Pride Complex, Fallout Radius, and Big World Little World

I'll start with the last one first before I forget because I already forgot once and it took a good 15 to remember and even then it was only because I started thinking about shapes and cut outs of construction paper and slicing bottles in half that I remembered Venn diagrams and then remembered it was a comparison thing, but I'm rambling so let's get down to it.  I was wondering where my, sometimes extreme, self centeredness comes from.  It does get pretty extreme sometimes.  Not to the point where my megalomaniacal, world beater, delusions kick in and I walk all over people thinking they're throwing themselves down there, when in fact, I'm going out of my way to haul them to the ground by their napes so I don't have to touch pavement on my way from my bed to my toilet.  Pavement?  Yeah because my house will be so huge I will have a second house that is only an enormous bathroom with three floors.  The first floor is the pee paradise and waterpark, the second floor is the bath house with every kind of possible bath or shower or steam you can take, including swimming pools, and the basement is the boom box where you can shit in peace featuring every kind of toilet known to man.  Sometimes my self centeredness gets out of control though.

To the point where I believe whatever difficult experience I'm going through is not only the greatest problem mankind has ever faced, but the first iteration ever of that difficulty.  I get so into myself that if everyone I know isn't asking me what happened or if I'm okay or petting my ruffled feathers they must be blind and stone deaf.  But that's not the case.  It's not even that it's particularly easy to take up arms and march to the point of attack and scream like the hound of hell "life's not fair!"  It's not.  Everyone knows it.  What are you going to do about you?  It gets out of control.  And there's nothing I hate more than "who's had it harder" pissing contests.  Everyone has and everyone hasn't.  Which discomfort do you prefer and at what intensity, becomes the more pressing question.  To put it another way, how comfortable are you here versus there.

The most important thing is the "why".  Why so far focused inward?  What I've come to is hyper focus or big world little world.  The world is huge.  The world is daunting.  The world is not as violent or angry as we make it appear.  The anger and violence is just what sticks because you don't come out of a hug with welts and scars, but you do if you're at odds.  Violence is the first language and love is violence's child.  The branches from the trunk above the roots.  Because life has the ability to scar at random and will, and sometimes in love, it is scary.  Do you want those scars?  That chance?  "Is today the day something comes apart and I die?"  You stay in for protection.  That protection turns into faith.  That faith turns into mania.  And I close off opportunities for both danger and expansion until I am walled in and have every detail of the compound mapped to a square inch and where every potential threat to my existence stands and where it ranks and then I am stacking pee jars against one wall and logging days against another and getting lung infections and passing out from lack of oxygen because I've sealed myself in a space where air can never circulate.  The second part is the crux of big world little world.

Determinism.  If it was possible to plot every persons geographic location to a tee and, at some point map out all of the possible outcomes of each persons interactions you could, fairly accurately, play out every persons life from birth to death with some outliers and random pop ups of paths that skewed due to chance and freak probability and I guess quantum mechanical (insert longer lettered science terms and statistics) that make it impossible to do anything with 100% accuracy.  But you'd have a pretty reliable, maybe down to ninety nine million out of one hundred million person type of accuracy.  Or just look at family tree deaths.  You've maybe got a shot at beating the over under, but by how many years?  A decade?  Two?  How hard can you or would you want to torture who you are to get those years.  What are you going to do with them? Sit in a wheel chair?  Enjoy the massive stress of drastically increasing the chances you'll die putting on your slipper at the side of your bed and slip and fall and fracture your femur and die from the massive infection after surgery?  Danger world becomes a lot more dangerous up there.  That aside, the determinism factor also drives me inward at 300 pounds per square inch.  Determinism is boring.  Sure there can be a joy in choosing a path having a pretty solid understanding of where it can and probably will go.  Even in small choices, but when the map increases in size and grows to world scope, I see that I am a very small bit of the circuit and no matter which paths I choose I am not going to cover any more ground than those dimensions... unless some other path comes in from outside my circuit and selects me.  Pretty much, your circuit is printed at birth.  And that is boring and difficult to live with.

