Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with my health or wound care or anything important.

I am just annoyed that my computer crashed twice when I was playing Morrowind despite the fact that I was playing via the far more stable OpenMW (for Open Morrowind, obviously) executable instead of the error ridden original one.

I have been using OpenMW almost exclusively since it doesn’t crash like the original executable does, or so I thought.

But turns out that switching to OpenMW did not so much solve the problem outright as give me way more leeway before the thing crashes.

Because I know what caused the crashes : I had way too much going on in the game.

I had enemies fleeing^[1], snow falling, other enemies attacking me, and I was shooting arrows at all these things (except the snow), and I guess that was just too much for my imperfect computer to handle so it shit the bed and crashed.

Speaking of shitting the bed (what a segue), I had another “incident” last night, and I was even awake for this one.

Graphic poop talk ahead, for those of you who had not figured that out yet.

I was lying in bed, reading^[2], at about 3 am or so when I felt the need to pee.

No problem. My receptacle was handy. So I peed into it, and noticed in passing that peeing was making me feel like I had to poop.

This happens sometimes. I fear that it means something is going wrong in my lower abdomen that is making my bladder push down on my bowels, or somesuch.

I do have that completely untreated umbilical hernia floating around in there. There is always the possibility that it’s starting to act up.

Anyhow, I didn’t pay it much attention, but then when I finished peeing, the feeling didn’t go away. In fact, it got worse. Much worse.

Time for a trip, trip, trip to the loo, I thought. But the moment I began to roll over as a prelude to getting out of bed, I felt the contents of my insides squeeze like a toothpaste tube and threaten to come out, so I stopped.

Which was futile. It all came out anyhow, and I was stuck cleaning it up with the world’s most unlucky McDonald’s bag because it was what I could reach.

Normally I would use Kleenex like a normal person, but I could not find my box of Kleenex under all the other stuff on my bed, so the McDonald’s Bag was it.

And I think I did a rather heroic job of cleaning up as it came out so that not a lot of it actually made it to the sheet.

Some of it still did, alas, but it could have been so much worse.

Now I have no idea why things went the way I did. My best theory is that I’d had some sort of bottleneck in my colon that caused a substantial logjam to form and last next was when the dam burst.

Two things disturbed me about it (plus the event itself) : for one, everything coming out of me felt hot as it exited.

Not really hot. More uncomfortably warm. And it was strictly felt in my anal and perianal region, suggesting it was something about the substance, not the aperture.

The other thing (warning, it gets worse) is that what came out of me was not normal feces. It was that pablum-like substance that smelled, well, like a diaper pail.

A full one.

So all that has me worried about my guts. But I know that the usual pattern is that there will be no more events for at least a month, or however long it takes me to completely forget the previous incident.

So I guess I won’t do anything about it. Again.

More after the break.

---

How much should I worry?

Because I never really know.

I get the distinct feeling that I worry about a lot of things that don’t matter at all while completely failing to worry about things that are, in fact, super important.

But I dunno WTF I am doing most of the time anyway. I just kind of stagger through life bumping into walls and falling down wells and getting blown around by the breeze.

I’m trying hard to wake my sleeping inner child up. At the moment, it feels like I am trying to jump-start a very cold engine. I put the energy in and get sort of a response but it’s so faint that it’s hard to be sure it’s real.

Was that the engine almost turning over, or just the spark plugs clicking?

I know a weird amount about cars.

All I can do is keep shunting as much of my enormous excess of nervous energy into warming up and activating my sad and somber spirit as I can, and hoping that eventually, I will rise from the slab and begin a new life.

One where I am actually alive for a change.

It’s a thrilling prospect.

At the same time, part of me wants to get into bed, burrow deep under the covers, and retreat so deep into myself that the outside world is barely a glimmer in the sky.

I won’t do that, of course. That would be like dying and I am not ready to die. I may not be all the way healthy yet, but I have found that stubborn spark in me that refuses to give up no matter what, and it simply WILL. NOT. DIE.

So I’d better get used to being alive.

I’m working on it.

And I don’t think it’s entirely psychological.

I think there must be something physically wrong with me that makes it so hard for me to stay focused and pursue my best interests, and so much easier for me to just keep going the way I always have.

Just making it through the day.

It’s this feeling of fading away. LIke the vessel within me that is supposed to hold the energies that would drive me to explore my options and expand my life is so weak and fragile that it ruptures almost instantly if I try to fill it.

And what worries me is the possibility that it truly is rooted in the physiological and I just haven’t noticed because I’ve been like this for so long that I no longer have any sense of how I should be feeling.

Maybe there’s something wrong with my heart. It certainly feels that way sometimes. That would certainly explain why I feel so weak and fragile and timid all the time.

Or maybe it’s my nerves that can’t handle even the slightest strain. I dunno.

But it’s entirely possible that I am so scared of the world for reasons that go beyond lacking character and backbone.

I know that I’m sick of it. I don’t want to be weak any more. I don’t want to have to hide away from the world and keep my mind occupied by video games so that I don’t sit an think about my disastrous life.

I want to be robust and healthy and strong. I want to be able to tackle my issues head on and be able to just keep hacking away at them till they collapse under their own weight and disappear forever.

Instead, I am a weakling who has to stay in this shapeless, formless mode most of the time where I just float down that long dark corridor like a leaf on a river and all that awaits me in my future is debility and death.

And I feel so helpless, and oppressed by all the things I “could” be doing except that I don’t have the wherewithal to do much of anything.

I don’t like where I’m headed but for some reason I just can’t steer.

I mean, I don’t even know where I want to go.

Out, I guess. Away from this squalid squatting in my pigsty of a room and into a life where I can feel competent and strong and capable and worthwhile.

