That’s how I feel right now. Like I am in World War 2 era London, hunkered down in a bunker trying and failing to ignore the thuds and bangs and other horrible noises from above so I can finally get some sleep.

Except that I fucking hate sleep.

I thought I had done the smart and adult thing last night/this morning when I took my sleeping pillls at 5 am. My therapy appointment wasn’t until 1 p,m (or so I thought), and I don’t usually sleep more than five or six hours a night, so I figured I would have plenty of time to sleep, wake up, and be all woken up and ready by therapy time.

Bzzzzzzzt! Wrong. I was dead sleeepy all through therapy, despite having had around seven hours of sleep. I am only starting to wake up now and it is 3:18 pm.

And when I say I was sleepy in therapy, I mean I was barely coherent. I kept fading in and out of the conversation as my brain kept trying to make me sleep .I frelt like I was barely there. It was very stressful to fight the sleepiness.

But I bet my therapist has no idea I was in such distress. I hide mjy pain. It’s what you do when you were the baby that stopped crying.

This is no good,. I am still falling asleep. I will be back later.

Much later, as it turns out.

Well, I feel like I am on the opposite shore of that ocean of sleepiness now. I still feel pretty waterlogged but at least I am drying out in the sun.

Part of the problem is that now that it is getting serious about being fall, I’ve had to shut my windows and turn on the heat in my room.

And hisorically speaking, two things have always made me sleepy : poor ventilation, and radiant wamrth.

I’n getting both of those right now.

I first noticed the ventilation thing when I was a college stuident (the first time) and I had some classes in this classroom that was somewhat well known for making people sleepy because it was a basement classroom with no windows and hence subpar ventilation.

This turned courses I loved, like Psych 101 and The History of the English Language, into constant battles for consciousness. And both of those courses had significant video components, and thus required the lights to be turned down.

That made staying awake even harder. And we all had that problem. I just had it a little worse because I’m the sort of person who likes to sit directly in front of the professor so he can hear and see everything clearly.

And, to be honest. to reduce my social anxiety by letting me ignore most of my classmates. I don’t see them, they are all behind me,, I can be calm.

That’s quite sad, really.

Adn the radiant warmth thing I have experienced my whole life. I call it “the melt” because I associate it with coming home on a cold winter day and the heat of the house making me deliciously drowsy and needing a nap in which I would sleep quite well.

The only problem with that is when it happens when a nap is not an option. Like, for instance, when I had the seat right next to the radiator in Physics class in grade 11.

And guess what, it was the first class of the day.

So I would come in from a busy morning of walking to school and resenting having to walk to school on some bitterly cold day, sits in my assigned seat, and spend the next hour or so playing chicken with totally falling asleep in class.

To be honest, I was that at least one time I had just gone for it. Fallens asleep right in class. Just to see what would happen.

But my fear of falling behind the other students – which is quite potent – would never have let me do that.

The very thought that they are all learning something without me gives a panicky feeling like I am being left behind for good.

This is what happens when you are the youngest of four kids and people have a tendency to forget you.

Today’s been rough. Dealing with all that sleepiness was hard. Fighting to stay awake and stay focused is so goddamned stressful.

It would have been fine if this had happened on one of my lazy days where I have nothing in particular on in terms of socializing.

Saturday would be perfect because I don’t even have an episode to write. Or Friday, come to think of it,. for the same reason.

But no, it had to happen on a Thursday, the day of the week where I have therapy AND the Paragon meeting. It’s my busiest day of the week.

so I spent most of today either asleep or awake and trying not to falls asleep. In fact, I wasn’t sure I would even make tonight’s Paragon get together. Despite having slept most of the day, I was still so sleepy I was drifting of involuntarily as late as 6 pm.

I took one more 45 minute nap, and that seemed to do the trick. I was finally awake enough to go do stuff. I still felt like I needed to nap for a few months, but at least I was upright and conscious and more or less sentient.

All in all, I consider today to be a writeoff. Some days are like that. All you can do is write them off as one of those days and go on with your life.

When I finish this blog entry, I am going to take my clothes off, curls up in bed, turn out the light, and close my eyes for a while.Try to let the stresses and confusuion and and weariness of the day wash away in the outgoing tide and leave me fresh and new.

And when I open my eyes again,m it will be a new day.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This song has been stuck in my head all day.

Specificaklly, the part at the end where the background singers are singing :

Everybody needs somebody
Everybody needs someone
Everybody needs somebody
You’re not the only one
You’re noit the only one

Well I might not be the only one.

But I’m the lonely one/

Despite my friends, both the in person kind and the over the Internet kind, I am still a very lonely man.

That doesn’t mean they have failed me or done anything wrong. It just means that I have the kind oif damage that can’t be reached by the usual sort of friendship. That sort of thing, wondrous and cherished as it is, only goes so deep.

And under that, I am a broken and lonely person roaming the endlress tundra of my frozaen soul, looking for sources of warmth but often too numb from the cold to feel anything more than the feeblest of warmth from them.

It’s taken me a while to realize this. I didn’t want to face it. And nut just because I felt it would seem like insulting ingratitude to those who care for me.

The truth is that realzing my own lonely nature meant facing to face a basic human need so massively unmet that to even contemplate it makes it seem like a vast black plane of broken ebony, hostile to life and colder than the depths of space.

And to touch it would be to die. It would swallow my feeble flame and the void would finally claim me. The darkness would finally finish the job of killing me and I would be no more. Like I’d never existed at all.

Cue my “It’s A Wonderful Life” sequence.

Oh look, it turns out everyone was a lot happier. that way.

