Since Friday you have been tormented by recurring flashbacks of the SC. Your last CM. Your last day in the old lab. Your last day in the library. Ad infinitum. It’s making you go as far off your rocker as you’ve been since the post-expedition depressions.

Your mind is an empty shell of itself. It can’t even summon the imagination to distract yourself from the flashbacks. All it has are those memories. They form your mind now. Inescapable.

The slug plops herself on your bed and shoves her butt against you, thinking this makes for a more intimate atmosphere or something that would facilitate her latest attempt to get you to suffer in order to save her face. Minutes after you get her off the bed and physically away from you you can still feel the slime. You’d personally prepare a tub of concentrated acid and dissolve the slug in it. In fact, that feels like the only course of action that would remove the disgust that is now permeating all your perceptions.

Made by the psychologist three years ago. Both came true. Very true.

1. I would love and thrive in WFGTD.
2. I would not be able to work under anyone I disrespect, and there was a significant danger of this happening in the CD.

Perhaps it was a good sign that for those three years you managed not to think of people as just sacks of hormones. Now that you are back in the CD you find that that’s again the only way you can think about people at all and not burst spontaneously into flames. Because trying to find intellects here is bewildering and frustrating.

It took the transition from the SC to the Cultural Desert (CD henceforth) for me to realise the above. Before then I had thought it not just possible, but feasible to learn and think effectively on one’s own. Tales like Ramanujan’s are inspirational. But even Ramanujan didn’t contribute anything new to mathematics until he made contact with contemporary mathematicians, because he was busy reproducing much of Western mathematics on his own. Prior to living in the SC, I had got by without an intellectual community, reading on my own. Even while in the SC I thought that the intellectual community made learning easier and more fun. I certain didn’t expect the level of difficulty I’m facing now in trying to learn and think on my own. The internet helps a good deal but not anywhere near enough.

This lack on the part of the CD brings into clearer light why it’s so difficult to effect change here. Why the government has been so successful in keeping the population ovine. It’s because if independent thought is reduced to a level below a certain threshold, then only minimal policing is required to ensure that it doesn’t germinate. For under that threshold, the population will have a self-regulation mechanism that suppresses those who try to think differently. They are sufficiently isolated that they cannot sustain confidence in ideas that no one else they know shares. They cannot go far with their ideas on their own and lose motivation to do so as their ovine companions sneer at them. One good kick in the balls 40 years ago let the CD attain that blissful* state of affairs, and since then the population has obediently self-regulated.

Surely I can overcome this intellectual vacuum with sheer determination. Surely. Or if I can’t, I must continue thinking that I can. Like Ramanujan did (not that I think I can achieve anything anywhere close to what he did, but that’s all the more reason why I need stimulation of some sort). See *.

*As in Ignorance is ____.

The pain comes and goes.

An hour ago I was hurting at the thought of setting foot of campus, let alone actually doing so (which I did, several times). Was also in a state where spinning on my bike was all that was keeping me from breaking down — remember thinking that I should glue myself to my bike. Remember yelling inwardly at myself for not being able to escape the sadness.

Went out for pointless spins.

Returned.

Made some progress on the pointless report.

Now just tremendously sleepy.

I accidentally spilled beer on my roommate’s books.

I need sleep. To the point that even thinking “this is the last time I’ll do/see X” doesn’t have the usual debilitating effect.

Are splitting. Symmetrically, too. Perhaps dehydration. But I experienced a private moment of wonder when I noticed that the splits, one on each hand, each occurred on the same finger of each hand (middle), at the same relative position on said finger. One is a slightly large split than the other. But that the tension of my skin gave way at the exact same spot on each half of my body seemed to demonstrate a beautiful consequence of developmental symmetry.

I found this excerpt, from an academic’s biography which I shall not link to for fear of discovery, most amusing:

“…our offspring consists of two sons (1993, 1994) and one daughter (1998) — no pictures of me and them on this webpage, as if they were trophees of some kind, or as suspicious visual testimonies of Look At Me Being A Cute Loving Father.”

A new “flavour” of experience: the one I had standing on a steep Scottish slope, both legs incapable of bending at the knees except with great pain. Slogging up the damn thing was bad enough, but walking downhill without bending either knee was impossible. Every step a flinch, millions more steps to go. Damn left knee had joined right knee in the torture just before you approached this particular devil of a hill, the worst climb of the day. Or rather, the worst descent.

That’s the feeling that slips into the pit of my stomach regularly nowadays. It’s always worse when you stop to look around. You notice the pain more. You are more aware that you are going nowhere.

Have recently been involuntarily falling into too-heavy sleep. The kind that descends so abruptly and effectively that I don’t have time to realise that I am getting sleepy. The kind where my head feels like an anchor and throbs on one side after I wake up, and my brain feels like it’s filled with sludge for hours afterwards. Perhaps it’s the recent lack of exercise. But I think not, because in the dead of winter, during a similar stretch of inactivity, I did not fall into this kind of sleep. Not even while scraping by on 20 hours of sleep a week. I’ve been having more sleep than usual lately, if anything. But it’s unenjoyable sleep. I’d rather not sleep if I wake up with a throbbing head and a sludgy brain.

Now I think I feel more mentally exhausted than any time in the past year. But perhaps I’m just latching on to a suitable excuse for my heavy-headedness. Perhaps I’m just making more excuses for the chances I’ve missed.

I keep bringing up the Behemoth issue to make myself angry, just because it temporarily dissolves the sludge in my head. Rather boiling oil than sludge.