A long time ago, I forget how this came up, but Joe said that he thought I wasn’t ll that grateful for the help he and Julian give me.

And I replied, “But I thank you guys! I thank you all the time!”

Which is true. I unfailingly thank them for every little thing they do for me. It’s very important to me. Politeness, manners, and consideration are all things about which I am meticulously^[1] correct, and not because I have some abstract sense of propriety or a love of “the rules) (ick) but because that’s what I believe to be right and I hold myself to an extremely high standard of behaviour as a reflection of said beliefs.

This, according to some, makes me manipulative.

And by “some” I mostly mean my brother Dave. Many times we had this same extremely dead end conversation :

Dave : No, you see, you manipulate people by being so nice.
Me : I’m just being the best person I can be!
Dave : Yeah, that’s how you do it!
Me : So what, I should start being rude and crappy instead?
Dave : Well no…

And… scene. Conversation has crashed. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, kill process, reboot.

It’s true that I behave so well partly in hopes of people being nice to me too. That kind of mutuality is something I seek with a missionary zeal.

And the roots of it all is that brutally depressing image of myself as a fox trying to be the best fox I can possibly be in hopes of being let back into the house.

Sometimes I can’t believe I wrote all that. It’s so sad. But it was something in me that had to come out, and as much as I cried when writing it, I felt a lot better afterwards.

And it represents a tragic truth of my life.

As patient readers know, I was a Christmas puppy, Before I was school age, I got loads and loads of love and attention. I was often the center of attention as a cute n’ precocious child who effortlessly entertained and bemused adults. And I was a happy little guy in the warm and comfortable world of my babysitter Betty’s care in the morning and afternoon and time with the family at night.

But then I got raped. And then I got bullied. And somewhere along the way, people got sick of me and went away, leaving me all alone in a world suddenly gone not just cold and lonely but savage and cruel as well.

And on some very, very deep level, far below conscious reason, I concluded that I had done something wrong and that if I was very, very good, I could get the attention back.

Problem was that my family did not provide any instruction on how to be good in their eyes. And even if they had, I doubt it would have made a difference. They had gotten sick of me, and left me tied up in the back yard, forgotten.

And all I know was that it was good, and then it was bad, and I didn’t know why, but it must have been something I’d done.

No wonder the terrible damage done to me by the rape led me to conclude, much later in life, that I was a horrible disgusting awful toxic thing that was the quintessence of repulsiveness and lowliness and completely impossible to respect.

Yes, that’s really how I used to view myself. I still feel that way sometimes, the difference is, I don’t believe it.

Not everything that feels true is true, especially if you have a mood disorder.

Anyhow, to drag myself back to the point like a bag of wet cement, the idea that I manipulate people by behaving well is a real mindfuck and I more or less just reject it out of hand because it’s a line of thought that goes nowhere fast.

I’ll just keep on being my dear sweet lovable self.

After all, it’s all I can be.

More after the break.

---

Making being me easier

I know that I still have enormous amounts of inner friction.

Hence my “driving with the parking brake on” analogy. I know that there is a lot of inner turmoil roiling and writhing inside me. Parts of me are locked in conflict with each other so that my energies act against themselves.

And maybe that’s not an accident. Maybe that’s just how the sick part of me likes it.

After all, that way I can be “in control”. No pesky drives or impulses making me want to do new and unknown things that will take me God knows where. Everything safely ground to a halt.

I can gun the engine all I like, I still ain’t going anywhere.

And it all devolves back to a lack of faith. Deep down, my deeper self refuses to believe that following my drives and desires can be “safe”.

Only that which can be fully understood and predicted is “safe”. I have to know where the road leads before I set foot on it. I have to completely comprehend things.

And that’s just not possible with most things.

What I am missing is that vital faith in being okay no matter what happens. Faith in my ability to handle things, even very unexpected things, and survive them and be fine after them, maybe even profit from them.

Faith that it is, therefore, safe for me to explore and maybe find my niche.

I’ve been locked inside myself for so long, and as a consequence, I have never gained any of the life experience everyone needs in order to mature and grow and become strong enough to handle the world.

And now I’m fifty one and still terrified of the world and still stuck frozen in time and locked in the conundrum of being too scared to go get the life experience that is the only way to become less scared.

Something’s got to give. There has got to be a way to break this deadlock and get myself moving for once in my god damned life.

This ride sucks. I want off.

Next month of meds will contain a further reduction in my Paxil dose. From 30 mg two times a week to 30 mg three times a week.

We’ll see how that goes. I hope I can unfreeze my emotions enough to find my natural vibe and stop feeling so god damned frozen inside.

This year, Spring is coming for real.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And I get it.

Except not really.

I have lived for a very long time trying to assert a level of supposed “self-control” that is quite clearly insane.

In the name of this farcical notion of “self-control” I have appointed a very narrow minded and emotionally constipated “committee” in my head that has to be looped in on literally every kind of decision and who is so rectally puckered that it rejects almost every impulse except for a very short list of “safe” options.

Well there’s a big difference between something being normal and something being safe. The fact that an option does not spark anxiety in me is hardly a recommendation and it sure as hell doesn’t mean said option isn’t bad for me in the extreme.

Right now, in my life, I am trying to pry open that clenched aperture and let more sunlight and fresh air into my soul, even if that means being, in the extremely narrow view of that inner committee, “out of control”.

Their idea of control is bullshit anyhow. If I was truly in control of myself, I’d be able to do whatever I wanted to do without having to overcome all this inner resistance. I’d feel free to pursue whatever path strikes my fancy instead of living my life as if video games and blogging are literally my only options.

Like I have as little control over my life as if I was on a very long Disneyland ride.

