Today has been another of those sleepy days. I have slept all of the morning and afternoon, and I have a distinct feeling that after I am done blogging here, I will be going back to sleep again.

Sleep is a major issue in my life, as any reader of this blog will know, and I really do wonder what the heck is wrong with me sometimes.

The thing that has been bothering me lately is the fact that I do not feel that I can trust myself to make the distinction between “I genuinely need sleep” and “if I sleep now, I can fast forward through life to the next meal, and avoid reality for a while longer. ”

And when your reality consists of eating and sitting in front of a computer amusing yourself, finding that you can’t handle that and have been retreating from it into sleep is quite humbling.

Humiliating, to be precise.

But I have made no secret of how unhappy with my life I am. Mental illness has me trapped in this tiny pathetic box, and I have been there since I was taken out of university at the age of 21.

So this box has held me inside it, and away from real life and all that comes with it, for my entire adult life, and maybe that is why it is so hard to let go of it.

It is the only world I have ever known, and even if it is a crappy, dirty, pathetic, tiny, grotesque world that is slowly killing me in many, many ways, it is home.

Sleep is no way to go through life, though. No wonder the days seem like they are whizzing past in a formless blur. I am sleeping my life away. In terms of hours of consciousness, I am probably getting five days on the week from everyone else.

Times like this, I really miss my hypomanic periods from last month. Sure, I had trouble sleeping and I was worried about that, but at least I feel perky and happy and content and confident. I wish I knew what I did to bring that on. I could use another one right now.

Because right now, I feel tired and deflated and deeply melancholy. I feel like crying and feeling sorry for myself, and I will probably at least do the crying later on, in bed, where I usually do it.

Feeling sorry for myself is another matter. I have never been very good at it. You have to care about yourself and feel that you deserve better than what you are getting out of life in order to feel sorry for yourself. You have to consider yourself worthy of pity.

And I am not there yet, at least… not all the time. Not even half the time.

I have my good days and my bad days. Today has been fairly bad in terms of mood, at least for what little time I was awake. Right now I feel very sad. It is no fun.

But whatever I am going through will end, and I will come out the other side of it a little bit stronger, a little bit more solid, a little bit more able to cope.

It is called recovery, and it sucks, but not nearly as much as depression does.

I would rather burn in Hell then rot in peace any day. Hell, at least, is stimulating. Pain reminds you that you are alive, that you can still feel something, that you are not a numb dumb hunk of flesh trying to live at little as possible, riding a gurney down the hill of life, not even bothering to steer because you are going to end up in the grave at the end anyhow.

Fuck that shit. If I am going to die anyhow, I might as well enjoy the trip. Steer for a wall, dart into traffic, whatever it takes to wake yourself the hell up and show you that life is something to be embraced and enjoyed, not avoided and endured.

That is another thing which makes me suspicious of my motives for sleeping. I could get a lot more done if I could just be awake more, and more awake. Even when I am awake, I feel like I am always sort of sleepy… like I always have one foot in the bed. I am sure that must be part of my own life-avoiding self-sedating self-medicating strategy, but I do not, as yet, have sufficient life energy to escape from this deep harsh gravity well.

Right now I feel so cold, so alone, so fragile, so sad. And yet, not really depressed per se. As low as I feel right now, I know I will feel better later, and that keeps me from despair or self-loathing.

I am just another broken person, and there is no shame in that. There are so many of us, it is not like I am alone in my being just plain not functional. Just not able to cope with life. Raised without the emotional nutrients needed in order to grow into a healthy and functional adult. Wandering the world in pain and confusion, looking for something to cling to for warmth, draining people like vampires of their motive force because we cannot (or dare not) generate our own.

Or, for safety, just basking in the glow of strong personalities, willing to do whatever it takes to stay near them because only the brightest of glows can generate enough warmth to pierce the chill around out hearts and our spirits.

Or shining ourselves, with a light so bright it is blinding, but without being able to feel our own warmth at all. So we seek others to reflect it back at us, and shine as hard as we can for them, because the harder we shine, the brighter the reflection and the greater the warmth we can, at last, feel.

Broken people everywhere.

We are getting something seriously wrong in this society, in this world.

Technically, the sun will not be going down for around an hour or so, but it is already early twilight out there, so I am considering this the sundown period.

