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The makings of a psychotic break

As I had mentioned in the first part of my story, my second trip to the land of delusion began around 2009, I had initially started taking Adderall for ADHD symptoms, it was a reasonably small dose of 10mg twice daily prescribed by my doctor, and worked like magic, the best way to describe it is that it was as though I ha…

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This is hard to share, full disclosure right up front, I am a recovering addict, I’ve experienced some painful lessons in my life, this is one of them, I’ve attempted to learn from all of them, following that learning however, is not always easy with substance use disorder. This is only a very small part of “my story”, a…

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I have a terrible need…shall I say the word?…of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars. —Vincent Van Gogh

Watching The Fall of the American Experiment™ is driving me mad, on top of the crazy that was already in my life, I really didn’t need it, but here we are. This being the case, every now and again, I need something to clear my head, usually it’s just getting outside for a bit, so last night I was looking up at the constellations, contemplating the stars if you will, and I got to thinking what some of them have seen, just to keep things in perspective, and decided to write about it. [In a “fast forward”, but not necessarily chronologically, or scientifically consistent fashion. For brevity’s sake, I took a bit of creative license….]

In the beginning, the stars presided over time itself when they were, themselves formed, in stellar nurseries of super-heated collapsing molecular clouds. And then there were only the stars, for billions of years, nothing in our little earth space but a cloud of dust and gas, but, all things come to an end, and all things too, have a beginning. Probably from the collapse of a distant sun reaching its end in a supernova, a wave of energy set our cloud of dust and gas to collapsing, and spinning, eventually leading to, well, us, but this is not a treatise on its exact mechanism, only a dream of its far-flung observers. There was not even a sound, as planetary accretion smashed this earth together out of the dust and gas, bits and bobs of other planets’ formations, and the waves of energy from that distant star, as gravity pulled that spinning disc all together into what would become our home. And the stars whose lifespans hadn’t ended, looked on, but…

If a planet forms in the void and there is no one there to hear it, does it make a sound….?

Later, they watched a moonless earth, covered in molten rock, smoke and ash, still bombarded by asteroids, as oceans formed, from water contained within those giant rocks from space, and out of those collisions, they saw the creation of the moon as well. When the new earth had cooled sufficiently, they watched life slowly creep from the seas, at first it was only giant towers of fungi called prototaxites, but eventually they watched those give way to something more green. As life became more and more abundant, they quietly regarded enormous saurian creatures shambling across the land, and they saw the rise of mountain ranges, as continents formed, and broke apart, and then formed again.

For a hundred sixty million years they watched dinosaurs, continents, and mountains evolve, and when an asteroid the size of a mountain hit the earth, covering it in soot, black carbon and debris for a century, they saw that too. Finally, when the smoke had cleared, and the dinosaurs that couldn’t tolerate such an environment had gone, a new epoch had begun, and they watched the rise of mammalian life. And the birds! I find it a source of endless amazement that birds are what’s left of the dinosaurs today, once evolution had its way with them.

Observing birds closely sometimes, if I magnify them in my mind, I can almost see a velociraptor. Although I’m just odd like that I suppose, perhaps it’s the child in me, who wanted to be an archaeologist, once upon a time.

As an aside, for a hundred and sixty million years those dinosaurs ruled the earth, if you put that time on a calendar and compared it to us, we’ve only been around for a few seconds, humans, in our current big brained form, have existed for, what? Conservatively, around two hundred thousand years? And yet, we’ve driven ourselves to, what looks to me, especially with the prevailing madness, like the brink of extinction in about three hundred. Thus much for “big brains”.

Anyway, moving along….

These cosmic spectators in the night sky were watching as the first humans walked upright, like a parent watching their child’s first steps, quietly looking on as those upright humans discovered fire, and at some point much later, made a wheel. They observed whatever crude form of communication evolved into language, created out of what one imagines began as grunts and squawks. They watched first, pictograms, and then written alphabets being created out of those languages, saw the creation of mathematics, and algebra, which I’d be remiss to mention without mentioning the stars being witness to the creation of gods, since I am reminded that there was one god humanity created, for example, who evidently spoke to an ancient cleric, and informed him that manipulating those numbers was “evil” (mon dieu!). Of course, it stands to reason that this cleric was not a mathematician, but that’s a discussion for another day.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. -Thomas Paine

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Ages and epochs came and went, from Stone, to Bronze, to Iron, over years by the hundreds of millions, from Cambrian, to Pleistocene, to Holocene, and everything in between. Civilizations came and went, and speaking of gods, Bronze age civilization, which is virtually synonymous with their creation, rose for two thousand years, empires and kingdoms both large and small evolved, only to collapse again, all under the watchful glare of our astral observers. Were the stars to possess human attributes, they would tell us that all civilizations collapse eventually, because unlike archaeologists, they were there, the scale of time is so vast that it’s even possible they’ve witnessed the rise and fall of entire civilizations yet to be discovered by archaeologists, we have seen but a glimpse.

