Heavy dinner post

Well, i have nothing better to do owing to a late big dinner, which has sufficiently fatigued me that i'm not able to concentrate on what i'm reading ( completeness of 1st order logic in Computability and Logic by Boolos and Jeffrey), so I thought I would post in my little cared for, little pored on, like Milton's Tetrachordon (see this, for his funny xenophobic little poem), blog. And indeed, if this is to be my thought sink, my thoughts are fairly contented at the mo, owing in part to my discovery of a great site stripgenerator.com, which allows one to quickly make three panel cartoons using a database of graphics. It's really great, and has served as a creative outlet for me since i discovered it 2 days ago. Creation is an excellent activity for those prone to introspection (prolly that's what got God going, if he's like Aristotle's bloke thinking thinking thinking). One can people a world, and one's own peoplelessness and worldlessness is forgotten for a while.
Hopefully this little spurt of logorrhea has knocked away the dietary cobwebs, and now I can go back to my canonical derivations.

Stupid early sabbath

Urrgh, very poor night's sleep, stormy without and sick within. Unslept I always feel disconnected from the world, in a way I struggle to describe, because it's very rare that one actually feels connected to the world, in the sense of sensitive to surroundings rather than to one's inner voice. But tiredness\sickness\boredom, three similar things for me leave one even more disconnected. Perhaps disconnected from one's self, from the voice. Yeah, that may be it. The big tell-tale sign of the three above is lack of interest in things. My whole life revolves around my interests, so it's not a great feeling.

On a different matter, the past few days have seen the very welcome return of my being able to write creatively. When I was young I used to write a lot of poetry, which I enjoyed doing even if it was shit, which it in general was. I think I felt more alive in those days; i had a few friends and there were more possibilities. Now, the lack of being able to drink means that the possible isn't so possible, because shy and sober don't mix too well.
Nevertheless, I had some sort of minor modal epiphany the other day. I'm not sure of the actual propositional content of this epiphany, if any there were, but I don't know, something reawakened in me, and i have been steadily writing prose. This is both enjoyable and therapeutic; it lets thoughts get filtered out in a more interesting way, and I have been thought clogged of late.
Next time on this very blog: religion and metaphorical mental words.

10 minutes ago

A slow, dull sunday. How much of life is wasted with this just slow heavy feeling of a too big dinner, and mental dullness? I guess boredom is the word; the things that hold appeal don't hold appeal. The sun shines against the bedroom wall; a muffled public concert is happening nearby, wind soughs thru trees. The various things I would do at this point are a) Read a novel. But the novel I'm struggling thru at the mo, Piercing by Murakami, isn't very good. b) Read some philosophy or logic. But i'm too tired. c) Play Final Fantasy IV. But it feels too nice at day to stare at a small screen. d) Eat or drink. I've just eaten and drank. And so comes last e) Write in blog. But i have nothing interesting to write about, and thus to do so would be pointless in the extreme. It would however waste some time. That's what I'll do then.

I'm obsessed with observing street alcoholics. This is partly, no doubt, owing to the fact that I, despite my tender years am\was (delete according to semantic taste) a "recovering" alcoholic. What I think fascinates me, and what was an important factor in my own dipsomania, is the idea that the alcoholic is like a piece of performance art, with himself as the canvas. Again in my own case, at that point of my life i didn't want to do anything, but I had all this energy, so it turned inwards, and so I gained a goal, that of self-destruction. I was and remained fascinated by the physical specimen of alcoholism; the other day I was walking near the sea, by posh seaside houses. It was a nice day, hot but thanks to the sea air not unbearably so, and fresh with morning. And far ahead of along the deserted road I noticed the shuffling gait of the chronic drinker. It's called peripheral neuropathy, I think - the nerves in one's feet are destroyed by alcohol, and so it causes pain to walk normally, and so one walks on the balls of the feet. This particular guy looked really bad, I saw as I got closer. For each step he took forward, his body would compel him to shuffle to the side, so he had the uneven pace and progression of a zombie. A zombie is exactly right - what fascinates me in the alcoholic is the non-humanity. One becomes both internally and externally non-human. Internally one is reduced to an animal; one is reduced to seeking alcohol like an animal seeks food - higher mental faculties apart perhaps from guilt are shut off. Externally, one becomes, i think, recognizably different - there is something otherwordly in the eyes of an addict, again perhaps something animalistic
( I'm reminded of Rilke:
MIT allen Augen sieht die Kreatur
das Offene. Nur unsere Augen sind
wie umgekehrt und ganz um sie gestellt
als Fallen, rings um ihren freien Ausgang.
Was draußen ist, wir wissens aus des Tiers
Antlitz allein; denn schon das frühe Kind
wenden wir um und zwingens, daß es rückwärts
Gestaltung sehe, nicht das Offne, das
im Tiergesicht so tief ist. Frei von Tod.

