OK, I guess I am ready to discuss it now.

Plus I have no other ideas, so this is it.

Here is the vid :

Now to start off, you must ignore a whole section of that video because he goes off talking about dysthymics that are hard working and reliable and excellent in their field but find there to be no joy in it for them.

That’s clearly not me. I never got a chance to do that. My illness took me before I could even get my first job.

And I was never the one my parents could rely on because they never gave me any responsibility, or anything else for that matter.

I guess they could rely on me to stay invisible. Never ask for anything, stay in my room most of the time, rarely even watch TV with them.

Because I was dead inside.

Now for the rest of it.

He talks a lot about learning to generate your own joy, and that jibes with my own observations about it seems like healthy people have a faculty inside them that generates the right emotional input to keep their mood from going below a certain level.

So far so good.

But when I try to apply this to myself, I hit a dead stop. My brain screeches to a halt. I literally cannot imaging pleasure coming from inside me.

So like Doctor K says, I rely entirely on external stimuli, and in my case that’s video games, and to a lesser extent food.

I’ve cooled out on food for the most part. I eat, obviously, and the foods I eat are ones I like, but I don’t think about food or plan my life around food and I certainly don’t use food to improve my mood.

That’s a dead end street. Emphasis on dead.

I can’t even imagine pigging out like I used to now. I know where that leads and it leads to feeling ill for a much longer time than it made me feel good.

But video games are my doom still. They are my “dominant other” and I rely on them almost exclusively for my emotional needs for :

1. A safe and acceptable level of stimulation
2. A sense of accomplishment and, god help me, productivity
3. An outlet for my intellectual energies
4. Something to occupy my time
5. An escape from having to be me

And pretty much everything else, too.

Or at least the needs I recognize and experience. As we all know, I have ruthlessly suppressed every goddamned emotion that did not fit in my addictive lifestyle and that is a lot of freaking emotions.

I don’t even feel horny any more. All I feel is a certain tightness in my balls that suggests I should at least try to masturbate to get some relief.

Then again, I suppose there’s nothing in my life to MAKE me horny.

There I am, putting all the onus on an exterior source of pleasure again.

That’s really where the bullet hits the bone. I can only see the world through the lens of a perpetual need for external stimuli to keep my mood afloat.

The idea of being able to be OK just on my own, unstimulated, seems utterly foreign to me. Alien. Like it comes from a very different universe than my own.

And I’m sorry, Doctor K, but I don’t rely on external things to make me happy. Maybe this is the depressed Gen X in me, but I don’t believe in “happy”.

Nothing can make me happy. At least not yet. Even if I am enjoying myself greatly, that layer of ice around my heart never melts and I am, at best, okay.

And that’s all I really want out of life. Contentment. Fulfillment. I just want to feel okay instead of feeling like I am always fighting oblivion and barely producing enough thrust to keep myself out of the black hole at my core.

And you want me to somehow generate my joy internally?

That’s not in the cards.

At least, not yet.

More after the break.

---

Cancel it out

That’s what I am trying to do with the negative thinking displayed above.

And it’s not easy. It’s like there’s a massive flywheel in me that’s been spinning in one direction with enormous force for a very long time and I am trying to get it to spin in the opposite direction now.

And that means that the first thing I have to do is kill all the momentum going the wrong direction and that means applying an opposing force.

I don’t have it in me yet to stop the wheel all at once. I can’t just slam on the brakes and have it grind to a halt in a shower of sparks.

Instead, I have to apply little bits of opposing force that slow down the wheel just a little each time. Eventually, I may be able to stop it and then start it spinning positive.

Until then, I feel kind of like I find pockets of negativity in my mind when I do things like write here and by writing them out, I excise them.

I can let go out those emotions now. They have been transmitted.

Other times, it’s more like grinding the barnacles off a ship’s hull. The negative thoughts and attitudes stick out from my actual natural mind and so, with a small concentration of will backed by my massive rage battery, I can grind them down to nothing.

And that feels good. Like a hot shower when you’re really dirty. You can feel all the sweat and grime and nastiness just melt and slide off you and down the drain.

Like I keep saying, it’s a slow process. Perhaps I am too cowardly and/or cautious to make the big moves I really need. Maybe I don’t have the strength yet. Maybe I have not built up enough frustration and rage yet.

Still can’t get mad and stay mad. I’m just too naturally mellow.

But I will grind my way out of here sooner or later.

If I live long enough.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Feeling very sleepy and derpy today.

Must be one of my sleep days when my sleep debt comes due and my brain wisely makes me shut the fuck down so it can get some maintenance work done.

I was going to comment on this Healthy Gamer (with Doctor K) vid, which is all about dysthymic depression (hello!). I had this whole set of comments I was going to make relating the content to myself, but meh.

Maybe later. Maybe not. Whatever. I am too tired to think about it.

Let’s see what I can remember. He talked about dysthymic depressives like myself not having depressive episodes per se but feeling kind of rotten all the time.

That syncs with my observations. There are bad days and better days with my depression, but I don’t have episodes where it gets far far worse like people with major depressive disorder (MDD) do.

Instead I cling to the baseline. The amplitude of the waveform of my mood is quite low. Never very high but also never very low either.

That is changing as I tear down that wall inside me and open myself to the full range of human emotion. That baseline shit comes at the cost of muting all your emotions, good or bad, in order to create that artificial calm.

The concept is that this omnipresent muting is worth it because it keeps you out of the severe lows and thus keeps you “safe” from things like self-harm.

That’s well worth eliminating the highs as well and thus living a sad but stable life doing not much of anything.

Or so the reasoning goes.

