I am quite sleepy as I type these words.

Kept playing my game, Divinity : Original Sin 2 Definitive Edition^[1], up till a bit after 3:30 pm. So far so good. I didn’t feel sleepy then so I didn’t bother with taking a nap before my blogging session and just kept on playing.

But oops, the moment I stopped playing, the tiredness caught up with me and now I wish I was snoozing instead of typing.

Oh well, it’s all part of the job. It has happened before and it will happen again. I should be fine as long as I maintain momentum.

Which is harder than it sounds when I feel like this.

I’ve been mulling over the idea of making peace with my life as it is. It sounds like a great idea. If I just relaxed about my current life and reframed my existence in far less catastrophic terms, I would save myself a lot of stress and frustration and I would be way happier no matter what happens.

Sounds like a deal worth making, doesn’t it?

But I don’t know if I can do it. My anger about my current life is very real and represents a whole galaxy of frustrated human potential that I am too afraid to confront directly because the truth of it all is so very brutal and sad and if I start thinking about all those things I’ve never done and may never do, I might give in to despair.

And not the quietly weeping over things lost kind either. The kind that leads to desperate acts of screaming lunacy.

I don’t want to go to the Bad Place.

Although I dunno. Maybe I could get some serious emotional healing done there. It might be worth the risk that I might just dance too close to the fire.

At least then I might feel something.

That’s one of the main ways that depression leads to not so good behaviour : you become so numb that your nervous system goes into panic mode and makes you desperate to do absolutely anything that might make you feel something.

Me, I am too stable for that shit, for better and for worse. My depression has never included any sort of acting out. I’ve never been a threat to myself or others.

Well, not in action, anyhow. On the inside, well, that’s different. I have been suicidal in the past and it flowed from that exact same sort of desperation.

The kind that makes you want to set yourself on fire just to warm the fuck up.

But no, your stalwart correspondent would never do anything like that. After all, that would either lead to drawing attention to myself, which would be bad, or absolutely nobody noticing or caring about my cries for help, which would be worse.

So I just stay safely locked away inside myself and away from the big mean ol real world and never cry for help in any way at all.

Because when you were the baby left to cry, you learn very early on that there’s no point in crying because nobody’s coming and nobody cares.

Take care of it yourself or do without. Those are your options.

I lean heavily towards doing without. It’s easier.

And all you have to do is withdraw even further from reality in order to get away from your deprivation until you become too numb to care any more.

It’s the perfect system!

Oh, except for not actually leading to my being happy. Only distracted. Absorbed. Absent from reality.

But other than that, it’s flawless.

More after the break.

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On going easy on myself

Let us once more thrust our meaty hands into this tangle of thorns.

So : depression is anger turned inward. I am so hard on myself because I have all this rage that I don’t have an outward outlet for and therefore it can only go inwards.

It’s internalized abuse, and it’s almost beautiful in its brutal efficiency.

And that brings us to the same crossroads that it always does because the only way to get the anger to stop going inwards is to turn it outwards and that means finding a target for my rage that is not myself.

So like… other people. And that complicates things.

I could try to pour it into my politics, I suppose. Belch fire and brimstone over the state of the world. Try to spread my, “billions of us, hundreds of them” message as far and wide as I can in order to get a good healthy revolution going.

They can only wreck the world with their ignorance, decadence, and greed if we remain isolated individuals too wrapped up in our own lives and worried about our own comfort and convenience to ever unite and take them on.

If we band together – even a tiny percentage of us would be millions of people – there is absolutely nothing they can do to stop us and we can rewrite the rules however we like.

You wouldn’t even have to do much. Just show up and demonstrate. If we do that in large enough numbers, the rich and the powerful will get the message.

It’s justice or the guillotine, motherfuckers.

So yeah, I guess I could get it out that way. Who knows, I might just save the world with my extraordinary powers of oratory.

Of course, that would require making videos and being seen.

I watched a video about the French Revolution recently and I was struck by how Marat, a man with some kind of terrible skin disease that meant he had to spend all his time in the bathtub, nevertheless played a crucial part in the Revolution simply through writing.

I take a certain degree of inspiration from that example, though not, of course, from the bloodthirstiness of his politics.

I mean, I’ve got a computer and the internet. I can get my message out there way more easily than Marat penning his revolutionary newsletter.

The people need me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve stumbled upon a YouTube series that is so amazing that I can’t believe it exists.

It’s called Toon’d In and it’s all about legendary voice actors being interviewed by the greatest living voice actor of all time, Jim Fucking Cummings.

Aka Tigger, Minsc from Baldur’s Gate (the mostly lovable psychopathic barbarian ever), Fat Cat from Chip n’ Dale Rescue Rangers, and literally over a thousand other toles.

Just typing that out makes me feel a trifle peak’d. I am marking like a bitch over this. For a cartoon fan like myself, these people are practically gods.

I would definitely put these voice actors on my fairly short list of people whom, if I were to meet them, there is no way I would be able to be cool about it.

I mean, he interviewed Tress MacNeille! Babs Bunny herself!

I mean, just look at all those voices! Mom from Futurama, Dot Warner from Animaniacs, Gadget from Rescue Rangers, the crazy cat lady, Principal Skinner’s mother Agnes, and one of Bart’s bullies from the Simpsons, and many more roles, mostly from things I don’t watch and don’t care about.

And I am almost as excited to be watching Jim talk to the incredibly Keith David, who has done many, many roles with that super sexy voice of his (could melt the panties right off me, no problem) but most of all, to me, he’s the voice of my hard crush, Goliath from Disney’s The Gargoyles.

He’s my kind of hunky (broad shouldered), he’s smart, he’s wise, he’s sensitive, he’s a great leader, he has a deep and silky smooth voice, and he even has a tail.

