Hi again, faithful readers. Have I mentioned lately how much I love you? ‘Cause I do.

Had one of those days where I sleep a lot and have intense dreams and wake up sweaty and messed up and blah, blah, blah. It happens all the time, and yet, I always feel like I should write about it because it all feels so important, somehow.

Perhaps I experience these intense dreams in a way similar to the sort of frontal lobe seizures that cause religious visions, and thus, like said visions, it leaves me with a sense of something “realer than real” because that part of the brain that decides how “real” something is becomes hyper-activated.

Whatever the cause, I wish I remembered the dreams long enough to write them down. I have the feeling that sharing my dreams with others, externalizing them, is an important psychological step. I know that other times, when I have managed to hold on to enough of a dream to write it out here, I have felt a profound sense of release, like I am letting something go that was, in a sense, too large for my head.

Perhaps I should keep a notebook by my bed to jot down impressions when I wake up.

Moving on, I recently came across a Wikipedia entry for something I did not know existed : the concept of a philosophical zombie.

No, this is not a zombie that, while all the other zombies are shambling forward moaning “Brains!”, take a moment to pause and moans “Brains…?”.

It is, if I am comprehending the entry rightly, the concept of an entity that is indistinguishable from a human being in that it responds in all ways to stimuli exactly like a person, but does not actually have sentience, a soul, consciousness, or whatever else you want to note that makes someone “human”.

It is used to argue against the idea that all we are is meat, flesh, and bone. The argument goes that if that were true, then you could have a “zombie”, or automaton, that reproduced all human responses but would, in fact, not “human” at all.

I suppose we are meant to recoil in horror at the thought of a zombie or robot fooling us into accepting it as a person when somehow it is not, and hastily concede our materialism because the alternative seems all creepy and weird now.

But that is mere emotionally manipulative rhetoric, not true philosophy. I am a materialist without exception. We are truly nothing but our physical selves. Even that which we hold most dear is the result of chemicals in our heads and not some completely nonsensical magic substance that by definition we can’t prove exists, because if we could, it would become physical.

However, the fact that we know the method by which all our hopes and dreams are encoded does not diminish how important, special, rare, and true they are. Knowing a book is only paper and ink does not mean a book is “merely” paper and ink. The method of storage does not define the content. The fact that we are “merely” physical does not make us zombies.

We simply need to discard our belief in magic. There is no escape hatch to reality, no non-real realm where the rules no longer apply, no force outside reality which can act on reality.

Something is real, or it is not. There is no third option.

And no amount of saying “There has to be something MORE…” is going to change that. Perhaps you want there to be something more. But that does not mean it has to oblige your desires by existing.

Another note on the philosophical zombie kick : to my way of thinking, we are all zombies. You cannot definitively prove that anyone is sentient (or real, or human, or whatever) than yourself. Even in this era of the fMRI, where we can watch the electrical activity of the brain in realtime, we cannot construct a philosophically bulletproof argument for the sentience of others.

And once you realize this, the door is open for you to realize that if it acts exactly like a human being, to us, it is a human being, and thus the whole philosophical zombie construct becomes meaningless. The whole idea posits what it purports to prove, that there is some magic ingredient that would distinguish a perfectly replica of a human being from a “real” human being.

But there is no difference between reality and a perfect illusion of reality. If we cannot tell it from reality, it is real. We have equal proof for X being real as we do for a “really really real” thing.

We might be temporarily fooled into accepting one kind of thing as another kind of thing, but if it is even theoretically possible, via means not even conceived of yet, to tell this is not a “real” thing as we have come to accept it, then the illusion is not perfect and hence the thing in question is not “real”.

Let alone the phenomenological argument that it is impossible for a non-real thing to cause any effect on a real thing, including causing us to perceive it, and therefore whatever we perceive is “real” in the sense that it is a real object which is impinging upon our senses somehow.

We might be entirely wrong about what we are perceiving, but the object of perception is still real.

Otherwise, once you take magic out of the equation, what else can it be but something real? The entire philosophical concept of “illusion” is therefore suspect.

There is no perceiving that which is not real. There is only being wrong about what you perceive.

On a totally different note, I am intrigued by the development of devices like these.

It is a “lifelogging” device that takes two pictures a minute for an entire year at a time. That is 1,051,200 pictures, which is a heck of a lot. Each picture is geotagged with your GPS coordinates so it will give you both the time and place of when it was taken.

It is meant to be worn around the neck at all times, and hence, you would end up with a year’s worth of pictures to look through and remember the year.

I am very interested in this “lifelogging” concept. Documenting your entire life has been a dream of mine for a while, and it is becoming increasingly feasible. Imagine being able to expand your biographical memory into the digital realm, where you can use the power of computers and digital media to call back any moment of your life with perfect clarity.

Some people think that sort of thing is narcissistic, and I suppose that is true in a sense. But I am intensely curious as to what happens to the minds of people who do this. Do they become intensely self-conscious about everything they do because it will all be recorded, as though they have their own personal panopticon? Does their natural biographical memory weaken, like how your ability to remember phone numbers disappears once you have them all programmed into your phone?

