Well, so far so good. I feel a lot better than I did yesterday, though I am still very tired.

But it’s a better kind of tired, the kind of sleepy tired that feels like it leads to nice, safe, relaxing, gentle, soft-feathered sleep instead of the deep dark dragging down drowning kind of sleep.

This morning, I had a fairly nasty episode of Irritable Bowl Syndrome. This particular mode of attack is seriously unpleasant, and happens (I think) when I have a blockage so bad that the contents of my intestines back up into my stomach like a clogged storm sewer backing up into the street.

It is very nasty and makes me very nauseous, although due to an odd genetic quirk I inherited from my mother, I have strong nausea resistance, so it doesn’t usual actually make me throw up. And for some reason, it also makes me sweat like crazy, which is generally a good thing, because these attacks usually also involve a low grade fever and a very distinct feeling of overheating, and general heat stroke type symptoms. So the sweating is good, it cools me off and makes the whole thing more bearable.

I think carbonated beverages may be a factor too. It might be that the real problem is a large ball of carbonation trying to rise through a badly clogged system, and that causing something rather horrifically like a bubbling swamp to happen in my poor guts.

Luckily, I was able to stay calm during all this badness and keep a grip on my emotions and remind myself that I had been through the same many times before, and that I knew all I had to do was hold relatively still, breathe evenly, let the bubbles rise and do their damage and dissipate, and if I just hung in there that they would eventually all be gone and I would feel a lot better.

And yup, that’s just what happened. It was very unfun, but I am pleased with my performance in keeping my cool. One thing that suffering from Irritable Bowel Syndrome my entire life has taught me is that freaking out about it only makes it far, far worse. If I can stay calm, I can just ride it out and make it through with minimal pain.

Even when I was a little kid, I had what they called at the time a “nervous stomach”. if I got too excited about something, or too anxious, I would become physically sick.

No wonder I grew up to be so dependent on maintaining calm. Emotions make me ill. How’s that for a fucked up Skinner box to grow and develop in? To this day, when I imagine what it would be like if I had all the health, both mental and physical, that I want, I imagine myself as fundamentally calm and centred at all time, which would in turn make it safe for me to feel more emotions and not be so god damned numb all the time.

Because despite how I depend on a very low intensity life to control my mood, a big part of me really wants to feel things. I think our bodies and our minds know what should be felt, and register a deep wrongness when the right feelings are not there. Whether it’s your foot or your feelings that fall asleep, you kno somethign is terribly wrong somewhere, and while it can be painful to get feeling back, it also feels really good. The warmth flows back into what was so recently cold and dead and numb, and that feels amazingly wonderful. LIFE!

So often, whatever makes me really feel strongly is beloved to me, even if it makes me really sad, because at least I am feeling something, and for a time I am fully alive, and some of my incredible wasteland fillfed with frozen emotion melts and the glacier I live under becomes a little lighter.

Part of me wishes I could just melt it all at once, total catharsis, and gamble it all on myself surviving the flood to be so much cleaner, stronger, clearer, and more joyful when the waters abate and I am left on dry ground once again.

But if there is a way to trigger total catharsis, I don’t know it, and that is probably just as well. As tempting as the thought is, I imagine that, realistically, it would be at least equally likely that your mind would either be smashed to pieces by the flood waters, or the whole structure of your psych would collapse without all the emotions propping it up anymore.

I don’t know. Might be worth it, though, to get rid of all your crap at once. Like Hercules diverting a river to clean out the stalls of the man-eating horses during one of his Labours.

Have I mentioned how much I loved mythology as a kid? Myths are great stories. To me, there is no better testament (so to speak) to the power of writing and language than religion. From a certain angle, all religion can be seen as a product of some very powerful storytelling, so powerful, in fact, that in an era before the concept of fiction, the stories overrode the usual filters of perception and become real and true to people.

After all, powerful storytelling is so evocative that it really seems real while you are experiencing it. It is not that hard to imagine that in a time before everyone grew up immersed in fiction of various forms and had to learn the difference at quite an early age, the sheer immersiveness of strong storytelling would create the feeling that one had experienced something real and true.

And in a world before the post office, newspapers, or even literacy, and without the full scientific method (and knowledge) for examining the plausibility of a statement… one can hardly blame them for believing it.

And all because someone came up with a really powerful, resonant, affecting story that really moved people.

We writers wield incredible power at times.

Check it out, this section is called Diary and not Blog now. Baby steps.

Anyhow, I feel like three day old shit and I am fucking tired of it and I am beginning to freak.

Today was just like yesterday, except slightly worse. Once more, I spent the entire day asleep and lost in troubled and draining dreams. Once more, I got very little practical accomplished as a result. I was really hoping that I would get my Christmas cards done today, but for the few hours of this day that I was awake, addressing envelopes and writing messages in cards would have been entirely beyond me. I have felt miserable and worn out all day, and have had a hard, grinding headache to boot, and so the mental resources available to me have been meager and scant.