He’s basically a much more huggable (and humpable) Optimus Prime.

Oh right. So here’s Keith David I guess.

I mean, you should see all the Tiny Toons Rule 34 stuff I got.

Anyhow, the show is amazing. I am gloriously geeking out. And the great thing is that as it is mostly audio, I can listen to it while I am lying down, or while I am doing a crossword in my web browser, or whatever.

Such podcast like things are not really compatible with more serious games like the ISO RPGs I favour because those take up way too much mental bandwidth and I am terrible at multitasking things like that.

For some reason, I can do crosswords just fine. Less taxing, I guess.

Hmmm. Accord to the IMDB, Tiny Toons started in 1990. But I could have sworn I watched it with my friends in junior high. But I was 17 in 1990.

Minor factual Mandela effect, I guess.

Anyhow, the show is burned deep into my brain. There’s just something about it that affects me far more deeply than other animated series.

Even shows I love, like Transformers and the original TNMT or even my beloved Spider Man And His Amazing Friends, don’t have the kind of emotional hooks in me that Tiny Toons does. It’s like the show took place in this magical toon-y world that was so much more colorful and vibrant and fun than real life.

I never felt that way about the Animaniacs or Freakazoid.

The closest show I can think of that had that kind of effect on me is Road Rovers, a sadly obscure one season show about a team of superhero dogs.

I got Rule 34 of them too, of course.

Look, it’s how I express my devotion and/or perversion and/or gonads!

More after the break.

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Chipping away at the ice

That’s what I feel like I am doing lately. Chipping away at the cold fear and mindless avoidance that keeps me down and holds me back.

Part of that is the usual attempts to build up my ego and my confidence. I keep reminding myself that I am a person of extraordinary abilities and therefore I really could be out there wowing the world with my wizardry if I wanted to be.

And I do want to be out there kicking names and taking ass.

But I also don’t. I think the fundamental crux of the crossroads upon which I am crucified is a deep conflict between what the bright and happy, healthy part of me wants and what the deep down crazy and broken part of me wants.

That broken part of me can’t accept that I want to make myself visible. It thinks that the only way I can be safe is to remain undetected, like I’m evading arrest, and so it views any activity which attracts attention to me is the worst kind of madness.

And unfortunately, that broken part of me operates on a much deeper level than the healthy part of me and therefore it retains a death grip on my soul that gives it unlimited veto power over all potential actions.

And it vetoes pretty much everything except my usual routine.

Maybe the smart money is in making peace with my life as it is now. Clearly the feeling of constant crisis and desperation isn’t doing me any good. All it does is reinforce my tendency to withdraw from everything by creating a harsh inner climate from which my usual bullshit life is the only shelter.

There I go again, slagging my life and thus myself.

There has to be a healthier way to channel my discontent. It would be far more sane if I could take that energy and use it to escape this gravity well, but it’s not that simple.

The truth is that it’s hard for any inner or outer motivation to get me to do anything. My inertia is fierce. And it’s an inertia made of that deep primal fear.

I have to make peace with being seen.

I’m an incredible person who needs to get out there and shine.

I have this enormous personality that needs to be expressed because it’s miserable all cooped up inside me. .

I know damn well I’d be a healthier, happy, saner man if I expressed myself more.

But I’m scared.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s not easy being a wizard.

That’s what you basically are when you are blessed with a very high IQ. The basic, gut-level definition of magic is “the ability to do what seems impossible or otherwise inexplicable” and that is what a very high IQ lets you do.

In fact, it comes naturally to you.

Note that I am not talking about the well known link between high intelligence and social awkwardness and/or the autism spectrum. That’s a topic for another time.

No, I am talking about my own brand of spookiness, which has no definition or diagnosis that I know of.

I’m talking about the kind of smarts that lets you intellectually dominate others with such smooth ease that you don’t even know you’re doing it. The kind that leads to doing astounding things like learning to read at the age of 3. Or being a straight A student without ever having to study, which most people would consider impossible. Or being a small child who talks like a tiny professor.

You can see where I’m going with this.

That sort of thing weirds people out, and makes you seem superhuman and therefore not entirely human. Even if you’re as personable and friendly as I am, you are still going to put out a strangely chilly vibe no matter what you do.

In fact, the contrast between my warm demeanor and my chilly intellect makes me all the weirder, even if you subtract my social anxiety making me want to run away while still putting on a friendly façade.

This is why I keep circling back to the question of whether or not I would be better off being the typical arrogant and superior neckbeard that lurks within me. At least then I would be sending signals that people could recognize and I would fit within a known archetype that let people feel like they know how to deal with me.

And there’s something to be said for taking what I’ll call a challenging attitude toward the world, like you’re just daring the world to knock that chip off your shoulder.

Nothing printable, of course, but still, there’s something to be said.

Instead, my natural instinct seems to be to remain enigmatic. Perhaps I suffer from a strange compulsion to force people to get to know me for me, without the help of labels.

Not that there’s any labels that really stick to me anyhow. I am a very unique dude, for better and for worse, so I defy categorization without even trying.

And that’s creepy.

For the most part, people want to be able to file you away in an already well known folder in their mind. They don’t want to have to keep thinking about who you are and what you might say or do. It’s taxing.

And like I said once long ago in this space, if they can’t label you, they can’t predict you and therefore can’t feel safe around you.

At least, on a basic intuitive sense. The smarter type people will register that you are weird but friendly and harmless and even kind of fun to be around.

But that pesky high IQ threatens people, and it threatens the smarter types most of all, and that can lead to trouble no matter how hard I try to be nonthreatening.

The fact that I’m a 6’1″ behemoth doesn’t help either, of course. Some people will hate you just for making them feel small.

