As you might have guessed from the title of this diary entry, I am not feeling sunshine fresh and rainbow wonderful today. In fact, I feel like crap.

My head hurts, and I feel deep down tired but not in a physical way. Just tired of my life, I suppose. I am either not sleepy, or not able to be sleepy because some deep pain keeps me awake. I can’t tell the difference.

But to be this tired without the potential outlet and comfort of sleep is a fresh and snappy form of Hell for my stupid horrible body to cook up for me.

I am getting that trapped and anxious feeling again, like nothing in my life is satisfying or even satisfactory and I can’t take any real pleasure in anything because it all bores me and frankly even disgusts me. I desperately want out, yet I lack the courage, the energy, and the money to really go do anything.

I just plain hate my life right now, my stupid fucking pointless life, where all I do is fuck around playing video games and eating poorly and chatting online and watching my days on Earth as anything but worm food slip away in complete meaninglessness, knowing full well that in theory, there is nothing truly stopping me from going out and living a more full and rich life except for my own stupid self.

But as roadblocks go, feeling a terrifying numbness inside that makes action impossible is a doozy.

I feel like I never really have any fun. My only recreation is going out to eat with my friends, and while I absolutely love those occasions because my friends are awesome and we have extremely interesting conversations about everything under the sun, there is definitely a deep part of me that want something more. Something more exciting, more adventurous, more stimulating, more fun.

There is just one problem. I am a deep down coward, terrified of life, and so no matter how badly I want to break out of my mold and do something new and find new avenues of life to explore, there is this massive weight of numbness from my relentless and desperate internal self-sedation to which I am hopelessly addicted.

It is an addicted called dysthymic depression, and let me tell you, it’s a helluva drug.

I was talking to my therapist about it last time, and I used the anology of having this great sleeping beast inside me, and living my whole life in such a way as to keep that beast asleep.

This, of course, means living very quietly, very slowly, and very cautiously. And the longer the beast sleeps, the bigger it gets, and the greater the danger should that horrible beast ever awaken. And the bigger it gets, the smaller the amount of room left in this fetid and foul cave for me.

And this obsession with keeping the beast asleep means that all the great foul monstrosity has to do is stir a little in its sleep, twitch a talon or lift its tail to fart, and I scramble to do whatever it takes to keep it asleep. I scurry deeper into the cracks in the cave and hide my head and lay very, very, very still and just hope that it goes back to sleep some time soon.

The beast is, of course, my deep deep well of depression, anxiety, anger, and so forth. Living your entire life completely dedicated to keeping all your emotions quiescent in order to avoid the bad ones is really no way to live at all, and yet I feel quite trapped in this dark cave with my horrible beast, and I don’t know the way out at all. Or at least, I don’t know a way out that I have the courage to pursue.

Perhaps instead of looking for a way out, I should be working up the nerve to deliberately wake my beast up and invite him for tea and ask him how he feels about things. “Reach out a hand to the ghost that haunts you”, as Nietzsche said. After all, he’s my beast, my ghost, when all is said and done, and as frightening as he can be, he is just another part of me, and so no matter what happens in an encounter with him, I will still be here afterwards. It can seem like our deep darkness can devour us, that the flood of emotions held back by the dam of our depressions would completely obliterate us if it was ever loosed, but it’s not true.

And this becomes clear when you realize and accept that you are all of it… the village below, the dam, the waters, and everything else. The mix can change, and taking out the dam will surely do that, but whatever is left at the end is still you. You cannot be invaded from within yourself, for you are the invader.

And it is just barely possible that all that destruction and chaos will be worth it once everything settles down and you realize just how much tension and energy went into keeping the two halves separate, and how much better you feel now that you are one whole thing.

Anyone know any dambusters?

But that is probably not the way to go. Too risky. The better, if less dramatic, alternative is probably to open the dam slowly and reduce the pressure, letting the waters flow throw channels in the village out to the sea in a slow, measured, and careful way.

And I guess that is basically what therapy does, whether it is the traditional kind, or this rather more modern variant where you spill your guts out on your blog and other people get a chance to, at least in theory, check them out, and compare them with their own.

And for the opportunity to do that, I am eternally grateful. Thank you so much, my dear readers, for keeping this outlet alive to me.

It means more to me than you will ever know.

