These pieces are made up of several things: Circumstance, friendships, relationships, behaviors, career, luck. These are all the individual pieces of the puzzle.

A lot of people are born without certain pieces of this puzzle. That makes it very hard for them to put the whole puzzle together and create the final picture. That isn’t to say it’s impossible; it just takes a lot more effort and work and tenacity for them to put the puzzle together. Sometimes they can basically complete the puzzle without those pieces and sometimes they are able to forge new pieces on their own.

Occasionally, unfortunately, over the course of your life, you will have a piece of the puzzle stolen from you. It’s really unfair, but it happens. Other times, you lose the piece yourself. When you lose it yourself, at least you know it’s there, hiding under the couch cushion or tucked away under a pile of magazines. Most likely it’s under the fridge. At least at that point you know its somewhere within your reach. It’s much easier to produce knowing that you have seen that piece before and that it must be somewhere in your house than it is to try to build it from scratch.

I think that once the puzzle is put together, it’s easier to maintain. It creates this somewhat stable square that you can mount on the wall and maintain for a very long time. That isn’t to say that at any point a piece will be stolen from you unfairly, because that’s just part of the cruelty of chance, but for the most part you know your puzzle is all together. Sometimes a keystone of your puzzle will be taken and the continuity of the overall picture will disappear, and that is truly unfair, but it is possible to recover from, generally.

Most people will have pieces of their puzzle taken from them or will be born without all of the ingredients. That is unfair and challenging for those people. What is really depressing is knowing that all of your pieces are in your hand, maybe a piece or two is lost between the couch cushions, but that you just can’t find the stamina to get off your ass, find that piece, and even begin to put all of the pieces together. It’s so rare to be dealt such a good hand, and such a shame to let it go to waste.

When we write or reflect on our thoughts and our consciences’ they seem very epic and storylined. We believe that everyone behaves the way they behave and act on impulses based on some lifelong story arc. I believe that is the way that everyone sees themselves and one another. It is probably drawn from some average that naturally can be derived from a series of experiences that all individuals share. We end up drawing caricatures of ourselves and each other.

In these stories and in the way we treat ourselves, we experience a larger story arc that we feel is inescapable. The villain will always be the villain, the hero will always be the hero, I will always be a guy that skirts the middle ground, and so will you.

In this sense, our lives and interactions end up being defined by who we were born to be.

So this post that I read somewhere (that I can’t link unfortunately), it read said that we are merely a consciousness reborn from our most recent few minutes or seconds. That the person we are is drivin by each fleeting distraction and impulse and zoned-out experience. They described that we only truly live, chemically and biologically for a few seconds to a minute and that all the decisions we make are based on the information we are given for those 45 or so seconds and then we are vanished. Replaced by a new, reborn thought.

I want you to deeply consider this concept. It may sound farfetched, but imagine for a moment that each individual thought that you have is handed a deck of experience. Experience from the amount of time since you were born, but diluted. You can handle this deck in any way you want for 45 to 360 seconds. Imagine now that once done reading this post is over, that a new consciousness will come into play. We act and behave and daydream in sequences of 45 – 360 seconds.

We program, we work, we relax, we indulge, we decide, we behave on this increment of time.

We all dream in periods of time similar to this. Fleeting moments of random encounters and strange, revealing personal behaviors. The only thing that separates our dreams from ourselves is a long term memory and the physics of reality.

So I imagine that our individual consciousness is much closer to our dreams than we expect. I don’t mean to downplay personality disorders that we want to escape at all. In fact, I believe this model supports most of them. I imagine that someone with a pre-disposition to addictive behaviors, every three or so minutes, that may have had cigarettes lately, is given a hand of cards that says “Okay, lets not smoke this round.” A few minutes later, a new sense of being is told “Well, we wanted to smoke, but we didn’t, what are you going to do?”

Eventually, we reach a tipping point where each previous consciousness is essentially peer-pressured into acting on the impulses of the prior generation.

It is up to the current controller to decide how to handle the stress of each given situation. Or not. It depends on the nature and nuture, or “deck”, that we are handed.

Cigarettes and other addictions are a very relatable and simple example of pretty much all behaviors, from drug addiction to eating to the way we treat others. I only list it as a behavior that most people can associate with. I encourage everyone to consider their behaviors against this concept.

Anyways, just something I thought about today.

Does anyone here watch the Walking Dead?

If you do, next time you watch an episode and they are doing something to a zombie, imagine the show in a different setting. Specifically when a zombie gets grabbed and is being killed. Imagine the zombie with its make-up off and as just a normal person that is struggling because he / she doesn’t want to die. Replace the grunting and panting with screaming and crying. The super strength as adrenaline.

It quickly becomes a much darker, more emotionally challenging show.

It’s upsetting to think that its been so long that I’ve forgotten the names of the streets. I remember what they look like, or what they used to look like, at least. At any rate, there’s a left hand turn stamped into my memory. It was an ordinary thing–I was just going somewhere, for some reason, in a car; just a left hand turn at a traffic light. But this particular turn coincided with the simultaneous welling of a song and a realization that a certain time in my life was coming to an end. For whatever reason, that was the intersection that occured–that time, place, feeling, and song–and so the memory of this ordinary thing persists.