Could you end up with a person who can’t even remember what happened half an hour ago, but when you ask them, they just say “Wait, let me look that up…. “?

But what interests me the most is the potential for these lifelogs to provide an absolutely unprecedented data set for the study of human behaviour. No self-reporting error, no laboratory conditions error, no observer bias, just the straight up truth of what people actually do.

To me, that is an astonishing prospect, and it would only take a relatively small number of volunteers to provide valuable insights when the quality of the data is that high.

Right now, gizmos like that are a wee bit too expensive to fit into a psychology department;s budget. But the price is bound to come down with time, and when it does, I can easily imagine a trial of a thousand of these sorts of things going on with people of all walks of life, and resulting in a data set that could be mined for theses and conclusions for decades.

And that would be simply… amazing. I bet a lot of comfortable theories would be overturned by access to the literal truth of what people actually do in various situations.

Going back to the personal, I imagine that a lot of lifeloggers will find out a lot of things about themselves that they might not enjoy learning.

What we think we do and what we really do might turn out to be radically different. I can’t imagine what this extension of the metaconscious knowledge of self could do to a person.

I would like to think that people are always better off knowing the truth.

But I am not idealistic enough to say that I know that is always the case.

It is just, in general, the best policy.

Cars going past like falling elevators.

Spent a lot of today asleep. Still not really sure how much of that is voluntary and how much necessary. Certainly, I was pretty sleepy after lunch. Don’t know how much that means I needed to sleep, exactly. But I felt like sleeping, so I slept.

Maybe that is all there is to it, and I just just stop picking at that scab and let things heal for a change. But analysis is my primary mode, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.

The cerebral outlook may have caused a lot of my troubles, but it is still pretty much all I have. As much as I would love to tell myself “Stop thinking about everyone and just LIVE!”, I don’t really know what that means. Not for me, not in my own context.

It has been a long, long time since I had the kind of faith in the universe required for that kind of relaxed attitude. I have realized that I have a very deep kind of paranoia that feels that I have to constantly be figuring everything out and using my mind to the fullest in order to be safe.

No wonder I stay home and do very little. Who could live in reality with that kind of demand on one’s mentation? Trying to process all of the potential information in actual live reality and understand all of what is happening around you is just plain impossible.

Normal people do not even try. They have, without even knowing it, an enormous amount of faith in the safety of their reality, and therefore are quite comfortable taking in and processing only the tiny percentage they need in order to operate, and they can, therefore, live happy normal lives without worrying about what will happen to them if they go outside.

I call it faith, but I am not claiming it to be unfounded. They are clearly right to assume their lives are mostly safe, and to relax their guard and do what they need to do at work, at home, with their loved ones, without the kind of deep paranoid fear that lurks deep within my psyche.

It;s not hard to see where that deep down animal fear came from. Bullying in my childhood turned me into a child who never wanted to go outside even at school. Inside the school I was fairly safe, especially if I was someplace with a teacher. A classroom, or even better, the library.

Outside, in the free flowing anarchy of the playground, I was anybody’s. If I was forced to go out there, I would find someplace to hide and hope like hell nobody noticed me. To be noticed was to be hurt. The only safety was in being ignored.

So, no friends, no “gang”, no safety. Just fear, hiding, and reading. At least when I was reading, I could get absorbed in the book and tune out the outer world that was so frightening and hurtful to me.

And that deep fear has never left me, and here I am damn near forty. I don’t yet know how to reach that scared little boy inside me and tell him everything is okay now. He can relax, and come out of his shell, and play with the other little boys and girls, and not be in danger all the time.

And that was just what happened to me at school. My home life had already made me used to being ignored. But at least before I was sent off to school (sans kindergarten), I had a babysitter. She was the one adult who paid attention to me almost all the time. She never ignored me.

But after I went to school, Betty the babysitter went off to her own life, and for a while, there was a friend of hers who my parents paid to be there when I came home for lunch.

Even that was too much, though, so instead my Mom started packing a lunch for me, and I ate at school, in the lunch room, with the other kids.

Weirdly, I did not get bullied in the lunch room. Maybe everyone was too busy eating, I don’t know. Or maybe bullying and the free-form physical, primitive play nature of the playground are interrelated.

Or maybe it was just because there was usually a teacher monitoring the lunchroom. Can you see now why I am pro-surveillance? A security camera on every telephone pole?

The animals behave when they know someone is watching.

The worst that ever happened to me in the lunchroom was a little light verbal bullying, which looking back might have even been an attempt to befriend me via verbal jousting.

If only I had understood then what I understand now. But some of us learn certain things really slowly.

Back then, I was far too scared and defensive and literal to understand when someone was genuinely abusing me and when someone was trying to engage me. I probably missed a dozen opportunities to make friends that way.

So I really have no idea how much of my childhood isolation was my own doing. Maybe all of it, or at least most of it. I was certainly not an easy kid to reach. Fear and intelligence (plus a certain creativity and willfulness and fierce independence) all combined to make me a rather difficult kid to deal with.

