It’s been another sleepy day for me, although this time, it was deliberate.

I decided that today would be a good day to simply sleep until I wasn’t sleepy any more. I had nothing besides writing this here blog entry on my schedule (plus meals, natch) and so I figured I am just going to make sleep my project today, and see if I can do myself some good by just letting my body have all it needs and all it wants besides.

So far, I can’t tell if it has done me any good. I don’t feel particularly well rested or relaxed at the moment, and it’s 9pm and I have been sleeping all day. So I would have to say that so far, this experiment in the MJB Sleep Lab is a bit of a bust.

Perhaps by this point, I have overslept. Isn’t it silly that such a thing is even possible? That you can sleep too much and that can lead to being more tired and crappy feeling than if you had slept less? You would think that once you get enough sleep, you would stop feeling tired and sleepy, wake up feeling nice and refreshing, lose the urge to nap, and that would be it for a while.

But no, you can mistake “still being a little tired from the last nap” for “still tired enough to need more sleep” and then sleep too much and wake up feeling worse than when you went to sleep.

Why is life so fucking complicated and so easy to screw up? Sometimes I swear it would be nice to have someone come along, take over, say “from now on, this is all that is required of you, and if you do this and do it well, everything else will be taken care of and society will love you. ”

Perhaps that is where social conservatism comes from : the desire for a much simpler world than the complex modern world, with its unlimited freedom and panoply of options and so many ways (to a negative mindset) to go wrong and end up hurt…. way more ways to fail that to succeed… no wonder people, as they get older and lose their ability to absorb change, long for a simpler world.

The primary mistake, of course, is to imagine that this simpler world once existed, back when we were all children. But the world was just as complicated and difficult back then, we were just both ignorant of it and protected from it.

It’s not like when we were innocently and naively enjoying that simpler and more innocent time, our parents, as adults, were also thinking “I love how simple and easy and wonderful life is right now, free of complications and difficulties and pain!”.

No, they too faced a world that was far more complex and frighteningly onerous and intimidating than the one they knew in their own children.

In fact, they probably looked upon us, their children, and longed for the innocence and freedom from cares and responsibility that we were enjoying right at that moment.

They, at least some of the time, understood that the innocence came from the childhood and not from the state of the world during it.

But this is a subject I have covered many times in my previous writings, so I will belabor it no further. Nostalgia and I have a troubled history.

In the news today, there’s some great news from Newt Gingrich : he plans on fighting Mitt Romney all the way to the convention floor!

Way to go, Newt! No hesitation, no compromise, no surrender, buddy! You’re the only one who can save America from Obama, so fight until your very last breath to take Romney down!

Split the GOP into a million pieces if that’s what it takes for you to get the nomination! Show all those GOP insiders who hate your guts because they envy how smart and charismatic you are that you will stop at nothing to prove them wrong!

Go for blood, Newt, and don’t ever give up! America needs you!

Of course, I hate the current GOP and modern “conservatism” in all its forms and think Newt Gingrich is a horrible, horrible human being on pretty much all levels, and would definitely lose to Obama by a massive landslide, and actually be incredibly bad for the GOP and probably cost them the House and the Senate as well as the Presidency, and be a hilariously horrible candidate to boot…

… so I might be biased.

And finally today, we have this rather magnificent entry into the world of public acts of wonder.

It’s a clever idea, and it cannot have been easy to pull off. I would imagine there was considerable trial and error involved in putting together something that would be big enough to look like a human being in flight but light enough to fly from just the power you can get from an RC vehicle engine.

So it’s an impressive work not just of public wonder but of design, and it’s DIY, which as far as I am concerned makes it very chic indeed.

And sure, most people probably eventually figured out that those were not actually people flying up there… but for a while at least, they got the feeling that there just might be more to this world than they ever expected was even possible.

And that is what wonder is all about. Giving people the feeling that the world is more magical, more fabulous, more wonder-ful than they ever dreamed of before.

It is about a joyous expansion of the imagination. And I figure, if you can bring that feeling into people’s lives, you have done something truly worthy.

That’s a big part of why I am so devoted to science fiction. There is much wonder and magic in science fiction, and the best part is, in science fiction, it’s plausible and therefore truly possible.

And really, how can you beat that?

More bad sleep.

Woke up feeling groggy and disoriented and overheated and heat-sick, with sheets soaked in sweat. Same old same old around here. Sleep should not be this much work.

