Well, here I am, with nothing of substance to write about yet again. I must qualify for some sort of world’s record for time spent without coming to a point, right?

No? I don’t qualify? There’s no such record? I’m talking to myself? Echo?

Woke up feeling intensely anxious just now, and it still has not worn off. I don’t recall having any nightmares. I think it’s something more serious, honestly.

I think my discontent with my lot in life is reaching some kind of crisis point. I am really tired of my life. I am tired of sitting in front of this computer and fucking around and wasting my life and my precious time not getting anywhere or doing anything.

Over and over again lately, I have felt an intense urge to just destroy things. Smash the keyboard across my computer monitor. Pick up my computer monitor and throw it out the window. Break everything I can get my hands on, in an act of utter inchoate rage. And all the time, I would be laughing, laughing like a madman.

Crazy, I know, and it’s not like any of this is what I consciously or rationally want to do. I just have this deep primal frustration building up inside of me, and I need to learn to vent it some way without doing harm.

I am a caged animal, in a cage of my own devising, but no less binding for it. I have a great deal of energy simmering below the surface of my carefully content free, low stimulation, low energy lifestyle, and it is coming to a boil, and I am the one in the pot.

I am particularly worried because I have noticed myself spending more and more time in bed without even being sleepy. I just stay there because I am so sick of my life that even the prospect of sitting down in front of this trusty old computer nauseates me. What, again? Gee, more time spent fucking around playing Flash games and chatting with people and reading webcomics? Oh, joy of freaking joy.

I think I am outgrowing my current life, and in the process, growing far too big for the cage I am living in, and the animal inside me wants out.

So it’s no wonder it wants to smash, crush, kill, and destroy everything it associates with the cage. Something greater than the sad little thing I have been is growing inside me, and it is growing very impatient with waiting to be let out and is starting to seriously consider gnawing on the bars of its cage.

It’s the sort of thing I have been fearing for a while, that my personal growth would be blocked by my stunted personality and this would setup a tension that can only end in a radical and uncontrolled transformation of personality when the structure of my psyche can no longer restrain the growing force within, and so it bursts like an overladen dam and floods the countryside.

The thought of such violence and chaos terrifies me, but part of me says “Meh. At least then it would be over. ”

It is hardly like me (or so I’d like to think) to just let catastrophe happen and pick up the pieces later, but I feel like I have no choice. It has truly come to this. It is rigidity of personality versus the intense dissatisfaction that breeds change, that longs for transformation. It would be nice if it could have gone a different way, one of gradual and peaceful and planned and coordinated change, but I don’t see it happening.

Sooner or later, something is going to go pop.

I can only hope that it is a benign transformation as opposed to a destructive one. A spiritual transformation where I become a stronger, more together, more active, more whole person, as opposed to something where I become impatient, apathetic, hedonistic, manipulative, mocking, sarcastic, and dismissive.

I can honestly say I feel both of those possibilities within me these days.

What I am hoping for out of all this potential mayhem is to find out that my plan of finding a way to simply write all the damn time and keep those internal fires banked down is quite feasible. I am trying to concentrate on how much calmer and more content I am when I am writing, even when it’s just low-energy writing like the stream of consciousness shit I am doing right now. And how when I am not writing, just doing other things on the computer, I am bored and restless and discontent.

All this is to fight the strong current of dysthymic depression that says “less effort is always better” and “doing less is always safer than doing more”. Always minimizing effort, to the point of being practically sessile, is a long-ingrained habit stemming from the truth and/or belief of having low energy, and thus having to invest it very frugally.

Personally, I wonder if the real problem is that activity makes you anxious, not tired, and dysthymic depression comes from a habit of living your entire life in such a way as to avoid the feared anxiety by remaining as still and as calm as possible. The third response, not fight or flight but “hide”.

Anyhow, if I concentrate on how much better it is to be writing than to be doing more or less anything else in my sad little low income life, perhaps I can convince myself to just write all day, all the time.

It would be better than sleeping my life away, that’s for sure.

Of course, in order for that to happen, I would need some kind of writing project that could absorb all that writing. And I certainly don’t feel the need to just go for quantity again. I did a million words in eleven months, I did a whole book in a month, that kind of thing is done, done, done like dinner.

So I guess I will either start another book, or maybe finally get around to making that parody type magazine I have been talking about forever.

Either way, it beats blowing up and going psycho or having a breakdown or some shit.

Change can be good. I need to remember that.

