Strokes

It's pouring down the rain here, keeping me inside this morning.

Strokes, (not the vascular kind), things that make us feel good, wanted, interesting, valued. Sometimes they're just to take our mind off of other things.  Everybody wants some, I want some too.

People get theirs in different ways.  Some healthy, some not so much.  Some of us use myriad sources, good ones at this time of day, bad ones at another.  Some people build, others tear down.  It's not hard to slip from one to the other. Some might say that's human nature.  Maybe.  I'm thinking there are other forces at work.

I have a nephew who gets his strokes at the gaming tables.  It must feel really good to win.  He'll sacrifice just about anything to play.  I understand the feeling, but not the means to his end.  Never been a game kind of a guy.  I suppose if I were confined to a closet, and the only entertainment was a deck of cards or a monopoly board.  Well, then maybe.....but there is always my sweet imagination to take me elsewhere.

I have encountered persons who have an obsessive need to control.  One that added humiliation of those she was controlling to her palette.  Like nurse Ratched in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.'  It was her in reality now that I think about it.  Often, I don't think they can see it themselves.  That kind I really cannot understand.  Perhaps it's to assuage the feeling of helplessness.  The world is a random and capricious place.  "If I can just create some order over here, chaos will cease to exist!"

I'm gonna build today and try real hard not to be an ass.