The delicate balance of aloneness

This morning I woke up and spent a little time considering the sermon from church yesterday. I was in a pretty decent state of mind. I was trying to get my head straightened-out so I could have a productive day. Then my wife walked into our bedroom, "Can I ask you a question?"

I always feel a bit of trepidation when she asks that. I know it means there's some emotional payload coming. She gets up hours before I do and by the time I'm starting my day she has a list of items to talk to me about, things she wants to get done, and so on. We've had a few good arguments over it all. She's tried to wait a bit, but she has horrible timing. For a while she tried just hunting me down when I was in the shower. Then she tried sending me emotion-laden text messages while I was at work. Then she'd try to dump things on me as soon as I got home. Of course, by the time I am feeling balanced out in the evening she's too tired to talk and falls asleep. Our clocks couldn't be more out of sync if we tried.

Sure enough, she asked this morning, why I am "always" so hard on my oldest son? Apparently he had his feelings hurt when I told him to go out last night, put the lawnmower in the shed, pick up his two bicycles, put them away, and then close the door on the shed. Of course they had all been sitting out for days...in the rain.

As soon as the question was asked the mental walls flew up. The delicate balance of healthy mindset was gone. My train of thought was not only derailed, but the bridge was blown out from underneath it.

Suddenly I was no longer trying to have a good day that avoided moral pitfalls and was truly productive. Now I was worrying over how bad of a father I am. Is my son sitting there thinking his father hates him? Does my wife think that I'm driving him away from us? What about the other kids? Are they feeling the same way?

My morning shower is usually a refuge for me. I slowly come to terms with what the day is going to bring and try to get a bead on how I'm going to go about handling the list of things I have to do. I lost that too. I just stood there wondering if anything I do is worthwhile.

By the time I made it to work the day was destroyed. I spent lunch with my son and daughter trying to express to them that I love them by just spending time with them. It never feels like it's enough.

I was so close to having a good day. I almost had the morning just perfect. I had almost the perfect amount of solitude. Then it all got blown up. I can't even express how frustrated I am.

A Side of Turkey

It's been a while since I did any fiction writing, but a few of the people at The Refuge have been talking about it and I decided to start up again. Having been out of the mix for a while I struggled to find an idea that I felt was worthwhile. Fortunately, an article online was helpful and suggested just spending a lot of time asking, "What if?" It was late at night and there was a bright flash outside that lit the house through multiple windows. It only took me a couple moments to realize that it was a lightning bolt from a passing storm. I asked myself, but what if it wasn't...

A Side of Turkey

He opened his eyes and sat staring into the dark wondering why exactly he was awake. He lay motionless listening. The box fan in the window hummed on the low setting but there were no odd noises. Maybe it was a dream. He had always been the sort to have bad dreams. There was the one with the giant wolf and then there was the other with the screaming demon head. He shivered a bit at the thought of that one. Why the demon was a pale blue-green he never could figure out, but it scared the hell out of him.

No, he hadn’t been dreaming. It was something else, but what? He wished his wife would stop snoring and junior wasn’t jammed in between them like a radiant heater stuck on high. Maybe that was it. Maybe the kid had kicked him. Great, kicked awake at, good grief, three-forty-eight in the morning with a presentation to make tomorrow for the Wilkinson account.

Taking a deep breath he closed his eyes again. Maybe he’d still be able to squeeze in a couple more hours before the wife’s hair dryer blasted him awake. And then he could see the inside of his eyelids. It was one of those moments where a person isn't quite sure what they are seeing, but know they had seen it before. Suddenly the red world of flesh and capillaries disappeared. He felt the bed shudder a bit beneath him.

Wide awake now his eyes snapped open again. What was that?! Stepping to the window he peered out into the darkness, except it was not dark. The sky was brilliantly lit with greens, whites and blues. Thousands upon thousands of streaks racing all in the same direction. Or rather out of the same direction - a bright light hanging low over the horizon and flying out of it the streamers of light. Suddenly one of them flashed like lightning and disappeared. There was a dull rumble that he could feel more than hear.

He stared at the spectacle for a while and thought about waking his wife, but realized if he did then junior would wake up too and then they would never get him back to bed. The meteors, and how could they be anything but meteors, were not decreasing in any way, in fact they seemed to be ever so slightly increasing. He decided he might as well give up on sleep and go watch the show. Maybe even see if there was anything on the television about it.

