It must be in the stars or the water or something.  Three separate and unrelated groups of online friends of mine are all imploding at exactly the same time.  There’s a bunch of dirty laundry out there coming to light, and I just (sigh), I don’t want to pick sides.  I don’t want to dig into the details.  What is wrong with me?  Normally I’d be all over that truth-finding judgmental shtick.

People sometimes call me an old soul or a magician.  Perhaps all that means is that I tend to see things from a wider and more level-headed perspective than they do, although not always.  I’m prone to blind spots, the same as anybody else.  I do want to know the truth, usually.  It helps shrink my blind spots.  Yet, not right now.  Not for petty stuff hundreds of miles away.  Perhaps that’s my emotional boundaries talking.  It is not my business.  It doesn’t affect my day-to-day life, nor does it really affect my long-term goals.

There’s a lot of character assassination going on out there right now.  People are destroying other people’s reputations left and right.  Sometimes justifiably, sometimes not.  That’s the chaos of the cloud, eh?  There is a lot more public information out there than there was even 10 years ago.  According to fiction and myth, destroying reputations is very effective.  Shunning is effective at killing people.  Then again, verbal and emotional abuse is also effective at killing people, given enough time.

Having given up perfection, I sometimes long for the easy solution: to know for sure that I am a good person.  That is no longer an option.  I know for sure that I have a dark shadow side, and a bright shining light side, and a mystical shimmery grey and colorful side.  I have no need to kill any of them, and attempting to do so merely feeds them and increases their power.

As my communities end, I grieve.  I mourn their passing.  I learned a lot from them all.  Perhaps it is time to do something different.  After all, endings are also beginnings, and contain within them opportunities.  Darkness has fallen.  Darkness has come.  May it be that you see the sunrise shine upon you in the mourning.

There are times in your life when the pain is so bad, that all you can do is endure, secure in the knowledge that all things eventually end.

They just don’t make trolls online like they used to anymore.  A long time ago, on a forum long gone, there was a troll called Dennis From Oregon.  Dennis was a psychopathic liar, but he was very good at what he did.  It took more research than usual to prove he was lying.  Oh sure, he’d answer in vague terms a lot, but every once in a while, he’d slip up with the details.

I learned a LOT from what he wrote.  I learned about emotional manipulation in real time.  I learned about symbolism, and about mind control techniques as well as subliminal messaging from him.  I learned about propaganda.  Today’s fake news?  Pfffft.  Pales in comparison to the stuff Dennis From Oregon wrote.

The trick to the quality of what he wrote was to include a lot of real stuff along with the fake stuff.  So, he wrote over ten years ago, that he was bulldozing all of his topsoil into a pile, and covering it with a tarp, in order to protect it from the nuclear fallout which was going to come.  This was a doomer forum, so nuclear fallout was a given.  After all, all pipelines leak, so eventually, all nuclear stockpiles get released into the atmosphere.  That’s just the way things work in Murphy’s law, right?  Plus, he was digging a nuclear fallout shelter into the bedrock, just like his father and grandfather did.

The trouble is this.  If you’ve been a doomer long enough, you’ll have read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture, or at least watched a few videos on how topsoil is created and maintained.  Soil is alive.  It contains millions of types of microorganisms, all of which are dependent upon the plants on top to keep them alive so they can make the nutrients in the dirt bioavailable to the plants in a very interconnected dependency web.  Tarping topsoil for a decade will kill it.  The moisture won’t get to the soil.  The sunlight won’t get to the soil.  The bacteria and fungi will change to anaerobic, and become toxic to the plants humans tend to like to grow.  Tarping topsoil to prevent nuclear fallout is a dumb idea.  If you’re a psychopath, the better way is to plant stuff that is very good at heavy metal uptake, like corn, and the harvest the corn and feed it to something that bioaccumulates heavy metals very well, like pigs, or sacred cows.  Oh look, now you’ve reduced the radioactive content of your soil!  Then, you just don’t eat the radioactive animal products.  Now that all the radioactive particles are concentrated, you can better dispose of them safely.

Dennis from Oregon also wrote quite a bit which pointed me in the direction of finding out how the money works.  He wrote about centralization of currency with “globos”, which were a fictional currency distributed by the one bank to rule them all, and about the business cycle, and about enterprise corruption.  He introduced me to the concept of “confidence.”  It wasn’t enough, but combining it with a little David Graeber later on cemented a better model than the stupid gold fractional reserve banking model which is so outdated it doesn’t work anymore.  Green pieces of paper with symbols and incantations on them, backed by, well, backed by a whole bunch of nuclear and conventional weapons, a bunch of oil flows, and a bunch of narcotics and human trafficking, that’s what money is.  When cryptocurrencies can buy any of the above?  That’s when you’ll know it is backed by something more than confidence.  And why wouldn’t it do that?  Theft and tracking of black market money are important variables.  The black market is always bigger than the official market.

