Sometimes I can feel myself drifting.

It’s no big secret that I have done nothing but drift for most of my life. I drift through time like an obese jellyfish, doing only that minimal amount of contraction of my blubbery body needed to stay roughly in place, eating whatever happens to float my way, living in my own little tide pool, doing nothing to guide or create my own destiny.

Unlike most drifters, I don’t even get a lot of travel and experience out of my rudderless life. I am too muh of a coward for that. This tide pool of mine doesn’t lead anywhere and that is how I like it.

Well that was weird.

So I ordered some KFC. I order in for supper every Saturday, if I can afford it. It’s kind of a treat for myself. Something to make me feel like I can have nice things.

And this week, I ordered KFC. I hadn’t one so in a long long time because the previous time I had it,.it made me sick.

Not wretchedly so. It was mostly just a gross greasy feeling in my stomach. But still, it made me reluctant to get it again.

But this week, the craving overcame me and I took the risk.

I’ve eaten my KFC and so far, I feel fine.

The weird part came when I sat down to blog. Normally, it goes like this : I order my foodstuffs, then blog till it arrives.

Usually, it takes around 30 to 45 minutes for food to arrive, and that is plenty of time for me to make a big dent in the day’s bloggination.

In fact, sometimes it’s even enough time for me to finish.

But this time the order showed up super early. So early that I only wrote 141 words before it was time to drop that horizontal line into the entry and go get my food.

And when I went out to get my food, I found out that Joe and Julian did not go to Joe’s parents’ place to play board games like they usually do on Saturday evenings.

So instead of eating my KFC while finishing the day’s blogging, I ate it with my friends watching the Colbert Show and the Daily Show off of the PVR.

So here I am now, two hours after I started blogging, sitting down at this ol’ computer of mine to pick up where I left off and keep on bloggin’.

So it’s back to the tide pool for me, I guess.

Where was I? Oh right.

I am not a courageous drifter. I don’t explore. I have felt wanderlust many times in my life but my depression has always squashed that emotion like it’s a ten ton weight dropped from twenty thousand feet.

Were that not so, I could see myself being somewhat of a wanderer. Honestly, it would probably do me a lot of good to go out into the world and explore and learn about myself and how best to get along with people.

And not just to get along. To connect. I have a very strong desire to connect with people. I have been all alone in my head for so very very long. I long for the feeling of connection with others that would make me feel safe.

But that’s a mighty tall order. I learned that at VFS. I have serious social issues that only show up when I am actively trying to relax around others and connect with them. Enormous walls of anxiety and mistrust spring up out of nowhere, and waves of hostility and resentment and even loathing wash through me as my mind tries to figure out how to properly interface with these emotions.l

It can’t tune them in. It doesn’t know the frequency.

And the thing is, I know that there’s no reason for it. I know that inside me is a person who is not only not socially awkward but actually quite charismatic and pursuasive and a whiz at moving in social space.

But all the fear and the anger and the bad bad memories get in the way. And I have tried just ignoring those emotions and pretending I am normal but that’s like trying to ignore a hurricane when you are right in the middle of it.

So I might seem calm and bright and friendly on the outside, but on the inside, it’s an emotional fireworks factory fire.

No wonder I have such a hard time connecting with people.

I want to. But I can’t. I don’t know how, and my disease makes it hard to get the kind of experiences I would need in order to learn.

I would need to be around very patient and understanding people whom I felt I could trust enough to believe that they will not judge or reject me when things get awkward.

Ideally, they would also be highly sensitive and articulate people would could explain what went wrong in a language I can understand.

Call it rehab for dorks.

Without that, I honestly don’t know what my path forward would be,. The depression is strong in me lately. Remember that sad feeling that makes me turn away and say “no” and not be able to continue?

It’s very close to the surface lately.

Everything I think of that would get me back on the right track, that feeling vetos and torpedos. I hate the authority it has over my life, but it’s so strong.

So I guess what I need to do is find a weak spot in this wall of denial and see if what little countering force I can muster is enough to put me through.

If it is, then maybe I can tackle tghe issue of my physical health. I know it’s poor I know I could be healthier and happier if I got my act together.

But I am too sick to look after myself properly, and nobody else is going to do it.

So I guess I will just… fall apart.

I will tal

k to you nice people again tomorrow.

(Editor’s Note : The site came back WAY before the guy said, like I predicted, and that’s why I was able to post the results here, as written. )

My site is down, so I am blogging into a Libre Office document tonight, and that’s depressing to me.

