More twiddling

I started out this morning 7:45 with one cube of the Casper soup and two pucks of the duxelles. I wanted a fairly strong trip, but not as strong as two cubes of soup would have taken me. I want to address two particular sliders in my mind. Two control stations. There are two knobs I need to twiddle. I want to focus more of my attention on my husband and our family, and I want to be more organized about getting shit done and taken care of with my hands instead of spending so much time writing and enacting pornography. Some of this may not make it into the blog it's because it is an  adjustment that I need to make but not one that I am particularly proud of talking about. This holiday season has been absolutely unparalleled. We had a spectacularly good holiday with my parents at Thanksgiving, and then we had an absolutely amazing season with my husband's family at their home. It has been happy, and cozy, and all the good things. 

The one sour note was that I stayed out too late one night, selfishly paying attention to my dick and to my pornographic urges. I need to be better about keeping that dude under a schedule. It is a problem that comes up again and again. I need to get this energy to a place that it is healthy rather than obsessive. For me it is exactly like walking out of a bar drunk or stopping a gambling binge halfway through. I have to be shaken out of it most of the time. It doesn't want to let go naturally. The personality or aspect that I think of as the Horny Stoner has very little sense of time, and also very little sense of compassion toward my ordinary self. I need to have more senses around me when I'm in that space, or I'm not going to be able to let myself go to that space. I enjoy it immensely. It is a strong creative outlet for me. It's a thing that is good for my soul in a lot of ways. But I need to keep it better control because it becomes obsessive and not healthy. The trip that I took to the adult bookstore close to my Husband's parents was not a good idea.

It was something that Husband recommended, it was something that he encouraged me to do. However, it was not a good idea for me. And I recognize that in hindsight. I need to bring the Weaver more forward. I need to bring the Self that does house and organizing and gardening more forward. I need to let go  of my dick a little bit. I have been thinking way too much with it. It is not good for me. Or at least, it's not balanced. The thoughts that I'm having are not unhealthy thoughts, they're not bad thoughts. They are good and constructive and positive ways of exploration. But I have not been considerate with it as far as my primary relationship. That aspect of myself is one that I struggle with getting enough control over, because in the moment it is very much like when you are drunk wanting another drink. It is not something that admits of entirely conscious control. And so I have to be a little bit more conscious of how much leeway I give it. Ideally, I would like for it to be an element of my life that I have more of myself involved in the decision making power over during the moment. And that is partly an exercise in will-building and I think some of it is going to be an exercise in making guided careful choices about when I let that dude have the keys. 

I don't think that I have made unsafe or healthy or dangerous choices while I'm being that dude. It just needs to fade a little bit more quickly over the course of an evening, and it needs to admit of more conscious management moment to moment. I need to have the decision-making power focused a bit more on overall good rather than if there is a chance that the sex will get better and more interesting if I stay longer. A situation like last Tuesday where I was prowling around working to make things better is not necessarily helpful. It was definitely not a good idea to keep going once I recognized that my time should be over. It was just about to get really awesomely juicy, or at least that was what it looked like, and that doesn't help. That becomes more of the problem. In the same way that an alcoholic has difficulty letting go once the good feelings start, I have significant difficulty relinquishing control back to my sensible daytime self when I can feel a hot scene or a story unfolding. That's really what most of it is about. It's not primarily focused on sensations or actual horniness. It is about this itch for connection and story. It is about wanting to explain and teach and talk. It is a creative energy that pushes my mind but it also is a prurient itch. It is a craving that I should shut down sometimes and go do something more constructive. I should stop playing with my dick as much and stop spending so much time on Twitter trying to get attention and followers, and go for a walk or walk the dogs or clean the house or organize my clothes or any of those things would be more constructive. 