Well, the deal is done. Returned the ice cream maker to Future Shop today. The money went back onto the credit card. So I have something like $120 on there now.

It was clear to me that the thing was just not going to work out for my purposes. Technically, I never actually tried making actual ice cream with it, but if the Splenda based lemonade did not work, I highly doubt that Splenda based ice cream would have been any different.

The stuff just freezes too hard, and then the scraper can’t keep up, and then it is disaster city. Perhaps some day they will make an ice cream maker that suits my needs, and if they do, I will buy it. But this was not that ice cream maker.

And the truth is, I really need the money. I am facing another one of those brutally tough months where there are five weeks between monthly cheques instead of four, and so I am expected to get by for with the same amount of cash for 25 percent more time.

And that is just not fair, especially for those of us who are already getting by on so very, very little. I live on slightly less than eight thousand dollars a year. I do not need anything to make my financial life any more difficult.

So sadly, money that was supposed to make my life better (via an ice cream maker) instead will be used to just barely allow me to get by.

In other words, I just cannot get ahead. That is the message this sort of thing says to me.

But oh well. I have a nice enough life, especially on gorgeous days like today. Sunny and bright, with little white clouds up in the blue, blue sky and mirror shade mirages on the streets. Too hot, of course, but what the hell. It is still beautiful weather, even if it is not sweaty fat guy friendly.

And I hope to be well enough some day to be able to just go out and enjoy the beautiful days by myself. Just grab a blanket and some snacks and a book and a big bottle of water, and head for the beach, and find a nice spot where I am fairly unlikely to get bowled into by toddlers or hit by an errant frisbee, and soak up the rays.

For a big sweaty fat guy prone to heat stroke, I really like the beach. Like I have mentioned before, being near the ocean calms me somehow. It is like all of my problems, all my tension, and all my suppressed emotions just flow out of me into the water and float away. Perhaps I just have the sea in my blood from growing up six blocks from the Atlantic Ocean, or perhaps the water just mirrors my own turbulent sea of emotions, but with such enormity that it makes me feel safe in the arms of something far larger than myself.

But for whatever reason, just being near the water soothes me and calms me. I would love to find out who I am and what I am like if I get to spend, say, a week right on the beach, with a cabin or home just a stone’s throw from the sand.

I can totally see why island peoples tend to be so mellow and present-oriented. I get the feeling that if I lived like I just described, I would become one mellow, happy go lucky dude. Might even become a mystic. I mean, I am already a philosopher and poet. Mystic is not that far off, despite my lifelong skepticism about what most people call mysticism.

Had a pleasant little spiritual experience last night. I was sitting here at the computer, messing around on Facebook, when the moth which had been flitting about my room suddenly took a wrong turn and ended up in my glass of water.

Oh no! I had visions of the poor little thing dying a slow and terrible death right in front of me. That is the sort of thing that could make me very, very sad.

So I peeked into the bowl, and found, to my surprise, that the moth was clinging to the side of the glass with its front legs and its wings were not full wet yet. This was my opportunity!

So I grabbed an envelope and very very gently slid it under the poor moth, then lifted up. The minute all its legs were free of the water, it flew off, apparently unharmed.

Hooray! I acted to prevent one tiny tragedy in this world full of cruel happenstance, and that makes me feel really really good. I had the opportunity to make the world just that little bit better, and I still feel all lit up with the glow of tiny karma.

And the best part is, the envelope turned out to be one that once contained a card from my mother, and even has her handwriting on it, and saving the life of a moth is exactly the sort of thing she would do. In fact, she is the one who taught me to be gentle and kind to all living things, and I am sure she would be proud that her shy and gentle son acted just as she would have acted in that circumstance.

And that just makes me feel good all over.

Remember, it is not about the ocean of suffering in the world. It is about the drops of compassion in your own little tin cup, and what you do with them. It is about knowing that every little act of kindness and compassion makes the world a better place, and that while you might never be the hero who cleans up this whole town, you can at least keep the dirt from your own doorstep.

Have a happy day, folks!

Remember that ice cream maker that I was so excited to get?

Well, the honeymoon ended pretty damn quick. Turns out, it might be useful to me at all, and I might just end up returning it, which would be depressing.

You see, it turns out that it does not make slushies out of some sugar free products. And I only found this out after I had read almost the entire manual.