It’s all because of that thing I mentioned before, where I failed to update my credit card info in a lot of places, continuing to haunt me.

And that all stems back to my apparently entirely fraudulent belief that I had updated my credit card info on PayPal, and that all my bills went through PayPal, so I was covered.

Neither of those things are true, as it turns out. And I am still paying for it. Had to pay an extra $15 US to set in motion the return of my blog.

For some reason, that process will take between 24 and 48 hours. I call bullshit on that. Sorry, Nazeem my live chat customer service guy, but it does not take that long for the change to propagate through the DNS servers of the world.

I suspect that, on some level, my web host is holding out for more money. Like this is the sort of thing that is supposed to get my to pay for a more expensive package, or something.

Well I got news for you. I might ditch the whole privately hosted blog thing instead.

I think that, while having my own blog on my own server has its advantages and while it soothes my obsessive need for control, I think that for the most part, it’s put me at a huge disadvantage and cost me greatly because that’s just not how things work any more.

Everything is interconnected now, and if I want there to be any sort of chance that someone might stumble across my words and become a fan, I have to move the whole damned thing to a public blog host like Tumblr.

So as loath as I am to have my precious words end up in the hands of a freaking corporation, it’s a nove I need to make.

Been thinking a lot about my ambitions lately. I swsear I used to have some. But they retreated back into their default “maybe someday but probably never” position due to the new Ice Age of my latest bout of depression came crashing in.

I still have them, but I don’t do a damned thing to pursue them, and that shit’s got to stop. I have to either decide that I am perfectly happy rotting away in this tiny pocket universe of mine till the day I die, never growing up, never making a mark on the world, and never being noticed or taken seriously, or I decide that I am going to start striving again.

But striving is hard, though, and spending all day playing Skyrim is so much easier.

I don’t know. I know I am growing increasingly discontent with this sad Skyrim lifestyle of mine. So I am trying to cut back.

But like any addiction, it fights back hard and plays dirty. So right now, it’s a pitched battle between the addiction and the fact that I know that I am happier doing something like this, writing on my blog, than I am when I am playing Skyrim.

But Skyrim is so much safer. When I am playing, I forget everything else. I am busy, I am occupied, I am pumping out my energies, and I am content. Time flies by. It’s a lot of fun.

It’s hard to say no to that. Who explores the world when they have Heaven in their back yard?

<——–pause for sudden nap attack——>

I’m even part way through figuring out how to get the sexy stuff working in Special Edition.

As you know, my sexuality and my libido have been surging as of late. Perhaps it’s that portion of my teen years finally showing up that is doing it.

But I get real horny now. And it’s kind of stressful but rather fun because it goas me into exploring various aspects of my sexuality – my real one, that is, not the virtual one I use when I am being Fruvous that I have explored to death.

The real thing is always better anyhow. Or so I have heard.

And at this phjase of my life, it would be really great to go back to what I had in the original Skyrim, namely a vast amount of sexual options at my hot sweaty fingertips.

I explored the fuck (ha) out of them when I first discovered the world of Skyrim mods. That was what triggered my slide into total addiction, in fact. I would stay awake and neglect all my bodily needs in favour of working like hell to get this and that working.

It was glorious and horrifying.

But over the months, the thrill of it all went away and I got far more into actually playing the game and the sexytimes stuff faded into the background.

Then I got Special Edition. And I learned the facts of life about it, namely that only a small percentage of all the fun stuff I had in the old game had been updated to work with the new version.

But there was still lots of good stuff, so I was not too worried.

Eventually, though, I wanted the sexy stuff back. IT made things so much more fun. The ability to go from killing monsters and collecting loot to some good old fashioned fucking whenever I liked, purely on a whim, was thrilling.

So I sought out the updated version. And it was… sort of there.

Right now, when I initiate sexytimes fun, everyone involved just stands there while the sexy sounds play. And that’s no fun.

And I know what the problem is – something called ‘beaviour files’ are not being generated – but I have no idea how to fix it.

It makes me consider going back to the original game. Sure, the graphics were more primitive, but there was so much cool stuff out there for it.

Right now, all that is keeping me from doing it is sheer stubbornness. I made up my mind ot make the move to Special Edition, damn it, and to go back to the old one would be to admit defeat.

So for now, I struggle to get the frigging thing to work.

But who knows. I might cave in one day and go back.

Or I might even find something better to do with my life.

