This song seems appropriate for today.

It’s one of my favorite sad songs ever, and today, I feel sad.

So, no different that yesterday, really. I feel listless and restless and depressed. I feel like my life is beyond my control and headed in entirely the wrong direction. I feel vulnerable and miserable and have a sense of dread that I just can’t seem to shake.

So, not a good day, mood-wise.

The lower Paxil dose might have something to do with it. I am pondering going back to 35 mg for a day or two to see if that helps. But I think I am dealing with something deeper than that.

And there is no point in turning up the anesthetic now if I am dealing with some shit that really needs to be dealt with. I might as well just ride it out and come out the other side of it stronger and more stable for the effort.

Still, the signs are not great. I find myself saying “I hate my life!” to myself a lot lately, and that is always a bad sign. I feel like everything in my life is pointless and stupid and futile. I long to just leave everything behind and start my life over again.

Push reset and start over again with what I know now. I mean, I could hardly do worse, right?

But life is not a video game. You make your choices and then you are stuck with them, no matter what. There are no save games to go back to and there is no reset button to press when you realize you have made a whole bunch og mistakes and it would be easier just to start over.

You are where you are and nothing can change that. If you want to get back to where you were before, you are going to have to do at least as much work to get there as you did before. Probably a lot more.

And to be honest, the journey is likely futile anyhow. The moments of our lives are about not just where we are but who we are, and who we are is always changing.

It might not seem like it. For very good reason, we always think of ourselves as the same person we have always been. Anything else would be too big a threat to our sense of self, and our sense of self is the basis for our entire identity, which is in turn the base of our entire personalities.

So it is easy (and probably wise) not to notice the way each day changes us. But you are not the same person you were yesterday, and neither am I. Every moment of our lives changes us just a tiny bit, and like erosion, those little changes add up to enormous ones given enough time.

Think of a candle. Whether it is freshly lit or nearly burned all the way down, it is the same candle. And yet, it changes so much as it burns.

Ergo, even if you get back to exactly where you were before, it will not be the same. You are a different person now, and that means that, sadly, you truly cannot go home again.

Our only hope in life, then, is to face forward and constantly seek a better situation for ourselves in the future rather than fall into the trap of facing backwards and longing for that which can never return.

Still, sometimes I wish I could just walk away from everything I know, sell all my possessions except what will fit on my back, give away what I cannot sell, and just head out on the open road in search of some place where I can be happy.

Someplace where nobody knows me and I have no history, and so I can start over, deciding who I am going to be all over again. Make up an entirely fictional past for myself. Cover up the fact that I have been nothing but a loser my entire life. Pretend I was somebody, once. And then work on becoming somebody again. Erase my mistakes and start over again. Push that reset button.

I do not really have a point I want to go back to, not really. College, I suppose. I was pretty happy way back then. I had courses and friends and felt like my life was going somewhere.

And if I had the opportunity to go back to school, even at my advanced age, I would jump on it in a second. I would complete my studies in psychology, become a therapist, and set up a nice little practice somewhere, and spend my days helping people get through their own problems.

I would like to think that I have a special insight into the world of the depressed. After all, I have been living there for nearly two decades.

Or maybe I would take creative writing. I don’t know. I suppose if I am dreaming, what I would really like to do is take a writing for television degree at a broadcasting college and then get into the biz. Writing for television is my greatest dream.

And you know what? It’s good to dream. Dreams bring hope, even big fluffy impractical dreams that you know damned well are never going to happen. They still help fill your world with a sense of possibility.

Of course, eventually you have to put away the dreams and start to strive. And it is that striving part that I have trouble with so far. Picking a direction and sticking to it until you get somewhere.

Instead I dither and wobble and walk those long slow sad circles.

But who knows, maybe it is all just a chemical imbalance in my brain, not enough norepinephron in my brain for me to be truly motivated to do anything.

If so, come the beginning of next month, I might just finally get what I need to succeed.

And then, maybe, I can forgive myself for being such a loser.

Or at least get on with my life.

Today has been kind of crappy.

Crappy in the usual ways. Slept a whole bunch, and as usual, the sleep got more unpleasant in the afternoon.

The morning sleep, aided by Quetiapine, was pleasant enough. Some dreams, some restlessness, but overall it was solid enough sleep.

