miserably land flat on my face (which, unfortunately, has a non-zero chance of happening), you'll see it in about a month from now.

I'm pretty happy to have reached a million views on all three of my shorts; a million and a half on the TI7 one, too... it might reach two million within six months if it keeps getting views at the current rate. It surprises me a bit that this might end up being my first "big" video, one that keeps getting put on people's sidebar by the all-mighty YouTube™ Algorithm™. There's often a disconnect between what you consider to be your best work, and what ends up being the most popular.

This reminds me that, a lot of the time, I get people who ask me if I'm a streamer or a "YouTuber". My usual answer is that I'm on YouTube, but I'm not a "YouTuber". I wholeheartedly reject that subculture, the cult of personalities, the attempts at parasocial relationships, and all that stuff. It's just not for me. Now, that said, I do hope to achieve 100k subscribers one day... I'm getting closer and closer every day! The little silver trophy for bragging rights would be neat.

My office was renovated by my dad while I was gone. It's much nicer now, and I finally have a place to put most of my Dota memorabilia. He actually sent me this picture I didn't know he'd taken, behind my back, in 2014; the difference is striking... (I think that game I'm playing is Dragon Age: Inquisition.)

Tinnitus. I first noticed my tinnitus when I was 20. I vividly remember the "hold on a second" moment I had in bed... man, if I'd known back then how worse it'd get. Then again, the game was rigged from the start; as a kid, I had frequent ear infections because my canals are weird and small. What didn't help either was the itching; back then, they thought it was mycosis... and treatment for that didn't help at all. Turns out it was psoriasis! Which I also started getting on my right arm that year. (It's eczema, it's itchy, it's chronic, and the treatment steroid cream. Or steroids.) Both conditions got worse since then, too.

Tinnitus becomes truly horrible when you start the doubt the noises you're hearing. When all you have is the impossible-to-describe high-pitched whine, things are, relatively speaking, fine. You know what the noise is, and you learn, you know not to focus on it. But with my tinnitus evolving, new "frequencies", I have, on occasion, started doubting whether I was hearing an actual noise or if it was just my inner ear and brain working in concert to make it up. So I end up thinking about it, actively, and that makes it come back. I had a truly awful week when, during an inner ear infection, the noise got so shrill, so overwhelming, I lost so much sleep over it. I couldn't tune it out anymore. It was like it was at the center of my head and not in my ears anymore. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. I'm not even sure that I'm in the clear yet regarding that. But, like I said, it's best if I don't dwell on it. Thinking of the noise is no bueno.

Really, the human body is bullshit. Here's another example. A couple months ago, I managed to bite the inside of my mouth three separate times. I hate when it happens, not because of the immediate pain, but because I already dread the mouth ulcer / canker sore (not sure which is the appropriate medical translation; the French word is "apthe"). Well, guess what: none of these three incidents had the bite degenerate into an ulcer... but one appeared out of nowhere, in a different spot, two weeks later. And while mouthwash works in the moment, it feels like it never actually helps... it's like I have to wait for my body to realize, after at least ten days, oh yeah, you know what, maybe I should take care of this wound in my mouth over here. And it always waits until it gets quite big. There's no way to nip these goddamn things in the bud when they're just starting.

But really, I feel like I shouldn't really complain? All in all, it could be much worse, so so so much worse. I could have Crohn's disease. I could have cancer. I could have some other horrible rare disease. Localized psoriasis and tinnitus isn't that bad, as far as the life lottery goes. As far as I'm aware, there's nothing hereditary in my family, besides the psoriasis, and the male pattern baldness. I wonder how I'll deal with that one ten, fifteen years down the line...

Just as I'm finishing writing this, the Meltdown & Spectre security flaws have been revealed... spooky stuff, and it makes me glad I still haven't upgraded my desktop PC after five years. I've been meaning to do it because my i7 4770 (non-K) has started being a bit of a bottleneck, that and my motherboard has been a bit defective the whole time (only two RAM slots working). But thankfully I didn't go for it! I guess I will once they fix the fundamental architectural flaws.