This loneliness eats away at me constantly. It’s hard to truly encompass the sheer scope of it. It’s like I have been starving for my entire life without thinking about it, having shoved the hunger into a dark corner of my mind. And it’s only now, as I slowly emerge from the dank and dirty cave of my depression, that I realize how fucking hungry I am and how I honestly have no idea how to go about getting food.

As patient readers know, I missed most of the socialization one is supposed to get as a child. I was a lonely kid locked away in my lonely world of books, comics, TV, and video games. For long periods I had no friends whatsoever. I was at the bottom of the social totem pole – to the point where even the retarded kids made fun of me.

That really hurt.

And that whole time, instead of falling apart or crying out for help or in some way let the people who cared about me know that I was miserable, I just hid it all under a surface pleasantness and buoyancy that reassured the world that there was no problem, that everything was fine, and that noboby need to worry about me.

Not because that was true. It was, in fact, the polar opposite of the truth. But that was my role in life. To be the kid who’s easy to forget and ignore. The kid who never asks for anything. The kid who is happy with whatever he gets. The kid who always goes along with whatever is easiest for others.

The kkid more than willing to help you forget you ever had him.

My siblings do not – cannot – understand this. Because, as I have said before, you don’t remember ignoring something. Especially when that something is someone whom the entire family structurre treats as unimportant and without merit. Someone who seems complicit in their own utter lack of status.

Someone who is weird and sort of icky and who in no way will penalize your ignoring him, so you just do with what’s easiest, which is forgetting about him most of the time.

And when he does remind you of his existence, whether or not it’s his choice, you then react as if he’s annoying you just by existing because before he spoke up, he didn’t exist to you at all. And you convey that irritation with him via a clipped, angry tone of voice and the undertone of a constant weary put-upon sigh that underlies every word you speak. You make it abundantly clear that you are mad at him for reminding you that he exists and that you want to go back to forgetting all about him as soon as possible.

That’s what my childhood was like. So it’s no wonder I gave up on myself. Everyone else had. And that’s why I locked myself away from the world and retreated into the ice palance of the world of the mind and tried, as best I could, to stay there all the time.

A baby can only cry for so long before it realizes nobody is coming.

Then it stops. And despair sets in.

It’s only in this late phase of my life that I can look back and see how wrong it all was. And I don’t mean merely in a simple moral sense. It was wrong in a deeper sense of being the opposite of what should happen. It’s wrong in that it’s the sort of thing that is not supposed to happen.

It’s wrong like fish falling out of the sky is wrong. That’s not supposed to happen,. That’s not even supposed to be possible.

And yet, here I am, living the life that resulted from it.

And the wghole time, I pretended that everything was fine because it was clearly what people wanted me to say so they could go right back to forgetting all about me with the minimum of effort wasted on dealing with me.

And oit was clearly the only answer permitted. If I said anything else, people reacted with shock and irritation, like I had just appeared in a burst of flame and demanded their firstborn and a sack of gold.

That was not in the script. That was not allowed. They had not allocated any mental resources to dealing with any problem I might have and they damned well we’re going to change that now. Not for someone so absolutely devoid of merit, worth, or status.

After all, any resource spent on the worthless is a waste, right?

Books. Video games. Comics. TV.

It’s a miracle that I made it this far at all.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.

Recently, I stumbled into performing a bit of an experiment on myself.

The mechanism was simple : I stopped using my sleeping pills. First time was an acident – I just plain forgot. But  the result was fascinating enough to encourage me to keep it going.

First of all, my previous sleeping pattern almost immediately, and I can see how very strange it is now.

It’s a simple cycle : two hours awake, one asleep. Two hour bursts of activity followed by a one hour nap.

That’s the same ratio of wakeful hours to sleep hours as everyone else, of course. We spend a third of our lives asleep. It’s just that for most of us, that sleep comes in a single bundle of eight hours of sleep per night.

For me, it was more spread out.

And it’s an easy pattern to fall into when your computer room is also your bedroom and the bed is your computer desk. Add in depression and you have opened the door to a very strange lifestyle indeed.

It’s a lifestyle that can only exist when you are an isolated depressed loner, of course. Normal people have all kinds of things that make that kind of life impossible. Things like jobs and spouses and social commitments and all the other things of which I have no personal experience to draw upon.

But I’ve heard good things about them.

Anyhow, he said, violently jerking himself back to the point, I stopped taking the pills at night and my old pattern reasserted itself.

Not fully, thankfully. Trust me, it’s a bad place to be in, despite sounding kind of pleasant in a very lazy kind of way.

The big problem is that it traps you in the space between sleep and being awake. And you never truly wake up. That’s why it is so attractive to a depressive like me. The coziness of sleep never entirely fades away and in fact hangs around as an extra layer of warm numbness that protects me from the outside world.

But in the long term, it only makes things worse. There’s a reason why it was while living that lifestyle that I had the worst depression of my entire life and it’s because this half-asleep state suppresses your executive level brain functions, including the ones that keep your sanity together.

So I lost myself. The world felt increasingly unreal, and so did I. This terrible twilight I was living in was taking its toll on me and I was going along with it because it was easier than living.

Not better, in any way shape or form. Just easier.

Again, I drag myself back to the point.

This experiment of mine yielded the expecvt effect : the resumption of a previous sleeping pattern. Admittedly, I had forgottten exactly what that entailed, but I can’t say I was surprised to find myself back in that zone.

The surprising result was that I felt great.

For a while at least. Perhaps it was simple eupohoria from having to drag myself up out of the deep pit of apnic sleep any more. Perhaps it was my body’s ability to produce a natural stimulant when needed, and so I was kind of high on that. Perhaps it was the rare privilege of staying out of my own depths for a while.

