So I was hanging out on Bluesky earlier, like I do, when I came across a post where a lady was complaining to “men” about the harassment she suffers on a daily basis.

So for balance (uh oh) I replied with a call to women to stop flipping out when men say no to sex.

Obviously not speaking for myself. If a lady offered me sex, she would have to be entirely without gaydar and probably secret quite ambivalent about sex in general.

I can relate.

No, I was basing my reply on some Reddit threads I have seen about the subject. Apparently some straight dudes (and presumably the occasional fag) have endured some quite catastrophic reactions to turning down a lady for sex.

And I get it. For some ladies, the patriarchy has left them so in conflict with themselves that it’s like crawling over hot coals just to get to the point where they are capable of saying yes to sex at all, and to be turned down at that point must be incredibly upsetting. Galling, even.

Because men are supposed to always want it and be ready willing and able to fuck any woman at any time and anywhere. Right?

Anyhow, I posted my little comment and that ignited a very unexpected massive shitstorm down on my poor head.

People were heaping abuse on me left and right and calling me all kinds of horrible things and wishing grievous harm on me and general being awful to me.

And I…was… LOVING IT!

It made me so happy! I finally managed to spark discussion and cause controversy and with what to me was a pretty innocuous equivalent statement.

I was accusing of belittling the original post (how?) and detracting from or even opposing the original post’s message (nope) and of being an incel (wrong on at least two levels) or an Andrew Tate follower (god no, that man is atrocious) and I was replying to each and every abusive comment in my usual inflammatory style and the whole time I was happier than a pig in oak barrel aged shit.

I must have been doing that for at least an hour, maybe more, before the shitstorm died down and I ran out of steam.

So it turns out that I do have a limit as to how much I can argue. Good to know.

And when I say “my usual inflammatory style”, I mean I was accusing people of the exact kind of hateful behaviour they presumably rag on the right wingers for doing and trying to burn me at the fucking stake and pricking their consciences (or maybe just being a prick) and pointing out to them that they were reacting to things I never said because, presumably, why let the facts get in the way of a good ol hatefest.

God was that fun. I was in full on trickster mode, mocking people’s hypocrisy, holding up a mirror to the monster inside them, and laughing at their rage.

Boy does that make me sound bad. Oh well.

I am still quite confident that I was (and am) in the right. They attacked me, after all. All I did was counter said attacks and maybe throw in one of my own here and there.

But I have a clear conscience because nothing I said in reply was even half as heinous as the shit they said to me, and my stuff was way more on point.

I got to witness first hand how people will deliberately misinterpret and project their own wishes onto an innocent (ish) person like me in order to twist things into whatever is the most fun to get mad about.

And I am more than happy to point that out each and every time it happens. I thrive in opposition to what I know to be wrong. The more they abused me, the more I reveled in it because clearly I had struck a nerve and now I was drilling down into it.

It’s mostly died down now. Which is good because if it was still going I probably would have dropped dead from exhaustion by now.

All in all, it’s been a very fun day.

I wonder how I can get myself in trouble again…. 🙂

More after the break.

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Prepare to have your heart severely warmed.

Pixar has the magic Disney once had.

That’s why Disney had to buy it back from them.

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Chip who now?

Turns out we have a Chipotle in the area!

And I am giving them a try tonight.

The menu immediately won me over when I checked them out on DoorDash because they have my beloved carnitas.

Basically Mexican pulled pork. It’s SO damned good.

They also have beef barbacoa, which is Spanish for BBQ beef. I keep seeing it on Mexican menus but I always end up ordering something else.

Like taco beef. God do I love taco flavoured ground beef.

So right now I am eating a burrito bowl from Chipotle. It’s got the carnitas, sour cream, red salsa, lettuce, black beans, corn, and for some reason green pepper.

I don’t recall asking for green pepper. It seems to have come with the lettuce. Good thing I like it.

And for an appetizer, I got chips n’ salsa. Both are quite good. I am impressed with how fresh everything is.

Patient readers know how much freshness means to me. The fresher the better, whether it’s produce or air.

So yeah, I think I’m a Chipotle guy now. Sorry Quesada, your stuff is good, but not THIS good. Plus Chipotle is a little cheaper.

There was some bullshit when the delivery arrived and I picked up my phone and it immediately died. I guess I thought I had put it back on its base but I hadn’t and so it did not recharge. Oopsie!

Oh, and Demon Hunger update : I just ate a big burrito bowl AND some chips and salsa and yet I am still fucking hungry.

I wish I could just hit up a buffet place and slay this beast.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Having a sleepy day so far.

As in. I have slept most of the hours of today except for the two hours I spent eating breakfast then going to Wound Care.

Whatever. I’m fine with it. It’s been decent quality sleep. Restful and untroubled. So it’s not been leaving me feeling terrible when I wake up.

I can live with large quantities of that sort of sleep. Eventually I will, as usual, become annoyed with how much of life I am missing out on, but for now I am content to snooze.