But there are worse things than being really depressed. I am more than willing to risk serious lows in order to destroy that wall of numbness inside myself and find out what it’s like to really feel something.

I want to feel everything. Everything there is to feel. The entire smorgasbord of human emotion, from anger to zealotry.

And I am pretty sure that I am very well armed against self-harm. I know that no matter how bad I feel, it’s only temporary. If I hang in there until it passes, I will be happy that I didn’t do anything permanent to myself.

And what the hell. I’d rather feel bad than feel nothing. Pain and sadness suck but at least they tell me that I am alive, god dammit.

I have not felt truly alive for a very long time. All that “stability” came at the cost of being dead inside for thirty fucking years.

Thirty years I won’t ever get back. And that hurts so bad. All that time alive and in my prime wasted playing video games and blogging and nothing much else.

I could have completed a college degree and maybe a masters in psychology and gone into private practice somewhere and really helped people while living a comfortably middle class life.

At the end of the day, that’s all I really want. A comfortable middle class life. One like my childhood back in good ol’ Summerside, Prince Edward Island.

More than that would be nice. But even then, my aspirations remain middle class.

Just middle class with nicer stuff.

That’s probably how I would live even if I was rich. I don’t want a mansion or a castle or a huge penthouse apartment someplace chic.

I just want a cozy middle class house that I can share with my Man of Life which we would turn into our own cozy little nest to make our home.

Something in a nice, quiet, leafy neighborhood. Like the one I grew up in.

I guess we really do return “home” after all. Even is we have to build it ourselves.

More after the break.

---

Beat up and beat down

That’s how I am feeling right now.

Going to the kitchen to make supper was a real slog. I’m so body-tired right now. And yet, mostly all I have done is sleepy.

Starting to worry that I have something viral.

You know, like a funny meme, or bad news about Trump.

Ha ha. But seriously, I might have some kind of bug. A flu, or the like. The telltale signs are that I feel sore all over, and like my energy is being drained away by something.

My throat also feels a little swollen and sore, and weirdly enough, so does the area just inside my ears.

That’s a new one.

So the evidence is pretty strong that I have caught something nasty. Yay.

I will, of course, continue to monitor the situation in case things take a turn for the worst and I need to get to the good ol ER or whatnot.

God, even just getting up to get water from the ensuite leaves me breathing hard and feeling like I just ran up a hill and down again.

But it had to be done. Dehydration is a bitch at any time but it’s especially bad when your body is trying to fight something off.

I hope I don’t end up in the hospital again. This time I won’t even have my tablet to keep me entertained because I still have not gotten around to buying the new battery for it.

I’ve been putting it off partly because of the expense ($35 CDN or so) but mostly because I suspect I am actually better off without it.

I sleep better without it. No more lying down to sleep and immediately picking up the tablet to play games until I am sleepy enough to actually sleep.

Yeah, that doesn’t work. I just end up overstimulated and that drags me away from sleep, not to it.

I am much better off listening to a podcast or a YouTube video in the dark before I go to sleep. That drops the stimulation level down to just my ears and my mind, and it is way easier to go to sleep from there.

I suppose I could get the new battery and then just stick the damn thing in the closet by the door where we keep our jackets.

That way it could be there when I am definitely going to need a smaller version of Mister Computer here (Computer Junior) somewhere, but I won’t be tempted to use it all the damned time any more.

Besides, a lot of those games were really stupid.

I miss doing crosswords on it, though.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My health is maybe getting worse?

I dunno. So many things happen to me that seem bad but then they pass and I feel silly for having gotten all worked up and worried about it.

But(t) twice in the last 24 hours, I have felt the need to defecate but when I stood up to go do so, something shifted and the need became VERY VERY URGENT.

As in, the main event started happening before I had found my seat.

In other words, I started pooping immediately and had to make a dash to the toilet to prevent something very nasty from happening.

I’ve never really been good at euphemism.

And another thing : the same sort of thing happens with urine too. I feel my bladder is full and my receptacle is full so I have to go to the ensuite to have a civilized pee.

And when I stand up or move, the urine sloshes against my urinary sphincter and a little bit leaks out.

And that seems to be getting worse too. A few times recently it’s been more than just a little pee. It’s been more like a squirt of it.

Thank God I was wearing pants both times.

I’d rather wet myself a little than pee on the floor. 🙁

These eliminatory misfires have me quite worried that something spinal is going wrong. I was, after all, instructed to go to the ER if I experience incontinence or an inability to pee, and I am coming close to the incontinence on two fronts.

And yet, I don’t really wanna go to the ER. It’s super boring and stressful and my symptoms are nebulous enough that I am positive my issue would score very, very low on the triage scoreboard and so it would take forever for them to get to me.

And of course, like I always bring up in these situations, there is the lurking socially anxious fear of going to the ER and enduring the entire process only to be told they could find nothing wrong with me and I just wasted everybody’s time.

And I get the whole “better safe that sorry” thing and I know whatever medical person was dealing with me would tell me that I did the right thing in coming in, but that would not make a lick of difference to my socially anxious self.

I would still feel horribly guilty and embarrassed.

So I am in my usual position of hesitation where I know I probably should go but I am not ready to go yet and all I can do is wait and see if things get bad enough to motivate me to go to the ER or UC.

I sure hope that the fecal half of the issue is just some passing thing. A bug, or a touch of food poisoning, or just a weird reaction to something.

The urinary part is bad but not “poop yourself in public” bad.

I could also make an appointment with my GP, Doctor Chao. But that would involve a delay of at least a week and that’s too long to wait.

And even then, it would be a freaking phone appointment.

As far as I can tell, I don’t have any other symptoms of note. I don’t feel sickly and my appetite is fine and my insides are being pretty quiet.