Whatever it was, I felt pretty good. So good I was starting to contemplate discontinuing my use of my two sleep aids, Quietiapine and Trazodone, permanently.

Another interesting side effect : my sleep cycle became entirely nocturnal. Dawn made me sleepy and I did not wake up and perk up and feel ready to take on the world till it went down. It seems to be my natural sleep cycle.

I’m a creature of the night, apparently.

And looking back, I can see that there have been signs of this readily apparent in my life. I’ve mentioned how difficult I find afternoons to be in the space many times. Well that’s because the afternoon is actually my “middle of the night” and so it’s no wonder I am having difficulty staying awake during this time.

My body really wants to be asleep.

And it’s only the idea that I am “supposed” to be awake in the afternoons that has made me fight it for all those years. A social expectation of proper wakefulness timing has made me go to war with my own body.

I’d be far better off simply accepting it.

So now I have to contemplate an entirely nocturnal life. One where sunset is my dawn and supper is my breakfast. One where I am on a very different clock than others. One which is more or less the mirror image of how it’s “supposed” to be.

It seems doable. What socialization I get in life tend to happen in the early evenings, so I could do that without much trouble.

Especially now that we’re heading into winter and sunset is coming earlier each day. That’s always seemed like a depressing thing to me before now – the days getting shorter and nights longer.

But now I can see my way to downright enjoying it. After all, it will give me more hours of being awake and active. Just like summer is for non-vampires/

I am willing to give total nocturnality a try. It involves ignoring the voice of “supposed to” and the feeling that I am pulling further way from the rest of humanity, but the potential rewards make this gamble worth it.

It could improve my mood dramatically and vastly reduce the stress on both my body and my mind. And all it takes is accepting that I will sleep through the day.

Heck, if this goes well, I might not even need the sleeping pills any more.

Some things will still have to be done during the day,,,, after all, the rest of the world is day-active. Things like doctor’s appointments, meetings, and other dealing with other human being type things.

But I think I can puil this off.

And if I can, the results could be amazing.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

HEARKEN UNTO THIS WARNING : Spoilers ahead! YE BE WARNED! 

Overall impression : Not bad.

Ths how seems to have at least some of the genuine Roddenberry spirit in that its Starfleet seeks peaceful exploration and stumbles into a situation in which that simple and innocent desire it put the the test in a very big and comnplicated way.

The tension built over the course of the episode until the cliffhanger ending, by which time I was, qyuite frankly, uncomfortable.

I’m gettingh old now and that level of tension is painful for me. I would much rather have things build more handleable levels of tension more slowly.

But that’s just my aged nerves talking.

I like the two female leads. Our main character, a chick named Michael, is first officer to an older Asian lady, and their student/mentor relationship comes across strongly without needing to be highlighted.

The main character is a human raised by Vulcans, which is really fucked up in my opinion. Perhaps because of my onw struggles between my Vulcan rationalism and the living breathing spirit it smothers, I can only see that situation as a recipe for disaster.

How can Vulcans possible see to her emotional  needs? How can any child withstand the constant punishment for normal emotional responses?

Hosw inhuman is it to let a human be raised by well intentioned non-humans who will not let her be… well, human?

We human beings do enough of that shit to one another. We hold ourselves amd/or others to utterly imossible standards of rationality and restraint and end up creating far worse demons of of mind whi lead us to far less logical activity than we we had just let ourselves be ourselves.

I’ve been pondering that today. Trying to find that self-forgiveness within myself so that I can drastically reduce the amount of senseless inner conflict within the area of my emotions and regain that energy and those reseaources for something more in keeping with a hale and hearty happiness.

I can feel the deadness inside me – the necrotic tissue of the soul – and it horrifies me. And that’s like the maximum amount of understandable. It’s hard to deal with the realization that you are dead inside in some pretty serious ways.

But it also gets in the way of healing the damage. Of pushing that dead tissue out of myself by whatever means necessary so that clean, healthy flesh can takes its place and my spritual kidneys can scrub the toxic leftovers from my toxic soul.

And so the cognitive capture continues. I catch myself in these negative thought patterns thaqt stem from the inability to accept my humanly imperfect self and stop trying to be some kind of secular Jesus of logic, reason, and compassion, and start just being a human being and making some kind of life for myself.

Just like my brother said I should do.

He’s a lot smarter than me in so many ways.

But the thing about cognitive capture and the rejection of the bad thoughts and insertion of the good thoughtds is that it is very, very tiring and involves this whole other kind of inner conflict that I feel. on some level, must be futile.

Or at least very very hard on my systems.

But at least it’s a way to fight back. A crude way, perhaps, but it’s better than nothing. It lets me feel like I am nope helpless before the massed might of me depression, but instead can reshape, reform, and recast my fractured mind by sheer force of will.

It is, of course, nowhere near that simple, but there’s renough truth to the idea that it makes me feel better.

It’s so hard to heal a broken mind when you have a broken mind. SOmetimes I get frightened by tghe sheer dpeth, breath, and vivid purplse-black horror of my illness. It tempts me unto despair.

But despair is pointless.

Sometimes I think of the process of recovery as being like having a good long healthy sweat in a sauna. The toxins get flushed out as the sweat evaporates the second it hits that hot dry air, and little by little, the body recovers.

I’ve never been able to do that, sadly, because the heat triggers my heatroke and I end up far sicker as a result.

Plus, saunas tend to be confined spaces with too little space inside, and that means my calustrophobia goes berserk as well.

