Your Jailbreak

[LMNO]

Well, you said you no longer fear getting damaged.


Hmm.


Ok, I can see your point. You got damaged, but I suppose you weren't afraid of it.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Well, you said you no longer fear getting damaged.


Hmm.


Ok, I can see your point. You got damaged, but I suppose you weren't afraid of it.

Yes

A small correction; I no longer fear being damaged. Damage happens. Healing happens. I'm no longer afraid of walking around a big, suppurating wound that will repel people. I know I have been/will be wounded, but I now understand that damage is a verb, not a noun.

[LMNO]

PS- I demand that that when you're finished with the laments, you Lulu that shit.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

PS- I demand that that when you're finished with the laments, you Lulu that shit.

Thanks! I will!

Not sure how many of them I'm really going to end up writing... I think I'm almost done.

[LMNO]

99 or GTFO.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I might have to have my heart re-broken to get that far... hmmm.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Is it sick of me that I think it almost might be worth it?

[LMNO]

Yes:no.


I always figured the second half was clawing yourself out of the abyss by your fimgernails. These are the DIFFICULT ones, sister... The introspective ones. The ones that count. The payoff. Otherwise, it's just a Good Charlotte album on repeat. The Abyss needs to be crossed.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Well, I have a live one on the line. If I suddenly start writing a bunch of laments, and any of them mentions fabulous hair, you'll know it went sour...

[the last yatto]

why would i want to escape, I get three square meals a day or not. We get an hour to ourselfs in the yard,
and if we are good we get to watch TV. No I dont have a problem with my jail cell just the inmates.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Is it sick of me that I think it almost might be worth it?

Shit that doesn't kill you and makes you stronger is always worth it.

Always

[AFK]

I grew up in a sleepy little town in Northern Maine.  When I was little, all of 2000 people lived there, now it's probably 1000 soaking wet.  Anyway the Protestant brands of Christianity are pretty strong up there.  My little town had 6 or 7 churches in it.  One of every flavor.  My town was a dry town as well.  Alcohol was not sold or served anywhere.  So you get the idea.  I pretty much grew up in Squeaky Clean, USA.  Everyone knew everyone and no one ever left town, and if they did, they didn't go far or leave for very long.  There wasn't much thought about the outside world, not much need for it.  Even the folks growing up in Southern Maine (read: south of Houlton) were foreigners.  So while it was a very safe and healthy place to raise a family, there certainly was a strong reinforced yet unofficial hive-mind quality at play.  I was fortunate to have my Grandmother.  My Father's mother.  She was a devout Baptist Christian.  In fact I went with her to her baptism.  I was a Baptist too.  I said my prayers every night faithfully.  But my Grandmother had a playful imaginative spirit.  She definitely knew the Art of Playing Games and bestowed that art upon me.  We made up silly radio shows, plays, and other adventures.  So knowing her was part of the first jailbreak, her dying when I was only 12 was the second part of that jailbreak.  She set the wheels in motion as far as pondering the unknown and using my imagination to explore the world around me.  Her death made me apply that to my, then, religion.  My guess is as a Christian, she probably would be sad to hear me say that. 

The second jailbreak was when the Air Force Base in No. Maine was shut down by the Government.  (Thanks alot George HW Bush!  )  Dad moved us to Southern New Jersey as he had secured a new job at McGuire AFB.  Again, it was a forced jailbreak as I went from a tiny little rural Maine town to the middle of New Jersey suburbia, just 30 minutes from Philly.  Or I should say, that was the first part of the second jailbreak.  The culture shock.  However, getting to know a different set of neighbors, friends, and classmates was very eyeopening.  And when we moved back to that sleepy little No. Maine town a year later, I realized just how sheltered from the outside world that little town was.  The friends I knew before New Jersey were different when I got back.  Well, they weren't different, I was different.  This jailbreak had expanded my horizons and made me aware of many more possibilities in terms of culture. 

So from that point I realized that my outlook was different than most of those around me.  It wasn't better, it was just processing a wider variety of incoming information.  And it was purposefully seeking more information from the outside.  I became aware of how limiting it was to stay in the safe and cozy little box that was built for me when I was young.  It was now part of my goal in life to keep exploring and to discover more of what this tiny blink of time has to offer me. 

[Arafelis]

For me, it's mostly gradual.  I don't know if it makes a good story, because my thoughts are always intensely tied to context and history.

One significant moment came about a decade ago.  A little while before that, I had just started to find the Christianity I'd grown up with constraining.  I knew that it wasn't enough, but I knew I wasn't an atheist.  I also couldn't shake myself of a lot of the morals and ethics I'd grown up with -- I couldn't bring myself to curse, I thought there was something (although I couldn't say exactly what) wrong with being gay, and so on.  So as I was futzing around with ideas from gnosticism or other religions, I was introduced to the Principia.

I immediately rejected it as an absurdist, contrarian piece of literature.  The people interested in it seemed self-aggregandizing and bandied in-jokes that made me feel ostracized.  I kind of read it, but not really.