Today was a therapy day, a rare Monday session as opposed to the more usual Tuesday.

My therapist assures me that we will be able to settle down to solid Tuesday mornings at 8:15 for the foreseeable future, come February. Good. I like predictability in my life. It lets me settle into a routine and focus my energies in the right place at the right time. I am not the kind of person who does “sudden” very well.

Heck, even the fact that I got my ride to and from said therapist’s appointment from my dear friend Felicity instead of my roomie Joe threw me off far more than it rightfully should. Don’t get me wrong, I am very grateful to Felicity for stepping in when Joe was just too damned tired from work to do it (damn graveyard shift work) and I always find her company extremely enjoyable. We have great conversations full of wit and wonder and it’s a pleasure to be around her.

But still, there was a part of me that sullenly resented the disruption in my expectations, and felt like Joe had somehow abandoned me, which he very clearly did not. He discharged his responsibility to me by arranging for Felicity to take me, and even giving her some gas money for her trouble.

But that is the rational truth, and the inner world of our inner children is not a rational place. Emotional logic is the only governing principle, and as unfair as it was, part of me thought “oh, I’m not important enough to bother staying up go, he has to fob me off on someone else. Lovely. ”

That’s a pretty big sore spot, isn’t it? I am one tightly wound artistic type under the affable and laid back exterior. I get the feeling that if I ever get into a relationship, I am going to be kind of a high maintenance handful to deal with. I can take offense at or be hurt by what are objectively tiny things because I am so god damned sensitive and fragile.

Oh well, comes with being such a hothouse flower, I suppose. And like a hothouse orchid, I am very delicate and sensitive, but rare and beautiful as well.

Well worth it, to the right gardener.

Right now, I am feeling down. I think I am just a little behind on my sleep, as I am feeling rather sleepy and am looking forward to curling up in bed for a long nap on this cold and blustery night.

Dealing with the sort of things stirred up during therapy probably is not helping my mood either. We talked a fair bit about how hard it is to live with depression, how I often feel like I am barely keeping my head above water in the sea of my self-loathing and depression and pain, and how sometimes I get these surges of frustration and rage and feeling trapped. The sort of feeling that might make a person do something crazy just to escape, just to change something, to feel something, to make the world feel real again.

Plus, there’s the whole caffeine thing. The main reason I didn’t sleep that well during the day is that I had a liter of diet cola last night, and so I was feeling kinda perky earlier.I really want to start getting my work done while I am up instead of doing these writing jags when I am arguably at my lowest.

And the weather. All cold and dark and windy and starless. Very goth weather, great weather for interminable brooding on the parapet of your Gothic mansion while staring down at the jagged rocks on the seashore way down below and asking them silently for permission to leave this terrible void called life.

Did I say goth? I meant emo.

But for whatever reason, I am feeling sort of blue. All dark and lonely and darkly contemplative. Times like this, I just want to hide from the world.

I am currently around half an hour into the movie Cold Souls, starring critical favorite Paul Giamatti as himself in a world where you can have your soul extracted and stored, thus relieving you of its burden of emotional difficulties, bad memories, neurotic complications, and so on.

It is an interesting premise and I am quite curious to see where they go with it. It’s kind of hard to define exactly what attributes of person belong to soul as opposed to heart, mind, and so on. But the idea of leaving the part of you that has all the bullshit in it behind is intriguing.

Of course, it’s not that simple. Getting rid of one’s soul because it hurts sometimes to have one is kind of like getting your arm removed because you have tennis elbow. Sure, it solves the problem, but it creates a heck of a lot more of them, especially when you try to serve.

Still, that is probably also a thing contributing to my broody mood. Thinking about the whole notion of souls and problem and feeling a great burden of pain and trauma and anxiety and just how much bad shit I am hauling around, and how deep this hole is in which I live, and which I deeply want to escape while also being crushingly dependent on it as a means of escaping my mortal enemy, the real world.

So yeah. It’s a dark and broody night of the soul for me right now. Hopefully, when I am done writing here and get my chance to nap, I will get some good deep sleep and wake up feeling less down and more perky.

I have great energies stored within myself, and I just need to learn to trust them and follow them and let them be expressed instead of listening to the voice of dysthymia which harshly penalizes even the thought of action and instead tries to force you to do nothing, and tells you that is the only way to be “safe”.