There’s technically a sauna in this building, in fact. It’s tiny. Like, half a walk-in closet tiny. I get a low grade anxiety attack just thinking about going in.

Actually closing the door would be unthinkable.

So the closest I have gotten to the full sauna experience is sunning mysxelf on the beach. The sea breeze keeps my head from overheating and plenty of open space around me plus the ocean in front of me to help soothe my nerves.

And I am not moving around and thus overtaxing my fat guy cariovascular system. Instead, I am immobile, and can just lay there and enjoy having all those nasty toxins baked out of me by the heat coming up off the sand.

I’ve been feeling so stifled lately. I am worried that my sleep apnea might be getting worse. It’s completely untreated, after all, and it’s degenerative. Sometimes I find it hard to breathe even when I am awake.

The CO2 builds up in my lungs as I sleep, and being awake doesn’t clear it out all the way. So it builds up over time.

So obviously, I should go to my primary care physician and tell him I need help.

But then I would have to admit to him what a shitty patient I am, and that seems impossible to me. Too big. Too much.

So I guess I will just keep going until I keel over one day from lack of oxygen.

Yeah. That sounds like a plan.

Oh, and I guess the new Star Trek is okay.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Believe it or bnot, I can actually back tghat pretentious title up.

I have been thinking a lot lately (well, since this morning) about how anxiety feeds on itself and when you are an old pro at freaking out over shockingly little,. it all happens so smoothly that it takes real effort to remember that this slide from okay mood to the everyday mortal terror of the afflicated used to take time and have steps.

And each of those steps was its own escalation, which in turn was made of smaller escalation,, and so forth down into the twisting void.

Now LIke I have said before in this space. I am the “dysthymic” type of depressive, as opposed to the “anxious” type of depressive. That means that I exist in a constant state of low mood that sometimes detiorates deeper depression but not usually as quickly as the more anxious types leap into the stratosphere of mega-anxiety. The dysthymic depressive is tortoise to the anxious depressive’s hare. Most of us sad ones switch modes at times,. The diagnosis has more to do with overall trend than a description of any particular moment in the individual depressive’s life.

Hmmm. I have wandered into theorizing, pontificating, and lecturing again, I suspect. Better safe than sorry, anyhow. I am trying to learn how to tell when I am going away from the stuff I need to talk about and into the stuff I like to talk about.

I feel hoiunded by anxiety and aversion lately. Like I can’t go a minute without dealing with this enormous storm system of latent anxiety just ready to arc a lightning bolt of pure panic into my heart when all I am doing is sitting there trying to play a video game (three guesses as to which one, and they’re all Skyrim) without my emotional seismograph needle drawing something that looks likie the signature of a very angry person who doesn’t actually know how to write.

Trust me, it’s a complicated image, but worth it once you get there.

Now this latent anxiety is not exactly a total mystery to me. I think I am entering a phase in my life where a lot of the things burdening my CPU have been either handled or eliminated entirely, thus releasing more of my bodily energy for my personal use.

One little problem/. I don’t use it.

The release mechanism is still rusted shut for the most part. I haven’t covered the emotional geography necessary to truly unlock my inner resources and use them,m and so all this energy is building up with no way to be released.

Masturbation is of limited help. For one thing, it doesn’t always “work” ( I don’y “get there” and end up more frustrated than before.

And even when it does work, it doesn’t release nearly as much tension and energy as you would thinbk. I

I mean, it’s quite lovely and all, but its cathrsis value is far less than I would like.

In fact, I am beginning to suspect that I am reached the point where solo efforts just won’t cut it any more, and what a massive barrel of horny fish THAT opens.

I could probably arrange an assignation or two. Being a big fat dude lowers the odds but it’s a big city out there and there are bound to be people out there who would jump at the chance to tap my big fat ass.

That’s what I have been craving. It’s like I’m in heat. In October.

I suppose it’s too late for a TMI warning.

So I could probably get me some lovin if I could get through the massive social anxiety minefields involved. I’m not used to letting people into my life.

Let alone my… favours.

And the nature of a hookup would help because I would have a “role”, of sorts. We would both know why we were there and there would be a minimum amount of time in the hellish void of social uncertainty.

In fact, with how I have been feeling lately, I would want to “get right to it”.

Is it weird how I can be so explicit and so cerebral at the same time? Whatever.

And this libido crescendo is, overall, a good sign. It means I am connecting with life on a bolder and more intimate away. Another layer has been removed from my emotional suppression apparatus and another form of normal human emotion has come online.

I will be a real little boy one of these days, by gum! (Mental note : Buy gum. )

I have honestly never experience a sexual appetite like this. I think I might be finally getting around to emotional puberty. I am pretty sure this is the sort of hot hormonal insanity that I have heard so much about from TV.

I never experienced that at the appropriate time. Sure, I was horny as a teen, but I never felt like I would go crazy if I didn’t get to fuck.

I kind of feel that way now. It’s…. interesting.

So who knows, this might be what finally drives me to put up that craigslist ad advertising my deep need for cock and seeing if anyone wants to provide some for me in the local area.

I might even consider a paid “escort”. What the hell, I got money. And the nature of the financial transaction sure would cut through a lot of small talk.

But the Scot in me would have trouble paying for something he might have been able to get for free.

So we’ll see.

Odds are nothing will come of or from this. Those fears of mine are still pretty tough. Inviting a stranger into my bed is a pretty big challenge.

But damn it, I want to start enjoying the unlimited sexual license that is my birthright as a homosexual man,. I want cock, damn it!

