A Flash Fiction Piece in Parts by Matt Maday

Just a dream or hallucination not reality—or—a dissociative state that did occur in response to a reality so shocking! that—WHOA UH—having an out-of-body experience when you’re outside your spacecraft and in outer space—that will slap you naturally back to consciousness.

I was right up against one of them squids—those squid—does it matter?! sorry—I was indeed able to communicate via OcTone-a-Ton with the squid commander conveniently due to my cerebrospelunker equip—whoa!—didn’t notice the synaptic rush of electricity until the squid data-dispersed into a star cluster.

I was deeply leaking data. The squid patchers got me intact again, though. The captain and the pilot waved—wove?!—uh—sorry—again wasn’t able to exactly leave it all there in space you know?

The captain and the pilot waved from the ship’s window. I watched a radiant circle of glowing quasar energy delineate space and time and nature.

A Flash Fiction Piece in Parts by Matt Maday

I remember our captain saying “art is all about the empty spaces” as a neon galaxy illuminated our ship in prismatic light. The empty spaces in time, space, dimension, virtual vs. physical: the captain could be referring to any or none of these in this era of quantum, interdimensional, intergalactic travel, my captain could have been referring to empty spaces in consciousness, intradimensional, inner travel into the voids in conscious thought that allow for the light of consciousness to permeate the unconscious–

I fell asleep, and the pilot woke me up–he was right to wake me up–I was supposed to be learning from the pilot and our captain how to captain and pilot the ship by myself if need be, a drastic understudy of sorts, commissioned to learn roles he couldn’t possibly fulfill alone; I had to admit, I was sleeping too much to escape from the stress and the stream-of-consciousness-inducing DoeMensional cranial overloader caused my brain to hitch into a restless yet lengthy slumber that broke up my day as well. My thoughts wouldn’t make sense–this is a journal–I’m still alive: made it back–kind of!–guess I will have to explain that later.

So in other words, this is a journal that I’m editing right now about some space and/or time travel or something and trying not to embellish yet trying instead to accurately describe–

THUMP.

There was another one at the window, organic, deadly if they breached the walls of the spaceship. Or bizarrely beautiful, water-colored killer squids in space–THUMP–I wanted to sleep through the whole wave, but I knew that I was the first person who would have to explore if there were any space creatures. I would have to negotiate or neutralize the squid–or choose not to–best to avoid–I was wide awake–the captain was staring out the window, tracing bioluminescent squid movements with his hand in a mournful swimming motion.

Hi all.

I’m a week behind with my blog/podcast, and I’m taking a blogging hiatus—whatever that means for me personally: probably just do everything in a random order for a couple of weeks.

Some things may improve: if I fix file format compatibility issues for old posts, e.g.

Rebalance. Hone.

This website should look presentable by the end of the summer. Indoor, independent, digital programming should still be relevant headed into fall and winter, right?

—MM

Matt Maday

This blog post is a planning document that I’m posting as a blog. It’s going to outline my goals for creating a blogging schedule. Additionally, this should serve as a possible handbook for other bloggers. Just be forewarned that it’s my outline; your wants/needs may be different. Also, it represents a mash-up of writing styles: representative of my background in technical writing, creative writing, professional/scientific writing. My poetry and research work have received high academic recognitions, yet I’ve also written a satire of the experimental method that no one — professors, students, me — can understand.

So, if you like to experiment with your writing, I’ve got you covered. Also, if you need some fresh ideas because the tried-and-true are experiencing diminished returns, this might refresh your writing. Or, hidden in these ideas and the way they are formatted and expressed is the classic, gold-standard methodical playbook for all blogging and blog-scheduling activities from henceforth. Whatever works.

Today, I’m blogging about blogging, blogging about blog-scheduling, and scheduling how I’m going to blog within my blog entry about scheduling blogs. Matt Maday’s getting meta-; help me.

Matt Maday

I’m white. I grew up in a middle class household. I went to public school until I was in second grade, and I attended a private school from second grade through eighth grade. I was able to choose to attend an out-of-district high school. I was given the means, materials, and opportunities to become an acclimated member of society. I saw a straight, normal path unfolding in front of me: do well in school, become accepted to a good college, and get a good job and a good career. I’m in a socioeconomic bracket that seems to assure its members that they will be successful. However, I’m also diagnosable with a mental illness: a severe case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. When I was in middle school, I succumbed to the idea that OCD would ruin any hopes of reaching my future aspirations, any aspirations of being considered “normal.” Ironically, it was only when I decided to give up on the idea of achieving normalcy that I was able to consider functioning as a “productive member of society.”  

