Amongst my odd collection of literature is a text on psychology I found at a thrift store in the desert for $1.00, The Psychology of Normal People, from 1940, I believe (highly entertaining). It was in this book, if I remember correctly, that it was explained that a nervous breakdown had nothing to do with the nervous system. It was actually a mental breakdown, but people would not accept the fact that our minds were so susceptible to such a failure, so they called it a nervous breakdown in order for people to be ok with it, because our nervous systems are out of our control, so it’s not our fault, whereas we were ignorant enough to think that we have complete control over our minds, when most of us are victimized by it on a daily basis, and changing the structure of our thought process requires years, often decades of un-fucking hardwired behavior that is often put in place before we are old enough to sort out the useful shit from the…well… shit. A simple synaptic misfire can cause someone to put their work key in their home lock and wonder why their key isn’t working. Bigger relay problems can cause people to drive through red lights because they know, without a doubt in their stable and controllable mind, that the light is green, when it’s not.
Even the most brilliant people lose their keys, but it’s usually because they aren’t exactly where they’re supposed to be. Just the fact that we use so little of our minds baffles me, and it should concern you. Even the most advanced sciences will admit that we still don’t truly understand the human mind. We can map out probabilities and isolate specific responses, but when it comes to fixing shit everyone is still “trying’’, pretty blindly, and the side effects of most psychotropic trying make it far easier to just learn how to deal with it. At the end of the day, the greatest thing we’ve learned about the brain is that it is best to just leave it alone, but the obsession drive in this animal is to understand everything, so we keep guinea pigging whatever idiot is game to try, and selling detrimental snake oil to whichever idiot can afford to pay for it, for science, and we just keep digging a deeper hole of confusion. So what happens when you’ve burned enough focused-magnifying-glass sized holes in your mind and you don’t live in a world where this intelligent species is smart enough to understand it, much less fix it? I think I’m on the verge of a mid-life crisis, and there’s nothing I can fucking do about it to appease this unquenchable thirst for what I can’t afford and don’t have access to.
So much has happened in these last few months, and I have posted nothing. I feel creatively lost and strangled by the world I'm stuck living in. Right after our fire evacuation, we went down to the desert to shoot with Vik. We had a great time; great talks; great food; but something is missing in my work, and my love of it. I am standing on the edge of epic drop, deciding whether or not to jump... just in time for Nova to come through in two and a half weeks. Maybe I'll find myself out there in the Mojave somewhere?
I feel like I've wasted another summer, and I am swiftly running out of them.
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