But you can’t be safe in Hell.

This is a test to see if you are completely sick of me yet. Because yup, here we go, with another boring diary entry, this time not brought to you by “my brain being too fried by black sleep to write anything more coherent” but rather, by “I couldn’t think of something to write about so I took the path of least resistance and decided to just blather on and on instead”.

Trust me, I am as disappointed as you are. Hopefully, I will go back to being interesting soon. If not, you have my apologies well in advance for it.

Sleepwise, I have been doing fairly well lately. I still have my up periods and my sleepy periods, but they don’t seem as harsh lately and a lot of the time, I actually feel something like well-rested, which is a pretty rare thing for me. Most of the time, I just feel various shades of tired, from “oh god, why am I awake, kill me now, at least then I will get some rest” to “could use a nap but is more or less upright, functional, and ready to face a very, very tiny portion of the world. Maybe. ”

Not sure what I have been doing right lately to cause this renaissance of somnolence, and that makes me a little nervous. Says something about neurosis, I suppose, that when things are going well, I don’t think “Yay, things are going good, I should relax and enjoy this!”. Instead, I think “Oh crap, how did I manage this? I have to know so I can do it again!”.

Neurosis is largely about the desire to control one’s world via the intellect raging out of control and leading to a hyperactive mind that can never rest and constantly picks itself apart.

I think that part of the reason for sleeping better lately, though, is that I have given myself permission both to just lay in bed and sleep until I feel fully rested, and to stay up for as long as it takes till I get tired enough to go to sleep.

This prevent both not getting enough continuous sleep because I don’t go right back to sleep after getting up to pee or whatever, and sleeping just because I am bored and want to hit the fast-forward button on life.

Skipping my life is the last thing I need at my age and total lack of achievement. I feel like I have slept through most of my adult life already. If I deny myself the escape of all that napping, maybe I will be forced to actually do something with my life out of sheer boredom.

As life plans go, it’s no self-help best-seller or rousing battle speech, but it suits my low impact (no impact?) lifestyle and rate of speed.

I am trying to learn to be more patient with myself as well. Let myself just do things at my own pace, and not beat myself up all the time for not doing everything in the direct, linear, immediate way that my impatient order craving self might prefer.

Maybe I am better off just accepting that I do things my own way, in my own time, and while it might not get things done in a hurry, it does get them done, and in a way that encourages inner harmony instead of constant self-directed rage and abuse.

You have to become the person who will treat you nicely and gently and forgivingly, instead of waiting for someone else to come along who thinks you deserve it and is willing to keep giving it to you no matter how much resistance and negativity you “reward” them with.

I have also been pondering a perennial axis of inner conflict within myself, which is order versus chaos. Part of me really wants things to be neat and orderly and efficient and well run and controlled and professional and all those good things. But part of me really does not care about all that, and I have been wondering lately why that is, why part of me actually kind of resents things being too ordered and finds too much order to be stifling and sterile and hostile and dull.

This is the sort of thing which forces me to be such a moderate. I don’t really have any choice. I live in a state of constant dynamic compromise between conflicting forces inside me, none of which can “win”.

From this eternal debate within me, a disturbing truth emerged recently, in the form of a question : What if your need for order far outstrips your capacity for generating it?

What if the real problem is that I would like to have everything neat and organized and orderly like my roommate Joe has his stuff, but I simply lack the energy, will, skills, and wherewithal to make it happen myself?

Well, then I am back trying to figure out exactly how much an increased amount of order is worth to me, and hence, I am back between the Scylla and Charybdis of my desire for order and my resentment of it.

There has to be some sort of stable balancing point between the two extremes, a level of order which pleases the side of me that crave order and control without striking the more creative, free spirit side of me as sterile and boring and dead and dull and artificial.

Some kind of organically constructed order that feel natural and whole but still decreases the amount of things in my environment which make me sad to look at them because they make life seem so crappy.

Or maybe I just need to finish my incomplete oral stage of Freudian development, and hence stop being so passive and messy and dependent, and finally get on with that whole anal stage learning to control yourself and your environment type thing.

Nah. That sounds like a lot of work. I will just keep being a good boy by patiently waiting for someone to come along and do everything for me.

Yeah. That’s bound to work eventually, right?