But I am on alert anyhow. Things can get far worse quite fast and I may have to do another dash to the toilet

And that’s not easy with legs like mine.

I just want to make it through doing Denny’s.

I can fall apart after that.

More after the break.

---

Not falling apart yet

Back from Denny’s. So far so good.

One thing I forgot to mention earlier was that I have also been experiencing mild pain when I defecate.

It sort of feels like I am pushing out something rough and spiky. As if my feces had fragments of walnut shell or somesuch in it.

Pretty sure it doesn’t, though.

And then afterward there is a lingering burning sensation in both the rectal and perianal regions. It’s quite unpleasant.

But I must stress that this is mild pain. These are fairly faint sensations.

Trust me, if it hurt a lot, there would be no question as to going to the ER. I’ve been in that situation, though with urination not defecation, and you wanna bet I hit the ER.

God, that was horrid.

So add that to the running tally of ways my body is being weird.

It’s so hard to find an island of peace and calm where I can center and ground myself when I never know what is going to go wrong next.

I am trying to convince my deeper self that I am safe and it can let down its guard and let me relax and just live my life without all these neurotic second guessing and futile attempts to exert absolutely control over outcomes.

That’s not possible. There are too many variables that you can neither predict or control. And if you take trying to control outcomes too far, you end up with a life like mine which is toxic to the soul and a miserable little cage to live in, but it’s predictable.

Far better to work on getting used to handling the unexpected.

I mean, don’t stop me if you’ve heard this, but you can’t control the world. All you can control is how you react to it.

I will never be a person who likes surprises in the real world. That’s a fundamental part of my temperament.

But surprises don’t have to be utterly devastating events that leave me shocked and reeling like a bomb just went off next door either.

Plan A is no surprises. But there has to be a robust and flexible plan B, and that plan B has to be to rise to the occasion and deal with the situation with strength, intelligence, and maturity so that the new problem is handled, not just fled from.

That’s the only plan that makes practical sense. After all, having only one plan with no contingencies is extremely shortsighted and inefficient.

And I am all about efficiency.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m beginning to think that my computer crashes are actually a good thing.

Why? Because it encourages me to stop playing video games for once and be more sociable online instead.

And that’s a good thing. The more positive social input I can get, the better. Right now, it’s all text based (damn microphone not working) but I am going new places and doing new things and these things do involve other people, so it’s all for the better.

So I now poke around on Instagram and Blue Sky. Of the two, I prefer Blue Sky as it doesn’t automatically play video when I mouse over them like Instagram does.

I wish I could set a global “never automatically play anything” flag on my computer so that all apps and sides know to wait until I tell you to play that video”.

There might be a way to make that happen in Instagram’s settings.

I will look into it.

And last night I managed to do what seemed impossible : I found a Discord server where people were actually talking.

Thank frigging god. I was getting serious liminal chills.

It’s called Paradise Paws and it seems quite lively, with many active channels and a pretty good system of moderating bots and other necessities of modern online life.

So I actually text chatted with total strangers last night and it was loads of fun.

It helped that these total strangers were furries, of course. It would have been a much harder row to hoe if I had to deal with normal people.

But some day, I will venture into some sort of normal person online space and do my best to get along with them, too.

I suppose Instagram and Blue Sky are not filtered by furriness, so I am dealing with normal people there.

But I try not to think about that.

To me, they’re just strangers who can type.

And the best thing is that in these environments, you ARE your words. You are free of all your accidents of birth and can express yourself however you like and maybe even be the person you’ve always wanted to be.

Like me, with Fruvous.

So while this is, in fact, an increase in social stimulation, it’s in a small enough dose and a safe enough form for me to use it as the next step up in my journey to unlock my full and natural self and be happy, gregarious, charming, adorable person I once was a long time ago, before I was raped.

That wall inside me has to go. It is the beating, throbbing, bleeding heart of all my problems and the more I tear it down, the saner I will be.

I am, in fact, a pretty amazing dude. One that has no reason to fear interacting with others because he is genuinely likable and in fact rather remarkable.

I am an academic genius, after all.

I can’t help but hear that in a Wile E. Coyote voice in my head.

I have physical issues. And I am not just talking about the mysterious illness destroying my arms and legs.

The dyspraxia and major brain fog are also handicaps. They make it so I can’t quite function like other people do, and that gets me down sometimes and fills me with a very deep sense of shame.

But fuck that. I have plenty of other gifts. I might be a tad overspecialized in certain areas and abnormally weak in others, but that’s where genius comes from.

And nobody is good at everything.

I seem to have enough good attributes that people want me around.

And what else do you need, really?

---

Grumble mutter curse!

It was call it that or try to transliterate a growl.

So I order me some pasta from Pizza Hut. Creamy chicken alfredo. Good stuff.

The problem starts when the driver shows up. She calls up on the building phone, which is what she is supposed to do, and that building phone still has the worst audio connection the Earth has ever known, so I couldn’t hear or understand her.

So she hangs up, and a couple of minutes later, she calls back, and I can tell by the clarity of the audio that she is now on her cell phone.

Once more, I try to explain to someone that I can’t let them in the building while I am talking to them on the phone.

I only have the one phone line.

There is a pause after I stop talking, and I know in my soul that she did not listen to or understand a word I just said.

Then she says, in the voice of someone who is retarded and/or a toddler, that she has another order and she has to go.

I’m still hoping against hope that she caught what I said.

But no. I look up my order on DoorDash and there it is, a picture of my beloved pasta sitting alone and forlorn OUTSIDE THE FRONT DOOR OF BUILDING.

God fucking damn it.