Bad Sleep (or is it just Misunderstood Sleep?), sweaty bedding, fucked up intense dreams, yadda yadda yabba dabba doo, where are you.

I think the key here might avoiding afternoon naps. For some reason, that’s when this kind of sleep strikes the most, and the hardest. Perhaps it has something to do with going to sleep when it’s light and waking up when it’s dark. Stupid winter with its darkness at 4 pm. Whose brilliant idea was that, anyhow? What Madison Avenue genius came up with this whole getting dark before suppertime shit?

I mean, what is the deal with that?

The worst was when I was a kid, walking to school each day in the winter. Not only did winter itself make walking to school even less fun than usual (and boy, do I have a lot of bitter resentment left over from having to walk to school when others rode the bus or got rides from their parents), but for an interminable period in the winter, it would be still somewhat dark when I went to school, and then it would be getting dark when I got back out again.

Not quite the flipside of the Land of the Midnight Sun, but it was still intensely depressing. It really made me feel like I was shut off from the sunlit lands like some kind of troll or goblin, unworthy of the sun’s rays. Fear! Fear the yellow ball in the ceiling of the upper world! It burnses us!

Speaking of sunshine, I have been considering getting myself some “sushine” compact florescent bulbs for this room. Have I mentioned this before? Probably, but I can’t resist a segue like that, so you’re going to hear it again. Feel free to skim ahead.

I don’t suspect myself of suffering from seasonal affective disorder (sometimes called ‘winter depression’), or at least, I have never noticed that I am any more depressed in the winter than the rest of the year.

But when I look out my window and see a sunny day, it really does seem to lift my mood a great deal. This, despite knowing full well that a sunny day is probably a hot day and I am highly prone to heat-stroke, so honestly, it would make a lot more sense from a practical point of view to be happy to see a cloudy day.

But something deep inside me really responds to blue skies and sunshine, to the point where when my my all time favorite colors is sky blue, otherwise known as azure. Sky colors in general seem to make me happy. Sky blue, cloud white, sun yellow. All suggest a clear, sunny day to me, and that makes me feel good inside.

Why? I am not sure. Could simply be cultural programming, I suppose. The general consensus in the zeitgeist is that a sunny day is a good day, literally and metaphorically, and a cloudy day is a bad day.

And what do you know, what do some of my favorite songs assert?

That there’s nothing worse than a Sunless Saturday , and the best thing would be Everyday Sunshine where every day is a Sunshiny Day.

And sometimes, for no apparent reason, strange cloud formations scare the hell out of me. It’s a deep down primal fear, way below the level of reason or even phobia. I could not tell you why I am scared, or what I think is going to happen. It’s just this deep and terrible dread that makes me want to either scream at the sky or go to the deepest place I can find and put as much matter between me and the sky as I can.

Obviously, I don’t actually do that. I am not that kind of crazy. For one thing, that kind of thing is just way too much work.

And the sorts of clouds that cause it are not common. For all I know, it’s not even the clouds themselves but some weird weather side-effect.

Anyhoo, my point is, sky things seem to really have a strong emotional impact on me, which is richly ironic given how I spend all my time indoors and only see a little bit of the sky through my window.

So I suppose, for the full effect, I would have to get the sunshine bulbs and paint my ceiling sky blue with little white fluffy clouds. Then it would be a happy sunny day all the time in my room! And when I want it to be night, I just turn out the sun.

Who knows, maybe it would work. Maybe I would feel a lot better just from that. Color therapy and light therapy are both known things. Beats the heck out of taking still more drugs!

Also on the sunshiny front, I managed to send another of my stories off to a market I discovered via exhaustive research today. Well, exhuasting research anyhow. People in the sci fi community keep sending me to Ralan for their admittedly quite large list of science fiction markets.

but the website design is so clunky, ugly, and old-fashioned that I feel like trying to find anything there is just too damned depressing to be worth it. Just looking at it makes me sad.

So I have been poking around for other market lists, and found this good one on the SF Canada site.

It might not have a lot of listings, but they are all Canadian (smaller market means less competition!), and most importantly, it has a nice pleasant readable web design.

So I sent my story to AE Canada, whom I had never heard of before, but they are Canadian, they accept electronic submissions, and they pay actual hard currency spendable money! Six cents a word, even, which is decent for s short story. If they bought the story I sent them, it would be around $170. Not bad.

Not likely, but not bad.

And I am totally going to hang a photocopy of my first ever check for my writing on my wall.