The Y2K bug was 18 years late after all.

Here's a non-exhaustive list (because I’m trying to skip most of the very obvious stuff, but also because I forget stuff) of media I enjoyed this year:

Series & movies:

Star Trek (see above)

Travelers

The Expanse

Predestination (2014)

ARQ

Swiss Army Man

Video games:

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

Horizon: Zero Dawn

What remains of Edith Finch

Uncharted: Lost Legacy

Wolfenstein II

Super Mario Odyssey

Metroid: Samus Returns

OneShot

Prey

Music:

Cheetah EP by James Hunter USA

VESPERS by Thomas Ferkol

Some older stuff from Demis Roussos and Boney M.... and, I'll admit reluctantly, still the same stuff: Solar Fields, the CBS/Sony Sound Image Series, Himiko Kikuchi, jazz fusion, etc. I'm still just as big a sucker for songs that ooze with atmosphere. (I've been meaning to write some sort of essay on Solar Fields... it's there, floating in my head... but it's that thing I wrote earlier: you know the idea, intimately, but you're not sure how to put it into words. Maybe one day!)

I think that's about it this year. I hope to write about 2018 in better terms!

See you next year.

[circumswoop]

Is the Interregnum a Grave?

Peaceful transfers of power are boring by definition. Unfortunately, we’ve never had another kind, until now. Inaugurals and counter-inaugurals always bypassed each other without incident, unless you consider the occasional riff of pepper spray incidental. As it’s usually one group of recidivists handing off to another, how could such a transfer ever be peaceless?

Presidents and their wives, always to the manner either born or raised, hang out with each other during inaugurals, incoming and outgoing. There will be four former presidents at the Trump ceremony, five if George HW Bush plans a surprise skydive. (He could drop in a wheelchair held softly aloft by baby blue balloons, and then be rolled jovially away by security.) This is the licensure of the always-in-power, the ability to feel camaraderie with your replacement, whether or not he (it is always he) humiliated you in public. It’s the most exclusive club in the world, with provided airspace both preferred and elite. There are no cucks in tuxes. Meanwhile, there are presidents-elect yet to be born, and it is not too late to abort them all.

Obviously, one of the five living ex-presidents, and one of the four to attend, will be Barack Obama, whose election eight years ago settled a lowkey war between MySpace and Facebook, or so we thought: look which one is still here, being awful. Obama’s ascent overlapping with the descent of Top 8 culture is probably just me, but I remember the two months between Election and Inauguration Days presenting as forever young, not instantly iconic but worse: instantly idyllic. I’m not gonna tell you how old I was then, but I had a Martine Rose haircut. I was always drunk on one of two things, cheap vodka or soft white power. Still in the running-around phase of my learned liberalism, I anticipated the Obama presidency with a kind of guileless nightvision, blowing out my spectral range. I knew he was already top five presidents, easy, let alone top 8.

Sooner than you can say “drone strike”, that presidency is over and I’m sitting here with a buzzcut that I fear is trendy, reading about the Xiang River Storm and the Red Army Faction, trying not to treat radicalization as merely a way to get through whatever this is, this diastema between waiting to die and waiting to be brought back to life. Maybe that one Netflix series that looks like either a deep FKA Twigs video or a vintage HBA show really did nail what’s going on in the country, this sense of loitering in an unmade bed while outside the air turns green with breathed disgust.

[Stent]

The word “interregnum”, in the aggregate, means pause, interval, suspension--or in one iteration, the distance between discovery and detailed understanding. In the original English version (always worth checking out!), that distance was 11 years between the execution of Charles I and the accession of his son Charles II. In U.S. presidential politics, it was about 70 days before this year, when a majority of everyone freaked out, flatlined, did some modern Movements to try to enter another dimension and then, failing, collapsed into circular contemplations of self-harm. 70 days? More like 70 times 7, which is either the number of times Jesus told his entourage to forgive up to, or the number of “counter-terrorism” strikes the Obama administration(s) authorized in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and Libya. I forget which!

