provisionally declare writer's bankruptcy on "Memoirs" pt. II

I really did have a lot of interesting delusions back in April that could, with
sufficient writing skill, be turned into a genuinely engaging memoir that
people would want to read despite the lack of objectively important events. But
it's been a while, and I want more general effortposts on page 1 of my blog—not
a rambly Diary entry about stuff that happened the better part of a year
ago. Perhaps the most interesting insights and visions from this period can be
worked into some future work of fiction?

diff --git a/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md b/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
index cc50c0c..3d8b75c 100644 (file)
--- a/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
+++ b/content/2017/memoirs-of-my-recent-madness-part-i-the-unanswerable-words.md
@@ -53,4 +53,4 @@ It would be difficult and tedious—not to mention somewhat emotionally painful
 
 Maybe people get kidnapped and thrown in prisons (mostly prisons-masquerading-as-hospitals if they're of my social class) _all the time_. Maybe they often _die_ in there. Maybe sometimes they escape, perhaps with the help of friends who are willing to pretend to be family members, the authorities being more likely to release someone into the care of family rather than mere friends. (And then no one talks about it, fearing stigma and loss of credibility.) Maybe sometimes the prison authorities mistake someone's identity and manage to successfully use social pressure to brainwash them into accepting that identity—the authorities reasoning that if the paperwork says the patient's name is, say, Michael Jones, that _must_ be his name, and he mustn't be released until he truly accepts this, even if the patient currently insists that his name is Mark Saotome-Westlake (the testimony of crazy people being assigned zero evidential weight, and the possibility of a paperwork mixup being assigned prior probability zero). Maybe people who talk about reincarnation and past lives are actually talking about things that really happened to them before a traumatic event after which they ended up in a new social environment that forcibly brainwashed them into adopting a new identity. (Stockholm syndrome has every reason to be _adaptive_; as a just-so story, imagine a surviving woman on the losing side of tribal warfare during the endless æons of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness doing better for her genes by starting a new life under the bondage of her captors rather than going down with a fight like her brothers.) _Maybe_—and stranger hypotheses than these still.
 
-To be continued.
+To be continued. **Update, 14 January 2018**: ... or maybe I didn't get around to writing up the rest and it's time to declare writer's bankruptcy on part II? It's not that interesting.