Corny or not, it’s a good idea!

Welp, I was really hoping that I would have it together enough to write something other than yet another rambling and incoherent diary entry today, but I am not quite there. I was all feeling up and such earlier today, but I think I took one nap too many and had some of that Bad Sleep shit that plagues me, and now I am feeling kinda wobbly and not fit to try to assemble an article or a think piece or some shit.

I swear, I will write about the upcoming war with Iraq sometime soon, so I can seem faintly prescient.

Today was sort of an experiment. I wanted to see if I could actually catch up on sleep if I just slept enough. I was hoping that eventually, I would wake up feeling refreshed and recharged and ready to take on the world, or at least fully awake, and that if I tried to nap after that, I would just end up bored in bed and get sick of it and get back up again.

You know, it would be nice to just be done for a while, and enjoy a period of fully awake and aware existence, like I hear some humans do. Not be constantly sort of tired and kind of sleepy.

But what ended up happening was I had a bunch of decent sleep, then a major kaboom brain explosion of the bad kind, and now I feel a little more alert than before but not much.

I had some pretty interesting dreams during the Bad Sleep attack, but I don’t feel like going into them right now. Nobody really gives a shit about other people’s dreams anyhow, and like three quarters of last night’s entry was taken up by dream journaling, and I hate repeating myself.

I repeat, I hate repeating myself. I hate repeating myself! I hate it. ^[1]

No, I would rather ponder just what the fuck the deal is with this Bad Sleep shit tonight. It is really a major force in my life and has a lot to say about whether I am having a good day or not, and I can’t help but feel that I do not truly understand it and what is going on in me to cause it, and that if I could figure it out, not just intellectually but spiritually, I would have a much better grip on my life.

It occurs to me that I judge this sort of thing to be Bad Sleep largely because of how I feel after waking up from it. Usually, I feel like shit. Dizzy, disoriented, soaked in sweat, and so on. Declaring any sleep that ends that badly to be Bad Sleep is not exactly unreasonable. It is, in fact, perfectly sensible.

But it might also be missing the point. Maybe this kind of sleep is not so much bad as intense. Perhaps the more lasting effects come not from the sleep itself, but from my declaring it to be a bad thing and thus considering it to be a personal catastrophe when it happens. Perhaps if I could simply embrace it as a thing my mind (or soul) needs to do right now, or at least develop a neutral attitude towards it (that ever elusive philosophical attitude), it would do less damage and I would be happier.

It’s a possibility.

On the other hand, I am still considering the theory that the real cause is simply too much mental mojo built up. All that raw creative energy and intellectual stimulation that never leads to intellectual release (intellectual blue balls?) results in a mind that cannot sleep, cannot rest until it burns it all off.

And there I am, in the middle of the inferno.

No wonder I wake up covered in sweat and dehydrated. I am roasting alive in the fires of my own unused and unspent creativity. Another argument for writing way more than I do. A thousand words a day is not nearly enough. It would take a really big rig to cap this gusher.

In fact, honestly, I think I would have to write pretty much all the time I am on the computer. No more fuckign around playing Flash games, reading Fark, and all the other jagoff shit I do just to waste time. Like I am just biding time between the rare good parts of life. Like meals.

It’s a sad picture that paints.

But there is hope. I am slowly rolling this idea of writing all the time over and over in my mind, taking my time with it, no big leaps, hoping to just grow into the idea and settle into it as the next natural evolution of my life.

There is the other writing related stuff too, editing my work, submitting it here and there. On the practical level, obviously, I should totally be doing those things, and doing them a lot. And to not do them, to ignore them as I have been doing for weeks now except for little fits and starts, is clearly purely self-indulgent and lazy of me, and I will never get anywhere until I get my shit together and keep plugging away at the parts that are less fun and more scary and difficult and uncertain. I should be ashamed.

And so forth and so on.

But I am becoming increasingly aware that as much as part of me thinks practical concerns should always be one’s primary motivation, for obvious practical reasons, another part of me is beginning to realize that the supposedly practical point of view does not take a great many important and relevant factors into account, and is, in fact, simply insufficient in breadth and depth to be the entire basis of one’s life.

Sometimes, you have to follow your instincts and do what you feel like doing, not just what you think you should. And sometimes that means doing things which might seem crazy or stupid or just plain a bad idea.

It’s the sort of notion that will take me a long, long time to accept. But I feel the essential truth of it.

And I definitely need more to my life than my own cold rational thoughts.

