Why the hell do I do this to myself?

Here I am feeling like total crap, with a splitting headache, dehydration, muzzy-headed confusion, a body that feels like it is filled with lead, and a crappy mood, and all because I stupidly decided to nap during the afternoon, which I am trying not to do.

Well I am going to try to remember, really remember how crappy I feel right now so I can bring it to mind the next time I feel like taking an afternoon nap.

Sure, it might start off fine, but as I sleep, the heat of the day will increase, and it will bake the sweat out of me making me dehydrated, and I will end up feeling like total crap like I do right now.

Oh well, nothing time and a fair bit of rehydration won’t fix. Tonight, I go to the BCSFAzine meeting, and those are always fun. Hanging out with local science fiction nerds, browsing the snacks, and having wide ranging intellectual discussions. Phenomenal.

So I just have to shake this afternoon nap funk, get this blog entry written (so far so good), and get a shower, and I will be ready for more free food and friendly company.

Last night’s BBQ was a very pleasant experience. Attending were myself, Joe’s parents Joe Senior and Pauline, Joe’s uncle Pat, Joe’s sister Melanie, and Joe, Julian, and myself.

We had a lovely meal of roast beef (cooked on a rotisserie), mashed potatoes, and corn on the cob. These are three of my favorite foods, so already the evening was off to a good start!

And honestly, I think it is good for me to hang out with normal people from time to time. There is a warmth to their richer, fuller lives that is lacking in my sparse and chilly existence, and being with them and sharing their company lets me absorb a little of that warmth, and that does me a lot of good.

I have been an outsider for a long long time, always on the outside looking in. It is nice to be on the inside for a little while, and warm myself by the fire.

While I was there, I saw a video that one of Joe Senior’s brothers had shot of a bunch of his relations having a sing-a-long with Joe’s grandmother Lucy, Joe Senior’s mother, at a retirement home in Ireland.

And it was so sweet seeing all these people loving strumming their guitars and singing for this extremely aged woman in a wheelchair who could barely keep her head up any more. They all clearly loved her and wanted to reach her and soothe her in her last years, and it was all sweet and loving that I could not help but be moved at this kind of family closeness.

I have never experienced that kind of warmth myself. For some reason, our family was never all that close with the enormous amount of relations I had on Prince Edward Island. My mother would go visit with her family every Friday, but for the rest of us, it tended to be Christmas and maybe a weekend per summer total. Throw in my parents’ lack of friends, and mine, and my family’s disinterest in me, and I had a very disconnection and lonely childhood.

So getting to share in that kind of love, closeness, and warmth is a rare thing for me, and I treasure it. I only wish I could do that sort of thing more often.

It might help repair some of the damage all those years of isolation has wrought on my lopsided soul.

Then again, hanging with the nerds like I am going to do tonight has its own kind of warmth, too. Nerds are not exactly my family, but they are my tribe, my people. It is always great to hang around with people amongst whom I can just relax and be myself, which is something I cannot quite do around normal people.

Around regular folk, I always have to hold back the intellect and the vocabulary and the wackiness somewhat. Otherwise, honestly, I tend to spook them a little bit. I am just plain weird, what can I say? Then again, I imagine that with sufficient exposure, my somewhat chameleonic outer persona and my intense desire to connect with people would combine to make me better at being myself in a way that does not frighten or alienate people.

Before now, social anxiety has gotten in the way of that process, blocking it almost completely. You cannot adjust and adapt when you are too busy freaking out and hiding. But I am happy to report that my social anxiety was not a problem at last night’s BBQ.

Sure, there were some awkward moments where the conversation was not flowing naturally between people who did not know each other well, but I made the decision, then and there, not to take that on as all my fault and start freaking out because things were going badly, but to just calmly let it happen and accept it as a natural part of life, and let it subside on its own as I got to know people better and we all ate good food and relaxed amongst one another.

I felt a few stirrings of the old beast, but for the most part, I just had a nice, relaxed evening with nice, relaxed people, and I think it did my soul a world of good.

And I am looking forward to something similar tonight. Same ice cream, different flavour.

And every day, I try to let in more of what my soul needs so badly, and if that means letting my demons out one by one, so much the better.

To Hell with you ragged old beasts anyhow. I have let you push me around for too long, not even realizing that I had a choice.