I recognize the value and the beauty of what I'm doing sexually. It's not that I feel like I'm doing bad things are wrong things or inappropriate things, although they would certainly be considered that by a lot of mainstream society. I am not being unkind or hurting people with most of these experiences. It is just that I am spending so much time doing it and spending so much of my energy and my life focused on something that doesn't build and maintain my person and my family. I feel the urge to masturbate right now, and that's not right. I should not be hounded by this constant itch. That's the reason that I want to bring it into this trip experience and think about it intensely. Not that I want to masturbate now. Not that I think that it's a good idea or anything like that. I want to slide back that rheostat. I want to make it less compelling. I want it to be something that I can enjoy when I have the time and I have the right energy to devote to it and when my body is actually ready for it. Because I will sometimes go at myself so much that I am spent and sore and I'm not having fun but it feels compulsive. And that's what I need to let go of. It's not even a compulsive sexual urge, it's a compulsive psychological urge and I recognize that. I guess they two are strongly blended, the sexual and the psychological, but when I am thinking through things like I want to be able to play with a guy after I'm no longer horny myself, I should be going home instead. I should look at that and say, I have had an awesome night; I am spent, I am tired, it is time to go home rest is the right thing now and not continuing to drive forward with it. It's not healthy for me, and it's not good for my organism in the sense of my own physical body but it's also very much not good for my organism in the sense of the two of us. It's not good for the octopus. It's not good for the version of myself that has eight limbs and two beating hearts. I recognize that my distraction with this is often hurtful to my husband and not beneficial to our overall goodness. I am moderately deep down the ladder this morning. I can still quite clearly read the text on my phone as long as I move my eyes around. The colored dots that begin to populate the letters and the patterns that overlay the light on the ceiling dots are not overwhelming. The sensation of the geometry moving through my body is moderately but not extremely strong. I think partly because I've been deliberately and carefully working on psychological and sexual material I am focused more on a conscious level.

The place I work lost power just now. I had to function fairly competently and not let on that I was weird. It worked out fine. We did eventually get the power back up, and I talked through the various steps with my colleague who mans the building on Saturdays about how to shut things down if it didn't. It kind of knocks the trip off, like having to suddenly deal with something when you're drunk. It makes everything weird because I've still got a lot of psilocybin rushing through my brain but I had to be very functional and very together. Of all my colleagues the the guy who works Saturdays I haven't had a complicated conversation with about what I do on my Saturday mornings, and I probably ought to. I don't feel like I ever give bad information or anything problematic , but it would probably help if he knows why I want to have a fairly brief conversation rather than hang out on the phone. 

It does make me feel like I've got my brain fairly well together. It makes me feel like I am at least moderately competent during the middle of an intense trip. I'm not out of things. Now, I would have had difficulty in any situation that would have required me to travel there, like if I'd needed to go and fix something at the office I would probably make my excuses and not be able to go unless it was at least a couple of hours later in the trip. He called me at something like 9:15 after a 7:45 start, so the psychedelic part of it was right in the middle. I suppose it's actually down from the peak center of the trip, and I had already been in the middle of long dictation about adjusting levels and things like that before the call came. But I should probably have that conversation with the weekend guy. Now I am lying in bed with four little warm hearts (dogs) surrounding me while my husband is off taking an important test. In a bit I will go and start packing down Christmas. It's a thing that needs done. He will probably hopefully be happy to see it underway when he gets home. Hopefully we'll be coming home mid-afternoon with excellent results and he can stop stressing so much. These tests have been an extraordinary trial of how he can remember. It's not anything he's taking classes on although he has done reviews and followed study guides and listened to and watched presentations on how to remember all of this crap, but it is important to his career and nothing which he will use which is the unfortunate and ironic part. None of it is anything that he will engage with and operate on a daily basis, it's just a bunch of stupid rules. Many of them are so bizarrely arbitrary that it is hard to figure out why the rule was even set. 17 days. Why 17 days? Some of them have explanations but most of them are just completely arbitrary random crap you have to remember. All of them are the kind of things that if he were actually doing the work, there would be layers of computer management and lots of regulated engagement that he would have to know because he worked in it. However, with the way his job is he doesn't actually work with any of that side of the whole company and he doesn't really want to, but because of the kind of company they are, for him to become a manager he has to have that licensing. And so it has stressed him and frustrated him and he has wrangled with all these certifications and he's failed tests repeatedly but just keeps doggedly working at it. He keeps going at it and studying and cramming his brain full of this stuff that he does not use. So it's just bizarre rote memorization and there's nothing that he can do to make it more substantial and real in his mind.

And all that happens for the rest of us is we try to make space for him to have that study time but with the way he works, there's not a way that I can realistically help him with any of it other than just staying out of his way and taking care of other stuff so that he doesn't have to worry so much about dinner or dishes or whatever. And even if he passes this one today there's still one that he skipped over because he had failed it twice and he has to wait an established time between that and taking it over. I can understand the legislative and governing aspect of making sure that people know what they're doing with this stuff, but I wish there was some understanding for the people that are having to get all this bizarre regulatory licensing when it doesn't even apply to what they do. And that's one of the two potatoes I walked into this trip with. 