I’m just too ,much of a pussy to get it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I was going to do a second attempt at typing the worlds in as fast as my mind creates them as an experiment today, but I don;t have the energy.

Mental note : should probably do this kind of thing AFTER I have eaten.

Feeling sort of oblong and out of season today. I’ve poked somje life into my Skyrim playing by downloading a few key thing, but the game is still in a death spiral in my estimation, and when it crashes, I am going to need a new game.

Otherwise, I will be in serious danger of producing productive labour. Ha ha ha.

Seriously though, I have enjoyed this vacation from having to figure out what to do with my comious free time. SPending nearly all of said time playing a video gqame might not strikle the casual observer as a healthy response, but everything else involves having to get out there and deal with the world, and I am not inclined.

But seriously folks.

My gig doing Uno scripts is going the way of Skyrim too. I find myself more and more reluctant to do the work and I am finding it harder and harder to get through that painful initial phase where the initial news story has to be carved into pieces that can be turned into jokes. I keep getting the urge to go wildly off topic and write an ep that is just random and weird and goofy.

Or do the quivalent of a film school project with one ep. Moody lighting, overlapping dialogue, dramatic lighting of just people’s eyes. Could be fun.

Or if I really want to burn all my bridge from now till the end of time plus five minutes, write something so incredibly and vividly pornographic it would makle Ralph Bakshi blush and cause Larry Flynt to become a passionate advocate of comprehensive censorship for everything everywhere.

And you know I could do it. I’m a dynamically perverted man with mad verbal skills and a strong desire to give the masses something they can’t handle while also creating a haven for all us pervs where they can ask for and get what they really want, without judgment or shame but with love in all its wonderful forms.

That turned out fancy.

And I would, of course, love writing it. And not just in the “what is the sound of one hand typing” kind of way. To me, the sexual liberation for the human race is a spiritual mission. I honestly believe that an unashamed and horny world would have far less war, hate, ugliness, and evil.

I imagine a world where sex is open and free. Seeing people fucking in public would be as common and as frowned upon as making out ihn public is to us today.

In other words, it would be something that you shpouldn’t do and people would tsk and maybe even complain, but it would not be that big a deal and most people would choose to simply ignore it.

Obviously, then, this would be a world where sex is no mystery to kids. It’s a fact of life like needing to eat or wanting a hug or being happy to see a loved one. It would be seen as a “soft neeed”, in that you do not literally need sex in order to survive like with oxygen or water.

But A real need nonetheless.

It would also be a bisexual-ish world. Most people would have a preference but would be open to sex with both genders, at least in theory .There would be no need for this ridiculous idea that you have to “choose”.

Bullshit you do! Love who makes you happy. Fuck what makes you horny. The only rule is consent. Other than that… have at it!

I’m not idealistic enough to claim that this kind of revolution would lead to a utopia filled with nothing but love and peace and stain resistant public seating. There’s no such place as Utopia, not because hope is for fools and life sucks but because humanity is restless, curious, and bold, and will always find the next problem to solve.

Back to my post-revolution happpy humpy funland. There would bhe places you can go for specific kinds of sex just like there are pla ces you can go for different kinds of food in the world we live in now. It would not even be thought of as prostitution, and a lot of the time, it wouldn’t be, because there’s nothing to keep the customers with shared interests hooking up with one another.

The business model would. presumably, be entry fee or membership based.

Just like gay bath houses, come to think of it. If they had those for straight people (somehow), there would be no more war.

Anothjer aspect to this wondrous fucktastic future of mine is that there would be a mostly unspoken backbground attitude of “try to say yes”. Not if the sex act someone proposes is repugnant to you or in any way will leave you worse off after.

Just a general sensze that the world is a better place when we all help each other out, and that means that polite people would try to accomodate others. Sort of like being a good Samaritan, but with sex parts.

“Exuse me, but may I suck on your penis until you ejaculate in my mouth?”
“Hmnmmm…. bust won’t get here for ten minutes, so…. sure.”:

I know this fucktastic future of mine would absolutely horrify most people . Simply letting kids see sex happen would be enough to make people want to club me to death. I am, to put it mildly, way ahead of my time.

But I honestly believe that this is the future we are headed towards in the far far future. Every generation peels back another layer of bullshit shame and completely unnecessary sexual weirdness, and eventually. we will have gotten rid of all of it and a whole lot of problems will have just kind of… taken care of themselves when everyone is finally sexually satisfied.

I won’t live long enough to see it.

But I can see the seeds of it in today’s young people.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Tonight’s blog entry is going to be an experiment. I want to see what happens when I write as fast as I can without stopping to think or anything.

I’ve done this experiment before, but that was way before I started developing myself as a writer was back in 2011. So I am kind of curiousa as to what will happen now.

So get ready for an entry even more meandering, disjointed, and bizarre than usual!

Let the experiment….. BEGIN!

Well there frst thing to do, obviously, is to start anywhere at all. No trying to find the “right” opener. That’s like trying to plan being sponteneous. It just doesn’t work.

Part of the point of this whole thing is to encourage myself to be more spontaneous in my life and my writing. I have talked in this space about how all my imkpulses have to pass a strict border check that lets very few of them through, much to my detriment.

To act without needed to think it through on any level – going purely by gut – would be a powewrful act of rebellion for me. It would signify a level of trust in the world that I have never had except possibly when I was a prechooler.

But once the school damage set in, I turns into a person who treated life as a chess game, with every move carefully considered and weighed and considered from all possible angles. Underlying it all is a vast mistrust of the universe and a deep conviction that the only way to be safe is to stay one step ahead of life by thinking ev everything out and checking for potential disasters and controlling the fuck out of outcomes and in general never, ever, ever doing anything out of pure emotion.