But don’t count on it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I ordered pizza tonight. Pizza hut. My usual deal, where you get the Panalicious pizza with two topping, plus 2 of the following four options :  Caesar Salad, Cinnapart, Boneless Chicken Bites, and Breadsticks.

I always get the Cinnapart and the Caesar Salad. The Cinnapart, while messy, is still pretty tasty, and I am always up for a Caesar Salad.

Plus the Boneless Chicken Bites are way, way over-sauced and too greasy for my tastes, and the Breadsticks are snoresville.

Anyhoo, my food shows up and it’s my usual driver, a kindly seeming older German gentleman. I take my stuff and pay.

Only to realize that the rather hot ovoid on fins type container that caught my eye was not, in fact, a novel presentation of my salad, but some else’s enormous order of said Chicken Bites. Not sure what flavour but the sauce is black so I am guessing it’s one of their variations on Buffalo Sauce.

I wonder if they call it Bison Sauce in upstate New York.

Now normally, I would not bother making a fuss. I’d shrug and eat what I got, and email the chain afterward. But there were two extenuating facts :

1. I don’t like Buffalo Sauce or most BBQ sauce variations, and
2. Someone, somewhere, was not gonna get their gross Chicken Bites.

It was the second point that compelled me to do something about it.

So I call my local Pizza Hut, and believe it or not, I got no answer. None. What the fuck? Nobody is answering the phone at a PIZZA PLACE? That’s like a consumer electronics store not taking credit cards. It’s crazy-go-nuts lunacy.

Called back again. No answer. Once more, no answer. I am very close to letting it go through to voice-mail and giving them an earful, but I gave it one last try, mostly out of sheer cussedness but also because leaving voice-mail would have meant accept a reality in which you can call a major pizza chain and get no answer three times in a row, and I just wasn’t ready for that.

A surprising amount of people’s determination comes from weird shit like that.

Fourth time they pick up at the very last second and I explain the issue to someone, and it seems to throw her for a bit of a loop. Understandable. It’s not the kind of call they (hopefully) get all the time.

So she puts me on hold for a while, then some dude with a thick accent tells me to keep the chicken and they will send the salad.

Now, this is not a complaint by me, exactly. I mean, it cost me some stress and aggravation, but I actually profit by some potentially edible chicken.

What it is, instead, is a long-winded way of introducing the subject of incompetence – by which I mean people not doing their job – and me. Because as harmless as this incident was, it touched on some pretty damned big issues, and I want to explore those.

Because the thing is, things like the Chicken Bites Mishap have the potential to make me super angry. WAY angrier that is called for by the situation. There is a part of me that is absolutely furious about all the people who can’t seem to do the most basic part of their jobs right and how much bullshit I had to put up with as a result.

And anyone who knows their way around a psyche can tell you that when such a strong reaction is generated by such a minor source, it ain’t about what it’s about.

It is merely the trigger for something else. The spark, not the forest fire.

And I have a lot of issues surrounding people not being able to just do their fucking jobs. It’s a big chunk of my entire controlling/untrusting complex of issues. Why?

Because I have been deeply wounded by a lot of people who didn’t do their jobs. People such as but not limited to :

• Parents that didn’t parent.
• Teachers who ignored me and allowed me to be brutally bullies because they didn’t like me either
• Siblings too busy to look out for me or pay attention to me
• School administrators who ignored a crying child covered in scrapes, bruises, and his own blood for nearly an hour before telling me to go to class
• Therapists who tried to get me kicked out of their group
• A surgeon who apparently had never operated on a fat guy before so he ended up having to slice me open like a gutted fish to get my gall bladder out as opposed to doing it cleanly and competently via laproscopic surgery, which is the norm
• The nurses and orderlies who treated me like I was under quarantine, meaning my pain went untreated, as did several small complications, and who, when they did bother showing up, acted like they were being sent before Jabba the Hutt
• And oh, so, many more

It’s things like that which convince a guy like me that nobody can be trusted to do their goddamned jobs, that I can’t rely on anyone to ever have my back, and that the only safety comes in doing it by yourself, alone.

An extreme reaction, I admit, but you can see how hurt I have been in the past. I was abandoned by everyone who was supposed to be looking out for me, That makes me razor paranoid about it ever happening again, and makes me feel like I have to be ever vigilant and ready to make sure people do their jobs… or else.

This is not a healthy attitude. And I am glad to say it’s only a part of me, and not a dominant part. But there’s a lot of rage attached to it that I have no idea how to release.

It’s not like I can get back at the people who failed me. After all, some of them are family, and the rest are probably either dead or wouldn’t remember me at all.