The real dirty little secret of it all is that I have been in control all this time. The reins are in my hands whether I use them or not. I’m as free as anyone else to pursue my own best interests. Or even just try to have a good time.

There’s lots of fun things to do that aren’t video games. I don’t necessarily have to use video games as my one and only way to absorb all my free time in order to avoid the existential black hole that is trying to figure out what to do with myself.

There has to be a way for me to develop the kind of “evil Kirk” killer instinct that would let me make decisions on my own behalf. I can’t spend my last remaining years sitting at the mother of all crossroads unable to make a move because I don’t know which is the “right” way to go and I am too scared of unspecified terrible consequences of making the “wrong” choice that I don’t dare move at all.

I wonder if anyone out there has exercises for one’s id.

Because mine’s a puny lil thing.

And that means my access to the primary energy of my being is weak and tenuous and that leaves me timid and fearful and easily spooked.

I’m still trying to wake up. To resurrect myself. A great deal of me has been completely dead and/or dormant for so long that sending all my spare energies down into the deepest parts of my mind in order to warm myself up and bring my soul fully online feels like pissing into a well sometimes, but I keep at it nonetheless.

It’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

Still, I know that my progress will continue to be glacial in pace unless something bigger than myself, something I can’t even conceive of, breaks through all my barriers, wrecks the fuck out of the “committee”, and forces me to change.

I’ve never had something more powerful than myself to look up to, be protected by, have the support of, and in general not be so freaking alone in the world.

From an early age, my incredible intellect made me more powerful than all of the adults around me. It’s like I was the kid who puts people in the cornfield in the Twilight Zone.

And that sucks because it means I was almost impossible to parent. So much of how we raise kids relies on the adult being smarter and wiser than the child, and my creepy little self upended that equation.

How do you raise a kid who’s smarter than you?

Well loving me a lot would have helped.

More after the break.

---

On second thought

On second thought, “impossible to parent” is a vast overstatement.

Granted, my sky high IQ made me somewhat of a handful. I could not easily be dominated by anyone. That approach to parenting would not have suited me.

And I know that cost me something. One kid’s domination is another kid’s safety blanket, after all. Knowing, deep down, that there is someone smarter and stronger and wiser watching over you must give kids a well grounded, secure feeling.

On the other hand, I was a ball of neurosis and anxiety. Afraid of the world because, deep down, I knew there was nobody looking out for me and nobody to pick me up if I feel and nobody to even give a damn what happened to me most of the time.

To be fair, they cared when they remembered to do so. Which wasn’t often.

Dragging myself bodily back to the point, I couldn’t be dominated but then again that was completely unnecessary with me. I was a naturally cooperative and eager to please and highly adaptable kid. I tended to obey adults not out of fear but out of a combination of wanting to help and/or participate and my natural desire to show off and get praise.

What? I’m no angel.

But what I really needed was emotional, not intellectual. That’s why my babysitter Betty could handle me despite having more of a street smarts kind of intellect.

I needed someone to help me feel grounded and oriented and safe. And that would only have taken love. Love I could feel. Love I could count on. Love that could reach me.

I wasn’t born with all this ice around my heart. The right person could have given me the emotional anchor I now lack. The right person could have made all the difference.

That person should have been my mother.

But she was tired.

And I was uninvited.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

In a word, ugh.

Suffering from some temporal dislocation at the moment. I took a nap and for some reason, when I woke up I was convinced it was around 1:30 pm, and so when I finally managed to get up and get my butt in front of the computer only to find it was in fact a hair past 3:30 pm, I felt like I’d just had two hours of time and life snatched away.

And that feels bad. Real bad.

I will adjust, of course. The regular flow of events will help me get back in sync with the rhythms of the day and by this time tomorrow I will have forgotten all about it.

These are the strange little hazards and issues that my fractured psyche throws my way when fate is getting bored with me and wants to stir shit up.

So those are the depths I’m arising from : the depths of a temporal fugue and its accompanying sense of loss and confusion.

Meanwhile, my heater arrived early this morning. Ah, the miracles of the modern age, where I can order something Saturday afternoon and have it show up right on my doorstep Sunday morning.

I haven’t plugged it in and tried it out yet though because the place I had planned to put it on my bedside table turns out to be absolutely filthy and I am kind of afraid that if I put the heater there right now, the random gunk caked on there will burst into flames.

But I will probably end up plugging it in tonight anyhow, because tonight I will be sitting here in front of Mister Computer after the sun goes down and that is, of course, when it gets seriously fucking cold in my lonely little spot.

Not that it’s a tropical paradise right now, either. Le sigh.

Maybe I will check the thing out soon.

It’s basically a fan with a heating element in it. Which means that someone finally invented the “hair dryer” style heater that I’ve always wondered about.

Hopefully it will work and solve my lil freezing my butt off problem. I must admit that I am having second thoughts. Certainly, as with all space heaters, I am sure I’m going to have to fiddle with its exact placement near me to make sure I neither freeze nor fry.

Still stuck in my video game. I am going to have to revisit every single site listed as having a Blood/Star Stone and make absolutely sure there’s nothing there.

I did make a little progress though. As I have been rechecking old sites I came across an Inert Stone I had not picked up for some reason, and so I now have 11 of the 12 stones that I need to proceed with the god damned game.

At least I hope I only need 12. The internet is unclear on that. I might need as many as 15, and that would be a biiiiiitch.

My last resort will be to go to every single character in the frigging game and initiate trade with them in case I sold an Inert Stone to them.

If that doesn’t work then my playthrough is officially completely borked because it’s pretty unlikely that I will find another one just lying around somewhere.

Oh, one cute little joke : there’s a skeleton buccaneer you fight early in the game

And his name is “Pontius Pirate”. LOL.