Who knew modern conveniences could be so stressful?

So I do the usual complaint and get the usual refund. So I am at least not out any money. And I decide to pivot and order me some Burger King instead.

Got the Bacon Whopper Melt again. Very tasty. I do love that flame broiled taste.

Even if it’s probably mostly chemical.

That leaves one matter : there’s still my pasta sitting out there in front of the god damned apartment building.

So I called up Julian to ask him to get it for me when he comes home from hanging out with Joe and his parents like he does every Saturday night.

Sadly, it will no longer be in an edible state by then. Alfredo means dairy and dairy means do not eat after it’s been sitting outside in the elements for three or four hours.

I dunno. It might still be good. It depends on whether or not Alfredo has cream in it as well as the cheese.

But I don’t think I will risk it.

I am proud of myself for ending my complaint to DoorDash with, “I am very angry!”.

Yay, I expressed anger!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m thinking I need to rethink them.

First I have Wound Care. And that involves a journey from the parking lot up to the Community Care Clinic, and that’s not short.

Not by my fucked up standards, anyhow.

And then there’s the trip back down to the car.

And then, at 2:30 pm, I have my shower at Rosewood. And that involves going from the front of Rosewood all the way to the back, where the shower room is located.

And then, after the shower, the return trip to the lobby.

And I think that’s just too much for my poor compromised legs. Today. when I made the trip from the shower room back to the lobby, my legs were hurting so bad that I was worried they were going to give out on me, and indeed, when I got to the lobby I didn’t so much sit in the chair as I fell into it.

This is not good.

Oh, and today I also did my banking in between Wound Care and Rosewood, and that added to my mileage too, though not as much as the other two.

No wonder my legs were very angry with me. I did a lot of walking with my walker today and that pissed my legs off so bad that they almost went on strike.

This is the sort of thing that really rams home the fact that I am disabled. At home, I spend most of my time sitting or lying down, and so the only times I use my legs are when I go to the bathroom or the kitchen.

Two places at opposite ends of the same process.

But when I have to actually use these malfunctioning pegs of mine, the truth of my debility rears its ugly head and forces me to deal with it.

I can see only one solution to this Friday problem and it’s not one I relish :

I’m going to have to get Albert to push me in a wheelchair.

And thus, it begins. I knew that I would end up in a wheelchair sooner or later as my mysterious illness progresses.

For now, the walker will do for most things. But by the time I get to Rosewood, my legs are on their last legs (ha) and making the trip via walker is downright dangerous.

I could have taken a nasty fall today. The kind that really messes you up. The kind from which you never really recover.

There are worse places than an old folk’s home for that to happen in, mind you. I imagine falls are something they deal with fairly often.

Sometimes I just want to wrap old people in bubble wrap.

Anyhow, so yeah. I think I am going to have to ask Albert to push me to the shower room and back in a wheelchair.

Rosewood has lots of them, of course. Overall it seems to be a very good nursing home. Clean, well lit, soothing and gentle décor, bright and efficient staff, and an overall vibe of wholesome good health and good cheer.

I can only imagine that it ain’t cheap.

I’m not ready for the nursing home just yet, of course. In fact, one of the nice things about going to Rosewood is that it sure makes me feel young.

Oh, and one random thing I feel compelled to note :

When I was sitting in the lobby, an old fella said hello to me in a very cheerful way

And when I was making my way from the lobby to the shower room, a random old Korean lady said hello to me too

I of course said hello back both times. I am meticulous in my manners, after all. But it made me wonder what about me had changed to make myself so approachable.

Oh, and of course, both times I had to frigging stifle my social anxiety and stuff it in a box. But I am getting better and better at that.

I’m actually a friendly, lovable, sociable guy when the anxiety doesn’t get in the way. After all, before the rape, I was a very charismatic and friendly child.

So I am making it my mission to grind away at that stupid aversion until I can just be my sunshiny lovable self without my unwanted passenger making life hard for me.

Go away, Avoidance. You’re not welcome here any more!

More after the break.

---

Brown trousers again

Had a fecal incident earlier.

But this time, I woke up right before it, and so I was able to minimize the damage to my bedding via LOTS of Kleenex.

I have to wonder if it is somehow related to my extra effort today. Like all the walker-ing caused problems in all the muscles of my lower half, or maybe started something happening in my spine, or somesuch.

Now the standard disclaimer : if it happens AGAIN, I will take it to the ER or UC.

I think I would be marginally less embarrassed to tell the intake lady at the ER I have been pooping the bed than some stranger at UC.

Not that I know the intake lady personally. But the ER is a much more familiar environment for me and that would be a lot to a nervous nelly like me.

That place is like a second home to me, sadly enough.

Though I have managed to stay out of it for a while now.

Let’s call that progress, and move on.

Computer continues to shit the bed (how apropos) now and then. Moreso with Kingmaker than Odyssey, which is odd, because Odyssey, like all Assassin’s Creed games, takes place in a 3D open world with tons of freedom of movement, so it should be a lot more demanding on Mister Computer’s resources.

But then again, it’s by gaming giant Ubisoft, and Kingmaker is by a scrappy indie studio called Owlcat Games, so maybe it’s a matter of Ubi being able to afford to do way more testing before they ship.

Oh well. I will get that new power supply some day.

But not any time soon.

Fucking five week months!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Because my computer keeps crashing. Dammit.

It crashes in the usual way : screen goes black and nothing I do will bring it back to life except for rebooting the whole machine.

It’s been doing this for a while and it’s always been very irritating. But now it’s happening more and more.

And I don’t like that.

For a while, it was only happening maybe four or five times a week. But lately it’s been happening after about half an hour of gameplay and sometimes even less.

