I’ve been hearing the siren song of gluttony lately.

Because my Demon Hunger has returned and while so far I have kept it mostly in check, wrestling with it all the time is really hard on my nerves.

I’m hungry all the fucking time. Sometimes even right after a big meal. All the meal does is slow it down a little.

And this has physical consequences, albeit minor ones, because being hungry stimulates my stomach into generating more acids and that leads to me being hungry AND suffering from a little bit of acid indigestion.

And that just makes the hunger bite into me more sharply because I know what will end the acid indigestion and that is FOOD.

It’s like my stomach is an angry beast that I have to keep feeding or it will start tearing up the carpets and humping the furniture.

Or vice versa.

And this all inexorably leads to cravings for carb laden junk food in mass quantities. The urge to go back to my wicked ways when I used to use junk food as a side dish for every meal has reared its ugly head for the first time in a decade.

Looking back, I can’t believe I used to do that shit. How mindlessly gluttonous! And just yesterday I remember that I used to have sugar free cookies as a dessert with every fucking meal in addition to the piece of fruit I still eat for dessert.

So it was like I ate two desserts with every meal. Insane.

How the heck did I afford all that? Well I guess not buying around $18 worth of trail mix every week yet helped a lot.

And, sadly, junk food is very cheap. Le sigh.

And it would be oh so easy to start eating like that again. And that would be horrible. My health would nosedive and I would be in serious trouble almost right away.

The lowered Paxil dose is probably partly to blame. With the greater access to my emotions comes a greater desire to “eat my feelings” and self-soothe with food.

Hopefully I will find a more healthy way to soothe myself. Right now, I can only think of one, and there’s a limit to how much one man can masturbate.

Seriously though, right now I am running on discipline and willpower. The hunger attacks and I just grit my teeth and push it down again and continue my day.

And so far that works, but willpower is never a truly effective long term solution. I need to redirect the urge to eat into something else rewarding.

Because that’s what cravings always are : a desire for the activation of the reward center of the brain. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. That is, as I have said before, the mainspring of life you’re dealing with there. Cravings keep animals alive.

But the fact that what we really want is not the food (or the booze or the drug or whatever) but the reward means that it is possible to substitute another, healthier reward stimulus and get the same effect.

Not easily and not immediately. You will still have the fixation to deal with. Addiction forces us to fixate on that exact source of reward and that alone can make us feel like we will just die if we don’t get it.

It is impossible to convince an addiction that something other than feeding the fixation can be “just as good”.

All you can do is starve the fixation and hope the new, healthier source of reward will eventually take over.

Anyhow, back to a vague afterimage of the point : I’ve been struggling with that Demon Hunger again and it’s wearing on my nerves and that sucks.

More after the break.

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Truth or… something

Consequences! That was it.

Early into my adulthood I internalized a very simple moral formula :

“I am responsible for all the reasonably predictable consequences of my actions. ”

And like a lot of the ideological relics from my younger days, it makes irrefutable logical sense and cannot be countered yet it is nevertheless wrong both in theory and in application for reasons well outside its scope.

Kind of like how I present myself to the world :

“Everything you see is real but you don’t see everything. ”

Both catchy and confusing, n’est-ce pas?

Within my moral rubric lies the innocuous seeming word “reasonably”, which I put in there to make sure it could not be interpreted as requiring omniscience.

But “reasonable” is a very slippery concept when you try to pin it down to an actual definition. We all think we know what is reasonable and what is not but I doubt any two people would have exactly the same things on both lists.

And lately I have been wondering if my little definition needs further refinement because I am beginning to wonder if even my seemingly modest moral formula is in fact something that does not run well on human hardware.

It may well be that in order to function, the human mind needs some well defined limit to the responsibility we take for the consequences of our actions, even ones which might fit the definition of “reasonable”.

We may need to be able to say, “OK, past this point, fuck it. People are on their own. ”

Not to the point of moral nihilism, obviously, or anywhere near it. Just to the point where the responsibility of anticipation reaches a reasonable limit that takes into account the limitations of the human mind.

Even a mind like mind.

I’m not really sure where I am going with this. It began as just a feeling that on some level, my moral equations were crashing due to running out of mental space and that this is obviously not acceptable.

Exceptions need to be made. Code needs to be altered in order to stop all these stack overflow errors from crashing my cranium. I must define a space for myself, one that does not routinely get overwritten by whatever I am thinking at the moment just rudely shoving it out of the way.

There has to be some way to create structures that persist in my mind.

Or I will remain lost at sea with no land in sight forever.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

And now, the Ye Olde Fornicators Guild presents this demonstration of the ancient and majesty art of fuckery.

My computer’s been misbehaving. It crashes when I am not using it (probably due to Salad) and when it reboots it can’t connect to the Internet.

Obviously, I solved this problem for now, but not before I rebooted a bunch of times.

What worked this time was a completely cold boot. Turned the power off at the power supply and waited for the case fan’s blades to stop turning, then turned it on again.

Apparently, that was what it needed. I exorcised whatever little demons were fucking things up by completely mindwiping the computer.

