...m...

…ye gads, elementary school boys are the worst: we had gang urinals (big open troughs) and the shenanigans were epically horrific…

…man, don’t sit on the urinal: it just leaves a mess and leads to awkward face-to-face conversations with the guy standing next to you…

if…then?

(fifteen cars, jets, and submarines)

…you know, it’s funny, i had vehicle voltron too, and although i never watched the cartoon, my best friend’s little brother did, and i don’t remember ever seeing episodes of the vehicle team, only the lions, although i know vehicle voltron also had a cartoon…

…real exotica was gladiator voltron, three humanoid robots which merged into a larger robot, which i never saw anywhere outside of catalogs…

…ideas, not words: written language is weird one (and kind of oblique to my point), but in that instance visual stimulus -> letters -> wordforms -> sounds -> words -> ideas; hallucinations skip all those earlier steps and go straight to the idea end of the perception chain but it’s not obvious that the earlier steps are missing…

(i don’t think i’ve ever hallucinated written language, though, just the ideas of hearing sounds; or of seeing creatures or objects; or of inhabiting spaces, environments, or situations; similar to how one experiences dreams)

…no, they’re never really visual images; they’re more akin to the ideas which images represent when i parse visual stimulus, but that’s a pretty muddled distinction to distinguish in the heat of the moment, ceci n’est pas une pipe and all that…

…kind of like when you struggle to parse sounds into phonemes and then phonemes into words and then words into coherent language, but you’re never really hearing language directly…

…those dependas ain’t gonna potamus themselves…

BlickCait.

…i don’t really get earworms unless i’m playing them deliberately…

…the hallucinations appear real and range from subtle peripheral perception to full-focused attention, but they’re unexpected and incongruous with my immediate environment, so recognising them is akin recognising a dream for what it is…

…tell kiki she still owes me five bucks…

…look, i’m from the heart of generation X and i can vouch from the trenches that all those cultural icons folks hold up as emblematic of our coolness?..they were a tiny, tiny minority rebelling vainly against the overwhelming majority of sellouts comprising our peers, ultimately buying into the same dystopian orphan-crushing-machine championed by our baby-boomer parents, and their parents before them, and their parents before them, a legacy of selfish exploitation since time immemorial…

…gen-X may have had good branding, but we’re no less subject to the 95%-of-everything-is-crap rule than any other generation before or after us…

…yeah, odor, taste, touch, and vision i recognise but i can’t just recall arbitrarily; more than once i’ve become separated from my wife out in public and realised that if someone were to ask me to describe her i’d have no idea how to do so…

…i can hear her voice in my mind, though…

…random disruptive sounds, peculiar phrases in strange voices, typically loud interjections but seldom anything visual; over time i’ve grown fairly proficient at recognising the hallucinations for what they are…yes, they’re sounds like i’d hear from my ears but at the same time they carry similar resonance to sounds i play in my mind, and learning to distinguish that difference in acoustic character helps to identify them…

…i don’t have an internal monologue orchestrating my thoughts but i can recite, read, sing, or imagine sounds, music, and acoustic environments in my mind with perfect pitch…

…i used a framing hammer to build a wood fence last weekend; it felt good but also surprisingly old-fashioned by comparison to the nail gun the builder used for the original construction…

…that’s not normal?..

…i’ve kept a wardrobe of identical clothing since the turn of the millenium; a coworker confessed that they had a pool as to whether i actually changed shirts, so they covertly marked a dot on the back of my sleeve and money changed hands when it was gone the next day…

…if you’re not pursuing one hundred applications per week you’re not treating your search as a full-time job…

…i have no internal monologue and i can conceptualise spaces and environments but not images; i hallucinate all the time, mostly sounds…

…fifty-five; been working since i was ten years old and everything i brought in after taxes went to finance, insurance, and real estate for the past fourty-five years…i harbour no illusion that i’ll ever enjoy the luxury of retirement, so i try to make the best i can of surviving today and hope to drop dead before i’m unable to work anymore…