That’s no way to loive, as I like to say. For one thing,. lifer requires a lot of decisions and you often simply do not have the time to think them through. It’s go with your gut  or nothing. And nothing is not an option.

Another thing wrong with that approach was pointed out to me by my therapist recently – oit’s a hell of a lot of work. The mind has to work pretty hard, in an absolute sense, to do all that processing and predicting and pruning.

It’s the sort of solution that only a highly intelligent brain would even be able to contemplate let alone implement, and the fact that when my therapist brought this up to me, all I could do was ;lamely say something about how I am used to it speaks volumes about how messed up my mental situation really is and points to the nature of the problem on a concrete level.

It’s one of computational overhead. And it’sa tricky one. I’ve spoken before about freeing up my mindspace by ridding myself of all those unexpressed emotions.

That can be looked as an a ct of freeing up mental CPU cycles. And those CPU cycles can be used to support mood.

Turns out, being happy takes a certain amount of processing. The average person’s minds does a lot of calculation as it figures out how to balance the individual’s mood dynamically at all times.

We depressives lack that balancing function. So our moods are unstable and unpredictable. In response, we develop external balancing mechanisms which vary in form but which all have the common trait of activating the reward center of the brain whether the addiction in question is physical, chemical, sexual, emotional, or even spritual in nature.

These balancing mechanisms are very crude and have nowhere near the kind of efficiency that a healthy individual’s long developed and refine self-balancing instincts can provide. It’s like the difference between catching a ball in your hand and catching a ball in mittens, blindfolded, and the ball is on fire.

It’s like healthy people have thius force that pushes back against negative emotions, and people with depression don’t. A healthy person’s mind received a negative input that initially pushes the mood deep into the red, but then this other mechanism pushes back until the final result as a mood that is a little worfse than before, but not anythimng like the deep and horrible abyss that a depressed person’s mind would go to.
When the negative input is received, it pushes the mood downward without resistance. No wonder it craters so hard.

So we now have to ask ourselves what this balancing mechanism is. how does it work, how to fix it, and how did it get broken in the first place.

The simpel answer would be “trauma”, but that hardly adds any information to the debate. Presumably it involves trauma that is beyond the human mind’s ability to heal and which therefore persists and acts as a wound on the the psyche which causes long term problems of its own.

What I really want to know, though, is what IS psychological trauma on a biological basis. It seems odd to me that thois sort of thing can happen – that the human mind is vulnerable to a form of injury that has absolutely nothing to do with physical trauma whatsoever. Mere input can destroy parts of the system.

It’s something we all understand on the everyday level – bad things happening to people hurts them,. Tjat’s obvious to pretty much everybody.

But wbhen I try to imagine what is happening in the brain, I draw a blank. Presumably it’s something deeply biochemical and therefore opaque to someone like me who larned absolutely no biochemistry in school.

But still…. what the hell is happening in there? And is it possible to prevent it or at least immediately treat it with a form of mental first aid.

And is there a way to train the human mind to better respond to this trauma? Could we raise a generation of child who are far more psychologically robust than us? Could mental illness become a thing of the past this way? Dare we find out?

Well that’s my words for tonight. Did not turn out much different than a regular bog entry, did it? Well I fugred out a lot of the observatiobns above as I was writing them, and so I ghave profited from this idea that way.,

But if I do it again, I will clear my immediate environs of  distracting displace substances like food and drink. I ate supper while I wrote this, and I think the pauses to take a bite or a sip gavem me too much time to think about what comes next.

Next timne., I will put the pedal to the metal and see where I end up!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s Therapy Thursday today.

Me and my therapist got talking about my Energizer Bunny way of just keeping going no matter what, and how bad that is for me in the long term.

The enelogy I used was that I likened it to one of those people who drivers the same piece of shit car for twenty years, pouring thousands of dollars into it and becoming a laughingstock for the whole town because they drive this disaster of an automobile,. and seem oddly prouid of their “loyalty” to it.

And all because they have a little trouble letting go of things.

I’m like that car. No mattter what, I keep going at my extremely low level. Rain or shine, come what may, I slog ever onwards.

But the thing that I am quite ill, and I have a lot of psychological issues, and there are times when you actually should flame out and fail because that’s the only way the bad system can die and make way for a new you to emerge.

The role of destruction in change is something I have struggled with. Logically, it’s a slam dunk. but part of me always wants to believe that there is another way.

The fact that in moves and on TV, the only peopole you hear talking about destruction and renewal are supervillains looking to kill everyone on Earth doesn’t help either.

Myh entire persoanlity (and that of any Taurus) is geared towards preserving and maintaining , and accumulating value.

That doesn’t leave much room for destruction and renewal. That’s more of a Scorpio thing. We are the sign of not being able to let go. They are the sign of not being able to keep things. It’s balanced.

So I just plain keep going when I should at least be pulling in for a pit stop now and then. But that would involve stopping and I can’t stop for any reason.

If I do. something terrible will happen. It’s the same overwhelming dread that I feel when I contemplate doing something other than what I had intended on doing.

My guess is that it’s the universal emotion of compulsion denial and that what I feel is a lot like what people with OCD feel when they try to resist one of their compulsions.

It doesn’t matter how blatently and obvious irrational it is. It obviously causes me no great hard to have to change the plan in my head. It’s just as obvious that nothing bad will happen if an OCD sufferer doesn’t touch the doorknob exdactly three times when they leave a room.

But the forces involved are way stronger than reason and operate on a level far deeper than our consciousness, and it’s very hard to resist it as a result.

