And that’s not something I say easily, because normally, intellectually, I am usually pretty fearless and open to things which might be sad or harsh or strange or terrible or terrifying.

So it takes a lot to make me wish I had never, ever read something. Even something as brutal as The Cold Equations is something that, while it has a serious emotional toll attached to it every time I read it, I am still glad I read it. It’s a profoundly important work.

But I really, really wish I had never read this story that starts right here.

I link to it for reference, but please be warned, it’s incredibly sad and depressing. Make sure your heart is warm enough to survive the chill.

As for me…. I fucking hate the webcomic creator for telling the story and I fucking hate the world of dropping it out of the blue into my brain when my defenses were down and making me feel like I feel right now. It’s not fair. I have been feeling pretty good lately, and have been watching things which were new to me and enjoying them and feeling a little warmly towards the world, and now… this.

God, why did it have to be a fox?

I would retell the story in brief here, but I just can’t handle it emotionally, so I am sorry, but you are going to have to go read it. I am sorry that it’s so sad and if it makes you feel bad too, I am really, really sorry.

But it’s like it was written expressly to destroy me emotionally. I feel a deep connection with foxes, and often, things which involve foxes have an especially strong effect on me. To this day, I can never watch Disney’s The Fox And The Hound again because all that stuff about childhood and friendship and conflict and being different would be hard enough to take, but put a fox in there… and it is just too damned intense, and hits far too close to home.

So to have such a sad story revolve around a fox of a (hopefully fictional, but I can’t bring myself to check because if it’s not fictional, it will kill me to know this really happens in this horrible cold cruel world) breed called the Japanese Glacier Fox… jesus fucking Christ, why would the world do this to me?

Because god damn it…. I am that poor little fox. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me. My life went fine while I was still in the den, before school. But then I went to school, and something I could not even slightly begin to understand (bullying, and all it implied) burned out a very important part of me and left me helpless and dependent and abandoned and alone and confused and lost, lost, lost, so god damned lost.

And so help me god, I want to go down to the sea and sit very still and let it takes me away, because I can’t cope and I never will and maybe next time I will have eyes.

I’m just so broken inside, and everything is so damned hard, and there is always too many possibilities and so much pain and I am always so god damned scared deep down inside and there is no place anywhere that I can run to get away from it and I am trapped and I am dying and I am alone.. really, deeply, alone.

And the ocean….. it had to be a fox AND the ocean. I grew up a few blocks from the Atlantic. I feel a deep connection to the ocean. Usually it calms me just to be near it.

But to just surrender to it, have it wash me and my filth and my horribleness and my taint away for good, take me away from this world where I don’t work and I don’t fit and I don’t know how to do anything and I can’t even do the the things it would take to get better and I am probably not even going to make it to fifty because I am so fat and unhealthy and disgusting…. to end that, to rid the world of me and leave it clean so I am no longer a burden or an embarrassment or a drain on people’s time and attention and good willl…

To take myself out of the equation so that at last, the world can heave a sigh of relief and say “thank goodness, I thought he’d never leave… ” and drown in the ocean, the only thing big enough to wash away all that I am and remain clean, because even a profound shitbag pathetic joke of a person like me is just a tiny drop in a sea of pure calm water…

To spare my loved ones from the burden of having to care for and clean up after my helpless self…

I am terrified by how good that sounds to me right now.

This is way worse than the spider, and he was a real creature. Here I am, crying my eyes out and feeling suicidal over a cartoon fox.

God, I hope the Japanese Glacier Fox isn’t real.

I can only hope that, despite how I feel right now, I will make it through all this and come out stronger and cleaner and that this was just the trigger I needed to release a profound catharsis deep from my soul, and when the flood ends and the waters recede, this will have turned out to be just what I needed.

Sometimes, the best thing life can do for you is to slip through your defenses and make you deal with things.

But right now, I feel like the best that I can hope for is that the ocean doesn’t want me today.

I am going to go lie down and try to get my shit together. I have a friend coming over soon. I think I will be OK. I did not want this, but maybe I needed it.

But fuck… a fox… childhood…. the ocean…. what are the fucking odds?

Eeek. Napped all afternoon, in that annoying reality way where I relax while reading, not really going to sleep per se, more like intense daydreaming, and then get back up and it’s four hours later.

It’s especially annoying because I lose the time without seeming to gain anything. I don’t feel well rested or relaxed or anything. In fact, honestly, I could use a real nap. I feel more tired physically now than I did when I lay down. But I’m doing dinner with my friends soon, so that’s not on. Plus, you know, gotta write this very thing here.

Oh well. such is the harsh and cruel life of whatever the fuck it is you call my sort of life shaped thing.

Otherwise, it’s been a nice weekend. Nothing too exciting, just the usual. Went to Denny’s with my friends on Friday night. Of our usual haunts, it remains my favorite. The servers there are very nice, and they seem to genuinely enjoy us being there and appreciate our business, which has not been true in other places we have tried in the past.

So we’re loyal to them, and them to us. Plus, Denny’s has a great menu with a lot of variety and a uniform good quality. None of it is fancy or Cordon Bleu, but that’s fine by me. In fact, honestly, it’s nice to go to a place here on the Wet Coast that isn’t trying to be yet another casual chic trendy Left Coast brew pub slash restaurant slash sports bar with weird stuff on the wall.

It’s just Denny’s.

Plus, while they sometimes have “the game on”, it’s only in the front part of the restaurant, and we always go right to the back, where the seating is less cramped and it’s almost always quiet. We eat out to enjoy one another’s company while having a relaxed meal served to us by others. We do not want to have to yell at each other over loud music or a sports event with hollering fans.

Basically, we’re all quiet verbal types, and loudness, therefore, repels us.

I have said it before but it bears repeating as it’s been on my mind again lately : I think the main reason the modern world supports so much eating out at restaurants is that doing so activates some highly relaxing instincts in our minds by providing us modern busy types with someplace you can go and just have a meal with people. We never eat together at the table like family at home any more. At home, there are far too many of our modern distractions. It’s too easy to just grab something in the kitchen and then wander off to do our separate things like we do in the modern world. Plus, and this is vital, if you eat at home, someone has to cook it, and someone has to clean up afterwards too. It’s all too real, too mundane, too dull.

But go to a restaurant, and there is a sense of occasion, and vitally, nothing to do but talk to each other. not only that, the mere acting of sitting around the same table and eating together is powerful human social bonding mechanism. Family, on a primal level, is the people you eat with. Many of us had childhoods where the only time we were all together in the room talking to each other was at meal times. This trained us to a certain deep expectation of a certain amount of coordinated social connection each day.

Plus, I am convinced that, on a deep level, being fed by people who are nice to us makes us feel like we are being “cared for”, and thus gives us that nice warm feeling of safety and comfort that comes with things which activate and sooth our social bonding urges.

Hence, you drive down any random primary street in our modern worlds, and there’s a strip mall every three blocks or so, and half the places in there are fast food, and there’s a simply staggering number of traditional restaurants everywhere you go.

We have a lot of options in this modern world when it comes to what to do with all that money that we don’t spend on basic necessities.

I think it say something about what it means to be human that we spend so much of it on the simply pleasure of sitting down to eat with one another.

With, of course, someone else to cook and do the dishes!