I want a life I can be proud of, instead of always cringing in shame on the inside. I want a life where I can provide for myself instead of being entirely reliant on the government and the kindness of my friends. I want to feel strong and happy and proud

And maybe my barriers are entirely psychological. That doesn’t mean I will somehow magically learn to pull myself up by my bootstraps and learn to be a man some day.

I will just have to keep on digging to free myself from this deep dark hole I fell into decades ago when my parents pulled me out of university.

And that got so much worse when I discovered Skyrim,

I wish I could just reboot myself and start over. Or land a rich boyfriend who pampers me as I dote upon him, like Leona Helmsley did.

Anything to escape this timid treadmill of mine where I can’t even paddle my own canoe except for those rare moments when the biochemical storm in my head randomly abates long enough for me to feel normal for a little while.

There’s got to be a way out of this mess.

And I will keep on looking till I find it.

After all, it’s not like I’ve got anything better to do.

More after the break.

---

I dwell in darkness

And not just because we’re approaching the Winter Solstice.

As you can possibly tell from the previous section, my mood today has not been great. I’ve slept a lot – looks like it’s time to pay the sleep debt again.

And that can drag my mood down sometimes.

But it feels more like I just have emotional trash to burn. The negative emotions have accumulated once again and it’s time to vent them so they can go away.

The only cure for emotions is to feel them, after all.

So right now I feel pretty low. There’s a grumpy feeling smoldering under the surface of my mind and it’s making me feel like glaring at somebody.

As out of character as that would be.

I mean, I’ve been talking about it for over a decade now, yet anger is still one of my biggest issues. I know that I have an enormous lake of molten rage buried deep in the subterranean layers of my consciousness and I know that it’s one of the major source of my psychological pain, but I still can’t bring myself to vent it as often or as thoroughly as would be best for me because I fear the consequences.

I’m so afraid of the monster that lurks within me. He’s a brute and a lunatic and a liar and I really don’t want to turn him loose because there is no guarantee that I would be able to rein him in again afterward.

I might just be having too much fun being evil to stop.

All I know how to do is vent it all here now and then. And I apologize for subjecting my friends to that. Just know that it helps me enormously to be able to get my negative feelings out and that I usually feel a lot better afterwards.

It’s kind of like throwing up in that sense. I have something toxic in me that has to come out and there’s no neat and clean way to accomplish that, so emotional emesis it is.

Come to think of it, that’s a good word for how I feel today : toxic. Like there’s something nasty brewing inside of me and soon it will all come out.

So um, things might get a lot darker before the dawn, folks.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My head is so full of depression’s lies about me that I don’t really know what it is like to be in my company.

Smelly, I know that much. Not nearly as bad as I assume it was before the wonder and glory that is my showers at Rosewood^[1], and when I am in public I am in clean clothes and wearing deodorant, but I still feel like I am olfactorily unpleasant.

I assume that I am fairly pleasant to encounter. I’m always at least somewhat cheerful and friendly, and I like to think charming or at least endearing.

Not sure which of those I’d rather be, come to think of it.

I think growing up walking on eggshells around my short tempered father made me acutely aware of how one’s emotional aura affects others.

Especially us sensitive types. Having the high degree of empathy has its pitfalls, to be sure, though I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I can’t imagine only perceiving my own emotions. I’d feel so alone!

I also think that my high degree of empathy is another factor in my being pleasant and cheerful around others as well. Whatever emotions I put out are going to come back to be via others and so it’s very much in my self interest to make sure that I make other people feel good with what I do.

That does cause problems with my ability to assert myself, though, because it makes me reluctant to do things I know will upset people and sometimes that is necessary in order to promote one’s own best interests.

Like I said earlier this week, I end up just telling people what they want to hear. Not only is that more pleasant for me on the empathic level, it makes them go away, which ends the state of tension I was in due to just being around others.

And then I go right back to being lonely.

It’s what I’m good at. What I’m used to.

Thus is revealed the fundamental conflict of my being – I am terribly lonely and long for any kind of human connection, yet my anxiety makes it hard to be around anyone but my little circle of friends.

It’s not too bad in known environments. Like the Community Care Clinic where I go to get my wounds cared for, or our friendly neighborhood Denny’s.

I’ve gone down the road to recovery far enough that places like that only cause the faintest of spikes in my anxiety level.

And, of course, being with one or more of my friends helps immensely. And seeing as since my legs went boom I’ve not been able to go places by myself, wherever I go, I have Julian with me, and that makes a huge difference.

Love you, dear Julian, My life would be a heck of a lot harder without you.

But back to the conflict. I’ve realized that in many ways, I am at my happiest and most relaxed when I am with my friends and being social, and quite often when the time comes to go home and resume my usual life, it makes me sad.

And I find myself thinking, “But I don’t want to go back in the box!”.

And it’s things like that which make me realize that I am actually, deep down, a much more sociable and extroverted person than you would think given how I live and act.

Should I be lucky enough to one day shed my burden of mental anguish and be able to live a strong and healthy life, I am positive that I will want to be doing social things where I can express my personality far more often.

Just how often, I don’t know. Maybe very often, maybe still just now and then.

But it sure would be nice to find out.

More after the break.

---

Dear straight boys :

Just a friendly little reminder that unless you’ve seen her naked, you don’t actually know what she has between her legs.

I say this not to make you paranoid but to encourage you to just keep an open mind and be prepared to be flexible in your requirements.

After all, the girl of your dreams just might have a penis.

Well, nobody’s perfect, amirite?

(I’ll leave it to you lesbians to cover the other case. I couldn’t do it justice. )

---

I find gender funny

Specifically with how seriously people take it.

