17 February 1999
Triumph and Tribulation

18 February 1999
Perhaps it's just me....

I just wrote Robb a note about how my timing is always bad for some reason, and now I have to ask myself who I am that I presume that if I had only (done something, said something, written something, made a choice, been more open, lived life differently; choose whichever you prefer) a little sooner, maybe someone else's life would be different for the better; maybe my life would be different for the better. I just don't know....

I expect all this journal reading is just getting into me again. I always felt personally involved reading Aaron's journal, like my inner thoughts somehow have an effect on reality, like all the silly people that yell at sports games on TV as if their yelling changes anything at the game.

I suppose that my only excuse, the only positive that I can get out all that is circulating through my head, is that I genuinely do care about other people; I genuinely do want to make a difference in peoples' lives. That's why I was so distraught about the girl at the Model UN conference the other day. I may not have expressed that well enough in trying to be frank in my journal. But I could tell she was I nice person, and I could tell that she was searching desperately for someone to love, but I knew that I could never be what she wanted me to be and I was never meant to be in that sort of relationship. It hurts me incredibly to know that I couldn't be what she wanted me to be. In the same way, I feel a great pain whenever I can't help someone......and time is my greatest enemy in that respect, because there is nothing that takes away your ability to do good in quite the same way as missing the opportunity and not even finding out about it until long after the fact.

But there's an even more insidious downside to this desire to help people.....and it's called ego. It's the belief that I have the answers to other peoples' problems if they would only come to me and take my advice. It's something that dwells deep inside me and wants me to take control. And I let this being have voice once.....I had a friend who was having a rough time in classes, as was I, and we decided to become roommates so we could study together more, etc.... This was one of the biggest mistakes I ever made. What was really going on was that I had the inner voice (the insidious one) telling me, "you're good so you can help him and make his life different and better....you can change him." And I listened to my voice, and I got frustrated, and I failed to accomplish what it told me.

But then I ask, what if now it's different? What if I can enrich someone's life and my own just by meeting them and getting to know them? What if I don't try to control (but be wary of being controlled myself) and instead go in with no expectations other than wanting to experience and get to know someone?

I envy all the journalers who are only a city away from each other. I think I've come back to my original conclusion that the "journalistic community" is in and of itself largely a bankrupt concept. When one sits and views all the writings and tries to make sense of them in an intertwined relational ways, it's nothing more than a soap opera, with fantasy characters and viewers that believe in vain that they can take part with but their thoughts, by simply following the continuing saga. I'll make one caveat though....one note of hope....that if one really interacts; if one sets aside the illusions and tries to build real relationships that transcend the internet, then maybe it is possible to also transcend the "journalistic community" and build real community and real friendships. I'd like to believe that maybe I've done that a bit with Robb. I'd like to believe that my life will seem more fulfilling in the future. Maybe those rays of hope are all that we have to hold onto sometimes.

Late evening addendum

In some ways Cleveland sucks....it took me forever to find a store open after 10 PM to get some cough drops from. It wasn't like this in Columbus.....there I had four 24-hour grocery stores within 2 miles. Needless to say I fell down at the feet of the store I finally found open and worshipped. I'm now in a state of honey-menthol semi-bliss. Actually it's more like not quite as miserable as before, but humor me with my embellishment. I'm going to sleep now...maybe tomorrow will be better.

23 February 1999
The people responsible for this title have been sacked

If you've read Mickey's latest journal entry, you are probably well aware of his acute lack of classic journaler angst as of late. There are no cases of extreme unrequited love in his life....no multidirectional love polygons....no anxious long distance net relationships.

And, in a serious turn for the worse, he started expressing what us journalistic experts refer to as "Angst-over-your-lack-of-angst Angst". I unfortunately fear that I may have contributed to this malady, as evidenced by the following quote taken from a recent e-mail to Mickey:

You can no doubt see how an innocent comment like that could inadvertantly shatter an otherwise healthy self image. To bring up such doubts about someone's ability to convey angst and confusion consistantly in their journal is certainly an extreme disservice to them.

On account of my present state of grave frivolity, I've decided to declare today "Angst for Mickey Day". I urge you all to e-mail Mickey with suggestions of how he might improve his Angst to healthy levels once again. Here are some ideas to help you get started:

• suggest off the wall reasons why you doubt his true sexuality
• offer to involve him in a promising yet dysfunctional relationship
• tell him of all your own relationship difficulties
• just send a depressing little Angst Day card to show you care

Okie....in all seriousness, I hope that was not *too* off the wall. I had been feeling pretty absurd all day and that just popped into my head. I'm still in the process of reading through Mickey's journal....I embarassingly managed to not be able to find his last year's ones through a serious lapse of navigational skills. He set me straight however.....heh....yeah right....ROFL.

