I was wrong about the two previous posts not needing to have been writ. They were actually helpful. Sometimes you need to go some place to realize it's not a place you want to go. Oh. That's kinda the story of my life.

The conveyor belt/treadmill metaphor was useless, albeit accurate, but realizing that still requires formation of some other paradigm. New paradigm. Different paradigm. What was wasn't working.

Nothing should be comfortable about my existence, considering how it has to end. Well, how it has to end for all of us, but trying or pretending to choose to in my case. Itsa big difference. For people in general, we all have to die but that's no reason to not get comfortable about existence as much as we can. Let it come when it does. Don't go where you're not invited until you're invited.

For people like me with the realization of death as a focus, there is no getting comfortable with existence. Death is a reality that can't be put aside because putting it aside is ignoring the obvious, and existence is by nature uncomfortable because it's fleeting and needs to be explored and understood as such. Maybe that's what the great adepts were getting at. Maybe they were as bad at it as me. Probably not.

I'm thinking I have to tap into sadness and despair, not as emotions but as concepts, which is a bit ironic since Buddhism teaches to do away with concepts. In this case, the concept is a tool in furtherance of doing away with concepts. Which in many ways is exactly what many Buddhistic methods necessarily are.

Sadness and despair are useful in that those are the normative emotions, tools, concepts that ordinary people avoid or are given as reasons or explanations for suicide. But I'm not ordinary, I'm not necessarily suicidal, it's just what I want to do and will eventually have to do since that's the way I set my life up. Not being suicidal makes it hard to commit suicide. Tapping into sadness and despair just as concepts, and not as the things humans generally attach to as real and things to avoid, can help. 

There's a lot of blurring that goes on. All the beauty in the things I love and appreciate become sadness and despair because they are fleeting. They won't last no matter how much I want them to be loved. Dig deep and deeper into those emotions of love and appreciation and they become sadness and despair because they all come to pass. It's still love, and joy is still joy, laughter is still laughter, but they take on more dimensions, they become multi-faceted. Anger is no longer a feeling but an energy that's pretty useless and can be stopped when recognized as an energy. Lust is no longer some base animal impulse for desire and self-gratification, but a very powerful energy that is very useful if controlled. Despair and sadness don't mean depression. Everything starts getting transformed in practice.

I don't know when it will be time, I don't know how others knew it was time, but I've come to imagine it's a full-body realization. I've never had that before. I used to talk about being at 100% or getting to 100%. As a full-body realization, I doubt I've ever been near 100%. I won't project on what I think I was, I may have never even been 1%, I may have gotten to 80%, I just don't know myself that well. 

Appalled. Fucked. Wack. Facked (Australian accent). Those are some words that have occurred to me to describe my previous post. I was poking fun at myself, but what I wrote is seriously twisted. Ah, another word. Some sick shit. I could probably go on if I put my mind to it. Totally muhfoofooh.

The suggestion that I should just comfortably accept staying alive just because shit isn't hitting the fan is mind-blowing and has been sending me into core code wtf? reality collapses and existential fishtail skids. Poking fun at myself as a coping mechanism for neurotic dysfunction and things not going my way is fine and dandy, but it's wack telling myself it's fine and dandy when all the screens start blanking on and off with static and white noise because the frivolous bit of code I introduced (the previous post) is just that bogus.

So no, no, no, no, no, no, no (oh mama-mia, mama mia) on that smooth-ride-day-to-day, wait-for-something-to-happen-first attitude. I should be stressed, I should be on edge, there should be existential angst. Mindfulness practice should take any emotionality and hysterics dramatics out of it, but the tension and cognitive dissonance is necessary. I should be constantly pressing towards suicide despite a pattern and history of failure (the 'failure is overrated' claim is still valid). There is something seriously wrong with this picture, this program that is my life, and pretending it's a smooth ride that I can be lazy about (lazier than I am, apparently possible) is way off mark. The previous post is just a sub-routine, a fail-safe. It's an aspect that's there and may actually come to pass, but it's not a primary paradigm.

This may come off as sounding really strange, but it also conflicts with my ideas of interdependence, which I believe in as a part of mindfulness practice. Interdependence is integral to mindfulness practice, actively recognizing the connections and relations between everyone in our lives. When you think and act independently and not interdependently, you risk running into trouble. The interdependence aspect of mindfulness practice helps avoid or mitigate those problems because you considered other people before acting.

In my case, consideration of interdependence of course comes with a twist. Where's the interdependence when my life has been all about isolating myself and cutting contact to some degree or another with literally everybody? But even with my idea to commit suicide, I'm aware of interdependence. And actually I theoretically couldn'twouldn'tshouldn't commit suicide without interdependence, it would be pointless. The interdependence is still there in the removing myself from their lives and affecting them as little as possible. It's a whole life thing, cutting off from people doesn't eliminate interdependence.