I have veered way off topic again. Sorry. Mygh therapist has noticed this tendency in me too. He said he could warn me when I am doing it – when I start off talking about myself then slip into theorizing and extrapolating and pontificating as I am wont to do, and do it so smoothly that I don’t even know I am doing it.

I will strive to fix that in the future. The first step is becoming aware.

Where was I? Oh right, keeping going.

Time break! Ironically, after writing that last senetence about keeping going, I failed to keep going (I needed sleep) and it’s now much later in the day.

And with the time shift comes a topic shift, because now I want to talk about my argumentative nature and how it still gets me in trouble.

I ended up arguing with Felicity tonight and she made the very excellent point that it feels like I am attacking her when I argue with her negative self-comments because of the way I go about it.

Wwhen I hear someone I love saying bad things which are untrue about themselves, I (over) react in my typical fashion and rise to their defense. The same thing happnes when I hear them expressing a way of thinking I think they need to escape.

I leap into action as Counter Argument Man and my missions is to destroy the evil thoughts and ideas before they can hurt my loved one any further!

OR at least, that’s the idea. But those evil thoughts and ideas are part of the person I am trying to protect and from their point of view, its hard for them to tell the difference between me attack the pernicious thoughts and me attacking them.

So my big ol heart is in the right place, but my pugilistic nature and my overperforming urge toi defend people I love get crosswired and I end up doing morw harm than good when I so desperately want to help.

This is, of course. unacceptable.

So now I have a lot to think about. I feel like I have to invent an entirely new mode for my personality. Or rather, a synthesis of other modes. Be a gentle listener, and ask the sort of questions that keep the person talking. Attack nothing, no matter how loud my entire endrocrime and nervous systems are crying out for me to leap into the fray and destroy the threat.

What matters are the results. As a hardcore pragmatist, that’s a truth I cannot dodge.

So I will have to work on modifying my response so that it matches my intention.

And that will take a long time and a lot of difficult thinking. That’s always the case when you realize that your natural response just won’t cut it any more and that means you want to change your natural response, in a sense.

In the right context, my instantly leaping to the defense of a loved one would be seen as heroic. But there is no kind of action that is the right thing to do in every situation.

Gotta put that bear back in his cage and finds a new animal for my act.

Something a rad calmer/.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Caveat : It’s a rhetorical question,. Please do not answer it.

That said, lately I have been wondering what exactly mky major malfunction is. The eay answer would be “depression” but that is a functionally meaningless label at this point in my life. Yeah, I’m depressed…. and…?

It was very important when I was first diagnosed and put on Paxil. Before that, I was only vaguely aware that there was a mental disorder known as depression and that some people suffered from it. but if I had thought about it at all, I would have been imagning people on ledges with cops trying to talk them down, or people in mental hospitals who aren’t allowed near anything jagged.

I certainly wouldn’t have thought of it applyinjg to myself.

But that’s how my particular flavour of depression operates. It hides itself under distractions and diversions and a superficially bright and cheerful mood while on the inside, I am in terrible pain and falling apart.

The problem is. I rely on that game of pretend to be happy to make me happy. Fake it till you make it, I guess. When I have an audience, I can escape from myself and pretend to be the person I want to be.

So to me, it’s not entirely fake, or entirely real. Instead, this persona I project exists in the grey area between real and fake, and I’m very comfortable there.

Reality is too much of a commitment. Fantasy is too ethereal. Things that are in between are perfect for those of us who like to have our options open so that we always have more than one escape rouite.

Otherwise, we feel trapped. Even when we are perfectly safe. Because we’re crazy.

All part of the deep down inability to feel totally safe that comes from early childhood trauma. The world has always seemed hostile and dangerous to me. I’ve always thought that my only defense was my ability to anticipate and control events. I’ve always considered my brain to be the only weapon I had against a cruel and rejecting world that had no place for me in it.

And that’s no way to live. It’s bad for any mammal to have that kind of permanent, long term stress. Physically, stress damages people because it causes our bodies to act like it’s an emergency and to make decisions as though it’s in a fight for survival.

That’s mpore or less the recipe for poor long term decisions. The stressed state is not meant to last. IT’s meant to save you when the saber toothed tiger is about to eat you. Then it’s supposed to go away.

Psychologically (and neurologically), the situation is even worse, because a haunted mind like my own never truly rests. And that makes the psyche inherently unstable because it can never fully shut down for maitenance and repair.

Not even when I am asleep.

So that’s one thinjg that’s wrong with me. Another, and this one is key, is that I do my best to keep from being alone with my thoughts.

That mind sounds odd coming from a thoughtful person like me, but that thoughtfulness is just one of the ways I keep myself distracted.

When there is no other option, I think about stuff. This began when I was a hyper bored bright kid who spent most of classtim, shall we say, unengaged. Listening to the teacher took only a tiny bit of my massive mental bandwidth, and when we switched to doing the classwork, that wouild divert me for a very short time as those mental muscles of mine made short work of this stuff that was far, far beneath my abilities.

That’s one thing. But for some insane reason, I was not allowed to read when I had completed my classwork. Can you believe that? Telling a kid NOT to read?

What harm would there have been if I had read quietly while the other kids did their work? I was perfectly willing to be a happy little bookworm and fade into the woodwork while I escaped into a book, But no, it was important that I sat there with nothing to do, bored out of my gourd, as punishment for being too smart and making the other kids feel bad. I guess.

Anyhow, my response to that situation was to travel inwards, so to speak. To disppear into the world inside my skull and think long and hard about things, mostly on a subconcious level. It was like a rather cerebral form of meditation, and it made the time pass a lot faster.