So most people didn’t. People have a remarkable ability to just decide something is too difficult and too weird to deal with and just edit it out of their minds. It just stop existing to them. After all, it is messy and complicated and hard to deal with, and they would have to slow down and really invest in it in order to deal with it at all, and they have busy lives and lots of other things to do.

So the most natural thing in the world is to just edit it out, pave it over, and get on with your life.

I was one of those things.

It’s Saturday night and I feel like I am running a slight fever. Woo.

Still feeling sort of crappy in general lately, although the psychological side of things is doing a bit better than it was earlier this week.

Psychologically speaking, I am feeling somewhat okay. Not exactly bubbling over with joy, but halfways decent. I still need to figure out a route of catharsis that does not involve hating myself.

Or maybe it is okay to hate yourself for short periods of time, as long as you are doing it entirely to get the stress and pain out of your system and afterwards you remember what a swell person you are.

I don’t know. I am making shit up as I go.

I feel like I am at least dragging myself very, very slowly towards being a more active and engaged person. I still have a huge weight of fear and suppressed or unexpressed emotions to shift before I can fully emerge into the sunlight and breathe the air of the truly sane and whole, but I make a little progress every day, and that is a reason to be alive.

And let me tell you, someone with serious depression like me needs all the reasons he can find.

I still have a lot of darkness inside me. It is always there, the suppressed anger, the frustration of helplessness, the key and tragic weakness of spirit and soul, the deep dark cold of outer space that sucks all the heat and power from my soul.

Sometimes the anger and pain well up in me so bad that I just want to hurt someday, anybody, just to externalize the suffering. Throw my pain into someone else and make them experience it instead of me, the classic definition of taking it out on someone else.

It scares me a little that I feel these way sometimes, but I am not too worried. I know that in my own deep ethics, taking out your foul mood on others is just about the worst crime there is, or can be.

That is what my father did to us Bertrand kids, and I refuse to ever do it myself.

I need to find some way to externalize all my bullshit, all my darkness, but it will never be at someone else’s expense. There has to be another way.

And if there isn’t, then I will die of my darkness before I let it victimize others. That is how evil spreads. No doubt my father was working through his own dark shit when he went on his dinner table tirades at us kids. Frustrations from work, where he was the sucker with the sense of professionalism and duty that everybody used at their pack mule so they could fuck around and be useless. Despair from the slow dissolution of his relationship with my mother (largely his fault). And a head full of serious badness from his father, a sociopathic, child beating, wife beating, pedophile compulsive liar whom I am glad is dead and could almost wish there truly was a Hell for him to be roasting in.

But see how it goes? Maybe my paternal grandfather had a father who was as bad as him or worse. Someone is responsible for creating that bad of a mess of a human being. Compared to his father, my father is a saint. That does not excuse anything he did, but it sure puts it in perspective.

And the thing is, there is such a thing as “good enough” and “not good enough”. Hard limits as to just how bad a job you can do, regardless of the challenges you face and the baggage you have, and if you do not make the grade, whether or not you got eighty percent there or ten percent there does not really matter.

You failed, and whe what you fail at is parenting, that is serious fucking business.

And sure, I know of parents way worse than mine. On paper, my parents did fine on the middle class standard of living test. I never worried about the material things of life as a kid. Being so bookish, I never even wished my parents were richer so they could buy me more expensive toys or fashionable clothes.

Though I suppose it was weird that I was not even a teenager when they just started giving me the money from the Children’s Allowance check and telling me to go buy my clothes myself. I am pretty sure that is not something most parents would do.

Isn’t it hilarious how “liberal parenting” so often looks a lot like “neglect”?

And sure, maybe I should have dealt with all this bullshit before being almost 40, but I have been busy working on a full time job called “not killing myself” and it has left me a little distracted.

God, I was so whipped as a child and a teenager. I was the agreeable child (despite what some of my teachers might have said), so eager for attention and acceptance that I just accepted whatever they asked of me without hesitation or question.

And largely, what they wanted of me was to disappear. To not really be there. To do everything I could to make it like they had never had me. Be quiet, stay out of the way, take care of my own needs, do my own laundry, pack my own lunch, buy my own clothes, and most of all, expect absolutely nothing from my parents besides my allowance and a key to the house.

None of this was done deliberately, openly, or as part of any plan. It was deeper than that. It was their whole attitude towards me growing up.

That whole “You’re still here?” kind of thing.

But because it is not something anyone ever said out loud, they don’t have to acknowledge the truth of it all, and at this point in my life, I can’t make them.

Some day, my mother and I will have a long talk about all this.

I guess I had better hurry up and get rich enough to travel.

Well, here I am, blogging to a text file again. Our Internet is out, and I have turned it off and on again like a good IT Crowd watcher, and it is still out.

The connection is working, but DNS lookup is a bust every time. I am sure there is something simple I could do to fix that, but I am miles away from being in the mood to go try to figure it out, and so today, I just blog to this thing and skip the editing for now.

That’s the silly part of all this. I have dealt with Internet outages and blogging before, so that is no big deal. Do a blog entry to a text document, post it back-dated when the Internet comes back, not that bid a deal. It’s a known thing.