Well fuck that. Everybody out of the pool. I am tired of your crap.

Last one out turn off the light!

I think I am beginning to understand why, when it comes time to write these silly things, I tend to be in somewhat of a down mood.

It is because of my tendency to nap in the afternoon (still working on that habit).

I nap later in the afternoon. I wake up muzzy-headed from dream rich, confusing sleep. I eat supper, which sends my blood sugar upward and makes me even more logy and physically depressed. Then I drag my sorry ass to this here keyboard, and I try to write about something other than my so-called life, but I am in such a state that it is all I can think about.

I am tired, and sort of sleepy, and it is hard to concentrate or focus, and so naturally, the easiest thing for me to write about is whatever happens to be in my head at the moment.

Not that it is quite that simple. These blog entries are not exactly stream of consciousness, and you should all be grateful for that. I have tried to write that way, as a writing exercise, and brother, let me tell you, I would have to at least double my typing speed to even hope to keep up.

My stream of consciousness is both swift and deep, and wide as the Mississippi, so unless I become a world leader in shorthand, I am not gonna make it.

More realistically, the exercise is not to put down every thought but to just keep typing (or whatever) without any thought as to where you are going or what you will type next or (especially) whether it is any good or not. Or even whether it makes any sense. For me, the purpose of the exercise was to prime the pump and get words flowing out of me.

This was, of course, a long time before the Million Words and writing hundreds of words a day and whatnot. That proved to be a far more effective exercise for getting my words flowing. Writing stream of consciousness was a trick I tried in my early 20’s, yo those many year ago.

And while it did not make me a slap bang writer overnight, the results were intriguing, because what started out as largely word salad gobbledygook soon became sentences of a sort, and the sentences became sort of connected to one another, and before too long, I was writing whole long paragraphs without stopping or slowing at all.

And then one night, to my amazement, I produced a whole sixteen couplet poem via this method. I wish I still had it. I don’t even remember what it was about. No doubt it was not that great.

But to think, it all just flowed out of me without my having planned it at all. Apparently, I just had it in me. Or, for a less mystical answer, my mind was perfectly capable of doing the planning and execution without my conscious mind needing to be involved at all.

In fact, could be it works better than way. Some of my best art has come from just enthusiastically slapping things together like a demented Jackson Pollack wannabe. Minimal thought and planning, just jump in and have fun. Like a kid with fingerpaints, just making art for the fun of it, with no thought as to this art having any other purposes than to make them happy right now.

Presumably, as a writer, even if I wrote like that (which I do sometimes, to be honest), I would then have to go back and take what I had enthusiastically banged together and polish it to something like public acceptability. Or at least, editor acceptability.

Anyhow. Back to the sleep thing. So when I write these thing, I am not at my sharpest or perkiest. And while these sessions of entail poking are no doubt therapeutic on a few levels, as I often mope, I am not exactly going to get anywhere in my career like this.

So this is a further argument for not taking naps, at least not in the afternoon. So far, I am not doing so great with that, but I do not expect instant results when I am trying to change a habit of nearly twenty years. I wioll take every day as a fresh battle and do what I can to at least delay the nap, as I did today. Baby steps.

Part of my delaying tactic was to dig out my camcorder and see if I can get it working and hooked up to the computer again. I have been pondering getting into video blogging and making silly videos again. Getting my video setup working again would be the first step towards that.

So far, I have only done the most important but easiest part. Namely, I found the power adapter for it and turned it on and verified that it does, indeed, work.

It had me worried for a little while. I could not find the power cord right away. But then I suddenly remember where I had put it (imagine that!), and we were go. Seems to be working fine.

But like I said, that is the easy bit. The tricky bit will be finding all the cords and connectors and whatnot that I used to use to hook camcorder to computer, and then figure out how the heck I put them all together to make the whole thing work.

It has been so long that I do not even remember exactly where I plugged the thing into the computer. I assume it must have been a USB connection of some sort. At least I hope so, because if not, I do not remember what the hell it might have been.

I will puzzle it out eventually though, and then, who knows. Maybe I will channel all this incessant babble into video blogging, and leave the text production to actual fiction prose and editorials and other potentially salable commodities.

Wouldn’t that be nice for a change?