I am so tired of not knowing what the hell is going to happen to me when I lay me down to sleep. Will it be peaceful and restful? Or nightmarish and tormenting? Will I sleep on a cloud, or in the inferno? Will I wake rested, or bested? Will I even sleep at all?

Sleep is supposed to rest you, not stress you. Maybe this is what I get for trying to prevent my bladder from waking me so often by drinking less water before I sleep. I just dehydrate from the night sweats all that much faster, and hence, the inferno beckons.

I am still entertaining the idea that overstimulation of the imagination without release plays some kind of part in it. I suffered from this much less last November, when I was writing my little heart out every single day to get those fifty thousand words written ASAP.

I want to get back to that, somehow. As soon as I find the bridge. Or build it.

But for right now, I feel like I enter hell when I sleep. Or rather, I spin the Wheel of Doom, and half the wheel is marked Hell. The other half has entries like “meh.” or “sleep, sort of” or “that wasn’t even sleep, dammit!”. Only a very slender strip is marked “actual, normal, restful, pleasant sleep. ”

And no matter how long it’s been since you’ve had any decent sleep, the odds are still the same every time you lay down once more : everything to 1.

But enough self-pity. How about video clips?

Like this sweet piece of video.

Apparently, it’s a cutscene from some game called Binary Domain. I know absolutely nothing about this game except that it’s from Sega (obviously). The game itself could suck monkey taint, I have absolutely no idea and I am not curious enough to look it up.

But as a movie : if I saw that scene in one… I would be absolutely riveted. I would be dying to see where things go after that.

Talk about science fiction power : a world in which the powers that be have just realizes that completely lifelike androids exist and could be absolutely anywhere, blending in with the population perfectly, but with an agenda written by a malign outsider… that’s paranoia enough.

But to have the androids themselves believe they are human beings , and hence open up the frightening possibility that you, yourself, could be an android and not know it, and therefore you could be the next one summarily executed without any need of warrant or verdict…. that ratchets up the paranoia and tension to a truly epic level.

What do you do if you find out you are, in fact, a robotic replacement? That the person you thought you were is dead, and you murdered them before taking over their identity so completely that you have spent decades thinking you are them, living their lives, loving their loved ones, being them in all ways except for the deepest one?

Would you commit suicide out of sheer horror? Would you decide that whatever was inside you, you WERE the person you have always thought you were, and go on living your life as you did before? If you tried, would the paranoia destroy you? Always worried that you will be discovered and destroyed?

And what if the original you showed up, surprisingly alive, and wanted their life back?

Hmm. All this might make a good short story, honestly.

Unrelatedly, here’s another fresh clip I felt worthy of sharing with you, my eager but discerning audience. It’s faboo.

What I love about this video the most is how they obviously did it on zero budget, and yet, it is really entertaining and rich, especially once the song starts. Once they song kicks in, they really show that they know how to keep the ball in the air and keep new things happening. I am duly impressed.

Heck, the fact that the whole song sequence in the car appears to have been done as one long song-length shot, with car dancing and props and surprises and lip-syncing all in one long kickass take, just blows my mind. I bet they did a ton of takes of it before they got the one perfect, golden one we see here.

The points they make are not exactly fresh or new, although relationship humour is always a reliable source of comedy because relationships are a universal truth of the human condition.

But the format they put it in is fresh, with deft rhymes and funny facial expressions and so on. The mock-serious expressions they use while doing this goofy shit are just plain magic. It really sells the comedy and sells it hard.

One last fresh clip, of a fairly well populated genre that is nevertheless always a ton of fun to look at : blowing stuff up in the microwave!

Oh, right… VIRAL ALERT. This is actually an add for some restaurant that is bragging about how they don’t use microwaves in their cooking. Stupid, I know, but who cares? It’s fun anyhow.

This, to me, would be the ultimate thing to do with a microwave oven that was near the end of its life and was headed for recycling anyhow. Play a fun game of “what happens if a microwave THIS” until the thing dies or the police show up because you are putting out all kinds of weird interference and now nobody can get WiFi in your area, or something.

Of course, safety first. So ideally, you would do this with a nice clean dry outdoor area and a very long extension cord, and of course, a good camera with a good optical zoom function, so you can watch all the fun without you or the camera having to be anywhere near Ground Zero.

Why yes, I have given this a lot of thought, thank you.