You would think that I would remember that, but no, each time life sucks again, it comes as a terrible surprise.

Perhaps I am being a trifle melodramatic. Forgive me. It’s been one of Those Days, the ones with the deep sleep and the last time and the sweaty and incoherent awakenings and such, and so I am all kinds of under the weather right now, and feeling a little gloomy as a result.

Speaking of weather, it’s been dark and rainy all day, which I think has heavily contributed to my feeling of a vast deficit in my reserves of whack. I hate these dark, cold, rainy days where even at noon it’s not really bright enough to feel like day and so it leaves me feeling drowsy and lethargic and oppressed.

In fact, the day left me so whack deficient that I ended up having all my meals about two hours later than I usually have them. Between brutally transcendental sleep and a profound feeling of temporal majadjustment, quite often today, I felt disoriented on a nearly disassociative level.

Who am I? What am I doing? Where am I? What time is it? Is it day or night? Is this real now, or another dream?

The dream harvest proved interesting, at least. I had two separate dreams in which I volunteered to help someone with something. One was very short, or at least, the part I remember is brief.

In it, someone was making mashed potatoes for some large dinner I would also be attending. The person was female and the whole thing definitely had a holiday family dinner vibe to it.

I saw that she was struggling with the task, and offered to do it for her. It occurs to me now, in the waking state, that mashing things might be one of the only kitchen tasks in which a man’s superior upper body strength might actually make a difference.

Anyhow, I did what I usually do to mash potatoes, which is to first use the edge of a spatula to chop up cooked potato as fine as I can that way, and only then apply the masher. If you try mashing right from the get-go, you end up having to put a hell of a lot more energy into it. Chopping first is far more efficient.

So perhaps it had nothing to do with upper body strength and more to do with superior technique.

Once the potatoes were mashed, the dream ended, because honestly, after a dramatic and spine-tingling climax like that, all you can do is roll credits.

The other dream was stranger and more interesting. (More interesting than mashing potatoes? Impossible!)

Somehow, I came across this particular corner store from the neighborhood where I grew up, I knew it was closed down now, as the guy who ran it had retired. (True in the waking world too. )

But I heard sounds from inside, and so I looked in, and the place was a wreck, garbage and debris everywhere. And there was someone, a little kid sort of(sometimes he seemed older), behind the counter, which now sported a grill like one would expect in a bank in a rough neighborhood. The sort of thing that is supposed to protect the cashier from the public. A sort of cage.

Also in the dream, I somehow knew that this kid hated me, although I didn’t know why. I asked him when the cage was put in, but I don’t remember his reply. But I remember thinking “Well, I have always wanted to be involved in a small business like this, so I should offer to help out. ”

So I did. I asked him if if I could help. He narrowed his eyes suspiciously at me and asked me “What for?” I shrugged and replied “Something to do. ” I suppose I figured a long explanation of wanting to be involved in rebuilding a small business and hoping to maybe get a job there was not my best tack.

So he thought about it a second, and then said, rather haughtily, that he supposed I could pick up the snacks left around the place. I looked around and there was various bits of junk food half-eaten here and there. I asked him what he wanted me to do with it, and he airily replied “oh, whatever. ”

So I cleaned up, throwing most of it out, but helping myself to a powdered donut for my troubles. (NOrmally, I really don’t care for the ones covered in powdered sugar. It doesn’t add much to the flavour, and makes the donut far messier to eat. But what the hell, it’s a dream.)

When I was done, he said to me “OK…. you can come back tomorrow and I will see what there is to do. But I still hate you! ”

I asked him why he hated me, because as far as I could recall, I had never done anything to hurt him. He said something about my stupid eighties hair. I said “Well, I’m a child of the eighties!”

I don’t recall what happened after that. Looking back on the dream now, the kid was clearly the younger brother of Keanu Reeves’ character in The River’s Edge, a movie I watched with Felicity less than twelve hours before the dream.

Truth be told, I really would like to be involved in a small business. I would love to have my own small business, honestly, that I build up myself. A small bookstore (hard to make those work, though) or a little cafe or restaurant, or something along those lines. Something big enough to employ me and a couple of other people, and afford us all a decent, comfortable living.

I would love, in fact, to have the old-fashioned deal where you live above your store. Imagine your commute being walking down a staircase! That would be amazing. Plus, I would want my business to have a homey, comfortable feel. That is something you just can’t get from a big box chain store.