And not being able to think properly always makes me even more miserable. Another price of being such a dysthymic intellectual, I suppose. I need all my mental faculties intact in order to maintain the artificial state of false hyper-calm on which I am so very emotionally dependent.

I wish I could really convey just how bad it is to feel like this. I feel like I am being squeezed to death on all sides, like I have been buried under massive heavy stones which are slowly crushing me to death. My dreams are so deep and intense and vivid that I feel like they are stealing my real life away, and I am terrified that some day they will triumph and I will lose all connection to reality and die in my sleep, or even worse, have some sort of seizure in my sleep and lapse into a coma and never ever awaken again, and be cursed to live forever more in the confines of my own mind.

A fitting, Twilight Zone type poetic end for a person whose main fault is spending too much time inside his own head avoiding reality while awake, I suppose. But not something I want happening to poor little old me, who just wants to be awake and alive and alert enough to have a life, god dammit.

When my health problems get so bad that I cannot support even my sad little nothing of a life, I begin to really worry, and having this crap happen to me two days in a row is really starting to freak me out.

Normally, lately, I have been getting pretty good at handling this all philosophically and not getting too freaked out by it. These things happen, this too shall pass, it is like the weather and the best thing you can do is just wait for it to be over then get on with your life, and so forth and so on.

But lately, the effect has been so deep and so powerful and so severe that my usual calm is shattered. I sleep so much, and feel so bad when I am awake, that I can’t help but feel panicky and anxious about it. I feel like a wounded frightened animal trapped in a situation it cannot control or understand, desperate for escape but unable to even understand the nature of its confinement let alone find a way out, doomed to die in fear and confusion and panic without even knowing why.

My recent spate of nosebleeds worry me as well. My GP brushed them off as just the effect of dry weather and advised me simply to lubricate my nostrils with a tiny touch of Vaseline. But he barely looked, and might have been primarily motivated by a desire to get on to the next patient and try to catch up to his appointments. (My appointment was at 9:30 am and I didn’t see him till 10:20 am. Typical.)

And considering all the bad things happening in my head from a subjective point of view, I can’t help but wonder if something bad is happening in my head in the objective sense as well.

I know it’s not related to caffeine, because I have not had any since Tuesday night. The Diet Coke I had Tuesday night might account for Wednesday’s problems, but not today, Thursday’s.

I don’t think it’s sinus related, as I have been taking my allergy meds, but they could still be a factor. If my sinuses are filling and clogging while I sleep, that could certainly account for sleep related breathing issues. My airway gets smaller while I sleep. Strangled in the dark, indeed.

Psychological factors are difficult to weigh. I suppose I could be in the grips of some long term intense psychological transformation and the hyper intense dream activity is the result of my brain trying to clear some seriously resistant emotional blockage. It would make a lot of sense and if that is the case, I am willing to put up with the insanity if it works out in the end, and I come out of the darkness stronger and more relaxed and happier in my own skin.

I suppose we all hope that out pain serves a purpose, don’t we? We fear meaninglessness more than we fear anything else. We would rather suffer for a good reason than be happy for no reason at all.

But I don’t feel like wandering off on a whole “the meaning of the meaning of life” tangent right now, I have done enough of that in the past and right now I am wallowing in my own misery, not basking on my own brilliance.

Not that those two things are entirely unrelated.

I think I will see how tomorrow goes, and if it’s rotten like today and yesterday, then on Monday I am going to call up a few of my doctors and see what’s up.

I was supposed to have gotten a phone call for an appointment to do the overnight sleep study thing by now, so I have got to call Doctor Yeung. And if I am this ill for much longer, I will call Doctor Chao, my GP, and get an appointment with him and tell him how bad things are getting.

Now if you will excuse me, I am still sleepy, so I guess it’s time to go back into my tomb and sleep.

Here’s to hoping I get to live a while tomorrow.

Time for my roughly weekly bitching about lousy sleep and all that shit.

Today was really bad. I can’t say I have gotten over it yet, and here it is, 7:23 PM.

The problem was this morning. I had a very bad attack of deep sleep, vivid as hell dreaming, and for bonus fun, it all ended in a nightmare that really shook me up.

I don’t remember much of the dream, just the ending. That often happens when something happens in a dream that is so bad or so startling that it wakes me up. My mind races to expunge the dream experience from itself and does not leave anything behind except the final climax.

So here is what I remember of the dream :

I had someone else’s car. I think it might have been Felicity’s car, but I am not sure. I can’t drive in the real world, but interestingly, I often can in my dreams.

I guess the dream DMVs have very low standards, which makes sense, because in my dreams, driving a car is only slightly more complicated than just thinking of what you want to do and the car just does it.

You have to wiggle the wheel and sometimes push a pedal, too!

Anyhow, somehow I had possession of a car that was not mine, and somehow I ended up parking it somewhere that, unbeknownst to me, it was not supposed to me.

Really not supposed to be, because it resulted in people moving the vehicle onto the train tracks, where it got destroyed rather spectacularly by a speeding locomotive.

