Pscyhologic Blankets I Have Known

Throughout the course of my dramatically problematic life I have encountered an abundance of interesting things that soothe me when times seem the most dire or in the aftermath of yet another life destroying event.

Sometimes I found solace in books, tomes of great wisdom from people long dead that experienced their own shares of real and imagined trouble. Sometimes from music, people who cry out with lyrics and voices that stab at the throat of my issues or wrap me in their sullen tones and lull me to a place inside where its safe to be numb.

Repetition of imagery and smells are the next most powerful drugs that have sustained me. Vanilla, the scent of fog used in a high school play in 1994, still fills me with fond memories of times when I wore a compilation of black clothes and did my damndest not be seen during scene changes.

The individual components of a psychological blanket don't seem to hold up under close logical scrutiny. The threads part, separate, unwind and blow to the wind as they are observed. But solace is not a product of logic. It is not held to the whims of the thinking mind, it holds up in the primitive portion of the emotions and soul.

There, in the center of any given person, is a little factory that takes in stimulus data and converts it into simple components of like and dislike. And once something has been marked it rarely changes.

There is no great conclusion to be drawn from this process, no single defining event that takes a sight or sound and produces comfort. It is a gestalt of a lifetime of tiny iterations that creates an effect that ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on what insect is flapping what where.

But in the end everyone has a happy place, and the doors to that place are labeled so that no one else can enter in quite the same way.