I mean, shouldn’t we be past all this gender essentialism by now? People are people are people, no matter what’s between their legs or where they do most of their shaving.

And all the modern gradations of gender (genderfluid, bigendered, femme boy, etc) just point to the fact that the whole thing is a spectrum anyhow, so how big a deal can it be?

Myself, I don’t have the right term for myself. I honestly wish I didn’t need to have a gender, it all seems so boring and restrictive and comes with so much bullshit.

Yeah, I’m male, and I’m fine with that. But I would never let that limit my self-expression. Because while my body has a gender, my soul does not, and sometimes it feels male and sometimes it feels female and sometimes it feels neither and sometimes it feels both with the needle buried at 11 and so what is the point in trying to put a label on it?

Any label you stick to me will be wrong after my next transformation anyhow, so what is the point? I’m a little bit of everything and can become anything, anything at all.

I am, in fact, downright magical, in the sense that I can do things that most people would think are impossible because I operate on levels most people don’t even know exist, let alone that anyone can manipulate them at will.

That’s the magicians favorite trick, after all. Pulling a rabbit out of a hat by moving it though a dimension you can’t see.

Oh right. Gender.

Ultimately, I find the whole thing tedious. Be whatever your soul says you are, and if that changes for you as often as it changes for me, be the thing that changes and don’t worry about which one is the “real you”.

You are not your masks, you are that which wears them.

And that thing, my glorious darlings, is fabulous.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I did the second of my System Administrator classes online today, and oy.

Once more, I am at the mercy of a teacher goes on and on about a subject without ever defining their terms or going over the basics.

So he’s telling me about things I don’t understand in terms I don’t understand that let you do things I also don’t understand.

So to me, it’s like…

“Now as you can see, Blerp 6.2 really makes it easy to fromp your penkars. And we all know how important THAT is!”

No we do NOT.

I can only assume that he will eventually fill in the gaps Or not. Either way, it is hard on my 51 year old brain. This is not how I would normally choose to learn something. I need the information presented to me in a clear, logical order where you start with the absolute basics and define those, then build upon that.

I don’t think this guy has the faintest idea of what it’s like not to know any of this stuff. I mean, I’m fairly computer literate, but I don’t know what half the things he’s talking about are, and I am not built to get information in whatever order then put it together myself.

I’m sure he thinks he’s pitching this towards beginners, but he ain’t.

But I will adjust. Despite my incomprehension, I got all four questions on the little mini quiz at the end of the chapter right, so clearly some of it is sinking in.

I just have to stretch these old gray cells of mine to accommodate a style of teaching to which I am unaccustomed.

I’m not giving up, though lord knows I felt like doing so many times in the lecture. My brain is not happy with the demands I am putting on it and I felt so totally at sea that I kept thinking, basically, “I’m getting too old for this shit. ”

But I am too damned proud and stubborn to quit now. I will trudge onwards and if I really get hopelessly lost, I can always consult my furry friends, nearly all of which work in IT and many of who are sysadmins themselves.

And I mean, we’re all nerds, and nerds love having their knowledge called upon.

Maybe being a sysadmin is not for me. Maybe it is. The lecturer in question makes the job seem impossibly complex, possibly to stroke his own ego in a backhanded way/

Like when the London cabbies kept making the exam to become a cabbie harder and harder till it was way way harder than anything they’d had to do to become a hack.

Then Uber came along.

See, this is the problem with leaving the teaching of the young to the old. It sounds like the most logical, sensible thing in the world, but there are serious pitfalls with asking old people to take young people they already feel threatened by and then, by teaching them, make them seem like even more of a threat.

The truth is, a lot of old experts deep down don’t want young people entering their trade and competing with them. That might cut in their own pay, after all.

Not that I think my new professor is doing that, at least not intentionally. This is the sort of thing that creeps into teaching unconsciously.

But we can never forget that deep vein of corruption that makes the old turn on the young and give in to the urge to punish them for daring to be happy and full of hope.

Happens in families too.

And there are few things in this world uglier than a parent who is so emotionally immature themselves that they are jealous of their own kids.

To me, that is what is obscene.

Don’t eat your young, people.

More after the break.

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Memories of alienation

I’ve been out in the cold for so very, very long.

Part and parcel of retreating into ice cold intellectualism, I’m afraid. A flash frozen land of the mind which could offer world upon world of fascination, amusement, and diversion, but absolutely nothing in terms of warmth, affection, and connection.

Especially not connection. It might be my own little secret playground, but I am all alone in there and it’s not nearly as much fun without the other kids.

Ah, the other kids. Always my bete noir. Because of the conditions that led to my serious social retardation, including that pesky sky high IQ of mine that made it very hard for me to relate to them, I never learned how to make friends or get along so that I would fit in.

And I don’t want to fit in. Other people can “fit in” with me, thank you kindly.

And that’s the problem, innit? That non-negotiable inflexible individualism. That fast burning temper of mine that always surprises everyone when it suddenly flares up when I feel threatened.

Comes as a shock from a normally quite mellow and agreeable fellow like myself. And it certainly did me no favors on the playground.

Again I hearken back to my lack of kindergarten. I think I might have missed a vitally important developmental stage where I learned to negotiate the territory between my individual prerogatives and making friends.

But it’s more than that. The only word I can think of to describe what I missed and what remains missing in me is socialization. I never got that vital societal message that said it was okay to be around strangers because they won’t hurt you and might be your friend.

Because for me, that just wasn’t true. They did hurt me, and none of them wanted to be my friend or even have anything to do with me.

And that dashed any chance I had of learning to connect. To this day, I live in my very own Fortress of Solitude, and like Superman’s, mine was someplace very, very cold.