That’s it. No monsters, no aliens, no ghosts, the nightmare was an ethical and/or emotional one. The nightmare was that I fucked up and got someone’s car completely totaled.

To me, failing in my responsibilities like that is one of my worst nightmares. It’s one of the worst things I can imagine happening, and it was made all the more plausible by the fact that it happened because my being generally forgetful and absent-minded and not paying attention to my surroundings.

There was a definite feeling, in this dream, that the rather extreme actions taken to move the car from where it was not supposed to be were justified. I was not outraged. I realized I had done something really boneheaded and stupid and thoughtless and that of course they had to do what they did. I had done something like block a fire lane or a hospital entrance, but a million times worse.

I fucked up. And my friends’ car was destroyed as a result, a car they will still have to make payments on for years, a car I certainly could not afford to replace, and it was all my fault. All my fault.

That sounds like exactly the sort of thing that could happen to me, assuming I learned to drive. All my life, I have fucked up like that. And the weird thing is, the terrible thing is, I always will. I try very hard to be more attentive and responsible and focused, and I certainly don’t make big mistakes like getting someone’s car smashed into a zillion pieces, but still, that sort of thing, on a smaller scale, will likely plague me for life. Again and again, I have the same experience of realizing I just made a horrible error which cannot be defended. It seems to be part and parcel of being a dreamy, internally oriented, intellectual type.

I am not saying that being that way doesn’t pay off in other ways. It just seems like a really heavy toll for what I get for it.

You can see why this dream freaked me the hell out, though, right? It was pretty much a nightmare come true until I woke up. I awoke in a panic of guilt, freaking out like Walter Bishop when he is sure some science experiment from long ago is about to destroy the world.

As I have mentioned before, the only good thing about a nightmare like that is the moments after waking up when you are so relieved to find out that it was all a dream and none of it really happened.

And as giddy as that experience can be, I would still vastly prefer the whole thing had not happened in the first place. It just costs me so much and hurts me so much.

In fact, I am rather worried that my sleep apnea is getting worse lately. Dream content aside, the dream itself happened when I was very “far out” in terms of severely under-oxygenated sleep. I woke up feeling really, really horrible, and staggered around my bedroom like a stoned zombie for my room, barely able to get enough of my marbles together in a pile to get myself a highly needed long drink of water, and sit in front of my computer staring without comprehension at the screen.

And I have spent the rest of today sleeping and trying to recover. And I am still not all there, or rather, I am still not all here.

Again, I wonder if unspent mental anergy has anything to do with this. But that’s a tricky thought to juggle because it could so easily simply lead to more self-hatred and that is exactly the opposite of the direction I want my life to go in.

I am trying to build a stable, healthy, positive self-image. Falling back into hating myself and blaming myself for everything is not the way to go.

On the other hand, I need to keep in mind that I really did feel good in November and that I do know a way out of this jungle of steam and pain and nightmares. I just have to find my way back to that way out.

I don’t have to be afraid of my own life, my own mind, my own chair, my own bed.

I don’t have to live my life in fear of my dreams strangling me in the dark.

Not if I can turn them into words fast enough.

I bet there’s a million blogs out there which are described as someone’s “blog about, you know, whatever” in one form or another.

That’s one of the things I like about LiveJournal. It doesn’t pretend to give everyone a blog. It’s just a journal, a Live one at that. Journal, diary, logbook, memoir, call it what you will.

The point is, there is no inherent assumption of topicality in a diary or journal. It’s not supposed to have a single unifying theme or stick to one subject matter to the exclusion of all others.

It’s about you, the diarist, and your life, and whatever it is you feel like writing about.

It really is about, you know, whatever.

Have you figured out yet that I couldn’t think of a subject to write about today? If so, please reward yourself with a healthy dessert.

I haven’t gotten much else done today, and I will likely be busy for the rest of the evening, so this is my best chance to at least get some words out of my brain today.

I did get four or five more pages edited in mah book type thang. I think the main problem, beside the obvious factor of just being lazy and self-indulgent, is that it is so hard for me to know when I am done with a page.

And I don’t handle open-ended tasks very well. I need to know when things are done. I need predictability. I have a terrible need to know where, exactly, the road leads and how long it is and exactly when I will get to go back into my shell once more.

So something linear, like writing a certain amount of words a day, I can do. But something like, basically, “stare at this bunch of words until you can’t find anything to fix any more” is just too unpredictable for me.

I keep trying to convince myself to view it not as editing, but as reading with the option to fix anything that happens to strike me as wrong. Reading is linear. I can do reading. Reading is good.

And honestly, I am enjoying the reading part. It sounds funny, but I have forgotten a lot of what I wrote last month. Not the broad strokes of the plot, but the details of what I wrote. So it is kind of like rediscovering something I wrote myself.

And I might be biased, but I am finding it all quite fascinating.

I can already feel some of my faith in my own writing skills returning. Yesterday really was the nadir, and I am climbing back up. I just have to keep certain things in mind, like….