There are a handful of these that exist for me–songs that carry a vivid association with a certain time and place. Beyond a cold, scientific recollection, they capture the feeling of being there. Like somehow all of the emotional data of the moment can live inside a song, in some compressed form.

A lot of these memories for me are in cars, strangely, at points between the places we more ordinarily ascribe significance. I guess there’s music on and alone time to wonder about the state of things. There was the spot on my commute from that time I was a counselor at a day camp in high school. That was a Guster song and I was thinking about a girl, I think. And another at a rest stop on my way back to Rochester at the beginning of my second year of college, excited to reunite with friends and continue to explore fake adulthood (Sufjan Stevens, that time).

The left hand turn was at the end of my last year in Rochester. People were making plans and finding jobs; entering and leaving the proximity of each others lives. I was grappling with the reality of all that at the time. The song was “My Rights Versus Yours” by The New Pornographers. The street pointed downtown.

There was an album released this year, 2012, by A.C. Newman, (one of the founding members of The New Pornographers) that reminds me, as a whole, of the feeling of that song. And somehow, this totally separate music takes me back to that same place–that same spot on the road. It was instant and powerful upon first listen and I enjoyed the melancholy of thinking back on that time. After a few plays, I found myself reaching out beyond that starting place. Somehow, this new framework stirred other memories; old feelings, places I sometimes wish I could go back to, states of being that had no songs attached to them to keep them alive. I found myself with a head full of these forgotten moments that, like the names of Rochester streets, had faded with time.

For all of this, A.C. Newman’s Shut Down The Streets is one of my favorite albums of 2012. In time, I imagine it will be a reminder of the time I spent on a subway in New York, writing this note, and reflecting on old times. For now, it’s fun to wander in places I thought I’d forgotten.

Just trust me guyz.. I’ve only done this once before.

Holla’

So, I just wanted to drop some quick thoughts about a subject that is personal to me not in an attempt to get attention but more just to outline some thoughts on the topic.

So I have ADD. There is a lot of hate around ADD. I am sort of an ADD hipster. I have had ADD since before it was cool. I honestly believe I have it. Anyone that spends time with me unmediated also is pretty sure I have it. ADD isn’t really like a lot of conditions. You can have a cleft lip and there isn’t a lot of medical uncertainty or judgement around it, due to the way it presents itself.

I am certain I have it. I have all of the symptoms, including the side ones. They aren’t an excuse, but they certainly are a point of frustration for me.

I want to know what the root is. Like any condition, I don’t believe that ADD is a series of symptoms that present themselves. I want to know what the underlying cause is.

Maybe, in an effort to explore ADD, I should present some of my symptoms, and maybe describe some feelings that I feel I have that “normal people” don’t have

Here is a list of things I struggle with

- I have a very hard time reading. Sometimes I do a pretty good job at it, but really for the most part I struggle. I don’t have trouble with the words, and this isn’t always the case, but sometimes my eyes move across the words, even reading them out loud, and my mind is somewhere else. This was a real problem for me in high school. I was in the AP english class but I really never could read any of the books. Maybe i was just lazy, I don’t know, but I truly struggled. My eyes would pass over the words sometimes, but none of it was really being listened to. I think that’s an important part of my analysis this time around: LISTENED TO
- I have an impossible time with names. I like to excuse myself like “I just suck at names” but I don’t think that’s enough. I can remember plenty of things. I am a generally awkward person and get really stressed out in social situations. I think I spend a lot of time focusing on what I am asking and not listening. When I meet someone, I focus on “Hi my name is Colin, and you are?” and by the time I finish delivering that line, all I can think is *phew, you didn’t fuck up that time Colin*. Again, this comes back to the voice.
- I have a hard time with addictions. Not really anything serious, but I find with things like drinking, its so easy for me to convince myself to have “just one more.” I often say “it just got in my head that I wanted more.” But the truth is, is that if I don’t have something in my hand, I am sort of driven crazy. I don’t think its just alcohol. I think it presents itself in a lot of different ways. A lot of ways where I say “Man, I could have MORE of this.” or even in more socially awkward contexts “Man, I SHOULD have more of this.” its something I struggle with that I find many of my fellow juicers don’t. The inability to just say no. Its not even about the inability to say no, but its about NOT being pestered to have more.
- When I am off my medicine, I find my internal filter is turned off. I say jokes that aren’t funny, I am loud, I talk too much, I say things that I know I shouldn’t. This doesn’t support the claim I am about to make in any way, honestly … but I thought in fairness I should bring it up.