“...completely unlike anything we have ever seen before. This is nothing like the Leonid or Perseid showers in November and August! This is absolutely massive...,” the scientist turned cable television personality nearly shouted. The guy was not one of those real scientists, he just knew about as much as some high school teacher and got himself a spot on the evening news a few years ago talking about methane explosions or something. Now he was suddenly an expert on meteor showers.

“So, what you’re saying is this is a once in a lifetime event?” asked the woman who was far too chipper for this early in the morning. Must be on Cocaine, he thought.

“No! I’m saying this is unprecedented!” the fake scientist was getting shrill, “That bright dot is a comet and we’re looking right up it’s tail...,” he kept droning on about the moon and approach angles and slingshots and a bunch of other stuff.

Outside the light show was brighter than before. In fact that big light in the sky that he now knew to be a comet was much bigger. The thunder was growing louder too. It seemed that the comet had moved higher above the horizon. As he watched it he realized that it was growing, and quite fast too.

The slower meteors, if they could be called slow, were now more obvious to him as they flashed and exploded. The comet was filling half the sky and the rumble was turning into a low roar.

“....near Oklahoma...” he barely heard the t.v. nerd say. Well, maybe I’ll get interviewed in the morning. Couldn’t hurt to have old man Wilkinson see me on television when’s he’s eating his egg whites and...

At that very moment the comet grew insanely huge and the man felt something like hot rain searing his skin while a pungent scent attacked his nose. Standing in his backyard in his boxers while staring into the light his last thoughts, the thoughts of the first man ever to physically touch a comet, were of turkey bacon and a blue-green screaming demon.

INTP Experience Down

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That crawling feeling

I really thought I was on the up-swing, but clearly I'm not. Recent news that one of my children will need a major surgery, continued pressure at work, and the return of my recurring pain has put me right about where I was before I crashed.

The oddest part for me is the crawling feeling on my skin. When I get like this my body becomes hyper-attuned. Every sound, smell, taste, and especially touch is heightened. I don't want anything touching me except maybe the flowing water of a warm shower. Walking down the hall the sound of my pant legs popping was grating.

Yesterday I did everything I could to avoid human contact. People asked me at church how I was doing and I avoided the question. How can I explain to them what I'm feeling if I can't figure out myself? My wife has started to key-into the fact that I'm not doing well, but I don't know what to tell her either. She asks me if I want to talk, and I do, but I don't know what to say or how to express myself.

I feel like I am caught in a strong current being pulled around, bounced off of things, and unable to rest. It's just a constant swirl.

I just want to hide. Burry myself in the side of a mountain, deep within its heart where there is no sound and the world cannot touch me. I want to be able to just let my mind unwrap everything on its own. To rest.

The INTP and Work

Following my recent crash and burn I've been trying to sort through what happened, why it happened, and how I can improve. One of the key topics that I have hit on is how I have been viewing work. I'm still processing through this, but this discussion on The Refuge helped me start to clarify some of my thoughts. Last night I was responding to the thread and got on a roll about what works best for an INTP in the workplace. A lot of this seems to be me explaining to myself where I went off track...

I see work in two ways. One is a way for me to pay my bills. For that, one job is just as good as the next if the dollars add up. Any extra dollars above what I need to pay my bills is frankly a waste of time. I don't love money or having fancy things so pay is just about keeping the bill collectors off my phone.

The other way I see work (if I am being clear-headed) is as a way for me to challenge myself, to create, to solve problems, and generally do what I want to do. Sure, my employer has a job description for me and expectations and all that, however what I really work for is my secret agenda and I use their money to do it. Now I'm not talking about stealing from them. What I mean is that I see it as an old fashioned bargain. They want something (labor to make them money by doing certain tasks) and I want something (to do what I like to do). We strike a bargain - they pay me and I do the work they need done. However, the reason I work is for me, not for them and not for money. I want to be intellectually challenged. I want to solve hard problems. I want to create order out of disorder. I want to learn new things. I want to be creative. I want to make discoveries. I want to be an INTP. So I work for me, not for them. I sell them some of the fruit of my labor, but the rest of it is for my pleasure. They know this and they're happy to get what they get.