But my book is an online thing at the moment. I have been editing it by retrieving it one chapter at a time from my blog.I nab a chapter, add it to the cumultive OpenOffice file, edit it, and then go get the next one. Simple and effective.

Except for one lil problem. Sans Internet, I can’t go get the next chapter to edit, and so I am a wee bit sunk when it comes to editing anything more.

I can go through the stuff I have already downloaded, and I likely will, if I get bored enough. But I have been enjoying rereading my book as I edit it, and I was looking forward to the next bit today, and so this Internet outage is a real pain in the glutes.

Oh, sorry for the lack of Friday Science Whatever this week. I hope to resume it in the future. I love talking about science and I want to do more of that, it is just that I am not quite used to the whole blogging thing any more. I am still recovering from not doing it for a month while I was pounding out the rough draft of my latest book, and so I totally forgot to collect science stories to share with you lovely science loving folks.

And well, with the Internet out, I can hardly go get some, can I? D’oh.

The Internet is totally a utility now. It’s like electricity or water or garbage collection. You just expect it to be there all the time and only really notice it and think about it when it’s not there.

And just like with a power outage, I keep not quite realizing what it all means. I keep going “Well I could just go play a video game on Facebook… oh wait, nope, no Internet. I know, I will boot up Netflix and watch an episode of…. oh right, that’s Internet too. Well, I will just go edit… “

And so forth and so on.

And it came on quite suddenly, too. I was eating lunch and watching an episode of Bones via Netflix when it just crapped out.

At first, I figured it was just one of those little SNAFUs that occasionally plagues my Netflix.ca usage (Netflix Instant for you Americans). Every once in a while, the Wii Netflix app crashes, or loses connection and I have to reboot it.

Even more rarely, the Wii app crashes so hard, I have to reboot the whole machine. And by reboot, I mean I have to get up and pull out the power connection and then put it back in. That’s how hard the crash is. Even the power button on the Wii console itself stops working, which to my old fashioned thinking should be impossible, but whatever.

So I thought maybe it was that. But nope… all things reset and still no Internet. So then I checked it on this a-here computer of mine, and whaddaya know, no DNS response.

So I rebooted the cablemodem, and still nothing. So I am a little worried. Condition light yellow.

Hmmm, I suppose I should have checked to see if we had cable reception. See whether it a cable outage or something more subtle. Oh well, I am not in a troubleshooting mood.

I am sure that when Julian and I both attack the problem, we can figure something out. Either fix it, or at least get our cable provider working on it.

I have learned in the past that I have around a day’s worth of residual Internet coursing through my veins at any given moment, so I won’t start going through withdrawal symptoms just yet.

You laugh, but I am addicted, it’s no joke! Well, OK.

It’s not entirely a joke, anyhow,

But who knows? Maybe this is just reality telling me that I need to find more things to do with my time than just fuck around online or sleep.

After all, sans Internet, and sans sleeping like ALL the time, I will pretty much have to find something else to do with myself.

Maybe even something useful, like cleaning, or baking, or untangling the enormous knot of cords that have wrapped themselves around the center post of my computer chair.

I am serious, it is getting so that if I move the chair at all, something either goes flying towards me like it is suddenly possessed of a will to destroy, or unplugs itself.

I have been further researching my dietary options. Turns out that one good thing for diabetes is onions. Something about their high sulfur and flavonoid (totally a real science word and not something from a Doctor Who themed candy commercial) contents.

Well hell, I love onions. That is something I could add to my diet effortlessly. Plus, I am going to be adding more cheese to my eats now that we have these cool big packages of shredded cheese from Costco. (We get sliced cheese too, but it is pretty much just good for burgers. )

So I see a lot of toasted cheese and onion sandwiches in my future.

I just have to remember to buy the dang onions.

If only you could buy pre-shredded onions….

Been doing some research into things relating to my diabetes.

It started with a worry about the lack of results I am getting from my insulin injections.

Now, I might be worried over nothing. It might just be that I have not found my dose yet. I started off at ten units and I am up to 26 now, but who knows what the right dose for me might be?

It is true that the higher the dose I need, the sicker I am, so part of me keeps hoping that the next dose increase will be the last one. I will have found the dose needed to get my blood sugar levels down to normal, and I can stop increasing the dose and just be healthy.

The sooner I find that level, the less sick I am. It makes sense, in a way. But right now, it is looking like I will practically be dumping the entire pen into me (60 units)each time before I see any definitive result.

And this worries me, and I have been wondering what other factors might be causing such high readings.

Some of my readings have been so high that I should feel way sicker than I do. And that made me wonder.

Then I remembered an incident many years ago, the last time I was testing regularly, when I tested my blood sugar and the result came back “Error, level too high to read”.

This freaked me out, even though I did not feel that sick. So I got Joe to drive me to the ER (that’s what it said to do in the manual for the tester) and went through that lovely process. Always fun sitting there waiting in a series of waiting rooms when you have no idea if you are, like, dying or something.