However there is no saying you can't shrink the map.  The smaller you make it, the more random it appears. The more random it appears the more beautiful each day becomes.  Each day begins to hold actual surprises beyond what randomness you can try to choose to inject.  Point to point, you can zoom in along the path and detour at will if you so choose to do, but the destination still looms and will be reached barring sudden death of some sort.  You know what your ceiling is, you learn your floor, and at some point you understand what your potential is for exceeding them and the costs involved.  There is no rule that says you can't shrink that map to the scale where measuring something changes it's properties.  And that's where I find myself sometimes.  My map shrinks to the point where everything that happens is truly random to my perspective and in that vastly shrunken world I know that I exist and the people around me are almost shadows, coming into and out of focus with a rarity that is extraordinarily delicious and I forget that I am not the only one walking the face of the earth.  Nobody but me.  NOBD BTME.  Sometimes I have to have it though or I will never leave my front door again.

Pride complex is another thing.  An entirely different animal to learn to stop feeding.  My world once was a world of "no"s.  To the point where the energy expended in asking the question was not worth the energy expended recovering from the disappointment.  A universe of broken contracts.  You can't do that because this.  You can't do that because that.  You can't do this because you're too this.  You can't do that because you're too that.  I got fed up, but not in a hurry.  It built up over the years and I didn't digest it well and I'm sure some of the reasons were fairly valid, if not entirely truthful.  Still, it's like telling someone to not get mad when you're about to give them bad news.  Nurtured inside was pride complex.  I can't do it?  Watch me.  Not doing it for them, but doing it for myself, and it started off small and then blew grotesquely out of proportion.  Coupling with megalomania it began to beg how far could you really jump if you really really tried?

How far was too far?  I can stick it.  Fuck it, you're trying to say I can't?  Okay, watch this right here.  And it bloomed gorgeous.  More.  And it bloomed gorgeous.  But what are you really capable of?  Pride complex has ruled me and I it in waves of awesome sorrow and awed joy.  There is nothing that beats that high of putting your ten toes on the ground on the other side of a leap of faith in your bones and grit.  The only things you can rely on sometimes.  The things that never let you down.  It is, however, damaging.  You become arrogant.  A soft, passive, arrogance that tells me no matter what comes down the pipe I will, I will!, be able to handle it with this body and this mind on this island.  It and I will head into the woods and only I am returning.  The belief will insist, but anyone with any one of their five senses knows there is no way in hell you are coming back.  Anyone with any sense in the world knows your odds and that you've put the entire stack on something that breaks good once in five years and there are a lot of hours and minutes to go.  I don't see it on my scale because everything is possible there to a fault.

Pride complex kicks in.  I need pills?  Fuck you, you need pills.  Watch me go.  I need money?  Hell no.  Watch me destroy myself solving this, but damn you, I will fucking solve this.  Pride complex branches out like ivy.  It infects things like blood cancer.  Don't want to help me do this?  Okay I'll do it without you.  But that is not always and many times not the stance to take for many a several reasons I won't go into.  Pride complex doesn't only damage the self.  It has a fallout radius.  Pride complex damages a persons ability to make adjustments.  It damages a persons ability to integrate and coexist with society.  It damages a persons ability to integrate.  It pretty much harms society as a whole.

Yes you are going from A to B, but as you traverse the map and make your choices, your piece of the circuit board begins to function less and less successfully to the point where other pieces of the board have to compensate harder to function as well.  When you are offered assistance, for whatever rationalization the assistance is offered, it is in the interest of keeping the entire computer running.  Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that.  Sometimes it's difficult to appreciate that this setup or that is there specifically to make everyone's lives easier to a degree, but that degree is there and measurable and quantifiable in every nervous action or choice the people with greater numbers of points A and B and area to cover and allotted (if you take too broad a path from A to B and B to C and on and on, as many points as you are allotted when born there are consequences out of your control.  a path selecting you) make.  Your space is governed by their space.

Understanding that is one thing.  Dismantling delusions of grandeur is another.  Growing a map is another.  Are they good things?  Are they necessary?  Should they even have to be?  I want to roam wild.  Yessir I do.  Life's not fair.  I'm not on this planet with you.  You're on this planet with me.  Control.  Take what you want, but understand where it comes from.  I love you.


///Band of Skulls - "Fires"