So to be a pundit for just one second and pull out feelings that are worthless scientifically, I thought I would just mention one common thread that I find between most of my symptoms. There is always this voice in my head that is just speaking a little bit too loud. What we all experience in our heads is hard to quantify, sort of in the same way that its hard to quantify pain, or depression. We all have a little bit of depression, but we experience it differently. We all feel pain, but we experience it differently. We all have a voice in our heads I am sure, but we experience it differently. I am sure that everyone who ends up reading this will say that they, too, have been bothered by the voice in their head, and I am sure that is true. Truly. Unlike the cleft lip, most of our psychological conditions exist within a spectrum. We can all sympathize with depression, anxiety, whatever. Its just to what extent those symptoms exist.

Without understanding how all of your consciousnesses manifest themselves, I can say for sure that the voice in my head is just a little too loud for me. It’s hard for me to read books, because while I am reading, every now and then he will start talking to me about work, or about video games, or about whatever it is I am interested or anxious about. I can tell you that the voice in my head is way too loud when meeting people for the first time, probably because he is nervous. Sadly, it leads to not hearing people when they introduce themselves or when they are telling me about themselves. Sometimes, when I know I should be listening, he is busy telling me that I should be listening.

Battery is dying. That is all

In an election where whites were fleeing the president, he held on to white working class voters in the rust belt, creating his “Midwestern firewall” of Michigan, Wisconsin, and most of all, Ohio.  The auto bailout had a +23 favorability in Ohio exit polls, with 74 percent of those who viewed the bailout favorably voting for Obama.

7PM

Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, and Georgia will all be immediately called for Romney

Vermont will be immediately called for Obama

Virginia also closes.  We’ll likely be waiting a long time for a call on this one.  If it gets called earlier either way, that’s a sign the polls were wrong.  Keep an eye on Montgomery County.

Score at 7:01 – 44 R, 3 O

7:30PM

West Virginia immediately called for Romney.

North Carolina closes.  This one should be tight as well, so don’t expect an early call.  It should eventually go to Romney.  Keep an eye on New Hanover County.

Ohio, Ohio, Ohio.  This one is big.  Romney will have a hard time winning without it, and if Obama wins it, it’s just about over.  Obama is ahead by close to 4 points in the polls, so he looks poised for victory.  Keep an eye on Stark County.

Score: 49 R, 3 O

8PM

MO, OK, MS, AL, TN immediately called for Romney.

ME, MA, CT, NJ, DE, MD, DC, IL immediately called for Obama.

Pennsylvania closes.  Polls have tightened here, but there’s no reason to believe Obama will lose it.  Romney is making a last ditch effort to move the state, because it’s his only option if he loses Ohio and Virginia.  The networks will be timid on PA, but it should eventually fall into Obama.  Watch Bucks County.

New Hampshire closes.  Polls here show Obama with some momentum, but NH is notorious for being a hard state to poll.  I wouldn’t be surprised by a Romney upset here.  Should be tight either way.  Watch Merrimack County.

Florida closes.  This is a must win for Romney.  He will struggle to find a winning combination without it, so if Obama wins FL, it’s most definitely over.  That being said, the polls here are excruciatingly close; we may be headed for a recount.  Watch Hillsborough County.

Score: 92 R, 75 O

8:30PM

Arkansas immediately called for Romney.

Score: 98 R, 75 O

9PM

AZ, WY, ND, SD, NE, KS, TX, LA immediately called for Romney.

NY, RI immediately called for Obama, and probably NM too.

MN, WI, MI are favored for Obama, but may not be called right away, as the networks will be squeamish, especially since they have been touting these as “swing states.”  On the other hand, if the poll truthers are right, then look to WI.  Obama should win the state by 5, but if this becomes close, and they haven’t called Ohio yet, it might be time to worry.

Colorado closes.  Obama has a very slight edge here, but I don’t expect this state to be called early.  Should be a while.  Watch Arapahoe and Jefferson Counties.

Score: 175 R, 113 O

10PM

MT and UT immediately called for Romney.

Nevada closes.  Obama has opened up a big lead in early voting here, and some estimate that 70% of likely voters have already voted.  I expect Nevada will be called for Obama pretty fast as a result.

Iowa closes.  Obama has a small but robust lead here.  Look to how things are playing out in nearby WI, MN, and OH.  If Obama is doing well with the neighbors, expect Iowa to follow.  Watch Cedar County.

If Obama is having a good night, we may be at the point now where I would be ready to call it for him.  If he has OH, PA, WI, and NV by now, it’s over.

Score: 184 R, 113 O

11PM

Idaho immediately called for Romney.

WA, OR, CA, and HI immediately called for Obama.

Continue to watch OH, FL, VA, IA, CO, NH.  Obama should already have NV, PA, WI, MI, and MN by now.  If not, start to worry.

Score: 253 O, 188 R

1AM

Alaska immediately called for Romney.

By now, hopefully OH, IA, NH have been called for Obama, which would put him over the top.  CO should follow soon after or be in this group as well.

NC should be called for Romney by now.

VA could be in limbo for most of the night.

We may never know who wins Florida, but at this point, it shouldn’t matter.

Score: 290 O, 206 R

Live election coverage starting at 7 tomorrow night on Politico.