I think of them like potatoes because I have to have things that I can visualize gripping in my hand and there can only be two of them because I only have two hands. I can't go into a trip with a lot of complicated thoughts on the front end because the storm is so intense and I have to be able to hold on to very simple ideas. So I picture them like a potato in each hand. They are warm, they are nourishing, they are meaningful things that help me. But sometimes it's difficult to keep hold of them. I can't go into this with a backpack. I don't have a sack of any sort. I suppose that I could pre-record things that I want to remember and think about and play them for myself or something like that, but really this is more of an exercise in stripping down the extraneous to a core of what is important about a particular issue and figuring out where I need to make an adjustment in my head based on which particular thing that is.

Every one of those sliders has side effects. If I slide down the one that has to do with my confidence, my comfort at work struggles and my social self feels underpowered and lonely and I have difficulty reaching out. If I push the confidence slider too high I'm an arrogant asshole and I make mistakes based on believing that I'm right rather than careful work and double checking. It's a fine balance. Things like my ability to do math in my head are substantially impacted by some of these. And so with recognizing that I need to dial back the Horny Stoner and reduce the amount of time and energy that I devote to those pursuits that it governs will have an impact on things like how I feel in terms of daily life and whether I am comfortable speaking up in a conversation, etc. The fact that I have spent most of my life unaware that other people just let things hit their faces and have emotional responses that are not considered, is still weird. 

I know, and I have known for a long time, that most of human body language is instinctive for most humans, and not conscious and not even something that most people are aware that they do. But because I think of it like careful armor, because it is conscious so often in my daily life, my adjustment of things in my mind sometimes will impact how smooth I am at operating those levers. It can make me stutter. It can make me um and ah a lot more if my confidence is down. I am less smooth. My façade of having an ordinary body expression breaks down more readily. But I'm also less of a domineering asshole. It's a complicated dance. I don't necessarily feel like I have that much control of the lever from day to day. I feel like it's an adjustment I try to make once a week, and now if I go forward with it twice a month because I have to have a period of experimental production to be able to compare to my notes. I can go in with a hypothesis, that a particular frame of mind is going to be helpful for me or that a way of engaging will need more confidence for a season or something like that, but each knob has a whole little constellation of other things that cling to it and move along with the knob. I'm not as conscious of them, the little things, as I wish I were. Vibrato in my voice. My ability to relax and focus. My visual acuity. They all get tied up to certain basic psychological aspects or measurements. 

There's a book that I need to reread about how we focus things like openness and charm in our lives and how they can make you happy or unhappy, productive or lazy, open to new experience or closed off to the world. Some of them are fundamental basics of how we are as a person, but many of them are amenable to change just by changing the way our attention is focused or the way we engage with other people. When I am in a happy confident competent space and I smile at strangers in the grocery store, it feeds into itself and I feel warm and engaged and cared for as a human being. But if I push it too far and I have to tell everybody about my experiences because I am clearly the most interesting and important person in the room, and I can't shut my mouth -- then I become a conversational problem, and it is difficult for me to get along nicely, and then I don't feel cared for and engaged, I feel like I am either compulsively pushing out information through my speech or I feel like I am a little bit of a monster in the sense that I am portraying a character that is not friendly and not warm and people react to that with intrigue but not warmth in return. I don't get hugged a lot when I'm in that space. And so I have to push up the part of me that listens and is interested and pays attention and makes connections. But if I spend too much time in that, I can become maudlin and sensitive to the point that it is difficult for me to drive my car through the tears. I sing along with music and it touches me so deeply when I'm in those spaces. Even just the color of the sky or the flight of birds can make me cry. And I love that openness and that sensuality and that attachment to poetry, not just in the sense of remembering verses that I love but in the sense of feeling poetical in my life. When I am in that space I'm a very powerful storyteller and my connections to human warmth are very vital and very intense. But it could also make me so much of an emotionally driven person that I have difficulty focusing on work and getting away from wandering through the emotional pathways in my mind. They're beautiful, they just don't get the floor swept. I have to be able to focus and do my work at my office job and I have to be able to focus and take care of things around the house without spending so much time meandering through memory lane that it impacts my function.