Right there, in the recipes for slushies (slurpees, whatever) it says, at the very end, “Do not use with sugar free products.”

And it does not say why.

Needless to say, I was angry and confused when I read this, so I tried Googling around to find out why. And a lot of people seem to think that you just plain cannot use anything other than real actual sugar while making ice cream. Period.

The sugar free stuff that you can buy at the store is made with exotic emulsifiers in order to combat the fact that apparently nothing binds the ice cream together like sugar does.

This would render the unit completely useless for my purposes. The whole reason I wanted an ice cream maker was so that I could make sugar free desserts for myself. I had ice cream dreams of making all my favorite kinds of ice cream and slushies and sorbets and gelatos (gelati?) with Splenda instead of sugar, and be able to enjoy the sweet life that everyone who is not diabetic takes for granted.

But the jury is still out. I have not been able to cash my monthly cheque yet, so I have not been able to pick up the proper ingredients for home made ice cream^[1] and tried to make it with Splenda yet. That will determine the fate of the machine.

If I can make ice cream with Splenda, despite the naysayers online, then the machine stays. If not, it goes back to Future Shop and I sigh a big, heavy, creamy sigh and go back to making bread.

My experiments so far :

1) Generic Diet Lemon Lime Soda. Did not work at all. Formed a layer of ice around the inner edge of the freezer bowl that the scraper could not scrape off. That was some seriously tough ice. Had to turn the machine off because it was making very unhappy grinding, scraping sounds. Total fail.

2) Cranberry juice. This was specifically mentioned in the slushies recipe in the book, and it should have worked. But results were inconclusive. The juice began to slush up, but never got more than slightly slushy. I might have interfered with the process too early, though. So I will try again without touching the unit for a full half hour, then see what we have.

Experiment 3 will be lemonade made with water, bottled lemon juice, and Splenda. The freezer bowl for the ice cream maker should be fully frozen again by now, and the lemonade has been in the fridge long enough for it to be fully cold. I am primed and ready.

In fact, I think I will go get that started right now. Live blogging! I am so hip.

All right! It is a go. Even when it is running smoothly, it is a fairly loud machine. Apparently, that is simply an inevitable part of making an electric motor strong enough to push a sturdy plastic blade through a freezing liquid for half an hour.

Those are not going to be quiet.

The principle is pretty simple, actually. The rotation of the bowl pushes the blade through the liquid. The liquid freezes on the inner edge of the freezer bowl and is scraped off by the blade. The blade is angled so that what it scrapes off is pushed off the blade in to the middle of the bowl. Thus, the final product accumulates in the bowl and the edge of the bowl never develops enough frozen stuff to clog up the blade. Simple, elegant, and effective. I love that kind of thing.

Hopefully, in 22 minutes or so, I will have delicious lemon slush to consume, and a reason to keep the ice cream maker. In theory, there is no reason that Splenda should not work exactly like sugar as far as binding goes. It is, after all, just reverse sugar, sugar with the atoms arranged in a mirror image way from normal sugar.

So in theory, it should behave just like sugar, except that it does not fit in your body’s digestive receptors, and is therefore not digested.

Sounds like the perfect solution, right? Fools your taste buds but not your stomach. The ideal diet product. Does not even cause anal leakage.

But it turns out that in a lot of cases, the sugar is doing a lot more than sweetening your product. It is reacting chemically with the other ingredients, and that might not work the same backwards.

For instance, I cannot substitute Splenda for the small amount of sugar used in my bread machine recipes, because the yeast eats the sugar in order to produce the gas that leavens the bread, and yeast can’t digest Splenda either.

And for some reason that I can’t understand, Splenda does not work with Kool-Aid either. With all the Kool-Aid I have drunk in my life (mostly as a kid), I never thought that the Kool-Aid powder somehow chemically reacted to the sugar I used.

Oh well, perhaps the problem is simply that it takes a lot more elbow grease to make Splenda dissolve into water than sugar. The problem was that the two things, Kool aid powder and Splenda, did not merge to make Kool-Aid.

It just tasted like raw Koolaid powder and cheap sugar.

I will have to try again, and really give it a good stirring. I heart Kool-Aid muchly.

Well, my lemonade experiment is almost done, I better go check on things.

Wish me luck!

OK, now this being tired thing is growing tiresome.