That goes for the intellect too, come to think of it.

Then there’s peoples instinctive hatred of weak leaders. Intelligence is a dominant trait and therefore a non-dominant intelligent person reads as a weak leader to people and arouses their contempt.

This is the instinct that causes younger, stronger leaders to push out weak ones, and for the rest of the tribe to support that.

This is, I think, at the core of all nerd-bashing.

And a depressingly large amount of politics, come to think of it.

More after the break.

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Liberals with alpha energy

The world is in desperate need of more of them.

And that will require more than just putting the call out. It will take a fundamental realignment of how liberalism works and how liberals think and see themselves.

Right now, by default, people with strong alpha energy are not welcome in liberal circles. Liberals think they do not wish to be led and do not need a leader and anyone who might fill that role will be rejected as being too angry, confident, cocky, too unwilling to compromise, too pragmatic, too strident, or just plain not “nice” enough.

That’s why true progress requires a leader with incredible oratory charisma like Barack Obama or JFK, and even then there’s no guarantee they will actually do anything.

They might just be like Obama or Bill Clinton, charismatic but lazy and still too “soft” and corrupt to b willing to fight to change things now that they themselves are at the top.

It’s always easier to do nothing. Nothing is always the easiest option. And why shake the tree when you’ve finally made it to the top branch?

That’s why the world needs more people like Bernie Sanders. He’s as liberal as they come – besides me, of course – but he is also an unrelenting prick who can and will pound away at the exact same issues over and over again and attack any and all who are standing in the way of progress until the easiest thing is to give him what he wants.

That’s the kind of person who can truly change things.

And that’s also the kind of person liberals reject as not being “nice”.

There’s a reason he had to toil alone in the wilderness of politics for all those years before trying to change the system from within.

And even now, there’s plenty of liberals who want to reject him for not “playing ball” or understanding that the real job of a liberal politician is to placate the herd so that they don’t notice when the true powers that be shear them.

Right now, we’re lucky. We’re in the exact kind of age where we kill the dinosaurs of the old guard so that the next generation can take over and actually change things. Dipshits like Chuck Schumer and the rest of the paddle-waving stooges at the top level of Democratic politicians are enraging the left wing masses with their limp wristed and ineffectual opposition to Trump’s insanity and pretty soon that is going to boil over into some kind of radical action that will make Schumer and the rest realized that their only options are to get out of the way… or get run over.

Come to think of it, I’m a liberal with alpha oratory energy.

I should probably do something with that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I find it extremely gratifying to see businesses everywhere polishing up their Canadian bona fides and putting them on display for the world to see.

Like, takes everyone’s favorite clown shack McDonald’s. In the drive-thru line at McD’s today, they had a sign that emphasized that they use 100 percent Canadian beef, 100 percent Canadian chicken, 100 percent Canadian eggs, and 100 percent Canadian potatoes. And that was very cool.

And on the radio, I heard advertiser after advertiser emphasize their Canadian-ness, thus assuring us patriotic Canadians that we can shop there with a clear conscience

And the vast majority of Canadians are patriotic. 80 percent of Canadians say they are partially or completely boycotting American products, and you know what?

That is a metric fuckton of people. 33.3 million or thereabouts. California has a population just shy of 40 million.

So the Americans have lost most of a California of market.

The irony is that Trump’s flaccid threats and whiny tariffs are making both the Canadian identity and the Canadian economy much, much stronger.

We are not a loud or boastful people but we have our own quiet, stubborn pride that makes us unflappable in conflict and unstoppable in war.

Not that I expect the USA to declare war on us. Trump doesn’t have even one lousy percent of the balls it would take to do that.

And very few Americans, both in and out of the active military, are going to be willing to wage war on us.

There is enormous soft power in being the nice guy everyone likes. That’s something cretinous barbarians like Trump will never understand. There is absolutely no chance that any nation on Earth would side with Trump against us.

Not even Russia. Or North Korea. Even Kim Jong Un would be like, “dude, stop, that’s just plain crazy. It’s making you look like a dick. ”

It’s like picking on the retarded kid everyone loves.

Not that I am saying we’re a retarded nation, just that we’re universally loved and seen as plucky, scrappy little guys going up against the bullying braggarts down south.

Plus, to be honest, we go hard in war and other conflict.

Because once we decided we’re going to fight, we go’er. Head down, straight ahead, driving straight to the goal, no hesitation and no doubts, we fucking go’er.

And woe betide whoever incurs the wrath of the quiet, patient man. Canadians have no problem pulling together when the chips are down. None of us are trying to be heroes and we are far more capable of forming a consensus that our American cousins.

One thing I want to make clear though : I have no problem with America. I know that Trump does not represent how they really feel.

Even those who voted for him and continue to support him – and there’s fewer of them every day – don’t agree with the shit he says, which is why their Fox News overlords try to explain that shit away rather than trying to convince the flock it’s true.

Face it, Little Donnie, it’s way, way too late to change anyone’s mind about Putin. When he invaded Ukraine global consensus was swift and complete : Putin is an evil aggressor and the attack on Ukraine was unjustified and unjustifiable and anyone who sides with him is evil too.

And that’s something even conservatives agree on. Your people, Little Donnie, have a very black and white way of seeing the world that is extremely resistant to change, and they have completely accepted that Putin is evil for years now, and not even you can change their minds on that.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, Canada.

My own case has a few annoying complexities, because I want to buy Canadian in all things and that’s easy when it comes to restaurants but it gets much trickier when I go to buy my groceries.

I am clearly going to have to research where all my usual stuff comes from.

You see that, Little Donnie? You’re driving me to do research.

And I hate doing research.