I think of it like a young man in a small farming town. What if he's forced to become a farmer but what he truly loves is being a mechanical engineer? He might be forced to be a sod buster due to economics and education, but guess what he's going to end up doing? If he's on the ball and does what he wants then he ends up making a better tractor or designing a better thresher. He knows he has to sell vegetables to pay the bills, but what he really works at is what he wants and loves to do. Soon he designs a way of sorting vegetables, so he doesn't have to do that tedious job anymore, which will let him spend more time designing machinery and improving things. Then he goes to his next challenge. Sure his customers still think of him as a farmer and still expect him to produce vegetables. He does that and they pay him for it (and he pays those stinking bill collectors), but what they think and expect doesn't define what he is, what he wants, and ultimately what he does. He is a mechanical engineer.

I once read a psychologist who talked about going into a factory. It was a dreary environment - one of those places where workers are little more than machines with slightly more dexterity and a lot less job security. It was a mind numbing environment that epitomized the industrial revolution. Well, there was one guy there who was one of the happiest people the psychologist had ever seen. He got to work a bit early every day, set out his tools just so, and eagerly waited for the whistle and the first bucket of parts to arrive. His job was to put parts together in a certain way to make a product. He would make the same product day after day. When that whistle blew and the parts hit his bench he smiled happily and charged into his work. At the end of the shift he would carefully clean his workbench, put his tools away and walk out of the plant whistling while everyone else was dragging. How in the world could the guy be happy? The psychologist spoke to the foreman and asked about the man. Was he a slacker? Is that why he was happy? Was he a new guy? Was he a moron? Was he wealthy and just did this to feel like one of the people? The foreman responded that no, the guy wasn't a layabout, had been with the company for years, and he wasn't wealthy. In fact he was the top performer and constantly produced more than anyone else. So the psychologist went and spoke to the man to find out what the deal was. He found that the guy had designed his job into a personal agenda. He knew that he was stuck in that factory since it was the only game in town, but he was a guy who was competitive and loved challenging himself. So he started seeing how many pieces he could make in a shift. Eventually he realized that he couldn't improve his count unless he reduced his number of motions, set all the pieces in a particular way, kept all the tools in exactly the right spot, and stayed perfectly focused on what he was doing. Day after day he challenged himself to do better in that mundane job and refined his work, his tools, and his environment. Everyone else around him was miserable (including the foreman) but this guy had found a way to do what he wanted and he was happy. It wasn't a job anymore.

That's why I asked you what it is you want. I don't like going to a job either. It's pointless except for paying the power bill. However, if I can go do what I want to do and strike a bargain with someone else to get them to pay for it then it's not pointless anymore and it's not a job. It becomes an enjoyable activity for me even though once in a while I may have to drag my cart of vegetables to the market. If I set up my job that way then I don't have to be significant to the world, I don't have to be a rising star, I don't have to even like the people around me. It doesn't matter, because I am doing what I want to do. It just takes some thought to realize what that is and a little creativity to figure out a way to do what I want in the framework of my situation. I have to reassess every once in a while since things change, but the overriding question that I have to keep coming back to is simple - what is it I really enjoy and want to do and how can I do it right now?

By tomorrow...

Yesterday I crashed and burned. Bad. It all just came apart at once. I left work and went for a drive. Eventually I ended up down by the Snake River. It was a place that I had visited numerous times throughout the years and I occasionally find myself drawn there when things get tough.

I stood there for a while gazing into the water and watching the massive trout rising below to sip insects from the surface. The sound of falling water was in the background and the pungent scent of old river water filled my head.

Nearby is an old power station. There used to be two of them that competed to provide power to the nearby town. They sat on opposite sides of the river and occasionally the operators would take pot shots at each other with .22 rimfire rifles leaving bullet scars on their stone walls. Now the area is overshadowed by a huge dam with massive turbines the likes of which those old boys never could have imagined.

Today I took the day off and then took another drive. I went in a different direction and ended up on back roads I had never seen before. A sign warned "rough road" which seemed to be a signal to the roads department to just let the potholes be. I dodged around them swinging wide from one side of the road to another.