And now I don’t know what to do with myself. Just like in my childhood, I want to play with the other kids and be part of their bright, active, exciting world, but I’m just this weird little alien kid who lives on another planet entirely.

See you on the playground, Earthlings.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I forgot to talk about this last night.

I realized recently that for me, in a sense, being someone who likes to make people happiness came very naturally due to my high degree of empathy.

And my anhedonia, but we will get into that later.

Making other people happy makes me happy is not a matter of a feeling of virtue, nor an expression of my enormous ego (WIP).

No, making other people happy makes me happy because via empathy I feel their happiness, and therefore share in it.

That’s where the empathic reward comes in. That little jolt of other people’s happiness rewards me for making others happy and that encourages me to do it more.

And that’s a central part of my whole motivational complex.

Maybe that’s what I need in order to get motivated : an audience.

I need to make some videos.

Anyhow, it’s empathic reward that motivates me to be funny and fun and interesting and all the other things.

And that’s especially important to people like me because our own happiness mechanism is broken by depression’s anhedonia and therefore other people’s happiness is truly like a drug to me.

For those who don’t know, anhedonia is one of the central symptoms of depression. An anhedonic person is someone who finds very little pleasure (aka reward) in most of the things they do, and are therefore unmotivated to do most things.

Instead, we tend to succumb to some form of addiction because only things that are extremely rewarding for extremely little effort can pierce the anhedonia and give us the stimulation of the reward center of our brains that all organisms need to survive.

Indeed, seeking stimulation of that reward center of the brain is the main reason any of us do anything. When some fool says something is “its own reward”, what they really mean is that to them, it is inherently rewarding.

So you can see how empathy creates a reward system that favours people pleasing and telling people what they want to hear.

For me, telling people what I know they want to hear, and thus getting that quick empathic hit of their being pleased, is always a more attractive option than telling them something that will worry or displease them.

And that’s particularly problematic when it comes to my health.

Dealing with serious health issues almost always involves telling a doctor or other medical professional something more troubling than my usual “fine, thank you. ”

I mean, if your doctor is happy to hear about your back pain, get the fuck out of there, because they’re either a psycho or hate you or both.

And I can tell a doctor about my ailments if they are serious enough to alarm me. But the more vague, could be nothing kind of things are hard to bring up.

As a child, I developed the instinct to just tell authority figures what they want to hear so they will go away and leave you alone.

That doesn’t happen in happy childhoods.

And that makes it very hard for people to help you. After all, they can’t help you with problems you never tell them about, no matter how badly they want to.

Usually the people close to you can tell if you’re hurting via their own empathy. But if you just say everything is fine all the time, what can they do?

You’re putting them in a terrible state of conflict between what you are saying and what they are picking up from your vibe.

And I know this. And yet still, when someone asks me how I am doing. it is nearly impossible for me to say anything but, “I’m fine, thank you. ”

I am a complicated man.

More after the break.

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Weak sense of self

Weak, yet extremely fluid and flexible.

These factors must be related.

Like I wrote a long time ago, I’m a shapeshifter, and that means that my sense of self is so fluid that I can become whatever I need to be in the moment.

But that means I lack internal integrity. Most of the time, I am goo. Just a protean blob lying in the bottom of a test tube in a long forgotten lab fridge somewhere.

No wonder it’s so cold in here.

Part of the problem is the inability to commit. After all, if I pick a shape and commit to it, what do I do if that turns out to be the wrong shape for the situation and there I am, “stuck” in the wrong shape?

This is a very weird way to look at things, granted.

The real answer to that question would be, I assume, “Just deal with it. ” Most people are not shapeshifters like me and so changing metaphorical shape to meet the needs of the moment is not even remotely an option for them.

They are who they are and they just have to learn to work with it.

It’s the weirdos like me who demand that level of flexibility from themselves out of a morbid fear of the commitment it takes to be solid and real.

But how did I end up so… gooey?

I think it’s fundamentally a lack of connection to my id. Without the vibrant life force of an active and healthy id, far too much is decided by the scintillating but unstable world of the ego, of the mind, and minds don’t like restrictions like, say, form.

Undoubtedly my social retardation is a big factor too. One of the ways we discover and reinforce who we are is by interacting with others, starting with kindergarten, and my formative years were spent utterly alone, at least during the school year.

My father was too angry and volatile to be much of a parent. My mother was always too tired from being a teacher AND a housewife.

And my siblings had lives of their own that did not include me at all.

So I was alone, both at home and at school.

I am still working through the many, many layers of frozen loneliness that accumulated on my poor little heart from all those lonely days.

They did not exactly encourage me to come out of my shell.

In fact, that shell was all that was keeping me together.

So I did not go through the usual process of formation of self and therefore my self was left in a half-formed (at beast) protean state.

Maybe some day I will figure out who I truly am.

Maybe some day I’ll grow up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Just got back from the optometrist and the news ain’t good.

The good news is that my prescription hasn’t changed much. The bad news is that there’s a fluid buildup in both my eyes. That’s why my vision has been getting worse.

And that’s bad.

So my eyeballs are still the same shape, they’re just ready to explode instead.

That’s probably an exaggeration.

Anyhow, it means I am going back to Doctor Vaezi and his clinic, West Coast Retina. Because fluid buildup like mine is definitely above an optometrist’s pay grade.

The solution may very well involve surgery, possibly even emergency surgery if Vaezi et al decide my vision is in serious peril.

At this point, I feel the need to remind myself that I have already had major surgery on both of my eyeballs before, when they took my cataracts out way back when.

