CONFIRMATION BIAS, CIRCULAR THINKING, AND THE FULFILLING OF SELF-DELUSIONAL PROPHECY

TACTICAL

I am well.  I would say so if I wasn’t (maybe).  But it doesn’t much matter as Ken was here on business and he scheduled an extra two days in his trip to visit with ME!  I can’t tell you how special that makes me feel! (but I will try, just not in this entry!!)

MYTHS WE LIVE BY

An oft repeated “Myth” around here is the “yes, a no, a straight line, a goal” ideal.  I have always wanted to imagine my life in a vector that would resemble this statement.  I sincerely believe that is the key to MY happiness lies in having all the “points of light” on my life map to give off the look of a straight line.  From the scene in “Glengarry Glenross”, to “Coach Singletary”, from my “formula of happiness” and love of all things regarding the philosophy of Nietzsche and Orwell.

So I am left at a loss at anyone who doesn’t “get me”.  In fact, I take slight offense at people IRL who say that they don’t get me.  I mean, how could you not?  As often as I repeat

themes and principles that matter to me... for instance, my supervisor knew enough of me make getting me to the hospital for treatment.  Even though I could have assured her that I would get my hand looked at (presumably, after my shift at work, of course!), it was not only that she likely knew my attitude about life in general, mine specifically, and she simply CARED ENOUGH to go out of her way to help me.

The myths that we have in our individual meta-consciousness that form how we see and interpret the world becomes our reality.  If you see the world through a tube, your vision will be limited to the scope of that tube.  Then when the tube is warped and manipulated by outside influences, which also sees reality through a limited vision, you have a Tea Bagger (or Sarah Palin!!).  And eventually a cognitive dissonance (hey, this term will appear in these pages again soon..!) asserts itself...

CONFIRMATION BIAS, CIRCULAR THINKING AND THE FULFILLING OF SELF-DELUSIONAL PROPHECY

I like to believe that I can (I am soo very much the “ I think I can” train engine..!) and I look at my goals as the projection of my desires.  For better or worse, it has seemed to me that what I have always wanted, I have had reasonable opportunities to make my dreams happen. And not just the requisite full life dreams that are developed as we grow as a human being, but the dreams that I have had back when I was watching Captain Kangaroo on WJBK in Detroit before I would leave in the morning for school. As told Ken while we quaffed cool, amber beverages at the Rock Bottom Brewery this past Sunday in the Old Market, “I need a new bucket list,” since I have marked off so many of the things that are on my current one.

The time is out of mind whenever it was that I realized the unique path that I was on.  It could have been when I found myself getting up at the a**crack of day to go to hockey practice (because, you know, black people don’t play hockey).  Perhaps it was when I saw the marker at Camp Humphreys back in Korea, denoting it as the “home” of the fictional 4077th MASH unit.  Hell, it could have been when I realized that I was marrying one of the young women graduates of Virginia Farrell, a Metro beauty college that I would walk to on 7 Mile Road and get $5 haircuts.  The women, mostly girls (who still seemed like women in my adolescent eyes) and young ladies in their late teen and early 20’s, looked so pretty and unattainable to me... and then I met my starter Wife...

...and despite how “less than good” an experience in my life may had turned out, the life that I am actually living has always been the life that was meant for me.  Accompanying this feeling was one of recognition, a recognition of those who weren’t living lives that they could have, of those for whose dreams that were not adroit enough to manage the treacherous straits of happenstance, and would eventually allow a cynicism creep into their thoughts under the guise of “reality” and and of course, of all things that “kept it real”.

I would never let that view of reality become a part of mine.  But yet and still I have encountered a persistent antagonism against my perspective of life and living, especially from those with whom I am intimate with.  And this intimacy is not about sex, but it is about the intermingling of hopes and dreams, and the how and why these dreams are achieved.  Of merging goals and the processes that occur as two individual transmorph into a couple, a loveship...