Occasionally out here you take a turn and find an old homestead. I can't help but think about the people who built them, their desire to make a good life for themselves, and then they left it all behind. Sometimes it's obvious that the old house was the original homesteader and there's another place built right next door in the 1920's or so and then another next to that built even later. This one though sat all alone in a valley. 

Clearly they had put some time into it. That was a nice place back in the day and it's held up pretty well. Someone put a lot of extra work into making those gables and extra windows. But they left, so I did too.

Eventually I found myself on a long lonely road that crosses the northern edge of the Snake River plain. I had intended to go another way, but this was good enough. Eventually I saw a sign for Atomic City and hit the brakes.

It's an odd place. It quite literally sits out in the middle of nowhere. Nearby is the Idaho National Laboratory where nuclear power was first investigated by the U.S. government. It was there that the nation's first nuclear reactors were designed and built. It was there too that the first nuclear submarine was designed and tested in a huge tank some 600 miles from the ocean by Admiral Rickover. It's also the area where the first ever fatal nuclear accident occurred. That was on the Army's watch, Rickover never would have let it happen.

Atomic "City" was the first town in the world lit by nuclear power as a test by the finest engineering minds in the nation. There's almost nothing there now despite its brush with history. A race track was built for some strange reason. There's a fire station to deal with range fires and it seems that there are a couple decent houses for the folks that man it. The rest is dilapidated, empty, eternally for sale. 

Things are looking a little up though. The 2010 census showed that population had increased over the last decade. The number of families in town had increased 30% to 9 and overall population had risen 16% to 29 souls. Still, it's clear they have a way to go to get back to the heydays of 1950 when 250 people lived their lives here.

To get to Atomic City you take the turn at the old Quonset hut that's been turned into a bar. It's easy to find, someone made an attempt to make it look Irish by painting a couple shamrocks on plywood. There's a paved road into town, but all the others are still dirt just as they were back in 1950 when its name was changed from Midway to the more ambitious label it still bears today. 

The only thing ambitious in town today was a large turkey vulture eating dinner on the road. Some rabbit had hopped it's last.

There was at one time the Twin Buttes Bar named after the two buttes that rise to the North. I suppose that in a place like Atomic City all you could do was get well lubricated and try to avoid the burning summer heat or hide from the biting winter winds. I can't imagine how depressing it would have been to walk into that place for a cold one and then step back outside and realize that things hadn't improved.

Mysteriously a couple cars and an ancient RV are now parked in the gravel that serves as a parking lot. Where the two Fireside Pizza signs came from I couldn't guess. As with all old towns some things just kind of show up, stay, rust, and soon nobody thinks about them anymore. A few decades later they're still there.

Apparently your car could get well lubricated too...

By the time I snapped this picture someone in a fire district truck was keeping an eye on me. I guess I looked kind of suspicious. After all, who comes to visit Atomic City today?

I turned back onto the road and frightened off the giant bird again on my way back to the old highway. In my mirror I could see the vulture return happily to its meal. By tomorrow there will be nothing left.

Gone

Well, I did it. I got burned out. Last night after that post on The Refuge I drove off for a while and just went somewhere safe. Took today off from work to do the same thing.

Is it so bad to go mad?

One of the things I have found interesting about INTP's is the number of people who have said something along the lines of, "I seriously thought I had mental illness..." I've been there too and often, and often too often. But I have begun to wonder what it is that I am afraid of and why I don't just quit wasting time and step off the edge and into the abyss that I am so sure is there. After all, if it's not there then I can quit worrying about being insane and start worrying again about world peace, hunger, and whether or not the Rolling Stones disprove everything I have ever heard about substance abuse. If, on the other hand, the abyss really is an abyss and I really do go mad then at least I can be happy in knowing that my fears were justified and I can go about my business believing that a rock I found in the road is an alien from the Galactic Empire come to tell me that I have been selected to rule the universe from a hostel in Southeast Los Angeles.

Of course, the things that pull me back constantly are all the responsibilities and important stuff that the world tells me I should be concerned about. Not unparadoxically these are the exact same items that keep pushing me to the edge. And so back and forth I go just exactly like a madman trying to decide if the automatic door at the supermarket is out to eat him. Ergo, I am already quite mad and probably (based not completely on, but fully confirmed by the above) a raving lunatic. Strangely enough, I think the rest of the world pretty much knows this and is waiting to find out if I am the kind of lunatic who turns out to be brilliant, the weird uncle, or the guy you see on continuous live news coverage.

