Hey there! Anyone remember me? I doubt it, but either way I don't like messy breaks. So instead I'll direct you to my new projects so that I may not appear as rude as I may have before.

The first project is a collaborative version of the WriteClub concept located here: [link]

The other project is a publishing of my journal and general article/essay writing: [link]

Oh yea, and I've pretty much abandoned this site in particular, and the whole concept of social networking sites.

As you may well know, I haven't been as active around here as I used to be. This doesn't mean that I dislike any of you; it simply means that I do not think that this method of communication/collaboration lives up to my standards.

This is the very first draft of what I hopes to be a mature, evolving standard for communication/collaboration: [link]

This project is one of the primary reasons why I've made myself scarce in these parts.

I may visit from time-to-time, though.

About an hour or so ago someone asked me what I wanted out of my life. A simple inquiry which defies a simple reply. As usual, I felt reserved, as I've come to believe that those who know what you value most in life are more apt to deprive you of it; but I got over it. After some delay, however, I formulated an answer to this question, and then I saved it to my hard drive, lest I forget. This is what I wrote:

"I want it to be known that I am not one to leave the world as I've found it. That I make choices, but do not do so cruelly. I want a fair degree of respect. I want to be able to solve problems, and to think clearly. And, I suppose, I want some degree of warmth; something like a trip to the forest at this time of the year. I don't want to speak, but I want others to listen. I don't want to be the tired cliche of this generation: the shut-in who knows of little more than apathy, video games, and The Internet."

Now, I hardly believe that I have escaped the shackles of generational cliche, but I have at least acknowledged this; and in acknowledging this I have accepted some imperfections about myself. Yes, I am apathetic a great deal of the time; however, this is not an apathy that rests as comfortably with me as it does with so many of my peers. The indifference and the learned helplessness runs contrary to my innermost nature.

I want to be a man of genuine class and quality: I want to be dignified, and to know the finer things in life.

How would I describe my innermost nature? I suppose that I'm like a fortress of a person, retreating and fighting at the same time. Deep inside this fortress, however, there must be something worth all this protection; otherwise it's just a pointless, futile struggle to even survive. Sometimes this precious thing appears as just a small point of light, and this I know is the better part of myself. Now the better part of myself is seen within my mind's eye as a small, precious garden. This part of myself must not die, not while my heart still beats, as it is all that I live for. Being--in general--a realist, I cannot deny the dark, horrible aspects of human existence, not even my own. However, if I am to endeavor to be the best person that I can, I must nourish this better part of myself. Oftentimes, problem-solving people like myself pay attention to the flawed and broken things that must be mended more so than the good, useful things that must not atrophy and die. Realists can fall into this trap because they are so repulsed by those who see the world through rose-colored lenses and cannot face the world as it really is. We must not let neither our desires nor our repulsions define our view of the word.

I want to hold on to the good things in life, and make them grow.

Another aspect of my own personality, which I believe has changed, is my personal shame at feeling very lonely sometimes. My desire to reach out and connect to other human beings is simply my way of reality checking. It's not a flaw in my own personality, but a simple truth of human biology. I need at least a minimal degree of socialization or else I drift off into a state of depersonalization like a proverbial Major Tom. Without the stimulation of mirror neurons in my brain, my own self-image begins to dissolve and I cease to be able to locate myself in the universe. The world becomes contained within my mind, and I am the last human being left alive.

I want to be able to locate myself when I need myself.

One of the things that I am obsessed with is mental illness and disorder; as I'm sure you already know. I used to do this because I was convinced that there was something horribly wrong with me, and that all I needed to do was just find out what it was and then I could fix it somehow. However, instead of learning about what was wrong with me, I discovered--quite to my surprise!--all the things that were right with me. In my quest for insanity I discovered my own sanity; for sanity/insanity is not a dichotomy, but a continuum, with insanity merely being a judgment call on the part of a physician. This means that even though I'm a little schizoid, I don't have Schizoid Personality Disorder; and even though I'm more than a little paranoid, I don't have Paranoid Personality Disorder. I am obsessive and compulsive, but I don't have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. The disorder-based way of thinking about struggling people is fallacious, especially when it comes to personality disorders. Far too often I have been treated as someone who was mentally ill or disturbed based upon misguided assumptions that never took into account my own personality traits--all that mattered was their own definition of who I should be. So that instead of trying to accept that I will probably always be suspicious, withdrawn, and emotionally inscrutable and just trying to live my life that way, I have been regarded as sick based upon the deep truths of who I really am. Does this mean that I don't believe that some form of self-improvement is necessary? Not at all; I just believe that that it's necessary for all humans. No one alive is so perfect as to be above serious self-reflection and introspection.

