Another dull summer day. My friends and I will be going to one of our favorite restaurants, ABC Country Kitchen, later on this evening. But for now, everything is quiet.

Well, on the outside, anyhow. On the inside, I am increasingly bored, restless, and dissatisfied with my life. It is a feeling that has been building in me for a long time, but only recently have I stopped suppressing it and treating it like it is the enemy, the monster inside me, the terrible thing which makes me miserable from time to time.

Because it is not a terrible thing at all. It is simply life trying to happen. Being tired of doing nothing with your life is not a terrible thing, it is a good thing, a natural thing, a normal thing.

Sure, it makes things less comfortable for me and the way I live right now.

But one of the truths I am struggling to bear is that sometimes, in order to get to a place of greater happiness, you have to go through the desert of unhappiness. There may not be (in fact, there probably is not) a smooth upward path which is easy, safe, and fun.

You may have to surrender your current safe, comfortable position with no guarantee that you will get it back should you fail, and set out for the higher ground anyhow.

That is my spiritual challenge right now. I am conservative by nature, used to avoiding risk and using my clever mind to keep things the same all the time rather than upset the applecart with change, especially the kind of change that cannot be quantified or predicted. I have held to a very intense and strict policy of never starting on a road unless I know exactly how long it is and where it will end, which sounds smart in a way, but only superficially.

Think about it at any depth, and you realize that this sets an impossibly high bar of predictability for life, and the only way to meet that standard is to do practically nothing.

And that is precisely what I have been doing for almost twenty years, my entire adult life. I eat, I sleep, I play video games, I chat online, I write 1000 words of nonsense a day, and I go out with friends a few times a week. That is my entire life, and it is, frankly, pathetic.

It is, at best, a fragment of a life, the outline of a life, a life without the actual life part. A life, technically, of unlimited leisure, but that only sounds good if you a) are working right now and do not exactly love your job and b) you take the issue of resources off the table.

When you take into the fact that I have $8K/year to live on, unlimited leisure begins to seem like what it really is, more like a very low security prison, where you can go wherever you like but you cannot really do anything. Like you are slightly out of phase with reality, and can see and hear what normal people do, and even walk among them, but you cannot truly touch anything.

You are not really there.

And for what crime do you suffer this fate? Being broken. Unworthy. Disabled.

It is hard for even minimum wage workers to understand what it is like in this kind of lifestyle limbo. We human beings are born to find out place in society, to find a job and do it and from that, we derive our sense of worthiness, our sense of being good in society’s eyes. Even if you hate your job with the white hot passion of a thousand suns, you are still getting that feeling from having a job and doing it.

You just don’t know it, because it is the water you swim in, a constant, a background noise.

And to be blocked from all of that by an invisible disability like mental illness is particularly harsh. The wall between you and the rest of the world is made of clear, invisible glass that nobody can see but that you can feel all the time, making you forever the outsider.

You meet a person, and what is the first thing they want to know?

“So what do you do?”

And what do I say? “Nothing, because I am a crazy person. Wait, where are you going?”

At least these days, I can say I am a writer, and that I am as yet unpublished. As long as they do not think to ask how hard I am trying to get published, I am covered,

Because that is just the thing. I have not written anything publishable in ages. It has been even longer since I actually sent something out to someone. I just lead this stupid life and wait to die.

It is just so much easier to let the days go by than to stand up, straighten up, and actually do things. I am just so damn limp. I live a flaccid life, all brain and no spine, just flapping in the current and yet, stuck to my rock like a barnacle, doing nothing, going nowhere.

At least a leaf caught in the wind ends up someplace new. I just flail about and go nowhere.

That is why I am letting this discomfort with my current position grow and spread. I have to allow myself to become uncomfortable before I will get the strength to pull my roots from this rock and open myself to the flower of the river and see where I end up.

I just get so god damned tired of watching my life pass like I am not even here. Months go by like a dream. Am I really here? Or do I just imagine that I am? Is this all just some dream, and one day I will wake up and find out I am someone totally different?

Bring it on.

Here we are again, at that special time of the day when I blab what is on my mind to you nice people, and imagine that you are listening to it all.

