feeling is primo

I suggest absorbing his Code Poems for guidance. Reading, after all, is a participatory activity, and like DaVinci, Meika often employs mirror-image writing, and sometimes inside-out writing as well. Ultimately, it’s up to us, the reader, to assign meaning to all those little squiggly thingies on the screen.

During the seven months of his race, Donald Crowhurst went insane. He left behind a record of his thoughts in his captain’s log.

The log books of Donald Crowhurst contain many signs of his advanced education. Crowhurst was acknowledged as a very smart and plausible man, and did design several nautical and navagational devices which, if manufactured, would have made him a comfortable living.

The early logs also reveal the indicators that would increasingly define his baffling form of insanity:

Ideodialect; the use of words in such ways that only the speaker understands them. Crowhurst’s favorite ideodialectical terms were “the system,” “the impulse,” “the game,” and “Time.”

Obsessive grandiosity; belief that his mind had been blesssed with the ability to uniquely behold a Divine cosmological truth. Crowhust’s logs toggle between correct notations of his boat’s position, speed and direction, which require rational thought processes, and grandiose passages which describe a mathematical construct of man’s relation to god and the universe. This construct, Crowhurst writes, empowers him to embrace and forgive all of mankind’s faults and grievances.

Isolation fixation; conflicting, traumatic expressions of pain and obsession with his own social, emotional, and physical isolation from others. During the race Crowhurst realizes, with surprising acuity, that his boat will kill him if he attempts to round the Horn of Africa and enter the southern ocean. He engages in an audacious set of deceptions which give the impression that he is proceeding with the race at record-setting speed. He is, in fact, hiding in the untrafficked regions of the south Atlantic and defrauding his sponsors. His detachment from reality, his manic log entries, and his eventual suicide, all begin with this act of deception, which cuts him off from his family and community in England.

Donald Crowhurst’s story is expertly described in his biography The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall.

The similarities between Crowhurt’s last log entries, and the words of this author are, to me, astonishing. I wish this soul a happier future, and recommend the Crowhurst book as a cautionary tale, if only for its strong potential to remediate the awful feelings of loneliness to which so many bright but troubled thirty-something men are susceptible, and replace those feelings with a strong desire to seek the company of other people, to seek fellowship other than with the reflections in the sterile wilderness of mirrors in which you are lost.

Or perhaps someone will start a 101 Reasons to Keep Writing blog. Post #1 could be called You Are NOT Meika.

You aren’t unique. You aren’t special. You aren’t progressive. You aren’t even particularly eloquent or grand. What you are is confusing, annoying, and suffering from severe delusions of grandeur. Continue to convince yourself all you like that you’re just misunderstood, but the rest of us will just keep on laughing, shaking our heads, and hoping to God above that you just stop writing.

Word of advice: Don’t be shitty and then leave it until the end to describe why. No one will GET there in the first place, because shitty = shit no matter how well intentioned the shit maybe.

You think the denizens of WEB 2.0 will be happy to slog through underedited, unfinished work in the hopes that someday it will shine? My, that’s charitable of us. In return, do we get your patronage of our own underbaked crap, or are artistes like you allowed to read only the good stuff?

think of it as a galley proof with a very wide, critical and professional, if not all-knowing team.

The world.

For that to be true, you’d have to listen to people. So far, you’ve shown yourself open to suggestion–about font spacing. Mieka, font spacing is the least of your problems.

There were lots of comments way off the mark that I did not refute by the way(like the ESL comments). They were just so way off beam and said more about the commenter than me.

I’ve been following this from your first appearance in The Rejecter’s blog, and the first thing that popped into my mind was, “English isn’t his first language.” Your comments have a garbled, slightly off quality, as though you’ve studied English for a long time and mastered a few of the more advanced skills, but your basic skills and your grasp of subtleties are lacking. You also construct sentences oddly, dropping words and trying to pack too many ideas into one sentence, as though you spoke a language like German that supports denser sentences. You make strange word choices–not creative ones, off ones, as though you didn’t know the exact English word for a concept and picked something likely out of a dictionary. Your writing falls apart completely when you try to express complicated ideas. In short, your writing has the classic characteristics of an ESL speaker’s.

I suggest that you stop writing and for God’s sake, pick up a book on grammar.