But after lunch, I was still pretty sleepy, so I went back to sleep and sure enough, it was the worse kind of sleep, the kind with hyper-vivid dreaming, waking up soaked in my own sweat feeling disoriented and dissasociative, and frankly, not finding it restful at all.

More like I had been keelhauled on the Dead Sea.

So I woke up all groggy and fucked up around 4:30 PM, and honestly what I wanted most was to go right the hell back to sleep, but no, I forced myself to get up and mess about on the computer for a bit because I knew that if I went back to sleep, I would likely sleep for at least three hours and then I would wake up with really low blood sugar and my eat/sleep schedule all fucked up.

And I have just barely gotten back onto my usual schedule from last weekend anyhow.

So I forced myself into consciousness. My plan was to stay awake long enough to eat supper then go back to sleep and do this writing when I got up.

As so often happens, though, the act of keeping myself awake woke me up, so by the time I ate supper, my sleepiness had mostly evaporated.

And that’s where things start getting a little tricky, and highly idiosyncratic to myself.

The sane and logical thing would be to then say “Oh, I am not sleepy any more. Great! Time to go do that writing and then see what else the evening brings. ” Right?

But as I have talked about before, I have this strange problem where once I plan to do something, it is very hard for me to change or scrap than plan merely because it has become obsolete and no longer makes any damned sense.

Ergo, I tried to make myself sleep after supper anyhow, and thus spent a stressful and futile hour and a half or so trying to sleep when all I really wanted to do was get up and do something.

Since then, I have been pondering just what the fuck is wrong with my soggy brain.

There is definitely something wrong with the machinery of motivation and reward. Besides this strange inability to change my plans when circumstances change, I have also noticed that I do not get the right amount of reward when I do something that takes a lot of effort.

Example : say I finally finish a difficult level in a video game. You would think that I would then feel really great. Triumph! Victory! Celebration!

But it just does not work that way. Most often, the most I feel is a cold sense of accomplishment and an overwhelming feeling of depression instead. As if I wonder why I put all that effort into, or at least, the amount of effort it took has drained me to the point where it is impossible to summon up the energy to feel the kind of powerful reward that I should.

Now it is not hard to imagine how that would mess up your motivational structure. Your efforts go unrewarded in a very deep and intimate way. Even if you put in your all and triumph over the forces of evil, you do not feel like you have won. No joy, no exultation. Just grim satisfaction at best.

The tendency to bull through and complete plans no matter what might, therefore, have developed as a way to get things done despite this. The plan, such as it is, gets lodged deep into my intentional machinery, and part of me is so happy to have a sense of purpose for once that my mind resists going back to the unfocused and purposeless state even when that is the sensible thing to do.

If only this lead to the kind of useful, highly determined action plans that lead me to do great things, or at least things that would improve my lot in life.

But no, they tend to always revolve around two simple animal needs : food, and sleep. And that provides a further clue as to what is going on, I think.

Food and sleep are both high reward activities. They satisfy primal needs and they are highly reliable and low effort ways to secure pleasure.

So these weird plans that form in my mind and can’t change are, I think, about more than just the joy of having a sense of purpose for a time. They have to do from the depressive’s deep pleasure starvation due to the anhedonia caused by low serotonin levels.

That is why I am increasingly certain that all depressives are addicts. Only our pleasures vary. One depressive might drink, another might eat way too many high reward foods, still another might use the rush of purpose and self-righteousness from anger as their medication.

Life is so unrewarding to us because of the chemical imbalance that we are forced to cling to whatever provides a strong and reliable enough source of reward to cut through the anhedonic fog and give us some kind of sense that life is worth living.

And for me, those are food, sleep, and video games, in roughly that order.

And here I am, nearing the end of my daily writing, and feeling the urge to slow down and do more other things in other windows because deep down, I don’t want this sense of purpose and focus to end either.

After all, this damned blog is the only vaguely worthwhile thing I do most days, and even it is not exactly going to lead me to fame and fortune.

But if gives me something to look forward to and something to do with my energies and helps me get through every day with just a tiny shred of hope.

And that means the world to me.

Hmm, where to begin. At the beginning, I suppose, wherever THAT is.

Well, first off, I should let you all know that I am feeling a lot better than I was yesterday. I just have to dump out all those negative emotions sometimes, and this blog is the organ I have developed for that.

