Something happened recently that has me wondering just what kind of a person I am, and I thought I’d share the story and the thoughts that stem from it with my readers.

I’m totally addicted to an online game called Dungeon Fighter Online. It’s an MMPORPG that operates like those old “brawler” games like Final Fight and Double Dragon, but with a lot of RPG elements as well. So I spend a fair bit of every day beating up (and in my case, shooting, for I am a Gunner) various monsters and bad guys who represent the Implacable Forces of Evil, and in doing so, fulfilling quests, gaining XP, going up levels, getting loot, and all those other things that make RPG life fun.

Being a nonjoiner, to me, these types of games might as well be single-player. I don’t join guilds or parties or clubs. It’s just me, the monsters, and my love of kicking ass on evil.

And up until recently, that didn’t really bother me. A lonely childhood and an almost as lonely adulthood has made me the kind of person who just wants to do his thing by himself and get it done.

I always loathed group work in school.

And until recently, that worked out fine. Occasionally, some random stranger would send me a guild invitation, which just shows up as a window saying “Do you want to join X Guild?”, and I would click “no”, and go back to my monster thrashing.

(Seriously, does that ever work? Who joins some organization with who knows who in charge just because they were randomly asked? The same people who buy things from spam, I guess)

But yesterday, in the game, someone messaged me out of the blue to ask me to join his guild, and that made it a lot more personal. I had to turn him down to his face, in a virtual sense, instead of just clicking “no”, and that made me really think about why the hell I am so antisocial, and how conflicted I feel about it.

I didn’t turn him down right away. That would have been rude. Part of the conflict in me is that I am not your archetypical antisocial person. I am not grumpy, brusque, hostile, or even a little surly. In fact, in demeanour, I am quite friendly and pleasant, if a little aloof. And I like that about myself.

But the thing is, that’s just the social mask. I am friendly and polite, but I still don’t want to join your thing, and I am not terribly interested in your party or the night your band is playing at a club. I politely decline.

I am just not a joiner. But why? Why the hell not join? What’s the deal?

And I have thought about it, and the thing is this : I just cannot stand being subject to the will of others.

Sounds impossibly arrogant, doesn’t it? But it’s true. Perhaps if I had been properly socialized as a child instead of being bullied and ostracized, it would be different. I would have learned I could still be free while being part of something.

But I never had those experiences. So now, to join is very frightening to me. The idea of joining some group, with rules and relationships and expectations and all those other things I don’t know and don’t pick up on easily just sounds like a massive recipe for social suicide to me. I would inevitably just make people angry by making a lot of ignorant faux pas type mistakes because I don’t know how these things work, and it would just lead to me being rejected and ostracized once more.

That’s the tape that plays in my mind when the possibility of joining comes up. That’s the source of the deep panicky fear I felt when this random person asked me to join their guild. I hemmed and hawed and asked him a few questions about his guild, but I knew damn well I was not going to join.

There’s just too many variables. And when there’s too many variables, it comes down to trust. Trust in people, or trust in the benevolence or even the neutrality of the universe.

And I just don’t have any of that kind of trust. I only trust what I can understand. If I can’t compute all the variables in my mind, I have to just leave it be.

I believe they call the kind of trust I lack “faith”.

And I don’t have any.

Having another bad day, of the sleeping all the time, dreaming really intensely, and feeling like utter crap variety, so today’s blog entry will be a mite less than a tightly organized and precisely machined word wonder. If you are lucky, I will at least remember to finish my.

Lucky for you all, my dreams, while vivid to the point of making me surprised when I woke up and had to remember reality (oh right…. reality…. I remember this! Gee, it’s been so long…. you’re looking good… ), my memories of said dreams are nowhere near complete enough to be worth telling, and frankly some of them are of the kind of dreams that are very nice to have, but you don’t tell anyone about them at all, so you are all spared another dramatic retelling of my adventures wandering around in my own mind.

Have I mentioned lately that my worst nightmare is to get trapped within my own mind, no distractions, no inputs, no escape? Because it is. That would be the ultimate claustrophobic nightmare of the agoraphobic mind, in my books.

Your mileage may vary.

No word from my doctor about test results and/or Avandia alternatives. This merely makes me fret more. I have never understood the idea that “no news is good news”. It’s stupid on the face of it, and suitable only for those people who are lucky and/or foolish enough to believe that the world is benign by default and that ignorance is bliss.

Myself, if I don’t hear anything about something I am worried about, it takes a profound act of will to keep from assuming the worst. I am the sort of person who is rattled by uncertainty and soothed by information. The more I know, the more I feel I can deal with the situation and make rational plans.

The less I know, the more I assume that reality is sneaking up on me from an unknown angle and just about to blindside me and fuck me up worse than ever before.

I realize this is not, strictly speaking, a logical attitude. Neither pessimism nor optimism are even remotely logical, because both make grand and unsupportable assumptions about the nature of reality and life on Earth. You cannot possibly know enough about all the lives in the Universe to declare whether life sucks rocks or just rocks. You can’t even assume you know whether your own life is wonderful or horrible. To do so, you would have to understand all the possibilities branching out for you from your current moment in time, and then be able to evaluate them all as positive or negative, and that is clearly impossible.

But we human beings are hardly restricted by logic, and as illogical as it may be, we just go right on feeling we know that our lives are wonderful or terrible, positive or negative, a helpless drag through a fetid swamp filled with broken rusty metal and tortured souls, or a long slow deep rainbow filled joygasm.

The thing is, I want to be a more positive person. I think it’s a better way to be. Optimism and pessimism might be equally illogical, but the optimists seem a hell of a lot happier. If you have to be wrong, might as well be wrong in the direction that feels better, right?

And negative people are just plain less fun. I would rather, in my heart of hearts, be a positive, uplifting, fun person whose enthusiasm is contagious and who inspires people to open up and be their best than a parade-raining balloon-popping hope-killer any day.

Even when I know I am right, and when I am performing the very important function of being the balance to people’s irrational exuberance and unwillingness to face harsh truths, being the Paranoia to their Confidence, I still feel like a jerk and like I would rather be a different kind of person.

Someone who can stay both positive of polarity and grounded in reality. Someone who can be both inspiration and guidance.

But I think in order to do that without becoming some sort of manic maniac, I would have to truly believe that the world is a wonderful place full of magical possibilities just waiting for me to go out and get them, and I just don’t know if I have that in me.

Perhaps the real solution is to simply withhold judgement about the world entirely, and retreat to a more existentialist and individualist position based on the notion that no matter how the world is, you’re going to give it all you got and try to be happy.

That’s something that maybe I can live with.

Well, that’s all for now, folks. Talk at ya later.