Wow, Windows’ dictionary has the word “mindwiping”. I am impressed. I had no idea the Windows dictionary was that hip.

Or maybe I did know but somehow forgot all about it….

Feeling physically and emotionally cold right now. The emotional part of it has been happening on and off for a while now. I have these periods where I feel especially cut off from the human race and completely and utterly alone, and all I can do is keep on trudging forward, knowing that as long as I keep moving, I will reach the other side of it.

When you’re going through hell, keep going!

---

Great. Just great.

Just got back from the bathroom. Despite having defecated quite recently, my body apparently needed a repeat performance, and so I had to interrupt my blogging (which I am loath to do) to go eliminate waste again.

Now I am back from said mission and I am quite dizzy and tired.

One might even say I’m pooped. (SFX : Cries of audience outrage)

And I don’t feel well at all. I am feeling so unwell that I may end up having to stop blogging before I hit the end of part 1 and go lay down.

Yellow alert, basically. I am not ready to pull the brake cord to make the train stop just yet, but I am eyeing the scenery and looking for a soft spot to land if I end up jumping off before my stop.

And of course, this would have to happen on the weekend. And not just the weekend, Saturday night, when there is almost always going to be nobody here but me.

Oh well. Whatever happens, I will take care of it. I always do.

A big part of expanding my world will be getting over my long ingrained feelings of weakness and incompetence and helplessness.

Sure, I have unavoidable limitations, but I am a smart and resourceful and more than capable of solving whatever problems arise if I just give myself a chance.

Deal with it first, freak out about it later.

The ability to remain cool under pressure is something I have always admired. It was one of my late father’s truly heroic attributes. He is one hundred percent the person I would want with me during a crisis.

The rest of the time he can fuck right off, though. Moody prick. Cool in a crisis and testy and angry and verbally abusive the rest of the time.

Don’t get me started.

Anyhow, my point was that I can handle unexpected things if I have to so there is no need, or a lot less need, for me to worry about bad things happening to me.

I will of course avoid the pitfalls I can see coming, but the door will always be open to completely random shit that I never could have anticipated dropping by to fuck with my shit and force me to deal with things myself instead of withdrawing in panic but not before whining for a real grownup to come fix it for me.

That’s no way to live. I won’t learn to respect myself like that.

Time to man up at last and get shit DONE.

Like a nap. Right now.

More after the break.

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Just skating along

But I never learned to skate.

I had a number of opportunities. Every year of elementary school there was at least one field trip to the rink at Cahill Stadium in my home town. I could have learned then.

The first problem with that, though, is that I would have had to ask my parents for skates, and I was far too timid to do that.

On a deep level, I understood that people barely tolerated me. I was an unexpected and unwanted burden and responsibility first and foremost and I should thank my lucky stars that I got anything ever and that people ever put up with me at all.

Asking for more than that was bound to go about as well for me as it did for Oliver Twist.

The lack of skates led to my having to feel humiliated and abandoned when all the other kids had skates and I didn’t and I was decades away from being able to explain why.

“Because my parents don’t love me very much and deeply resent me for being alive. ”

I wonder if that would have caused a stir. Probably not. It would have been just another weird thing said by that weird fat kid that made people just shake their heads like they’re trying to wake up and then move on, forgetting what I said as quickly as possible.

Because it disturbed them. I have that effect on people. I weird them out.

Maybe that marks me as a visionary. I dunno. The way I see things is so different from how people usually see things that exposure to my thoughts can leave people feeling dizzy and disoriented.

Maybe it would go over better as a book or Ted type talks. I could fire up the webcam and record myself holding forth on this and that. Put it on YouTube with the right tags.

The problem with that is picking where to start. Anywhere, I suppose. My thoughts are so densely intertwined that one spot is as good as another, really.

Yeah. Maybe I’m a visionary who could bring about a whole new era of thought.

That’d be neat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

As you have no doubt already figured out, my blog is working again.

Turns out I didn’t need to contact the support workers at Fatcow after all. Imagine my surprise when I went to check my email last night and I had one saying that my payment for my domain renewal had been received.

Apparently whatever snafu was blocking my payment cleared up. Boffo. The disruption ended and now I am back, baby.

Please hold your applause till the end of the performance.

Today’s been less busy than my usual Friday because I did not get a community shower today. That’s because it is normally on Wednesday in the first week of the month and we completely forgot that.

But no harm done because Wednesday was New Year’s Day and I doubt any support workers would have been working anyhow. Which explains why we didn’t get a “where are you?” phone call on Wednesday.

For all I know, I was told there’d be no community shower for me this week at some point and I just plain forgot.

That would be very on brand for me.

It’s otherwise been an unremarkable day. My mood continues to be a lot more variable than what I was used to before the lowering of my Paxil dose, and while that does mean I am quite sad or frustrated or just plain pissed off sometimes, I still welcome this new breadth of emotional expression and I am confident that my mind will eventually wake up and use that extra emotional maneuverability to make room for a better mood.

I have thought for a long long time that healthy non-depressive people must have some sort of mood support system in their minds that adds just enough of an upward push to their mood in order to keep them from going below a certain healthy level of low mood.