Well, enough blather. Back to sleep I go, like a shell-shocked solider returning to the front.

Uh oh, look who’s got a case of the Mondays!

Not me, that’s for sure. I mean, seriously, who gives a shit? Not us unemployable types, that’s for sure.

But all seriousness aside, I am not feeling wonderful at the moment. Had one of my signature artisan customized on demand buzzword periods of deep intense dream filled sleep, complete with the sensation of dreams becoming more real than reality, waking up sweaty and dehydrated and disoriented and hypoglycemic, and the resultant stumbling around the apartment like a zombie while I try to put together some food and a nice tall glass of water so I can collapse in front of Netflix and try to put my brains back together.

And all for only the low, low price of daring to fall asleep as a fucked up freaky fat guy. Why, with a deal like that, you can’t afford not to sleep!

No, seriously, you can’t. SLeep dep can drive you organically insane. Holes in your brain and all. Sleep!

Honestly, I could use a few more centuries of eldritch slumber, but I should really get today’s writing done first, and guess what? You’re looking at it.

Thanks for that, by the way.

Had a very nice evening with my roomie Joe’s family last night. We chatted, had a lovely Xmas dinner with all the usual traditional accoutrements (including homemade cranberry sauce with orange zest added… was quite good, and I don’t normally care for cranberry sauce), played a few games of Guillotine with Joe and his sister Melanie. A pleasant and very normal evening.

I like visiting normalcy now and then. Helps me refuel my small sanity batteries and have them ready for those rare moments when I grow tired of being such an unnatural phenomenon and need to give it a rest.

Most of the time, honestly, it’s not exactly voluntary. I was born weird. I was a weird baby, quiet and contemplative and charming to strangers.

Yes, apparently you can be a charming baby. I was a darn cute kid, if I say so myself. Redheaded, freckle faced, precocious, a little eccentric, a little chubby. No wonder I kept ending up getting my picture in the local paper. I was positively photogenic.

Looking back, life was pretty decent until I had to go to school. I was the center of attention some of the time. My mother was around more. I had friends.

But then school took friends and siblings and left me with a babysitter and nobody else, and then school came along and the bullying, overperforming, boredom, terror, and isolation really began.

Hard to imagine that the teachers didn’t seem to see the fact that I actively avoided my fellow students as a problem, doesn’t it? But I was nobody’s particular responsibility. The homeroom teachers I had were not the same teachers who oversaw the playground, and in general, I was not bullied in class. In class, I was merely bored and showed it, something I regret now.

Doing the work with such open (if quiet) contempt was, shall we say, a bad move politically speaking.

Well, the last bout of Too Strong Dreaming did at least produce some interesting dream material. In one dream, I was in some sort of Presidential process, like he was going through town in a slow-moving convertible but the rest of us in his entourage were following on foot, one line of us on each side of the street.

And for some reason, I felt incredibly nervous and out of place. I knew that everyone around me thought I did not deserve to be there and thought I was a total joke and resented me for even daring to be there.

At one point, I even, to my horror, discovered that my nervousness had caused me to piss myself, the urine going down my leg and out onto the street with a humiliating (and honestly, illogical) distinctive piddling sound.

(I am so glad that has never happened to me in the real world. The horror. )

Everyone laughed at my so soiling myself, of course, especially the butch Secret Service types.

But then, the procession suddenly stopped because there was this crazy guy with body armor and a lot of weapons blocking the way, threatening to kill the President and as many of the rest of us as he could while ranting and raving and carrying on like a loon.

I find it interesting that in the dream, I was quite clear about what side I was on. I think I might have been some kind of Loyalist or something. It is not at all clear that this was a democratically elected President. I get the distinct impression I was the sort of person who identifies with the people in power and considers himself their servant, like that’s a good thing. Weird.

Anyhow, so there’s the crazy dude and everyone is tense and scared, The Secret Service types were all pinned down or something, and I suddenly realized that I had to save the day. I would show them all and prove I was a hero. They had given me a gun more as a joke than anything else, but I would use it to save the day and prove to all the people who laughed at me just what I was truly made of.

So I sneaked closer and closer, not very well I must say, but Ranting Dude was not paying attention to underlings like myself. And I kept getting closer, and aiming my gun (also badly… clearly I had no training in it whatsoever, but I grasped the idea of using the sights), but then deciding I was only going to get one shot so I better make sure I hit, so then I would creep closer.