So thank you all for touching my organ. I really mean it.

There was bound to be a fair bit of turbulence unleashed by lowering my Paxil dose, going to a convention, getting behind on sleep, and all that razzmatazz.

And I might not be all the way through the woods yet. But I have confidence that I will make it to happy little village of the New Normal and then take a break on my journey until the wanderlust stirs the embers of my soul once more and it is time to get back on the road and travel anew.

Gosh, I use words all pretty like.

In less local news, all of Canada is in mourning for a true Canadian legend, Stompin’ Tom Connors, who wrote songs about this great nation back when we had no appetite for them, and just kept on traveling around Canada leaving songs behind like a musical Johnny Appleseed, winning people over village by village, tavern by tavern, until we finally grew up enough to appreciate him.

His song are simple, heartfelt, and capture the spirit of the nation from the points of view of all the places he traveled in this great wide deep land of ours. He believed in Canada more than Canadians did, and gave us a vision of ourselves where we mattered just as much as our noisy neighbors to the South.

To me, that is a true testament to the power of art to transform a society. We Canadians have a hard time defining ourselves as a people, and the best Canadian art holds up a mirror to our unique culture and gives us a better sense of ourselves.

This, Stompin’ Tom did. I will confess, I was never a big fan. Partly that is simply because I have never been much into country and western music. And partly it is because of this song right here.

Growing up on Prince Edward Island, I was subjected to that song fairly often at this and that event, and even had to gaze upon some poor Islander dressed up as the titular Bud.

(Imagine how you would feel about your life trajectory after finding yourself step-dancing (think tapdancing but whiter) in a giant smiling potato costume. ) (Sorry Wayne. )

And let’s just say that the song did not exactly fill me with pride about my place of birth. I can only assume that I felt about that song the way Australians feel about Waltzing Matilda. To be brutally honest, when I heard it, I tended to wince and want to hide from shame.

But now I listen to it as a more mature adult, who incidentally has not lived on the Island for well over a decade, and now it seems pleasant enough.

Dorky, but pleasant.

Plus, it is probably the most famous song in existence that actually mentions my home town of Summerside, Prince Edward Island, where I was born and raised and lived probably seventy percent of my life.

I do not think about where I come from much, but it’s undoubtedly an enormous part of me and you cannot cut yourself off from where you are from without cutting off a part of yourself.

And I do miss my home town sometimes, which is probably why I often go there in my dreams. I know its streets well, and I miss all the family I have there.

So thank you, Tom, for taking where I come from seriously enough to write a silly little song about it and give us something of our own.

What else. Well, it’s gonna be a cheap couple of weeks. I got $100 to see me till the 20th, and that is not a lot of dough, brother.

Just enough for Denny’s and my usual snacks and pop. Oh well, there is always a financial refractory period after a convention, especially for the likes of me, clinging as I do to the boot-heel of society.

I should really do something about my low financial status. I could at least try to get on the higher level of disability, which would help huge. About $200/month more, access to a yearly bus pass, and access to greater educational opportunities.

So why don’t I do it? Laziness, inertia, lack of focus, lack of drive, timidity. It all amounts to the same thing, a tendency to hold back from life and cling to my dirty little perch like a bird that is afraid of flying.

But every day I get a little better, even if now and then it does not feel that way. Sometimes it feels like I never get anywhere in life, just keeping pacing the yard in the same slow sad circles.

Luckily, deep down, I know better. I know that the upward spiral can fool you into thinking you are going in circles, but you are really going ever upward.

Maybe not in a straight line, but since when have I done anything straight? I was born bent. Everything I do is crooked and dented and perpendicular and sideways and wrong.

Yet somehow, I muddle through. Life goes on. The river flows ever onward, and yet, the river also remains.

And somehow, day after day, I am still here. I keep going on and remaining too. I have faith that I will unlock myself one day and move out of my shallow little life into the bigger, broader world.

And once I am out there, I will do my best to catch up on all the life experiences that have been denied me by the cruel embrace of mental illness.

I swear, give me just a minimum wage level of income, and I will show the world some serious shit.

I haven’t really been talking about it, but I have had some periods of serious depression lately, and I figured this is the space to talk about potential reasons why.