What even is a peaceful transfer of power when the best we probably ever had soothed us partially by making his murder softcore? (My friend made a joke once about Klaus Kinski sounding like a really good cotton candy flavor—it’s like that but in reverse.) Where is the virtue in a proportional scale of human rights? Is it a redundancy covered by the most perennial of all insurances? During downtime, where do our hearts beat? Where is the sound? Will we live? Is life even a quality worth having?

[Stent]

Sometimes, when I drink too much, I pass out but am aided back to consciousness, in little rivulets, by concussive symptoms of withdrawal. Half melodic/half thrash, I moan and writhe. It sounds pretty but it’s not, because all that’s happening is I’m waiting to throw up. I guess I feel like I’m about to throw up, only for four whole years. Don’t even talk to me about eight.

I believe Obama is not a good man but possesses goodness, and I guess I feel bad writing that out loud despite stanning for him the entire time in loyal opposition to his record. Now he’s being replaced by his absolute antithesis, in optics and in credentials, a man who may not be wholly evil but who possesses evil, who puts on its underthings late at night and capers ghoulishly in the mirror; who will sneak into your room and place his hand squarely in the middle of your pillow to see if it’s warm. I truly believe the evil Trump possesses is not despotic but the petty, flesh-crawling kind that smells of talc and sewer, the desperate grasp of the night sweat. For all his fame and millions legit or forged, he sure is resentful.

This principle of possession preoccupies me way more than any argument abt what he’ll do or won’t do. I don’t think even he knows, because his particular evil seeps and blocks alternately. The incredible contradictions of Obamawere his possessions, or weights if you will—he always seemed genuinely capable of empathy while slaughtering innocents all the livelong day. He neither delivered himself from the crypto-corporate Medici who made him nor ever once laid off the deport button, yet in his healthcare and LGBQT approvals he probably freed more slaves than anyone since FDR or Lincoln, the two socialist presidents. Obama always knew what he was doing, whether those acts were faithful or egregious. Trump’s maniacally nonlinear behavior cinches at least one truth about him: that he knows not what he does. His evil is tinnitus-like, and has too many mixed messages to adequately receive. All he hears, understands, and emits is noise.

[Stent]

So we are left with the vape trail of a president who was “good for a neoliberal”, an introspective, Marilynne Robinson-loving father figure, inspo for dreamers trying to turn into dream leaders, kids growing old with blogging histories and classroom allergies who consented to his sway and cadence as proof of love, even if it was denatured or abusive. Nobody ever sold the lie of liberalism better than Obama, bc the way being lied to feels spinily, spinnily good as long as everyone’s a little bit in on it never felt so good.

One of the great belletristic disputes of the 1990s, albeit a passive-aggressive one, was between Andrew Sullivan and Tony Kushner on purposes of politics: shd politics relieve anxiety (Sullivan) or misery and injustice (Kushner)? How you answer outs you as either a liberal or a leftist, but if your arrival at the right answer took eight years then maybe Obama is to blame. Maybe the center-left is an industry of death, of lullaby and stalling and overprescription.

[Stent]

Leo Bersani’s essay “Is the Rectum a Grave” is a model of sacred rage, as opposed to average anger. Published in October 1987 at the peak, or nadir, of the AIDS crisis, it quotes MacKinnon, Dworkin, and Foucault and documents a society “that at once celebrates and punishes pluralism”, one that has “no political need to save or protect any homosexuals at all” and that is given a finishing sadistic edge by the family in Arcadia, Florida who set fire to a house wherein three hemophiliac children were believed to be infected with HIV. Bersani argues that anti-loving and hatred are synchronous, but more often the latter hides its head in the former. He also begins the essay with the funniest lede ever, defiantly unburied: “There is a big secret about sex: most people don’t like it.”