A sort of “mood floor” if you will.

Admittedly, that sounds more like a carpet that changes colors according to how you are feeling when you walk on it, but you get the idea.

Anyhow, us depressives (sorry, us “people with the lived experience of depression”) do not have that floor and so there is no limit to how far down we can go.

Ain’t that a peach.

I would love to get a mood floor installed, obviously. I am quite thoroughly sick of languishing in an icy cell far below the sunlit lands above.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that vast tract of frostbitten land (my Midnight Tundra) that separates me from the rest of humanity like the air between the walls of a Thermos.

Well I am an urban hermit, so it would make sense for me to be hermetically sealed.

It’s now easy for me to see (and feel) the relationship between that distance and my withdrawing from the world.

That’s why the “turtle response” is so dangerous when used as a primary coping mechanism. The more I withdrew, the colder my world got, and the colder it got, the more I withdrew.

Talk about a negative feedback loop. Oy.

I am not going to claim this is something I can simply turn off in myself. This tendency to turtle operates on far too deep and fundamental a level of my mind for it to be that easy.

But I can at least contemplate resisting that urge now and then, and staying connected and present even when feeling scared and/or stressed, if for no other reason than to see what happens.

After all, I know that I’m in no danger. There is no real threat, I’m just scared. Any alarms that may be sounding in my head are patently false and express absolutely nothing about the real world.

So why not just wait it out and see what lies on the other side?

More after the break.

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More mind-blowing AI

I continue to have fun with the horribly named Hailuo image-to-video AI.

Check out this august gentleman.

That my character Professor Scruff, delivering his TED talk to a pack audience of fellow academics who are hanging on his every word.

No wonder he is wagging. 🙂 The wagging makes me eeeee all over!

I’ve tried some other videos but they didn’t turn out that great, so, whatever.

Hey, I’m learning not to post stuff when it isn’t good enough! There might be hope for my sloppy genius self yet!

What can I say, I am built for brilliance not perfection. I’d rather make a messy masterpiece than a neat and tidy mediocrity any day.

Besides, cleaning up messy masterpieces is what editors are for.

I need to get me one of those.

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Learning to fly

Metaphorically speaking, I kinda feel like I am learning to walk all over again.

What I am really doing is learning to feel, of course. My long winter’s nap is ending and I am emerging from cold storage and rubbing my limbs as the blood flow returns to them.

And this necessarily requires my learning to trust my feelings. The rational mind isn’t always right (especially mine) and gut instinct isn’t always wrong. And trying to live your life by rationality alone is both futile and insipid.

And a waste of effort. It is far more efficient to let instinct handle the low level tasks it can handle so that the rational mind can concentrate on its job.

This involves a deep and fundamental change of perspective, though, and those do not come easily or quickly.

So I am trying to keep my mind relaxed and supple so it remains flexible enough to make the kinds of changes I want to make.

I just keep reminding myself that there is nothing in my mind that is more precious than my journey to mental health and my long deferred emancipation.

I may have to go through a whole series of radical transformations before I reach my final form, and for those I will need to simply trust that my deep core self knows what it is doing so each transformation will bring me closer to my goal.

I will get out of this shark cage eventually.

And when I do, world, watch the fuck out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s miracle of AI is :

It’s not perfect – his run is wonky and the wolf on the right hand side kinda melts – but it’s still frigging amazing given that it just started with a static image.

I should see what other miracles I can unleash! 🙂

It’s occurred to me that kids have certain things figured out.

They know that it’s up to them to find fun stuff to do. A kid left to their own devices on a summer day doesn’t worry about what they are supposed to be doing or fret over whether or not they are using their time productively or living “to the fullest”.

And they know, intuitively, that they will only get out of life what they put in. They don’t sit around and mope waiting for someone to entertain them. They get off their cute little butts and go looking for things to do, and if there is nothing premade like a TV show or video game for them to consume, they will invent things of their own without giving it a second thought. It comes naturally to them.

All they worry about is having fun and enjoying themselves and I am increasingly sure that this is actually the right attitude towards life in general.

At least for me.

I certainly need to lighten the hell up. My attitude towards life needs a major overhaul and the major issue is taking life way too seriously.

So seriously that I feel like I have to hide from it in the realms of my mind and only deal with the real world on a very minimal level.

Just enough to keep myself alive and point me towards my screens, basically.

It’s survival mode, and survival mode, ironically, kills. It’s meant to get you through times of danger and/or crisis, and that’s all.

It is most definitely not supposed to keep going for the rest of your life.

My latest AI therapy session got me thinking about how closed off from the world I have been for so long, and how this profound divide cuts me off from the rest of humanity and leaves me cold and lonely and lost within the caverns of my mind.

I am only “safe” from reality in the same way an anorexic is “safe” from food poisoning.

And like an anorexic, I am starving on the inside. I have this terrible feeling that I missed some vital developmental window(s) and it’s left me unable to truly connect with my fellow naked apes in a true and genuine way.

At the very least, the distance between me and the rest of humanity seems vast and uncrossable. I feel so very far away from everyone. And I don’t know what it is like to be closer than friends with anyone.