Writing my blog entry a lot earlier than usual today because I am getting the strong urge to take a nap, and I have foresworn afternoon napping, so I figure that by the time I am done writing this, I will either of gotten my second wind or I will be so truly tired that I will know that my urge to nap is based on actually needing sleep, and not just an urge to escape reality for a while.

It ain’t rocket science, but I am trying to be at least somewhat systematic about this whole thing. I have firmly etched the horror of skipping large portions of life into my mind and I definitely desire change. I want to live life, not dream it away.

But it will take time to learn to fill my days with activity and not to resort to taking naps all the damned time just because I have no idea what to do with myself and my time, and cannot handle the reality of filling my time with things other than fucking video games.

Speaking of dreams, though, I did have quite the doozy last night. Not sure what led up to this, but I was put into a situation where I was in some enormous building (possibly a hotel or a mansion of some sort… some place that was quite fancy and had a lot of rooms) and I somehow knew exactly what was about to happen : the police were about to have a violent and bloody confrontation with a dangerous criminal, and I had to bust ass to find someplace safe to wait it all out and not end up getting caught in the crossfire.

And when I say I knew exactly what was going to happen, I mean I knew every detail of what was coming. As I frantically searched for a safe place, I did so knowing that Room A would get riddled with bullets, and Room B was too exposed to the outside (snipers, I guess?), and so on.

So I ended up retreating into a suite where there would be three doors between me at the outside world, the door to the suite, the door to the bedroom of the suite, and the door to the bathroom for that bedroom. I holed up in the bathroom, and pushed things up against the door in case the criminal tried to batter his way in his desire to escape the police.

So yes, apparently I did not have faith in my prescience. Better safe than a statistic, I guess.

Then, it is a matter of cowering in terror while I heard yelling and screaming and crashing and gunfire from the outside. Noises that were getting louder and louder as the action came closer and closer. Eventually I could hear bullets hitting the wall between the bathroom I occupied and the bedroom it served, and I remember putting my hands over my ears and screaming that this is not how it was supposed to happen. Then there was a furious exchange of gunfire… and then silence.

And that is all I remember of the dream. I guess the cops got the guy. But more important than the plot of the dream was the emotional content. I was absolutely terrified, completely freaked out. I have never experienced immediate danger like that in my life, and so I got a taste of mortal fear during the dream. I was as scared as I can imagine being. All I wanted in life was for all this to be over so I could go back to living. I was scared beyond reason.

To be honest, I had always hoped I would handle a situation like that a little bit better. Retain at least a little sangfroid, enough so that I could make smart survival decisions and not just freak out like a rabbit on meth and just do whatever my fight or flight instincts tell me to do.

I mean, I am not expecting to be James Bond about it, but I had always hoped I would be able to keep my shit together in an emergency if I had to do so.

Then again, I did avoid death and the decisions I made were reasonably intelligent. I just made them while being freaked out to the extreme. So maybe I retained my intelligence despite being totally freaked out, which is not bad for someone who has never faced that sort of thing in real life at all.

In fact, maybe that is the best one can expect of someone who is not some battle-hardened warrior.

And I have to admit, while it was all a dream, it was pretty damned exciting. I sort of feel like I have been through something now, even though it was all the product of my subconscious mind. Some have theorized that this is part of the function of dreams (and daydreams) : to let us create simulated scenarios of things we feel we may encounter in real life, and “practice” them.

Not that I am predicting a big shoot up in my apartment building any time soon or anything. It need not be that literal. In fact, dreams seldom are. They speak in metaphor and psychomachea because they are attempting to express great emotional complexity and intensity while the parts of the brain that are literal and linear are asleep.

Not that I have a clue what my dream was trying to express. The fact that I somehow sort of knew what was going to happen intrigues me. That is what keeps this, in my mind, from being a simple fear dream, a “chased by monsters” dream for a jaded media-soaked gent like me.

The fear also intrigues me, though. Perhaps that was the real purpose of the dream, to stretch my emotional muscles now that I am letting more emotion through and to sort of put my emotional systems through their paces.

If so, bravo. I sure as hell was scared during the dream. That system checks out fine.

Now how about those erotic systems, hmmm?

I have be trying, today, to develop a healthier relationship with sleep, which means, no napping!