Well, I liked the results of my previous melatonin experiment so much that I went and bought me some.

Still in sublingual form, of course, which is annoying. Sorry I said “intralingual” before… dunno what I was thinking. Doesn’t even make sense. What the hell would “intralinagual” even mean? Sounds like something you would have to inject directly into your tongue.

That would not prove to be a popular drug delivery system. Well, except for hardcore masochistic piercing freaks, I guess.

But they are not exactly a large demographic.

So anyhow, I bought myself a bottle of 60 of the things. I noticed on the box how it said it was “extra strength”, but there were no other strengths available. Another example of how the world of advertising and marketing (are those the same thing yet?) rapes the English language by misusing words and phrases until they lose all meaning.

Are we really so fucked up in the head by marketing that, as consumers, if it didn’t say “extra strength” on the bottle, we would sneer at it and say “Well, I am certainly not going to use the normal strength. That might be enough for the peasants and the rabble, but my pain and insomnia is far too important and strong to settle for their meager dose!”

The advertising people sure seem to think that.

Anyhow, I bought myself some. It was around $14 for 60 of them. I could have got twice as much for three bucks more, but they were all out of that size.

No big surprise there. People ain’t dumb. Still, sucks to pay more that I could have done.

Oh well, now I got me a solid supply for the next while at least, and I doubt I will use mroe than one a day… at least, not again.

This morning, I took one when I was watching stuff with Joe and Julian and Felicity. At that point, I thought I was around an hour before going to sleep, so taking one then made sense.

But as it turns out, I was quite off in my guess as to when I was going to bed. I didn’t end up going to bed for at least five hours after that. And by then, I was not feeling the effects of the first dose any more, and I knew I still had enough caffeine in my system from diet Coke at Denny’s the previous evening to make getting to sleep different.

So I decided, as an experiment, to take another melatonin. It had been five hours, I figured, so surely all the previous dose was out of my system now, and therefore taking another should be safe.

Not gonna do that one again. The nicely mellow relaxed feeling I get from the pill increased to the point where I actually felt kind of numb and cold, especially in my legs and hands, and that was definitely not a pleasant effect at all.

Plus, as a diabetic, any kind of numbness freaks me out and makes me think I am experiencing nerve damage or a pulmonary collapse or some similar horror. So yeah. Not going there again.

But still, it’s good stuff for getting to sleep, so am I glad I have it around. I am just going to limit myself to one pill per twenty four hour period. That ought to be safe.

In fact, my plan tonight is to take one when I am done this blog entry. I am already feeling pretty sleepy, so the pill should really boost me into dreamland.

If I am very lucky, I might actually get enough sleep in a row to have a normal REM cycle and get some good, deep, restful sleep, instead of being stuck in the extremes of either no deep sleep at all, or hyper-deep extreme REM sleep which leaves me feeling like utter crap.

For a person who describes himself as a “radical moderate”, I oscillate between extremes a lot. I can’t help but feel there is some kind of connection there, but if there is, it is too subtle for my current somewhat groggy mind to capture.

I also finally got around to buying another big bottle of multivitamins. The first ones I saw, it was actually sixteen bucks for eighty pills. Too rich for my blood, man. Cause I got very poor blood.

That is, in fact, part of what the damn multivitamin is supposed to help cure.

After some more hunting, I found a bottle of the special “weight loss formula” I bought before, containing something called ECGC, which I think is supposed to be the active ingredient in green tea or some such thing.

Dunno about that, but I have noticed that since I started taking them again, I have had more color in my urine, and have a kind of pleasant “flushed out” feeling, and if that means I am being detoxified by this magical ingredient, so much the better.

Mostly, though, I just want to shore up my nutrition. My diet is not exactly horrible, compared to some people anyhow. I get plenty of fresh fruit and veggies, most of my carbs are complex, I get enough fiber to stay more or less regular.

But I worry. Come to think of it, I should have bought just plain calcium supplements instead, or as well, because what I mostly lack is dairy products and other sources of calcium.

I don’t drink milk, I eat cheese but not regularly, I hardly can afford ice cream much (the sugar free kind is pretty expensive), I am not exactly keen to start eating a lot of kale and almonds.

I know all this lack of calcium must be doing me harm, but I never quite seem to get around to doing something about it.

Well, at the very least, calcium is next on my list of things to buy at the drug store.

Either that, or I am just going to have to rent a cow….