I can only assume that after I defeated him, he washed his hands of me.

More after the break.

---

Nostalgia is a lie

Or at least, that’s how I used to think.

And like most of the ideas with which I have poisoned myself over the years, it is irrefutably true. Nostalgia makes people remember things as being better (and simpler) than they actually were. It introduces an error into our recollections. Factually speaking, nostalgia is a lie.

But there is so much more to life than mere factual accuracy.

For one thing, there is what is emotionally healthy for us to believe. I have wasted a lot of my life and my own mental health pretending that my mental diet didn’t matter. That I could drive towards the truth at any cost no matter what and if that hurt, tough. It was worth it to know the Truth(tm).

After all, even if it hurts, even if in fact it’s outright soul poison, you’re still always better off with the hard truth than with a comforting lie, right?

Um, but why? How could I even know that? Maybe there are some truths you are genuinely better off not knowing or at least not believing. Maybe some lies and illusions are way, way better for you than the harsh and toxic truth.

Maybe we all need to maintain a certain amount of leeway for self-delusion to act as a kind of shock absorbers of the soul instead of insisting that we have to endure every god damned bump and rock and axle-wrecking patch of black ice on the road unfiltered in pursuit of some abstract notion of intellectual ruggedness.

I hope I can change my ways. I’m so used to lunging for the truth no matter what like an over-aggressive attack dog that there is some doubt. And of course it is logically impossible for any mind to willingly and consciously embrace untruth.

But there’s wiggle room, if you’re willing to dig for it. There is Truth ™ and then there is the assigning of meaning to that Truth ™, and that’s where that leeway can fit in.

And a whole lot of depression happens on that interpretive level. The actual truth might be, “I just broke something”, but the conclusion, “therefore I suck and am terrible and shouldn’t even be alive” is one hundred percent optional.

That has absolutely nothing to do with fact and all the people who know me would vehemently disagree with that self-assessment and I know for a fact that I am crazy and that therefore my interpretations are suspect at best, so why not bow to the opinion of everybody who is not me, remember that absolutely everyone makes mistakes, and let myself off the fucking hook?

So, so what if nostalgia is a lie? Maybe I could use some soft warm lies in my life.

It’s not like the Truth ™ has made me fucking happy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

l

The Rubicon has been crossed!

The wheel of fortune is spinning!

THE VERY FATE OF THE WORLD HANGS IN THE BALANCE!

In other words, I finally ordered a god damned space heater.

A desk model, of course. Not only was that like $20 cheaper than the big fancy one I was contemplating, but I realized that I don’t need to heat a whole room.

I just need to heat a whole me.

And even then, not all the time. And I like that I will be able to point it where it is needed the most, which is my poor numb hands.

Especially the right one. It’s cold all the god damned time.

Like I said before, the circulation in that hand must be truly terrible for it to always feel so cold. I am constantly pausing what I am doing to rub it, or to put my hands under my pants and atop my big fat belly.

Or parts south, but that tends to distract me from what I’m doing.

My video game problem persists. My other character did not have the Inert Stones I need to proceed in the game. I checked some other vendors that I had forgotten before, and they didn’t have them either.

I am tempted to despair and just start playing something else. Or God forbid, start another playthrough and hope I don’t get glitched out.

Assuming it is a glitch. I might still be missing something, and knowing me, it will turn out to be something so gobsmackingly obvious that I will clap my hand onto my forehead and shout, “D’oh!”.

Fine by me if it that’s what it takes to solve the damned problem.

I can’t even keep myself busy doing side-quests because all the quests left on my quest list are either parts of the main quest I can’t access yet or things I haven’t the slightest idea how to pursue and the instructions I find online make no sense.

I’ve realized recently that I have never been very good at following instructions. Doing so requires slow, careful, detail oriented reading that relies on a lot of hidden assumptions and “common sense” interpretations.

And I am good at precisely none of that.

Instead, I try to inhale the information like I normally do, miss important steps, fail to actually assemble a series of logical, methodical steps, rush into action, and end up completely and totally lost.

And then I generally need someone else to come rescue me in one way or another.

It’s a damned good thing I’m cute.

I think this is why I get lost so easily too. I think I know the exact route I should be taking but somehow there is always things I didn’t think of or hidden ambiguities and I end up utterly lost in suburbia somewhere.

Thank God I’ve never been even remotely outdoorsy. At least if I get lost in the ‘burbs I can knock on a random door and ask for help.

Which is when my real skill comes to the fore : being appealingly pathetic.

I don’t know why I lack “common sense”, that mysterious subconscious body of understanding that fills in the very blanks I stumble over.

I feel like my general nervous temperament must play a big part. If I were calmer and more confident, I would stay out of the adrenal state and keep my big brain fully engaged and not get so flustered.

Maybe all us geniuses (genii) are high strung and mentally fragile.

I mean, check out Walter Bishop in this scene :

Maybe all us giant sized brainiac types need reality assistance.

More after the break.

---

Walter and Me

The thing that always made me burn with jealousy for Walter from Fringe is that someone noticed and appreciated his genius.

He was marked as a prodigy from a very early age and therefore the school system and all the other adults in his life invested heavily in him.

So he got a private school education, gifted classes. independent study privileges, and everything else that his young mind needed to grow and blossom into the world famous mega-scientist he became as an adult.

And most importantly, he got encouragement. He got praise. He got acknowledged as someone extraordinary and told in no uncertain terms that he had what it took to be someone truly important one day. He got recognition.

Eventually he went insane and spent decades in the looney bin, but that’s not important to my bitter little rant here.

