When I was at uni I went with some friends into a cellar with a druid to experience his home-made 6 foot tall light-strobing monolith, what I now know was a type of Dreammachine, which was a pair of stacked out-of-sync strobing lights so bright that it makes the receptors in your eyes produce concentric circles of moving colour even with your eyelids tight shut.
His performance of changing and interconnected strobe frequencies, which he had composed specially for my friend’s birthday, was exciting but also pretty overwhelming and long story short it made me puke.
Another story.
When I was a teenager there was a guy in our circle who - and I don’t know how this came up and apologies in advance for the image - when we were discussing what your poo might feel like, because truthfully you don’t know right, it’s there at the bottom of the water in the loo and you see it and can imagine the feeling it of but you don’t know with the actual sensory accuracy of your hands - he said he did know, and when we asked he continued that he had wondered once, so he had reached into the loo and picked one up, it’s just washing your hands after that’s all, he said.
And we were all vocally disgusted but actually I have always admired him, then and today decades later (I remember exactly where we were standing outside in the garden when he told us) for his clarity of purpose and also with jealousy of his secret knowledge. Anyway he is a successful Hollywood producer now.
Here’s some advice that has never left me since I read it: When stumped by a life choice, choose “enlargement” over happiness
(as previously discussed).
I feel like sometimes I don’t do some enlarging things, big or small, because it never occurs to me because it would involve something vaguely uncomfortable. Not gross necessarily, but uncomfortable like going into a room that I don’t feel like I belong in, or doing something publicly I don’t know to do with automatic unpleasant embarrassment included. An assumed micro-unhappiness.
I’m pretty good at challenging myself when the potential discomfort is visible to me, but the non-obvious ones are insidious.
It’s important to recognise these invisible discomforts because maybe actually they don’t matter, and they’re inhibiting me from doing things.
I’m talking about the opposite of a velleity.
David Chapman’s concept of velleity, as discussed by DRMacIver, which is where I learnt about it:
A “velleity” is a wish so weak that it does not occur to you to act on it. These are desires you instantly dismiss because they do not match your picture of what you think you want.
(But you should identify them and pursue them! That’s the point!)
So these anti-velleities, micro-discomforts, when unrecognised they act as blinkers so I don’t even think of the possibilities I am denying myself.
The future Hollywood producer was able to see past that.
Wise beyond his years!
Not all enlargements matter, of course. Gotta kiss a lot of frogs.
And what else is life for, if not puking in a druid’s cellar on a friend’s birthday? Answer me that.
When I was at uni I went with some friends into a cellar with a druid to experience his home-made 6 foot tall light-strobing monolith, what I now know was a type of Dreammachine, which was a pair of stacked out-of-sync strobing lights so bright that it makes the receptors in your eyes produce concentric circles of moving colour even with your eyelids tight shut.
His performance of changing and interconnected strobe frequencies, which he had composed specially for my friend’s birthday, was exciting but also pretty overwhelming and long story short it made me puke.
Another story.
When I was a teenager there was a guy in our circle who - and I don’t know how this came up and apologies in advance for the image - when we were discussing what your poo might feel like, because truthfully you don’t know right, it’s there at the bottom of the water in the loo and you see it and can imagine the feeling it of but you don’t know with the actual sensory accuracy of your hands - he said he did know, and when we asked he continued that he had wondered once, so he had reached into the loo and picked one up, it’s just washing your hands after that’s all, he said.
And we were all vocally disgusted but actually I have always admired him, then and today decades later (I remember exactly where we were standing outside in the garden when he told us) for his clarity of purpose and also with jealousy of his secret knowledge. Anyway he is a successful Hollywood producer now.
Here’s some advice that has never left me since I read it: (as previously discussed).
I feel like sometimes I don’t do some enlarging things, big or small, because it never occurs to me because it would involve something vaguely uncomfortable. Not gross necessarily, but uncomfortable like going into a room that I don’t feel like I belong in, or doing something publicly I don’t know to do with automatic unpleasant embarrassment included. An assumed micro-unhappiness.
I’m pretty good at challenging myself when the potential discomfort is visible to me, but the non-obvious ones are insidious.
It’s important to recognise these invisible discomforts because maybe actually they don’t matter, and they’re inhibiting me from doing things.
I’m talking about the opposite of a velleity.
David Chapman’s concept of velleity, as discussed by DRMacIver, which is where I learnt about it:
(But you should identify them and pursue them! That’s the point!)
So these anti-velleities, micro-discomforts, when unrecognised they act as blinkers so I don’t even think of the possibilities I am denying myself.
The future Hollywood producer was able to see past that.
Wise beyond his years!
Not all enlargements matter, of course. Gotta kiss a lot of frogs.
And what else is life for, if not puking in a druid’s cellar on a friend’s birthday? Answer me that.