1. I am just starting out in serious writing, so of course, my stuff is not going to compare well to the works of experienced writers who have been doing this for years and whose words have been through a very thorough editing process before I even seen them. In fact, in some cases, I am reading a fifth or sixth edition, which means it has been through many rounds of said editing process. So feeling bad because my stuff doesn’t read like theirs does in terms of polish and professionalism is like women feeling bad because they don’t look like the professionally made up, groomed, and Photoshopped models in the magazines. It’s just silly.

2. I have never been the sort of person with a lot of technical skills. I learn skills organically and nor formally. This means I largely learn by doing. That’s why I have largely given up on trying to learn anything about writing by reading books on writing. I simply cannot learn that way. My writing comes from deep inside and is a very specialized and personal process. You can’t teach that. I learn to write by writing, and reading. The rest is, I am sure, wonderful for people who have a different sort of process than I. But for me, nah. So the lesson to take from this is to just concentrate on writing and not worry about the technical side of things. That belongs to the other half of writing from the one I am good at, and I can’t learn that kind of thing from a book or an online course or whatnot. It’s all too technical for my organically constructed brain.

3. Talent is what you start with. Skill is what you develop. (That’s a simplification, of course, but it will do. ) So lack of skill does not mean “you suck”. One of the potential downfalls of a precocious childhood is that you end up placing too much value on that which comes easily and naturally to you. Talent, potential, intelligence, those sorts of things. But skill is acquired, not inherent, and sooner or later, you have to learn to accept that some things cannot simply be learned like a fact. You have to learn by doing it, and at first, doing it badly because you don’t have the skill yet. Doing it badly is the only way to learn to do it well. If you expect your efforts to be perfect from the get-go, you are setting yourself up for failure. You have to keep on trying long enough to acquire the skill. That is a very hard thing for a lot of us to accept. Especially, of course, those of us cursed with a desire for predictable, linear results. Practice doesn’t work that way.

Hmmm. I should print these out and stick them on the wall or something.

What else? Oh right. Had therapy this morning. Not a lot to say about that. Spent the first half of my precious time bogged down in a semantic discussion with him. Have to learn to avoid that in the future.

Plus, went to my GP, got the big old pill refill. There was some doubt as to whether my new pill, Januvia, aka Sitagliptin (say that backwards and someone goes back to their home dimension) would be covered by my provincial drug plan. But luckily, it was, so I am all set with 100 days’ worth. That was a profound load off my mind.

Still, no complacency. I have resolved to eat absolutely nothing containing sugar until Christmas Eve. I had gotten way too casual about going off script, so to speak, and I need to “dry out” and let my blood sugar levels go down to normal and stay there a while before I cross the line again.

And every time I feel a terrible longing for all the bad stuff available everywhere (you have no idea how much sugary food is ubiquitous until you can’t have any), it only confirms how out of whack my system has gotten and hence stiffens my resolve not to give in.

I will just stick with my sugar free cookies and remain safe. With their help, I can resist.

Thank you so much, Peak Freens!

Not fear of the electric chair, a torture chair, the dentist’s chair, or any other genuinely scary chair.

The fear I have been experiencing lately is fear of this very chair I am sitting in right now. The same old computer chair I have sat in for years now.

It’s not that it’s a painful or uncomfortable chair. It’s comfortable enough for a cheap computer chair. It gets the job done. It keeps my ass off the fllor and my hands in reach of the keyboard.

And nothing particularly bad has happened to me in this chair. Unless you count wasting your entire adult life sitting in chairs like this one playing video games bad.

But hey, that doesn’t count right?

No, I just seem to have developed an aversion to sitting down here lately. When I think about it, a part of me just plain screams. It is strange, and highly distressing. This chair is where I work and play and live. If I don’t sit here, I don’t know what else to do with myself.

And that, perhaps, is the problem.

I am thinking that maybe my recent book writing experience awoke a high level of awareness in me, and as part of that increased awareness has come in the form of being aware of just how unhappy I am with my tiny cage of a life, and how I crave release, but release cannot come because it’s a cage entirely of my own devising.

It is a cage of fear, deep down animal fear, and until the fear goes, the cage stays.

But there has been a part of me that doesn’t want to be here for a long, long time. I have kept that part suppressed because, well, if you have no faith that the cage door will ever open, what use is a part of you that wants to escape except to make you even more miserable than you already are?

Of course, it’s not that simple. You can shove emotions out of your consciousness, but that does not remove them from your mind. They are still there. You just shoved them in a closet and pretended you couldn’t hear them screaming to get out.

And the longer you lock them up and refuse to deal with them, the louder they get, and the more of your life and your mind it takes to keep them in there.

My closet is quite, quite full. I think perhaps part of the peace and happiness I felt during my book writing was that, for a while, that closet had a lot less in it than usual. Writing like hell for hours on end was actually enough to drain me to the point where I could get some peace in this dramatic electric psychedelic warzone hat is my mental neighborhood.

A lot of things are born here and then just left to run around in the ghetto of my mind.

My mind is filled with feral mutant bastards who will never find the way out.