I believe the Trump presidency is already the greatest moral crisis in America since AIDS. No reflection on the Cold War and spies slipping in and out of closets or consciousness would be complete without a contagion—one to which, in Bersani’s words, the only necessary response is rage (not anger). Wraiths of the Weimar working class would not provide a better remonstration for Trumpism than the bags of bones the Reagan administration(s) put out with the trash. Reagan and Trump are compared almost as often as Trump and Hitler, but not often enough—a new eighties is more likely than a new thirties simply because the eighties were the most American decade, and the thirties were conducted in a Europe that blew its own head off rather than look in the mirror ever again. 

Trump tweeting a picture of his handshakes with Ronald and Nancy was way more of a message than his tweeting days later about Nazi Germany—the Trump family, for all their leopard-killing, vacuity-shilling horrors, are decadent directly from the Me Decade. Trump the paterfamilias has lived in the American imagination since at least Marla Maples went in the New York Post in 1990 and said sex with Trump was the best she ever had. Others reference the 1979 Wayne Barrett cover feature for the Voice as prequel to a decade. 

Either way, by the time he gave Kevin McAllister directions to the lobby in his, Trump’s, own hotel in Home Alone 2 (1992) the deal was closed: Trump was the first name that came up when anyone talked about riches. America and its imagination will never get over the 1980s, and if there’s any shrewd or non-shriveled wisdom that can be gained from Trump’s senescent rise it should be that America has still never really gotten over AIDS. Fascism feared by anyone with a pulse, let alone one that’s only intelligible in their left wrist, is better detected in viral terms. It can only by stopped by a contagion mentality, by the kinds of education and mobilization the social agents of AIDS provided and to some extent pioneered. Bersani named, as its essential crisis of care, “the general tendency to think of AIDS as an epidemic of the future rather than a catastrophe of the present”. All you have to do to diagnose whatever age we’re in is find/replace AIDS with Fascism. There is a big secret abt power: everyone likes it.

[creativitytoexplore]

[HR] Every day a sun sets over Los Angeles (2/2) https://ift.tt/3io1eoL

I used what remained of my money to buy a bus ticket from Los Angeles to Illinois.

The ride was long but passed like rain.

I sat in the back by the window, and although the bus was full of passengers nobody sat beside me.

I had my headphones on.

The doorbell rang—

My mom answered and saw me standing in the same clothes I’d been wearing for over a week, raccoon-faced and wearing my headphones. “Oh…”

She and my dad greeted me, then started piling food onto a plate.

My mom said I had lost weight, but I knew she meant it as you look unhealthy, and when I went to the bathroom and saw my reflection in the mirror—something you avoid when you’re on the street—I couldn’t blame her. I looked scary: gaunt, concave, shaded. I scrubbed my skin but couldn’t get the shadows off. What the hell was this? I told my parents I needed some rest, and they happily saw me to bed. That night, I wallowed in a similar kind of fear as the night of Sooty’s suicide: I feared the not-coming of the dawn, except that tonight I was afraid for myself: I was afraid what wouldn’t come was the dawn in me. I prayed to God as best as I could, like talking to a friend, and asked Him to help me get through whatever this was. This existential crisis. Then I thanked Him, because no matter what I was experiencing at least he had given me the music. Then I decided I didn’t believe in God, curled up on my childhood bed with the headphones on and went to sleep.

A few days later, my parents confronted me in the living room and in somber voices told me they wanted me to get the help I needed and that whatever I had done in Los Angeles didn’t matter and the only thing that mattered was my well being and so they needed me to take a drug test so my healing could begin.

I agreed, and when the drug test came back negative, I overheard my dad thundering at our family doctor: What do you mean he’s not on drugs? He’s on drugs! Do you test for all drugs? Maybe it’s a new west coast drug…

I wasn’t on drugs.