There’s this one difficult battle in Pathfinder : Kingmaker that I finally figured out how to beat only to have the fucking game to crash my computer right as I’m about to win.

That is so freaking exasperating! I’ve actually had to decide to see if that fight is necessary for the plot and I am pretty sure it isn’t, so I guess I just have to skip it.

But I have cleared out all the rest of the three floors of this dungeon except for the big final fight and so my need to be thorough is going to give me hell for not finishing what I started and beating this particular gang of bad guys.

And all because my computer regularly goes blind on me.

Which means I am going to have to finally get around to getting that new power supply. That’s the most likely cause of these crashes. The high speed setup I have uses a LOT of power, and sometimes my current power supply can’t meet its needs.

So the graphics card poops the bed and stops putting out any video information and that’s why the screen goes black.

And there’s nothing I can do but reboot when that happens because computer are rather hard to use without graphics.

I’ve tried power cycling my monitor and unplugging it from the graphics card then plugging it back in, but neither of those worked.

I do wonder what caused it to get worse recently, though. The most obvious answer is that this is a progressive issue and thus has been getting worse over time.

And that’s not impossible. It could be that my el cheapo power supply (I needed one in a hurry) is being overtaxed and that causes it to burn out slowly.

Which would mean I need to get that power supply like NOW, before my computer becomes completely unusable and I am forced to find something productive to do.

Perish the thought.

Actually, a lot of my life would be unlivable without a computer of some sort. Not only would I have no video games to play, but I wouldn’t be able to blog to you wonderful people. plus I order my groceries off of the Internet

So yeah. Should probably get right on that.

The other possibility is that it’s a heat issue. Something in the computer (probably the graphics card) is overheating and that trips a sensor somewhere and the whole thing shuts down to keep the microchips from melting.

Kind of important, that.

If it’s a heat issue, the solution might be somewhat complex. I would have to get spuug to find somewhere to install more case fans.

And the graphics card already has four of them.

Come to think of it, I haven’t heard that signature “plane revving up for takeoff” noise from my computer lately.

Maybe the real problem is that the fans aren’t working so when the chips on the graphics card get too hot, the only thing it can do is go offline.

I am going to be listening very carefully to my computer during my next gaming session.

More after the break.

---

Society’s biggest secret

The reason rich people need to surround themselves with things that remind them they are rich, and indeed to keep buying more of said things, is that otherwise the spell would wear off and they would realize that money does not, indeed, buy happiness.

They are as much slaves of that powerful cultural delusion as the rest of us. We need to believe that money can buy happiness because if it doesn’t… what does?

What if the hidden truth is that we do not have the power to make ourselves happy. even if we had all the money in the world.

What if true happiness can only come from other people. Our fellow humans. What if true happiness cannot come from individualistic consumer society at all, no matter who we are, and no matter what we buy?

What if you can only be happy if you have good relationships in your life?

That seems to be where the science points. And yet, our souls reject this truth. We might superficially agree that money can’t buy happiness because it makes us feel better of our lack of it, but we don’t really believe it.

We all think that if we had a lot more money, we’d be happy forever. But we also know that isn’t true, don’t we?

After all, the homeless person we pass on a downtown street looks at us and thinks about how much more we have than them and probably thinks that if they had what we have, they’d be happy forever.

And we’re not, are we?

No matter what it is, it becomes the new normal and fades into the background. And then you have a choice : seek happiness in relationships instead, or delude yourself by thinking, “Well sure, getting more money didn’t make me happy THIS time, but surely the next time, it will. ”

And in a way, it will, because getting the money might well make you happy for a while.

And spending the money might also make you happy for a while.

But having the money never will.

And I think that is one of the prime reasons becoming rich turns people into monsters. They have gone all the way to the rainbow’s end, and there was no fucking gold.

Just more rainbow, on and on, forever.

And if you are born rich, it’s even worse, because you don’t even have the sense of accomplishment you’d get if you’d made all the money yourself.

And yet pop culture screams at you that you are “living the dream” and should be ecstatically happy all the time.

But you’re not. And that gives you a deep feeling of having been ripped off somehow and yet, society’s programming keeps you from seeing what the real problem is, so the pain makes you lash out at the world instead.

That’s why so many rich kids are assholes and bitches. And why they end up fucking up their lives with sex and drugs and dangerous sports and all the rest.

They’re looking for the happiness society has promised them. And they aren’t finding it.

And that really pisses them off.

Surely it must be around here SOMEWHERE….

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You’re doing more harm than good.

Specifically, by lumping actual, real, science-based environmentalism in with all your Greenpeace hippie bullshit, you discredit the real thing and hand ammunition to the bastards who are killing the planet in order to make a buck.

Because you and your lot make big deals about nothing issues like the rainforest (never was threatened) and water conservation (saving water here does nothing to help areas where there’s drought, take the brick out of your toilet) and other cockamamie issues that are just as delusional as anything the MAGA crowd believes, your inane BS can be used to discredit all environmentalism, even the real stuff.

Climate change is real. Pollution is real. Endangered animals are real.

But your anti-industrialization and anti-science stance is absolute bullshit. Billions would die without the products of the Industrial Revolution, including you.

And science is the only reason you know there’s a climate change problem in the first place. You can’t accept the results of science as your holy cause in one instance and then rail against science in another.

Science may well have gotten us into this mess, but it’s also the only thing that can possibly get us out of it, too.

It will sure as fuck do a lot more to solve the problem than banging drums and smoking pot in the forest ever will.

Your whole “green” schtick is all about emotional reasoning anyhow.

When you think of farms and forests, you get a good feeling.