But I hate being a traitor more.

More after the break.

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The other foot

Had my ortho shoe appointment today.

Talked things over with Nikki (formerly known as Jackie). Apparently, the shoes are supposed to go all loose when worn because they are meant to fit like slippers, not regular shoes. She gave me those shoes because I said I’d be wearing them at home.

Still working on that. They’re definitely not on my feet right now. Truth is that when I come home from being out and sit down with the shoes still on, after a little while my feet start to hurt, and so I take them off and am not eager to put them back on.

Now I know that when I walk, or even stand for a while, walker or no, my feet swell up. Just another fun side effect of exceeding the weight specifications for the human body.

In other words, being obese.

So if I have been out and on my feet (the two are inextricably linked), my feet are going to be swollen and distorted. That part makes sense.

And as I am sitting down again, they are going to go back to something like normal. That part also makes sense.

But why does that make my feet hurt? You’d think the swelling going down would make my shoes fit better, not worse.

Hmmm. Unless they were swollen when she took the original castings of my feet, which, seeing as I had recently walked from the car to Ortho, they might have been.

Anyhow, I complained about the loose fit and the lack of ankle support, and she made some adjustments to the shoes and they fit better now.

She couldn’t give me really good ankle support without basically giving me ankle bracers, and the Province wouldn’t pay for those anyhow.

So I still have weak ankles that tend to make my feet splay uncomfortably, and that’s something I will have to deal with.

Perhaps there’s exercises I can do to build them up.

That’s the update for today. Stayed tuned for more thrilling adventures.

Oh! And I ordered new glasses, finally.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This is pretty much it.

Well, this and playing video games. Writing my daily words is the closest thing I have to productivity and while I love each and every one of my readers, there are never going to be very many of them so it’s not that close to productive at all.

I mean, technically, even I don’t read it. I just write it.

I also hang out with my fuzzy friends on Tapestries, which is also marginally productive in that there’s a lot of people there who are happy to see me when I’m around and into whose life I hope I bring a little sunshine.

So I make a few people’s lives better that way too.

And that gives me a model for what a socially functional me would look like. And he’d be a pretty amazing guy, and way more extroverted than the current version of me.

i honestly think that in another timeline, I would have excelled at “personality” jobs like salesman, product rep, or marketing.

Bit late for that now. Though I could still be a very likeable cashier/clerk, like I was when I worked for my late uncle Sonny.

Or a receptionist, I suppose, or any number of sit down office jobs. Any job that does not involve much standing.

I guess if I had a job to do, I’d have to get a wheelchair. My walker would not cut it, because even with it, my travel range is very short.

I mean, going to the back of a Shopper’s Drug Mart and back damn near killed me, and I had a rest in one of their comfy chairs half way through that.

Man that was depressing.

I assume I’d have a lot more range in a wheelchair, especially if it was electric. And with more mobility, I’d have more freedom too.

I might even regain my ability to go places by myself!

Anyhow, where was I? Oh right, what I do with my life.

As little as possible, or so it seems sometime.

And a big part of that comes from that large portion of me that is asleep, and has been asleep ever since I was raped.

And it does not want to wake up. It is completely convinced that the real world means death, and worse than death. Destruction. Annihilation. The end of all ends.

Attached to that is also the deep down fear of overstimulation and overloading and being overwhelmed that I mentioned yesterday.

Just thinking about it makes my social anxiety stir restlessly in its semi-slumber.

And I know that’s crazy. So am I. I know that these fears that hold me down are just phantoms of my unbalanced mind and that very little of the dire consequences to my emotional state it predicts are actually likely to happen.

I mean, maybe I would end up feeling overwhelmed and anxious and lost, like Walter from Fringe in Chinatown. Maybe, like him, I would find myself stranded in the chaos and end up having to call upon the kindness of strangers just to be able to call someone to come rescue me.

I’m mentally ill. My world does not make sense, nor is it justifiable. I am beset by delusions of belief.

Anyhow. maybe I would end up in Anxiety Hell. I can deal with that. I know it will pass if I just let it run its course. There are worse things in life than freaking out.

Plus I have Xanax. Wonderful, soothing, calming Xanax, which appears to make me chemically incapable of anxiety.

I wouldn’t want to take it all the time but now and then it’s great.

So yeah, maybe I would end up totally freaking out. But I have been there before and I survived it. It was really unpleasant but nothing bad happened to me as a result.

So maybe my life is not as proscribed as I thought it was.

Maybe I’m only as limited as I want to be.

Because the truth is, right now, this is all I can handle.

More after the break

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Facing the music

So basically, I need to make peace with and prepare for the fact that when I open that door, all the loudness and craziness and overstimulation of the world is going to hit me like a physical force.

So to speak.

At least at first. Like I’ve said before, I will acclimatize to the higher stimulation level if I just hang in there and try not to fight it.

It’s amazing what our greater nervous system can do if we can just get our stupid conscious minds to stop trying to micromanage everything.

Because it doesn’t know what the fuck it’s doing.

I would try it without the Xanax first, whatever it is I choose to make my first foray into the world outside of my grotty little grotto.

It will probably be YouTube. That seems like the next logical step in my progression as a communicator and articulator and, dare I say, pundit.

I really want to be a pundit.

It feels like that’s where I belong. Basically make myself a one man Daily Show, riffing off the news and sharing my unusual views.

I want to be like my (not unqualified) hero, Martin Luther, and be a voice that decries the hypocrisy, bullshit, and willing ignorance of my time and strips all pretense of justification or legitimacy or even morality from the base evils of the world.

And if I could pull that off, people will revere me because I was the one who put what they were feeling into words for them and thus made things so much clearer to them.