But eventually, I got a bed, and hooked up to fluids, and they determined that I had been dehydrated the whole time, and that caused the super high reading.

Fast forward back to today, and I have been wondering if that might be happening again. I have chronic mild dehydration, and that causes my blood sugar test readings to be artificially high.

So last night, I decided to look that up, and I came up with this.

Theory confirmed. Dehydration causes blood sugar levels to spike. It is not exactly a false reading, just a somewhat misleading one. Dehydration causes low blood volume, and so the percentage of glucose in my blood is higher relative to total volume.

The blood testing meter is doing its job just fine. The readings are accurate. But the problem is more than just a lack of insulin response in my cells.

But the thing is, I drink plenty of water. Too much, perhaps. Drinking a lot of water can flush out the salt in your blood, making you less able to retain water, making you lose fluid rapidly, making you… guess what… thirsty again.

Throw in the diuretic effect of caffeine, and you see why some people drink diet cola all day long, or drink so much damn coffee.

Anyhow, I drink plenty of fluids, and I add a little salt to my food here and there to make sure my sodium levels are sufficient, and so I can’t imagine I have the classic sort of dehydration.

But sodium is just one of the electrolytes. What about the rest?

So I checked out this page and it suggests, to me, that I likely have pretty rotten electrolyte levels.

Especially calcium. I don’t drink milk, nor do I eat a lot of cheese or other dairy products. The only source of calcium in my diet that I can think of offhand is the very tasty almonds we get from Costco, and those are only around some of the time.

So I probably have pretty awful calcium levels. I have no idea about the others like phosphorous and magnesium. I know I get some potassium by eating bananas fairly regularly.

Anyhow, so now I am officially worried about my electrolyte levels. So I Google up “diabetes electrolytes” and I end up at this place.

That confirms that diabetes and electrolyte issues are intimately linked. All this drinking and peeing uses up my electrolytes. And yet, how else do I keep from becoming dehydrated?

I am in a bit of a bind there.

So I figure the solution is to get some damned electrolytes into my diet, pronto.

Checking out this article about foods with electrolytes in them, I am noticing a distinct trend.

That is, of all the electrolytes listed, the one kind of food that seems to have them all is green, leafy vegetables. Hmm, interesting.

So this would suggest that I need to up the intake of green, leafy veggies in my diet. And seeing as I currently eat almost none (apart from the occasional small salad at Denny’s), increasing the amount should not be too difficult.

The bar is set pretty low.

And I am a pretty veggie positive fellow, and green leafy veggies are not too expensive, so in theory, it should not be too hard to get like, a salad a day into my diet.

That still does not provide a lot of calcium, though, unless I was to get into the really nasty green leafies like kale and chard, and I am so not going there.

So I think I will also look into some sort of electrolyte supplement, probably in pill form.

There are plenty of sugar free electrolyte drinks out there, but I do not have much money to spend and I figure a one a day pill would likely be a lot more cost effective than shelling out for drink mix.

I might be wrong, though. And a drink is certainly nicer than a pill.

Either way, I am looking to up my electrolytes as soon as possible.

This explains why I always feel better after eating a veggie-heavy meal, though.

I needs me them electrolytes!

Been having a weird time of it lately.

First off, last night : I did not get any decent sleep last night because for some reason, every 2 hours or so, I woke up with a super full bladder and had to get up to take a piss.

This was very very irritating. Dunno where my body was keeping all that extra fluid, or why it decided it had to shift its water ballast all at once, but that is, indeed, what happened.

And I am no “power sleeper” who goes directly into REM-rich sleep moments after my head hits the pillow. I am as cautious in sleep as I am in life, in a sense, and I don’t commit to the really good sleep until I have been asleep for a while and my brain is convinced that we’re in for the long haul.

So these brief sleeps were more maddening than soothing.

And all this, on my therapy morning. Normally, that is Thursday, but for holiday scheduling reasons, my doc had to put me on Wednesday instead this week, and I won’t be seeing him again until the 20th, in order words, 2 weeks from tomorrow.

So, yay on that, then.

So I had to get up at 7 am despite not having really had much sleep at all, and when I tried to take a nap this afternoon, I still ended up needing to get up to pee 2 hours later. So I am running a fairly significant sleep debt right now.

Nothing big happened in therapy, although I did get asked some questions that made me really think, and that is always productive in therapy, at least in my little world.

Like I have said many times before, the most important job of a therapist, to me, is to ask questions and make observations that force me to think about things different and look at things from a different point of view than my own.

Left to my own devices, I will run in the same circles over and over again, making progress only very slowly. The right questions at the right time can force my train of thought onto an entirely different track, and save me a hell of a lot of time.

And I am pushing forty, and so I may not have all that long left. Not a lot of people as fat and sick as me make it to 50.

And with the way I have been feeling lately, I wonder.

Maybe it is just plain emotional constipation. Too many feelings locked up inside me making me all seized up and jammed up and fucked up inside.

I just find it so hard to deal lately. The urge to just crawl into a deep dark hole and pull the whole in after me is strong in me right now. I feel hemmed in by fear and pain and loneliness and depression and all that other bad stuff.