Soon to be a book, then a movie, then a movie again but with a younger, hotter guy in the lead, then a book again for a while, then a Broadway musical by John Grisham.

Oh, before I begin : whatever I write tonight, I write from a mind wrapped deep in a twilit fog between sleepiness and alertness, and so it might be even less coherent than usual.

No guarantees, however.

I have been having a really hard time sleeping lately. I think it started last Friday, but I am not sure. But I had been in this state before, probably due to just how fuck up and Biosphere-like my sleep life is because of my sedentary, indoors, unnatural lifestyle, so I recognized it when I got there.

It’s very annoying, because it is so tantalizing. What happens is that I can get sleepy, lay down, relax, and get almost to sleep… but that’s it. I never quite get there. At best, I drowse. At worst, I just lay there, relaxed and ready to sleep, but it just never happens.

I picture the mythical Mister Sandman standing over me, sand in hand, going “You want some? Well you can’t have any, so there!”, and giggling.

Send me a dream already, motherfucker!

So after three or four days of never really sleeping and feeling like my consciousness was suspended in a little plastic bubble that just refused to dissolve into the sea of sleep, that I would follow the recommendation of tons of people both online and in real life, and give a melatonin pill a try.

I had only recently been disabused of the notion that melatonin was not available in Canada. I am not sure who fed me that particular erroneous factoid. It was likely someone on IRC. I wish I knew, so I could give them a virtual kick in the ass.

Anyhow, in the process of learning that melatonin was, indeed, available all over the place here in Canada, I also learned that my roomie Joe had secured himself a supply and had been using it to help get to sleep for quite a while now. That Joe, always three steps ahead of me. We think the same way, but he gets there first, because he’s not lost in Dreamland like I am most of the time.

So after many days of not quite getting to sleep, and really dreading the inevitable thunderous crash that days upon days of hyposomnia would no doubt precipitate, I decided to ask Joe if I could have one of his pills and give this stuff a try myself.

I mean, I am not so vehemently individualistic that I will ignore an avalanche of recommendations just out of what my dear friend Felicity calls “knee-jerk nonconformism”.

So I took one of these pills, which in this case was one of those under the tongue dissolving “intralnagual” type pills that are all the rage now because you don’t need water to take them.

Myself, I already take so many god damned pills that I honestly would have preferred to just swallow the thing with a gulp of water instead. I find intralingual pills mildly annoying. They are so much more of a commitment than a normal pill. You have to slip it under your tongue and wait for it to dissolve there, which it does at its own damn speed.

It did have a pleasant minty flavour, however. So there’s that. Turned all chalky at the end, though, so that kind of negated the goodness of the mint.

Anyhow, mission accomplished. Took the pill, waited to see if it worked on me. Drugs occasionally do not have the intended effect on me, so I am always skeptical.

But yup, worked great. Really, really great.

And constant readers will know what that meant : I slept all damned day, with heavy dream activity. No waking up desperately sweaty and miserable, though, so perhaps it helped me sleep more soundly or at least with more of that breathing thing.

Now, I knew this was the risk when I took the thing. Go long enough without proper sleep, and you know what is going to happen when you manage to get the cork out of the bottle.

So I knew that if it was effective, I would be getting me some serious Z’s.

As it turned out, I slept at soundly as this little guy.

That’s a dormouse, a species most of us know only from his appearance at the Mad Hatter’s table in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carrol.

It’s a real critter, though, a species of rodent native to the UK who spends one third of its life sleeping through the winter in a cozy underground nest it digs for itself at first frost.

Aren’t they adorable? As you can see, they, like me, are really heavy sleepers. That little fella is not going to wake up until Spring, no matter what.

Unlike me, however, when the dormouse takes his big nap, he loses a third of his body weight in his sleep, and wakes up a lot skinnier.

Boy, I wish I could do that. A hundred and twenty pounds of weight loss sounds good to me, even if I have to sleep all winter in order to do it.

What the hell, winter is boring anyhow. And in the long run, the years the weight loss would add to my life would more than compensate for the months I spent asleep.

Try the all new Coma Diet! Watch the pounds melt away on the time lapse DVD we give you once you awake from your induced coma! No willpower required because you can’t eat in your sleep! No exercise required except for the exercises our trained physical therapists will put your sleeping body through in order to stave off muscular atrophy! And of course, no effort on your part at all!

Our system works automatically, while you sleep!

The sad thing is, that sounds kinda good to me.