But me, I didn’t get jack shit. I got to be bored out of my gourd, ignored, and deplored. Nobody felt like doing anything to make sure I was challenged or to at least point me towards challenging myself, and so I sleep-walked through school getting straight A’s without extremely little effort and nobody noticing or caring.

It’s not like I made a secret of how easy it all was for me.

A big part of the problem was that I didn’t stick up for myself. All I knew how to do was be a good boy and do what the adults told me to do. I rebelled against my babysitter exactly once as an experiment and never again. My parents were reasonable (if neglectful) and never gave me anything to rebel against.

So the idea of pitching a fit till I got what I wanted never occurred to me, and I wish it had. I know that I could have made my teachers’ lives a living hell if I wanted to, and maybe then I would have gotten some positive attention.

Or at least some respect.

It’s not like being a good boy got me anything but boredom and bullying.

I’m not saying that if they had invested in me instead of just going, “Well, there’s one I don’t have to bother with because they don’t need my help” and forgetting about me, I would be a super scientist right now.

But I sure as fuck wouldn’t be near the bottom of the totem pole either.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Apparently, a town called Wallingford has a very funny sign.

And I really enjoy what a good job someone or other is doing coming up with excellent one-liners that fit in that number of characters.

Over near our beloved Denny’s, there’s an Accent Inn which had a few good ones but whoever did their sign must have quit because there hasn’t been a new one in months.

Anyhow, I thought I would share a few of my faves from the Wallingford sign here.

Just call me your comedy curator. And this way you don’t have to listen to the music from the video, which starts out bad and then keeps getting worse.

“They’re not going to make yardsticks any longer.”

A gem of brevity and wordplay. This seems like the sort of joke a high school English teacher would love. She’d put it on the blackboard before class and then wait to see if any of her students are smart enough to get it.

They’re not going to make them any shorter, either.

“Dear naps : I’m sorry I was a jerk to you as a kid. ”

This one is in a more observational vein.

I don’t remember ever being told to nap by my babysitter Betty. It’s not something I can imagine her doing. She was way too cool for that.

I do remember napping, though. Toddlers can’t stay awake all day, after all. So I would take a nap in the afternoon.

But if I was sleeping while Sesame Street was on, call a doctor.

“I’m still hot. It just comes in flashes now. ”

One for the older ladies.

I love one older lady I saw on TV who calls them “power surges”.

Ya know, I would not be entirely surprised if, despite my definitely being male and thus incapable of menopause, I started having hot flashes one day.

I have a lot of feminine traits. I’m very maternal. Loving, caring, doting. I would make an amazingly good parent to some lucky kid(s).

I’ve even got tits.

Pretty sure they don’t “work”, though.

“All those who believe in psychokinesis, raise my hand. ”

Very funny, but it could be better. For one thing, you need to say “telekinesis” instead as it’s the more well known term.

And there’s a logic issue, because you can’t raise someone’s hand just from believing telekinesis is real. You need to actually have it.

So it would be better as, “If anyone in the audience is telekinetic, raise my hand. ”

Eh. Still needs work.

“I’m friends with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y. ”

LOL, very clever. Better with the addition of a single word :

“I’m ONLY friends with 25 letters of the alphabet. I don’t know Y. ”

But they had to use a version that would fit on the sign.

“Dogs can’t operate MRI scanners but cats can.”

That one includes both animals AND science, two of my favorite things!

I’m pretty sure I was born a furry. Even as a tiny child, I loved animals. I would light up any time an animal was on the TV screen. I loved meeting dogs, even though I was a little bit scared of them.

And of course I was surrounded by cats and I loved them all. When I was feeling lonely, there was always a nice warm kittycat nearby for pets n’ purrs.

I miss have fuzzy critters in my life. We can’t have any because Joe’s allergic.

“Ever stop to think and forget to start again?”

Boy have I ever. Being the thoughtful, dreamy type, I couldn’t possibly count the number of times I have accidentally got lost in thought when I really should be doing something important, like looking both ways before crossing the street.

That’s enough of this for now.

More after the break.

---

No more jokes

Eh, I’m tired of that now, and the quality really drops off at that point anyhow.

Grappling with the cold

God no, I’m even sicker of talking about that.

Need to buy heater, Amazon password, desk heater? etc.

My video game issue

Got stuck in my video game, Divinity : Original Sin Enhanced Edition, for a while.

I won’t bother with the details. Just know that I made it to somewhere near the end of the game (I think) when suddenly I needed a whole bunch of things things called Blood Stones or Star Stones.

This was a bummer because I had no idea the damned things were that important.

So I looked up where you find them all and I went through every single location and what the hell, turns out I had already found them all.

Well fuck, I thought, now what?

I had to face the possibility that a game bug was going to completely stop me from progressing in the game, which would be a serious bitch given that I have already played the damned thing for 156 hours.

Luckily, I decided to look up how to get past that one thing again, and it said that I could also use Inert Stones, which are what Blood/Star Stones become when used up.

Oh! Those I got.

But not enough of them. And I know I sold some at one point, which I would not have done had I known how god damned important they were.

So I went around to all the vendors I could think of and bought back the ones I could find, but that only got me to 10 and I need at least 12.

So my last hope is that a character I haven’t used for a while has a few.

I hope I didn’t sell them to some random character I met. I would hate to have to go check the inventory of every damned character in the game.

The whole thing has been emotionally draining. I will quite honestly be glad to finish the god damned thing, or at least find out there’s another big map to explore.

And that’s what has been stressing me out lately. The End.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve gotten my refund for last night’s curried lamb fiasco.

Not a full refund, sadly, because I did end up eating the garlic naan I ordered (and it was quite good) and I am obviously not going to get my tip back.

I mean, can you imagine?