Yesterday, despite missing my therapist’s appointment, I was rather enjoying being all mellow and getting around twelve hours of solid, decent sleep. It is rare for me to find the eye of the storm inside my tempestuous noggin, and so the long sleep and whatnot was a special treat.

But today I am finding myself tired for truly no damned good reason. I have had plenty of rest, plenty of sleep, plenty of time to recharge the old batteries, and yet, I feel heavy, sluggish, thick witted, and lethargic. I have a strong urge to go back to bed… and I have been in the damn thing all day.

As a diabetic, my first thought is to wonder if my blood sugar is somehow out of whack, or at the very least, whack deficient. And it is not out of the question. I have not had any huge variations in my diet lately, but I have been making an effort to eat more of the bread I keep making, and perhaps the increase in carbohydrate load is slowing me down.

Plus, I recently looked at the ingredients of some trail mix I have been eating in order to find out what exactly was in the little cubes of dried fruit (apricot and papaya, it turns out) and found SUGAR on the list. What the fuck, man? This is TRAIL MIX. It’s just peanuts and raisins and banana chips and such. Where did they even put the damned sugar?

Then it dawned on me… the dried fruit! The bastards at Trophy sweetened the fruit as they dried it. Actually, that is quite common with dried fruit, which is why we diabetics are told to avoid it. I had forgotten all about that.

And now I am going to have to ingredient check all trail mix that I buy to make sure I am not going to end up eating basically candy when I eat the stuff.

Dammit, I knew those banana chips tasted too good. But I kept eating the mix anyhow. I thought they tasted so good because I am hard up for sweetness.

I will never blindly trust trail mix again. Dammit.

So that might be part of the problem. I have been eating fruit candy and not knowing it.

Plus, I don’t know, it might well be that I am experiencing some large scale, deep down psychological change and my body wants lots and lots and lots of sleep in order to process it. Our brain does the really big work in our sleep, sort of like waiting until the middle of the night before you do the really heavy road work that shuts down traffic in both directions.

And I do feel like some big changes are happening inside this capacious skull of mine. I could not tell you exactly what they are, but I can feel the rumblings of the firmament. I am pouring a lot of energy into opening emotional channels that have lain dormant for decades or more. Heck, some of them have never been opened at all due to my stunted and sad emotional growth curve due to a complete lack of all the usual life experiences.

And every day, I feel like I am constantly rebalancing my emotions and my reactions in order to deal with the increasingly potent emotional inputs I am experiencing. Turning up the volume on your feelings changes a lot of things, mostly for the better, but it might also be pretty tiring in the short term.

So that is a possibility. Maybe I am tired because my brain is rewiring itself and that takes a lot of downtime because it is one heavy job.

But right now, I am working the theory that I am dehydrated. After all, it is the middle of summer, it has been pretty hot out lately, and I have a long history of both dehydrating easily and not noticing it right away because I am way too all up into myself.

So I am drinking lots of water. That covers me for dehydration and also for the sugar thing. As they taught us in diabetes class, if you accidentally eat something sugary, you can ameliorate the problem by aggressively hydrating. It is not a cure, and you are way better off not eating the sweet thing in the first place, but it helps.

If Theory 2 is correct and my brain is redecorating, well, there is not much I can do about that. I will just have to ride it out.

But hey, at least I will be well hydrated while I go through a profound personal transformation, or whatever. That can’t hurt.

Had a therapy session today. My last one until August 9, which is over two weeks away. Really not looking forward to going that long without a session. Being in therapy has been a godsend for me, and I am making rapid psychological progress with Doctor Costin’s help.

Heck, compared to how slowly I progressed without a therapist, just doing things on my own, I am moving forward at light speed and a half.

Tho he annoyed me today. He came up with this theory that I slept in and missed my appointment yesterday because I subconsciously did not want to see him because of the conversation we had last Thursday.

And I said to him “That sounds exactly like the sort of thing a psychiatrist would say.” And he happily agreed. That did not make me less annoyed.

What I wanted to say, but did not, was “Hey, it is not all about you, OK? I mean, Occam’s Fucking Razor, dude. I think there are simpler and more likely explanations. ”

I can’t rule out his theory completely, of course. It’s that kind of theory. But it strikes me as attributing a level of sneakiness to my subconscious mind that is has heretofore failed to exhibit.

And I have so much other weird shit going on in my brain that there is a plethora of more plausible explanations lined up.