To understand how my therapy went today (and I know how eager you all are to do that), you will have to learn a little about how my day went beforehand.

I got up at the usual time, and farted around on the computer (reminder : Febreze computer, then Purell. Or is it the other way around?) until around 7:30, which is the earliest we usually leave for my 8:15 am appointments with Doctor Costan.

Seeing that Joe (my roomie, my friend, my ride) is not ready yet, I sit down in front of the television, boot up the Wii and thence Netflix, and resume watching a very fascinating (and, perforce, depressing) documentary called “Bobby Fischer : Against The World”.

Fischer is a fascinating historical figure, and his life is truly tragic, and so the documentary is quite engrossing. So engrossing, in fact, that Joe ended up watching it with me instead of getting ready to drive me to my therapy appointment.

And I saw this happening, and it was making me increasingly tense. I absolutely hate being late for anything. It’s a deep part of my nature. I hate it when others are late for things and leave me in doubt and suspense and tension, and so, in order to be morally consistent, I also hate tardiness in myself.

So my tension/anxiety level is peaking, but I can’t just come out and say so, because Joe drives me to and from these weekly appointments purely out of the goodness of his heart, and well, beggars can’t be choosers, can they?

And I have been a beggar all my life.

Finally, I just turn off the Wii and say “We should get going!”.

Might not seem like much, but for me, that was a fairly significant act of assertiveness. It is very hard for me to speak up for myself in personal matters. I tend to just let things slide.

And by slide, of course, I mean fester and boil and seethe inside me until it turns into the pure poison of my deep self-loathing and depression.

Because hey, you can always take it out on yourself, right?

Anyhow, so it’s already past 8 am when we finally leave, and all the time we are driving to the appointment, I am staring at the clock as the minutes go past.

Joe, sensing my tension, begins driving aggressively, which is meant well, but I have this hunk of PTSD about driving in cars and so it only serves to make me more nervous because I am pretty sure that one thing I would hate more than being late is dying.

Even when we are driving at normal speeds, I keep having these anxiety spikes, thinking a car is about to hit us when it just happened to merge next to us, or passed too close, or whatever. It is classic PTSD, and it started the last time I was in a car accident.

And that was many years ago… so I am assuming this PTSD bullshit ain’t going anywhere. Sigh.

So you can imagine how anxious I was when we finally got there. I was all jangled and frazzled and angry with Joe for dicking around and making me late (by two whole minutes) and feeling like nobody takes me seriously or really cares about me and that is why they don’t care enough to be on time and so forth and so on and so what.

So then I finally get to the appointment…. and the secretary tells me Doctor Costan is running late and won’t be there for another ten minutes.

Now doesn’t that just figure? In theory, this could have been a good thing, like when I would be late for class in university only to find the prof wasn’t there yet.

I would just sit back and say “If he’s not here yet, then I’m not late!” After all, the class hadn’t started without me, had it?

But this time, what with my mood already foul from feeling like people had let me down, the revelation that the Doctor couldn’t be bothered to show up on time either only made things a lot worse.

I sat there thumbing through their giant Herman collection (save me with your brilliant single panel humour, Jim Unger!), and fuming, thinking about what I will say to the Doc when he shows up.

I feel bad for the people who arrived in between my arrival and the Doc’d arrival, because I probably glowered at them. Sorry folks, it wasn’t anything you did, it was just you not being Doc Costan.

So when he finally did arrive, guess what the first thing we talked about was?

If you said “how I felt about him being late”, go get yourself a cookie. Jar’s on the fridge.

So I ranted a bit about that, and talked about how I knew that feeling like people don’t care about you just because they are late is not rational, but I felt that way anyhow. I have been ignored all my life, made all the more convenient by my total lack of assertiveness, and so those issues are very raw and close to the surface, and liable to emerge at the slightest stimulus.

It really is the height of self-centeredness to take accidental things personally, I suppose.

So I vented about that to the Doc, and we got into other related things, but the most important thing that came out of it was that I expressed my anger and disappointment, and not only did the world fail to end, but he actually told be that he not only gave me permission to do it again if something is bothering me, but he actively encouraged it.

And it made me realize just how bad a problem holding myself to this impossible standard of “never taking my emotions out on others” can be, and that maintaining that kind of purity can be a poison more toxic than any snake’s venom.

Purity is its own poison.

Been trying to remember that I wasn’t always this sick lately.