But a lot of bad shit has happened to me because of other people’s incompetence, and all that rage and pain has to go somewhere if I am to get healthy.

I will ask my therapist about it next week.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We have all absorbed the message that money can’t buy happiness through popular culture, and to some extend, we believe it.

But only to a highly limited extent. The extent, that is, to which we are thinking of our own situation. It soothes us to think that people richer than us are no happier, or preferably, less happy due to their wealth. That’s why there is always a big demand for entertainment in which high status people endure terrible hardships.

That gives us the double pleasure of imagining we are them (status balm number one) while cutting off feelings of jealousy and rivalry by having these people be demonstrably less happy, either because fate is punishing them for the temerity of insulting our own status with their highness or because their wealth has made them morally inferior to us and they are their own worst enemy (status balm #1).

Incidentally, science only supports one of those, and it’s not the first one.

But the thing is, this applies to all citizens no matter their prosperity level, even very high levels. So before we go patting ourselves on the back because we are obviously at the correct level of status and prosperity, remember that there is someone who thinks you are too rich to be happy, and someone else who thinks people at your level must be miserable drudges…. unlike themselves.

But notice that in this scenario, we are only imagining ourselves to be in our current position. From wherever we are now, it is safe and comforting to think that money can’t buy happiness.

Hence this Beatles song :

But if we imagine ourselves in a much wealthier, more high status position, this belief that money can’t buy happiness vanishes. Ask someone to imagine that they have won ten million dollars in the lottery and ask them what they would do in that case, and you will find that people cannot help imagining that they would be far, far happier. Myself included.

As I have said before in this space, this is because that is what consumer society teaches us. The true deep philosophy of a consumer society is that there is no problem money can’t solve. So when we image ourselves with lots of money, we implicitly imagine all our problems disappearing and every pleasure we can think of being at our fingertips. Even if, consciously, we know that probably isn’t true.

But like I have also said before, money can’t make people love you. It doesn’t improve the quality of your relationships with others. It doesn’t get you recognized by your peers as something special in an of yourself. It doesn’t improve your self-esteem – shit with money is still shit.

In short, it does very little to improve the things that we know, scientifically, lead to happiness. And yet our need to believe that happiness is something you can buy (as opposed to something you have to acquire via other means) that all the scientific evidence in the world could not convince us of otherwise.

So we internalize this consumerist faith very strongly and from the age we first realized money got you things. It runs through to the very core of our being and one only has to question it lightly (by suggesting, for instance, that you – the person reading this – might not be any happier with a lotto win) in order to see hope deep this unquestionable faith runs.

In fact, odds are that right now your mind is busy formulating a response to my questioning of this faith that money would make you happier that would prove that it would, indeed. You are likely thinking of all the things you would do with the money, both selfish and worthy, and are ready to present this as proof that while other people might not be happier with more money, you definitely would because you know just what to do with the money, unlike other people who would do other, less intelligent things.

But that’s beside the point entirely. Everybody thinks they they would know how to use the money right. This is a necessary belief in order to maintain the faith in the power of money. The idea that you personally would not be any happier with millions of dollars is a profound heresy of the first order, and the minds of us products of consumer society simply refuses to even entertain the thought.

It might be true for other people…. but not us!

The faith runs so deep that we react almost as though questioning it will somehow make it less likely to happen to us. As if there is some god of money who might be listening in, and they will shrug and say “Well I was going to give them a ton of money, but it won’t make them any happier, so…. on to someone else!”.

That sort of clearly irrational belief is a sure sign that you are dealing with a deep faith, deep enough to inculcate deeply irrational but intractable superstitions in the population.

And again, I am very much including myself in that population. I feel it too!

Given all this, it is no wonder that so many people are unhappy in modern consumer culture. We are taught that more money would make us happier, and when that turns out not to be true (we’ve just established a new normal), we assume the solution to the problem must be…. still more money!

And people will live their whole lives via this delusion. They will pursue more money and status no matter how often it fails to make them any happier. Even after they have reached a level where they are very comfortable and not particularly unhappy, they will still strive for more.

Why? Because they are terrified of what would happen if they were to stop. If they stopped, they would actually have to deal with themselves. They would be forced to realize that the things they really want are simple not for sale and that in order to get them, they will have to do things like deal directly with people as human beings, and do things like wait their turn, negotiate, compromise, open themselves up emotionally, and all kinds of other things they have been avoiding by acquiring wealth.

In short, they would have to become human beings again, no different than any other.