I’m currently facing a tough battle in Divinity : Original Sin. Not so tough that I can’t imagine winning it, but tough enough that I am going to have to really think about tactics and come up with ways to neutralize some of the enemies’ advantages.

I keep telling myself that all it takes is persistence, and that’s true. This isn’t the first difficult fight I’ve faced in the game and all it took to get past the previous ones was to try, try again and so that’s what I am doing.

But I have been falling back into wimpy habits in the game lately. Namely, when I hit a really tough fight, I don’t stay and persist till I overcome in, I go exploring and looking for an easier fight instead.

And that is very much loser behaviour. Sure, in an RPG like D:OS, I can always tell myself that I am just choosing to level up my heroes before tackling the tough fight again, and that might seem plausible, but I know myself and I know that’s not what I am really doing there.

What I’m really doing is wimping out and looking for the easy path. And there’s nothing wrong with a little of that – why make things harder for yourself if there’s an easier way – but to say that running away when faced with adversity is a way of life for me would be like Mount Everest is a little hard to lift.

It’s an understatement, is what I’m saying.

I’ve spent my entire adult life in full flight from even tiny amounts of adversity. On a subconscious level, I have been waiting for some kind of mystical magical path of literally zero resistance to open up to let me through to even the most basic level of adulthood for a very long time.

It ain’t coming. At some point, if I want to get anywhere in life, I am going to have to climb that stimulation gradient and endure my fears and learn to stay and fight for what I want instead of instantly caving in and running away all the god damned side.

I hate being so weak and gutless and spineless. I know how wrong it all is. It is definitely not a smart or wise or seemly way to live and yet I can’t seem to make myself knuckle down and change my wishy washy ways so I can get somewhere at last.

Because doing that will hurt. Overcoming oneself usually does. Facing my fears by focusing on what I want and actively pursuing it instead of drifting lonely as a cloud like I have doing for thirty fucking years will not be easy, and to the unworthy soul (like mine), if it’s not easy – REALLY easy – you just plain don’t do it.

And when I try to imagine what I would need to overcome my lassitude, I keep coming back to my lack of some spiritual substance I can use to comfort and steady myself as I brave the storm within to find safer ground.

Or at least more fun ground.

This substance could be called a lot of things. Courage. Character. Grit. Self-discipline. Belief in oneself. It could even be called faith.

Whatever it is, I don’t have it, and I feel its lack quite keenly. I can feel my soul trying to make the connection between desire and action and I can feel it attempting to draw on said mysterious substance and it just plain not being there.

The tank is empty. I’m not sure it’s ever been full.

All I can do is keep sending energy down to my deeper self to keep the thawing out of my ice torn and frostbitten soul and hope that my Spring will some day come.

Other than that, I feel utterly lost and alone. As usual.

So what the hell do I do now?

More after the break.

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The wrong question

Come to think of it, I guess “what do I do now?” is the wrong question.

Wrong because there is nothing I can “do” to make myself healthier. Not in the usual way we think of “doing” things.

There isn’t a concrete and logical series of steps I can take in order to gather that mysterious substance unto myself or anything like that.

Things are not that sensible.

Everything that I need to “do” is entirely internal and spiritual and existential, and that’s somewhat of a stumbling block for me because I am not used to acting in that realm or even acknowledging its existence at all.

I’ve gotten better about that in recent years, but it’s still virgin territory for me and hence I tend to feel lost in the wilderness when I think about it.

I’m so used to using these mighty mental muscles to engulf and overwhelm problems that I have to keep reminding myself that there IS another way and I know what it is.

I mean, this “intellect first” approach to life is the whole reason why I have to write my emotions down in this blog in order to process them and find out what they are.

Only the act of articulating them can bring them close enough to the surface of my mind for them to make the therapeutic journey from the subconscious to the conscious.

It still strikes me as an ass-backwards way to have to go about things. Like having to translate something into Finnish and back before you understand it.

But it’s what I’ve got to work with, so work with it I shall.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been rough.

Julian and I needed to go back to the sports rehab center where I had gone to have impressions of my feet made in order to pick up the resulting shoes.

The trip there was uneventful. I felt fine at that point. No warning signs.

But as soon as I got out of the car, I started feeling dizzy. And I felt dizzy all the way through the lobby and down the elevator as well.

But it wasn’t too severe. I felt unsteady on my pegs but not terribly so. So I just proceeded as normal, not giving it much thought as I went into the little where the nice British lady^[1] talked to me and showed me the shoes (which are ginormous, I feel like Frankenstein in them) and had me put them on and walk around a bit to see how they were fitting and so on.

After that, it was time to go back to the reception area to make my next appointment (Jan 22 at 1 pm) and this time, when I got up, I got REALLY dizzy.

This culminated in me taking a spill in the reception area. Luckily, my right arm absorbed most of the impact, thus sparing my head.

And let me tell you, if I had to fall, I sure as heck picked a great place to do it, because within minutes I had a doctor, a nurse clinician, a physiotherapist, and Jackie hovering over me concernedly.