It is a very hard thing to keep in one’s mind, because nothing makes you really feel just how sick and broken and messed up you are now than the memory of when things were not nearly so bad.

So when that gets to be too hard, I try to remember times when I was a lot worse, too.

Maybe not worse off in terms of health, but at the very least, worse off in terms of lifestyle.

Like when I was stuck in Summerside, living with my parents, stuck in a place with extremely high unemployment and not much going on, completely unaware that I had a disease called depression and so blaming myself for being such a big time small town loser, and having absolutely no source of income whatsoever. That, in a word, sucked.

There is no way to describe just how depressed one can get from being completely cashless. It was the same when I was living off friends in the USA. With no income whatsoever, the depression just gets worse and worse and worse. You are so completely powerless to seek any pleasure for yourself that the reward center of your brain just starves to death and you simply cannot avoid the conclusion that you must be a terrible, terrible person if the universe never so much as throws you a half-gnawed bone.

Plus, honestly, you simply cannot grow up while living with your parents. Even if, defying the odds completely, they do not behave in any crazy ways towards you because the part of the animal brain that says “drive off your young to make way for the next generation” has kicked in, there is still programming inside your own brain that says “head out to make my own way in the world”, and that part of your brain won’t listen to all the rational reasons why it would not be practical to live on your own.

The truth is, when you live with your parents, you are defined by your relationship to them, just as you were for your entire childhood. So when you live with them, you remain, essentially, a child.

And I have never bought that whole Peter Pan bullshit of never wanting to grow up. I have always wanted to grow up. I am keenly interested in growth. To me, “grow or die” is a self-evident truth. As much as I might desire stability, predictability, and reliability in life, the truth is that everything changes, and the only way to keep things the same is, ironically, to be able to change in ways that compensate for the changes imposed upon on us from without.

And, it becomes increasingly clear to me, to be willing to make the changes in one’s life demanded by one’s inner growth as well. It is hard to sacrifice current security for future health and happiness, especially when the heavy weight of depression makes is so very hard to believe in the future at all.

But on some deep level, you have to fight back. You have to view your depression as the enemy, and you have to find the primal spark of life and defiance that refuses to give in. You have to reach deep into all the rage that comes from feeling so helpless, accept that the depression is not a part of you but a disease like cancer that has invaded you and that can be fought and defeated, and keep that spark alive even if the heat and light burns you.

It’s burning away the cancer. It’s like chemo for the soul.

You also have to face the fact that as well as being a disease, depression is an addiction. Post-diagnosis, you can become addicted to your depression and the way it offers an enormous blanket excuse to not face anything, and hence never learn to handle anything, and thus, make it even harder to face anything. It is a deadly and addictive cycle, leading deeper and deeper into the grave of your own self-destructive fear of light, hope, and the Universe itself.

Until you realize that you benefit from your depression, you will find it impossible to truly fight, because you will never make the conscious choice to give up those benefits in exchange for future happiness and personal growth.

And so, you will cling to your depression out of primal fear of losing those benefits, without knowing that this is what you are doing, and thus all efforts you make towards fighting your depression will result in a deep conflict within yourself.

A conflict you can’t even recognize for what it is. You are just in pain, and don’t know why, and don’t think there is anything you can do about it. And that is pretty much the definition of depression.

The feeling that all routes lead to an electric shock, and none lead to the cheese.

And in a way, that is why it is important to remember that you were not always so sick. It reminds you that there was a you that existed before the depression and, while you cannot go back in time and return to a happier area of your life, you can hold on to the memory that you are not your depression, and it is possible to be yourself and not be depressed at all.

For me, the happiest time was when I was at college. I had cool nerdy friends, I had my studies, I had a life. I didn’t have much cash, and there were the various stresses of college life, but still, looking back, that was the closest I have ever been to being “okay”.

Imagine what might have been if I had had the courage to come out of the closet. Ah well.

And some day, I will get back to that level of happiness. I have the cool nerdy friends, and they are a godsend. Some day, I will have the college too, or something else to occupy my life.

And this time through, the closet doesn’t fucking exist.

A hearty good un-evening to all you special people out there in ocular reception land, and welcome to this vibration’s edition of Live From Inside The Caldera! As you can see, it’s hotter than Satan’s nutsack in here tonight, and our guest of honor, poor MJB’s brain, is just about ready for another basting with sewer water and recycled sweat, so we are in for a heck of a luau on the lanai tonight!