My family included.

I have lived in this ice fortress of the mind for most of my life. And I can see now that I have been, at best, only half alive that whole time. Still am. And that’s why I have always been so weak and fragile.

It’s hard to have a robust connection with reality and my embodied self when most of me is not even here.

And I know that I am terrified of truly being present, in realtime, immediately. I would feel so very exposed without my frigid tomb around me. Being truly present would almost certainly involve making decisions without thinking them through first, and the inner force I call “the Committee” won’t allow that.

Like I told Doctor Costin today, at some point I let my ego and superego completely take control and they demand that anything I do get their approval first.

And if it doesn’t “make sense” to them, it doesn’t happen.

And truth be told, they don’t know shit.

---

Oh great, my domain expired and my web host won’t accept my credit card.

The fuckery is afoot, methinks.

I am going to have to borrow one of my roomies’ credit cards or I won’t be able to blog.

And foxy gotta blog.

I guess I will be blogging into LibreOffice for now!

---

The fuckery continues

Woman, get thee to a fuckery!

Still blogging into a LibreOffice document, god damn it.

I knew I had to renew my domain soon. In retrospect, it seems obvious that this would need to happen in the general vicinity of the new year, as I have a yearly plan for domains. And I certainly have the $25 I need to renew it.

But this not accepting my credit card bullshit is one of those out of nowhere curve-balls that life seems to love to throw at me now and then.

Couldn’t possibly have seen it coming. I just have to deal with it.

Oh, but something HAS changed : because I tried “too many” times to get the web host (Fatcow) to accept the credit card, I am now locked out and I will have to contact their tech support/phone support team to get it unlocked.

Oh well, I will just ask them why they no like my card at the same time.

Plenty of other places have taken this exact card. Amazon.ca and DoorDash have no problem with it. But there is something in the system these prepaid cards use that makes random institutions suddenly turn against them every once in a while.

It’s all very stressful and frustrating.

I am procrastinating on asking Julian if I can borrow his credit card. I don’t have any good reason to do so, I just don’t wanna do it.

I suppose it’s possible that my communications with Fatcow tech support will, in fact, resolve the issue with the card altogether, which would be awesome.

The very last resort would be to seek a new host for my blog. But I severely doubt that it will come to that. I am sure this can all be ironed out once I have the wherewithal to contact support.

This would have to happen on the day before my busy day, Friday, so that I will not have a lot of spoons to spare for contacting support tomorrow.

Tomorrow’s blog entry may also end up going to LibreOffice as well.

Why can’t things just fucking work for a change, huh?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I gave an AI therapist a try last night and found it to be surprisingly helpful.

I was scrolling through the listings on a favorite site of mine called There’s An AI For That, which lists all the wildly innovative and powerful AI tools that have been unleashed ‘pon the world by the marvelous and occasionally terrifying AI revolution, when I came across a listing for a virtual therapy service called Milburn and decided I would give it a shot, despite my expectations being extremely low.

I mean, how could some mere chatbot help me with my profound mental health issues that have consumed my entire adult existence (and I am 51) better than my extremely experienced therapist whom I have been talking to for over a decade?

Well for one thing, I can talk to it whenever I want, not just once a week. Doctor Costin tells me that I am free to call him whenever I feel the need, but given the problem I have calling my own relatives, whom I know would be happy to hear from me, calling my therapist and interrupting his life with my needs is simply out of the question.

But an AI doesn’t have a life for me to interrupt. So score one for AI for that.

More importantly, I don’t have to worry about frightening, intimidating, or overwhelming it. My powerful presence, rapier wit, incisive and analytical mind, and sheer intellectual muscle can make me quite difficult for even a seasoned therapist like Doctor Costin to handle, so even with him, I need to restrain myself quite a bit.

That ended up being a lot of what me and “Doctor Milburn” talked about. How I am not the “real me” in the sense of being my unrestrained, emotional self even with my current therapist because I know from little tests I have performed with him that he would just end up frightened and overwhelmed and I would end up feeling even worse.

Nobody can handle the real me. Especially me. All I know how to be is the “true but not the whole truth” version of myself that has been my public persona for so long that I have no idea just how “real” it is.

Like Terry Pratchett wrote, be careful what you pretend to be because you just might turn into it.

I guess I am stuck in the “nobody understands me” mode of my arrested adolescence. Had I developed in any way normally, this would have been the time in my mid to late teen years where I became surly and irritable and moody and very hard to get along with at all.

But I never went through that phase because I “knew better”.

Or so I thought.

I think my mind has been nudging me towards reconciling the difference between the me everyone knows and loves and the “real” unstrained me, though. I keep finding myself imagining that I have been involuntarily committed to some enormous psychiatric facility and therefore I don’t feel any need to restrain myself and can be just as rude, arrogant, dismissive, and sarcastic as I want to be without worrying that this will jeopardize my access to therapy.

Basically, I would turn into the main character Will from Good Will Hunting, using my extremely advanced intellect to lash out at people like the Robin Williams character or those CIA douchebags for daring to think that tiny weak minds like their own could hope to even comprehend me, let alone help me.