Ones that do not require a highly stealthy metaconsciousness.

Holy crap, has this been a Sleepy Day to end all Sleepy Days.

I went to bed at around 3 AM. Could not get to sleep right away, felt too restless and keyed up even though I was also very tired. Remembered that I had forgotten to take my sleeping pill, my Zopiclone. Well, that would do it. So I got up, took the pill, fucked around on Facebook for fifteen minutes while I waited for the Zopiclone to kick in, then went to bed at a little after 4 AM, confident that I would be awake in plenty of time for my noon appointment for therapy.

The next thing I know, Joe is waking me up, telling me it is ten minutes before noon, and don’t I have a therapist’s appointment? Uh… yeah. Whad dee fug mang.

So we call my therapist and he offers us tomorrow at 12:30 PM. I am acutely embarrassed because I hate being late for anything, but that is blunted by the fact that I am still extremely sleepy.

And that has still not let up fully.

So all day I have felt like this :

I guess I have hit a time of major payment on my sleep debt. I don’t feel bad, in fact, for the most part, the sleep has been quite peaceful and calm and the little periods where I manage to eat drink and eliminate before having to go right back to sleep have been pleasant enough. Kind of hard to concentrate in this mode, and I am sure I missed a third of the TED Talks I have watched because my mind kept wandering off into La La Land.

But otherwise, it has honestly been kind of nice. I am a little annoyed at Joe for not waking me up sooner, but the responsibility is primarily mine. Usually, it is I who signal Joe that it is time to go for something by emerging from my room and making my presence known.

This time, I was fast asleep! Oh dear.

Well, not exactly fast asleep, actually. I have this vague sense of being slightly awake, suspended in that mode of sleep where you are mostly sleep but just slightly aware of your environment. I think I stayed that way for quite a long time, unable to fully awaken, or perhaps just enjoying this rare island of calm peaceful sleep so much that I was unwilling to leave it for the harsh bright realm of reality until it was absolutely necessary.

And maybe a bit beyond that, as it turns out.

I have to admit, I wonder what role Zopiclone played in all this. Normally, its effect is quite mild, just a general sort of soothing, relaxing effect which makes it much easier than usual for me to slip from my usual mental cacophony into the cool calm waters of somnolence.

And no doubt that is all it did this time, but I don’t know for sure. I keep wondering if I accidentally took it twice or something. That would explain a lot.

But then again, I have had the occasional day just like this one long before the big Z came into my life. Days where I felt like my limbs were very heavy, and my bed called to me like a lover, and I had little choice but to spend most of the day dissolved into the deep dark waters of slumber.

I must say, I don’t think I ever had one that was this calm and pleasant though, and where I woke groggy but not utterly incoherent and covered in sweat and vaguely terrified.

Perhaps that is the Zopiclone’s contribution. It eases the path and makes it so sleep is not quite such a rough trip for me.

If so, thank you, Zopiclone! It was been quite lovely. I hope we can continue in this vein ad infinitum. It would be marvelous if this had somehow sensitized me to the drug and now it will have a nice firm solid effect instead of the subtle but still quite nice effect it had before.

As I have mentioned before in this space, that is what I really want from a sleeping pill. I want to feel secure that I will be able to sleep when I wish to sleep and awake refreshed, ready to face the day. That sounds a lot better than the nebulous netherworld where I feel like I am never fully awake and my sleep is rough and difficult and traumatic, and not really all that restful.

A lot of my daily constant anxiety has to do with sleep. I worry that I will not be able to get enough good sleep before it is time to do something all the time. And because I never fully rest, I am always sort of sleepy and that leads to greater anxiety the further I am from the opportunity to sleep at the exact moment when I feel like it.

That is a particularly limiting one. I suppose I have grown spoiled by spending most of my day either in bed ore only three feet away from it. I use sleep for a lot of reasons, the worst of which is simply taking a nap because I am bored and do not know what else to do with myself.

But I am slowly unlearning that. Baking helps. It gives me something to do when I am bored with the computer besides taking a nap. I can go play with the bread machine and make bread. And soon I will have an ice cream machine to play with too.

And that is progress. Honestly, anything that keeps me from abusing sleep is a good thing.

But what I really want to do is start focusing extra energy into projects like sending my writing out to publishers and writing fiction and getting all my technology working again.

