Awareness. Self-awareness. I could get lost in any of a dozen sci-fi flicks. Of course, all the good ones like Matrix, Back to the Future, and really just about anything, I’m not too picky when it comes to movies… I just finished watching a movie called Project Almanac, last night was something called TimeKeepers maybe? The “timekeepers” were significant characters at least and the movie could have been called something else.
Tonight’s movie played with Time travel and although it used most of the common memes in that genre, it did try to add a few unique pieces into itself. Most notable was it portrayed most of the cinematography as self-shot, Blair Witch style almost- without the scary. Otherwise, it used a set of high school characters to act out the tropes and add in the requisite drama. Not a bad movie, and it left the same plot holes you would expect in a movie built on a falsehood, Time travel in that fashion is not possible.
The days have been routine, and that is good.. though, it takes some of the interest out of the day. Tomorrow I’ll wake up the same I bet. Only ten twenty-three now, so I’ll probably be in bed by eleven or so, and awake again at seven. Then I’ll come downstairs to watch TV and see what’s going on in the world, while I smoke and wait to take my pills at eight-thirty. The last few mornings I’ve gagged a bit on that morning smoke, so perhaps I should skip that part tomorrow.
Oh, to note: what’s going on in the world? Well, the same stuff as when I stopped watching before. I didn’t completely ‘turn it off’ until I left for Texas last December. No tv/media screen time at all for nearly six weeks or so. I think it was in Carlsbad, yeah at Brantley Lake State Park when I used the iPad to watch Hulu. That worked to kill the excess of tent time I had there. It was still another month though before I started watching the news again though.
Earlier last year, the spring of ’22, I watched a lot of TV too, way too much daytime TV (and still,) yet there isn’t much else to do when you’re stuck in bed all day for months. I did watch the news, CNN, etc, back then, I tried to keep up on it at least. For most issues I just didn’t have the bandwidth- I’d see something on the news and try to fact-check it with my own sources, fall down a rabbit hole or two, and just never find my way out. After a while, it just wasn’t worth my time to try to understand ‘politics’ anymore.
How do I reflect on that, knowing what I know now? If my brain was damaged and now shows signs of healing, then at best, that is if I am ‘recovered’ from that injury now, then at the least it has been a progressive process. Meaning from the moment of my head smacking the ground, the damage was done and everything since has been a slow climb back up from that hole.
My ADHD, I have to remind my self, it is not a ‘thing’, it is an absence of a thing, a deficit of my attention, and it is still worse (or is it?) than before, so likely the other function of my damage, the ToM processing likely was just as impaired in my original crash. Is that why it was hard to watch the news before? It was too hard for me to process the emotional and social states displayed and compile that into a view of reality.
I think I’m on the right track there- I remember the news sounding just the same as the commercials, just another sales pitch, that much I could see, yet the unchecked facts and the sure confidence of the presenters (all of them, really,) conveyed to me that it just wasn’t worth watching. Too many contradictory opinions and no one left room for being wrong, it just didn’t logically compute.
I tried over the months, and yes on some issues I did take an interest and follow along, though mostly with everything else I was going through physically and with the opioids at that point in the timeline, I didn’t keep up well. I didn’t know then and I hadn’t even thought to wonder what part specifically of my brain might be impaired. I wonder how my brain did that ‘plastic’ trick. If I couldn’t emotionally attribute feelings and thoughts to others, did I do it using my left side’s more analytical processes?
Have I continued that and now practiced it well enough to make my left TPJ a stand-in replacement or maybe my right TPJ is back in action now, better than before? In any of these cases, there is a gradient of some sort, established by my brain’s recovery curve. Looking back, there were times I must have processed wrong- yet, my memories (for as much as my research shows now,) were unaffected. This leaves me to wonder if I can go back and reprocess now, the easy answer is yes.
No, would also be an option, kinda. I can go back in memory and reprocess now however there is no guarantee that I would have any different result and even if I did, I could not go back and change any previous action (this isn’t a sci-fi flick.) However, increasing my awareness of true reality, even if in the past, must increase my wisdom of the current world. That’s a lot of words to say the more I learn of my past mistakes the more likely I am to not repeat them now.
I tried to be hyper-vigilant with my task list today and went to work cleaning off my desk. It went as well it has the last few weeks, the top paper caught my attention and I went to work following that thread and almost stopped what I was doing- I wanted to clean the desk. I caught myself and realized what I was doing, so I went back. First I went and cleaned all the papers from the whole downstairs (often I’ll leave stuff in piles by my chair,) and collected them into a pile on my desk.
Then I went through the pile, one paper at a time and either discarded it, added its ‘action’ item onto a new list, then filed it on the other side of the desk. Maybe an hour I spent, making some phone calls to follow up on some, then disposing in the trash. About half the papers are gone now, and tomorrow I’ll have a nice list numbered one through nine, to actually finish the whole pile of stuff.
As soon as I’d gotten back in Michigan I started watching the news again, some but little. Now, I’ll usually leave the Today show on for most of the morning (the entire thing is a sales pitch- for the entire world to wake up and have an answer to what they need to buy today.) I find it odd how the hosts mimic real social interaction as they carefully play out the memes and tropes to illustrate to everyone watching what might be a good way to behave.
That is the part that bothers me. The movies, fake time machines, I’m good with all that- we all know it’s just pretend. Yet, when real-world people pretend to socially interact on TV, that is just not authentic to me. Granted that is just the morning sales pitch, yet the rest of everything else isn’t much different. And the news hosts. Geesh. I thought they were just telling the news. Nope, they’re selling it.
Each line they give confidently applies the pre-established norms of their intended viewing audience to whatever piece of news crosses their desk already. I can already tell you what whoever will say tomorrow:
“Look, look here at what happened today! Obviously, we’ve been right!”
Whatever pieces of news actually happen tomorrow doesn’t even matter. There will be enough to pick and choose, to curate the best pieces of information to support their cause. Promoting the truth? No, that is not what they get paid for. They are just the face of the organization set to sell their own advertising space.
Is that what all of it comes down to? Everyone is out to protect their own number one? Well, actually, maybe, yes.
Maybe it’s time I get on that train, what does that mean? I don’t know. Or I do and those words just aren’t coming yet. Maybe I do see them, and I just doubt myself too much and I’m wondering how much of a limb I’m already out on.
Yeah, the goldfish bowl effect has come and gone several times, I’ve gotten used to it (as is my intent,) just writing to myself. Yet, this week, this feels different. Self-doubt is a good thing I’m sure, it must be: imagine how bad things might be if we never did doubt ourselves. Then again, listening to a lot of people (and everything on TV,) there is not much ‘self-doubt’ displayed. An attitude of “I could be wrong”, ha, you won’t see that on CNN (or any of the other news channels.)
Okay, fifteen hundred is good.. if I doubt my brain I at least shouldn’t let my fingers go soft, this might end up taking me twice as long to figure and type out.
Time to rest.