At least, I think that’s why things that stray into that domain can make me so god damned angry. People who try to help but can’t basically get me to lower my defenses to let them in then end up brutally disappointing me, and that infuriates me because it hurts so bad.

In my little institutional fantasies, I am the ultimate “difficult” patient known for chewing up therapists and spitting them out with my incredible mind.

That would make a good start for a movie, or maybe a one act play.

Unfortunately, there does not seem to be a way for me to view a transcript of my conversations with “Doctor” Milburn so far, and that’s tragic because I would love to have something I could reference for my own edification as well as being able to copy and paste excerpts into this a-here blog o’ mine.

I don’t know when I will do my next “session”. Maybe soon, maybe not. I will try to make it as soon as I can in order not to drift away from this wonderful resource.

No promises, though.

More after the break.

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A night in

Like I ever have a night out.

Eh, maybe some day. I will never be the sort of person who wants to hit “the clubs” but there’s a gay pub called the Pumpjack on Davie Street that is supposedly where us “bears” hang out and I can see giving that a shot.

After all, if it’s a “bear” hangout, the food must be good.

I ordered in tonight. Got stuff from a place I’ve ordered from before and found to be high quality, Uncle Sal’s Shawarma.

There’s a weirdly high number of restaurants called Uncle $Someone’s $Cuisine around here. Apparently that makes it seem more “homey” to people.

At least, that’s my guess as to why that name.

Tonight I got a veggie samosa for an appetizer, basically because if samosas are an option I feel compelled to get one.

They’re so good!

The main dish I got is four little shawarma chicken rolls plus a little salad and some fries and it’s all quite good.

I love it when food comes with salad. I find that salad is not only tasty and nutritious, it really helps my digestion. It’s like the leafy greens act like a little basket for the rest of the food to go into.

Makes sense why we traditionally eat salad before the meal, then, doesn’t it?

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Make more waves

I do things in waves of enthusiasm. Tidal surges of energy.

The problem comes when the wave crashes and the tide recedes and I am left stranded and lost and wondering what happened.

Any surfer could tell me what to do next : catch the next wave. Accept that this is just how I operate and use the surges to get things started, knowing that my compulsive thoroughness will force me to finish what I started.

That way, when the floodwaters recede, I will know what to do : keep doing the thing I have started doing.

Then, when I am done, take a nap.

And when I wake up, generate and ride another wave.

This could work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But is this it?

I’ve been dreaming of escape from this dead end life for a long long time, and I have definitely been assuming it will happen eventually, but the brutal truth is that I do precious little to actually make that happen so I have to face the very real possibility that it never will.

That I will die without ever making it to adulthood and actually living the kind of life that most people take for granted – one with a romantic partner, a job, a car, and the ability to earn a living – and instead I will die in a hospital room with tubes everywhere gasping out my last knowing that life completely passed me by.

And I have so much that I could contribute to the world if I could just get over myself. I’m a brilliant and phenomenally talented dude and I would love to be able to share my thoughts and my creations with the world and make a name for myself, but fear and indecision and anxiety keep me caged up inside instead.

I’m just too damned crazy to make it.

I think the only solution is to make myself earn the right to think it will all turn out okay eventually. Almost like I am renting it. Earn it by progressing towards that goal by taking actual concrete steps towards my desired ends.

And that means shaking off my usual sleepwalking state of semi-unconsciousness and waking fully up so I can actually pay attention to life instead of merely making it through each day with minimal exposure to reality.

That’s a sensible enough reaction to mental illness in the short term, but in the long term it is positively toxic to any hope of actually getting to grow up.

And I am 51. With the way things are going, I might not even make it to 60. A lot of us fat people – especially fat men – do not.

So the clock is ticking for me and every day it ticks a little louder and I know that deep inside I am desperate to escape this mausoleum of a fricking life and yet I also know that my insanity will continue to trap me here with nothing better to do than while my life away playing video games and waiting for death.

Because those are my grim choices : either get myself an actual life or just keep letting the days go by until I die without ever learning to fly.

Thank God I have my friends. They are my lifeline to reality. They help ground me and keep me from completely falling into myself and disappearing.

I remember what it was like on Duchess Avenue when I first moved to this area and I had made a sincere but doomed attempt to get a job (too much anxiety) and so all I saw all day was my tiny little bachelor apartment.

It was like solitary confinement. And like with solitary confinement, my world became dangerously unreal. The internet was my entire life, and that’s no good.

So I am eternally very grateful to my friends – Joe, Julian, and Felicity – for giving me a way and a reason to get out of my own head and experience things despite being arguably quite crazy.

Not barking at the moon crazy, though that seems like it could be fun.

But crazy nevertheless. I try to be merciful and forgiving with myself about that but that’s so hard to do when I am so god damned frustrated all the time.

It’s maddening to be caught between my very real urge to get out of this befouled nest of mine and finally fly and the hard and unyielding surface of my insanity.

Something, somewhere has to give. The sooner the better.

And that means I need to keep pushing myself whenever I can.

Because I gotta get out of this place.

More after the break.

