Black birds exist. This is not about them. This is about the other black birds, the ones that are 2’s. You’ve certainly had this experience. Peacefully existing in an outdoor space and there they are, black birds dancing and fluttering their blurry wings right on the edge of your vision. Ignore it, chalk it up to needing new glasses or mistaking a leaf on the breeze.

This is harder to do when the birds are inside a building, a room, and one where the birds are at a distance that is greater than the four walls of the room would allow. Don’t worry. This short text will explain what they are and why there’s no need for alarm.

First, we need to make an apple pie from scratch.

The world is not a 1, it’s a 3. That’s an important fact to remember. Just because I look to the right and see the rough trunk of a shagbark hickory doesn’t mean there’s a tree at all. It means my eyes are focusing rays of light on a set of receptor and processing organs that come back from the brain as “tree”. If I was blind, the tree wouldn’t exist in the same way. Reality is a product of senses receiving stimulus and cognitive functions interpreting it.

Baysiean statistics is a dangerous field for a non-expert. I’m almost without a doubt conceiving of it wrongly, but nevermind. The fundamental rule of Baysiean statistics is that the prior predicts the posterior. What you, or I, or anyone, comes into a situation with affects the outcome of that situation. If the last time I pushed a button I got a reward, I’m primed by my prior to expect a reward in the (situational) posterior. There are arguments regarding if a prior affects the actual posterior, or just the expected posterior.

Again, nevermind. I have seen a blackbird in the past. My prior has primed reality to present to me a blackbird. This is true even in situations where that wouldn’t make sense, such as if I’m seated in a bathroom. Why though?

Psychological states and impairments can mess with  expectations in a particular situation. People who have seen a mylar balloon flying overhead, who are primed by science fiction and conspiracy theories, will see Venus brightly glowing in the sky and think “alien”. The religious will see miracles in the mundane. There aren’t any teenagers in the Midwestern USA who see the outline of Vishnu in the bark of a tree.

Under standard conditions, where brain chemistry, anatomy, and nature is operating at the mean, no one is seeing black feathers and darting shapes. If stress, anxiety, trauma, or even just a deranged prior exist, the posterior is primed to color outside the lines.

This simple little thing has done more for the terror than I think even the major tranquilizers and sedatives have. To be sure it does not replace those important chemicals. I do find that I’m less likely to flee a situation at a sprint and hide in the wood until the Minotaur is passed. There’s value in that.

Airports used to be a 1. I don’t know how it happened but now airports are a 3. This doesn’t make sense. Drugs are generally at a therapeutic peak at the airport, this is on purpose, and should keep fluttering butterflies off the wheel and see them safe behind the glass walls of a benzodiazepine bell jar. No more. Now airports are full of people who are even less real than what is generally referred to by that term. It’s profoundly upsetting, being surrounded by ghost-like philosophical zombies. Even seeing them physically hurts. It’s nearly as bad as dollar stores.

If everything happens at once temporally, so that they may both be there and not, but the 3, being discreet creates a touchstone, it’s ridiculous to expect me to cope with this in a way that could be decreased normative. I can’t change the order in which things happen. I can’t tell what’s about to happen, that’s been dead for years, a personal failure. I can try and push and prod all to maybe move the needle just a little, enough to get to the other side of security. And security, inscrutable. Signs describing requirements are smudged hieroglyphs. Standards from a federal agency are inconsistent whims. There’s no way to adapt, no way prepare for alligator wrestling, not when it’s a different alligator every time. I hate it there. They broke it.

Something has changed the utilitarian, earnestly navigable airport as a 1 into the worst sort of 3. With enough β-blockers it shouldn’t be possible to get constant high heart rate alerts. It’s a good thing though in theory, proof of life, at least. I think this is all related to a personal problem. Without being able to put a date to it, though it’s been months now, sketchbooks and watercolor blocks and pallets and pens have been abandoning me. That’s maybe inside, it’s my faltering regime of maintenance that’s the root of the problem. That might be good to write about later-for now tides.

Build upon a beach, or among the dunes, and in time be overtaken. Have you ever been to Kittyhawk? There’s a mini gulf there swallowed by dunes. It’s more meaningful than any corps of engineers flooded village. What to do about disappearing cotton paper and fake sable brushes, pages of effort suddenly gone forever? Cheap. Become cheap. Throw out the pretense and use the worst paper. Use a gel rollerball. I can’t pretend to have it figured out yet, they just seem far more forgiving when I suffer a lapse.

Yeah, of course I know, this is just filler, prologue. The next one will be at least a little practical, I promise. For now a poor attempt at presenting things in narrative form. It was described to me once what it was like to take a day off from school in the middle of the week. Car on the road and things on the sidewalks were all surprising. It’s a dissonance. Should be on school, so seeing the everything that still exists is strange. It’s how shallow graves and tarp-wrapped corpses are found; the depositor takes for granted that the out of the way corner of the field, the scrubby tree line, is remote. The solopists oversight.

When it’s dark out the light has to come from the inside! The light that got in, it has to be there, it can’t light the darkness if there isn’t anything inside. So when the light gets dim, when all the stuff the doctor prescribes, when it takes away all the things, everything, that makes the world look different STOP TAKInG THE DRUGS! Not forever, not ever forever, that doesn’t work, when you stop forever, for too long, it gets really hard to find the way back.

So you have to do it right. You have to tell the doctor. She gets mad if you stop without telling her, she isn’t happy about it, but at least when she knows she’s not mad like she’d be if she had to find out later from the emergency doctors, from the police. So STOP! Informed stop. But stop.

Then you can go out at night again. When you stop you get to where it isn’t any safer night or day and you get the fear, the real fear, all the time, so it doesn’t mater night or day. When you feel it, when you know they’re out there, the Minotaurs, GO AND SEE THEM! Show them, watch them pretend they don’t see. Then hit the shutter, Hit the shutter and leave it open, hold it or lock it, or hit it again and again and again. Expose over and over without motion, without concern.

Do it. Do it until even the Minotaurs can’t pretend they don’t see. Scare them. If we can’t scar them yet at least we run them off. This is what happens now. Say it, and push the release. This is what happens now, shutter.