It's been a while, yeah.
/*NOTE: ...It's been a few days after I posted this, and I decided to come back and edit some stuff. Just as usual, I'm kind of unhappy with my posts; I didn't really like how this post looked, so I made a decision to spend some more time on it because the set of events I was about to talk here have a significant importance to me. The original post failed at showing that, so I'll try to make it a bit more easy to come around but much more bright in terms of significance. Wish me good luck on that, lol.*/
Early 2017
Ahoy. It's me again (surprise!) with another load of barely comprehensible text. I am so glad it's January now. Maybe there's something true in this "start anew" sh!t that peeps talk when new year begins, after all. But again: nothing is true.
I just watched (no, not watched - listened to) a vid on utub and got my small grey matter gears turning. There was a lot of stuff to think about, but, in a funny way, the central kind of motive of that podcast on utub was Artificial Intelligence. Now, how many films or games or other sh!t on this subject are there? You won't count. Starting with Asimov's books and ending up with recent movies like "Ex Machina". Most of all, that podcast brought to my mind that famous '95 full-lenght anime which I watched in the end of last year thanks to the upcoming movie with S. Johansson. It's a very interesting subject and, of course, it's very appealing.
When I was a kid, I had one funny moment which still sparks in my memory. At the time, I had a Pentium III PC with a very little selection of games. One of those was Quake III Arena which was extremely popular (and still is, to some degree). I never was a "pro MLG-style player", and, in fact, some 1st person shooters really terrified me with it's corridors and tight corners back in the day. For that reason, I barely even played the game apart from those space-themed platform CTF maps. Oh, and there was no online play either - so when I was at home I could only have played vs. bots.
One day, I was playing the "campaign" mode and I was faced against a female character Crash (probably the very first level). So, I was under the pressure of my "cyber claustrophobia" and instead of blasting her to bloody pieces with my favourite plasma gun, I was... chatting with her. In the console. Can't remember how exactly young I was, but these "conversations" really impressed me. These days chat bots is such a common thing that u barely even notice it, but that Quake bot chat really left a trail. At some point, I was about to call her something bad, and her reply was like: "So who do you think I am, mr. Sigmund Freud?"
But, anyway,
for a several months now, I've been about to post some of my personal experiences that keep bugging me. I would say I
need to do it as a form of therapy (and just to "document" those stories), problem was I never had a good fitting moment to do so. I think today is the time to start. A small disclaimer of sorts: I do not expect any1 on this planet to fully comprehense what I'm trying to express here, as when I am, myself, reading back and forth what I've already posted, I often feel either embarrassed or sad. And, oh yeah, I'm pretty sure I did mention that a lot - you probably won't "get it" as if you are not me. With that out of the way, I shall continue.
Stuff I want to put here
Oh boy, I do feel it's going to be a long wall of text. There are things in life that we percieve as "normal" and "common" and then there are things that we can't label as such. I am going to speak exactly about that other category tonight. Maybe it's not a biggie, but this whole "start a blog" idea came to my mind not by an accident, I am pretty sure that this sounds appropriate. At first, I only thought it's going to be my online diary where I will talk about my daily routines, some questionable achievements like getting laid or somesh!t like this. But after a while, it came clear that this is not what it's all about.
I know there are many ppl around who were doing blogs even before I surfaced my digital ghost on the worldwide web; what I did not know, however, is that there are so many people who were willing to share stuff like NDE or other similar, very personal, experiences. For the obvious reasons, it's an attractive theme to talk about (stuff such as NDE), but it takes some balls to put yourself out like that and go on with your story on how you met archangel Michael. //not really funny, sorry
What about me? I never had an extremely bizarre event occured in my life like being abducted by aliens or whatnot (at least, not that I could remember). My stuff is a bit more ... how to put this? "Awkward" might be a matching word. From my childhood I have been a lonesome kid, spending most of my time inside the house, barely going to meet and hang out with kids on the block. I was overly protected by my mother, who was always there for me to tie my shoelaces. I was, and I am, a very sensitive person, which leads to all kinds of troubles. I took many disillusions too hard.
Sometimes I am ahead of myself and I paint some pictures in my memory that weren't exactly what I thought they were. Ugh... Example: for many long years I had this memory of a UFO sighting. I was about 7 years old or something, lying in my bed, looking out the window. Out there, not that far in the distance, I saw something that occured to me as a black craft, slowly moving on a horizontal trajectory from my right to my left. There were 3 blinking lights on it; they left me with an impression that they were not exactly blinking, but rather circling around the craft, so that would be your classical flying saucer from the 60s movies. It was a summer day, dusk, sky was in violet and I could clearly see this object slowly passing by on a perfect horizontal path. Then it was gone. And then, many years after, when I was, yet again, trying to paint this fleeing childhood memory, I was looking out the window (not the same window, but the same opening) only to see a civil plane with 3 blinking lights just slowly passing by in the skies.