And they would rather die.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, seriously. What is it?

Let’s say that there is a microchip they can implant in your spine that will exercise your body for you. You will physically do the exercise exactly as if you had decided to do it yourself. Same activities, same pain, same results. The only difference is that you didn’t have to go through with it yourself.

Most people would go for it in a big way. And if you asked them why, they would say it’s because it means you don’t have to go to the effort yourself.

But what is this mysterious substance that we call effort?

It’s clearly not about the pain. The pain is the same. And it’s not the strain either. That too remains the same. It’s not the getting sweaty, or being tired after, or the time it takes, or the boredom, or the muscle aches, or anything. All of that would be exactly the same.

And yet those are the very things we would cite as the reasons why we don’t exercise more. What gives?

There must be a mental resource that we consider finite and treat as precious that doesn’t really map to anything physical or even logical. Something kinda of like effort, sort of like willpower, a bit like chutzpah, but really a thing for which, as far as I can tell, we have no precise name.

Let’s call it “the wherewithal“.

And it seems to me that the question of exactly what it is we are talking about is extremely important because a lack of this substance or power is the single factor keeping us modern consumers from being the person we want to be.

My feeling is that it has something to do with serotonin. After all…. everything does. On a neurochemical level.

Some activities deplete our serotonin supplies, others preserve or even recharge it. Things like exercise, housework, or pretty much anything else that requires doing something we don’t want to do because it isn’t the steady stream of unalloyed pleasure (or at least, lack of pain) that modern society can provide depletes this serotonin (or whatever) and because this substance is the basic building block of our sense of wellbeing, our default behaviour is to hoard it and spend it very conservatively.

The physical manifestation of this is what we usually refer to as “laziness”.

The irony, of course, is that this attitude is all wrong. It does not lead to maximizing happiness. The best it can do is minimize pain, and because of how consumer civilization programs us, we tend to view pain as the enemy and a lack of it as a kind of victory.

This results in a mindset where he thought that some pain is actually worth it – that there are things which involve some pain but bring far more in pleasure than they cost in pain – has a hard time taking root. Pain acquires a level of fear and/or reluctance associated with it that is wildly out of proportion with its actual severity.

So a kind of unenlightened hedonism kicks in, where the idea of delayed (but vastly superior) gratification disappears over some seemingly distant horizon and people act in an almost robotic, mindless fashion, without forethought or purpose.

Why? Because they are so depleted by their lives that their basic needs (in this case, for that reward/serotonin) override their rational brains, and even very intelligent people engage in self-destructive behaviours that they know are stupid, but they don’t feel like they have a choice.

And in a sense, they are right. Evolution gave us big brains, but it also gave our bodies a kind of veto power over our powerful rationality. If the body’s needs are not met, it can usurp control of first our minds and, if things get bad enough, even our body itself.

That’s why it’s hard to concentrate when you are hungry or thirsty. Your body is raising the alarm and there is only one way to turn that alarm off – give it what it needs.

Back to our main subject. How do people end up so depleted in the first place? Let’s start with work.

Work involves a massive investment of that mysterious substance. So does school, to a lesser degree. Our simpleminded and hedonistic ids have to be restrained and forced into things every second of our workdays. So many primitive impulses (like, say, wanting to smack the crap out of one co-worker and mount the other) to suppress, so many stimuli to filter out, so much energy invested in dragging our inner children kicking and screaming through out day that it’s no wonder that when we get home, we don’t want to do a single thing that would take any wherewithal whatsoever.

As we mature, we learn to stop fighting ourselves and just do the things we have decided to do. And of course, exactly how draining your workplace might be is highly variable.

Then there’s diet and exercise. Yes, the very things we want to motivate ourselves to do. There is no doubt, scientifically speaking, that we are making bad choices. Not from the point of view of some moralistic purity standard, but from the purely selfish hedonistic point of view. Our tendency to try to solve emotional issues via consumer purchases, coupled with our depleted states and consequent lack of rationality, leads to a string of short term solutions that in many ways just makes our problems worse over time.

By trying to fill the hole in our souls by cramming things into it, we only make it bigger.

I don’t have a ready solution for this problem, but all solutions begin with the same thing : awareness. If more people knew what was really going on inside them and what they were really up against, maybe they could find ways of making themselves happier in the long term. At the very least, they would find it easier to motivate themselves to do the less-fun things in life if they knew that they were not just deferring pleasure, they were investing it in being a richer (happier) person later in life.