I also seem to be going through a low point in my faith in myself as a talented writer. I don’t worry about this too much. I am learning to accept that this is simply how it goes when you are an artist. You go through highs where you think you are brilliant and lows where you think you suck, and if you can hang in there and not give up during the slows, then you can can see that they as just part of the process of improving as an artist. You reach a certain level in your growth, and for a while, you are happy and impressed with that level, but then eventually, you start looking for a still higher level…. the next rung up, so to speak… and the process of reaching for that next rung involves growing discontent with the rung you are on.

So I will swing back up, sooner or later. It is a brutal process in many ways, and it is no wonder that a lot of is creative types end up getting off this crazy ride before really achieving anything, or never getting on the damn thing in the first place out of fear of the harsh ups and downs of the process.

As many an artist has said to themselves many times in their lives, “this is a crazy way for a sensitive creative person to live their life”.

Too bad we are the only ones who can do it.

Part of overcoming the downs of the process is to remember that it is just that… a process. It is not just about what you are right now, it is about what you are capable of becoming.

It is absurd for even the best seed in the world to hate itself for being such a lousy tree.

All this is well and good. But, about that chair thing….

(See, I remember that I had a point at one point. Quit pointing at me!)

So why am I fearing the chair? Because part of me has come to realize that this chair, and the computer, and the rest of it, are both my cage and my way out.

The scared part of me does not want to go back into the cage. It wants something else. Something I may not yet be strong enough to even imagine, let alone do.

Perhaps all I can do at this point in my life is sit at the bottom of my well, and look up at that big bright circle that represents the way out, and say to myself, “Someday. ”

And do what I can to make that come true. A little bit every day. Some says better than others, but every day trying far better than even the most peaceful and quiet day of doing nothing and letting yourself sink deeper and deeper, and further and further away from the light.

Someday, I will write my way out of this hole.

Until then, I will fear the chair.

Well, due to a complete and total lack of focus or motivation today, I totally failed to get anything much done in the way of submitting or editing, so I sure as hell better justify my existence by writing something.

Luckily, I have hilariously entertaining high content value vaguely new thoughts about the nature of depression that I am just aching to share with you all.

I know, I know…. even more ill formed navel grazings about your mental health issues? Can this be truly truly truly true? Can you lovely, intelligent, and sexually transcendent people get any luckier?

I know, I know. I spoil you people. I can’t help it, you are just so adorable!

And to answer your question : nope. You cannot get any luckier. So relax and quit trying!

Anyhow, depression and stuff.

It occurs to me that part of the desperately maladaptive pattern of depression, at least of the dysthymic variety (you know, us boring depressives that just hide from the world and don’t bother anyway while we die a little more each day inside), is an intense over-reliance on keeping everything quiet and calm.

Like a lot of maladaptive patterns, it is in some ways the reverse of a healthy person’s response.

A healthy person goes out into the big bright loud scary world, and (not being cripplingly avoidant) stays there and learns to deal with it. As they are exposed to the higher levels of stimulation, challenge, fear, uncertainty, and emotion, they slowly acclimatize to it, develop their own effective coping methods for dealing with it, and after a period of doubt and confusion, emerge with a sense of their own power and independence and a conviction that they can handle life’s challenges and overcome them.

And all because they hung in there long enough to adapt, grow, and succeed.

Contrast that to the depressive pattern, which is to enter reluctantly and draw an immediate conclusion based on a very small amount of evidence…. namely they immediately conclude “I can’t do this” where a healthy person might not even think to give up or escape that early in the process. This fits with a generally avoidant personality, which deals with the world via collapse and withdrawal…. essentially identical to an animal’s submitting and fleeing when faced with a stronger competitor…. and hence, the individual never learns that they can hang in there, overcome things, and come out of it stronger.

Thus, their belief in their inability to handle life is reinforced, causing them to further withdraw from the world, often writing off enormous avenues of life based, again, on a very small amount of negative experience. In adaptive terms, this is like cutting off your arm to avoid the slightest possibility of another hangnail.

The rest of the cycle is clear. By withdrawing even more from life and experience, the person gets even less of the valuable life experience that might help them to better adapt to the world, and thus their self-image of incapacity is even further reinforced, and they withdraw even more, until they are living the highly proscribed life of a shut-in or worse, and cannot even begin to imagine how to escape their situation because they have completely abandoned all notion that they can take on the world and succeed.

What causes this destructive behaviour pattern? Why does one person persist and succeed, while another person fold, give up, and retreat, over and over? What taught this second person that the best thing to do when faced with stressful situations is to give up and flee?

Presumably, there is no single cause. But I have come across a bit of data that might shed some light.

I read recently that a study was done investigating the differences between the ways men and women play with their children. The main difference in play styles centred on what might be considered rough play.

Mothers tended to be extremely protective, keeping their children far away from all danger, discouraging energetic, exuberant, or enthusiastic play and in general emphasizing quietness, low levels of stimulation, and highly danger averse play patterns.