The most obvious and prosaic is that the reduction in my Paxil dosage is finally catching up to me and I am just now feeling the negative effects of the slippage.

That is probably the bulk of the reason why. At least, it is the most obvious and sensible explanation, and what the hell, those are often true.

Boring, but true.

Another factor : the depletion of all my mental resources caused by my three day social bender at VancouFur last weekend. Not only did I go three days without an appreciable quantity of sleep, but I also burned my social coping candle at both ends, and that is something that we introverted types do at our own peril.

The definition of introversion is that social activity drains you rather than charges you up, and while I greatly enjoyed all the stuff I did on the weekend, it also took its toll.

And I have to admit, not everything went well. My lack of sleep made it hard to participate in the convention as fully as I would have liked. I spent a lot of the time between events just cudgeling my brain to keep myself from falling asleep in the lobby.

Hotels frown on that sort of thing.

And then there was Saturday night, which depresses me just thinking about it because what went does was so exactly like me and my fucking mental problems that it is just plain sad and absurd and pathetic.

Originally, I was going to go to a very fun sounding event, a Bad Movie Night featuring a bunch of stuff from the MST3K/RiffTrax crew, and I was quite looking forward to it. Love those guys!

But Joe, Julian, and I had some time to kill between supper at ABC and the event, so we went back up to our motel room to rest, and rest we did.

In fact, we fell asleep. Woke up at around 10:30 pm, which meant the event had already been going for like half an hour. No big deal.

But then I made a very stupid decision and decided to stay in the room instead of going to the event. I was so amazed that I had gotten any sleep at all that I guess I wanted to strike while the iron was hot and capitalize on the opportunity.

Yet even while I was making the decision, I knew it was wrong. There was a voice screaming in my head, saying “No, no, no, you idiot, you know you are going to regret this, don’t do it!”

Even as Joe asked me if I wanted to come with them, and I told him I had decided to stay and catch up on sleep, I felt like I was two people, the one saying the stupid thing and the one who knew better.

I honestly felt like I had no control over my actions, like I was just a puppet for my worse instincts. The words just came out of my mouth and I knew damned well they were wrong.

So Joe and Julian left, and I try to go back to sleep, but of course, now I can’t. And so I am stuck sitting in the hotel room thinking about how fucking stupid I am to have given up the opportunity to have a good time. And after that, all I could think of was how all those people were having a great time while I was stuck back at the hotel room watching TV and hating myself.

And the thing is, I knew that if I called Joe and asked very, very nicely, there was a chance he could come pick me up and I could join the fun. Or I could have called down to the front desk to see if there were any shuttle buses available. Or I could have called a cab. I mean, how expensive can a five block cab ride be, anyhow?

For that matter, I could have walked that far.

But no, I got locked into this self-defeating mental state where I was angry at myself and depressed and anxious and feeling like I wanted to jump out of my own skin, but was not actually capable of doing anything to rectify the situation, which of course only made me more upset.

So that was a bad time. And looking back, I know how irrational it all was, but at the time, I was stuck in the basement of Hell, locked in a box called mental illness with no way out.

And that was depressing. But I was doing fairly good at getting over it, or so I thought, and then I looked up the Harlem Shake video we made at the con, and I saw this :

For those of you who do not know me in the flesh, I am the hugely, grotesquely, obscenely fat guy in the white shirt, suspenders, beard, and glasses.

Seeing myself in that video makes me realize just what a fat sack of shit I really am. I had no idea I was so extraordinarily… egg-shaped. Ovoid. Bulbous. Ridiculous. Grotesque.

Turns out, it was smart of me to avoid looking in mirrors all these years, although there is no mirror in the world that could give you a look of yourself quite like that.

It makes me wonder how anyone can bear to even be seen with me. It has sent me into a pretty bad depression for the last day or so.

I guess I will get over it eventually. I have no choice. It’s get over it, or it will kill me.

But a lot of the old feelings are back. Feeling like I am a fat freak, a repulsive and disgusting creature that is nothing but a superating tumour on the heel of society’s foot.

Oh. And pushing forty with no life lived and no contribution to society.

Why do I go on?

Today has been taxing in more ways than one.

First, in the literal sense, because today I did my taxes. Note that I did not say I “paid” my taxes today. And that has nothing to do with the fact that I live on $8K per year ($7,930.14 last year, to be precise) and therefore have no taxable income.