So my two potatoes for this trip were first to pull back on the Horny Stoner, reducing the amount of time that I devote to THC and sexual exploits, and to turn my mind more toward taking care of the physical. I need to exercise more. I need to watch what I eat. But I also need to spend more time with things like cleaning the house and making food and weaving. I need to direct energy into those things because they are vital to my mental health as well as important in my life and my engagement with my husband and with other people. So that's two sliders. Two knobs. They impact one another. Reducing the energy that I devote to pursuing novel sex will free up additional energy. It can be directed toward things like sweeping the floor and getting the towels folded. I also need to make sure that I am paying at least some attention to the creative work that I need to do in my textile pursuits, because not only are they remarkably fulfilling from an individual creative aspect, they tie me to a community of like-minded and supportive individuals whose feedback helps keep me on an even keel. I need a certain amount of adulation. It's like sunshine. And the way that I get it honestly is by doing good work and letting people see that good work and getting their comments and their feedback. If I'm not doing the good work, then the feedback feels hollow and empty and not engaged. And so that's a complicated cluster of things and there again it ties into issues like competence and confidence and pride and happiness and each one of them is webbed to the others by little filaments and they tug one another and limit one another and shadow one another even though the individual aspect that I'm trying to move seems like a distinct idea. They feel like they ought to be more separable than they are. I recognize that this is much of the complicated question of modern psychology. And definitely one of the big issues in modern psychiatry. Because you can't just push an individual switch and make your serotonin more and that fixes everything. More serotonin makes you happier but it also makes you lazy. More dopamine makes you driven but too much makes you a jerk. None of these things are simple. Every single one of them is tied to things deep in my biology and my psychology that are affected when I change those perspectives. I feel like the fact that I'm aware of that helps. Knowing that I'm going into it consciously and with the understanding that adjusting something like my confidence will need a lot of fine-tuning and I wish that it were easier to compartmentalize some of this. But it's really just like having a fluid level in a vat or setting a power level on a switch, it has to go through everything else and suffuse them before I will really even be aware of how I function with that difference. 

I don't feel like there are an awful lot of large levers. I feel like there are a few large levers and a lot of little small adjustments. It's like the sails on a ship or the engines on a rocket. You have your main thrusters and then you have things that adjust your yaw and your roll. Attitude and pitch. Some of those are very slippery to get a hold of and I can usually only adjust the main engines on a deep trip, and then I have to trim the sails all week to adjust and get what I need done. Reducing the first chakra energies which are generative and sexual and dominant will also bank the fires on some of my engagement with other people and some of my basic confidence in myself and things like that. It is almost like I'm having to rebuild channels in my subtle body. For so long the pipeline has been completely blocked and there has been no fluid flowing through me in the sense of feeling creative inspiration. Sexual expression both in terms of the actual having of the sex and in terms of the writing about it has been such a source of creativity and joy and engagement and fun, that I don't want to damp down that channel entirely. I just want for energy to flow up through me in a fuller, more creative, more engaging and nourishing way. I feel like I've had a hugely radiant first chakra, and then almost nothing on the second and third and the fourth and then when it gets to the speech centers in the throat and the centers in the mind where it is expressed and considered and related to, that energy is still very red. That's a little bit of a simplistic way to try to explain it, but there's really not an awful lot of language I can wrap around it that makes sense. I feel like I've had a pipeline going through me that used to be a riverway. It used to inundate a wide variety of pursuits and energies, and I don't feel like I am blocked in any particular aspect, just that the ditch has been dug very deep so that the energy goes direct from that sense of being universally sustained as a generative force, right up to speaking and thinking. It doesn't warm my heart enough. I need to let that go through me and come out as art and poetry and weaving and gardening and making food and taking care of my house and my husband and our dogs and our cat, and I need to have those things be the way that much of that energy is expended and also renewed. I need to stop focusing so much on the attention of random strangers to my sexual creative energy. It's performative, and I recognize the value of performance especially with my career, but it often bypasses emotional connection. Emotional connection is important and helps to stabilize my world. The horny stoner is entirely a creature of hot intense benders. He is not a smart person to take care of the house. He is not a competent worker. He is a hot greasy dude that only meets you in the bar. He's very compelling, he's very charming, he's very engaging; it's a lot of fun to be him. Having my mind in that state makes me feel very attractive and very compelling and very powerful. My ability to hold sway over other people with it is astonishing to me. I am still, in that character, fairly conscious of the maneuvers that make people listen to me or make people pay attention and feel heard, and all of this is still fairly deliberate even when the Horny Stoner is driving. It's like we all use the same car, but each family member adjusts the seats and the mirrors. I feel like that's part of why he's powerful. Being able to consciously manipulate body language, facial expression, posture and vocal tone gives me a very strong set of levers to control other people with. I can get people to do things that they've never done before. Mostly those are things they've fantasized about or wished they could do. I'm sure that in some cases there are things that they later are amazed that they did, and I know that in some situations they regret in the morning what they did in the dark. I try to be warm and friendly and compassionate and engaging with all of these guys. Even the rough stuff, and in some cases especially the rough stuff, I present an aspect that is non-threatening and engaged and enjoying and sensual. 