When you think of cars and factories, you get an icky feeling.

And clearly, if something gives middle class white people an icky feeling, it must be pure evil and deserves to be destroyed.

Sure, factories are icky and gross. And if they pollute, that must be stopped immediately. We’re on the same page there.

But just because something is icky and gross does not mean it is evil or bad or that we would be better off without it.

After all, the sewer system is disgusting and awful, and yet modern life would not be possible without it.

So it is with all the factories and cars and highways and fast food places that you and your ilk find to be so objectionable.

You need to put down that tambourine, shave off the beard, cut your hair, and put on respectable clothes so you can talk to your fellow middle class people as equals and “one of them” and connect your cause with their concerns.

But that’s your call. If you’d rather let the planet burn than put on a tie, that’s up to you. Nobody is forcing you to care.

But those of us who are actually dedicated to finding a real solution instead of the symbolic crap that Big Business has convinced you means you are “making a difference” and “doing your part” would greatly appreciate it if you went off to your Ewok village or vegan ashram and shut the hell up while the grownups are talking.

We have a lot to do and not a heck of a lot of time to do it. Saving the world is going to take nothing less than a massive overhaul of governance itself and that’s not the kind of thing that is going to happen if we give Big Business and its billionaire buddies a choice.

But don’t forget : there are billions of us and hundreds of them. If the people got together to make the necessary changes, there would be absolutely nothing they could do to stop us.

That’s how real change happens. That’s what actually makes a difference. That’s what being dedicated to saving the world really means.

Everything else is just mutual masturbation.

More after the break.

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A therapy…. Wednesday?

My therapist’s schedule has been all kinds of wacky lately.

Hence my having therapy at noon today instead of my usual Thursdays at 1 pm.

And next week will be normal, but the week after I won’t have therapy at all because it’s Rosh Hashana so he’ll be busy with family all week.

That’s the Jewish New Year, and a very big deal for them.

I wish him and his family all the best.

Today’s session was kind of bouncy and informal. I was in a good mood, so I guess I didn’t really feel like digging deep into my fucked up psyche.

I feel differently at the moment. Right now I feel kind of heavy and sad. Not sure what happened but I feel like it happened when the sun went down.

Maybe my mood really is solar powered.

But whatever. I am opening myself up to all my emotions now and that includes feeling sad some of the time.

I’d rather be sad than numb.

Sad isn’t fun but it’s not the end of the world either. It can be worked through just like any other emotion. It’s not like I’ll be stuck here forever.

The secret, like I told Doctor Costin today, is to just keep moving forward.

Keep processing my emotions. Keep that karmic wheel inside my soul rolling forward. Forever reject the supposed safety of stasis.

Fuck that noise. I want to live and breathe and feel and truly experience life.

I want to be alive, god dammit. Whatever it takes.

Let’s see. Oh, I told him about my microphone letting me down.

I did it without mentioning VRchat, of course.

I mean, the man’s in his seventies. I’m just glad he understands email.

I have not completely given up on that microphone. Some time soon I will take another stab at seeing if Google can deliver a solution unto me.

But it might be a hardware problem. Given that my computer can’t communication with the mic at all, that’s definitely a possibility.

It knows I plugged in a microphone, but that’s it. And I have tried two different USB ports and got the same nothing from both of them.

I should ask Julian to plug it into his laptop, see if it works there.

Worst case scenario, I just buy another microphone. Probably one of those headsets like you see people using in call centers.

All the l33t gamers use them nowadays so they can shout obscenities at each other without having to use their hands.

Sounds good to me. Fuckers.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

First thing I would do is open up Task Manager and end all the tasks that I don’t care about any more or that I don’t really need.

I am positive that a big part of my brain fog comes from having a subconscious mind packed to the gills with background processes that eat up my RAM (working memory and clog up my CPU (cognition) and generally make it harder to live.

No wonder I am so confused and lost all the time. My conscious mind, despite all its speed, power, and precision, has remarkably little space to work in

There might be a connection there somewhere.

i will think about it. Subconsciously.

The next thing I would do is a big ol defrag. My mind is like people’s garages or attics. Things are just shoved in there wherever because there is so much storage space and I am sure that I could think and remember a lot more clearly if I could just run a program to move it all into one tightly organized space.

And honestly, as this meatware of mine ages, the need for a better organized mind becomes more acute because I no longer have a seemingly infinite supply of cognitive resources and that means I am really going to need to prioritize somehow.

And I know there’s a lot of junk just lying around like carelessly scattered toys in a child’s playroom right before their parents get mad at them.

That ended up in a weird place.

But that brings us to the most delicate part of this whole metaphor : memories. Once I have pared down my RAM usage and defragged my HD, I would then have to face the daunting task of deciding which memories to delete.

Possibly none of them. As brilliantly illustrated in The Eternal Sunshine Of A Spotless Mind^[1], our memories make us who we are and become the very foundation of our being and our sense of self, and you don’t mess with that just to get rid of memories that are not fun to remember.

Plus, scientifically, our memories tend to be stored in long chains of association and there is no way to know what would happen if you decide to arbitrarily snip out one of those links. The whole chain could collapse and you could end up with huge blank spots in your memories or even total amnesia.

I wonder who I would be then? Certainly nothing like the current version of myself. I think if I had all my context removed, I would be a bright, cheerful, somewhat eager to please man whom people liked but also were wary of because there just seemed to be something a little “off” about me.

And they’d be justified in their wariness because I get the feeling that, shorn of my well established bedrock of morality, I could be a very tricky and unpredictable guy.

I wouldn’t become a raging monster or anything – I don’t think – but you probably don’t want to play games for money with this Fruvous Alpha.