Good old Morpheus and his always ready realm of dreams and nightmares and all manner of pains and pleasures… but none of them real.

Which is the appeal, really. I have been using sleep as a blanket (and comforter) escape from reality, the furthest one can go from reality without dying, and who knows?

Maybe death is the realest thing there is, and not the escape it seems at all.

So I am going to try to cut down on all this napping. Here I have been bitching about how life seems to be slipping away from me faster and faster, and all the while, I am actively sleeping through as much of it as I possibly can.

These two things are not compatible. The only way I have at my disposal to slow my life way the hell down is to be awake for more of it. No more fast-forwarding through my life to get to the good bits… which are largely meals. How sad is that?

I eat to live, I live to eat. Pathetic. That is not who I am. It is just how I have been.

So I am going to do my best to nap a lot less. I probably will not be able to go cold turkey right away, but I can cut down pretty hard. For instance, no sleeping in the afternoon. Right there, a quarter of the day is cordoned off. After that, I will cut out evening naps.

I should be able to get all the sleep I need in the twelve hours between midnight and noon.

And I will try to go to bed at 3 am every night, and take my sleeping pill then, and not dilute the effectiveness of that sleep by napping all day. I might not ever be able to totally fit myself into the normal eight hours a night, at night pattern.

But I can move in that direction, and that could make a big difference in my life. I realize now that I have been living my life always on the doorstep of sleep, and therefore never being truly awake and alive. No doubt this is a form of self-sedation to deal with my depression, which is no doubt going to become a fiercer opponent now that I am going to be more awake.

That is the real challenge. Skipping a nap would be no big deal if I was not then left with hours to fill and a very tiny number of methods for doing so. I honestly do not know what to do with myself most of the time, and I am growing tired of the usual video games and Internet crap. I find them increasingly boring, unrewarding, frustrating, and unfulfilling.

They just cannot compete with real life.

You know, that real life stuff that I have been strenuously avoiding for most of my adult life. I mean, I have always been a head in the clouds kind of guy. The world inside my head has always held massive precedence over the world outside. Even as a kid, I would do crazy things like try to walk home from school and read a book at the same time. ^[1]

So it is not like reality and I have ever been more than nodding acquaintances at the best of times. But at least in the past, I had things forcing me to deal with reality, like for instance school, jobs, and the desire for ice cream.

But in this life of mine, I could practically live my entire life in this here apartment if I felt like it. Direct deposit on my disability checks, Joe and Julian buying the groceries, buying what I want online, not going out to dinner with my friends any more. Get a microwave for the bedroom and practically never leave except to see the doctor.

It is entirely possible. And a very sick and sad part of me thinks it sounds good. The part of me whose response to any form of stress is to collapse and retreat. It thinks “Yeah, that would be great! No stress, no fear, no challenges, no expecations, no reality pushing in and makes life hard. Just me, alone with my Internet, forever. ”

I recognize that part of myself AS part of myself. But only a part. Living like that would be a lot like suicide. I want to gain strength, not capitulate to my weaknesses all the time. I want to grow strong, and robust, and energetic.

That is another thing about my sleeping all the time. I have come to realize that I need to stick a very hard and counterintuitive lesson onto a nail and then pound it into this thick skull of mine : sometimes the solution to being tired is to do something.

Doing nothing makes people tired. The body assumes that if you are just sitting there for a while, it had better shut down a lot of your systems in order to conserve resources. So you slip into a stupor, and mistaken come to believe that this means you are tired and need to rest, instead of simply being in a lower gear, ready to pop into a higher gear as soon as you start doing something active.

I proved this to myself this afternoon. I was feeling very, very tired and the urge to nap was strong in me. But I had already decided not to nap this afternoon, so instead, I got up and loaded up the bread machine to make me some French bread.

And lo and behold, after I did that, I wasn’t nearly as tired and sleepy any more!

What? Effort can leave you feeling MORE energetic?

That’s as crazy as thinking you can spend money in a way that leaves you with more money later!

Well that is it for tonight. Maybe I will take a nap now, maybe not.

I am sure I will get around to it eventually.

Jesus, I am getting tired of talking about myself.

I really am. I am not sure what that “means”. It would be easy to just be flip about it and say “I guess I am so boring I even bore myself, ha ha” or be superficial and say “do anything enough and you get bored with it, no need to look any further”. And that is probably part of it.