The creature gazes into openness with all
its eyes. But our eyes are
as if they were reversed, and surround it,
everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.
We know what is outside us from the animal’s
face alone: since we already turn
the young child round and make it look
backwards at what is settled, not that openness
that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.)

So yeah, there you go.

Swanning about

Well, the thing below I had to talk about turns out not to have been as interesting as I thought when written down.
I find that being differently socially abled, but nevertheless desiring, occasionally, social interaction leads to a weird way of conceiving others. There are two aspects to another person - that person themself, and the idea that you have of them. And one can think of living as going out into the world, getting a bunch of ideas like a photographer taking a bunch of photos before retiring to his darkroom to work on them. Or at least, that's how I conceive of things (and also interestingly a bunch of philosophers - see the representative theory of perception - and also closer to the theme, Proust)(I'm also reminded of David Baddiel's joke that he only has sex in order to have some material to fuel his wanks later). That is to say, I seek to reduce other people to my idea of them - in other words to come to possess them ( Proust's Swann does this), but reducing them to what they are not, a constantly changing thing to an idea which can indeed be 'viewed' from a number of perspectives but which is nevertheless unchanging.
To press home the point i've poorly and bile risingly pseudo-philosophically put, I want to narrate something that happened to me recently.
There was this girl whom I liked from afar. I remained entirely ignorant of her and was happy in this. Occasionally I would fantasize about the marvellous life we could have together (there comes that bile again). Then by a stroke of luck, I found her on the net. She had a blog, and I read it, and she seemed much cooler than I possibly could have anticipated. But this shook me somewhat. She became a real person rather than an idea.
Hmmmmm, this isn't convincing. Surely I was shook not because my idea of her proved inadequate, but very simply because by her becoming real she became unattainable, because real people tend to be a field in which i'm none too strong.
...Yes, even rewritten there is little sense to be made from all this.
Anyway, i've done more than enough navel gazing for the day. The incompleteness of peano arithmetic, and a post-prandial walk on a muggy day await.

Intro

well. I'm in my mid-20s, male, and the best 4 syllable adjective to describe me would be aspergian. Perhaps better and briefer would be autistic, paying attention to the etymology - selfic. Tho these are just labels, they are in fact in my case extraordinarily fitting labels - if one were to look at a definition of asperger's, one could get a pretty good idea of who I am, and how I appear. Who I am: obsessive, deeply interested in many things, mentally energetic. How I appear: Like the introverted mathematician in the joke, I stare at my own feet. I make little eye contact. Even weird details that I thought were eccentricities peculiar to me and me alone, such as a pretty rigid face, turn out to be features findable in Aspergianites.
The foregoing makes me sound like I define myself in terms of this syndrome, with which incidently i haven't even been formally diagnosed. This isn't the case: it just gives a good impression of who I am fairly snappily.
I am one of the shy people. This is disturbing to say the least, as friendship or girlfriendship has never really figured in my life up to now. I think of social interaction in terms of a switch, which needs to be pressed prior to engagement. So i'll be accosted by someone when I'm walking round the small picturesque campus where I study, and i'll need to make the transition from my own thoughts to suitable conversation. So in the little room of my mind I search for the switch, but struggle to find it. Meanwhile, my unswitched self is attempting some sort of appropriate sociality. But its really inept and something ridiculous will come out of my mouth, like someone will ask me how I am and instead of saying fine, i'll say, Oooh, touch of diarrhea this morning. Not appropriate. Meanwhile I'm searching for the switch, the franticness causes me literally to sweat. The conversation soon dies a miserable death, and i'm shakenly walking away with the switch is found, turned, and I think of some great stuff to say to the person. I am l'esprit de l'escalier, were it to be personified in a rather doughy, sweaty corpse.
I had another thing to write about today, but i think i've done enough. I hope I have the resolve not to give up this malarkey, it seems like a good idea in general.