The last thing I remember in the dream is finally being in position, and trying to take the guy out, but my gun wouldn’t fire, even after I belatedly remembered to take the safety off. I thought to myself “Of course, those asshoels gave me a piece of shit gun that doesn’t work because they have no respect for me. ”

I was one messed up guy in that dream.

Well, enough for now. More sleep. Seeya tomorrow, and happy Boxing Day, all.

I am feeling a lot better now.

Sorry for the Xmas Eve venting last night. A lot of things came to a head in me, no doubt shepherded together by the unique loneliness of the loner on Xmas Eve. And I figured, might as well write it all out and get it out of my system. After all, that’s what a diary is for, amongst many other things, right?

Plus, it seems only prudent to get into the habit of trying to solve my emotional issues via writing. It seems like that is what a lot of authors do, and it could in theory lead both to writing which has a deep emotional resonance that reaches into the reader’s heart and connects then with the rest of humanity, and maybe even helps them with those same issues…. and, of course, gives me something to write about when I am bored.

Of course, it’s a little weird to be turning your personal psychotherapy into cash via the quill, but then again, being a writer is pretty darn weird way to live your life anyhow, and so what’s one more weirdness?

Turning pain into art, and art into money… that sounds like the kind of scribbler’s alchemy I might just be able to pull off.

It’s not like I am cut out for the normal world, anyhow. Hi all you nice people in the normal world! Don’t worry, I won’t be coming in. I will just peek in from time to time from my writer’s garret and make my observations and move on.

Hopefully, I will even make money at it eventually.

Bound to happen sooner or later, right?

I have been pretty lazy about sending stuff out lately. My self-discipline usually goes all to hell this time of year anyhow. So there has not been a lot of the non writing but still writerly stuff happening lately.

In theory, I could have things really whizzing about. I have at least six short stories I could have in circulation which are currently just sitting in a directory on my computer not being rejected or anything. Plus I still haven’t finished even the first pass at my book.

Remember that? I wrote a book? Did it in 25 days in November? Today is the one month anniversary of its completion. It feels so much longer than that now. I have been lazy and self-indulgent lately.

Well, it is but once a year, sir. (Poor excuse for picking a man’s pocket every 25th of December!)

I will shape up in the New Year. Develop a list of markets and some way of keeping track of who I have sent which story to, so I can try each story in each market and not annoy them by sending the same story over and over again to them.

Although you never know, they get so many submissions, they might not even notice. It would be pretty funny to have the exact same story, no edits or anything, get rejected by the same editor five times before getting accepted. What changed?

And it’s possible. Maybe said editor never gave it a really good read until then, or said story just happened to fit in that issue of whatever, or they just decide publishing me is the best way to get me to shut up.

OK, that last one is not all that likely.

I am having a very modern Xmas morning so far, in that instead of unwrapping a lot of gifts, I have been spending the various gift cards I have received at various fine online establishments. So it’s a very shop it yourself Xmas, as befitting this on demand era.

So far, I have two pairs of jeans coming via eBay and a crock pot (slow cooker) coming via Amazon.ca, and I am not close to done yet. I have $40 left in my Gifts From Me To Me budget, $20 left on the Amazon card from my dear sister Anne, $50 at Future Shop from my brother Dave, and $25 at Best Buy from my friend Ray.

The Future Shop cash is likely to be going to Rayman Origins for the Wii. I was originally going to get Legend of Zelda : Skyward Sword, but then I would also have to buy the MotionPLus addon (or as I like to call it, the “Motion How It Was Supposed To Work In The First Plus Ha Ha Our Bad Now Give Us More Money addon) and I was not sure I wanted to buy a whole other thing to plug into the Wii controller just to play a game I might not like.

So then I took a look at what else was hot for the Wii, and saw Rayman Origins there, and looked at some of the reviews, and concluded that when so many critics use the word “perfect” over and over again when describing a game, the game might just be worth a look.

No idea what I will do with the other giftable cash. Gift cards are a wonderful thing, as they give you a chance to get what you really want, but they are also tought on a fellow like me who has option overload issues and trouble figuring out what he wants when faced with an entire online department stores to choose from.

Remember department stores? Seems like such a quaint and old-fashioned idea now. But back in the day, they were the only place to go when you needed to buy a department.

So due to online shopping madness, I imagine this place will be a little busy with deliveries in the next week or so. Should be rather fun, I like having things to anticipate. The rest of the shopping will wait until I think of something else I want.

After all, tomorrow the “Boxing Week” sales are starting. Who knows, I might be able to pick up a bread machine to go with my crock pot!