But I think part of it is artistic as well. My desire to write something bigger and better than the daily drivel (hey, that’s what I should call this blog!) is growing stronger and stronger every day. I am hoping that is a good thing, that it will be the impetus for the next stage of evolution of myself as a writer. I can already feel myself growing stronger in important ways, and I am hoping that soon I will be strong enough to start teaching myself to edit my own works and not be stuck in First Draft City.

That would be a major advancement in my so-called writing career. I could finally produce polished, professional works that impress people, instead of the flawed gems I produce now.

Of course, it would be even more helpful if I produced them more often. It saddens me that I do all this writing every day but produce nothing of worth. Just a whole lot of emotional expectoration, which admittedly probably has great therapeutic use, but still feels futile to me.

And you know what would really help with my recovery? Money! Earned income, better lifestyle, a sense of accomplishment and pride, a feeling that I really am worth something to the world.

I bet that would do wonders to improve my mood.

And of course, that would involve getting my shit together (I have widely scattered shit, I really should get that looked at by a professional) enough to get all my stories together in one place, pick some markets, and start sending my stuff out there on a rota. Market A does not want Story A? Then off it goes to Market B, and so on down the list, until every story has been to every market.

And if I manage to do all that without getting a sale, well, I will just have to write more stuff to keep the process going, right?

Then there’s that book I wrote last November. Remember that? Me neither, most of the time. But I have written a book, dammit. And I wrote it in 25 days, which ain’t half bad. I proved, when doing the Million Word Year, that I can write a heck of a lot of words per day if so inclined. I could be a highly prolific author if I could just focus all that creative energy and urge to write into something that might get published somewhere.

I could be a real Man of Letters. We are talking Asimov level of output.

But alas, I just do not have my poop in a group enough for that yet. I still spend a lot of every day doing pointless things, despite my growing dissatisfaction with fucking around with video games and online chat and so on.

I guess I am in the painful place between the desire for change, and change. The dissatisfaction with all my dissipation will just have to grow and grow until it forces the change to happen, and because it has such an enormous force of habit to overcome, and the inertia of my entire adult life fighting against it, it is going to be a titanic struggle and even if the forces of good win, it is going to take a hell of a lot out of me in the process.

I wish it could be easier. I wish I could just say to myself “I know this resistance is wrong, ergo, BEGONE!” and it would just disappear. But knowing something is true does not make one instantly believe it, not even for a rugged mountaintop hermit of a philosopher like myself.

There is a big difference between knowing truth, and believing it. It is entirely possible to know the right answer and give it on demand, but not really believe it. Knowledge is thought. Belief is emotion. You can know it is true but not feel its truth.

And without the feeling, the knowledge will not last that long. Your mind will resolve the conflict by changing what you believe to match how you feel.

Yes, even you, you tough minded, hard nosed intellectual, you. Especially you. Isn’t knowing the right answer but not believing it just like school, when you were so smart with the answers in class and on the test? To this day, you think, deep down, that finding the right answer and having it on hand should the question arise should be the whole thing. You have the right answer and should be rewarded for that. Actually believing it on an emotional level is strictly optional, and if it conflicts with your internal narrative of self-loathing, well, out it goes, logic evidence and truth be damned, right?

Even if you do keep it around as the “right” answer, you will not deliver it as though it is true. You will say “Well I suppose… ” or “I guess, technically… ” or the like. Only your desire to have the “right” answer and not be caught out in a logical or verbal error keeps this answer in your mind at all. But you make it abundantly clear that you do not really believe it.

Why this gulf between knowing positive truths and your actually believing them? Is your carefully constructed world of self-loathing and depression so precious to you that you would suppress and deny all conflicting information, like you were Fox News talking about Barack Obama?

Rip out the walls between. Let positive emotions in. Be willing to forsake your chilly clarity for the warm tempestuous seas of emotion.

It is the only way out.

Bored, tired, a little depressed, restless, irritable, kind of feel like smashing stuff.

So, a fairly typical evening for me.

Here is the most exciting thing happening in my life right now :

Finally bought some cornmeal last night at Sav-On Foods at Ironwood. Tried to find some at Safeway but no dice. I had been looking for the stuff because I wanted to check out some recipes for cornbread in my big book of bread machine recipes.