That means really leaving my zone of comfort, though, so that is going to take some time and a lot of work before I can go there more often.

Frankly, the real thing scares the shit out of me.

REally feeling the sands of time time slipping out from under my feet lately. I can’t believe it will be the last week of July soon. It feels like Canada Day was only yesterday, and summer started the day before that, and my birthday was just a week before that.

They say that once you are over the hill, you pick up speed. But what they do not mention is that at the bottom is the grave and most of us would actually prefer to get there as slowly as possible.

Now I try to tell myself that this is all just a trick of memory and perception. Logically speaking, Every day has exactly the same number of minutes in it that every other day in my life has had. I have the same number of waking hours, more or less. The minutes pass at a minute per minute, no matter what my subjective sense of time tries to tell me. Time has not, in fact, sped up.

This is rock solid scientifically and logically indisputably true.

And I also know the source of the error. As we grow older, our minds grow stronger and broader and deeper, and are hence able to grasp larger units of time all at once. When you are a small child, five minutes seems like an incomprehensibly long time. You do not yet have the mental faculties to encompass it. You cannot imagine what things will be like after such a long period of time. You simply cannot imagine that far into the future. Your frontal lobes lack sufficient complexity.

But as we get older, our frontal lobes develop, and we can grasp larger and larger units of time, and feel comfortable that we can know what the world will be like and what the future will hold for that amount of time.

The problem is that as these chunks of time grow larger, our brain does not fully compensate and keeps thinking of time as the time it takes for a certain number of chunks to pass.

And if the amount of subjective time it takes X number of chunks to pass stays the same, but the amount of real time increases, it makes it seem like time is passing faster.

The amount of time that passes in between the points where we are aware of time, the points where we subjectively speaking “look at the clock”, grows larger, and it feels like we are accelerating, and we go from impatient youths for whom nothing can possibly happen fast enough to grumpy oldsters who want everything to just slow the hell down for a minute so we can catch up.

And this is not entirely illusion. There is a cost to this increasing complexity of sentience. Those points where we “look at the clock” are also our points of decision and reaction. And when you are getting fewer of those in a day, you quite legitimately feel like things are happening faster than you can react to them.

You have fewer moments in which to adjust to change, and hence, absorbing change becomes harder and harder. In fact, at some point, you simply stop being able to keep up. The adjustment rate lags behind the rate of change, and you develop an adjustment backlog that gradually comes to stretch off into infinity with no hope of ever catching up.

And this is why the older people get, the more conservative they become. They will violently and vehemently resist the change that is happening now because they still have not adjusted to the changes from last month, last year, or last decade.

This is also what leads to their overpowering nostalgia for a previous era, once that seems pristine and perfect to them now. They will even say “Back then, things made sense!”

Their error, of course, is thinking that this has something to do with the nature of the world back then, rather than the nature (and content) of the brain perceiving it.

But I have gone on at length before, I believe, about the error of being unable to accept one’s own subjectivity. The lens is not dirty, dammit, the world is!

I find myself prone to this sort of nostalgia myself. I find myself increasingly feeling as though the 1970’s were a time of innocent, goodwill, understanding, and cultural wonders. And anything I see with a strong Seventies vibe gives me a wonderful flood of warm, gratifying nostalgia.

Of course, by sheer coincidence, that happens to be the era of the first seven years of my childhood. What a lucky man I am, to have had my childhood in the one era which was, in a purely scientific and objective sense, was the time when the world was absolutely perfect in all ways and all deviations from that one perfect golden era are a filthy nightmarish deviation from perfection that can only possibly be motivated by the purest and most malign evil.

Luckily, I have not seriously gone that far… yet. I cannot guarantee that I will not end up there. I bet a lot of people who laughed at their parents and said “Thank goodness I will never be like them!” ended up there just the same.

So I will not pretend that I am somehow immune. I have devoted myself to objectivity my entire life, but I am still a human being. The emotional power of nostalgia is incredible. It is like a drug that you can administer yourself with just a picture, a TV show, or a song.

I do not wonder that, given the seemingly out of control world that old people face, they decide that they simply want to leave the modern world and live in the world of their nostalgia.

The problem happens when they insist that the whole world be somehow magically returned to the world of their nostalgia, and try to drag everybody back there with them.

Luckily, it is impossible for them to succeed.

They sure can slow down progress trying, though.