I want to be a little less paranoid and obsessive, if at all possible; the schizoid element is just right.

What freaks me out about these disorders is that, since I have many of the thought patterns associated with these extreme psychological imbalances (never call them 'disorders', the people around me will often come to the conclusion that I "have" craziness. I often get these nervous tics, and then I press my fingers on my temples or cover my ears; this is usually in response to an egregious violation of personal space. When I do these things they tell me to "stop doing that crazy thing!" or "I'm not helping you unless you stop being crazy." As if by stopping the motions I'd be stopping the disease (which doesn't even exist anyway). To make matters worse, these are people who I've known all my life; my family. As prejudiced as they are, they know enough about me to know that there's little that's truly malicious or demented in my nature. If these people who had all of 22 years to understand me cannot do so, what hope can I have to ever be trusted enough by those around me to live a truly independent life?

I want to live a truly independent life.

These simple truths are things that I've known my entire life. I've always known that the "outside world" will subjectively interpret me as demented, and if I don't hide away from their view I will not stand a chance; they will take me in, drug me up, and extinguish that bright light deep within. For those with more socially acceptable personality traits, this fear is probably a very alien concept. Perhaps an illuminating analogy will help to enlighten: imagine yourself suddenly being transported back in time to Medieval England. You would find yourself in a society with its own sense of normalcy, sanity and rightness, but having grown up in this society you will have habits and tendencies that would be hard to suppress; that which comes normally to you will seem utterly strange and alien to those who inhabit the new society in which you find yourself. This is exactly how I see myself: as a stranger. It's not as if this means that I see myself as weird, or overly bizarre; if anything, I see myself as being very normal. The world around me, however, is absolutely bonkers.

I want to go to sleep, now, so I guess I'll stop writing.

Dalton.

Franklin looked at the incredible object that he had stumbled upon, and witnessed the splendor that is reality. Here, on this mountain, he was alive. Every antecedent moment was merely an image from a vast, hazy dream. Now that he had ascended the mountain, Franklin had achieved that which he had sought for all his fifteen years of life: wonder. Soon he would experience his own birth.

The trail was at least a mile away; his parents would not find him. These mountains were woody, dense, and they smelled of pine. During the ascent, Franklin ran ahead of the hiking group and out of view. As he stared down at the man-sized marvel which lay on the grass in from of him, he did not worry that others might worry. They probably had just assumed that he was far ahead of the group, rushing headlong in his eagerness to reach the summit.

Now that summit didn't seem so lofty to Franklin. Not since he heard the noise, and rushed towards it against all better judgment in his eagerness and curiosity. Over root, rock and log he rushed towards the high-pitched whine. Then, after a few minutes, the sound faded, leaving Franklin lost in the dark forest and wondering why he ever choose to run towards the weirdness.

Weirdness was how Franklin defined himself. As a child, he would collect insects and keep them in jars. When he was older, he would catch snakes and frogs and keep them in terrariums. Science Fiction was his primary pre-occupation, and he had always wondered why humans in the real world never experienced anything truly strange; to Franklin, the ordinary was incomprehensible.

No one paid attention to him. His teachers saw him as a quiet, attentive student, nothing more. In school, his peers would either tease or ignore him. The few friends he did have were little more than playmates. Sure, they played video games with him, cracked jokes with him--they were amiable most of the time. Then when Franklin would talk about those things that were closest to his heart, they'd listen but never commiserate.

"What would we do if aliens were real?" he would often wonder. "Our lives would change forever if we even just knew they existed."