And my driver did their job perfectly well. They played no part in the culinary nightmare that was my burned and bone fragment filled Indian food experience.

So I just got the actual ~$16 for the curry back.

Nevertheless, I am going to order in again tonight so I can get something legal to feed to human beings. It will cost more than the refund, obviously, and that means it will eat more into my money on my card, but oh well.

I feel a spiritual need to compensate for having a lamb curry try to kill me.

Obviously, I won’t ever be ordering from Tandoori Oven again. I mean Jesus fucking CHRIST. Actual fucking BONES.

Clearly I’m still not over it.

Well can you blame me?

I have, of course, also given Tandoori Oven a one star review on DoorDash, along with the curt and accurate assessment, “My lamb curry was burned and had bone fragments in it. ” If they don’t like that, tough.

I mean, how the hell does that even happen? The curry getting burned, I understand. Someone clearly did not stir it enough. The need for stirring things like curries, stews, chili, and so forth so they don’t burn on the bottom is just one of the little annoyances of the world of cooking.

But BONE FRAGMENTS? It seriously looked like someone threw the entire lamb in there. I am pretty sure I could have fitted those fragments together and gotten at least half of a rack of lamb out of it.

And they had straight, clean edges, so they had clearly been machine cut. By some truly horrifying piece of slaughterhouse equipment, no doubt.

Coming this Halloween… see what happens when…MARY HAS A LITTLE LAMB! (SFX: chainsaw starting up)

Hmmm. Could the problem have occurred at the slaughterhouse meat packing plant? Not entirely. Even if they fucked up, someone at Tandoori Oven should have noticed the odd clicking sounds the bone fragments made as they bumped into each other.

I guess that kind of thing can happen when nobody is stirring the stuff.

In my heart of hearts, I think I deserve more than a refund. I think I should be compensated for my emotional distress. And there is the question of punitive damages as well. Surely someone at Tandoori Kitchen needs to be punished over this.

Because I was raised by television, that immediately makes me think of some ne’er do well last son of the family that owns the place getting screamed at by his long suffering and thoroughly exasperated father.

“All I asked you to do is stir the curry! Just stir! How can you fuck up stirring? Oh, and did I forget to tell you to make sure there are no HUGE PIECES OF BONE in there before you serve it to a customer? Must have slipped my mind!”

And all the while the poor guy is in the traditional “getting yelled at by your parents” posture. Head lowered, staring at the floor, shrinking back a little.

I bet that’s one of those things that’s universal. You could do a supercut of parents from all over the world and from all walks of life lecturing their kids and it would look exactly the same whether you’re in Jersey or Timbuktu.

I guess I am done now. Hopefully getting a nice meal tonight will help me to put an end to this whole sordid affair.

But seriously. BIG PIECES OF BONE.

Un fucking believable.

More after the break.

---

The other reason I feel grumpy

I’m really fucking cold right now, but that’s nothing new. Really got to pull the trigger on getting that space heater.

Or thermal tape. Or a lot of sweaters.

This can’t be good for me, living in an icebox. It’s especially bad once the sun goes down, like right now, naturally enough.

I’m not a well man and these chills and things must be stressing my system.

The root cause of the continuing problem is my chronic indecision, though. I could have had a space heater a week or more ago but I keep dithering about it.

Last time I was on Amazon.ca, I noticed that they had cute little desk model space heaters, and that might work for me.

My father had one of those for his office, and it worked extremely well.

Any one I get would not be nearly as fancy, but I like the idea of having the heat source be close enough that I could just point it at myself like a desk fan.

Kind of a desk fan in reverse, really. At least in terms of function.

I could even put it where my desk fan in right now. Obviously I’m not going to need the damn thing for a while so I could just stick in the closet and put its warmer cousin there.

My main worry would be frying or overheating some of my expensive computer stuff, of course. Heat and computers do not mix well.

So I might have to rearrange things in my room a bit to make sure the heat points at me and not the computer or the monitor.

Heck, that CPAP machine of mine has been sitting there on my bedside table gathering dust for more than a decade, I could stick IT in the closet instead and the desk heater could then be pointed directly at me.

Wheels within wheels.

Oh that’s right, I tried to pull the trigger on the space heater but it wanted my Amazon.ca password and I didn’t remember it so I went to look it up in my Google Keep.

And it’s not there god damn it!

I am positive I put it in with all my other passwords. And now it’s gone. So I am going to have to go through the whole “lost your password?” thing even though I am not the one who lost it!

Google Keep, my butt!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today was Therapy…. Wednesday.

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

Apparently at some point Doc Costin told me that my appointment had been moved from one o’clock this Friday to noon today.

I have no recollection of this but given my occasionally spotty active memory I am willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

It was originally moved to Friday from the usual Thursday because he has a medical appointment on Thursday.

Anyhow, I had just finished up in the bathroom when the phone rang and it was Therapy with Doctor Costin time.

Oh well, it’s not like I was doing anything important.

I’m actually quite proud of how good I have gotten at just dropping whatever I am doing to do therapy when things like this happen.

Pretty good for someone who dislikes surprises as much as I do.

We talked about this n’ that, as usual. The Great Betrayal when my parents took my brother Dave and I out of university came up. Apparently he had forgotten that I had already told him how I went along with the whole thing willingly because I was just that eager to please my parents.

My mother even said, “We’re only going to do this if you agree to it” or something along those lines. I could have just said no and kept my life intact and on course.

But nope. For my whole life, a big part of my role in the family was to be okay with everything. To go where I’m told and stay where I’m put. To be a total doormat who always did whatever was asked and was always ready to sacrifice his own best interests so someone else could get their needs met.

Honestly, most of the time I didn’t even know what my needs were.