I just need to listen to the clock. I need to shut it down when the timer on my watch goes off. I need to be able to muzzle this dog. An upsetting message from my husband because I've stayed too late instantly shifts me into feeling guilty and wrong and bad, and I need to learn the lesson that proper time management and taking things to an appropriate distance without going to excess will avoid those bad feelings. I am given a remarkable amount of latitude. I have amazing freedom. I need to respect the limits of it more. I need to think about things before I turn the keys over to the Horny Stoner and, ideally, I need to have my daytime mind a little bit more along for the ride. I need to be more conscious of impacts and not just driven by weed and my dick. I'm debating significantly whether this is going to end up in the psychedelics blog or not. I don't want to edit my record to the point that it's untrue. I also don't want to put out a lot of information that will threaten or upset my home life and others around me. I don't want to be a source of discord with this. I'm really trying to get my head fixed. So on further consideration I will probably put most of it in the psychedelics blog with some edits. All of this is definitely stuff that I need to talk to my therapist about, and being able to send him a link to an entry where I've done hours worth of thought for contemplation can frequently shorthand a lot of introductory talk in a session and allow us to get to the meaty questions more quickly. I have also been in a weird mood relative to several Broadway musicals. I keep playing them again and again and singing through the words of the songs in many cases. Heathers the Musical, Mean Girls the Musical, Legally Blonde the Musical. All of them deal with different versions and different aspects of megalomania, narcissism, superficiality. I identify with the heroine in many of the cases but I also identify with Martha Dunstock, the fantasizing fat friend.

It helps, or rather it enforces the pattern, that the music is exceptionally catchy. More so with Heathers than with the others, although Legally Blonde is a close second. It is easy to get lost in the music and notice only later that the needle is burning a groove in the record in my brain. I think that some of the time I need to back up and pull my head a little bit above the level of singing along and look at what happens in Veronica's life. She fixes herself at the end, she readjusts to being a friend for her friend and trying to live at least a reasonable life, but the wreckage is spectacular. The human costs are phenomenal. I need to focus more on the things that I can see in advance without having to look back and see consequences. I know in many of these cases that being able to fire the rockets on an altitude adjustment engine will pay significant benefits. I think that I can work to trim my sails such that the prevailing wind carries me where I want to go. I can make a deliberate choice on how I put my oars in the water. There is a certain amount of stuff that I've got to taste the cake before I adjust the recipe. It is more like baking than it is like cooking a stew; I don't get as much input and feedback in the middle of the process. At least with these major adjustments that I make during a trip. They're very powerful, they are certainly worth poking with a stick to see how things happen. But some of them are a little bit blunt in the sense of not being able to exert fine control until situations arise. I don't want to keep going through my life feeling sorry for things I've screwed up. I recognize that I am given an extraordinary amount of leniency on some of that, but I also recognize that it has damaged some of my relationships in substantial ways. Being competent enough on most of my days to get forgiveness for my incompetent days does not push me forward well. It is not lead to a condition of being happy and whole as a person. And if I'm spending too much of my time and energy doing things like reading Facebook or checking Twitter for new porn or new people responding to my own porn, I don't keep my feet on the ground and my shoulder to the rock. I do valuable work. It is important. I lose track very often of the importance. The psychedelics have actually helped remarkably in being able to recognize the human value of what I do at my job as well as engaging with the people I work with on a daily basis in more substantial and meaningful ways. The week before Christmas break, I was invited to a little potluck lunch that an organization in our building was having. I got to sit and listen to three powerful creative Latinas talk about their food traditions and the ways they celebrate with family, and share the unique ways and stories that are my own. A year ago I would have never sat at that table. I would have made my little tray and taken it away and eaten it quietly at my desk and not shared any of the talk. It is so nourishing to my soul and it is so helpful to how I function as a person as well as how I do my job. I have to look at it sometimes and recognize how remarkably far I've come. I've done a lot of very good work. I keep having to make adjustments and reorganizations, but the direction I'm going overall is healthy and positive and I feel like it's good for me and good for the world. I really do feel like some of the conversations that I'm having with other people touch them significantly and often help them significantly. That's very new for me. Being open about my mental health struggles over the past several years has been important, and I feel like having an open and non-judgmental conversation about mental health and about things like anxiety and depression and psychological medications is important.