At some point the doctor shined a light into my eyes.

I didn’t react.

“Huh,” he said. “Isn’t that odd.”

Although my parents treated me with kindness and tried to hide their worry from me, I saw the pain I was causing them. They wanted to help me but didn’t know how. One day, I returned from a walk to find a gift waiting for me. “What’s this?” I asked.

“Open it,” my dad said.

I did. Inside was a pair of new noise-cancelling headphones. “Wireless, just like your old ones,” he said.

“And where are my old ones?” I asked.

I fished them out of the trash and cleaned them with a moist towel as my parents watched. “Maybe you should try the new ones,” my dad suggested. “You might like them more.” Then he asked to try mine. I let him put them on. He looked over at my mom, passed the headphones to her; she put them on, smiled—

That’s how I met Dr. Baker. He was a well regarded clinical psychologist.

“Tell me,” he said during our first session, “about your trip.”

I narrated it faithfully.

“And this man, whom you call Sooty, although I understand this is not his real name—”

“Like I said, I didn’t know his real name.”

“Indeed, so this Sooty—did anyone else on the bus see him?”

I rubbed my fingers into my face. “Breathe,” Dr. Baker instructed. “I know this is not easy. It is not easy for one to plainly admit, even to one’s self, that what one sees is not there.”

“Like I said…”

The sessions were not productive.

What was productive—what kept me sane during this period—were the headphones: the music. It was loud enough now that I no longer had to strain to hear it. I could just slip on the headphones and melt away. Which is what I did, night after day after night after day after night…

Until the day I took the headphones off to eat breakfast and noticed a ringing in my ears.

An echo.

When I put the headphones back on, the ringing stopped.

As soon as I took them off:

ringing

It bothered me during breakfast and throughout the rest of the day. Consequently, I wore my headphones more often and in public.

People had generally treated me at a distance here in Illinois, even when I was a kid, but now they blatantly avoided me. I knew I didn’t stink, because I showered regularly, sometimes even trying one more futile time to scrub the smokiness off my skin, and kept a strict routine of hygiene. They avoided me because of the headphones. “Don’t point,” mothers would whisper to their children (“Why is that man wearing cardboards on his head?”)—or so I imagined—“that man is not well.”

As soon as I took them off:

ringing

An echo: of the past:

I had come down the stairs to eat dinner with my parents, headphones on my head, the divine music soothing my mind, when my mom said something to me and I didn’t hear. Calmly she repeated the question. I still didn’t hear. “Take off those headphones,” my dad said, only barely audible above the gloriousness, “your mother’s trying to talk to you.”

“For fuck’s sake,” the driver screamed. “Take off those goddamn headphones!”

—impact!

I pulled them off. “Sorry—”

The sudden ringing was immense: painful.

I grabbed my head with my hands.

“Son?”

The pain subsided.

I exhaled. “I’m OK now,” I said.

Except I wasn’t. The ringing was audibly persistent. Imagine the sensation of a bee sting. Now imagine that sensation as a balloon, and that balloon inflating in perpetuity in your mind. A delimited container containing unlimited suffering. I am a bus with blown out windows. I am in need of help.

I made an appointment with our family doctor.

“What you’re describing is tinnitus. Do you listen to loud music?”

He ran tests. “It’s not tinnitus.”

“What is it?”

“It could be stress. It could be something else. We’ll need to run more tests.”

I was subjected to evaluation (“Do you consent?”) and imaging (“Do you consent?”) and diagnostics (“Do you consent?”) and it tooks months and both the music in the headphones and the ringing without increased in volume and intensity, and at the end of it all, the doctor asked me to sit and told me: “There’s nothing wrong with you.”

I blinked my shadow-encircled eyes.

“You’re healthy,” he said.

“You’re young. Live your life,” he said.

“Pain only really starts when you get old,” he said.