That led to me telling Doctor Costin all about how I never stood up for myself as a child at all. I certainly never advocated for myself. I was too busy trying to survive on the tiny little scraps of attention I got from my family.

I already always felt like I was barely being tolerated and that if I became even slightly more of a hassle to look after, they’d just give up and abandon me.

But that was never going to happen. Because they’d already abandoned me.

My fault for being a surprise, I guess.

No wonder my self esteem has historically been so terrible.

I also spoke with Doc Costin about my growing confidence and ability to actually appreciate my own extraordinary gifts and let that be reflected in my self-worth.

Which led to my mentioning how I have known I was extraordinarily gifted since I was three years old, or at least since my first days in school, and how for some reason it never made me feel any better about myself.

Partly that’s because I took it for granted. Like I have said before, it’s hard to value something that comes so easily to you.

But mostly it’s because I never got any positive reinforcement from it. Nobody ever told me, “Hey wow, you are amazing, you’re going to go far!”.

Well, except for Mrs. Moase who ran the corner store.

But other than her, nobody, Not my family, not my teachers, not the school administrators, nobody. There I was, an incredible jewel of a student, and nobody encouraged me at all.

If anything, it just annoyed my teachers and left me bored as hell and completely unchallenged in class.

Heck, I didn’t even get a nod at VFS and I was by far the best writer there.

Maybe I am just too god damned shy and humble.

If I had to do VFS all over again, I would go in there with a massively cocky attitude and see how that works out for me.

I mean, what the fuck. Why the hell not?

It pays to advertise.

More after the break.

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I am bewildered

So tonight, I ordered some lamb curry from a place called Tandoori Oven.

When it arrived, it was not what I expected.

For one thing it was burned. Definitely burned. I mean, check this out :

The too-dark color was the first thing I noticed when I unwrapped it. But I thought maybe that’s just what the curry from this place looks like.

But then I noticed an odd and out of place aroma. Then I tasted the curry and that confirmed what my nose had told me.

It smelled – and taste – like burned cinnamon rolls.

Not what I was looking for. I was definitely going to complain via DoorDash but it was still edible so I wasn’t that pissed off yet.

So I go to dig in and see something white and vaguely tubular sticking out of my curry.

I take it out and ITS A PIECE OF FUCKING BONE.

And then I found two more.

I mean, check this shit out.

I mean, can you fucking believe it? I’ve had ordered get fucked up before but this is a whole new order of magnitude worse.

It’s beyond “damn it, they fucked up my order” and well into “I did not think this kind of thing could happen here” with a hearty dash of, “how DOES this happen here?”

So you better bet I complained via DoorDash. And I complained under the “Food health/safety” category because duh, and even jumped through the hoop of taking the pictures they now demand with my webcam as proof.

Why do they now require pictures with complaints? Fuckheads, presumably. People abusing the system making life harder on everybody.

So yeah, this definitely sets a new low water mark. Imagine if I had not seen that glimpse of tubular whiteness before chowing down.

At minimum I would have chipped a tooth.

At maximum that one bone would have choked me to death.

So, not good.

Oh, and the kicker : I found two more chunks of bone.

Oh well, at least the garlic naan is good.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And today is one of them.

Started feeling really dragged out and tired last night, Uh oh, I thought. Then I started getting the chills, triggered by, but not entirely due to, the cold. At one point, the chills dug so deep into my poor body that I was not just shivering, I was shaking like Katherine Hepburn in On Golden Pond.

This did not bode well.

Sure enough, I woke up this morning feeling utterly wretched. So I had to cancel Wound Care. I will change my one remaining bandage myself.

That’s right, I haven’t shared that yet. A week ago, the nurse took a look at the wound on my right foot and decided it was sufficiently closed that I didn’t need a bandage on it any more, so I have only had one bandage to deal with for a week now.

Hooray! Now to get the other, more severe one on my left foot to heal.

Which probably means keeping my ortho shoes on way, way more. The point of the shoes is to offload my weight off my wounds so they can heal, and that means that technically I should be wearing those things any time I walk, even if I am just walking to the god damn toilet.

Because, you see, according to Nikki, the reason these wounds could not heal is because every time I walked, the pressure ripped them open.

Yikes. That’s bad.

And yet, having those big clodhoppers on is a pain because of the way they have collapsed on me. They are not comfortable to wear any more and I am still waiting to hear back from Nikki about that problem.

I get the feeling she doesn’t check her email much. Grr. I don’t want to have to call the office, Phone calls are much rougher on my social anxiety than email.

Then again, I am getting really fuckin’ sick of being chained up and hemmed in by fear. It’s no way to live, and I want to live god damn it, not just survive.

Yay, here come the chills again. But I type valiantly on nevertheless.

I can crawl back into bed and bury myself under the blanket when I am done,.

Haven’t ordered a space heater yet. I will probably end up with the fancy one. It’s more expensive than the Amazon Basics one but it’s highly rated and has both a built in fan and a sort of spout to aim the hot air where you want it to go.

Plus it looks nice.

Right now, being me is kind of a slog. I feel tired and cold. Making the words come out feels like hauling bricks and it’s hard to stay focused on the task. My mind does not want to sit still and write.

Writing is, after all, a strange job. Some strange person sits there perfectly still except for their fingers and types away and/or sits there staring into the middle distance looking to all the world like they’re in a daze or stupor before typing some more.

The real work of it all is 90 percent internal, which is why, I suppose, writers tend to be deeply introverted people.

Who else would be willing to do that? Extroverts need too much stimulation.

When I am writing fiction (which I should do more), I sometimes imagine my mind as being a chaotic and bustling factory floor with robot arms moving things around, sparks flying as things are welded to other things, conveyor belts bringing parts, and so on.