Remember that, because making the time go faster has been my pattern for my whole life. That’s a big part of why I am addicted to Skyrim.

When I am playing it, the hours go by withoiut friction or fear. It solves the problem of what the hell do I do with myself so well that it’s become the default thing I do.

And why wouldn’t it be? When I am playing, I am more or less happy.

That reminds me of another issue : being kind of dead inside. By that, I mean that I go long periods without amy real motivation or awareness of my situation or curioisity about what life is like outside my cage.

I am not a lively, healthy animal. I’m lethargic, incurious, and passive.

And I know this is not right. I can feel the wrongness of it all. I want to be a more lively, vital, engaged person,

But I am too addicted to that inner anesthetic that is depression to be able to reach my life-spring on a regular basis.

It’s just so much easier to stay asleep and let the days go by. I’ve been out of VFS for five months now, and I have done very little with my education and qualifications from there. The one really good opportunity I had was with Secret Informant, and I let that die on the vine, and since them I have been sliding deeper into the abyss.

And some days I have the energy and the wherewithal to pulls myself further out.

But on others, it feels too damned good to just…. let go, and let gravity take over.

And then I have to find the nerve to start the climb again.

And that takes a very long time.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Lately, I have been feeling like I am going down, down, down. No end in sight. No changes of speed. No thought of stopping the process. Just the feeling of a slow, calm, and easy death,.

The problem is, I’m enjoying it.

Dunno what that means, but it can’t be good. It’s like a slow and stately suicide where all I hve to do is sit back and relax and enjoy the show. And it comes with a rather sick sense of relief, as though part of me is saying, “I’m sure glad THAT is over and done with. “

“That”, of course, being my life.

A quick reminder : this is all metaphorical, I don’t think I am literally dying.

That said : death is the ultimate, final escape for us escapists. The last word in running away from our problems instead of facing them. The definitive way to remain untouched.

I’ve thought a lot about remaining untouched lately. Of going to where they can’t get to you. Of always dancing out of the way of their touch and remaining pure unto yourself.

It’s not a very good life strategy.

I wish I could explain what I mean by “untouched” in this context. Part of it is empathy based – being able to avoid the mental touch of others which can seem very invasive to those of us who experience the feelings of others very keenly, and who don’t necessarily have the strongest sense of our own identity as a result.

There’s always been a lot of people in my head, only one of which was me.

And this has its benefits. It gives me deep insight into the deep emotional lives of others. Every person I interact with leaves an impression behind and on a deep level, I process that impression and turn it into an understanding of that person and where they are coming from.

It all gets added to my deep model of humanity, which I can consult freely. This then informs my humanitarian impulses because the more you know about people, the harder it is to hate them because you understand their struggles and know that they are just as much of a bewildered monkey as you are, no matter how they may seem within the confines of social reality.

And once more, I have wandered away from myself and into cerebral pontification.

If only there was a WordPress plugin to detect THAT.

I will drag myself back to the point now.

When you have my kind of empathy, it can be hard to get some alone time, so to speak. I think this fuels my tendency to isolate myself. I can only truly calm down if I am completely alone both inside and outside my overstrained cerebrum. What company I do get tends to be via the moderating medium of the Internet, which vastly reduces the amount of psychosocial stimulation I get from people

.
Plus, I pretend to be an anthropomorphic fox. That helps too.

Anything to take me away from myself. That’s a form of escapism too. I hate being me and which I could be someone else. Things which occupy my mind fully let me forget that, and that’s a big part of what makes me so addicted to video games.
I get to be someone other than myself there too.

And this deep and primal self-loathing is not based on any particular fact or memory. It’s deeper than that. Like a lot of survivors of child sexual abuse, I carry with me a profound sense of disgust for myself and view myself as a disgusting, dirty, violated thing that reeks of corruption and unworthiness.

We end up feeling tainted and toxic, even though we are the victims and it’s our assailants who should feel totally worthless, not us.

But if someone dumps a bucket of shit on your head, it doesn’t matter that it is their fault and not yours. You still feel dirty and disgusting.

And my incident happened when I was a preschooler, so its effects went very deep. I think that might be why I got so good at concealing who I really am. So good that I can even fool myself sometimes.

And it’s why I have a deep down terror of people really getting to know me. If they did, they would see what a horrible shit-monster I am and they would run away forever.
It’s much safer to present the world with an illusion. One I can control. And like any good liar, I keep my illusion as close to the truth as possible so I attract the minimum amount of suspicion.

I could be wrong. Maybe it’s the projection that is the real me and the filthy and unworthy scared little critter inside me that is the illusion. I know I have done nothing to deserve this feeling of profound toxicity and the painful self-rejection that it engenders.
Nobody can be healthy with that level of self-hate. No wonder I don’t like being myself.

Or maybe that filthy little beast is the real me, but all it needs is someone to patiently and carefully and gently clean it up, and give it a hug, and tell it that it’s a good little beastie and that the dirt was never truly part of it and that it is loved and accepted and wonderful.

I’d like to be that person for myself. The ultimate pet groomer. The kindly kindergarten teacher I never had. The adult willing to take me on despite my troubles that I never found. The gentle but firm parent I needed so badly to give me both comfort and guidance.

But I don’t know if I can do it. I know that I will need to tackle that sense of being inherently horrible in order to do so. Otherwise I will not be able to generate the energy to do it. The deep conflict of self-rejection takes up too much energy for that.

It’s like I have a swamp inside me that needs draining,

And I’ve lost the keys to the pump.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.