I am not even going to pretend that I have any idea what to write about today. I am bereft of intention and so, fair warning, I will be winging it for the next 1000 words or so, give or take.

I mean, even more than usual, that is.

I seem to be experience the flip side of the super sleepy times, namely, super awake times. That is, in its own way, just as irritating. I am tired and I want to sleep, but I am not exactly sleepy, and sleep just plain does not come.

So it is feast or famine in the Land of Nod for me, it seems. Why can’t I ever have what normal people take for granted? I would love to say my weirdness is entirely by choice.

But it ain’t, and it never has been. I came into the world weird and I truly think I never had a chance at being normal. Not with this hyper bright blinding light of an intellect scorching and distorting everything.

Right now, I am feeling kinda twitchy, kinda squirrelly, kinda on edge. That is pretty normal for sleep dep, or at least, frustrated desire for sleep.

Not being able to sleep when I want to sleep is one of the few things that can make me cranky. I have a low grade headache and my nerves are on edge. I have the urge to beat the crap out of an inanimate object till I got my angries out and then curl up on a sofa and nap.

The first bit is the tricky bit. Napping, I got down.

Going to go to Denny’s tonight and do our little Xmas between us roomies. I got all the presents, although Julian’s will not be here until the New Year.

Well, that is what happens when I don’t know what you want until the 20th. It’s not like I can afford expensive one day shipping.

I am a Super Saver Shipping kinda of guy.

And Joe’s gift is here on my hard drive. He gave me a list of mp3’s he wanted me to secure for him. After much futzing with Chrome extensions (not a shiny hair thing, it’s what Google Chrome calls addons) that purported to allow me to download mp3’s from YouTube but just plain did not work, I decided to go back to Video2Mp3.net, which is rather spammy, but at least it works, unlike my preferred site, YouTube-MP3.org, which used to work great but now works only sporadically.

I mean, it gives an error that “Google Inc doesn’t want you to be able to download this content’. Well duh! I kind of assumed that was already implicit in our relationship. It’s like going to a site that used to let you walk into a bank vault and suddenly it’s bricked over, with a sign saying “The bank does not want you taking its money” and a link to a petition to be allowed back in.

Luckily, Video2Mp3.net does not get hung up on such petty and outdated qualms. They rip the audio directly from the temporary FLV file that sits on your computer when you view a video on YouTube. The computer has to make such a file in order to buffer the video and provide you with at least a chance of a stutter free playback.

And Video2Mp3.net just yoinks the audio from there directly, and YouTube and their Google Masters are none the wiser.

See? All simple and legal like. And there is no way to prevent it, either. So stick that where the sun don’t shine and smoke it, you RIAA goons.

I have been a shameless data pirate since the days of vinyl. When we first got a tape cassette recorder, the first thing I did with it was record (through the air) some of my favorite tracks off of various LPs my family had. I recorded music off the radio all the time, then when the VCR came along, I recorded music videos off of MuchMusic almost obsessively.

Software piracy also happened. Heck, I pirated a video game for the Vic-20, and I used my brother’s dual deck ghetto blaster to do it. (Yes, my children, at one point, you could get a video game on an audio cassette. It was a strange and wondrous time. )

When we got our first PC, the piracy began in earnest. When the battle came down to a sense of ethical obligation to people I would never meet versus my voracious appetite for video games, the straight and narrow path never stood a chance.

Don’t Copy That Floppy? Yeah, get real, Magical Rapping Black Guy. I will copy that floppy till it’s melted and sloppy, Poppy.

I still remember the day that I learned about mp3s. The idea that I could get any song I wanted was so huge, I couldn’t take it all in at once. I just sat there, the rough explanation I had been given circling in my mind, waiting for there to be somewhere to land.

And then, of course, I went absolutely berserk getting every song I could think of, and then some. If you thought I had an appetite for video games and books, they are nothing compared to my appetite for music.

Video games and books, after all, keep you busy for hours. Music lasts three or four minutes per song. It takes so much more music to keep the tunes going, and I gots to have my TUNES.

So yeah. I have been a data pirate (yar!) for a long long time. The only reason it stops for long periods is that I am either using a video game device that makes piracy impossible (like cartridge based systems) or I have found such a rich trove of games that I will never run out (hello, Flash games online!).

Well, and occasionally, I actually have to money to buy video games. Like, legally.