And it was fine. I was technically awake for the entire thing but the drugs they had me on were very, very nice, and I was super relaxed all the way through it.

In fact, they had boomer rock playing and more than once they had to tell me to stop singing along to it.

What can I say, I have a song in my heart. And stents!

So now I am worried about my eyesight. If it does, so do I. Put me on immediate suicide watch because I can’t imagine wanting to live without eyesight.

I am too damn old to learn braille.

And the range of video games for blind people is very, very limited.

On the positive type side, if it’s just a matter of fluid retention in my eyes, it could be that once that fluid is drained, my vision will be way, way better.

That would totally rock.

And to think that this all started because I was having trouble reading my paperback books and that’s just unacceptable.

I can’t afford large print editions of everything I own!

OF course, I could get a magnifier. One of those ones that can lie flat on the page.

Or come to think of it, if I got my tablet working again, I could use its camera as a magnifier. Or just switch to eBooks.

I mean, my tablet IS a Kindle, technically. Presumably it can handle letting me read eBooks extremely well.

And sometimes you can get eBooks for very little. I have heard that there are even subscription based services that work kind of like a library in that they let you “check out” books and you pay according to how many you want to have out at the same time.

Of course, I’d have to pay $35 for a new battery for the thing first.

And there is a very good reason I haven’t done that, and that’s because I concluded that I am much better off without the thing.

I do not need the ability to play video games in bed.

Bed is for resting and reading and listening to YouTube videos. It is not a place for mentally stimulating myself with video games to the point where the gap between my mental state and the sleep state is wider than the Grand Canyon.

Now where was I? Oh right, worried about my eyeballs.

Yeah, if they go, I go. I might be able to survive losing my hearing, although the lack of music in my life would be extremely hard on me.

But life without vision would destroy me. I would most likely go insane.

So now I am waiting to hear from Doctor Vaezi’s office as to when they want me to come in, and I am thinking, the faster they get back to me, the more worried they are, and the more worried I should be.

So I won’t exactly be disappointed if I don’t hear from them until Monday.

More after the break.

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Social retardation and Empathic Reward

By any reasonable measure, I am seriously socially retarded.

Developmentally speaking, that is. How could I be anything else? I was all alone and friendless so much as a kid.

And a child cannot develop socially all by himself.

Because I never went to kindergarten, I was already way behind my fellow Grade 1 students on the first day of school.

They all knew each other from kindergarten. They had learned to play with the other kids, make friends, and get along without me.

And I never caught up. I had no friends until Grade 6. When I did have friends, which was basically most of Grade 6 and junior high (Grades 7-9), they were not exactly close knit male bonding “brothers from other mothers” friendships.

Then High School came along, Jason Heisler and I parted ways forever, and I was once again alone, and would stay that way until college.

So how was I supposed to develop my social skills?

Hence my severe social anxiety. I know that I don’t know what I am doing around people, and have an awful lot of days of icy cold loneliness stored in my soul, and so in my mind it’s only a matter of time before people turn on me and bully me.

Crazy, I know. But so am I.

Thank God I did not end up on the autism spectrum. I really feel like it’s a minor miracle that I dodged that particular bullet.

I owe it all to my babysitter Betty, the tough gal from the other side of the tracks whose solid, grounded, rough cut wisdom and deep but no-nonsense compassion for a weird little boy was exactly the thing I needed to overcome my intellectually enriched but socially impoverished home life.

It’s all so very sitcom-esque.

She almost could have been played by Nell Carter.

And there was always summer. My mother was a teacher, so she was home during the summer, and so were all us kids, and my angry father was at work all day, so it was really the perfect time to be a family.

That’s why when I think “happy childhood memories”, I think of summer.

At least then, my siblings were around some of the time. We were still largely inclined to all be doing our own thing most of the time, but on the weekends we would do things as a family, like go to the beach.

i haven’t really talked about social retardation, have I?

That’s because I don’t really know what to say about it. I never learned to pick up the social signals everyone else understood instinctively.

But I know that I can change all that. I know in my heart than I am, in fact, a very charismatic and lovable guy, and have everything I need to not only be social but even popular, in some circles anyway.

All that cuteness and charm I display as Fruvous comes from me. I could totally see myself finding a nice little clique to click into.

All I have to do is escape my own shadow.

I’m working on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Apparently there’s an Apocalypse level wind storm afoot, with winds over 100 freaking miles an hour, and it’s hitting Seattle and really nailing Vancouver Island, and yet somehow all is calm here in the GVRD.

And it’s spooky. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop, meteorologically speaking. Ever since yesterday morning, I have been bracing myself for the wind howling around our building and make it sway just a tiny bit.

Or worse. That’s just what normal high winds do ’round here.

I don’t want to think about worse.

---

A small victory

Got my monthly banking done today.

Well, technically, it’s a credit union, but if you going around saying you got your credit unioning (credit uniting?) done today, they’ll lock you up.

It went quite smoothly, as always. I might have trouble with the fact that Van City does not offer Visa Debit, I cannot fault their customer service and overall relaxed vibe.

And vibes are very important to me. They are the water in which I swim.

Anyhow, as always, after the crediting of union, we went to Price Mart and Julian went in to buy me the usual monthly prepaid VISA card.

All went well until I tried to activate and register the dang thing online, and it just would not work. Kept giving me the generic, “we cannot process your transaction at this time” spiel that makes it sound like it’s just a temporary outage when the real problem is that you transposed some digits or whatever.

But I did not. I went over every digit involved very carefully over and over and typed them all in and it still barfed up that message.

So I sighed and resigned myself to having to call the toll free number.

Which got me a frigging automated “Press one for… ” type system.

Don’t those seem anachronistic these days?