They were there at the beginning of the Roman Republic, they watched it become the Roman Empire, and they were witness to that empire’s fall. From the Byzantine to the Ottoman Empires, kings and queens, and emperors alike, all gazed upon those constellations, as Chinese dynasties rose and fell, those celestial bodies watched, they saw every single piece of the Great Wall being built, and they know where the bodies are buried. The stars know the secrets of Stonehenge, for they were there at its construction, and relatedly, the Pyramids, so much time, so many secrets, they hold the keys to them all, but they’re not talking.

As humanity crept across the face of the world, these benevolent sentries of the night sky gazed upon them without judgement or intervention. They were witness to the creation of these United States, just as they were witness to the injustice of the great civilizations conquered in its process. Imagination suggests that in the writing of the documents founding this nation, even the men who wrote them took a break every now and again to look upon the evening sky’s majesty, just as I am, it is quite a sight to behold after all, and doubtless was then, with much less ambient light from human activity to hide their grandeur. Wars and wars and wars they’ve seen, wars for conquest, wars of revolution, wars for retribution, wars for money and power, how many lives have they seen, sacrificed to wars? But always there are more to sacrifice, we should probably be glad neither stars nor gods have ever intervened on behalf of the lives lost to war, although humans have uttered countless unanswered prayers to gods during wartime.

When the 20th century came, they watched the decline of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Germany, the first World War, and watched humans create new machinery for the purpose of destruction, a somewhat puzzling display for sentience, but the stars are not that. Another few decades, another World War, and they saw the splitting of the atom, they watched Hitler create his “Third Reich”, and this time, America rise in response, armed with a power not unlike their own, destruction taken to its pinnacle. They saw the Third Reich’s fall, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and with them, the birth of the Atomic Age, human beings coming ever closer to the power of the gods they’d created, while all the while those far off luminaries gleamed in the heavens, the only constant in a world gone mad.

Now, up here in the 21st century, “the information age”, the madness has not ceased, it has simply taken the form of ones and zeroes, the American Experiment appears to be nearing its zenith, and the same stars that witnessed its beginning, may very well be witnessing its end. As the Roman Republic before it, the American Republic could, for all we know, have been merely a placeholder for an American Empire, destined for an 800 year reign, given the changing climate, and ringleaders of the current circus however, this seems unlikely. What seems more likely, is that they are witnessing the beginning of the next collapse of human civilization, as in the Bronze age, which was also preceded by wars, disasters, and a changing climate, though unlike the Bronze Age collapse of 1177 BCE, this time, civilization is global.

In any case, the fact that the men who penned the Declaration of Independence could step out of their door, look up at the night sky, and see the very same stars, constellations and planets, depending on what part of the year it was, Pleiades the seven sisters, Cassiopeia, or Canis Major, and Orion, or Mars, and Venus, just as I can see some of them now, to me, speaks to our place in the cosmos, as well as our place in this American Experiment. There is a through line here, a thin thread connecting those men, who wished above all else, liberty, and freedom from tyranny, to those of us today who wish the same.

I will refrain for the moment, from using the word “patriots”, as it has been usurped over the previous decade by impostors to patriotism, though it is my firm belief that we should recapture our symbols from these impostors, that word being one of them. All of which is to say, that the revolutionary spirit is alive and well in, at least the mind of myself, and I am certain, that of many many others as well. Ultimately, I believe there will be enough of us who are not willing to let our republic die lightly, channeling that spirit is the way out of this mess, I fear “business as usual” will not be cutting it this time, the usurpers do not plan on leaving, not in two years, or four, or forty.

This said, in order to work out in what way to channel that spirit, there is required a bit of calm within the storm of strong emotion this sort of thing brings, one needs to gain some perspective, really trying to imagine the immense scope of the universe, for me, usually helps. Ultimately, I believe we are, all of us, connected, past to present, one to another, separated by time, a connected part of the whole, but only a very small part, in the scale of cosmic time all of human endeavor is but the blink of an eye. Thus when I’m feeling overwhelmed by everything, I try to look up at the night sky in hopes of capturing a little “perspective”, to remind myself that it has looked almost exactly this way for a long, long time, and will look the same, long after all of us are turned to dust. Truly, in comparison with the concept of deep time, which is challenging enough even to grasp sometimes, and the immensity of the cosmos, it’s all pretty insignificant, even though it may feel very significant to us now. In the daytime, birds will work almost as well for me in that retrospection, because to me, they also represent, in a way, cosmic time. So if you catch me outside some afternoon just looking at the birds with a wistful smile on my face, I’m taking a moment, cause it’s all just too much, but it isn’t the birds I’m smiling at, I’m watching dinosaurs…..

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