And that is when people can act on those feelings. Clarity brings action. Now they know exactly what needs to be done. No hesitation, no doubt.

And it doesn’t matter if I don’t have a format or a focus because the real product is me. My personality, my perspective, my insights, and of course, my hilarious jokes.

Oh and one more thing : my passion.

I shed the light that burns.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I know, let’s grapple with the meaninglessness of my existence.

I just finished a satisfying session of the game I am currently playing, Divinity : Original Sin 2, a title which, like in the previous title, has absolutely nothing to do with the game.

Someone just thought it sounded cool, I guess.

Anyhow, I enjoyed playing the game, like I always do, but the voice in my head that incredulously asks, “So this is it? This is all we’re going to do with our day?” is getting louder and harder to ignore.

And that’s probably a good thing. If it gets loud enough, I will have no choice but to give it what it wants and what it wants is for me to do something productive with my time.

Something with a result. A result that I can look at and say, “I did that. I made that. I accomplished that. My life has some sort of point. I’m not just a passive victim lying on the side of the road in life any more. I’m part of things. I amount. I count. ”

As you can see, I’m a desperate man. And kind of pathetic.

So what’s keeping me from putting down the games and picking up, say, a video editor?

I think the best place to start with that is that video games are my security blanket. And my shelter. I am deep down terrified of facing the real world outside of them.

That big bad world where I have to make decisions and figure out what I want to do and choose amongst the billions of options I have at my disposal at any moment and be a person and deal with a much higher stimulation level without freaking out and maybe even deal with other human beings.

As long as I keep compulsively filling ever spare moment with video games – keep living like my entire life is a video game playtime optimization exercise – I don’t have to face any of that crap, or anything else in reality for that matter.

It’s one mother of a maladaptive coping mechanism. And it’s had me locked in place with no chance of escape to a meaningful life for a very long time.

And I am so tired of it. Yet the truth is that I am terrified of life on the outside. It’s fear that keeps me locked away in this icy dungeon of meaningless stasis.

But is it really a prison if I know I can walk out of it at any time and it’s only fear of the outside world that is keeping me here?

Yes and no.

Whether it’s fear, a lock, or a ball and chain, if you are trapped, you’re trapped. If you don’t feel like you can leave, you’re right.

And so far I haven’t been able to summon up even one percent of the sheer grit required to force my way through that impermeable curtain of fear so that I can make a new home for myself on the other side.

Or at least get used to the fear.

I think that, deep down, I know that when I cross that Rubicon, some deep and very tender part of me will have to die and that’s going to really fucking hurt.

And I guess that at least part of that is my remaining innocence. It’s a battered and dented old shield but I am still hiding behind it.

But it requires me to remain uninvolved and detached from everything and everyone.

And I am starting to think it just ain’t worth it.

More after the break.

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One toe over the line

Faintly amused by the fact that Part 1 ended up being exactly 601 words, one word over the goal I set for Part 1 each day.

Feeling fine physically but emotionally I feel sort of out of sync. I suppose I am in one of my rumination phases where I struggle with some aspect of myself on such a deep level that all my conscious mind knows is that there’s something vaguely wrong.

About being detached et al : I know that one of the things that keeps me hiding away is the fear of too many things coming at me all at once.

Fear of overwhelm, in other words.

And I mean, sure, that’s a possibility, especially when I have just emerged from my cave. But there’s no need to take on the whole world right away.

I can linger in the doorway while I adjust to the outside world.

Then again, I opened that door months ago and I still haven’t gone through. And I mean, the fresh air and sunshine are nice but the idea originally was that this would only be a prelude to, ya know, actually going out there.

I’m working on it.

It all comes down to energies, really. My lowered Paxil dose is loosening me up and giving me access to more of my own life force as the ice sheets of numbness retreat.

The trick now is to learn to use those energies to support my mood. There is nothing wrong with lifting yourself up a priori to any particular justification for happiness and indeed, I think being emotionally healthy requires it.

Normal people do it subconsciously. Depressed folk like myself don’t. Either we never had this self-correcting mechanism or ours got broken by trauma somewhere along the way. Either way, we are broken.

It’s almost like we’re daring the world to make us happy. Like on some deep and completely irrational level we’re forcing the world to make the first move so that we don’t have to take the risk of opening ourselves up to it.

Look, I said it was irrational.

At some point you have to give up, open yourself up, and trust the universe to, at minimum, not be actively hostile towards you.

To not be out to get you, in other words.

And that’s a lot of ask of the wounded ones like myself. As far as we know, being closed off like a clam in its shell is what has been keeping us “safe” all these years.

But of course, you’d have to open up to find out if that’s true, wouldn’t you?

And that’s the fix I’m in.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Or rather, on winning the argument. Not the same thing.

Part of being the giant genius that I am is that I can outmaneuver, outmuscle, outthink, and basically outdo anyone at all in any argument or discussion whenever I like.

In fact, it’s hard for me not to. I often don’t know my own strength and my shield of innocence tends to blind me to the effect I am having on others when I effortlessly and unknowingly utterly dominate them in what should be a friendly conversation.

Instead, I seem like I am going for the jugular, and in a way I am because my mind lunges for the heart of whatever I am thinking about and cuts right to the very core of an issue and that can have more or less the same effect.

I know that I should be a gentler giant. But I honestly don’t know how.

I just do what comes naturally to me. It’s what I have done for my whole life. As far s I can tell, from my point of view, I really am just doing what everyone else is doing.

But the rules are different for giants.

Which brings me back to the issue of role models. I don’t have anyone I can look to as an example of how to be a nice and responsible giant. I don’t know how to deal with people with normal IQs without thoughtlessly shoving them aside, pinning them to the wall, or pinning them down with my logic beams.