I feel like I have been stuffed in a cage and forgotten in some deep dark hole down a public oubliette lately. The sunshine and happiness retreat further and further away while I watch helplessly, unable even to move or think, let alone pursue it.

Of course, the sunshine really has gone away. It’s winter, after all. It gets dark so early sometimes that, with my messed up sleep schedule, it is getting dark just as I am getting up.

That cannot possibly be healthy.

I just feel so burdened. With emotion, I suppose. Got to find a way to let it all out.

That is harder to do now that I have shut off the old “self-loathing” valve. (Well, not entirely. But compared to before, it is almost totally shut off. )

I am even getting pretty good at remembering that I am a cool, talented, intelligent, insightful fellow more often that not. I am learning to build a stable sense of self, and that makes a huuuuge difference when it comes to how vulnerable to the world you feel.

Without a stable sense of self, any input at all can cause your self-worth to fluctuate wildly and cause great internal chaos. The person then, not surprisingly, considers the world to be a cold and hostile place, because to them, it is.

But with a stable sense of self, your ego has shock absorbers and the road does not seem so rough.

And I am working on all that. So why do I feel so crappy?

Some of it has to be physical. Although with me, I can never tell. Are my physical symptoms caused by my emotional issues, or vice versa?

Who knows. And saying “It’s both, in a continuum” might be more accurate but it is sure as fuck not any more helpful, at least, not to me.

I just feel like a steaming sack of fetid shit lately, and I don’t know why. I feel craven and low and bored and frustrated and tied up and hemmed in and trapped.

I feel like climbing something tall and screaming “FUCK YOU!” into the night at the top of my lungs until I feel better, or pass out, or bust a lung, or whatever.

Finding a route for catharsis that does not involve taking it out on myself is proving a lot trickier than I thought it would be.

If this keeps up, I might have to find catharsis by actually doing things.

And that is just plain crazy talk. (Or, you know, sane talk, and since when have I listened to that? Sanity makes no sense to the insane. )

Oh, and to add to it all, the insulin is having no provable effect on my diabetes yet. I have not being writing my readings down like I am supposed to do, but my sense of it is that I am getting the same range of readings every day.

And I am up to 24 units of insulin… 26 tonight… and I sort of expected some sort of provable effect by now. That has me down, too.

All in all, pbbt.

Came across this intriguing article about the Amazon.com empire recently, and thought I would comment on it.

The nutmeat of the article is : Amazon.com has a business model that does not require profits. That is to say, they don’t lose money, but their profits are very small for a company that big.

And yet, they survive, and thrive. Common business wisdom would say that this is impossible. So what is their magic secret?

The secret is that while their profits are not huge, their sales volume is stupendous and increases every year. And as long as that is true, Wall Street is quite happy to invest in Amazon.

This intrigues me, because it seems to mean that Amazon has found a way to escape the expectations of profit that cripple the good intentions of any publicly traded company.

It is not the ideal way, by any stretch of the imagination. It still requires constant expansion, and that is something which is inherently unstable in the long term. So far, Amazon has been able to keep expanding its sales volume by constantly moving into new territories.

That way, if you can maintain your sales volume in, say, books, plus then add literally any sales volume in, say, non-perishable groceries, you have increased total sales.

But seeing as currently, Amazon.com seems to sell roughly everything except cars, there is only so long that this strategy can hold out.

Another way to constantly increase sales volume is to keep your margins incredibly thin. Thus, your prices are damn near wholesale, and you can get lots of budget conscious Internet shoppers that way. You even develop a reputation as the place to go for the best price.

Again, none of this makes you a whole lot of profit, but it does give you very high sales volume.

A third way to keep volume high is to aggressively steal market share from other competing retailers. Low prices are a great way to do this, of course, but not the only way. Constantly improving customer service, website interface, and so forth helps a lot. That is one of the ways an online retailer has a huge advantage over a bricks and mortar retailer. They can refine the way they do things constantly.

It is a lot easier to update code than it is to change a store layout and retrain staff.

Amazon does all of these. And the result is that Jeff Bezos gets what I think he always wanted : a business that is entirely about serving people well with no ulterior motive.

In that, he is a Hacking Capitalism Hero. I have pondered the incredible advantage that eliminating profit could yield for a business for a long time. In fact, a large volume/low profit model is exactly what Hacked Capitalism strives for.

But presumably, eventually, Amazon will reach the limits of market volume expansion, and its investors will show up looking for that profit that has been on the horizon for a long time without ever coming closer. And then what, Jeff Bezos?

I mean, I can only assume that people invest in Amazon thinking that a place with such high sales volume must turn big profits eventually. It makes me wonder if Amazon’s strategies for attracting investment are entirely honest.

But I could be wrong. Perhaps Amazon is a “cult stock”, a concept I picked up recently and which I instantly fell in love with forever.

The idea is that a “cult stock” is one that has a group of highly dedicated investors who buy the stock not because they expect this will yield the highest personal profit, but because they simply like being a part of the mission and mystique of the company itself.