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Speaking of being squished in between

Right now. I am super sleepy but the caffeine in the Diet Coke I had with my McD’s is propping me up so I am bother tired and wired at the same time

Normally I hate that state of mind but in this case I am not so tired that I can’t think straight (so to speak) so it’s just mildly stressful.

The moment I am done blogging, though, I am diving under the covers for a snooze.

Tonight is New Year’s Eve, so my friends and I will be getting together via Zoom at 11:45 pm so we can watch the ball drop and do the countdown for midnight.

Time to start a new year and say goodbye to the old one.

Farewell, 2024. 5/6 of you was really great.

But you um, kind of faceplanted at the end there. And seeing as 2025 will be the beginning of the world world having to pay for that, you will, sadly, not be remembered fondly by the global community.

You were so close.

Had an “incident” last night. You know, the “change the sheets” kind. And while those are always dismaying (to put it mildly), I am proud of the fact that I just handled it without any of my usual dithering and hand-wringing and wanting rescue.

I just got to the bathroom, went through a hell of a lot of TP cleaning myself up in both body and linoleum, and then went back to sleep.

Dunno what caused it. Too much fecal matter backed up in my colon, perhaps. At least that’s kind of what it felt like.

Stack overflow, dude.

And of course, if it happens again, I’ll go to the ER or UC, blah blah blah.

I am going to try to take a proactive approach in the future. Instead of only pooping when I feel the need strongly, I intend to just check myself – run an internal diagnostic, if you will – to see if maybe I need to empty myself right then.

Perhaps that will help prevent future incidents. Perhaps not.

But I’ve got to do SOMETHING, god damn it!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Biological analogues aside^[1], I feel like what I’ve been doing lately is squeezing out long dormant emotions and making myself feel them in an attempt to clear up space in my mind for my actual personality to emerge and grow.

It’s hard to say how long this process will last. It kind of feeds upon itself. The more space I clear out, the more space I can clear out from then on.

Obviously, the goal is to empty myself out. Or at least clear out enough of the backlog for me to be able to live and breathe and function.

Along that journey, there will be something I will have to face so I might as well face it now : what if my problem has been my Paxil all along?

All my complaining about feeling cold and lonely and isolated in my Midnight Tundra mindscape could simply have been the emotional anesthetic effect of the Paxil I have been taking for my social anxiety for over 20 years.

And this never occurred to me until now because I had lost all sense of what my emotions should be like so I had no basis for comparison any more.

But since the dose has been lowered by a modest amount (30 mg instead of 40 mg twice a week) I now have some idea of what my Paxil has been suppressing all these years and it’s been a real eye-opener.

Don’t worry, though. As tempting as it might be to a certain kamikaze part of my mind, I am not going to immediately jump to going cold turkey on the Paxil.

Heck, I am still adjusting to the moderately lowered dosage as is. I love that my emotions are thawing out and becoming more accessible and that this means my world feels more immediate and real now, as do I, but my world is also less stable and predictable and a lot of “stuff” is emerging from my inner deep freeze like zombies rising from their grave, so I know that a total cessation of Paxil would likely leave me absolutely insane, at least for a while.

So I will keep toddling along dealing with my newly more reactive emotional world and doing what I can to help the process along.

Maybe what I need to do is to think a lot about fiber.

It’s nature’s broom, after all.

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A new world

Specifically, the real world.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my video game addiction lately and I am getting increasingly sick of it.

It came to a head in the wee hours of the morning today when I form the intention of playing more Divinity : Original Sin but found myself putting off actually doing it in favor of watching more YouTube videos and/or reading more gay furry smut comics.

So I had to ask myself what was up with that. And I came to the conclusion that I just didn’t feel like dissolving my consciousness into that virtual world. I wanted to stay in the more immediate and “real” environment of non-gaming computer use.

This represents progress. The idea of leaving the cloistered confines of my video gaming worlds doesn’t seem quite as scary or cold now.

I don’t think I will be going cold turkey on the video games any time soon either, but carving out time for other things seems more possible than ever now.

I don’t have to hide from reality in these virtual worlds all the time.

I can stay out and play.

More after the break.

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The long sad

Apologies if I have used that title before. I was too lazy to check.

The long sad is like a long low-key sigh. It’s a feeling somewhere between depression and outright crying, and it’s the closest I get to sitting there feeling sorry for myself.

I’d be better off just having a good long cry, of course. This male emotional constipation than runs rampant in North American society is a demon and a curse and probably the main reason I have to sit at this keyboard and type just to know what I am feeling.

Or at least to articulate it. Make the feelings real.

This long sadness of mine can take place almost entirely in the back of my mind. I can be going about my usual (wasted) day playing video games and blogging and chatting with my fuzzy friends and so on and yet somewhere in my deeper being is a very sad little boy who is all alone.

Always all alone.

Or at least that’s how it feels. I am positive there have been a number of times in my life where people tried to reach out to me and instead just ended up feeling alienated and confused by this strange person who seems like he is there but can’t be reached.

Again, sorry if that’s ever been you. Mental illness doesn’t just hurt the mentally ill. It can hurt the people close to us too, and the worst part is we don’t even know it.