Somehow, though, distilling suicide to a knee-jerk reaction feels like an independent, selfish (yep, I went there) act. It treats suicide as just needing a trigger and becomes a matter of cause and effect and suggests I can be casual and cavalier until that trigger occurs. That all reacts badly with my ideas of interdependence which require continuous, mindful recognition that there is gravitas in such an act. However little impact it may have, it needs to be respectfully contemplated. I've done all I can to mitigate any impact, and there may be shock, but not any real impact beyond knowledge of an unpleasant fact; a fact of life I may add. I could've been killed by a bus and the impact should largely be the same.

So with the albatross firmly back around my neck, I'm back to wondering how will I know it's time? How did they know it was time? What strategies do I have to determine when it will be time? The spanner in the works is that time has long past, anytime will do really. Then the question becomes a perpetual 'why not now?' and I've been asking that for so long it's meaningless and ridiculous. Really, this and the previous post shouldn't have happened. I should've just posted about riding and the weather. Taipei should just cancel winter at this point. I think this is the first winter I haven't switched out my floor fan for a space heater. I don't think it's possible at this point for Taipei to get cold enough for a long enough period to salvage any notion of winter.

meet the new paradigm, same as the old paradigm

I started using the metaphor of the conveyor belt to cynically describe routine getting me from day-to-day, hoping to spur me to some sort of action. That was an abject failure. Even cynically observing that it had morphed into a treadmill has done nothing. Instead, the metaphor itself has transformed to accurately describe a "smooth ride". And who doesn't like a smooth ride? Would you rather be riding in the backseat of a car driven by a really smart kangaroo or on Space Mountain? It doesn't matter if it's a conveyor belt or a treadmill, my day-to-day is a smooth ride and I don't have to do anything, and as long as it's a smooth ride day-to-day, why do anything?

I'm well aware the smooth ride can get bumpy rolling on a dime. How long can a life designed like mine go on without something going wrong? It's become clear that I need something looming to actually do something, but loomage doesn't have to be some long, drawn-out thing where I'm watching the train approaching from way off in the distance, like finances dwindling away, and I have time to brace myself for impact and wane philosophical. Loomage can dramatically appear with the drop of a hat. I have a "go bag" ready (sort of) so that when I'm confronted with the situation whereby I assess I really don't want to deal with this thing and I'm done, I can go immediately.

For example, I have it established in my mind that I'll never move again. I can't imagine having the energy or motivation to ever put in the effort to futilely organize all the stuff in my apartment into manageable parcels to transport. My apartment now is the last place I'll reside. So if my landlord says he's selling the flat and I have to move, I'd look at all the circumstances and what I'd have to deal with to move, decide I don't want to deal with all that, and it's a go. I'd tell the landlord I'd begin looking for a new place and that's the last he'll hear of me (with apologies since he's been so good to me).

Actually, I don't know what situations would qualify as triggers, I don't even know if needing to move would actually qualify. I've been there before with the same attitude and duly ended up moving. Multiple times. I just don't know myself that well, but apparently I do have a survival instinct to deal with situations. My life is all about discrepancies between what I intend and what I do. Wait, everyone's like that, why am I tidying it up like that? My life is all about the discrepancy between intending to kill myself and never actually doing it. Imagine my surprise on the day that I actually do have to die. I'd just be so relieved that I don't have to do it myself. Disappointed, I'd consider it a failure, but relieved. Failure is overrated anyway.

How bad of a disruption to the smooth ride is necessary for me to decide it's more than I want to deal with; that finally ending it all would be the better option?
- Despite what I said, I think having to move still qualifies, past resilience notwithstanding. How would I even go about finding a new place? I don't have a phone. I can look up listings online, but convincing someone to deal with someone without a phone is probably asking a lot. How do I go about getting someone to move me? I don't have a phone. I don't speak the language. I don't know anyone I would be willing to impose upon to help me. Prior times I've had to move, at least I could figure out logistics of what I had to do. It was at least possible. Conceivable. Ideatable.
- Broken toilet that I can't figure out and doesn't affect anyone else? Things like water outage or internet down affect my neighbors and I'd just have to sit tight until they contacted the landlord. If it's something that affects only me, I'd have to contact my landlord. I don't have a phone. I could ring his doorbell. My Mandarin is pretty completely gone. Can't shit, commit suicide. Strange, but for me it's not so crazy. I'm a pampered, privileged bastard.
- Finances. That, my usual albatross, goes without saying. At some point, somehow, the money will be gone, and when the money's gone, the money's gone. It's math even I can do.
- Losing my keys. I've long contemplated that. I even mentioned it to Sadie when she was here that it was a trigger and she was like, "Let's get your keys copied NOW". I don't know how hard of landing or a brick wall this one is to go. First of all, forget the "go" bag, it's out of reach in my apartment. It may be a slow burn figuring out how bad it would be to ring my landlord's doorbell and get a new set of keys. Given my past and my psychology, I'd probably ring his doorbell despite long contemplating it to be an absolute trigger.
- Enlightenment! That strangely actually makes sense, but I'm not going to get into the mechanics of that. Believe it or don't, I couldn't care less. I think we just got an answer to the likelihood of this one.

All of this purely speculative and none of these likely to happen. But something will. I can count on that.