Imagine that. Investing in something simply because you think it is a cool thing to be a part of, or because you believe in what it is and what it does.

Economists are freaking out at this unwelcome injection of moral consideration into their nice neat and clean lines of self-serving bullshit about self-serving bullshit being great for everyone.

It also makes people a lot harder to predict. All of modern economics is based on self-interest. And when self-interest is further reduced to personal gain, in other words “whether or not a certain number goes up or down”, then suddenly, it is all just math.

But now people are truly hacking capitalism by asking whether or not a company is evil or not before deciding if they want their money going to it.

So perhaps that is what Amazon is doing. Certainly, if I had the money to express my economic and social philosophies via investment, I would be looking to back someplace like Amazon.

And with the rise of Kickstarter, you do not even need to have the price of one share in a publicly traded company in order to get in on the action. You can find a cause worth supporting on Kickstarter and then throw in whatever you can spare, and get what humans crave so strongly :

The feeling of being part of something bigger than themselves. Something good and noble and true.

Something that makes the world a better place.

Theoretically, you can build an entire successful business around a business model that does not require delivering profit to investors.

Just keep doing the right thing, and the investors will be happy, and you can make the world a better place by not destroying capitalism, but by being successful in it.

And being successful in a way that eliminates the mandatory sociopathy of the investor class.

That, to me, is what Hacking Capitalism is all about. Capitalism is an incredibly powerful force. It is arguably the most powerful economic force that has ever existed.

It does not need replacement, it needs fine-tuning. It needs optimization. Partly through government intervention. After all, someone has to be the referee in the game of life.

But also via people building and implementing radically different business models that change the entire way the game is played.

Hack capitalism, people. Make it BETTER.

That is how I am feeling lately, and it is around time I faced it.

I feel pretty shitty lately. Don’t know why. I don’t think it is because of an external psychological stimulus of any sort. I haven’t gotten bad news or been subjected to unusual stresses or had major blows to my ego or anything of that sort.

The switch from writing to editing is a bit of a letdown, true. Like I have been moaning, editing is a lot less fun. But that is not the real reason why editing and depression on my part might be linked.

The real problem is that editing is the most potent form of examination of my own work, and I have a fragile and unstable ego, and therefore going back and looking at what I have done risks taking the thing I am proud of and exposing it to the starving wild dogs of my destructive self-doubt and turning my work into yet another thing to be depressed about.

That is the real reason I have avoided editing for all these years of writing. I just write the thing, post it here, and forget about it. I might edit some on the fly, but for the most part, it has been Rough Draft City all the way.

That’s no way to become a rich and famous writer. But it is what I have been stuck with for all these years because of this inability to go back and look at what I have done and try to make it better.

I am just lucky that I have enough writing muscle and instinctual sense of story and so on to make anything half-decent without having to rewrite.

So right now, I am facing one of my biggest psychological blocks : that inability to go backwards.

And that might be a bg part of why I am feeling down. I can only hope that with patience and perseverance, I can work my way through this problem and achieve a fresh and more healthy equilibrium.

There’s also the matter of the reduction of my Paxil dose a while back. It is not impossible, I suppose, that this has had a slow, cumulative effect over the month or so that it has been in force, and I am only just now feeling the full effect.

Certainly, I have been feeling things more strongly lately, for better and for worse. Perhaps this increase in emotional pressure is revealing some leaks and cracks in my emotional defenses, and it will take some time before I get my feet under me and balance things out again.

There’s also the cyclical issue that (ha ha) I keep coming back to, over and over. Maybe I just have cyclical moods, and that means sometimes I will feel up and sometimes I will feel down and there is nothing I can do but wait for the Ferris wheel to go around again.

Like I have said many times before, I find this idea very hard to accept. I am a linear kind of person. Being goal oriented and task oriented sort of implies it. I want to go from A to B to C, not be stuck eternally going from A to B and back again.

Besides, I have a feeling that the real issue I am facing now is something physical.

Guess what? We are going to talk about sleep.

I have been sleeping a lot lately, and I am not sure why. I was thinking I was just using it as an escape like I have in the past, and that is what I told my therapist last week. And I still think that is a big part of what is going on with me.

A highly dysfunctional but depressingly dominant part of me likes it just fine when I sleep for most of the time that I am not writing or socializing. Life on fast forward, with none of those awkward bits where I am bored and restless and don’t know what to do with myself.

When I am bored with being on the computer and don’t really need to sleep, but my massive anti-action bias make it nearly impossible to imagine doing anything else.

There are millions of things I could do, of course. Intellectually speaking. I could do the Xmas cards I bought weeks ago, for starters. And hey, how about some invigorating and liberating exercise? Everything says that this is how to get your blood sugar down. Just a little exercise, and poof. The muscles suck up the blood glucose to make glucagen, and down the ambient level goes.

But sleep is easier… not better. Just easier.

And I seem preordained to just follow the path of least resistance, which inevitably leads downhill.

Of course, there’s also the issue of psychological release. For a while, I was getting that from the writing, but now I am back to blogging, and it is not the same.