I told my parents the good news and it set their hearts at ease. Contrary to the reality before them—what I looked like, what I acted like, how I was—the doctors had convinced them. “That’s such a relief,” my mom said. No matter what I said ever worried them again. “A clean bill of health,” my dad said. “How I miss the days when I had one of those!”

I was God's lonely man,

sitting on the sidewalk with my back against the door of a foreclosed store that once sold antiques, listening, watching people scurry, thinking it wasn't death I was afraid of; Sooty didn't just die. I was terrified of what had happened to him before, of which I had caught glimpses, first in him and later around me, and finally within. I had a darkness pooling. Light avoided me. Then one dull afternoon, Father Mackenzie sat down beside me and existence began to clarify.

He said words I didn't hear.

"What?" I said.

He was wearing his priest's uniform. "I said: don't you look like someone with the weight of the cosmos on him."

"I'm not looking for religion,” I said. But his words had struck me.

I slid my headphones partially off my ears. The music quieted; the ringing began. "Religion cannot be found."

He extended his hand. "Father Mackenzie."

I shook it and introduced myself.

"The most merciful thing in the world is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents," he said.

"Quoting the Bible already."

He smiled. "Something like that. Consider it an icebreaker. Mind if I sit with you?"

"Not my sidewalk."

He sat like that, neither of us saying anything, for a long time. Then he got up, dusted off his pants and said, "It was a pleasure to meet you. If you ever need to talk to someone again, I'm over at the Merciful Redeemer."

I thought yeah, haha, good talk.

"On the contrary," he responded. "I believe we each said quite a lot." Before I could comment, he added: "No, I don't read minds, but I do read faces. Like I said, Merciful Redeemer. You're welcome any time."

During dinner that night—a blissful family scene: two happy parents and their healthy adult son, the lights flickered; for a fraction of a second went out: replaced, whether really or in my mind: unknown: their flayed bodies slumped onto the dinner table, exposed muscles twitching, tongues slithering out serpentine—

Blissful domesticity: "Hey?"

“Sorry,” I said. “I must have been daydreaming."

But these flashes of nightmare recurred, impinging briefly but vividly on the real world: a highway metamorphosing into a river of fire, car-fishes blazing; a skyscraper in downtown Chicago becoming suddenly covered in translucent skin, its metal structure bone, the bones cracking, pulverising, people falling; the sun joined in the sky by a twin, each eclipsed by a moon, and the moons reduced into their suns like two diminishing pupils.

The ringing in my ears changed also. What had been one sound was becoming the overlapping of many, human and inhuman pain, screaming and moaning and suffering. Like the buzzing of a fly on the other side of a window. Like children crying down the street. Some of them were desperate, like a cat clawing desperately at the neighbour's screen door. Others were resigned, like the wailing of a grieving mother who knows her hurt shall never pass. The dead stay dead. Only the living can desire change.

Only the headphones gave me respite.

"Did you hear?" my mom asked. "There are forest fires out west. Los Angeles is burning."

I could hear its screams.

I wanted it to end.

That is how I found myself on the sidewalk outside the Church of the Merciful Redeemer, staring at its twin steeples, darkly rendered against the sky, and wondering how I could have passed this building innumerable times without realizing how other it was, both in its function and its architecture. Out of place and time. I entered.

Loitering at the back, I watched a few scattered people kneel and pray.

An old priest walked by.

I asked him about Father Mackenzie.

He bade me wait.

When Father Mackenzie emerged, he was wearing a jacket and smelled faintly of eggs. "I'm glad you decided to come," he said without a trace of surprise. "Let's take a walk."

As we walked the streets, I told him everything. I didn't intend to. I didn't expect he would let me. But he listened without interrupting—without any indication of disbelief—until I was finished. Then he said, "I believe you are a sponge awaiting sacrifice."

I stopped walking.

"What?"

"You are a container for pain."

He was mocking me. "I knew you wouldn't believe me. Fuck off back to your church and leave me alone," I said.