Franklin eventually stopped asking these questions, and looked within himself for the answers he sought. He began keeping an extensive journal chronicling his thoughts. Most other teenagers his age would write about girlfriends, school anxieties, but Franklin would write down his observations of humanity as an alien character. Within the bindings of his journal, Franklin was known as Pryler Eunix. He created this character as a means of being objective in his view of mankind.

Every day that he went to school, he went as Pryler Eunix. No longer were the faculty the oppressors, and his fellow students pawns in petty games of popularity. They were all simply data to be analyzed. The process of analysis took over two years, and when he finally reached his conclusion it depressed him.

"Human beings," he wrote, "do not have enough imagination to solve the problems of the 21st century. I recommend that we study these beings while we still can and collect a breeding population for relocation to a suitable planet."

After pondering the ramifications of his analysis, Franklin retired the alien and wrote about mundane matters of everyday life. He started dating girls, then was rejected by same girls. There was still too much of that alien character still alive in him. Other humans couldn't help but detect this, and it frightened them.

"So, what are the kinds of things that you're into?" a girl once asked him in a mexican restaurant.
"Well," he replied, "I like computers, and unix-like operating systems. Playing with computers helps keep me from being too worried about how we're all going die, you know, as a species. I really don't think it'll be global warming, though; instead, I think we'll run out of food and starve."

The evening was quite awkward from that point forward. What was to Franklin an observation he wished to share, was to the girl a horrible, evil thing to suggest. So went most of his dating experiences. No matter how far along he would get with a girl, he would eventually say something that would destroy the nascent relationship. After a while, Franklin eventually gave up on being accepted into society, and withdrew into apathy.

He'd stare into his computer screen late at night while playing Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing games; a meaningless repetitive task to numb his frustration. Something for him to do to distract him from the fact that he was really doing nothing at all.

Then summer came, and his parents decided to take an interest in his well-being. They planned a two-week vacation to British Columbia. As despondent as Franklin was, he still reveled in the opportunity to investigate something new. On this particular hike up this particular mountain Franklin had felt energized. The object was calling him, even then.

The object was egg-shaped, glass-smooth, with a myriad of shapes and colors undulating beneath the surface. Franklin has spotted it from trees and rushed across a plateau towards it. Now that he had found the object, he wished that he had never ascended. The cool wind rushed over his short brown hair. Birds chirped merrily in the trees. The normalcy of this moment made it all the more bizarre.

"What shall I do with what I've found?" asked Franklin, to no-one in particular. From behind, he sensed a familiar presence.

"You must touch it, Frank," said Pryler Eunix, in his trademark monotone voice. This would happen sometimes; he would project Pryler Eunix outside of himself. Though in recent months he had all but forgotten about the alien character. He turned around.

Now he could see the gaunt, foreign creation of his own mind standing before him as real as any human being, and seeing him in this way terrified Franklin. "You weren't so scary when I felt like I was you," said Franklin before turning his attention back to the object.

"'Monsters' do not see themselves as others do," said Pryler Eunix as he walked up to the object and placed an angular, ice blue hand upon the surface. "By doing this, now, I just made you real; you must do the same to make me real."

Blood suddenly rushed from Franklin's cheeks, "What are you talking about! I made you!" he exclaimed. The alien stared back at Franklin with orange-sized, obsidian eyes.

"While it may be true that I made you, now you must make me in return. Touch the object, Frank, and you will understand."

"Do I really want to understand?" replied Franklin.

"I know you more intimately than any other being in the universe does, Frank. There is nothing you know that I don't know too."

Stunned, Franklin nodded, then slowly reached towards the object, feeling the surface with his squishy fingertips. He had to understand; Pryler Eunix was right about that. Few things were frightening enough to overcome his curiosity.

For a few brief moments, he knew nothing more than the unceasing wind upon his face. Then came the atom, the molecule, and even the very essence of consciousness. Franklin remembered the very moment of his own birth within a folded dimension of space and time. A creature which hitherto did not exist invented his entire life so that this moment could occur. Time was not as it once had been--now it was as clear and objective as any dimension in space. He saw the entirety of his life as if it were a building, an ordered structure that was crafted and honed by a skilled architect.