So to speak.

When I try to imagine what operating with the correct level of gentleness would be like, all I can see is me talking down to people like they are children.

And even assuming I could somehow do that without people noticing – which is highly doubtful given my social cluelessness – I would find it deeply appalling to do.

I don’t want to see everyday people as children. I loathe the very idea of looking down on people from Olympian heights. I don’t want to be way up on the mountaintop, I want to be down to Earth with the people.

For fuck’s sake, my connection to the rest of humanity is already slender. I can’t afford to sever whatever life giving umbilicus that remains.

But what other options do I have? It’s either continue to accidentally harm people or accept that I am not like them and end up flying intro the stratosphere where I will most likely freeze to death, or starve, or die of lack of oxygen.

I want to be more connected to others, not less. And that very much includes “normal” people. They might not be as bright as me but I still could learn a lot from them.

Like how to be happy, for instance. Or at least how to be human.

I feel like this overweaning intellect of mine has been a wedge between me and others for my entire life and I don’t know who I would be without it.

But I still don’t know what to do with all these brains I got.

The only conclusion I can come to about all this is to fall back on the default instruction of our entire culture and say that I should just be the best version of myself that I can be and if the world can’t handle that, tough.

I don’t like that conclusion at all, but it’s all that I’ve got.

More after the break.

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Okay, prepare yourself for some God-tier level nerdity.

And that INCLUDES THE ENGINE! Holy SHIT!

It has a top speed of 17 mph, though it’s going a mere 13 mph in the video because the makers were afraid a higher speed would make it vibrate apart.

And obviously the wheels are not LEGO.

But still, pretty cool, huh?

My latest malady

And tonight’s featured player is… the inner ear!

I have been experiencing motion related dizziness lately.

It mostly happens when I stop moving. That’s when things slosh around inside my head and make me feel very dizzy and nauseous.

Every little fucking thing makes me nauseous.

I’m sure that this too shall pass, just like all my other ailments. It’s probably just one of the many ways my body manifests dehydration and once I get enough fluids in me things will go back to “normal”.

But the stakes of my hydration game are harsh, man. If I stop drinking water for more than an hour I start getting sick in one way or another.

So I am in the process of programming my brain to respond to any form of my feeling unwell, however seemingly unrelated to hydration, by immediately filling my water glass and taking a mighty swig.

If I am truly dehydrated, that swig will turn into a long series of gulps as I drink like half a liter of water all in one go because suddenly my body is like, “Water! This is what I need! Better fill up on it now, before this idiot forgets again. ”

My body doesn’t trust the brain to look after it properly, and for good reason.

But this hydration thing is starting to really worry me. This game should not be so stark. I shouldn’t constantly be only one sweaty nap away from feeling seriously ill.

That can’t possibly be normal.

I looked it up and my pharmacist and GP are in the clear because there are no official listed interactions between Metformin and Jardiance.

But still, some literature says that one of Jardiance’s listed side effects is dehydration, and that some people find that being on Metformin makes that side effect worse.

So to be honest, I would rather just stop taking Metformin. But I am, more often than not, wise enough to know I should not just take myself off a medication because I think it sounds like a good idea.

Especially not without telling my GP.

I should probably at least talk to my pharmacist, Simon, about it. He seemed to think that when one goes on Jardiance one is usually taken off Metformin at one point.

Maybe I should Google it some more.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today, I have been pondering the question of what it’s like to be around someone with a massive mind like mine.

Because I know that, despite my delusions of humility. I radiate intelligence like it’s my own personal electromagnetic field. It’s a strong part of why I have such a strong presence and why my attention can be such an intense experience.

I have thus far lived my life in a kind of holy ignorance of this effect on others. I go through life as if I was just another person and try, in my own highly eccentric fashion, to get along with and relate to average, everyday people.

But I’m not one of them. I’m a giant. And I am beginning to think that the smart thing for me to do is to concentrate on being a friendly giant instead of squishing myself down to try to pass as human.

And fail miserably, of course. It’s pathetic, really.

It’s true that I don’t know what I really am. I was talking about this with Doc Costin recently, I know that I am not autistic and yet autism is the closest thing I have to a label or a diagnosis for why I am so damned weird, and always have been.

So calling myself a giant makes as much sense as anything else, really.

Anyhow. About what it’s like to be around me. I can only guess that it can be kind of freaky, especially because I send such mixed messages.

That magnetic field of mine sends a very clear message of power. But like a lot of large people, I have invested a certain amount of my potential into appearing friendly and harmless so I don’t scare people.

That and my strange combination of charisma and shyness must make it potentially quite confusing to be around me.

Not to mention my tendency to talk about things other people don’t understand as I try to convey opinions and observations that are simply beyond their ken.

I do wonder sometimes what would happen if I simply forgot about whether people will understand me or not and just concentrated on speaking my truth, uncut and unfiltered.

But no. I am strongly driven to express myself and that requires someone to actually be able to pick up what I am putting out.

Some day, though. Maybe.

I guess I have never really learned to relate to normal everyday people because I didn’t want to end up talking down to them, which is kind of inevitable when you’re a giant.

The idea of them trying to talk up to me is a nonstarter. I mean, the logical inversion is right there in the language but that’s just not how these things work.

Part of the problem with the complex signals I emit is that people can’t tell if I am a threat or not. In some ways I am and in others I’m not.

I try really hard not to be. I’m not looking to hurt anybody. I don’t throw my intellectual weight around. My cloak of innocence keeps me from really noticing it when someone is challenging me for dominance or whatever. I can’t say I have ever set out to deliberately outcompete someone socially.

But that’s more a testament to what a recluse I am, not to my personal humility.

If I had my way, all my interactions with others would be gentle and pleasant and friendly and understanding and kindly and good.