Of all the means of getting my fix, that one is, historically, the weirdest.

Been pretty damned depressed lately, as alert readers have probably already guessed.

But I know why, or at least, part of why, and that means I am at least on the way out of the long dark tunnel. I feel better today than I have in a while.

And I figure it is mostly because I am finally caught up on sleep.

You see, I fell back into a bad habit without realizing it : being depressed by how much I was sleeping.

I had a few days where I slept around sixteen or so hours out of twenty four, and that can be pretty damned depressing if you let it be.

And for a while I knew this. I have written in this space before how proud I was of my ability to remember not to be depressed about how much I was sleeping.

But I guess I forgot all about that, as seems inevitable with me, and what is worse, I let the idea that I was choosing to sleep so much creep in, and that would make it all my fault and another sign that I am just pathetic and can’t handle anything, and yadda yadda yadda, shame spiral, depression, self-loathing, and hating my stupid fucking life.

I was even talking to my therapist today about all the usual depressive things, like lack of motivation, and feeling like I had no zest for living, no reason to be awake. If your life is incredibly unrewarding, why not sleep all the time? What is worth staying awake for, anyhow?

And there is definitely some truth to that. I do not enjoy my life all that much. I enjoy bits and pieces of it, which is good. I love hanging out with my friends at a restaurant or back home in front of a video. I like hanging out with my online friends, although that seems weirdly unrewarding lately for a reason I can’t quite fathom.

I guess I enjoy playing games on Facebook. Or at least, I enjoy it enough to keep doing it, which is not exactly the strongest of endorsements, but it is all I got.

I am seriously considering getting myself a new Wii game as an Xmas gift to myself specifically because it will give me something to look forward to during the day, and something to do besides sleeping.

Is that sad, or what? But whatever helps, I guess.

But lack of zeal for living aside, I do not only sleep for escape.

Sometimes I sleep because I am goddamned tired and the low quality of my sleep makes me run up a huge sleep debt that has to be paid off in very big installments.

So I end up being super sleepy for two or three days. I know all these things, and yet, somehow, I forgot. I started thinking the old bad way, looking for an excuse to hate myself and my life.

I am not surprised that all that negativity was looking for a way to go back along the same old pathways. I have not made much progress in finding new, less destructive, more acceptable ways for the same emotions to express themselves.

And well, if you block the old pipes without opening enough new pipes, things are bound to back up and cause a huge mess for you to deal with.

I guess I sort of thought that if I blocked off the self-loathing, the anger and frustration it expressed (and caused) would just naturally find another outlet.

I mean, it would have to, wouldn’t it?

But um, not necessarily, as it turns out. I figure the problem must be that I have not yet truly faced the issues that cause all that anger and resentment and frustration and rage in the first place.

Issues with my past, issues stemming from all the time I have spent sick, issues, issues, issues.

And the thing is, dealing with all that anger I have stored up over the years is a damned tricky proposition. I fear my own rage and so I have, historically, walled it up like in “The Cask of Amontillado” and ignored it while trying to live my life.

The sort of dark, violent, angry thoughts I end up thinking when I try to deal with it do not exactly encourage self-exploration along those lines. I really worry about what I would be capable of if I decided I just did not give a shit any more, and that scares me.

I just feel so close to madness sometimes. Like I could just snap.

But maybe that is all just a barking dog with no teeth. Maybe that is how my depression protects itself, by putting horrible thoughts into my head whenever I get close to the source of the problem.

If that was true, it would be safe for me to just dive into those emotions and see where they take me, see if I can vent them for good and reduce the pressure inside me. Certainly, I could see myself deriving great benefit from releasing all that nasty dark anger lying like a lump inside me.

Or at least some of it, for crying out loud.

But how? I grasp the theory of dealing with your emotions by going someplace quiet and safe and just giving yourself permission to feel everything while at the same time firmly establishing that you are not going to act on any of the emotions.

The metaphor is that you watch your emotions pass through you like clouds through the sky, not trying to control them but not letting them control you, either.

But that is a lot easier to do with things like grief or sadness or regret. Those are naturally fairly passive emotions that do not demand action.

Anger, on the other hand, inherently demands action as its form of expression. Just sitting there letting the rage wash over me without doing anything with it sounds really, really hard.

And if that dam should happen to break…..

Well, I would end up some sort of headline.