What else can I stuff into this metaphor? I wouldn’t dare try to improve my operating system. The stakes would be way too high. No way to justify the risk.

Besides, all the purging and defragging will leave me with such a massive bounty of freed up mental hardware that I won’t need any runtime improvements.

Hell, even now I have way more brainpower than I know what to do with.

I always have.

I long for tasks that stretch my abilities. But all I have are things to occupy my mind.

And I still can’t be my own parent. Or rather, I already am, and I treat myself just as badly as my parents and siblings did.

I can’t be my own GOOD parent.

After all, I have no role models for that.

More after the break.

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Just who is this Greenwich guy and why is his time so mean?

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Let’s try an Instagram embed!

This never fails to make me giggle.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by lilykzlaa (@lilykzlaa)

Hmmm. Not much of an embed. From now on I will just link the things myself.

Anyhow, I love that kitty goes smoosh clip. It’s the perfect blend of cuteness and slapstick. Plus the inherent comedy of cats violating their usual dignity.

No wonder the internet loves them so much!

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Lining up the suitors

I’m finally at a point where the end of both Pathfinder : Kingmaker and Assassin’s Creed : Odyssey are in sight and that means it’s time to start looking for my next game.

I have enough Salad money saved up to get a game called Darkest Dungeon that gets really excellent reviews but it looks like this :

And I know that awesome games can have crappy or at least primitive graphics but let’s just say that look gives me pause.

Supposedly the story, system, and voice acting are all amazing. The game has an 84 on Metacritic, which is pretty good, and I will probably end up going with it.

But I am going to play the field for a little bit longer.

I’m so coy and flighty!

Even when I finish the other two, I’ll still be plugging away at Fallout 2. Re-acclimating to that super old RPG feel was a bit of a challenge at first, and I know that there’s no chance I will actually complete the quest my first time through (there’s a time limit – boo!), but for now it’s still pretty fun.

Especially now that I have a cyborg badass named Cassidy in the party. He has very good armor and a shotgun.

Right the fuck ON, motherfuckers!

And I continue to dole out harsh justice with my sharpshooting skills. Which is fun.

So even if I finish the other two games, I will have something to play while I look around for my next gaming love affair.

I’m such a slut!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Why does life have to fuck with me like it does?

So last night, in the wee hours of the morning, I decided that…

In this case, specifically, it was time for me to download and install VRchat again and try to get with the young hip furries there.

I’ve been looking to expand my online social world and I keep seeing these excellent videos made by people like AydenFox with VRchat that make it seem like VRchat is a really fun place to be, so I thought I’d take another stab at it.

This marked my third or fourth try at this. All my previous attempts have been thwarted by my old nemesis, social anxiety.

I would find someplace where furries were hanging out and talking and someone would say something to me and I didn’t know how to reply to them and my anxiety would redline instantly and it’s ALT-F4 time.

Man it sucks to be crazy.

This time I was a bit more forewarned. But when I went to the big furry hideout where three or four furries were hanging out and chatting, I was reminded that VRchat does not really work via text, but by voice.

So when someone asked me if I had a microphone, I went EEP and ALT-F4.

Luckily, I rediscovered my VERY solid Samson microphone ($80 and reportedly damned near indestructible) recently, so this was a recoverable situation.

So I freed up a USB port by prising a long defunct wireless dongle out of one (surprisingly difficult) and plugged the microphone in and loading up freeware Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Audacity to try it out.

But I got nothing. No audio recorded. Hmmm. I went digging into the audio settings of Windows 10 to see if one of them was the problem. Nuh-uh.

Then an error message flashed by in the lower right corner of my screen WAY too fast for me to read it, but it said something about not recognizing… something?

Eventually I managed to click on the error thingy when it popped up and that made it stay on screen long enough for me to read that apparently Windows 10 did not recognize my microphone and that’s why it wasn’t working.

Well shit. Just when I was ready to dive back in and take the huge step of actually talking to strangers in realtime.

Terrifying! But also pretty exciting.

So right now I am stymied. Here I have this lovely unbreakable microphone and a service I really want to use it with but Windows 10 can’t connect to it.

I haven’t given up on it yet. There’s some suggestions on the Web on how to fix it and I am going to try those.

Luckily, I am the sort of person who gets angry when thwarted and so that makes me all the more determined to MAKE the goddamned thing do what it’s supposed to do.

It’s either that, or find my expensive webcam and try to use ITS microphone.

And JUST the microphone. I’m not ready for video chat yet.

Heck, I am barely ready for voice chat.

It’s going to be a huge increase in social stimulation for me, but I am determined to embrace that and do my best to turn that stimulation into enjoyment and enthusiasm instead of letting it turn into anxiety and panic.

One way or another, I am going to chat with fuzzies in realtime, using my actual voice, and thus level up my entire furry experience.

Oh, and I have to figure out how to take a picture of my current VRchat avatar.

He is so dang cute! 🙂

More after the break.

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Nothing I can do

Some of the worst moments when you’re disabled are the helpless ones.

Like just now. As part of making myself a chickenburger for supper, I put a hamburger bun in the toaster to toast.

The problem with that, though, is that these No Name hamburger buns I bought are not very big. Kaiser rolls they ain’t.

That makes it tough to get them out of the toaster when they’re done. It makes me wish we had one of those modern toasters where the basket can lift almost all the way out of the toaster in order to make it easier to get things like hamburger buns and bagels out.

Instead, I have to do that thing where you try to get it out with your fingers without getting burned by yanking it out really fast and with minimum finger contact.

Well this time I put a bit too much oomph in my pull because half of my burger bun ended up in the very narrow gap between the fridge and the cupboards.