What Franklin had originally experienced as reality faded back into perception, and he saw an eagle flying overhead. "Why build me?" Franklin enquired as he fell back from the object onto the soggy ground.

"Because consciousness is the rarest thing in the universe," said Pryler Eunix while he fidgeted with a small, oblong device.

Franklin struggled to comprehend the enormity of the new information. "But why do you value it, Pryler Eunix?"

"So long as there it one conscious being alive in the universe," Pryler Eunix said while placing the oblong device on top of the object, "the universe exists."

"Like a tree falling in forest," Franklin mused. He observed the oblong device as it melted into the body of the object, becoming what could only be described as a rippling tetrahedron.

"That which is observed, is," Pryler Eunix said, "and whatever is not perceived somehow can never be . This mountain, for example, is majestic to your people, am I correct?"

"Yes it is--at least to some of us."

"Could it be majestic without you?"

Franklin shook his head and managed to stand on two wobbly feet, "No, I don't think it could."

Sitting down on top of the egg-shaped object--which Franklin now suspected was a craft of some sort--Pryler Eunix seemed to sigh. "My people do not know majesty. I did not now majesty until I came to this world a few moments ago and created you to see. You are one of the most intensely aware beings on this planet--I needed you to be. I apologize if this has resulted in a lonely life for you. My mission here was one of understanding. I shall bring the sense of majesty home to my people."

"But you didn't even exist a few moments ago!" replied Franklin.

"Neither did you, Frank. Keep in mind from this moment forward that even though you are a creation of our technology that you are no less real than any other living thing. You are an extension of myself, and I am also an extension of you."

Momentarily unable to voice his own thoughts, Franklin stared into the unfathomable black eyes of the skinny blue extraterrestrial. Slowly, he opened his mouth to speak: "This is the moment of our birth, isn't it? We're brothers, of a sort."

"Indeed we are, Frank. Now, I must depart, as this moment has fulfilled itself; I must go and deliver consciousness to my people. You must go back to your people and deliver consciousness to them."

"But I don't want to go ba--" Franklin suddenly found himself on the top of the mountain, viewing a good portion of the planet Earth. Like that, it was all over. No farewell, no extraneous information was exchanged; just a brief, necessary encounter. Turning around, he saw his father approaching, and wondered if he could ever give this experience a name. It was as alien to him as majesty had been to Pryler Eunix.

"Hey, Frankie, what can you see from here?" his father asked him, while grinning from ear-to-ear and sweating profusely despite the cold.

Taking a deep, cool breath of icy Canadian air, Franklin said in his soft-spoken manner, "I can see far more than I ever expected to."

I have withdrawn from the world for the time being. My reclusion is so thoroughly complete that I am barely present even here on the internet. Personal interaction with the human race, for me, has virtually ceased. This is not something that I want to do, only something that I need to, for I intend to remake myself in my own image (bounce that one around your head for a while). When I am in the presence of others, I can barely focus on anything other than my act, the role that I play. Playing this role--that of a normal, social human being--taxes my mental faculties. I cannot hope to plan my life while I'm too busy plotting my way out of every casual conversation that comes my way.

Something happened to me a few weeks ago, and I've been trying my best to comprehend all the ramifications. The basic understanding that I came to is this: there is absolutely nothing inherently wrong with me. All these years I've scoured every available information resource looking for an answer, and the truth was that I simply didn't really need any answer whatsoever. All I needed was to be myself, as strange as that is.

I am not a sociopath, or a psycho. There's no schizoid personality disorder, or borderline personality, or bipolar syndrome. As a matter of fact, the only truly abnormal thing about me is my complete, utter lack of social graces; an inevitable consequence of having isolated myself in the erroneous belief that something was horribly wrong with me in the first place.