Anyhow, I went through the menus and they gave me the runaround but I stuck with it and that’s when my small victory occurred.

Namely that I found the secret option to let me talk to an actual person.

It felt like, in my small way, I beat the system. Hooray!

The nice lady on the line was able to register the card for me.

Or at least I hope she did. The website for my card still does not recognize the card, so I wont know for sure until I order myself some KFC tonight.

It’s going to be a rough month financially. Not only do I have to cough up $65 for my eye appointment tomorrow, I will also have to pay for new glasses (cheap when bought online) and, of course, Xmas gifts.

Which I am going to buy on this month’s disability payment because the next one is not until December 18, exactly one week before Xmas, and I am not going to bet my Xmas giving on Amazon’s ability to get things to me in less than seven days at the heart of the Xmas season rush.

Although they do say they guarantee one or two day shipping…

Nah, better not risk it.

Plus there’s my yearly payment to Postmates, the lovely people who sell me Xmas cards and send them to my family each year, complete with my little message

To be honest, I probably shouldn’t even be ordering KFC tonight. But I’ve already promised my stomach some Kentucky Fried goodness,

So that’s not negotiable.

I guess holiday stress comes for even us weirdo loners who spend every Xmas Eve alone because their family is far, far away

I’m getting an early start on being depressed about that.

I want to beat the rush.

More after the break.

---

Everything gets worse

Example : KFC’s four piece dinner doesn’t include a small salad any more.

You mean you expect me to pay and additional fee for my coleslaw?

How dare you, sir. How DARE you.

I knew things were going south when they switched from giving you cans or bottles of pop with your meal to giving you a fountain drink instead.

Way to boost the profit margin at our expense, COLONEL.

Plus I thought I had ordered a “Biggie” fries but I got a regular fries instead.

I’m not sure enough of that to make a complaint, though. I might have checked the wrong little circle on the Door Dash menu.

Oh, and speaking of menus, check this : I heard on the radio today that in the US, for the holiday season, they will be selling their McRib sauce by the half gallon jug,

$20, and you could have the cure for all potentially bland Xmas dishes in your arsenal.

“I’d love more of your squash soufflé, Aunt Margaret. Just give me a second. ”

Today’s been all right. I installed a patch to my Steam version of Morrowind that I hoped would make it stable enough to play without it crashing about 20 mins in.

I wanted this because the official version of the game supports MGE, the Morrowind Graphics Extender, and it makes the game so much prettier.

But alas, no. I think in order to get that working properly, I would have ot somehow make sure it doesn’t try to use my graphics card, and that’s such a depressing thought that I would rather use the less pretty but more stable OpenMW version of the game.

Right now I am playing an archer/summoner. The idea is that I would summon various critters to fight the enemy up close while I hung back and plucked arrows at them.

Pretty sneaky, no?

But I am finding that I don’t need the summoned monsters. I am getting good enough with the bow that I can take enemies down without them.

Which technically means that I wasted a skill slot on the Conjuring ability. And unfortunately, there’s no way to change that when you’ve already started playing, so I would have to start yet another new character to fix it.

And I’m already on, like, my sixth or seventh character!

What can I say, I get restless and want to try a different character build.

I can be quite fickle.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

It’s a lulu.

Took a couple of big first steps today.

For one, I started my System Administrator course from SkillUp. It’s a job I am fairly certain I can do.

I did the first chapter. It’s all videos – kinda lame. But whatever. The presenter is comfortingly husky and nerdy, which is a plus.

I wouldn’t trust a good looking person to know what they’re talking about when it comes to the heavily nerdy world of computers.

Oh, one amusing little detail – the captioning keeps spelling sysadmin as CIS admin.

I mean, he probably IS cisgendered^[1], but I can’t see how that’s relevant.

The first chapter is mostly just introductory stuff. What a sysadmin does, what areas of specialization there are, how to brew a cup of coffee so black it eats time, the usual.

It took a certain amount of self-control to keep myself from freaking out over how complicated he made it all seem. A lot of talk about reading tech news sites and keeping your certifications up to date and knowing all the latest hardware and so on.

Oh. And he said you should at least have a two year associate’s degree in computer science. In which case, why am I taking this fucking course?

The whole point of this exercise is to guide me to employment. I am not going to take a two year college degree just to be a sysadmin.

Just teach me how to do the job.

What I really want is diagrams. Ones that say, “this is this part, it does these things, it outputs to these things, here’s what they do…” and so forth.

Then you can teach me the software side of things.

I’m sure I will become more confident as I continue the course. I plan on doing at least one lesson a day. Maybe more.

That’s one of the reasons I am disappointed that it’s all video. I read a lot faster than I watch. If it was text base I could breeze through it at my usual top speed.

But oh well. I will learn anyhow. I will be a good student.

Heck, I might even take notes. No, really!

---

The other big step today was in getting my webcam working.

I learned that Windows comes with a simple video capture program called Camera, and so I can use that to capture the raw video for editing.

Oh, and get this : I downloaded a freeware video editing suite called Da Vinci Resolve because I figured if I could get a video editor other than Corel Video Studio that did NOT slap purple shit over the video I record, and I could stand to use it, I could avoid having to give Corel my $25.

So I download this thing, and it’s very impressive. Very professional looking. I recognize the things like timelines, clips, titles, audio tracks, and so on.

Totally looks like something I could use. So I boot it up and look around then decide it’s time for me to record my first video with it.

So I look for that function, and I look… and look… finally I Googled the problem, and it turns out the answer is quite simple :

Da Vinci Resolve doesn’t do that.

It’s this supposedly fully featured professional video editing program and it simply does not capture video.