The last one is clearly short-term thinking and just doesn't work out for an INTP. After all, if we're going to be that kind of crazy then we're going to do it right and go into politics. Otherwise at some point a person ends up being swarmed by people in tactical gear and the social pressures of so many people screaming and yelling at us and even touching us while telling us what to do would be pretty uncomfortable. Worse, should I survive, I would have to sleep in a concrete building with a few thousand people who inherently cannot leave other people alone. So it's either that or go to inauguration balls with people of exactly the same character, but slightly better taste in clothes and fewer scruples about who they sleep with. Either way, that whole type of crazy just isn't for me.

That leaves the other two options. Now, I already have various assorted nephews and nieces who all think of me as that strange guy who's supposed to be related to them, but that they know nothing about. I suppose I could just be happy with some such small achievement and start sending them copies of my combined analysis of Tolstoy, Dr. Seuss and Nitsche for Christmas, but it doesn't seem right to leave it at that (particularly since that list of authors doesn't include anyone from the southern hemisphere). No, I have decided that if I am going to go mad then I might as well go the whole way and become brilliantly mad.

And so that's where I am at a bit past 1:00 in the morning. It's not a pretty place to be, but apparently it's where I am so who are you to judge? If you haven't gone stark bonkers yet then you're just being all theoretical which might get you published in a journal or two, but never gain you any real respect amongst we the leaders of the Galactic Empire.

So what brought all this on? Earlier tonight I was catching a documentary on Henry Ford. Actually, I caught the last third of it last night, then the first third this afternoon and the second third tonight (ah the wonders of modern television). I was struck by the fact that Ford just bit the bullet and became completely what he was. Admittedly a lot of what he was turned out to be a vindictive jerk, but that's not the part I'm talking about. I'm talking about the single-minded obsession with making one type of thing and just making it better and better. The guy was badly embarrassed in court when he seemed to think the Revolutionary War was in 1812 rather than 1776. Newspaper editors called him a joke and then went home in their Model T's to houses that would just fit into Henry's bathroom. It would seem that Henry had the better way. He picked one thing that he did well, focused it on one thing he wanted to do, and then promptly ignored all the other stuff. I suppose that if he had failed to make an inexpensive automobile and thus change the world we would have called him mad.

Then there was another snippet of a travel show where some attractive girl is wandering around Vietnam and is talking about the last emperor of that country (who's burial place is unknown because the 300 people who buried him had their heads lifted so nobody could get to the dead guy's stuff that was buried with him). This guy knew what he liked and what he liked was having 50 different meals prepared for him every day from which to choose - and by different meals every day I mean he didn't want to see the same meal twice in a year. Seems eccentric, but on the other hand I am a glutton and I'm not so sure I wouldn't have set up a similar system if given the chance.

Also tonight I saw a portion of a really bad movie with an actress who got some awards (one for apparently being simultaneously fascinated and upset by a reference to fava beans in a show that was also mentioned in one of those non-reality tv shows I happened to watch last night). In this movie she's investigating some alien phenomenon or another which causes her to be simultaneously fascinated and upset (but not enough apparently to get an award). On the screen were shown some esoteric notes filled with scribbling that looked significant, but probably was just a set designer's high school algebra notes.

Suddenly it happened, all those disjointed concepts blended together and I thought, "Well, why not just go ahead and become mad?" What I mean is, why not just do what I do even if it seems insane to everyone else and even to myself? If that means going catatonic for a few hours then so be it. If it means that I finally outfit my pickup with a camper so I can take a nap at lunchtime while blasting Tchaikovsky then why not? If it means turning my backyard into a collection of small outbuildings each resembling a shed, but each with a different purpose then I might as well start buying wood and paint. If I want to fill a couple thousand notebooks with arcane scribbling that only I understand then dammit I have every right to do so!

As INTPs we are inherently different than the majority. People simply aren't going to get us. Unfortunately, we spend huge amounts of time trying to fix that by essentially trying to fix ourselves. Well, who's to say we are the ones that need to be fixed? How do we know that we aren't the right way up?

I think in the morning I might as well go mad. I've nothing better to do...