Of course, there's always room for various speculations specifically in the UFO fields on subjects like screen memories, brainwashing or whatnot, but I doubt that was my case. I guess I was just who saw a civilian plane and took it for a UFO. It was, in a very weird way, a comforting thought that I saw a flying saucer in the sky. I guess that's why I kept that memory the way I just reviewed it. I told this story only to my closest friends, and it's probably my first time when I tell it in an open form.
Memories
Brain works in strange ways, I dare to say. Certain events (in my life) somehow lost their chronological meaning but became transcendental /* not exactly sure if I use this word right, kept messing it up since I was in Philosophy class*/. Some of the memories "highlight" like if they are more important than others. And it would've been a common thing if it was something like keeping memory of your first sports medal or a memory of your first love (and I do have memories like this), but, instead, it's often very weird things, that are hard to explain. What's interesting is that the longer I live, the more complicated and even harder to explain this stuff begins to be. Time factor somehow reduces to zero, though, as if there is some other timeline where only these events have any meaning whatsoever, while the rest of your life is just white noise.
I can't tell what my earliest memories are. Maybe I am becoming a bit too old; this April should be my 25th birthday which is a quarter of a century. I wish I could tell I am wise enough to sort stuff out, but I get this sense that it is exactly the other way around. Maybe me as a kid was a million times wiser than I am now as an adult. I used to know all of the Greek myths panteon by heart back then, and now I can barely remember who Athena is. For a weird twist of fate, I lost my interest in so many things these days, that I doubt I will ever be able to truly learn anything. In addition to this, I always hated maths. I just don't like working with calculations. And it's definately not for my benefit. A lot of things that I used to do in my head I now do with my smartphone or the interwebs; even my imagination, which I always valued as one of my primary distinctions from others, really falls short.
But, no matter how far I fell down, there's still those "vector" parts in my memory that allow me to retain some sort of meaningfulness /*sounds cheesy AF*/. With all of my disappointments in life, time after time I just run out of thoughts about what I live for. That's when these weird memories pop out. Maybe I just want to figure it out, even though I already submitted that I won't find any answers. ANYWAY. It will get gradually harder for me to keep it all in one piece, so I will just have to use the chronological order for the things I am about to share here, all the while it's really hard to keep it accurate for the reasons I described above.
The begining
It's a bit funny, but it all started way back in late 90s with a dollar bill. At least, this is what I think it is. You see: 90s was a very tough time in post-soviet Russia; there weren't many good jobs for folks and the general situation wasn't all that great. My father always was (and is) a workaholic. As far as I could tell, he was working on various jobs to keep up the family budget, while I was spending time home with mom or on those pre-school courses. I never attended a kindergarten bcoz one time when mom tried to leave me there for a day I went sick in a moment so she had to pull me back. At home I did not have all that much of toys, but I had enough from all the family branches (cousins' toy cars, and such). So. This is a fleeing memory, but I'll tell it how I remember it: father brought home a dollar bill (which was a common thing, to hold money in different currencies), but, as it turned out, it was a counterfeit. It was a bill with Washington's portrait, a One Dollar bill. What captured and seized my attention was not the fact that it was a fake; it was the strange-looking figure which happened to be.. "the Eye of Providence".
For some reason, this image stuck in my brain. Although I wouldn't know what the heck did it mean, or why is there an eye, or why is this even placed on a banknote, I sensed it was something mysterious and it needed an explanation. However, time went forward and I had to focus on things like school and stuff, so I didn't really think about it for a good while. As I already pointed out in the previous part, memories like this one hold a special place in my neural network, if you will. I cannot even guess why does it work that way, but apart from that damn dollar bill I doubt I would ever see this weird pyramid again. And yet, today this infamous symbol is just everywhere -- and I'm not even exaggerating: it is used as a sh!tty "internet meme" by 10-years-olds and, thx to that, it's literally all around the web.
Next puzzle piece
The next chapter of this weird stuff happened to occur when I was in about 8th or 9th grade in school. It was the end of the school year, the summer was coming, and that day I was at my friend's house. We were hanging out playing games on his computer, but soon I had to leave to visit another classmate (we were planning to go to the year-ending party). Long story short, he messaged me on phone and asked when I'll be at his place. With some weird notion in my head, I responded that I will be at his house exactly in 23 minutes. That time I thought what I did was "original" as ppl usually say something like "I'll be there in 10 (or 15, or 20) minutes" while I picked the number 23. It was just a small thing, and I did not really paid much attention to it. However, I really did my best to match with the time so I even had to sprint at some point, that I won't end up being a liar.