It has been a sleepy, sunny day for me. Spent most of it asleep with Zopiclone’s kind and gentle assistance, and that was pleasant enough. No big deal waking up feeling all sweaty and dehydrated and discombobulated and incoherent and in pain. Just nice normal waking, which is nice as a novelty but might take me some time to et used to it as a regular thing.

After all feeling like utter crap really puts a special kind of oomph into the start of your day. The kind of oomph, in fact, that represents the sound you make when you are hit directly in the solar plexus with a garment bag full of old coins.

Compared to that dramatic beginning, just waking up and feeling OK seems downright dull. I am so used to aking up being some sort of fight for survival as I drag myself through the mires of sleep to the shores of consciousness that I am not sure I can candle anything less traumatic any more.

Seriously though, Zopiclone has been giving me better quality sleep, and I am quite happy about that. Even now, I feel a nice soft healthy sleepiness making my eyes and my head heavy, and I nod as I type to nice people. After this night’s missive, I will go back to sleep, and hopefully shore up my mental resources a little more,

Or at least, get some good rest for a change.

The cheesy bacon bread that I told you about on Thursday turned out to be uniformly blah. I am guessing that my guesstimations regarding the quantities of bacon and cheese were WAY off. Or, and this is a real possibility, the recipe itself was very bland and blah. I have encountered countess cases, as a sometimes baker, of recipes that are apparently made for people with House of Usher type tastebuds, where tiny amounts of spices and so on produce cuisine just bursting with flavour.

Oh, and of course, the recipe called for a can of green chilies, so it might be that most of the flavour was supposed to come from them, and the cheese and bacon were meant to be a background accompaniment ot the chili flavour, and so by skipping the chilies, I threw the whole thing off.

Or whatever. It’s only bread. I will put on another loaf of something different and some time tonight, and we will see how well that one turns out. Even with its mildness, the bacon and cheese loaf was still pretty decent bread. I am not producing failed loaves any more.

It is just that some of them turn out how I hoped, and some do not. I am still having lots of fun with my bread machine and look forward to adding some more ingredients to my baker’s shelf so I can branch out to making things like ginger bread and carrot cake and so on.

Hmmm. Ginger carrot cake. I bet that would be good. Makes me hungry just thinking about it.

And speaking of thing which make you hungry, check out these extreme naughty iced confections that my friend Phil sent to me yesterday (warning, this pic is VERY MUCH NSFW) :

Can we switch. I wanted the Asian/Banana.

Now there is a visual. Is it wrong that looking at those makes me incredibly hungry> I want one of those right now. I have a feeling that one of those would really hit the spot when you get those deep, hot cravings for something cool and sweet in the summer.

I will stop before I get any more excited.

But still, that pushes my buttons so very well. And I have to wonder where the heck in the world you can buy a dipped (and dicked) cone like that. I am assuming it is either a very well established Pride event, or something even more completely awesome, at the Kanamana Matsure, a festival of the penis held evey year in Japan.

On the first Sunday in April of every year, the Kanayama shrine in Kawasaki in Japan because host to a festival where the phallus, or penis, is revered, and everywhere you go, you see penises carved out candy, wood, vegetables, stone, and who knows, maybe even ice cream,

Just imagine it. Cocks everywhere. I might well lose my mind. And everyone participates, even little children sucking on dick shaped lollipops. Now there is a sight to blow your Western mind.

I sometimes mock Japan for being so messed up, but I have to admit, sometimes they are fucked up in a most wonderful way. I think we give the phallus far too much power by making it this mysterious horrible thing that a grown woman is supposed to shriek at the sight of and avert her eyes, and that we protect our children from the very sight of, even though half of them have one right between their legs.

This convinces boys and men that they have some sort of dark and might god between their legs, when really it is just another part of their bodies and is no more remarkable than they eyebrow or their elbow, although it is, admittedly, a lot more fun to play with.

So I think every town should have a Penis Festival. And, six months to the day later, a Vagina Festival. All this body shame serves no purpose and we would be way ahead of the game if we simply jettisoned all of it and embraced the physical truths of selves, and learned to celebrate our genitals, and then maybe let them take their properly proportionate place in our lives.

So three cheers for penises and vaginas, huh people? They propagate the species, they help us eliminate waste, and you can have a hell of a lot of fun with them besides.

Give your genitals a hug today!