No, I never said I “paid” my taxes when I just mean I did my taxes for the year because that is the literal truth of the action. If you are lucky enough to be a taxpayer, you pay your taxes all year. They come right off your paycheck.

When tax time comes around (April for you Americans), you get to find out how much you get back. That is like the opposite of paying your taxes.

I honestly think that society would be a lot more peaceful and we would accept the financial responsibility of living in the best kind of society the world has ever produced if we could simply eliminate this troublesome yearly ritual.

Having to either negotiate intensely complicated forests of forms all by yourself, or pay some professional to do it who always makes you feel like a reprobate for not saving every damned receipt, sure makes people feel a lot more heavily taxed than they truly are.

If you took the yearly torture period out of the equation, people would not feel like they are being made to suffer by a dangerous and arbitrary authority figure like the government and I think society as a whole would proceed on a much smoother and more comfortable basis.

Instead, we have this bullshit we all must go through every year that seems almost deliberately designed to create frustration, fear, resentment, and stress in the populace.

And this is the only time of the year that one’s financial role in society is brought to one’s attention, so it’s the only memory most people have of their government. It is no wonder that so many people think of the government as only this mean and punishing thing that takes their money away.

If you had a relative who only showed up when something terrible had happened, you could be forgiven for getting to really hate that relative, even if he is just the bearer of the bad news.

Or it’s like how people end up resenting their dentists because every time they see the guy (or gal), they get painfully poked and prodded in the mouth with metal instruments and then judged, and based on that judgment, they might be assigned tortuous and expensive penance in the form of further dental work.

Sure, as adults, we know that the dentist is just doing their job and that we should be glad anyone is willing to do this thankless and fairly disgusting and arduous job. We know that the dentist makes us better off in the long run, and that we should be glad these people are there.

But we are not adults all of the time, and a lot of the time, we end up hating the very sight of our dentist and do silly things like cancel appointments or “forget” them, and imagine our dentists to secretly be sadistic and greedy.

And the same goes for government. This yearly supplication before the altar of taxation forms the one clear impression of the otherwise invisible and unobtrusive workings of government that most people will get, and the impression it leaves is frankly terrible.

Not for me, of course. I have a very low stress life and for the likes of me, filling out taxes is fairly easy and simple. I only have one source of income, and with an income as low as mine, the very concept of deductions is ludicrous. Deductions from what? And I have no other factors to complicate things.

So doing my taxes takes around half an hour, and mostly consists of putting in my personal information and saying “no thanks, does not apply” to a bunch of crap like RRSP contributions, income from rental properties, and the amortized mortgage of a common-law spouse.

I am a little worried that it said I did not rate a refund check, though. Did Harper get rid of the standard deduction or something? If so, he fucking sucks.

Or did I somehow bypass the standard deduction when I skipper other deductions? If so, Turbo Tax really should have warned me about that shit.

It is kind of important to me. Most years, I have gotten something like $150 back. I have always assumed that this was basically an incentive program to get the wretchedly poor like myself to bother to fill out our tax forms.

Otherwise, honestly, what’s in it for us?

But I didn’t get one last year, and now, maybe not this year either. Last year, I chalked it up to filling out my taxes without my t5007 form handy and having to guess what my income had been in 2011.

But this year, I did everything right. So I should be getting some kind of cheque. Right?

As for the nonliteral sense of taxing, I have been pretty tired for most of the day and spent a lot of it asleep. No surprise there. But I feel like I am on my way to being caught up on sleep after my accidental sleep dep from the convention.

Another good night’s sleep, and I should be at least back to my normal level of terrible sleep.

Thank goodness for the quetiapine, though. Thanks to it, I am at least guaranteed five or six hours of solid sleep a night.

Might not sound like much, but I went many years never sleeping more than 3 hours in a row, and for most people, that is just plain not enough.

You need to sleep long enough to get that really deep down body-restoring, brain-refreshing, long term memory encoding sleep that we complicated naked beach apes need so badly.

And now… to nap.

And now, the aftermath period. No, I am not talking about the period after Math class at your local high school. I mean, the aftermath of my attending VancouFur 2013.