In fifth grade, I was an especially strong language arts student. By the middle of seventh grade, I could barely complete any homework involving reading and writing. It was understandable that I had trouble with all my homework, but I had particular trouble with English classes. My literacy problems didn’t involve a learning disability; in fact, the problems weren’t literacy problems at all. My poor reading and writing performances resulted from my failures to complete the work. I was re-reading certain sentences so many times that I could barely read a page of a book. When I was able to make it through a page of a book, I was so distracted by intrusive thoughts that I had difficulty retaining any of what I read. Sometimes I could hardly bring myself to fill in one blank on a fill-in-the-blank worksheet. I would erase a word, and then rewrite the word again, ad nauseam.

I became a victim of the “magical thinking” symptoms associated with OCD. I feared that if I wrote a word, phrase, or sentence incorrectly, I would somehow cause physical and spiritual ruin to befall people around me, especially people I loved or sympathized deeply with. It was terrifying as a child to go through this, and when I later, as an adult, told my family about what I went through, they became hostile toward me and treated me as dangerous. I suppose I was right to keep this a secret from them, and I made a huge error in thinking that they would understand, even though my symptoms are classic symptoms of OCD. My parents would have known this if they had done the proper research. Instead, they subscribed to, and continue to subscribe to, prejudicial ideas about me and my mental disorder.

After undergoing years of counseling and treatment with medication and completing a B.A. in psychology, I have some much-needed insight into psychological disorders in general and especially insight into OCD. Those diagnosable with OCD typically score high on the “conscientiousness” scale of a personality inventory called the NEO, so it made sense that I was so conscientious and caring, but I was sympathetic to the point where I felt like I had to protect myself from inflicting imaginary damage on the world. I had the “hypermorality” that comes with OCD, the tendency to believe I would have to strictly adhere to every rule, to strictly adhere to every possible moral code that I had been familiarized with. And in short, this is too much to burden one person with.

When I was in middle school, I had difficulty identifying with my peers. Failure to socially acclimate in middle school is a general problem probably facing most middle school students in one way or another, but in my personal case, I found myself keenly aware of the factors that can alienate an individual from the society around him. I was seeing a therapist for family counseling. I was a middle class kid going to a private school that my parents eventually had to stop sending me to because tuition was too expensive. I couldn’t articulate my feelings to my parents or my therapist. I looked to music to express what I couldn’t express. I started listening to punk rock and could identify with the messages of rebellion contained in the lyrics and in the sound. When I discovered hardcore, an offshoot of punk rock, I found a genre of music that seemed to speak directly to me. I also discovered music that would later guide my adult notions of political power and disenfranchisement, my notions of how a genre can have a self-contained history, and my notions of prosody in spoken and written languages.

Matt Maday

Let’s look at a perhaps overlooked similarity between the cognitive and behavioral perspectives: binary. Computers use binary as a means of telling which switches are on and which switches are off; each task is the result of certain switches in certain positions. In behaviorism, rewards and punishments are the 1 and 0 equivalents. Rewards and punishments necessarily follow a behavior, however, whereas the patterns of zeros and ones coded as binary necessarily precede a computer task. Is this because behaviorism is the mode of the past and cognitive psychology is the mode of the future?

On the other hand, even the most dominant and brutal leader — the strongest strong-man — doesn’t have the endurance to stay strong forever: he will reach a capacity that will weaken his dominance. If he’s only able to create fear of physical harm in his constituents, a human leader will never even achieve full brutalism.

Not really true of the nonhuman animals. Ethologists can speculate, but I think that nonhuman animals are simply more perceptive to microlevel psychological changes and their corresponding indicators in fellow nonhuman animals, as the main means of psychological survival: to me an oxymoron, an organic/algorithmic “choice” to treat fear as an empty indicator, move your hand away from the flame before you feel the pain or fear; then ignore the pain signal.

Is that all that’s left in a brutalist? A signal that tells to kill without emotional consequence? Shut the kill switch on; shut the emotion switch off? Doesn’t this bleed over into the domain of the ostensible royalty of the animal kingdom: the human animals?

Matt Maday

I’ve been pondering lately the concept of brutalism, of natural law, of “might makes right.” This is instinct in the animal kingdom, though, right? I guess what separates the human animals from the nonhuman animals is motivation, i.e. winning. I don’t think that a lion kills a gazelle and celebrates a victory. At the same time, if a scientist working solo were to kill the COVID-19 virus, eradicating it from the face of the Earth, that scientist would win some sort of prize, correct? Like an ultimate prize. Like the Nobel prize.

Yet, the scientist wouldn’t be made a king by virtue of whom or what they’ve killed, even if given full societal credit himself. That isn’t our human-animal reward system. Right?