To me, small kitchen appliances are toys that make food.

Well, here it is, Xmas eve 2011 and me all alone in the apartment, pecking away at the ol’ keyboard and feeling kinda lonesome and forlorn.

My original plan was to maybe go to the liquor store next door and pick myself up a bottle of something festive (probably some of that yummy Captain Morgan’s Spiced Rum, and some apple juice to put it in) in order to smooth the evening over. But I lack the motivation and the funds to do so, plus by now the liquor store is surely closed (even the booze fairies have families to go home to) and while I joke about needing to start drinking if I want to be a real writer, the truth is that turning to alcoholic beverages for companionship when you are feeling lonely is probably a very bad habit to get into, especially at my age and with all my health problems.

Fat and drunk is a stupid way to go through mid-life.

As is, though, I am not doing well. I feel cold and lonesome and tired and sleepy and isolated and forgotten and neglected and excluded and pushed out and unwanted and unloved and unlovely and unworthy.

So, par for the course for my Christmas Eves ever since moving away from home, really.

It sucks to have nowhere to go and nobody to be with for Christmas Eve. Tomorrow evening, I will be dining with my roomie Joe’s family, and that will be very nice. It’s good of them to take me in every year, and I anticipate a lovely meal and a relaxed evening.

But there are a lot of cold and lonely hours between now and then, and so here I sit with nothing but the Internet and my words to comfort me.

And other things have gone wrong for me lately. Lost $100 of sweet, sweet AdSense money (my first payout ever) to my own stupidity. Feeling all out of sorts because I am in one of my sleepy tired deep dreaming phases. Been too tired to eat properly, which is a bad combo.

And to top it all off, I have some sort of nasty infection under the fingernail of a finger on my left hand, which makes even typing these very words very painful. I am not exactly a touch typist, because I never took a course or learned all that “home keys” jive or anything, but I am much better than your average hunt and peck tentative typist, and I use every finger but my pinkies when I type. So it would be pretty hard to not used this particular finger when typing.

It’s the one next to my left thumb. Index? Ring? Pointer? Whatever.

I probably gave myself the infection, too. I trimmed my nails recently, and for whatever reason, I have a tendency to over-trim my nails and end up nicking the cuticle, and with my diabetes weakened immune system, that leads to this minor but highly painful and annoying infections.

Nothing like pain from one’s own carelessness to make a person feel lovely.

And to top it off last night, I learned some very depressing things. At Xmas dinner at Denny’s for my little group of friends, no less. Always a wonderful time to get bad news.

Turns out, the money I have been paying Joe has not been actually covering the rent, bills, and groceries. He has been paying the extra himself, and what’s more, resenting me because he somehow convinced himself that I knew about it all along and I was just willingly taking advantage of him and his good nature and fear of conflict and unwillingness to upset the applecart.

But I had absolutely no idea. I paid him $300 a month, which is what he asked of me, and assumed that covered things. It absolutely horrifies me to think that I have not been paying my own way (via government money, but still) for a long time now, and Joe has been resenting me for it, and I owe him a whack of money (which he has graciously waived as an xmas gift), and I had absolutely no idea.

I do not have much to keep my fragile ego afloat. But one of the few things I thought I had was that I was paying my own way and not living off others any more. Now, it turns out, I don’t have that, either.

And the knockout blow is that in order to get right with Joe and really pay my way from now on, I am going to have to start paying $380 a month, an increase of eighty bucks.

Bad enough for you employable types, but I live on less than $8000 a year, around $675 a month, and so a loss of eighty bucks of disposable income is a very big deal in my life. I have been just barely hanging on to the edge of the cliff for a while now, and life just came along to stomp on my fingers.

No wonder my finger hurts.

But I’m not suicidal. I have not been suicidal for a long time, thanks to the drugs, I suppose. I get attacks of that crazy panicky desire to try to escape from life itself now and then (existential claustrophobia?) but they pass pretty quickly and I am learning that those often come when my energy is blocked and what they are trying to tell me is that I need to do more things, not do myself harm, let alone do myself in.

Still, it’s nights like this when the barrier between me and the darkness seems the thinnest, and I find myself staring across the frozen abyss within me and wondering what lies on the other side of it, if I but had the courage and the stamina to cross.

I am in no hurry to learn, though. I will find out some day, and that is enough.

Just wish it wasn’t so damn cold on this side of it, that’s all.