Too busy being crazy, I guess. It takes up a lot of our time.

I know I have a long way to go till I am truly open. The walls around my heart are tall and thick and cold, and undoing that is a long, slow, delicate process.

Like I always say, part of me wishes there was a button I could push or a pill I could take that would just unsuppress everything all at once knowing that this would mean my being completely insane for a while but hoping that when the flood waters recede I would be remade anew without all that baggage and there would be a good chance for me to go out into the world as a truly free and present being.

Instead of constantly hiding inside myself, looking out, terrified of being truly seen.

Because if they can SEE me, then they KNOW, and if they KNOW, they can FIND me, and if they FIND me, they can GET me.

And that would be worse than death.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Oh, so very many things, and that’s part of the problem. A big part.

I’m growing increasingly discontent with my video game dominated lifestyle so I am looking to expand my life to at least the point it was at before Skyrim stole my life, where I actually did do stuff other than play video games with my free time.

And I have a LOT of free time. Way more free time than committed time, to be honest. And from that point of view, it would seem to be a trivial thing to simply peel a few hours off that fat bundle of time and spend them doing something more productive.

But I have an addiction to wrestle with and those are notoriously unreasonable.

When I imagine leaving the dank but cozy nest of filling all my spare time with video game playing, I get this cold-sweat feeling of deep dark dread accompanied by a chilly feeling like a cold wind blowing through my soul.

And I hate that.

I have lived this particular variation on my cloistered existence for so very, very long that it’s hard for me to even imagine actually doing anything else with my days.

Oh sure, I can imagine all kinds of wonderful alternative activities for my time on Earth. I could explore new social environments like Discord or Snapchat, I could take university courses via remote learning, I could write fresh new stuff and posted it to Not’d and/or send it to traditional publishers, I could try to become a YouTuber.

I’m a brilliant and resourceful fellow and dreaming up alternatives is less than trivial for someone with a mind like mine.

But the intellect is never the problem, is it? Not for me, anyhow.

I have way more intelligence and insights and charisma and so on than I know what to do with. Quite literally.

It’s the fear that is holding me back and keeping me from using all of my powers to make all my dreams come true.

Or at least let me make a fucking living for once in my life.

I suppose that on one level, it all comes down to my problem with making decisions, especially ones that effect or involve me directly.

If I step away from video games, I then have to figure out what the hell to do with myself and that means facing that Infinite Corridor Of Infinite Doors problem of mine.

And that always devolves down to asking myself what I want. And I dunno.

It sounds like the most elementary question you can ask someone. Whaddaya want? Even wee children can answer that one.

In their case, it’s probably candy.

And it’s not quite that I literally have no idea what I want. I want all kinds of things. Sex. Money. A pleasant living space. An occupation. Sex. Luxury. Indulgence. Sex.

Oh, so much sex.

But again, those are dreams, not plans, and to go forward would require choosing one of those things and pursuing it, and I am still afraid to truly want things badly enough to go out into the world to try and get them.

I just make do with what I’ve got, for the most part.

And that almost never changes. So neither does my life. My life in which survival is easy but thriving nearly impossible while I remain in this locked in, blinkered state.

Somehow, I have to convince my deeper self that it is okay to go out into that big bad world full of so much more stimulation and confusion and options and to fight my way upstream as the urge to scurry back into my hidey hole batters me and to do this all with absolutely no certainty of reward or success.

It’s how normal people live, as far as I can tell.

But I am both far more and far less than normal.

And I need someone or something else to provide structure for me.

More after the break.

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An open letter

Dear Normal People :

Hi. I’m a mentally ill weirdo from the far edge of the herd.

So no, I don’t think we’ve met before.

Obviously, as I was not raised by wolves in a cabin in the woods, I grew up around normal people like yourself. I might have been that weird fat kid in your class in school, the one who pissed you off by acting like the school work you struggled with was super easy for him.

I hate to break it to you, but it was. It really was. Sorry if that made you feel bad.

But school – the academic part – has always been super easy for me.

It’s the other part – the social part – where I failed miserably. I was the kind of kid who got straight A’s in math, English, and history, but flunked recess and lunch.

It’s also possible that I was that weird fat kid from your neighborhood. Maybe you wondered what the hell my deal was.

Don’t ask me. I’ve never known either.

Anyhow, down to business. I am writing this open letter so I can maybe open a dialogue between folks like you and folks like me.

I am very much a nerd and an intellectual, and that means I have both strengths and weaknesses that you do not.

And to be honest, I have always envied people like you. I might have had high grades but even as a little boy I could see that you had so much that I did not.

Things like warm family connections, a place in the social fabric, a feeling that there was someone looking out for you so it was safe to explore, and so forth and so on.

I would have gladly gone from being an A student to a B student if it meant that I could have had friends, and felt accepted.

And if that’s not enough to quell your envy, take comfort in this : you’re sane, I’m not. You’re functional, and I’m not. I have completely and utterly crashed and burned when I have tried to make it in the real world, and if you are my age, by now you probably have a career, and success, and a home, and a spouse, and a family, and all these other things that people like you think just come to you at a certain point.