And that’s fucking retarded. It’s like you started on step 2. The most basic thing a video editor should do is produce the actual video you recorded. The whole reason I downloaded your freaking program is that Corel wasn’t doing that right. And that turns out to be the one thing you can’t do.

YOU HAD ONE JOB.

Hence my looking up this Microsoft Camera thing. It has no features but it’s still a better program than Corel or Da Vinci.

Oh, and here’s the kicker : when I import the video I take with Camera into Corel or Da Vinci, the audio is out of sync.

It’s fine when I play the video by itself but put it in an editor and suddenly it looks like I have been badly dubbed.

But I am at least making progress.

More after the break.

---

A pink one

Felicity and Julian have already seen this, but it’s too good not to immortalize here.

Even thought it’s one of those weird YouTube vids that won’t let me embed it. Hence my having to give it to you in link form.

What is this, a Geocities site?

---

The long dark corridor

There’s a depressed feeling that I get sometimes that my mind has learned to express as a long dark corridor stretching infinitely ahead of me.

It’s a large and lonely feeling that contains a streak of helplessness and hopelessness, as if that corridor represents the rest of my life and what it will be like until the day I die.

Even my emotions just echo down the hall into nothingness.

It’s not a good feeling, and historically I have suppressed it, but now I am more inclined to try and slow it down and examine it and try to figure out what it’s trying to say.

It’s certainly an expression of my deep inner loneliness. An interior world in which I have always been and will always remain completely and utterly alone.

In fact, “alone” is too weak a word, but I don’t know what else to call it.

It’s a sense of “alone” which does not even contain the echoes of other people. There should be people in my head, people I have known and who have known me and who can be a warm and comforting, steadying presence, even if only in memory.

But there’s nothing but that long dark corridor to oblivion.

Even the people who should be there are absent. There were people I liked and who were at least somewhat nice to me when I was a kid. I have had online friends who mean a lot to me. I know my family and friends love me and want me to be well.

But it’s like none of that can make it through the thick layers of frost that have accumulated between me and the world from all those lonely days where I was just a sad little robot who went to school.

I don’t blame people for not being able to reach me.

I know it’s damned near impossible to do so.

And you can only leave people out in the cold for so long before they give up and go away once and for all.

And when they do, the absolute worst part of you goes, “Phew!”

Because that’s what it wanted all along.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

[[1][ Really, Microsoft? Your dictionary doesn’t recognize the word “cisgendered”?!? Read the fucking room! [[1]]

Alprazolam! And poof, your anxiety disappears.

Had my big important phone meeting with the nice lady from SkillUp this morning. And it went fine. All my nervousness about the whole thing was entirely unjustified and to be honest seems downright silly in hindsight.

But what can I say? I’m crazy. And crazy people do (and believe) crazy thngs.

It all says a whole lot more about my own rampant neurosis than it says about SkillUp. I was dreading the whole thing because I had convinced myself that I would have to tell this person from SkillUp my whole sordid lack of a life story and confess to them that I was a 51 year old loser who had never had a job.

And I obviously still carry an enormous about of guilt and shame about that.

And I honestly still don’t know how to deal with it. There is a lot of self-forgiveness that needs to happen before I can lay that burden down.

I’m working on it.

So because I was so nervous, I took a Xanax about an hour before the appointment. And it helped a lot.

Plus feeling my anxiety kind of melt away under its effects was fascinating and cool. I could feel my subconscious mind trying and failing to become anxious. The nervousness just faded away.

It all makes me very happy to have Xanax as an option. I would never use it on a regular basis, but for certain events it’s magical.

Now back to all that shame.

I know, intellectually, that I have nothing to be ashamed of. Yes, I have been unable to get employment due to mental and eventually also physical illness and that does make me a fairly extreme outlier – most people have had at least some kind of job.

But I have never supported myself at all. First I freeloaded off my parents, then Dhugal and David and Ross, and then I moved here to the GVRD and finally got to stop freeloadinf off friends and start freeloading off the government of BC.

Yay, independence at last.

All I have done is hide from the world and played video games. I have a massive lack of any kind of meaningful life experience.

Never been in love. Never supported myself with a job. I’ve never really traveled or had little adventures like that.

An awful lot of absolutely nothing of lasting value has happened instead.

And looked at that way, it’s kind of amazing, albeit in a terrible way. Most people would think avoiding life and work and romance for that long would be impossible.

But one of my gift/curses has always been that I can see how much of what people go through in life is actually optional and requires your cooperation and so I know intuitively that you can just,,,, not do it.

And when you can clearly see just how much of the social reality people live in is actually specious bullshit, you can choose not to participate in it when it does not seem like you will benefit from it.

This is bad.

It’s bad because you actually need to do all that stuff in order to become a properly socialized adult who can actually function in the modern world.

Turns out, all that “bullshit” was actually super important for reasons that are not at all evident to a stubbornly skeptical child, and by maintaining my right to disregard it any time I wanted to, I was actually dooming myself.

There are other factors. Lack of kindergarten. Lack of any meaningful form of guidance from adults. Total social isolation. Being a fundamentally broken kid due to the rape.

All of this led to my being deeply incapable of functioning as an adult. I have lived like a kid on a very low rent permanent vacation for my entire adult life.

I guess all that shame and guilt of mine stems from an assumption that I could have functioned like a normal, mentally intact person but failed to do so anyway.

And that’s highly debatable.

More after the break.

---

The eternal loop

Patient readers know the score.

COULD I have done better? If I couldn’t have, then I am off the hook for what a colossal waste of potential and living years my life has been so far. I can just square my shoulder, set my jaw, and tell myself that I did the best I could.