Fathers, while of course being very concerned about their children’s safety as well, tended to stimulating their children, and encourage them to try things which scare them, and which might get them a little hurt. And when their kids do get a little hurt, the fathers were far more likely to encourage their children to try again. Overall, they emphasized more exuberant, energetic forms of play, were more tolerant of noise or mild danger, and encouraged their children to try new things and overcome obstacles and fears.

If we imagine that evolution had provided these two approaches to parenting play for a reason, and that both are needed to raise a healthy, balanced child who can face the world with both caution and courage, then it is not hard to imagine that if one of these roles is absent or insufficient, catastrophe can result.

A child without a strong influence in the “mother” role might grow up to be rash, impulsive, quick to anger, overconfident, and have great difficulty with issues of self-control and gentleness.

Conversely, a child with a deficit of the “father” influence, might well be timid, afraid of the world, passive, insecure, and seeking unrealistic levels of safety, stability, and comfort in the world.

Sounds kind of like what we are talking about, doesn’t it? I have to wonder about a possible relationship between avoidant depressives and mother-centric upbringing. The father does not need to be absent or weak. He just has to fail in his role in stimulating the child to try things and succeed.

This might be because said father figure is simply too angry, impatient, or otherwise unpleasant to be around in order for the necessary connection and trust to be built.

It seems more than a little weird to say this in this modern era, but there might well be some truth in the anachronistic notion of the timid “Mama’s boy” after all.

And the mothers in these cases are not doing anything wrong. They are doing what their every instinct tells them is right. But it simply is not enough. There needs to be both influences.

This is only a theory, of course, and one that will likely ruffle a few feathers. A superficial take on what I have said here might lead to accusations of misogyny or the like. That is neither my message nor my belief.

But is it so wrong to think that a child is better off with both parents?

And what happens to the ones who are left all alone to be raised by television and the Internet?

I get so god damned sick of how fucking smart I am sometimes.

And I’m hella smart. I always have been. Learned to read at the age of two and a half. Sailed through school getting good marks without noticeable effort. Even in college, I found the work easy to the point of absurdity most of the time. On standardized tests, I bury the needle.

Blah, blah, blah.

In fact, being hella smart, way smarter than average, has been such a constant in my life that I am sure that I not even begin to truly appreciate it at all.

It has just plain always been true.

I am not bragging. It’s just a fact of my life.

The doubt is not whether I am redonkulously smart or not.

The doubt starts with whether it fucking well means anything or not. For most of my life, I have thought it doesn’t. Not really. Not where it counts.

Sure, school was easy. But life was hard. My intelligence (plus a whack of other factors) just isolated me from my peers. I was never like them at all. The things they said and did seemed pointless to me. Looking back, they were simply acting like children their age.

And I was not like them at all. I was never normal. I was too damned smart for my own good, times ten.

No wonder people thought I was arrogant and stuck up and thought I was better than everyone. I never thought that way, but in many ways, I acted that way.

So all my life, more or less, I have considering my high intellect to be more of a burden at worst, or a sad joke at best. Gee, I am so smart, so why am I miserable? Ha ha ha.

Because I wasn’t connecting with people, that is why. I was a lonely, emotionally and socially stunted child with an outrageously out of control intellect that often felt like it was dragging me along behind it, like a small child with a big dog on a leash. One far to strong and wild for it to control.

And the older I get, the more aware of the vastness of the warm, living, wholesome, healthy, natural world I have missed by being so emotionally cut off, frozen, isolated, and strange.

If I could have somehow known what I would be missing, perhaps I would have tried harder to connect with my schoolmates, found someone I could relate to, make some sort of connection to the world of normalcy before it was too late and I was too broken to make the trip.

As it is, here I sit, 38 years old, never had a boyfriend or a job, isolated from the world in my lonely garret because I just plain can’t handle jack shit, and I look into the mirror and all I see is sad, broken, twisted, deformed, pathetic creature who wants desperately to be loved by someone who understands him.

But wanting something, needing something, does not automatically give you the ability to get it. And so here I am, smart as hell, and what has it gotten me? Nothing.

Dumber people just go out and live life and do what feels right at the time and get hurt and learn lessons and grow as human beings and find love and meaning and purpose.

But not me, oh no, I am too smart for all that. I just stay in, make no mistakes, do nothing, learn nothing, and remain an emotionally crippled child in a hideously ill-fitting grownup suit.

And that’s just going to get worse over the years.

Right now, my hopes of escape are pinned on therapy and writing.

Therapy… I don’t know if it is doing a lot of good, but it’s way better than nothing. Sometimes I worry that basically, my therapist can’t keep up with me. If I throw everything at him that is within me and that I want to share, it would be too much for him. Like with nearly everyone else, I have to slow everything down to match the speed of the person I am dealing with.

Another marvelous benefit of my engorged intellect. I am just way too much, too fast, too weird, too out there for even trained therapists to handle at full power. I always have to step things down and take it slow for fear of losing my audience.

And that is far more painful than I like to think about. Than I like to admit. It is kind of impolitic to tell people how painful it is to slow down to their level.