But that gets kinda complicated when you’re a freaking giant.

Maybe I just need to accept that I am a special little hothouse flower and that means I have to find my own way to make it in this mundane world.

The world ain’t built for people like me, whatever I am.

More after the break.

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More on gigantism

I have never wanted to be “better” than others.

On any level. Don’t get me wrong, I dream of extremely high levels of achievement – the sky is the limit, really, I wanna fix the world – but I do not think of that in terms of putting anybody else down.

Maybe I would feel differently, though, if I had not always been so effortlessly dominant.

Intellectually, I mean. I have never met another person who is definitively smarter than me – not even as a child. I have spent my whole life feeling awkward and embarrassed about how I tower over others in the realm of the mind and it requires no more effort on my part to be that way than it takes for me to be tall.

It’s just how I am.

I know for a fact that I have dominated others with my verbal muscle and mental might without even knowing I was doing it. From my point of view, I was just participating in the conversation like everybody else, and if I wanted to I could plausibly maintain that posture and declare that I have no idea what people are talking about when they tell me I need to dial it back and I’m “just doing what everyone else is doing”!

But that would be like Superman saying, “What? I just tried out for the football team like any other high school guy!”.

Yeah but you know better, Clark.

My claim of innocence would be similarly disingenuous. And yet, to be honest, I still don’t know where that leaves me.

How should a mental giant like me behave? What should my attitude towards the world and myself be? What is my role in society?

The problem is that I have no role models. There’s nobody else like me in the world, as far as I can tell. I am a one of creation, the product of a very specific and extreme set of parameters unlikely to be repeated in any other individual.

I get along good with my fellow nerds, especially, of course, Joe, Julian, and Felicity, who mean more to me than I could possibly convey.

And I am humbled by their willingness to put up with a great lumbering beast like myself. I know that they are not exactly immune to my electromagnetic field but, thank God, they stuck with me long enough to get used to it.

But even among my fellow nerds, I stick out. I am the oddest of ducks, and it’s hard for me to imagine that a tribe exists where I would feel at home.

I just want one where I can feel useful, at least.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Most of us who have been to college are at least passingly familiar with the philosophical idea that to become wise, you must admit that you know nothing.

Not literally, of course. In the sense that one opens one’s mind to the idea that anything you know might be false. An illusion. A lie. A phantom of the mind.

This prepares the student to learn new things, and unlearn old ones. A better way to phrase it might be that you must admit that you know nothing for certain.

But telling young, intelligent people that they know nothing really grabs their attention.

Anyhow, for intelligent and capable people, the idea of questioning everything you think you know in search of errors to correct is a bracing but tolerable idea.

But how much deeper does it cut to admit that you know nothing about yourself?

The person you think you are – the one you think you know – is nothing but a theory based on what you have observed about yourself.

When you look in the mirror, you don’t see yourself – you see an image of yourself, and your idea of who and what you are is just as superficial.

The real you is the person looking at the mirror. And you can’t get to know who you really are until you turn away from the mirror of the false self and look at the world as it truly is, with your own eyes, from your own unique perspective.

That’s the whole deal behind people going on a long journey to “find themselves”. Through ordeal, exploration, and adventure, the false self is stripped away, letting the true self underneath come to the surface so you can get to know yourself.

Luckily, most young people do this instinctively, on one level or another. Whether it’s backpacking through Peru or just moving out of the suburbs and into the city or anything in between, the real life hero’s journey requires leaving behind all you think you know about yourself from your childhood and finding out who the heck you really are.

Not me, of course, but I’m special.

As are, I suspect, a lot of us other failure to launch types. We never made it to that stage of life. That’s why we didn’t launch.

That’s just another in the vast array of life stages I completely failed to complete. Heck, most of them I never even started. It’s like my intellect was so advanced that it soaked up all the human potential meant for literally everything else.

That’s why I sometimes feel like this big brain of mind is more of a parasite than a symbiote. Like I am some kind of deformed freak stuck lugging this massive mind around without any notion of what the hell to do with it.

Unfortunately, there’s no such thing as a “mental freak show”. Nobody is going to pay to see the Amazing Fruvous and his Magical Brain.

I’ll figure something out eventually. All this power must be worth money to somebody.

Anyhow, issues of selfhood have been on my mind lately because I have a very strong feeling that I don’t know myself at all and that the way forward for me is going to require me to surrender a great deal of what I think I know about myself in order to make room for a newer, better, truer idea of who I am to bloom.

I don’t know who I am. For all I know, I might be anybody. I have some things I think I know about who I am, but I could be completely wrong. Anything anyone, including me, thinks they know about who I am might turn out to be completely wrong.

Even the things I rather like about myself.

But the purification of self is beginning, and I don’t who I’ll be when it’s done.

But I think he’ll be a pretty cool guy.

More after the break.

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A post scarcity world

I should probably finish watching the video before talking about it, but meh.

And there’s something our host and narrator says that set me off, he said that in our world, everything is about money.

And that is simply not true. But the capitalist delusion that creates that impression is the main factor in why people fail so often when they try to imagine post-scarcity.

Actually, almost none of what most of us do every day is about money. Yes, we need to get paid for our labour in order to live, but for most people in most jobs there is no direct relationship between how much they work and how much they make.

So every day except payday, and most of payday too, what makes people do their job is not money, it’s the fact that it’s their job. Their responsibility. If they don’t do it, people will get mad at them and they will get in trouble. And the pseudo-tribe that forms in every single workplace will disapprove of them and they will lose status.

And that would be exactly the same in a post-scarcity future.

Think about it. If technology made food, shelter, electricity, et al one percent of the price that it is now, you would not have to work to live.