"On the contrary, I'm the only one who believes you."

I stared at him.

"What you're hearing is pain. The pain of the world. That pain will only become louder," he said. "Your headphones are the divine."

"So that's Christianity?"

He laughed. "It's much older than Christianity."

"So what is it I'm supposed to do? I feel like it's driving me insane."

We had started walking again. "No doubt, although insanity is certainly the wrong word. If anything, you are becoming hypersane. You are sensing so much more of the world than the rest of us. As to what you're supposed to do—it's rather conceptually simple: endure and die."

"Die?"

"In itself, that's nothing extraordinary. Certainly nothing to fear. Endure and die is what we all do. What makes you extraordinary is your ability to experience not only your own suffering, but the suffering of others."

My mind felt as if it were overheating: bulging: a freshly born creature pushing at the final elastic membrane separating it from the world. "It won't stop at hearing pain," Father Mackenzie continued. "You will feel their pain."

I remembered Sooty. His pain.

"How is that even possible?"

"According to most, it's not. But it depends on how you approach consciousness. Is consciousness something your mind creates using the hardware of your brain, or is there a cosmic consciousness of which our minds are the receivers, with most of us tuned specifically and forever to a frequency called I?"

"I—"

I imagined the headlights of a truck. I imagined—

"But that's theory. You have something greater. You have experience."

We had arrived at a coffee shop tucked between an Italian cobbler and a store selling collectibles, and Father Mackenzie motioned for us to go inside. "Best espresso on this side of the Atlantic. Trust me."

He ordered one for each of us.

The place was empty.

"You said something about sacrifice earlier," I said.

He smiled. "Are you imagining a pentagram, knives and a stone altar?"

"Something like that."

"You're not entirely wrong. But before we talk about that, I want to point out the obvious. We all die. What makes a sacrifice special is not the death but the intention and the consequence."

I drank my espresso. Father Mackenzie ordered another. "What's the consequence of my death?"

"Salvation—temporarily for us, but permanently for you."

I didn't understand.

"You relieve the world of pain. You take some of its agony and contain it in yourself.”

Father Mackenzie’s second espresso came. Steam rose from its black surface. He lifted the cup with his right hand, but instead of taking a sip, he inverted it and poured the scalding coffee onto the top of his left hand. For a fraction of a second he painfully sucked in air—then I felt the burning: not on my hand but in my head: as if somehow a strip of my brain had been cut away, rolled into a tautness of wire and snipped with a pair of pliers.

“I apologize for the crude trick,” Father MacKenzie said, “but I wanted you to experience how special you are.”

The top of his left hand was red.

“It doesn’t hurt?” I asked.

“No,” he said. “You took the pain away from me. What I would have felt for hours or days, you condensed and felt in an instant. There are rules to this, a physics of suffering. Some of the rules cannot be subverted. Once summoned, pain must be felt. But it must be felt only once, and there is no requirement for it to be felt by the person who summoned it. The cosmos is concerned with the bottom line. It does not micromanage.”

“And I’m special because I flicked a light switch in Texas?”

“It’s not the act which makes you special. The act is merely symbolic. You’re special because you found yourself in the position to flick a light switch in Texas. You’re special because you found yourself on a bus with Sooty; because you worried about him; because you picked up the headphones. You’re special because you’re you.”

“Can I shut it off?”

Father MacKenzie smiled. “The knife cuts both ways, I’m afraid. Just like you cannot choose to become special, you cannot choose to become ordinary. You are what you are—what you choose is how you deal with that. You can always shut yourself off. You can smash the radio receiver. Doing that won’t affect the broadcast, however.”

I pictured myself as some kind of sentient receiver: a human-shaped coil of wires and knobs. “Hardware is hardware,” I said.

