it’s like I just got here.

you can not get up no matter what you do? You feel almost as though you’re dying; you open your eyes and try to sit up and you weigh a million pounds, parts of you do something somewhere between hurting and stinging; it feels as though you don’t have the energy to hold yourself up and you’re going to collapse; and then you do, right back down, helpless, immediately back into sleep.

I went to take a nap at noon. It is now 5:30. I tried to get up at approximately 1:30, 2:00, 4:00, and 4:45 (there is a huge clock next to my bed, so I can easily see the time when I’m laying down).

Meanwhile, it is 80 degrees in here and I am hot as hell, sweating, overheated.

I have been unable to get up all day, and I have had dreams. Such dreams. Over and over again, the same themes. And then I open my eyes, am unable to get up, and fall back into new ones of the same variety. I have truly had a day of fevered dreams.

are dangerous.

whose value-orientations and resulting canon of behavior deviate from the crass normativity of social life, don’t ever bother to try to join society. You belong to the club of idiots and lunatics. You won’t have many friends. You won’t have many co-workers. You won’t be much liked. You won’t be able to make relationships work.

You will always be the sinner.

You will always be mistaken.

You will always be the naive, the childish, the un-adult.

You will always be a hindrance, never a help.

And you won’t, in turn, receive help either.

You’ll be offered support you don’t want or believe in.

You’ll be denied the support that would sustain you.

Because your goals are the wrong goals.

Your world is not their world.

You are the capitalist in the midst of communist revolution.

You are the communist decrying an insatiable bull market.

You are the pure thinker in a world of anti-intellectuals.

You are the relativist in the Newtonian world.

You are the antisocial, by definition.

There is no help for you but to accept the imposition. And because you don’t want to, you are at war, war, war, with society and with those you love, forever. You receive only the kind support that you cannot bear and that you did not want, at the expense of every one of those things that absolutely matter to you but that others do not believe in and wish you would outgrow.

—

I wonder if there is research about whether or not extroverts are more normatively oriented than introverts. My own anecdotal evidence would seem to bear out the notion—which makes a kind of common sense—that “people people” are unable to conceive of anything stronger or more right than social reality, than some set of internalized facets from their contemporary social milieux.

It is, after all, what makes “people people” tick, what seems to be most real to them. The introverts, on the other hand, experience social reality as a kind of harsh unreality, a storm that continually threatens and that often creates sudden, unexpected deluges at inconvenient times, never going away, never giving way to a clear day of reprieve.

For the introvert, every facet of social reality is an incredulity-inducing claim, and none of it has any particular moral authority.

—

Some study society because they love it.

Others study society because of the giddy terror of incomprehension and indignation that it induces in them, even as they live out their lives as human beings with social needs.