Well, you know the drill. Yesterday was links, today is moping.

But in order to protect ourselves from the chilling effects of moping, here is a picture to fill you with a prophylactic dose of bountiful sunshine happiness.

It;s dangerous to go alone. Take one of these.

Heck, take three, they’re small.

There, that should help.

So, did the therapy thing today. Told the doc about all the crap (ha ha ha) that has been happening in my life, and how bad I have felt lately, and that helped some. But I could not help but feel that he really did not get it. Or I just could not figure out how to explain it. Whatever.

I suppose that is just the depression talking. But that is the thing, something we talked about today. What do you do when you know something is not true, yet it still feels like it is true?

I was talking about all the deep self loathing and feeling like I was a horrible disgusting monstrosity of filth and that people would be better off without me that this whole Freudian nightmare with the toilet backing up and my horrible-ness spilling out everywhere touched off.

I told my therapist that if I concentrate, I know that I am not a horrible disgusting bag of corruption, and that if I asked the people in my life if they would be better off without me, they would vehemently disagree. Some part of me knows that there must be some reason people put up with me and all my faults, and mere pity cannot cover it all.

Generally, people’s pity does not last that long. And what about my online friends? I am quite popular with a certain select crowd. I must be doing something right.

So if I try really hard, I can keep the thought in my mind that I must be a charming and likable fellow, intelligent and sweet and wacky, and that is why people like me.

But that thought squirts away the moment I stop concentrating on it under the weight of the enormous feeling of worthlessness and disgustingness that I have been feeling lately. The knowledge is there. The evidence is clear. I am not as bad as I think I am, or at least, not as bad as I feel I am. This whole toilet incident has brought up the darkest, foulest part of my emotional makeup, and I cannot just will or wish all this negative emotion away.

And part of me does not want to, anyhow. I have a deep intuition that I need to hold on to these feelings and feel them fully before letting them go. Only then can I be rid of them forever, instead of just pushing them back down into the depths of my subconscious again.

Like I said in therapy today, the Freudian language could not be more clear. Toilet backing up suddenly from my using it, creating a dirty mess that Joe has to deal with and that then went on to spread to innocent people in the apartment below… stuff that came out of me getting loose and contaminated others… it is like a script for my own personal Hell.

And that freaks me out a little, because honestly, what are the odds that something that so perfectly activated my deepest, worst issues would happen right when I was started to feel pretty good? What bizarre force caused a toilet to back up and spill over hours after I had used it? How could something so perfectly shaped to just fucking wreck me happen at just the right time for it to do so?

This is the sort of thing that troubles a rationalist atheist liberal intellectual like myself. One might call it a crisis of lack of faith. Perhaps it is mere superstition, that desire of human beings to find patterns where there are none, but I cannot accept that this sort of thing as being merely chance. That is in no way a satisfactory answer. The odds against such a thing happening seem far too high.

And yet, what else could it be? I have no belief in the supernatural intervention of otherworldly entities, malign or beneficial, to act as cause for this effect.

Could I have somehow cause it myself? Unless I posit the existence of actual human beings plotting out my life (in which case, they freaking suck at it), what other cause can there be?

Perhaps this really is just superstition. Perhaps this is how religions get started, with this overwhelming feeling that there must be some meaning in seemingly random events that nevertheless leave an incredibly strong emotional impression on us.

Like when that guy empties a whole clip on Jules (Samuel Jackson’s character in Pulp Fiction) and none of the bullets hit him, when by all rights and all probability, he should have been deader than disco.

That makes even a cold-blooded killer like Jules start to think about his life and his religion. There is something in the human mind that cannot accept that extremely emotionally charged events that seemingly happen against all odds are just the random hand of fate. Our primate minds insist that things like that can only be caused by a human or human-like intervention.

Someone had to make something like that happen. That is the only thing that makes sense to us.

Mystic issues aside, I still feel pretty bad. I have attacks of just feeling horrible about myself. I feel like the darkness is all around me and it is only by an act of will and mental concentration that I keep it at bay, and if my guard drops for even a second, it floods in.

But maybe that is not so bad a thing. Maybe I am just processing a lot of suppressed emotion, and letting the darkness in slowly, and then deliberately opening myself up to the emotions involved, I can fight back the darkness permanently.

I open my soul to the sky.

Let it all come out.