It’s an imagine that I find quiet soothing because it gives me the feeling that all the sturm und drang in my head has some kind of purpose.

Of course, if I just decided it was time I wrote a book already, that stuff would have a purpose and it could keep me occupied for quite a while.

But what book would I write?

Whatever would be the most fun to write, I suppose.

I will think about it.

More after the break.

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This makes me so happy

I need more music videos to feature cartoon bunnies rocking the fuck out.

Wee freaking ha!

If I did write entirely for the fun of it, my shit would get REAL wacky.

Like, Douglas Adams wacky.

The image in my mind is a cartoon minecart rocketing through tunnels barely staying on the tracks as it takes turns on two wheels and me inside it cackling like a lunatic.

Me cackling like a lunatic seems to be on my mind lately. I guess because the world is getting so damned crazy that my inner lunacy is rising in order to compensate.

It’s like air pressure in that way. Inside pressure has to match outside lunacy.

Recently in a YouTube comment, I let something slip that I never thought I would ever say to anyone.

But I admitted that I go from my usual “love the world” mood-scape to my long suppressed “cackling demonic trickster dancing with joy as he watches the world burn” side with distressing regularity lately.

I’m pretty sure that side of me could never actually take over unless something TRULY horrible happened to me but I still don’t like seeing or feeling it.

I can so easily imagine this figure looking down on a burning city and screaming, “That’s it! Go for it, you dumb motherfuckers! Die in droves! Shit in your own nests! Vote for the ‘we will definitely slit your throat’ party! DO IIIIIIT! ”

Hopefully by writing that down I will ease some of the pressure in my head.

I mean, that’s how evil tricksters like the Joker happen. They are, in the worst possible way, smart people reacting to a stupid world by going insane to the point of complete misanthropy and thus evil.

And the problem of being smarter than most and therefore completely capable of seeing how stupid and misguided so many people are is one that all of us smart types have to deal with on a day to day basis.

For me, the solution is to ground everything in the purely emotional foundation of my deep and determined humanism. I care about people. even if they sometimes seem like children to me, and being smarter than the herd simply makes me a potential shepherd.

And don’t talk shit to me about how they “should” follow you because you’re so god damned special and smart.

Fuck that. That’s the moral nihilism of the spoiled and weak.

You do whatever it takes to lead them the right way. Or at least to do your best to do so.

I mean, do you really care, or don’t you?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why was I such an eerie child?

Patient readers know the drill. Preternaturally intelligent. Learned to read when I was 3 years old. Talked like a tiny adult. Was a strangely calm and self-possessed kid. Had zero fear of or inherent respect for adults.

Yet for all that, I was a terribly lonely child, starved for any kind of positive attention, all alone in my chilly little mind palace.

Honestly, that hasn’t changed nearly as much as it should have. I have very good friends who love me. I socialize with them regularly. And I love them to bits.

But I am still trapped in my palace of ice, nevertheless.

Lowering my Paxil dose gradually over time should help with that. I’m still trying to process the fact that a great deal of the emotional coldness and numbness I have been complaining about (a lot) over the last 20+ years was probably the Paxil, and I just didn’t even have a frame of reference from which I could understand the problem.

How was I to know what was depression and what was Paxil?

Arguably, Doctor Costin should have known. That is, technically, his area of both expertise and responsibility. He theoretically could have figured out it was time to cut back on the Paxil a long time ago.

But I bear no umbrage. I know that I can very intense and overwhelming to deal with. I have both great emotive power and a massive intellect that can make even people with doctorates struggle to keep up with me.

Sorry, Doc, but if I have to slow down to normal person speed for you, there is no way therapy is going to work.

Which is a problem in and of itself, and it’s why this song hits me so hard :

Obviously that’s a metaphorically exaggerated version of my situation. My mind might be accelerated but the rest of me ain’t.

But I get it, Barry. I really do. I’ve spent my whole life slowing way down just so I stand some kind of chance of connection with others. If I took the inhibitor off my engine and tried to go full speed ahead to see just how fast I can go, my last connection to the rest of the human race would snap and I would lose my fucking mind for good.

And that thought terrifies me.

Not to mention that I can’t even imagine what going full tilt would even mean for me. How would that even work? I’m neither a scholar nor a researcher so it’s not like I would be inclined to gorge my bloated mind on all the latest information.

I don’t gorge. I graze.

I suppose I could write at a frenzied speed. See just how productive an author I can be if I just surrender myself to my muse and my craft.

I know I could produce my usual rough first (and last) drafts that way. But then I would have to slow down to do the proofreading, editing, and so forth.

And that’d be a drag, man. I need an editor.

A pretty demanding one.

Often the people who most crave being controlled by others are the ones who can’t/won’t control themselves.

And I know I don’t have the self-discipline to make myself produce the very best writing of which I am capable.

I’ve gotten away with submitting rough drafts for far too long.

Then again, maybe that just means I’m so dazzlingly brilliant that everything I write is perfect the first time and I don’t need to slow down and edit and do multiple drafts.

Yeah right. Even at my most delusional I wouldn’t believe that. No matter how talented I think I am, I know that what I write can always stand a lot of improvement.

Including these blog entries. But that ain’t gonna happen.

The whole point of this blog is to allow me to express myself freely and second-guessing every word I type out of fear of my own eventually judgment is definitely a one way ticket to crazytown.

Oh yeah. And, um. something about being a weird kid.

I’m, pretty sure that’s where I started.

More after the break.

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It’s getting closer

Me buying a space heater, that is.

And none too soon given that it’s actually been below freezing all day today.

That’s no big deal for most of Canada, but here on the Wet Coast, below freezing with snow on the ground is like Arctic Armageddon.

