Forceps - Accelerates/Decelerates.

My current preoccupation is with speed.

Various things are altering the 'speed' of my brain. Exhilarating stimuli, danger, desire, caffeine, masturbation, exhaustion, food, music, moving image, illness, glandular fever, coding, writing, these are all things that affect the my speed.

I need to keep my activities and my speed compatible. If my brain is running too fast, I can't read, there's a bottleneck somewhere in my processing of language (maybe my eye movements) that means I accumulate energy and can't concentrate. If my brain is too slow, reading makes me sleepy, and I can't concentrate. If I do something too understimulating, too slow in other words, for the my current speed, I'll get anxious and stressed. If I try to do something that requires a higher speed than I am currently, I just can't manage it.

Yesterday someone told me they wanted to kiss me, someone who hadn't told me that before. At the same moment—it was a digital-textual communication—I was just coming back from jumping the fence at the Performance Centre VIP Opening to avoid security (turns out they'd all gone to dinner anyway). At that moment, I had the right speed to just let that go through me (the analogy that strikes me is being at a high enough speed in a vehicle to go up a gear without the jolt). But nonetheless, the rush was quite intense.

I had hoped that taking some caffeine would step up this morning's sleepy anxiety into a productive euphoria. Unfortunately, and oddly, I feel absolutely no difference. Next route is music and maybe some writing. I tried reading already but I was too fast for it, and then watching a video—usually slowing me down—which made little lasting difference.

Is this a masculine phenomenon? I realised yesterday my utter terror in the face of women. They have the power to make me more vulnerable than I could ever let anyone make me. Perhaps all of my romantic relationships are a process of me regaining that control over myself. Perhaps that is the masculine approach to relationships, to try to resolve this sudden loss of control. Perhaps rape comes from that direction too (loss of control over sexual desire, resulting in a need to resolve this through control over the object (necessarily objectified, for the act of rape) which took said control away from him.)

I suspect men to be the more vulnerable gender, and possibly the more vulnerable sex.

[I have heard men on a few occasions lamenting their loss of productivity and ability to work due to having their minds disrupted by women.]

Which is why I experience women's emotional masochism, desire to have control taken from them, to depend on me, as the most insidious betrayal. It fuels my madness, my paranoia, my overload, my heartbreak.