Actually I was pleased with the e-mail Mickey and I have been shooting back and forth....it was nice to get some more high quality debate on stuff I've talked about in my journal. I was also thinking about my friend Chrissy who is in Japan teaching English like Mickey was in the first few months of his journal. Yesterday was her birthday, and I'm planning to send her a copy of this tape I made of music from 1988. It's hard to believe that '88 was such a good year for music, but I have a full 120 minutes of hits that are all good.

Anyways, that was a pretty upbeat entry. I think I'll get back into some more introspective stuff this evening or tomorrow.

24 February 1999
You're Not Happy Enough!!!

So anyways, after stowing the groceries back in my apartment I headed out to campus. My friend Nate, who sings with me at church and also plays GURPS with the group, is in an acappella group called Speakeasy. Speakeasy was doing a performance on campus at "The Spot", and since I hadn't heard them yet I wanted to go. It was actually their first CD release, so I got my second CD of the night.

And I was not disappointed with the music. They were truly spectacular! They did mostly covers, but they were good, with some sounding close to the originals, and others taking a radical twist. It's amazing what one can do with no other instruments other than 8 voices. Of course I was sooo impressed with the two Billy Joel tunes they did, but it was all wonderful. Go check out their homepage and listen to some of the sound clips they have up!

So anyways, the basic gist of this is that I have been both upbeat and social recently, so my page and my e-mail are not getting as much attention as I'd intended. This is only a good thing as far as I can tell. I'm getting the hang of living life perhaps. As always, stop by often to see what's up in my life...it's highly possible that major events will take place in the near future, and if they do, I expect you'll be amongst the first people to know.

I've had a random adjustment of mood since I started writing. No, my mood hasn't changed...I'm still quite happy....now it's just an introspective happy. I expect that I'll have something different to add to this entry later in the day.

Part the Second

Some people would call it coincidence, others group intelligence, still others would say it's just subconscious thought.

I think I'll follow the lead of my friend Robert Anton Wilson and call it Synchronicity.

I feel like I've been dealing in Synchronicity a lot lately.

Thought patterns, songs, books, people all seem to be lining up in orderly rows and patterns that seem to make sense. Every journal I read, and every e-mail I send or receive from journalers seems to relate to all the others in an intricate web of Synchronicity.

I promised some time ago that I would elucidate some thoughts on Aaron, and I think my mind is back on track now. I have two sort of branches to this thought process that I'll touch on.

Aaron is such an interesting case for me, because despite all the journal time and despite all the honesty and despite all the no holds barred in your face openness, there is still so much that we don't know about him. At a glance you wouldn't think so, but Aaron is very careful with his journal, very planned, very controlled. That's the interesting thing about journals, but especially Aaron's I think, that it is the home turf....when we step into someone's journal, we walk precisely where the writer wants us to. When I mentioned Synchronicity, perhaps what I was really seeing was the fact that we all point each other through our writing with big glaring yellow road signs.

But, we all tend to give ourselves away in subtle ways....which is why being in control can be so dangerous...it gives you the illusion that your control is perfect. The real truth is that the more you control and try to be in control the more you give yourself up to control by other people and forces without even being aware it's happening.

This is so connected to my comments on Robb where I said, "....and some of us can see beneath the honesty to catch fleeting glimpses of a greater truth that no one fully knows." Part of my meaning there was that not even Robb knows everything about Robb. But the other important thing about that statement is that I pointed to the idea that our writing reveals so many of these inner secrets. I know from rereading my own journal that I give away hints of my personality that I never even touch upon in writing. It's the same with everyone...so many things can be found in writings. It's like a fractal....every word is a microcosm of the entire psyche.

I guess that first concept was more universal than about Aaron in particular. I definitely can't accuse Aaron of hiding more or less than anyone else, any more than I can criticize any of us for not having a more complete self awareness.

My second thought process applies to Aaron in particular. I have always had a hard time understanding his thought processes. I can sit and analyze journal entries looking for hidden personality clues until I'm blue in the face, but if the thought processes are completely foreign to me it's not going to give me enlightenment.

For me, reading Aaron's journal eventually became frustrating to the point where I had to step away from it for a few weeks at a time. As I read I keep saying to myself, "Why is he making this same mistake again?!" Especially in connection to his relationship with Mike. I truly echoed his sentiments sometimes when he would ask, "Why am I such a fuck-up?!" It always seemed so simple to me....just make a choice and stick with it....but I now think that it was never that simple.