Eventually, somehow, I found POEE.org.  It was pretty different at the time... anyway, I read their copy of the Principia.  It struck a chord with me, but I wasn't quite "in."

Around the same time I was going through the end of my first real relationship, I got ahold a copy of Illuminatus!.  I read it and parts of it made me really uncomfortable.  And parts of it made me feel very excited.  It was the singularly most fascinating book I'd ever read.

Soon after that I said the word "fuck" in conversation for the very first time.

[Roaring Biscuit!]

Like arafelis (though that may be dangerous statement to make  ) my jailbreak has been fairly slow, in fact I wouldn't even call it a proper jailbreak, at least not in the breaking sense.  More like the escape in the Shawshank Redemption, where he digs his way out with a spoon over a really long time.  And I left the lights on so idiots would still think I was inside.

I think it probably started when I was about 8 years old.  I sick in church.  Not like, plague or anything.  Just severe nausea and vomiting.  I think around that time I began to dislike God, though I still went to church, I was kinda forced to, though I started to (being the immature child that I was) replace God and Jesus in hymns with the names of various pagan Gods.  It was my way of making church a little more fun.  To this day (or at least the last time I was in church) I still get a little woozy, I'm sure there is some very basic explanation, like having to stand still for long periouds of time, heat, lots of people breathing in the same space as you etc.

But the point was that church made me ill, so eventually I stopped going.

I can't remember what age it was, but at some point I realised that I a fair amount of dislike for a vast majority of the people around me.  I disliked their treatment of other people, their political ideals, their musical taste and their dogma surrounding all those things.  I disliked their attitudes towards other human beings.

I didn't mind being called weird though.  It was a compliment and still is as far as I'm concerned.  'Cause frankly, I wouldn't want to be like them.  Some time after this realisation, I read the Illuminatus! trilogy, completely by accident.  I had no idea what it was about, I was just looking for a book to take ona family holiday with me, so I'd have an excuse to avoid my family.  More on that later.  Unfortunately, that time round I got hooked on the "wrong" thing (in hindsight).  Anarchy.

So for a while, I was an anarchist.  I tried to explain to people how amazing it would be blah blah blah...  Eventually I realised that this shit was just stupid.  So anarchy and the Illuminatus! drifted out of my mind for a few years.  Life went on, I continued to dislike my peers, but cultivated friendships with the people I could tolerate, which was a group largely made up of cynics, atheists and existentialists, to put it broadly.  But thankfully most of them don't take themselves too seriously.

More time passed.  And we eventually find oursleves in the present-ish day.  I re-read the Illuminatus! because I vaguely remembered it being good.  I read the PD for the first time.  I came here, I read the BIP, I crawled further through the hole in the wall and eventually wound up like this.

And as far as my views on God go, I don't think I'm atheist, but neither am I a plain old agnostic.  I just don't want God as a part of my life.  He's a twat.  (not just 'cause I was sick in church neither).


***WARNING:  TEEN ANGST ALERT***

My latest jailbreak was realising that my parents are the sort of narrow-minded materialistic fuckwits that I began to identify and dislike within my peer group all those years ago.

***TEEN ANGST OVER***

x

p.s.  leaving "the nest" in october, fucking win.

[MMIX]

I'd like to hear about this room you dwell in and how you've changed it.

She ran into the bathroom in that loose limbed reckless way that kids her age have - a wild excited flail of  7 or 8 year old limbs and a mindful of music and performance and the physical joy of dancing. But the room was too small, way too small for all that youthful elan. The world brought the full weight of its inertia onto the fragile fluttering fingertips. Agonised, shocked and without any suitable language to adequately express the shitfuckdamnedness of the pain she took the only retaliative action she could think of. The wall was obviously male so, taking her mother's advice on what to do with males who do unacceptable things to small girls she kneed it as hard as she could in the balls!

There was a brief moment of catharsis before the calm and then the eerie shock that her kneecap was not broken as she had expected, in fact it scarcely even hurt, but there was a small knee shaped hole in the wall.

Many years have passed but I have never got over the horrified shock of discovering that walls are not necessarily solid as my childish self had assumed, but can be hollow and not at all as substantial as they appear to be. Since that day I have lived in a world where I am constantly aware of the yawning gap under my feet when I am on an upper floor, where stairs are nightmarish and likely to disorient me, especially the ones with open treads, and lifts make me shudder. Even historic buildings with a track record of over a thousand years of seemingly timeless solidity could fall on my head at any moment because – well, nothing is ever as exactly what it seems to be, is it?

I quite literally broke down the wall of my BIP and I have had to live with the consequent vertigo.  It has made for an interesting life, for sure. From that day on I have placed my faith on one thing only: Gershwin's Law – It ain't necessarily so . . . Could this be any help to anyone else? Who knows, but as an afterthought I did end up lecturing in University and the one thing I really wanted my students to grasp no matter what course I was teaching them was to keep singing Gershwin's Law in the back of their minds. I think it helps.