So there I was, helpless. Because there was no way I could possibly retrieve it. I had to tell Julian about it so that he can figure out a way to get the dang thing out of there.

And that was a little humiliating.

But that’s what being disabled is like. By then my back and my legs were already in serious pain, so I could not even hang around to provide moral support.

And in a circuitous way that got me thinking about medic alert bracelets like the ones the famous “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” lady advertised.

I can easily seeing myself in that exact situation, or worse. I could hurt myself in a fall or get trapped somewhere when Julian isn’t home^[1] and end up in a lot of trouble, and not even be able to get to the phone to call him.

So having a little button to press to summon help that I can keep in my pocket would be just the thing.

And boy, does that makes me feel old. And I am old. I am not fooling myself on that.

But that feeling of helplessness is a killer. It’s got me very depressed and so I am going to go lay down in the dark a while and think about stuff.

Don’t worry, I am sure I will be fine after a good sulk.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how I am feeling right now.

More importantly, so far I haven’t had any weird metabolic events. So knock on wood there. No sudden fevers or attacks of demonic hunger or the like.

My new mouse (same as the old mouse) will arrive some time today. The currently delivery window is “between 3:15 pm and 7:15 pm”, which seems pretty vague to me but I guess Amazon’s delivery people have a lot more flexibility in their schedule than the workers in their warehouses.

Those warehouses strike me as a very modern kind of purgatory. Huge grey cubes filled with hapless workers picking products to make up orders at a downright inhuman pace in order to please their corporate masters.

But as long as enough people actually can match that pace, they don’t see a problem.

Ironically, 7:15 pm is when we usually leave for Denny’s. So in theory, the package is guaranteed to arrive before we leave, but possibly only minutes before.

No rush. I’ve managed to find a position for the wire connecting my current mouse to the computer where it more or less works as long as I am fairly delicate in my mousing.

Windows spellcheck says that isn’t a word. WELL IT IS NOW.

Take that, tough guy!

Logjams of the mind

Let’s drill down into my decision issues.

We will set aside the emotional problems and the way my depression uses indecision as a cover for my inaction for now, and concentrate on the cognitive side of things only.

Like I have said before, when I come to a decision point, it’s like my mind tries to go in all directions at the same time and sort of ingest the problem, like an amoeba engulfing some poor paramecium.

The microscopic world is so hardcore.

And the engulf and devour cognitive approach works quite well for me overall. It’s very good for learning things and adding that thing to my working model of the world.

Hence my academic brilliance.

But it doesn’t work for decision making except in very limited circumstances, where it is possible to actually calculate an answer.

Either mathematically or via some other logic.

Most of the time, this is not possible. There are too many variables and unknowns. To try to make a decision that way is inane.

Enter emotion. Because if you can’t decide via your intellect you are going to have to insert your own preferences and desires into the equation in order to decide at all.

And I don’t want to do that. To me, that feels too much like just guessing. I want to be able to thoroughly inspect and verify my reasoning before going forward and that is just not possible most of the time.

I can’t possibly know beforehand which is the best choice.

All I can do is make the best decision I can, and live with the consequences. And hopefully, if I do enough of that, my decisions will get better over time.

The inner mind CAN be taught. Your gut instincts CAN get smarter over time.

It just takes a while. And a lot of trial and error.

My future has to include the ability to make semi-arbitrary decisions. I will never have all the facts and even when I do I will not be able to predict and control all outcomes.

The universe, and our highly limited brains, don’t work that way.

So I am hereby giving myself permission to just make shit up as I go. Emphasis on GO. Because this means surrendering my need for control and going into unknown and unknowable territory with only my wits to protect me.

Luckily, I have some pretty good wits.

But in the end it all comes down to control.

Doesn’t it always?

More after the break.

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About this whole pet thing

Don’t worry. This is not (I think) an emergent new fetish of mine.

i have enough of those already.

It’s just a way to recontextualize my existence into something more positive than feeling like I am a blight to all who know and love me.

That’s an extremely fucked up way to see myself, but then again, what do you expect? I am mentally ill.

And that’s the thing about mental illness : it’s crazy.

Anyhow, imagining myself as functioning as a pet in people’s lives is definitely a step in the right direction.

It might not exactly have the status of being a full and independent adult, but it at least gives me a way to feel like I contribute something worthwhile to the world just by being my witty and lovable self.

This brings up an intriguing hypothetical : would I be able to take being someone’s human pet in a more formally declared way?

Not in a petplay fetish way. Nobody is putting a collar on ME, motherfuckers, and there is zero chance I will crawl around on all fours with paw shaped mittens on my hands.

But more in being someone’s house-husband in an old-fashioned nuclear family wife sense. Someone who is always there waiting for them when they get home from work with their slippers and housecoat and all the rest.

No pipe though. Because I don’t date smokers.

And yeah, I think I could take that. In fact, I might enjoy it quite a bit. Having a man to support me in an old-fashioned manly way while I cherish and nurture him in an old-fashioned womanly way might actually be the perfect situation for me.

Lord knows I could use a strong male presence to help steady and calm me and hold my hand while I cautiously explore the world.

And in return, I could be the sweet, gentle, soft, accepting and approving mother figure who gives him an island of understanding in a cold cruel world.

Yeah, that actually sounds pretty damn good for me.

And I would have no problem playing a secondary role in the household. I don’t particularly want to be number one or be in charge. And I have no interest in challenging anyone for status.

Fuck that noise.

But I would insist on being treated with dignity and respect. I might be second in charge in a two person household but that does not make me lesser or inferior.

The fact that I am letting him lead does not mean we’re not both dancing.

I hope that makes sense.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.