So don’t go to the gym thinking “I want to be hot!” Don’t eat fresh fruit instead of a donut thinking “I want to be healthy!”. Don’t spend time reading instead of frittering away your time on things you don’t even like that much thinking “I want to be smarter!”.

Our inner selves don’t care about that shit.

Say to yourself “I want to be happier!”.

That’s something our ids can understand.

I will talk top you nice people again tomorrow.

Usual place, usual space.

Warning, none of the following truths are gentle.

All my life, I have known I was special. Different. Unique. Many times in my early life, I was told I had so much potential it was scary. I have grown up thinking I was really something special.

And I am. So what? That and five bucks will get you a Starbucks coffee.

Specialness is shit. It has no inherent value. In a world where everyone is special,specialness is the cheapest thing imaginable.

In the real world, specialness doesn’t mean shit. You don’t get marks just for showing up, Nobody is going to show up and hand you a check for a million dollars “just for being you”. Nor are they going to give you a free pass for unlimited pussy (or whatever) just for being such a nice guy.

All society cares about, like the man says, is what you can do. And that’s not the world being cruel or cold to you, it’s exactly what you expect of the world.

If someone knocked on your door and said “Give me your brand new Bluray player!” and you said “Why?” and they said “Because I’m such a nice guy, and I have a lot of potential!”, you’d laugh and slam the door in their face.

See how it suddenly changes when it’s your stuff on the line?

And let me tell you, a lot of people waste a lot of years waiting to be rewarded for their specialness without having having to do anything. On some level, they feel like having to do something for their reward means they lose and life wins.

Wins what? The battle to make them do something in order to get something and thus deny their inherently wonderful extra special specialness. It’s a battle that is absurd on the face of it and absolutely unwinnable, and of course, most people don’t know that it was they are doing.

But they are. Take it from someone who knows. They waste years upon years waiting for life to make the first move. Like some cosmic agency is going to show them exactly how to get to happiness without effort or risk and then they will just do that. Like life should be without struggle or risk, and anything else is cruel injustice.

Like they expect to win the lottery without ever buying a ticket.

So you know what? Fuck your specialness. And mine…. especially mine. Society, with the best of intentions, fed you a false narrative that because you were special and unique and wonderful…. that’s all you would ever need to be. Nobody said that you would actually have to do things. Things like taking risks, investing effort, making yourself vulnerable to the world, and fighting like hell to get what you want.

School was great. It was clear that the system liked people like you. You were the right kind of person in school. And whether you worked hard to get those high marks, like a lot of people, or just took them for granted, like my lazy ass did, it was clear that you were destined for greatness, or at least respect.

But nobody told you about the fighting, and the struggle, and the stress. Why, you will just major in your favorite subject from high school and get a job in that! And that will lead effortlessly to a job doing that exact same thing, and you will love that job so much that it won’t even seem like work.

Nobody told you that all those academic degrees like art history and English lit can only lead to one career, and that is teaching it to other idiots like you. And that you will be competing for those tiny numbers of jobs in your field with hundreds of your fellow idiots, so it’s either become the Type-A competitor you have never been, or resign yourself to getting the exact same kind of job you could have gotten without going to college in the first place.

And should you get one of those kinds of jobs, you know, the sorts of jobs anyone can get, it will only be a matter of time before it occurs to you that maybe, just maybe, you aren’t middle class any more, and suddenly you won’t feel special at all any more.

That will be your crossroads. In one direction lies depression, self-loathing, self-destructive behaviour, and feeling like a colossal loser. On the other path lies ambition, drive, passion, and a healthy sense of self because you have decided that you are special, god damn it, and you are going to prove it.

Luckily, it is never too late to change the road you’re on. I am living proof of this. I languished on that first path for twenty years simple because I was unable to grow up and face reality and accept that I really did have to do things that were scary, uncertain, and difficult if I wanted to change my situation. I had to take responsibility for my own fate, and push myself to find the place where the gap between where I was and where I wanted to be was small enough for me to jump across.

As it turned out, that was Kwantlen.

And maybe you are reading this and thinking I am mean and sadistic and a total prick. That’s your right. You can totally throw all your hate and anger at me and convince yourself that I must be wrong about everything and a horrible evil person besides.

I just want you to ask yourself this : Why am I so mad? What is it about what I have said that makes you so furious. There’s lots of opinions in this world with which you disagree, many of which are far more evil and offensive than anything I have said here tonight.

So what is it about these particular statements that makes react so strongly?

You’d better figure out what it is if you hope to defeat me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.