You know, I really need to start writing these things earlier in the day. Lately it seems like my usual writing period, which is between 8 pm and midnight, is the time when I am least capable of any kind of coherent writing. Hence the mad proliferation of these somewhat incoherent stream of consciousness diary style entries.

I am writing these things with the least amount of brainpower I have in a day. No wonder they tend to wander and meander and trail off and get muddles and get lost and go on and on and on with far too many words in a row without even a comma or a semicolon to break up the relentless onslaught of word after word after misbegotten word until the reader is just about ready to claw off their eyebrows with a pair of white hot pliers rather than continue to endure this endless hopeless worthless cacophony of words that don’t even seem to make any sense together any more wardrobe carpet ampersand beetlefuck and you lose all hope like a man stranded in the desert of ever seeing water or in this case punctuation ever again!

(long desperate intake of breath)

I will try not to do that tonight.

My glasses seem to get dirty at frightful speed lately. So either my fingers are especially grubby lately or I have been pushing them back up on my nose far more than usual lately, and getting said grubby fingers all over the lenses more often in the process.

You would think that after wearing glasses for the last 34 years ago, I would learn not to touch the lenses when I push the glasses back up my nose. But alas, no. I have actually pondered inventing glasses which give you a slight electric shock, just enough to be a little painful, every time you touch the lenses (but not the frame, obviously). Get a little negative feedback conditioning working for you. You would learn not to touch the lenses pretty quick, and your glasses would stay clean for ever so much longer.

I have been noticing that my glasses seem to be a looser fit lately. I somehow doubt the shape of my head has changed much, so I wonder if they just need some kind of adjustment at the optometrist’s. Tighten up a few screws, make the fit snug again.

I could make a joke about needing a few screws tightened in the head the glasses rest upon as well, but I am too damned tired right now.

Seriously. Here it is, 9:53 PM, and I am dead tired. I want nothing more than to crawl into bed and hibernate for a while. This would not be that weird except that I slept all damned afternoon, so much so that I ended up eating supper at 8:30 instead of my usual sixish, and of course, that ended with some of that ever so wonderful sweaty Bad Sleep where I dream so intensely that when I wake up, I am not sure what’s real and what’s dream.

And sometimes, I am sincerely disappointed to come back to this stupid pointless boring life of mine. I wake up and I am thinking “Oh, right. This is what my life is actually like. Lovely. ”

Pretty fucked up, n’est-ce pas?

I have had some caffeine lately, so that might be a factor in extra sleepiness as I caff crash. Usually, in the long term, that ends up being a mildly good thing because after some deep crash sleep, I actually feel more refreshed and awake than I do from normal, not crash type sleep.

Sometimes you have to go higher to go deeper, like a high diver splashing into the water harder than someone who jumps off the side of the pool, I guess.

Well, the good news is that I finally done the first edit of the book I wrote over 25 days in November, Slightly Above Average. All that is left is to add a Table of Contents and a cover page and maybe even a frontispiece if I am feeling fancy, and then I can keep my promise and send out a copy of the final PDF (for now) to the handful of people who have expressed interest in reading it.

Not sure what I will do with it after that. Send some query letters to some publishers, I suppose. I have no idea if it is good enough to publish. I like it, but I wrote it, so I just might be biased. I am particularly pleased with the last section of the book. I think I did some good work in the science fiction of ideas, and I love how I ended it. By and large, when I read it, I am happy.

That’s a big deal for any artist, honestly. The basic act of art is to create that which pleases you. Like a child finger painting, putting color to paper for no other reason than to please themselves. If an artist can create that which pleases them, the rest of the process, like the stuff involving actually trying to make a living doing this stuff, is not all that important at all.

Why did it take me more than a month to edit the book? Was it really a time consuming, labour intensive, midnight oil burning, mentally exhausting process that every day threatened to break my will with its fiendsih complexity that mocked my feeble efforts to complete it?

Totally. OK, not really. Honestly, I am just plain lazy.

Though I am starting to wonder if all writers are lazy, if that, in fact, is part of what drives us to write. It might not be the easiest road to travel and it sure as hell is not a normal way to live your life, but it sure as hell beats working for a living.

Depending on how you define working, of course.

Possibly what makes a person a writer is, in fact, the fact that for them, writing is easier than “work”.

And with that, I am gonna take a nap.