First off, sorry there was no Friday Science Whatever on Friday. I just did not have the time or energy to write it between waking up, taking a shower, getting packed up, eating lunch, and then busting out for the con Friday afternoon.

As for Sunday, we were back in town around supper time, but I was busy catching up on hangout time with Felicity and the gang and did not have time to do one then, either.

So there is a three day period with no entries from yours truly. I feel a little weird about that, but the compulsion will heal and I am glad to get back to my daily routine.

Not that I didn’t have two tons of fun at the convention. I did. I had a ball. It was great to have a little vacation from my everyday life and spend the time just doing what seems fun at the time.

And it was great to get to see the people I don’t see any more since I sort of wandered out of the local furry fandom scene when things got just a wee bit more crowded than I could handle. I am seriously pondering trying to get back into the local scene so I can be a more social person and get to use my dormant and rusty social skills more often.

I really have no reason to hide away. I am an intelligent, charming, likable fellow with a sweet and thoughtful personality and a great sense of humour. Sure, I get sad sometimes, and I am certainly not everybody’s cup of tea, but still. I have nothing to be ashamed of, and I have a lot to give this crazy old world. I just have to go on out there and give it.

Work my magic on the world, and with luck, it will reward me with the good things I crave.

You know, like $money$. And all the lovely things it buys. Little luxuries like dignity and comfort and pleasure and access to life.

Gee, that would be nice.

Granted, I would have had even more fun at the convention if I had not messed things up a little by forgetting something kind of important.

See, I forgot my sleeping pills, and that presented a serious problem because the main withdrawal symptom of my particular sleeping pill, quetiapine, is insomnia. So I barely slept at all all weekend, and spent many late night hours awake and bored and lonely and irritated with myself, waiting for the rest of the world to wake up.

That is not a wonderful way to be, and so I really wish I had brought the damned pills. I was very conscientious about all my other medical needs. I carefully packed up my insulin injection kit, making sure I had needle tips and cotton swabs, and my blood testing kit, with lancets and test strips aplenty.

And I counted out my oral meds, making sure I had enough of every one of those in my little metal travel meds case. It was all so neat and orderly.

But I forgot the sleeping pills because I don’t take them at the same time as any of my other meds. I was so focused on the other meds that I forgot the outlier, and hence I was stuck sans quetiapine for the whole weekend.

And so I went a weekend with almost no sleep, and that ain’t healthy.

So when I got back to town, and after spending a pleasant evening hanging with Felicity, Joe, and Julian, I deliberately took three quetiapine instead of the usual two. I figured, by now I must need to sleep, I can’t afford to leave anything to chance. Might as well bring on the sleep avalanche deliberately.

So I slept for pretty much the entirety of today, which should surprise absolutely nobody. Had plenty of dreams, a few which were, shall we say, unsuitable for sharing. But very nice.

I also had a dream where I was walking through some nameless city when I spotting a black butterfly hovering at someone’s window. It was around the size of a large kite, and there was something sleek and shadowy about it.

As I watched, its form shifted and shimmered like it was made of a black, oily smoke. It briefly became a inky cloud, then turned into this spooky black shadow in the shape of a man in a long black trench-coat wearing a fedora.

That then began flowing over various windows, and I felt strongly that it was looking for some kind of opening that would allow it to go victimize some hapless person in a horrible way.

And I was angry, and indignant. Here they were, doing this in broad daylight, like nobody could see them! I found that incredibly offensive. So I started yelling at it.

“Hey, asshole! Hey you, yeah you! I can see you, asshole! Knock it off or I am calling the cops!”

And things like that. Apparently, in the world of my dreams, black shadowy shapeshifting clouds are a fairly commonplace kind of criminal, and ones that should at least have enough shame about their chosen profession to operate in the dark of night.

Sadly, the dream ended there, or at least, that’s all I remember. That is too bad. It was very cinematic and I would love to have seen what I did next.

I was pretty pissed off. I am pretty sure I would have chased the damn thing down somehow. Make a citizen’s arrest, I guess.

Damn shadow demons these days, they got no respect.

So that was today. I imagine that I am not entirely done with catching up on sleep, so I expect I will sleep a fair bit more.

And that’s it for today. I will hopefully begin turning my convention notes into an actual con report tomorrow. If so, it will be posted to this space.

As for me, it’s time to go back to bed.