How painful it is to feel like a giant among dwarves, Gulliver amongst the Lilliputians, always worried that one tiny wrong move will shatter their miniature world and worse, hurt all the people in it.

No wonder I prefer to spend my time in the wilds, and why I seek the company of other giants.

Justtyping all this down, I know some people reading it will hate me for daring to say how smart I am. How dare I just come right out and say it. How dare I make them feel bad. How dare I be so egotistical and conceited.

It’s true, though. That should count for something. I am not claiming that it makes me superior to anyone. I am not telling anyone they suck because they are not as smart as I am. If that is what you are hearing in what I am writing, that is your issue, not my own.

But I am getting around to thinking that this big brain of mine is something that I at least have to acknowledge, comprehend, encompass, own, and deal with somehow.

I have spent my whole life more or less ignoring it and taking it for granted and not appreciating or valuing it at all. I have a highly abusive relationship with this big brain of mine.

But maybe I can write myself out of this hole. Maybe I can use my writing skills to get some more financial security, which I think would do wonders for my emotional security.

Poverty makes you feel very, very vulnerable. And I don’t think I will be getting out via the routes that makes sense and sound practical to normal people any time soon.

I am going to have to make my own escape tunnel. You would think that after all these years, I would have learned that I just plain have no choice but to down things my own way. Other people’s ways just don’t work for me. I am far to unique and strange and hopelessly ill suited for the normal world.

Some of us never really had a choice about whether we were unique individuals or not.

Some of us were just born that way.

You should hear that title to the tune of the line “long time passing” from Where Have All The Flowers Gone.

Have had another bad period of super deep dreams from desperately deep and troubled sleep, and as usual, I am going to bitch about it on my blog.

There’s such a thing as tradition, after all.

But what strikes me as odd this time is that, this time, I realized that I was reacting to this attack (and the one previous to it, as well) with a kind of “oh crap, not this shit again!” reaction.

Which means there must have been a recent period with no attacks that gave me the subconscious impression that the problem had gone away for a while.

What could possibly explain that? Had it really gone away for a while? If so, why?

Could it actually be that writing a book not only made me feel better because it gave me an outlet for my energies, but because it also helped me sleep a lot better?

I did notice feeling less sleepy and tired when I was writing la book. I thought I was having hyposomnia and getting poor quality sleep, and I was worried I was headed for a huge fall.

And when I had a sleepy period shortly after finishing the book, I thought “A hah, finally the other shoe has dropped. ” I was actually kind of relieved.

But maybe I was way off base. Maybe my sleep problems have a lot more to do with having way too much creative energy coursing through my brain without an outlet than any of the usual causes of sleep apnea.

Maybe my soul-draining periods of intense sleepiness and at times brutally vivid dreams are the result of my brain simply creating an emergency overflow valve, a way to release the energy and get the pressure level down to something more manageable while I sleep.

If so, I have been dreaming my life away in more ways that one!

For a long time, I have felt that these sleepy periods are government by something in my mind, something I could feel slowly draining away as I slept. A kind of tension in my mind, like a knotted muscle, or a pool of fluid retained and then expelled.

I definitely feel calmer and more relaxed and more clear-headed once the sleepiness has run its course.

None of that maps to sleep apnea’s typical course. I figured, it must be that sleep apnea is depriving me of restful sleep and hence my need for sleep builds up to the point where it reaches a crisis point and then my body forces me to sleep until I am all rested up.

This theory is not out of keeping with what is known about sleep deprivation.

But this new theory, that it is an excess of mental and creative energy in my mind that causes these problems, holds even more promise. If I really did have no attacks, or fewer attacks, of this problem in November, then the new theory is the only possible explanation.

And if so, it only further underlines how much healthier I am when I am writing all the time. I have only been writing these blog entries lately, and they help, but they are nothing like writing a book. Writing the book absorbed my entire output. And I felt just plain great.

I have got to seriously think about an entire writing based lifestyle. I have been concentrating on proofreading and submitting things lately (send something to McSweeney’s today, w00t), and all that is necessary, productive, and very cool.

But maybe I should take the idea of writing all the time, without pause, more seriously. I can still work the proofreading and submitting in there somewhere (I think) but maybe I should be writing a lot more. Try to come up with enough ideas for things that I am never without something to be writing and writing like hell.

Heck, maybe I should re-examine my general distaste for the notion of rewriting things. From a practical point of view, it always seemed to me like the prospect of writing the same thing over and over in order to get it right was daunting to the point of despair. Right now, all I am doing to fix things up is looking them over and fixing typos, tightening up phrasings, and maybe deleting a sentence here and there. Small stuff, not a lot of effort, and most importantly, not putting the whole thing into doubt, which I don’t think I could handle right now.

But maybe in the future, with a firm grip on the idea that I need to write and that I can practically write myself sane and healthy if I keep it up, maybe rewriting is a viable strategy for keeping myself busy and hence keeping myself calm and clear and content.

I have been lazy for so long (depression does that to you) that it is hard to force my brain to accept the notion that doing more work, expending more effort, could actually make my life better. I have been a low effort person for a long long time. An energy miser.