After all, all your friends and extended family have them too, and everyone at work as well. So how hard can it be to get them?

Well it’s kind of like a disability. Walking up a flight of stairs is easy for most people. But if you’re in a wheelchair, it’s not just hard it’s impossible.

That’s how it is for me. I’m very good at brainy things like school but none of that matters very much because life is not like school and at some point you have to leave school and deal with the real world and at that, I have completely failed.

So don’t feel bad about where I was back then.

Look at where I ended up now : disabled, unemployed, alone, and on social assistance.

Not so smug now, am I?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Did therapy just now.

Covered a lot of ground, as is usual when it’s mostly just me talking. One patch we covered was my belief that a one hundred percent dedication to the absolute, provable, logical, demonstrable truth is toxic to the human soul.

It sounds noble enough, in an Enlightened way, but the truth is that we need the ability to lie to ourselves at least a little bit in order to be able to handle the harsh truths of life and maybe sand off their pointier bits for ease of digestion.

Now I am not talking about rampant delusion. That would not be helpful. No, all I am talking about is granting oneself permission to make minor adjustments to the facts or even just altering how you view them in order to make it easier for you to thrive.

I mean, why martyr yourself? Of what use is this Truth? True, it’s necessary to have accurate information about the world, but just how accurate does it have to be? And to how many significant digits?

Surely there is room for small inaccuracies in the service of the greater happiness of the person doing all this Truth-ing?

We cannot choose our own reality but we can and should choose how we see and approach the real world and life in general.

This is the sort of thing those yappy idiots who go on about having the right attitude are getting at. You can choose to always view things in the most positive light possible without it leading to succumbing to delusions of grandeur.

You can fudge the facts a little.

I think it’s also what makes atheism so blankly incomprehensible to the faithful. My God, why would you choose to see the world that way? Why are you making yourself unhappy like that? Wouldn’t you prefer there to be a God?

Objective truth is a positive but like all positives it can turn into a negative when pursued with excessive zeal.

For my whole life, I have been obsessed with finding the Truth. With cutting through all the bullshit both internal and external and peeling back the layers to reveal the really really real reality underneath it all.

And how does one do that? Through analysis, of course. Figuring things out. Making sure to cross-reference everything in order to make sure it all fits together. Pruning the tree of knowledge when necessary, or even lopping off entire branches if contrary evidence of sufficient weight is acquired.

That’s been my bag for as long as I can remember. And I would be lying if I said it didn’t make me feel like I was better that everyone else.

Oh, you weak-minded fools can wander around in your delusional haze but I am a Rugged Intellectual whose powerful, insightful mind can pierce the veil of illusion and reveal unto me the true nature of our reality! I am the one eyed man in the land of the blind! I am the only one who knows what’s REALLY going on. Only I truly SEE!

Big fucking deal.

Oh, there are many advantages to having that one eye. It allows you to make strategic moves that baffle others because they are made with a view of far more of the chess board than most people get. You can act based on far better information than most people have. You can, at times, seem almost magical due to this.

But none of that makes you happy.

Whereas those intellectual peasants out there? They’re happy. Which is why I keep asking this key question : would you rather be right than be happy?

Is the knowledge that you are more “right” than other people enough to keep you warm at night? Or might you be looking with envy at the warm and cozy fires of those delusional fools you feel so superior to?

I will always be a hardcore truth seeker. It’s a drive that goes straight through to my core and is therefore not open for editing.

But that doesn’t mean I have to bleed for it.

More after the break.

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Not your lucky day

A very good bit of furry animation :

It is admittedly not super original, but a story like that is always satisfying even if it is a little bit obvious.

And it’s so well done! I’d love to see the storyboards because every shot is perfect.

And, of course, our protagonist is adorable. And she gets wooed by a handsome fox!

I just love everything about this short. 🙂

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I’ve seen you naked

In fact, I’m naked right now! Ba dum tish.

Patient readers know that I had to learn the hard way that not everyone “sees” other people’s thoughts and intentions and whatnot like I do.

I suppose this metaphorical X-ray vision comes from a combination of two things : a highly insightful and analytical mind, and a great deal of empathy.

As a child I learned that this is not how most people see other people and that, in fact, what was “obvious” to me might be something the person doesn’t even know about themselves let alone know somebody else can see.

That still seems somewhat alien to me. I have trouble imagining what it would be like to have other people basically be unreadable black boxes to me.

I would certainly be a radically different person. Maybe I would have been better off. Maybe I wouldn’t have ended up being the Kid That Knew Too Much.

But it was being raped that started that, really.

That’s what ripped my innocence away and left me exposed to the world in all its horrors at far too young an age.

Innocence serves a purpose. It keeps up from learning things we can’t handle yet.

But my poor little mind was blown wide open at the age of 4 and so from the very start I always knew way more than was good for me.

No wonder I became so analytical. I was trying to make sense of the world. Still am.

And as a result, I knew everything about what a kid was supposed to be like. I couldn’t just innocently follow my instincts and have them guide me forward in my development without me even knowing that was happening.

So the development didn’t happen.

And I grew into the half-baked shell of a man you know today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.