But it’s not quite that simple, is it? Because then I would have to face how truly ill I am, and give up on the idea of doing better in the future, because I’m doing my best now.

And its kinda pathetic.

The opposite side of this is the idea that I could have done better and can do better in the future if I just try.

That would involve taking full responsibility for the despicable mess I have made of my life so far, and I am not sure I can handle that.

My self esteem is already dangerously low. Taking responsibility like that seems like handing my self-loathing all the ammo it needs to finally take me over the edge.

But maybe not. I know I don’t really hate myself any more. I have gotten that far, at least. I have embraced the fact that I am, in fact, an extraordinary person, brilliant and amazing and unique, and what’s to hate about that?

I’m a great guy with big problems. That’s all.

The middle ground between taking full responsibility and continuing to skate along like usual is obviously to create a privileged moment where I can say, “OK, I was helpless until now. but from now on, I take responsibility for everything that happens. ”

The question then becomes, well, what changed? Everything. Nothing. Whatever.

Honestly, my true best course of action is probably to just keep fumbling along doing the best I can day to day, knowing that progress will be slow and uneven and hard, but also knowing that there’s no way I’m going to stop now that I know which way is up.

And I guess that’s the best I can do right now.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have a very strong instinct to tell people what I know they want to hear.

Instead of, you know, the truth.

Especially if it has something to do with me. At some point in my childhood, I learned that there was no point in telling my parents and siblings the real truth about how i was doing because I wouldn’t get hope, I would get an awkward moment of stunned silence because they don’t really want to know and weren’t really asking, and then possibly something like, “But other than that, you’re okay, right?”.

It was absolutely not okay for me to not be okay.

So instead, I smiled and said everything was fine even though it definitely was not. School was the same soul-destroying routine of boredom (in class) punctuated by terror (on the playground) that makes soldiers lose their minds in a time of war.

But I trudged onwards.

I did the same thing with teachers. Tell them what they want to hear so the tension of the moment will end and the adults will go away and leave me alone.

This was bad. Very bad.

Some of those people may have been able to help me. Unlikely, but it’s possible. At the very least, it would have been good practice in the vitally important skill of getting what you want by sucking up to the people above you.

But I was lost in my own world.

On a deep level, what I was doing was the social equivalent of a chameleon changing its colors to blend in with its surroundings.

I “shapeshifted” into whatever it was I could tell they wanted me to be in that moment, and so it was like I was mirroring what I saw in their minds. \

Put that way, it’s kind of creepy. Like the Martian that looks like whoever you want to see the most in those two Bradbury stories.

The main one – the non-Christmas one – has always had a huge effect on me. I identify with that alien way too much. His torment at the end of that story when he’s trying to be what each person in the crowd around him wants at the same time is something I faced all the time.

Partly it’s because I have a weak sense of self. Maybe that’s what happens when other people’s emotions are so present in the mind. Who you really are gets overwhelmed.

But it can be hard to tell my emotions from the emotions of others sometimes. And there is always the temptation to just be someone else for a while.

I guess for people less likely to put themselves in the shoes of another, being yourself is kind of not optional. You are who you are. You can’t suppress your own troubled emotions by voyaging through the emotions of another.

I kind of envy them their lack of escape routes. My escapism has starved my life of meaningful content and left me with a soul so thin and emaciated that you can use its skin as a map of skeletal anatomy.

That sounded better in my head.

But the first brutal lesson upon which my entire personality is built was how to escape the real world by retreating into my mind.

Even now, it’s very hard for me to imagine staying in the game and fighting instead of constantly fleeing and hiding.

And when even this stupendously low stress life of mine gets to be too much for me, I retreat into sleep.

Maybe I would have been far better off if I had no choice but to stay in the moment and learn to cope with reality.

Then I my soul might have some meat on its bones instead of being as weak and diffuse and amorphous as a jellyfish.

Just how does one build spiritual strength, anyway?

Ain’t no such thing as a soul gym.

More after the break.

---

The boy who died

I sometimes wonder about what I would have been like if I hadn’t been raped.

Obviously, my memory of my pre-rape life is pretty vague, both because trauma does that to the human mind and because I was 3.

But I remember being a pretty happy kid who loved life. My days were filled with honey sandwiches and my babysitter Betty and Sesame Street and the Polka Dot Door.

Also Romper Room, but I found that show to be patronizing.

I am pretty sure that had I not been fractured by trauma to the point where half of me went to sleep and has still not woken up 47 years later, I would have continued to be a bright, energetic, charismatic, and downright adorable kid.

At least until I had to enter school.

Then things get a lot more dicey. But I think I would have found my footing despite my lack of kindergarten.

Without half of me being functionally dead, I would have had all of my considerable amount of spunk and defiance at my command and could have used it to defend myself against the bullies both verbally and physically.

So I think I would have made a place for myself somewhere in the social hierarchy. Possibly somewhere near the top if I were sufficiently ferocious in my defense of my prerogatives and my boundaries.

But not at the top. I don’t think even an unbroken me would have the ambition to claw my way to the top of the heap. Because like… why?

I don’t want to run things. I don’t need that kind of responsibility.

I might end up in a leadership position despite myself though, because I have a lot of leadership qualities. I’m a big picture guy with high ideals and the pragmatism and respect for the details to put them into action.

That’s pretty much a leadership role right there. You can’t do that by yourself, no matter how hard I might try sometimes.

I can’t do it all by myself.

But I can’t do it with others, either. I never learned to work as part of a team. I am now and always have been a solo artist.

This is not a brag. I know it means I’m broken in a deep and terrible way. I missed so much of my development because of being so alone.

You can’t develop socially all by yourself in your room.

Not even with the internet.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.