The Peaceful Gnome

I was hoping that writing about how on edge I've become because of the sensory overload I'm experiencing might help to release some tension... nope.  :-P One thing that it has done is to make me aware of how "on edge" I am right now so that I can at least try to be a bit more calm and relaxed about things... yeah, right. So... mindfulness.  I am jittery and stressed because the world is too loud and too bright and too smelly... and I have not managed to get away to a quiet place for a long time... and it's getting slowly but surely to the point where... where I don't know what.  Mindfulness.  I know what is going on, so I can do something about it right?  Take a deep breath, let go of the stress.  I wish that sort of stuff worked. Visualize peace maybe... ...ah... whatever. Breathe in.  Breathe out.  Repeat. I need to go somewhere very quiet for a day or two, and just lay on the ground looking up at the sky for a few hours a...

I'll start out by linking to this article called "What a meltdown feels like for an autistic person" that was linked from Unstrange Mind on Facebook.  You can read that first if you like, it's pretty good. "It’s never just a sandwich." Lately I've been having more and more difficulty maintaining my emotional equilibrium.  I've found myself having not-quite-meltdowns dozens of times a day, snapping at people, ranting uncontrollably about whatever the new "outrage of the day" is, flipping off drivers on the highway and being rude and obnoxious to everyone around me from work to home and in-between.   So what in the world is going on?   "It’s never just a sandwich."  I'm right on the edge of a full blown embarrassing meltdown.  I can feel it out there lurking on the fringes of my mind, just waiting for the final trigger, the last straw, the one last little drop of water to start the flood the last pebble to begin ...

I’m reading a book based on the writings of Saint Thomas Aquinas called “Practical Theology” by Peter Kreeft.   It is set up with 350+ short chapters so I should be able to go through it in about a year reading one chapter a day, usually it’s just one or two pages and doesn’t take long.   Of course sometimes the sitting and pondering what I’ve read takes a while but the actual reading is pretty quick.    Today’s reading was titled “Only Three Kinds of Goods” and went in a direction I would not have expected.   From Thomas Aquinas himself we have “Goodness is rightly divided into the virtuous, the useful, and the pleasant… Goodness is not divided into these three as something univocal to be predicated equally of them all, but as something analogical to be predicated of them according to priority and posteriority.   Hence it is predicated chiefly of the virtuous, then of the pleasant and lastly of the useful. (I,5,6) So, what is virtuous is the highest go...

I've been sick for weeks now.  I'm slowly recovering but I'm still exhausted by mid-afternoon each day and coughing and being dizzy.  This is much of the reason I have not posted here but have been re-posting stuff to Facebook instead, it takes a lot more effort to write and think than it does to grab stuff other people have produced and say "Yeah, this!  Look here!" The recent abominations done by the government against the people, the "clearing" of Hillary and the blatant murder of black men in Baton Rouge and Minnesota, followed by the murder of police in Dallas, have brought out much anger and outrage in the nation, and in me for sure.  I'm not surprised by any of it to tell the truth but I refuse to let pass justifications of the murders committed by the police and so I've deliberately posted provocative and extreme anti-government and anti-police things.  I'm not apologizing for that, I mean every word of it, the government is the ene...