But maybe that is the problem. I act as though I have no energy, but perhaps the problem is that I have a lot of energy that has not, until recently, had a route out. If I just open the door for it, I could find I have a lot of energy, and that if I just release it, let it do its thing, it will leave me and hence leave me much saner and healthier. It will take a very big psychological and philosophical shift on my part, but I am open to the idea and if I keep at it, maybe I can even change the whole way I look at the world.

I am not a low energy person who must guard every drop of energy and only do what he absolutely cannot avoid.

I am a high energy person with an energy budget he has to burn through every day in order to be healthy. A daily burden I can only reduce through activity. Otherwise, I get depression and anxiety and fucked up sleep.

It’s a crazy idea, but one that just might work for me.

I wonder if it would work for anyone else?

I took my story Rust in the Sunset, gave it a good once-over to whip it into shape, then put it into standard manuscript format, and submitted it to Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

Pretty nifty, huh?

I mean, it’s the exactly the sort of thing a real writer would do!

Well, you know what they say. Fake it till you make it!

I was reading some of Robert Sawyer’s advice for wannabe writers when it occurred to me to do this. He says that there is probably no point in trying to sell a book until you have a short fiction track record.

Makes sense to me. Good thing I have a bunch of unpublished short stories just kinda hanging around!

So I looked at my folder of getting published relating stuff and there it was, the link to the online submission gateway for my favorite science fiction magazine, Asimov’s.

It is my favorite for purely sentimental reasons. We had a subscription when I was a kid, so I got a lot of my new science fiction exposure from it.

It was there when I was an impatient reader in elementary school who would open a book of science fiction short stories and decide which one to read based on which one was the shortest.

I would actually sit there and do the math to figure out how long a story was based on the page numbers. If Story A is on page 126, and story B, the story after that one, is on page 140, story A is 24 pages long. And so forth.

Stories that were too long were too much of a commitment, I guess. Yet I read full length books, too. I guess it makes a difference whether you were given an option or not.

Anyhow, so that’s why Asimov’s is my fave, and likely always will be. I know the odds are very much in the favour of rejection, but seeing as I have done very little of this in the pass, even getting a rejection would seem like progress at this point.

At least I am trying!

After all, tons of super famous, critically adored, and financially successful writers started out by getting nothing but rejections for years and years.

So if you are not getting rejected, you are not really a writer yet, in my opinion.

And I know rejection does not necessarily mean the editor in question hates my story. It might just not be the kind of story they are looking for at that moment. Or it might be too much like another story they have already committed to publish. Or it might just not be the sort of thing they like. Or maybe they are just having a lousy day and hate the world. It can mean all kinds of things.

And I know that, as marvelous as I am, I still have a lot to learn before I am good enough to play in the big leagues. Nobody is perfect right out of the gate. There is raw talent, and then there is skill. Talent you start with. Skill you acquire. But skill, in many ways, is made of talent.

If you get my drift.

Hopefully, eventually my work will be good enough to get personalized rejections that tell me what the editor did not like about my work. That will prove invaluable advice for improving my work so that the next thing, or maybe even the same thing with fixes, stands a better chance of making it.

All this makes me feel like a real honest to goodness writer! Keen gear.

Putting the damn thing into manuscript format was the hard part. That is some particular shit, manuscript format. I am glad to learn it (I learned it from here, if you wanna know) because I want my work to have every advantage over the competition I can give it. If editors want manuscript format, they will get it. It’s the least I can do. I want to do as little to annoy them as possible, for obvious reasons.

But I think, from now on, it would be easier if I tried to write things in said manuscript format in the first place. I am not looking forward to that, because I find it visually ugly. Monospaced font, double spaced, ick. I like my words to look at much like they are already in a book as possible.

But it’s not about what I want, it’s about what editors like. Putting things in proper manuscript format is like wearing a suit to a job interview. It show you are serious and that you are paying attention and that you care enough to want to make a good impression.

So unless I find some marvelous macro for Open Office that does all the work for me, I will be stuck with either doing the writing in the ugly format, or doing the work of reformatting later.

Oh well, such is life. Life is work. Might as well get used to it.

Other than that, I didn’t do much today. The reformatting took most of the afternoon. Since then, I have been sleeping or eating. You know, the usual stuff.

Got a little bit more editing done on The Book. That is still proving one tedious mountain to climb. I need some way to break it up into pieces, or otherwise make it less of a dauntingly tall hill of text.

Or I need to seduce someone into being a proofreader and editor for me for free. Then I can just hand them the rough draft and be done with it.

Heck, as long as I am dreaming, I might as well make them my agent too. Efficient, competent, dogged, and incredibly dedicated to me and my amazingly deft and magical talents.

And what the hell, throw in a pony, a PS3, and a mansion near the beach.

Well, I guess that’s all for today. Thanks for reading, folks. It means the world to me to know that somewhere out there, my words are heard.

Who knows, someday you might all get to say “I knew him when…. “!