POST-LOTHLORIEN: This morning, I wrestle with dopamine takeover . . .

I seem to have absorbed the tumultuous transformation of the past weekend at Lothlorien (see last four posts).

Or have I? Did it change me? No. Apparently not.

In fact, I’m right back where I don’t want to be: ADDICTED TO THE INTERNET.

To “the news” on the internet? No. That was way earlier in life. In fact that addiction (which follows from the root addiction to intensity) began when I was a kid, and learned to read at five years old, so that I could scan the headlines of “the news” as it came to us in the daily newspaper.

Bad news, and I would cower in fear for another day.

Good news, and I could go out and play.

So, actually, there’s another addiction, rumbling silently underneath the second one, namely, an addiction to “the apocalypse,” not as revelation, however; even now, I haven’t totally absorbed that linguistic lineage.

 

. . . No. As utter, devastating, blackened destruction of the whole world via The Bomb. Which, we all know, remains an ever-present threat.

(Which makes me want to ask: how has this ever-present possibility affected the collective consciousness? Collective PTSD for the past 80 years?)

However, that The Bomb has not already blown us to smithereens has made me, over the past few decades, wonder if perhaps we are somehow being protected from this otherwise horrific potentiality.

 

I was born on December 19, 1942, only two weeks and three days after that first “self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction” under that stadium in Chicago.

WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT

So, last night, trying to back to sleep at around 3 AM, once again, my fingers found my youtube page (just as they used to find another cigarette), where all sorts of ephemera beckoned my dazed gaze.

Of course I latched on to a few of them, which held me in their spell — for hours — to the point where, at 7 AM, when I got up, I realized that, once again, I had ruined a good night’s sleep with my addiction to the internet via my ipad. YUCK.

I’ve weaned myself from this addiction before, many times, or tried to. But I always fail in the end.

And, I noticed this morning, that my fury at myself for fucking up my sleep again, had jelled, no, curdled, into a subtle mental infection that threatened to take me over.

This is not new either. In fact, I’m recognizing more and more that when I allow, get sucked into, this very bad mood, it’s as if this invites an invisible malign entity to enter, and take over.

Is this what happens to many people, without their knowledge? Is this the kind of thing that we need to learn to expect, given what’s going on, and how we’re all constantly tempted to succumb to an evil succubus?

In any case, luckily, I have a tried and true method of banishing this kind of attempted takeover, and that is my extended, fast, early morning walk, which for awhile longer this fall season, allows me to greet the sun as it rises. And always, thank goodness, I thank the natural world, now noticing how the changing colors of leaves are suddenly illumined by sun’s rays, and how my enjoyment of the busily scampering squirrels scour what remains of the attempted malign entity takeover inside me.

BTW: someone at the Intention Convention reminded me that at the first annual event, last year, at Sage Valley, around a fire that first night, I had mentioned my lifelong terror of nuclear war, and how I now realize that nuclear energy might actually save us!

Wow. Yes. True! My near-84-year old self thanks my near-83-old self for that forgotten bit of crone wisdom!

And I thank whoever reminded me of what I said last year for the nudge to not only forgive myself for my lapse last night that succored me into a hazy dopamine lockdown thanks to constantly revolving youtube videos that scream, watch this, look at this, pay attention to this, NOW!

 

For the rest of this day, after this post, I’m going swear off not only the internet, but any device that connects me to it. Instead, clean this house, thoroughly, both my own internal bodily house and the one in which my body dwells.

Expecting rain. Which is good. Will help wash away the clinging corruption.