So on the shopping front, I have at least narrowed it down to three or four potential space heaters, from a $45 el cheapo Amazon Basics model to this fancy thing. 

The fancy one is in consideration because it was recommended by two different “consumer reports” type sites and what the heck, it’s just $20 more.

What I want to avoid is the humiliating feeling that you get when you’re sitting there with something with subpar performances thinking, “I paid too little for this. ”

Of course, I don’t want to pay too much either, but at this point I am willing to err in the “too much” direction and rely on Amazon’s return policy to protect me.

Then again, I’ve heard they just keep making returns harder to do… probably because people were abusing the fuck out of the system to just get stuff for free for a week or two then return it.

This is how “restocking fees” happen, people.

Fuckheads. The enemies of all systems. The reason we can’t have nice things.

Anyhow, that is but a glimpse of why it takes me so long to make a decision. I’m trying to take the pressure off myself by telling myself it’s no big deal if I get the “wrong” thing as long as it does the job of keeping my enormous buns warm.

Especially my hands, specifically my right hand. The circulation in it must be terrible because it gets cold so very easily.

My fault, I fear, for using the mouse without a mousepad or wrist support at all for years.

Nothing I can do about it now but get a space heater… and some gloves.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I listened to this record dozens of times in elementary school.

I have, I must admit, a very minor kind of dysphoria.

I’ve always felt like I was a thin, supple, gymnastics type person stuck in the body of an extremely overweight ogre.

I’ve always wanted to do things this body is simply not designed to do. Like dance, or climb like a ninja, or vault over objects when I am feeling especially exuberant.

That’s why I love video games where I can do that stuff. Games like the Assassin’s Creed franchise, or the Shadow of Mordor games.

In those games, at least, I can move like I want to be able to move. Like some strange part of me thinks I should be able to move.

As in, I will get vivid flashes of the desire to move that way, all athletic and toned and acrobatic, that I of course can’t do anything with but wait for them to pass.

But I can see what that part of me wants to do so clearly in my mind.

Basically, I wish I could parkour. That shit has fascinated me every since it was still called “free running” and I saw a piece on it on some news show.

I want so badly to be able to move like that. To just flow up walls and over rooftops and along fences and such, almost like a cat.

But I can’t do that kind of thing. And it’s not just because I’m old and crippled and fat. I wouldn’t be able to do it even if I was 25 and my ideal weight and I had kept on working out at the UPEI rec center instead of letting my social anxiety make me stop.

I could have used some Paxil back then,

Anyhow, my point is, even I was the picture of physical health, I still couldn’t parkour. This fleshly frame of mine is capable of many powerful things. It can carry a lot, it can do a lot of work, it can endure much, it can protect the quarterback.

But it’s not built for agility and there is nothing I could do short of a total brain transplant to change that.

Take that as a hint, science. Get on it!

And it strikes me that this very minor kind of dysphoria must be fairly common, at least amongst us deep and thoughtful types.

The average person, thankfully, just becomes whatever they are to become holus-bolus without ever thinking about what body they wish they’d gotten.

It takes some serious brainpower to make yourself miserable like that.

Where was I? Oh right, minor dysphoria being common.

I mean, we know that there can be a mismatch between body and brain. That’s medical fact. It’s almost like the brain and the body come from separate dice rolls and it’s sheer luck when they happen to match.

Well, okay, maybe it’s not that bad. But it’s bad.

That’s why I am so very supportive of not just trans people but anyone who feels like the inside does not match the outside and I want them to do whatever they need to do in order to feel right.

Even if it’s something other people find “cringe”. Like the “fat bearded dude in a Sailor Moon outfit” trope.

I’m not going to judge. If that makes you feel good, go for it, and let the weaklings cringe. You’re living for you, NOT them.

And I am saying this as someone who needs to pretend to be an anthropomorphic fox from outer space on a regular basis in order to feel sane.

Make the outside match the inside.

It doesn’t work the other way around, though many have tried.

More after the break.

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From the inside out

For me, everything always starts from the middle.

By that, I mean that for me, inspiration and motivation and even belief have to come from somewhere deep inside me.

Maybe that’s a testament to just how much of an introverted intellectual I am. I dunno.

And I know that this reliance on the deepest and most mysterious, most intuitive part of my mind might sound a tad odd coming from a science loving rational materialist like me, but to me there’s no conflict because my reason and my intuition have always worked together seamlessly.

They’re like the left and right hands of my mind. Sure, one of them is probably stronger and/or more agile than the other, but I’d still be lost without either of them.

Ever had to deal with a temporary loss of the use of your non-dominant (submissive?) hand? Because that will teach you how much you need it right quick.

So even my most rigorously analytical thought processes use that awe-inspiring supercomputer that is my deep intuitive mind to do all the heavy lifting.

And even my most enigmatic creative thoughts, the ones that seem to have an enormously dense burst of information compressed into a nanosecond, still needs my conscious, rational mind to decompress, unpack, and organize them.

To me it’s all the same in the end. And I could not tell you where one begins and the other ends. Nor do I care.

The question that could really bake your noodle is whether or not I’m smart because of this close relationship between my brain hemispheres, or if my hemispheres get along so well because I am so darn smart.

Both. Neither. A quantum superposition of all possible states. Who cares?

I definitely don’t want to get caught up in yet another senseless dichotomy.

I have never responded well to being told I have to choose a side.

Fuck your goddamned sides. I don’t care whether Team Red or Team Blue wins. I’m not some junior jingoist eager to get picking a side over with as quickly and as thoughtlessly as possible so I can get to fighting (the fun part) all the faster.

Leave me out of your petty dominance games.

Or if I have to participate, let me be the ref.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.