After coming to this conclusion, I decided that drastic measures needed to be taken so that I may be who I really am. This entailed a great deal of personal introspection since the narrative of life that I have internalized remains strong, despite what my conscious mind may believe. Not even once in my entire life did I ever feel like anything but a useless burden upon those misfortunate enough to share my presence. I'm not complaining, or anything, this is just the absolute truth; I was treated like a scourge.

There is a word for people like me, "Problem Child." Once you are assigned this designation, you are a pariah. Now everything you think and feel is suspect because you are the one at fault; you have all the issues. Any point you may want to make can never be legitimate because you have a "problem in your brain." There is no trusting a flawed brain since it is bound to perceive the world in an inherently flawed manner.

No-one is genuinely sad; we're all depressed. No-one is genuinely angry about life; we have anger issues. What we think and feel are no longer part of ourselves if they are negative or unpleasant--then they become diseases to be treated. I am not going to fall into that trap. All that I think or feel, good or bad, is a part of me.

Half of my own personality lay dormant for most of my life, buried beneath a haze of pharmaceuticals. My natural skills and tendencies were entirely misconstrued as mental illness, and therefore I became a problem for everyone to fix. One of the primary reasons why I have withdrawn from the world is to take on the stupendous task of re-integrating that other half of my personality. This is the "Dark Side," or so it seems. The other half of me that terrified my parents so much when I was younger.

It is not an evil darkness; it is merely not illuminated. This is the part of me that will fight, and if I prevail it will be because I have embraced this forgotten half. Whenever I shrank from danger, and cowered in fear, I tortured this part of myself. When words I wanted to speak remained unspoken, I cut myself as well as if I had done so with a knife. The bleeding was all psychological, the true personality suffered deep within.

Now that I am myself for the first time, my pathetic, weak body can hardly keep up with my intense motivation. I am tired beyond words. Except for these words. All I do with my life now is read books, and write plans down into an encrypted file. This file contains a series of plans for everything in my life. My mind is so exhausted; it cannot keep pace. I must sleep now, though I do not want to.

One day I will say everything that needs to be said. For now, I prepare for the battle of my life. If I do not succeed, or if I can't reintegrate into the human world, I will most likely die young. This is absolutely do-or-die for me, and I find it absolutely amazing. Never before have my options been so starkly defined. One misstep, one mistake as this stage could send me plummeting to my doom. People think I'm far too intense, but they don't know how serious this all is. To them, it is a game; for me, it is absolutely life and death. I spend hours upon hours going over all this in my head, plotting every move, because if I fail I'm a goner. I cannot wallow in my own isolation like some pathetic Hikikomori; such a lifestyle will surely kill me.

I feel so slow right now. This is probably because I've been training in the freakish art of speed reading. I've always been able to skim over text very rapidly, but now I'm using this ability to determine my absolute top speed of reading comprehension. This morning I read nearly a third of a book in 40 minutes; a personal record. That's about two pages every minute, which each page displaying around 600 or so words--technically within the speed reading threshold (since I suppressed subvocalization). It's actually quite easy to speed read; it's the comprehension that's a bitch. Only if the writing is sparse and very redundant can you ever hope to understand it. Most of the time I'll just read Wikipedia articles like this. This is probably why I come across as a very erudite person; I look everything up first and then digest it. If I go for too long without an encyclopedic binge, I start to feel pretty stupid. I always feel stupid. I wouldn't do crazy shit like this if I didn't.

The technique I'm developing for myself--and it's utterly exhausting--involves writing a little essay about what you've just read every 40 minutes or so while you're reading so as to preserve memory. Most of what I've read in the book seems very familiar to me, and I don't have to go back to understand context. This is an ability that I never knew I had. Now that these buried aspects of my own personality have surfaced I can easily imagine picking up a book and then reading the entire thing in under two hours. I know it's not the most spectacularly fast speed reading method--that's not the point. I'll be sensible enough to cap it off right at my thinking speed. Sometimes I can tell when someone has read something that I've written far too quickly, and frankly it's a little insulting. That's something I won't do to another writer of words.

My body doesn't seem to like this, though. I'm so beaten and my eyes get more bloodshot every day. Tomorrow I'm going to try for the whole book, beginning-to-end, speed read. My head will probably explode.