Agrarian Peasants Must Die was a line too far.  Even that, though, planted seeds for me.  It made assumptions about doomers.  The assumptions are that doomers are loners, who will defend their bunkers with ammo, and live off the grid farming all the time.  The farmers knew better.  Even the non-farmers knew better.  We all live in community.  Some of our communities are healthy and functional.  In the end, we will protect our farmers, because we’d be dead without them.  When they lose their crops, because their climate shifts from time to time, and bad weather happens, the community should provide them with single-payer seed insurance instead of having them go bankrupt in debt up to their eyeballs.  Farmers are absolutely essential to a community, and keeping them out of tax prison, or regulatory hell, should become something worth fighting for.

The right kind of troll is very useful for newbie education.  The right troll provides the spark of curiosity.  Which part of what they said was true even though nobody talks about it?  Which part of what they said was a lie?  Which part of the official narrative is true?  How much of the official news is a lie?  That’s why we keep skeptics around to question everything.

You don’t have to put up with toxic people in your life.  You don’t have to put up with toxic organizations in your life either.  There are things you can do, to not feed them if they are narcissists, or to shatter their illusions if they think that you gave away your power to them.

I know, I know, what was I thinking?  I joined a few fakebook groups about how men are assholes.  I don’t need that kind of negativity in my life.  Yet, at the same time, I do need to know what kind of behavior is not tolerated.  That’s the downside of growing up a wee bit on the Asperger’s side.  I still need access to conversations that tell me what the social conventions are.  At the same time, that means I’m surrounding myself with losers.

So, let’s say you’ve got a “friend” who is an asshole.  My friends tell me I’m married to one, but looking around, meh, I could’ve done so much worse.  It could be a parent, although I don’t really have toxic parents, and neither does my husband.  It could be a toxic church culture, a toxic work culture, whatever.  In your lifetime, you are going to come into contact with toxic people.  The question is, what are you going to do about it?

First, you don’t have to put up with it.  You are not a slave.  You can leave.  If your school teacher is verbally abusive, you can switch teachers, or be homeschooled, or go to a different school.  If your church is religiously abusive, you can leave.  The Constitutional right to peaceably assemble includes the right to leave.

Sometimes, you don’t want to leave, because the benefits outweigh the harms, however slightly.  Sometimes, you can get the toxic person to leave instead.  Sometimes, you can get the toxic person to change their behavior towards you.  You’ve got a few options in this situation.  You can try your basic “fuck off.”  You can try the safer for work “go jump in a lake.”  You can even use the all powerful “No.”  Without explanation.  Just no.  My favorite?  Laughter.

You want me to do what?  (long uncontrollable laughter)  You know that’s illegal right?  You know that’s not possible or practical, right?  That is the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard!  Do you really expect me to believe your lies about my friend?  What on Earth made you think I’d believe that?  Did you really think I’d believe that you’re better at handling the finances than I am?  Did you really think you could get me to believe that I was stupid or immoral instead of you?  What planet are you from?

Cowardly bullies hate being laughed at.  You’re not an easy mark.  You don’t do fear easily.

Way back at the end of March, I managed to acquire a full-thickness rotator cuff tear, along with bicipital tenosynovitis and some funky non-calcific loose bodies floating around in places they weren’t supposed to be.  I was supposed to get a PRP shot to finally restart the halted healing process at the beginning of July, but that didn’t happen, because they couldn’t get enough blood out of me at the time.  I was supposed to get the more expensive Amniofix in mid-July, but the doc’s wife went into labor and had a baby the night beforehand, so that didn’t happen.

Tuesday, I finally got the shot.  It hurt.  A lot.  Which meant that I felt lightheaded and nauseous, and got to lie down in a dark room.  Being the statistically lucky kind of person I am, I then proceeded after a couple minutes lag time to look like I was having a seizure for a good 10 minutes or so.  It’s not a seizure.  It’s merely the convulsive type of vasovagal response that I get in certain very specific circumstances.  Fortunately, this doc is on top of his game, and didn’t freak out (unlike those other medical professionals at those other times).  Or maybe he did freak out and is an expert at not showing it?  Well, that’s good too, because emotions such as anxiety are contagious.

Since I’ve had the dramatic shakes before, I know roughly how long they’ll take, and am calm the whole time.  I’m not interested in hyperventilating with diaphragm tremors.  That’s not my idea of a good time.  You know what also isn’t my idea of a good time?  Driving home with the residual tremors because childcare has a hard stop.  Been there, done that, and was grateful I didn’t have to do that this time.  Once I’m upright and walking around, it’s hang out in the waiting room for at least 20 minutes time.

Hello pain, my old friend.  I’ve come to walk with you again.  I’m once again appreciative of my regular meditation practice.  It doesn’t stop white coat syndrome, which is what can happen when you almost die in a hospital in the past, but it can make it more comfortable, and stop feedback loops from making things worse than they could be.  Sometimes, I can be calm, even when surrounded by chaos.  Sometimes, I can hang out with my pain, and become best buddies with it instead of resisting it.

Ah, but that’s physical pain!  What about existential pain?  The pain that is lurking there in the background, whispering “you’ll never be able to swim again!”  Or “you’ll never be able to do a pushup or pullup ever again!”  Well, I can hang out with my existential pain as well.  I’m still me, even if I am not currently an athlete and can’t dress or undress myself completely.  I still have things to laugh and smile at.  It works on NTHE pain too, you know.  I’m not dead yet.  Let’s go be irreverent, as only somebody who has known intense pain can do.