is there a fundamental self?
if there’s no ego there’s no narrative.
the most powerful tool we have is the ability to program our own brains, assuming we have enough degrees of freedom to choose what we do with our days.
i dislike medicine. i am not in accordance with it, and i cannot allow it to program my brain.
thinking about my interactions with j— today and how they didn’t really go anywhere.
all these concepts are just concepts. i’m realizing, again, the trap of conceptual thinking. i keep climbing up on roofs, and i keep jumping off them and going up to my teacher like, “see, look, i jumped off the roof, like you said, and look at me, it hurts, look how i’m suffering.” and my teacher keeps saying, “you are so attached to conceptual thought. go jump off the roof again, but
about it this time.”
the middle way is about realizing that you don’t have to jump off the roof, and you also don’t have to bitch about stuff. you don’t have to do either. if you can let go of conceptual thought, you can save yourself the trouble of the whole thing. right?
you can say what you want about the things that have gotten me through life up till now, but buddhism is the biggest safety net i ever found. because it’s still there even when all these material safety nets disappear. who else will have my back in my final moment?
i love the eye as a motif. look in the mirror, and see how good your mind is at keeping the eyes in view. everything could be changing around them, but eyes always want to find other eyes.
the interesting thing is that the gautama buddha’s eyes are closed. every time i look at him, he’s always there with his eyes closed.
the lovely thing about life, as dostoevsky pointed out, is that you can always kick down the house of cards, whenever you want, and if humans don’t have that, then what do we even have, because that’s like our whole thing,
of cards and sandcastles and spiderwebs. we love kicking those things down, no matter how hard we’ve worked on them, how pretty they are, how magnificent it would be if we could preserve them forever.
there’s a lot of fake gay bitches in our world: people who act gay and look gay but are actually straight. i find that the fake gay thing tends to be accompanied by unsavory symptoms elsewhere in their lives.
for example, v— from the psych ward, who acts gay, talks gay, looks gay, but is straight and has a child with a woman—
and he’s an absolute monster to patients. the same patient who once told me to “stop messing around” if i’m serious about buddhism, lucid as our entire conversation was, was told by v— in unnecessarily opaque terms that she wasn’t ready to be discharged.
he said, “if you can’t tell me why you need to stay, then you’re not even close to being able to leave.”
and she said, “please, can’t you just tell me what the reason is?”
and he said, “the fact that you have to ask tells me everything i need to know. now sit down and take your clozapine.”
FAKE GAY BITCH! and mind you..... it’s many such cases, bro! i hate a fake gay bitch so fucking much, dude. i genuinely hate a fake gay bitch so much.
if we are tempering ourselves and moderating our hatred, i would say, simply, that i have learned to avoid fake gay bitches. i’ve learned to spot them and dissect myself from them before anything can get started. if you’re a fake gay bitch, i’m genuinely not interested in what you have to say, or your friendship, or anything. i love straight people—many of my best friends are straight—but i’m not friends with ANY fake gay bitches.
yesterday it was as if m— was ashamed to let me know that she has a boyfriend. fake gay bitch. like, stand on your business, queen. don’t get it twisted: just cuz i’m gay doesn’t mean i don’t support breeding efforts.
the main thing is i have everything i need already inside me and around me. it’s inside me, and in the people around me. if i were to lose all the material things that prop me up, it would still be fine, because of what i have in and around me. and i really believe that.
up to and including death, i am okay with anything that befalls me. okay is the baseline state of the world.
everyone was appreciative when i was holding the binky in the baby’s mouth today. that was the most sacred moment of the day.
the rest of the day was mind-numbingly boring,
a team of people walking around the children’s emergency department doing ultrasounds on kids somewhat unnecessarily. we tell ourselves it’s changing management, but i’m certain it’s not. like, we all knew that dude didn’t have a pneumothorax, but we scanned him for like 30 minutes anyway.
this is fake medicine. this is hyper-resourced medicine. doing unnecessary ultrasounds, wasting that ultrasound gel, digging around for your organs while you watch scooby doo and try not to be embarrassed that a 20something dude is sliding the probe so far down into your crotch that he’s almost at risk of touching your dick, searching for your bladder—which has nothing wrong with it.
sweeties ANYWAY, the baby. i was called in by a nurse who was immediately so nice to me... she put down the bars of the crib and was like, “here, you can see better if i do this” …. like thank you queen… then she was like, “do you wanna be in charge of the sweeties (sugar water dispenser)?” like yes, i absolutely do, queen, thank you so much... then she was like, “hey, i can have mom do the sweeties if you wanna pay attention to the screen; i don’t want you to miss out on learning,” and i was like, “no, ma’am, i can multitask.” but when you’re in the presence of a literal baby, and the baby is fucking locked into your eyes, staring at you, holding eye contact for so fucking long, and you just look right back while you keep your finger inside the binky that he’s sucking on, and you twist and turn and pull it in ways to keep it engaging for him, and you intermittently feed him little drops of sugar water—I gave him too much the first time, and i heard it getting caught in his throat, and i was like, damn, you can really just fuck up in the blink of an eye—it’s hard to pay attention to a screen.
and i was in a trancelike state until they got all the ultrasound views they needed.
previously the whole place is weird. i get such weird and bad vibes from medicine in general. i just don’t like it in there. and honestly, i would be so fucking proud of myself if i could man up and drop out with two and half months left. if i were honoring my humanity and that of everyone else, i would stop participating in this farce no matter how close I am to the end.
at the end of the day, when you get asked if you have any questions, sometimes you just gotta hit em with the “ummmmm..... not that i can think of.”