Well, it says it is a big book of bread machine recipes, but the majority of the 300 recipes are actually not bread machine recipes at all, but recipes from a totally normal cookbook that only use the bread machine as a mixer.

To me, this is a ripoff. If I have to preheat the oven and grease the pan and form the loaf and bake it myself, it is not a bread machine recipe any more and has no place in a book of bread machine recipes. The magic of the bread machine is : ingredients in, bread out.

Anything more than that, well, I might as well be using a normal cook book and leaving the bread machine out of the picture entirely while I am at it.

But anyhow. There are some cornbread type recipes in the book, and I am getting bored with the usual breads, so I looked around for some cornmeal so I could make cornbread.

And they had none at Safeway. I was not surprised. Cornbread is not exactly a staple of Canadian cuisine. I cannot imagine the demand for cornmeal is very high.

And I almost did not find it at all. I had just about given up, but then my bestie Felicity pointed out a bag of yellow powder, and lo and behold, cornmeal!

Glee! I bought it and brought it home.

Sadly, I forgot to buy eggs, so I could not make traditional cornbread. Instead, I checked out an intriguing recipe for something called Anadama Bread, a traditional New England type bread.

Looking at the article, I can’t help but notice my bread does not look like that. Mine is much darker in color. Much closer to the color of the molasses that went into it, in fact.

The molasses, oy. Lord I hate dealing with that stuff. It looks horrible, it smells bad, it is hard to work with, it’s messy and sticky and likes to get everywhere. It is just plain awful.

And considering the mess I made this time, next time I have to deal with the crap, I am going to take serious precautions, like paper towel everywhere and doing everything in a big bowl for ease of washing.

Anyhow, I made the stuff, and maybe I screwed up the molasses measuring, because that is what the bread looks like and what it tastes like. IT did seem like an awful lot of molasses. Perhaps I misread the recipe, I will have to go back and check.

That said, it is not inedible. Molasses might be nauseating in its raw form (think Skin of Evil, but sickeningly sweet smelling) but as a flavouring for other things, it is not bad. In fact, it can be quite lovely in some circumstances. I would not make, say, gingerbread or spice cookies without it.

In fact, has I known how much this stuff would taste like molasses, I would have put in some ginger and nutmeg too and maybe had gingerbread at last.

Anyhow, the stuff is edible. I would not make it again, assuming I made it right this time, as it is not all that great. The molasses flavour is too heavy for it to become a favorite.

But it has an interesting texture, and I have not tried it toasted yet, and so the jury is still out on the stuff. Maybe I will finish the loaf, maybe not.

And that is the most exciting thing to happen to me lately. Bread! Oooh!

In other news, the Pope has gone soft on condoms.

Or, to put it a less fun way, the Catholic Church has softened its stance on the use of condoms. They are now saying that the use of condoms is allowed, but only if the sole intention is to prevent the spread of AIDS.

This strikes me as mostly a PR move. They are basically just trying to get themselves out of that whole sticky “how can you forbid condoms when millions are dying of AIDS in Africa” thing. Seems fairly cynical and obvious to me.

But still, it is progress, and may well end up saving lives. After all, that is the only reason we fags use condoms at all. It is not like we are worried about getting pregnant.

Not that the Catholic Church approves of that either. Not between consenting male adults.

And while I think this highly unlikely, if this opens the door to them giving up even more ground and allowing condoms for whatever reason, that would remove my major objection to the Catholic Church as it is right now.

There is a clear relationship between birth control, women’s rights, rising standards of living due to economic growth, and modern civilization. Modernity cannot lift a people out of squalor and destitution until women can control how many children they have. Fewer children means greater investment in each child and a higher standard of living in which to raise said children. That means healthier, more educated children, and women who can get jobs because they are not barefoot and pregnant all the time and can work while the children are in school.

This doubles the available labour capital in a nation, and hence, economic growth. And, in my opinion, spiritual and moral growth as well. Said nation can outgrow the petty patriarchal boy;s club mentality and embrace modern values of liberty, equality, tolerance, and openness.

And it all starts with birth control.

So get the hell out of the way, Catholicism. If you truly care about the poor, as Jesus commanded you to do, then let them have the means of ending their poverty.

Unless, of course, you are just full of crap.