Watching the rest of The Secret and pondering the less inane and airheaded portion of its philosophical and psychological advice, I decided to follow the sensible suggestion of making a list of things I am grateful for in order to facilitate switching my emotional polarity from negative to positive.

I think the basic message (that you can change your life by changing how you think) is true, and I am going to try to do that and make 2012 a better year than 2011.

So here are the things I was able to come up with earlier today. This is going to sound a lot like bragging or egotism to those who cannot stand to hear others say anything nice about themselves.

That’s just too fucking bad.

I currently have :

1. Really good friends. Not a day goes by when I am not grateful for the friends I have. We are so compatible in temperament, intellect, and background. And they support me. Life would be a great deal more harsh without them in my life. I treasure them.

2. Shelter from the harsh world. Living on less than eight thousand dollars a year might not be very nice, but it sure beats the hell out of being homeless and going far crazier than I am now. So I am very grateful that I live someplace willing to give me what I need to survive. Thank you, BC government.

3. A computer and Internet access. Also under the category of shelter from harsh reality is the fact that I have a computer and the modern Internet to play on with it. It makes my problems a lot easier to deal with and allows me a window to the world outside my apartment.

4. A happy place on the Internet to hang out. I have found a place with cool, relaxed, smart people who like me. True, it’s online, not real world, but it is still wonderful. It suits me. I feel included.

5. A middle class upbringing. Most of us who have this take it entirely for granted, because it is their “normal”, but I have seen what people without it have to deal with, and I am grateful that I do not have that kind of struggle to face in life.

(last chance, ego haters, it’s pretty much all braggy after this)

6. A high level of intellect. I have to face it : I am really damned smart. That is something a lot of people would love to be able to say about themselves. I am grateful that schoolwork was easy for me and I never sweated a test or worried about my grade. And I am glad that continues to this very day. A good mind is a wonderful thing to have. I am grateful for mine.

7. A vivid, vibrant imagination. It can be a bit hard to handle sometimes, but my wild and wily imagination is a real asset, and one for which I am grateful. I would rather be a dreamer than a drudge any day, and with my big imagination, I would have nothing to write about. Speaking of which…

8. A way with words. I got mad verbal skills, y’all. A lot of people would love to be as articulate and fluent as I am. A lot of people have trouble saying what is on their minds or in their hearts. I do not. I am grateful for the difficulties I do not have.

9. A great sense of humour. Not only am I a funny guy, but I find humour in all kinds of places. I can’t walk through a supermarket without finding a bunch of things I find hilariously absurd. This is a great asset in life, to find the comedy in it, and I am grateful for it.

10. A sweet and sensitive nature. I am a pretty nice guy. I really care what happens to others, I want everyone to be happy, I am genuinely interested in people and their stories, and I try to be a good person at all times. I am nice to people by default. I am glad to be such an awesome guy.

11. A great big personality. Lively and vibrant and larger than life, I have a big time personality that I am only barely beginning to understand, let alone learn how to express to its fullest. But big shiny personalities are a wonder in the world, and I am glad to have one.

12. A unique perspective on life. As a gentle loner, I feel that I have a unique way of looking at the world from the outside in, and I think it gives me a unique insight into how the world works and how people tick that might not be available to those living in the thick of things and dealing with it. I see a lot of things that other people miss (and vice versa), and I am grateful for that.

I guess a nice round dozen will do for now. I wrote them all out in longhand before this, and I will endeavor to keep that copy on hand or nearby, somewhere where I can see it, at all times.

I really do want to turn my life around and that starts with turning my attitude around. I can’t want for life to come make me happy any longer. It it just plain never going to happen. If I want my life to change, I am going to have to be the one who changes it. I am the only person who is responsible for myself.

And things can be a lot better. Life can be good. It’s not just something to mostly ignore while you try to keep yourself distracted between the good bits. Life can be a rich, wholesome, healthy, shiny, wonderful, nourishing, warm, comfortable, and exciting thing.

I don’t kow why that idea frightens me so. I don’t know why it gives me the urge to compulsively cling to my negativity. What do I think my negatives protect me from? Why would I be reluctant to let them go? They certainly don’t seem to be doing me any good.

Perhaps I cling simply because they are what is familiar. Fear of the unknown can be a powerful thing, something that can easily cause people to act against their own best interests.

But whatever the reason, I want to let all that negative shit go. Go on, get out of here, you are no longer welcome in the house of my soul.

I am kicking my demons out on their pointy tailed butts.