I wish I remembered the doctor’s name. She was awesome. Very cheerful, gentle, and sweet. She asked me the expected questions about when I started feeling dizzy, had I eaten breakfast, what meds I was on, and so on.

Thanks to blister packing, I no longer know what meds I am on. I used to know them all by heart because I saw and read the pill bottles twice a day when I medicated.

But now, IDK WTF. Check my file.

I seem to be uninjured apart from my arm being a little sore. Once the nice ladies had checked me over and taken my vitals, I was able to sit up and then stand up long enough to get into the wheelchair one of them brought out.

So I got wheeled up to the lobby and waited for Julian there. The nice ladies stayed with me until I had gotten into the car OK.

All the way home, I felt ill. A little nauseous, dizzy, aching at the base of my testicles, head lightly throbbing.

The trip from the car to the apartment was fraught with peril. I was beyond dizzy. I was in such a messed up state that none of my usual environs – the car, the parking structure, the hallways, the door – looked or felt familiar.

Instead they seemed like something from a deliberately alienating art house film. Like things were shot from weird angles and through a fisheye lens.

Luckily I was able to get to the couch in the living room and then into my room and my beloved computer chair, and hence I could start blogging to you wonderful folk.

What happened? Well my new shoes have to take part of the blame. Jackie warned me that because I have not experienced arch support for almost a decade that there are likely muscles in my legs and feet that have atrophied over time and that might complicate matters somewhat.

Yeah, no shit. I just had to take my new clodhoppers off because they were starting to hurt my feet when I was just sitting here without putting any weight on them.

I am starting to think that whatever fucked up my arms and legs has done enough damage to my foot tendons that those big shoes of mine will not work for me.

That would be a shame. I rather liked having arch support for once.

Clearly I am going to need to call Jackie and tell her about all this. And that’s fine.

But I don’t know what made me so dizzy. I felt the dizziness again when I got up and used the bathroom just now, but thankfully at a far less severe level.

It could be a blood circulation issue caused by the shoes. We will see if things go back to normal when the shoes have been off for a while.

I’d hate to have to go to the ER for vertigo.

More after the break.

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As mysteriously as…

Well I just got my supper cooked and ready without being too dizzy, so I guess this is going to be yet another mysterious ailment that comes and goes with no explanation as to why it’s happening leaving me wondering WTF.

Oh well. I guess taking a nap helped a lot. I still don’t feel one hundred percent good – for one, I’m still a little dizzy – but I guess I am mostly back to my more traditional levels of pain and misery.

It’s like coming home again!

Still don’t have the shoes on. I will try them again soon. They felt quite comfortable when I first wore them, and my GOD did it feel good to have arch support again.

So I am really hoping the issues are fixable. I get the feeling that because medical science abandoned all attempts to find out what the fuck is wrong with my legs (and arms), nobody knows how the ortho shoes will interact with the damage and that’s how we ended up in this sorry state of affairs.

I imagine I will have to go back to the sport rehab place for more measurements and adjustments and whatnot. And a lot sooner than January.

Le sigh. Oh well. Welcome to getting old. Everything starts to break down.

Especially for a medical mystery like me. I’ll be six feet under and some schmuck doctor will still be saying, “Well our tests show you to be perfectly healthy, Mister Bertrand. ”

Not that I’m bitter.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or vice versa.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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Truth or… something

Consequences! That was it.

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

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

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

Kind of like how I present myself to the world :

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even a mind like mind.

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When you’re going through hell, keep going!

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Great. Just great.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Deal with it first, freak out about it later.

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

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

Don’t get me started.

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

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

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

Time to man up at last and get shit DONE.

Like a nap. Right now.

More after the break.

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Just skating along

But I never learned to skate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’d be neat.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

Please hold your applause till the end of the performance.

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

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

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

That would be very on brand for me.

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

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

A sort of “mood floor” if you will.

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

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

Ain’t that a peach.

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

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

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

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

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

Talk about a negative feedback loop. Oy.

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

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

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

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

More after the break.

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More mind-blowing AI

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

Check out this august gentleman.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I need to get me one of those.

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Learning to fly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will get out of this shark cage eventually.

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s miracle of AI is :

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

I should see what other miracles I can unleash! 🙂

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

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

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

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

At least for me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My family included.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The fuckery is afoot, methinks.

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

And foxy gotta blog.

I guess I will be blogging into LibreOffice for now!

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The fuckery continues

Woman, get thee to a fuckery!

Still blogging into a LibreOffice document, god damn it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s all very stressful and frustrating.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or so I thought.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No promises, though.

More after the break.

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A night in

Like I ever have a night out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

They’re so good!

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

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

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

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Make more waves

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

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

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

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

Then, when I am done, take a nap.

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

This could work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

But is this it?

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

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

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

I’m just too damned crazy to make it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Because I gotta get out of this place.

More after the break.

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Speaking of being squished in between

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You were so close.

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

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

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

Stack overflow, dude.

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

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

Perhaps that will help prevent future incidents. Perhaps not.

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

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.