Then, last week I finally had an insight that opened up the door of understanding for me. It all ties back to my discussions of moral and belief paradigms. Basically, it occurred to me that the difficulty in Aaron's life comes from the fact that he operates on a radically different behavioral paradigm from at least myself, and probably a lot of other people. It's not simply that he does a few things that I wouldn't, but that the underlying decision-making assumptions are vastly different.

I don't think this means that I can't understand him though....I just need to make some different basic assumptions. I would suppose it's like some of my engineering problems. You can sit and stare at some problems for hours trying to solve them in a rectangular coordinate system, but when you switch to a spherical coordinate system it suddenly becomes simple and all the terms but one just disappear.

With that in mind I want you to try a thought experiment with me. My insight was that Aaron makes a different fundamental assumption about interpersonal relationships than I do. The easiest way for me to envision this was to drop the standard Judeo-Christian conception of relationships/marriage completely from my mind. Without that concept, is there anything that logically constrains one to a monogamous relationship? I don't think so. Suddenly the prevailing logic is that if you are attracted to someone you go with it, and if you are attracted to different qualities in different people then you have suitable relationships with each person. Why should you suppress your feelings unnaturally? Once again, there is no reason to do that.

I hope I explained that well enough for you to follow my thoughts. Unfortunately, the concept is not as lucid to me as it was last week. But hopefully you can see that if one does not have the Judeo-Christian monogamy concept as a constraining factor the primary logic behind exclusive relationships suddenly falls out. This is how I believe Aaron functions...as do to a lesser degree many people who have tacitly rejected the preeminent religious concepts.

Having possibly established this concept as having some degree of logic, why does Aaron have as many problems as he seems to in making it work? There are two primary reasons I can see that would frustrate his desire for "open-doors" in his relationships. The first is the fact that no matter how much conservative pundits are decrying the fall of civilized society and morals, most people are still constrained by a significant amount of Judeo-Christian morality. It goes by many names: limits, conscience, morals, guilty feelings....but, basically, it is a rare person whose actions are not affected by these things. This no doubt includes many of the people Aaron has relationships with.

The second reason that the "open-doors" concept is difficult, if not impossible, in practice is that human property called selfishness. I know that I am selfish, and so is everyone else to one degree or another. It's really hard to make multiple relationships work in light of basic human selfishness. And I don't even know that selfishness is always a bad thing...in some sense it goes right along with self-preservation; it's looking out for yourself.

So, I think that I may have managed to explain what I think is part of what Aaron's thought processes are and the main reasons why, despite a certain logic, his way of thinking has led to a series of seeming circular relationship paths. Basically when you look at it from a standard perspective, a person in a relationship with Aaron sees a set of three statements, any two of which will work together, but which are logically contradictory as a set of three:
I. Aaron loves me
II. Aaron loves someone else
III. Aaron can only love one person
So, in Aaron's logic system, statement (III) does not exist, and therefore there is no contradiction. In most other people's logic system all three exist, so there is an alternating process of three different stages of denial. One stage is that (I) and (III) exist and Aaron loves me...until evidence contradicts that. The second stage is that (II) and (III) exist and Aaron loves someone else...until evidence contradicts that. And the third is that (I), (II), and (III) all exist and I am confused because I think Aaron has issues.

Well, that was a limb to climb out on, but I am pretty sure that I'm at least a bit closer to the truth than I was a few weeks ago. The thought process was a difficult one for me, but sometimes you get a moment of clarity and have to run with it. Strangely enough for me I didn't take the careful route this time. My usual modus operandi would have been to reread most of Aaron's journal before posting this to try poke any possible holes in my theory. I'm going to let you all do that for me I guess.

Of course, you wonder why I had to do this deep analysis....why I can't just say, "this is the way Aaron is," and leave it at that. Quite simply, I don't work that way....it would be too easy to just accept that this is the way things are. That kind of complacency is what leads people to ignorance and disaster. For some people it's much easier to not deal with it....they can't take the answers so they don't ask the questions....they just go with their gut reaction. Not me.

As a side note, I ask that you not mistake my detached, vaguely scientific tone for more than it is. I would hate to have anyone think I'm heartless or impersonal (or, God forbid, boring). I think my entry from the 18th should prove otherwise. This all has to do with trying to step outside myself at times because I tend to get too personally entranced in people's lives. Unless you've sat at your computer with Aaron's journal on the screen and spoken incredulously to it about how you can't believe he's doing what he's doing, you probably don't fully understand what I mean.

Last updated 18 February 1999.