Or maybe it all boils down to sleep apnea. I don’t fucking know. My CPAP machine continues to sit there, unused, gathering dust. For all I know, the thing does not even work any more.

Or worse, it works just fine, and I am six feet away from salvation, and I have just been ignoring it for two, three years now because it sort of wasn’t working once and I got mad so I stopped without telling anybody and so… there it is.

I don’t know what the hell is wrong with me, and I am finding it increasingly hard to care.

I just get so damn sick and tired of being sick and tired. I want to find the way out, but I feel like when I do, I will be too much of a chickenshit to take it.

Maybe I am just all cramped up inside from holding things in too much. I don’t know.

All I know as I got 99 problems, and riches ain’t one.

Oh, did I forget to mention the depression caused by living so far below the poverty line that it is just a dim outline in the sky?

Fuck my life.

Wow, it feels weird to be back on the mic after a whole month of just writing prose. I feel like I am dancing after a whole month of singing, and it is going to take me some time to get my feet back under me.

So what have I been doing? Well, writing another whole damned book, for one. This one is called The Road To Amarlea and it’s about two friends and their trip to the magical city of Amarlea.

It is meant to be funny fantasy a la Terry Prachett’s Discwold series, Robert Aspirin’s Myth series, Piers Anthony’s Xanth books, and the Malady of Magicks series by Craig Shaw Gardner.

Of the above, the closest to my style (and that is not an accident) is Pratchett. And not just in the obvious Douglas Adams-ish authorial voice. I hope I also put the sort of warmth and wit into my writing as he does. I would never claim to be as good as him (though I long to be), but I hope to emulate his gentle yet keen wit, his lovable quirky characters, his deft interweaving of the comic with the profound, and of course, his massive financial success.

Mostly that last bit, really. (Joking, people. Relax.)

I am worried, however, because I am pretty sure that I sort of forgot to be funny for long stretches of the book. I got really into telling other parts of the story and I am afraid I wandered rather far afield, as I am wont to do, especially when I head out into the writer’s wilderness with nothing but a few characters, a couple of scenes, and a vague destination in mind.

That is something I will have to try to fix in editing. Which is where I am now : editing the damn thing.

And having just edited two parts of it, I can say this definitely : editing is so much less fun than writing, it’s not even funny.

Writing the rough draft is fun. Very arduous fun, but fun nevertheless. I get to really stretch and expand and strengthen my imagination, work on my authorial voice, make up what happens next each day, spin stories, make up funny stuff, spend time in a world of my own making, and best of all, create.

That’s what I like to do. I am a creator, an artist, a maker, a progenitor. It is that act of creative birth that motivates me. I have so much creativity inside me, so many words and thoughts and ideas and emotions crying for release, that when I finally get around to letting them out through these busy typing fingers of mine, the relief is so profound that when I am done, the selfish and shortsighted side of me wants to just roll over and go to sleep.

Yes, that was a sexual metaphor. Sorry about that. What can I say, I am a man. Everything is about releasing our energies into the world to us.

But of course, this whole tendency to want to forget what I have done and move on to the next thing (what a pig!) of mine is not going to lead to a satisfying and lucrative writing career.

Nobody pays the big bucks (or even the small change) for someone’s rough draft. All the writing books say that you have to make it as good as you possibly can before you even think about sending it to a publisher. And so even though it goes against every grain of my lazy progenitor nature, I have to cuddle up with my book and stay awake long enough to edit the goddamned thing.

And I don’t like it. But I will do it.

And when I am done, I will make the edited version available to you, the readers, and then, God willing and the crick don’t rise, I will turn it into an eBook and sell it online.

I plan to fix up last year’s book too, and make it available as an eBook.

Or maybe not. I would prefer to go the eBook route, because I honestly want as little between me and reader as possible, for both financial and artistic reasons.

As a writer, all that matters to me is connecting with my audience. I have developed a definition of a writer as a person with a desperately strong need to communicate with people without them being in the same room. And that describes me pretty well.

After all, if I wasn’t shy, I guess I would just talk to people. Maybe.

Anyhow, I would rather sell a book directly to the audience with any goddamned gatekeepers in the way. Now that it is possible to do so (without needing to have the capital to self-publish), I view the entire traditional publishing industry as a completely unnecessary impedance to the artist/art consumer relationship, which is all that has ever mattered to art.

But… there is this little voice inside my head that says “But what if a big publisher WOULD publish it. What if you could have traditional success. Books with your name on them sitting on people’s shelves. Nice gat advances in the bank. Book tours all over the world, all expenses paid. You could HAVE ALL THAT. ”

And that sounds pretty good. I think my writing might not be all that polished yet, but I think the stories I tell are good ones, and that is more important than formal perfection anyhow.

So perhaps I will hedge my bets by sending one book to a publisher, and the other, I will eBook.

And seeing as I went to considerable trouble to retain first publishing rights of my latest magnet opus, I suppose it would make sense to send that one out to the Book Police.

My hope would be that if I have enough eBook success, I will attract a real world publisher, and have the best of both worlds.

So wish me well folks! Seeya tomorrow.