As always, this show is brought to by the sarcastically benevolent people at Sneip’s Specialty Sputum. Remember folks, if it’s not from Sneip’s…. it’s just not sputum!

And we have a heck of a show for you tonight folks, and I am not just saying that because the voices in my head tell me to do so! Not this time, no siree! Tonight, we have the kidney palpating jungle beats of Maximum Hootenanny, the hilarious grunting of comedian Professor Not Quite Enough Bleach, and a visit from our old friends, The People Who Touched It Before You Knew What It Was!

So sit back, relax, insert the included device in your orifice of preference, turn your major mood indicator to “unbridled joygasm”, send your kids out for medical indulgences, and enjoy tonight’s spine-jangling episode of Live From Inside The Caldera!

And remember, no matter what happens, MJB’s brain will continue to roast in its own foul juices, producing hilariously muddled hallucinatory dream states for us all to mock and enjoy, so stay tuned to this cosmic eventuality as required by law!

Enough of that for now. Sometimes, I just have to let some of the weirdness out of my brain to make room for the new stuff.

I meant, that’s what leads to this sort of thing.

That’s why my response, from way before I ever saw the Lion King, to people saying to me “you’re so weird!” had been “You have no idea. ”

The odd things I do an say are but the tip of the obstruse and dodecaherent iceberg, kiddies.

Today has been long and hard, even though I spent most of it asleep. Frequent readers of this blog will be rewarded with a palace in Heaven familiar with how that can be for me. Yes, I have had one of my “sleepy days”, and it’s been a mother of a lulu of one to boot.

All day, I have done nothing but sleep the sleep of the tortured mystic, full of dreams more intense than reality (thankfully), except my dreams are not symbol-laden spiritual journeys full of beatific visitations and wrestling matches with snake-devouring eagles, but rather, just the humdrum meanderings through hotels in search of lost footwear of a post-mystical INTJ like myself.

That doesn’t make it any easier on the mind and soul, however. I still awake from these surprisingly dull and low key dreams drenched in sweat and completely incoherent, barely able to even remember who I am, let alone where, when, or what. It gives me the distinct feeling of being very thoroughly wrung out, or perhaps, of having undergone some excremental existential emesis, a profound puking of the soul to purge built up spiritual toxins and leave me tabula rasa for the time being.

These episodes are one of the most profound reasons why I wish I could live in a luxury hotel. Just being able to wake up from one of these episodes and just phone front desk for a complete change of bedding would do me a world of good.

It’s bad enough to have your brain put through the wringer all the time without having to go back to sleep on sheets still soaked with your sweat from the previous round of damage.

The mere prospect of being able to just order some room service (lately, I also wake up hungry as well as dehydrated), eat it while they change the bedding, then have a quick shower before going back to sleep in cool, crisp, clean linen fills me with a sensual delight verging on a childlike eroticism.

Someday, perhaps. Some day. At the very least, it would be nice to have enough sets of bedding that I could do the laundering and changing myself. Perhaps I should start asking for that for Xmas and birthdays. It would be worth the extra cost for laundry.

I wonder if my dreams would be different?

Other than the usual brain broiling, life goes on as per usual, sad to say. Tomorrow night is the monthly BCSFA meeting, so I am working hard on gearing myself up to be social and willingly go into a situation where there will be at least one person I don’t know.

Last month, I didn’t make it, and I regretted it. But I just could not summon the wherewithal to overcome my social aversion in order to attend.

This despite the fact that this is a perfectly acceptable social gathering, or at least it should be. It’s in a known place, I will know most of the people there, it is a group of intellectually curious nerds, which is as close of a milieu as a lone sheep like myself has, and there is even free food.

So really, it’s a low hurdle to jump at best, and yet, social anxiety is social phobia, and phobias are by their very nature unreasonable. They operate below reason, down deep in our animal programming, and thus they can be dealt with, but negotiation and reason are not going to cut it.

Still, no matter what, I plan on going this month. I have been giving in to the illness too much, and I have to start pushing back if I hope to make any progress.

It’s seductively easy to just let the anxiety and depression rule me, and just keep going on like I have always been going on, while the years of my life rush past.

But that’s for people who are happy with their lives, and I am not.

Something has to change. Or one of these days I will just walk away, take a bus to a new place, and start my life all over again.

I would rather it didn’t come to that, though.