On the gentrification of my psychic neighborhood:

The Miriam-Webster definition of gentrification is "the process of renewal and rebuilding accompanying the influx of middle-class or affluent people into deteriorating areas that often displaces poorer residents."

Is it appropriate to describe the slow-motion commercial colonization of the mind, regardless of class, as gentrification?

Goals
Self Images

goals and self images (and desired self images) being replaced for you with new ones, shinier ones, better ones. and often these ideas and ideals get replaced while you're still inside them, like having your house replaced with a shiny new version while you're asleep and you go outside and look at it and it looks all different. and then the furniture, and the clothes. but the furniture isn't comfortable and the clothes don't fit (already it's awkward) so you tear them off and try and find your old clothes, but you can't right away, so you're naked, which totally breaks the rules of the psychic neighborhood, if anybody sees you, but you can usually hide behind other thoughts till you find those old clothes, but now they're looking a bit scruffier and when you're out in your psychic neighborhood you start to get disapproving glances from your neighbors, and insist on wearing those old rags long enough or letting your yard go and pretty soon you'll find there are parts of your new gentrified psychic neighborhood you're not allowed to go to anymore, or at least made to feel real uncomfortable in. which is how you find yourself pushed out of your own psychic neighborhood - everyone else's thoughts have been upgraded, and if you can't or aren't interested in keeping up you get pushed out of that reality, and find yourself in a more low-rent psychic neighborhood, which now looks rather crappy relative to the one you just got run out of.

The Clever Inc. trucks were in my neighborhood this morning, hooking everybody up with networking and active wear. Crossfit teams and Grooming Brigades were going door to door, and Dream Engineers were taking measurements and deciding what could stay and what had to go.

"Are you happy with your life?"

"Where do you see yourself in four years?"

"Don't you want to be happy?"

I escaped out the back alley and took the bus to school.

Sapir/Whorf is getting the reality shaft. Guess we weren't paying our bill. We've got water, and electric, but people walk right by and don't see us. We don't register because we are no longer on the Reality Register. The cost was too high.

But @Psychic Bicycle Joe still knows where to find us. He comes in and I make him a mocha, and I've gotten real good at making the psyhigh logo with the foam. I asked him if it was too uncool to go to the Valentine's Heart Throb Dance with me and he said no, not too uncool if he could hang with me. :)