But people WOULD still work. We are born to work. Our social instincts demand that we contribute to the collective. Work gives us far more than mere income. It gives us purpose, direction, organization, focus, an outlet for our energies and our abilities, and a place in society as a worthy citizen.

Sure, the 90 plus percent of the world with jobs often thinks that if they didn’t need money to live, it would be like a permanent vacation.

But vacations are rest and rest is only meaningful when contrasted with effort. You have to be resting from something. Resting after something.

I am sure every Federation citizen could spend all day on the Holodeck and never do a single bit of work. And I am sure some do.

But I am even more sure that most people don’t.

Because take it from me, long term unemployment rots the soul.

Human beings are not born to remain idle. We need jobs not just to live but to give our days on other some kind of meaning.

And money doesn’t even really enter into it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m beginning to worry about how easily I become dehydrated.

I followed a hunch and asked Microsoft Co-Pilot (which is my Jesus) whether there’s a link between Jardiance and dehydration, and yup.

I figured there might be because Jardiance’s whole deal is that it removes excess blood sugar from your bloodstream by passing it into your urine via controlled ketosis, ergo it might lead to increased urine production and thence increased hydration demand.

Apparently the dehydrating effect is particularly strong if Jardiance is taken at the same time as good ol Metformin, and hello, yeah, I take that too.

Seems like that shit might be contraindicated. Ain’t that a hoot.

That would explain why my pharmacist, Simon, seemed surprised that I was on both Jardiance and Metformin, and mumbled something about how usually when they start you on Jardiance… then trailed off.

You’d think either he or Doctor Chao would have put a stop to this. It’s their job to know about shit like drug interactions. I shouldn’t have to consult AI to learn about this.

Oh, and here’s some of the symptoms of severe dehydration :

Rapid Heartbeat  : Yup, experienced that during my recent bad patch.
Rapid Breathing : Yeah, that too.
Dizziness : So bad I couldn’t even turn my head without the room spinning.
Confusion or Irritability  : Lots of confusion. Probably would have had irritability too if anyone had bugged me.
Skin Inelasticity : Aka skin that doesn’t bounce back when deformed or pressed against something. Yup. Was kinda weirded out when the impression of a McD’s bag I accidentally sat on stayed on my ass for like, an hour.

So it would seem that my theory that recent spate of ill health was drive by dehydration was right on the money.

Now I just need to program my brain to remember that when I see or experience things like that. it is an emergency and I need to hydrate NOW.

Oh well. Like I was telling Doc Costin today, part of the problem with my recent run in with illness is that my judgment, never great in the first place, is one of the first things to go when I am sick or scared.

Hence my never making it to the ER. Yes, going to the ER or UC would have been the smart thing to do, but when I was feeling really bad, the last thing I wanted to do was get dressed and get my butt to the car and then out of the car to deal with the ER (or UC) and then wait God knows how long in a waiting room before they can get around to seeing a low triage priority case like mine.

And even when they finally saw me, there’s a fifty percent chance that after all that waiting and them running tests on me and so on, they would have just told me that they couldn’t find anything wrong with me then sent me home.

So yeah. Going to the ER or UC would have been the objectively sensible thing to do.

But I didn’t do it and now you know why.

I told Doc Costin about my conclusion that I am not a sensible man.

He seemed bemused and nonplussed.

The next step after that would seem to be to ask how one copes with life as a dumbass. And I don’t have a good answer for that now.

All I can think of is that it means I have to rely on my support network (Joe, Julian, and Felicity) to keep me from walking into the open manholes of life and otherwise all I can do a kind of muddle through the best that I can.

It’s true that I have no self-discipline.

But how the fuck was I supposed to develop it? And when?

More after the break.

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I am the Breadman! 

Coo coo cashew! 

WARNING : The following is German comedy. 

So glad that this time, when I came across something about this unusual German show about a clinically depressed loaf of bread, I actually looked it up.

Bernd is a perfect sad sack/grouch character. His entire existence is ridiculous and absurd, his very low affect sad reactions to the insane things he’s being put through are very funny and relatable, and he seems to live in the world of screens, and really, don’t we all these days?

Just had to share him with y’all.

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On growing up

I feel like it might just be too late for me to do it.

I was talking about that with Doc Costin today. I might have missed the bus to adulthood entirely. I might never grow up. I might be stuck being whoever and what I am now for the rest of my life.

I’m certainly not going to find my destiny in traditional employment. Who would hire a 51 year old crippled loser without a degree for anything?

For that matter, what the hell can I even do? It’s not like flipping burgers is an option, seeing as I can’t remain standing for long.

No, I think I am going to have to invent my own job, and that means one thing : YouTube. It’s time to finally stop dicking around and become a YouTuber.

Prince Edward Island boy becomes a Tuber. How apropos.

And that means I have to stop waiting to figure out what I “should” do as a YouTuber or what category I want to work under or any of that bloviating bullshit.

Like I’ve said before, I need to just start doing it and figure out what the fuck I am doing as I go, just like I did (and do) with this blog.

Just get the webcam rolling and whatever comes out, comes out. Maybe all I will ever produce is talking head videos. That’s fine, a lot of people listen to YouTube rather than watch it anyhow.

Or maybe I will get ambitious and do fun and silly things like I did a long long time ago.

Point is, it will put me out there and give me a place where I can express myself more fully than mere words makes possible, and that could do me a lot of good.

And who knows, I might even develop a following and get my idea out there into the world where they might do the world some good.

And net me a modest income. Just being able to support myself would be great.

But first I have to learn to exit my current mode, at least for short periods.

And it’s always so, so much easier to change nothing and just keep letting the days go by without me.

So this is going to take a very specific investment of will.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.