This small string triggered later, when I was checking TV programmes schedule. How'd you think, what I've read? A TV show called... "Успеть за 23 минуты" ("Be in time in 23 minutes"). This was so unexpected for me that I almost dropped my balls to the floor... And that was my first ever registered "meaningful coincedence". Even if I didn't knew anything about synchronicity at the time. /*The year was probably 2007*/
...As I look back, it comes to mind that I could've simply seen it in the schedule before, but haven't paid attention to it; then, later on, my brain subconsciously picked up this number bcoz it already saw it. Buuuuut... I don't like this thought whatsoever. More than this, it was just merely a first link in the chain. Next time I was presented with the number was even weirder. Me and friend were visiting a local CD/DVD shop to pricecheck some games (remember, it was before the era of digital stores). I was searching for nothing in particular, so I went looking all over the showcases, and then I saw a big close-up shot of a guy with a face covered in hand-drawn numbers and words. Spooky sh!t. It was a cover of a DVD case, and the guy turned out to be Jim Carrey. Yeah. It was "The Number 23".
I gotta say, I had literally no idea about the weird cultural following that existed around this number. But, of course, the 3rd time in a row when this number popped up in my life (in a span of few days, I may add) in such a bizzare way, this caught my attention. Looking back, I understand that there were a lot of reasons why these events played out like they did, but, nonetheless, it was f@%#ing weird and bizzare, and therefore I couldn't skip it. It was much like if this number needed me to get my attention to it, even if this sounds stupid. I started to search info online /*had to do it from friends' PCs as I had no stable connection to the web at that period of time*/ about the movie, which shortly led me to the legendary Robert Anton Wilson.
Continuing
...And then I've found out about the Illuminatus! trilogy. If you know what that is, try and guess how it kicked me in the balls when I started to read it. I was about 16 years old I think, and a lot of ugh... scenes? in the books were kinda too explicit. Although, they were not. But my mom was shocked when she found out what I was reading (damn!). Sex themes occured not only in these books; by another weird f@%#ing coincedence, I took a book in a library right about the same period of time.The book was based on Twin Peaks series characters, which included agent Cooper and Laura Palmer. A lot of stuff in "Laura Palmer's diary" was quite... sexually explicit too.
So, in 2009 I graduated from school and went on to a University. Of all the options I had (though there weren't so many, considering my "slightly-above-average" marks in the school diploma), I picked the Psychology faculty. I still haven't finished reading all of the Illuminatus! trilogy, because I basically had to find the books online as there wer no print copies; and then I had to read it on my PDA. I remember I was reading the last book, Leviathan, while I was in the subway, on my way to the University, or back home.
I must admit: reading these books was great. I certainly never ever had seen anything like it before, and for obvious reasons, it was like a thunder with all the symbolism and conspiracy themes. It was that time of my life when I've read the most - I was reading Poe, Lovecraft, Freud, Yung, Palahniuk and whole bunch of other stuff including a series of books on extended Star Wars universe. All thanks to RAW. I really enjoyed it; however, I wouldn't be so sure if I remember much of it now. Central themes that caught my interest were, of course, archetypes, subconscious, and, basically, "otherworldly beings". In a strange fashion, the eye in the pyramid and the number 23 played the primal role in all of this. And it's an on-going story. Of course, there were moment when I questioned all of this stuff, and I keep questioning it up until now. From a different point of view, it doesn't weight much or anything; I can't say it's as weightless for me.
I cannot say with 100% certainty what the hell does it all mean, or why am I even so attracted to stuff like "Operation Mindf*ck". It's just the way it is. The most recent addition to the whole "weird stuff" was the whole "owls synchronicities" I've had, but I've already spoken about this in previous posts so I'll skip this right now. What, in my opinion, holds importance, is that these things draw your attention not just to the fact that it happened. It goes beyond the mere fact, and forcing you to dwelve deeper into the background, like it did for me 10+ years back with the number 23. Even if there's no additional "mystical" layer to this phenomenon (which, I think, isn't the case), there's still a whole lot of power that is needed to turn a drone human being into an active seeker.
In place of conclusion
...Well, I hope this new year will be better than 2016 /*which I will forever remember as one of the sh!ttiest years I happened to live in*/ in every way, I'll finally manage to come up with something other than just decaying in my chair, and maybe gather more stories to tell. Even though, most of the time, my stories are not worth reading.
Cheers!