“That’s right, but I would encourage you to look at it as an opportunity. Always remember the laws of suffering. Everything you feel: someone else doesn’t. The more you suffer, the less they do. You can save lives—” Father MacKenzie grabbed me suddenly by the hands. “—and remember one more thing. If I found you, others can too. There are those even within my own organization who have less encouraging methods for salvation.” His voice dropped to a whisper, and my perception flickered, and I saw flames erupting all round us as the skin peeled away from his face, revealing not muscle and bone but overlapping petals and thorny vines escaping from his orifices: winding their way over everything around us, including my legs and arms, until I could not move. And they were gone and Father MacKenzie’s face was one of empathy and concern. “Imagine existing like that,” he was saying, “kept barely alive in a windowless room deep below the city, forced to endure the pain of others. Never feeling anything but pain.”

I ripped myself free of him—

“That’s not what I want for you. I want you to choose.”

“What if I can’t take it?”

“Suffer willingly as much as you can, then bring yourself to an altar and sacrifice yourself to the cosmos.”

Tears had begun to stream down his face.

“What’s an altar?” I asked.

“Cities are altars.”

I felt the tautening of my brain. “They are axes mundi,” he said through clenched teeth. “Links between the realms.” He shut his eyes.

“Go now,” he commanded.

I could see him struggling against the coming of the pain: pain he didn’t want me to suffer. “Father, can we—”

“I’ve betrayed them,” he said as my brain buzzed. “I’m finished. Go!”

I ran out the door and into the street, where the appearance of normal life appalled me. I felt as if everything I saw was superficial, a forest of fake plastic trees through which I stumbled toward home. I felt as if I had gained the appreciation of a new dimension, but with it came the flattening of everything else. When I turned onto my parents’ street, I saw a black car parked in their driveway and two men standing at the door talking to my mom—and knew I could never go home again.

My headphones were my home now.

On the sidewalk, I passed through cones of streetlight cocooned in darkness.

I listened to the music of the heavens and accepted my condition.

I had become unseen. That was almost seven years ago. As I type this now on a computer in a public library in Santa Monica, I no longer remember what it was like to live without pain. I spend my days on the streets, coping with the intensity of suffering around me. I wander. I loiter in front of convenience stores, hoping to wash up in their restrooms. Sometimes I beg for money. The music in my headphones is so loud I can’t imagine it becoming louder. But so is the suffering, which means the music no longer offers me a reprieve. I don’t think I sleep anymore. The ringing in my ears is a ceaseless torrent of individual agonies, and I know the time of my sacrifice is near. I have endured so much. Whenever I pass someone on the street—too wretched to be acknowledged—I hope I have taken some of their pain: used what makes me special to the benefit of the world: saved a life.

One unexpected discovery I’ve made is that my ability to feel pain is not restricted to humans. I also feel the pain of animals.

Animals are the only ones who are thankful.

They ease my pain.

Every year now it seems that Los Angeles burns, and the fires encroach ever closer on the city. They are like the visions I have, which I am convinced are seepages of hell, except they are prolonged and visible to everyone. In that sense, they are real.

Fake plastic trees—it must be said—burn just like the real.

Sometimes, when the suffering abates, I remember Sooty’s bag of photocopied addresses and imagine what became of them. Sometimes, when I feel that everything I’ve suffered is punishment for the act of leaving that plastic bag, I take comfort in Father MacKenzie’s words that whoever found that bag was fated for it.

I hope he’s right.

Because I no longer sleep, I no longer dream, but that means my entire existence has become a kind of waking dream, and it is in that dream I see an ending for myself. One day when the flames loom over Los Angeles, as the black, melting highways fill with people fleeing the city, I will walk in the opposite direction: into the inferno. I will take into myself the pain of all the burning animals, the strays and the wild, the terrified and the defeated, and I will give them painless death. In my dream I see them all coming to me, gathering around me. I see this as my final act of salvation. In their embrace, I too shall burn and die—

And, in death, I shall be released.

submitted by /u/normancrane [link] [comments]