A version of this song has started me thinking about children and fear of the dark.

Kind of odd that one of the best songs from one of the best heavy metal bands is about something as simple and innocent as childhood fears, isn’t it?

But really, it makes sense. Being afraid of the dark is a nearly universal rite of passage, something most of us go through when we are children, and a few of us, the adult nyctophobics, it does not stop there.

So just what is this fear? Why is it so common in children? And how do we get over it?

First, I will share my own personal experience with this fear.

I clearly remember being quite terrified of the dark. It took me a long time to get over it. If it had not been for the gentle pressure of my parents and my siblings, I might not have gotten over it at all.

Early in my childhood, I shared a bedroom with my older brother David, and so it was not exactly up to me whether the light was on or not.

Knowing that my brother is a fairly light sleeper to this day, I can only assume that we both slept with the light off every day. But we are talking myself at maybe three years of age, so my memories of that time are not exactly distinct.

But I do not remember ever being afraid of the dark way back then. I guess with my big brother snoring on the bunk bed above me, I felt safe. Or maybe I was just not old enough to be paranoid and neurotic yet. I remember being lonely sometimes when I would wake up at night and everyone else was asleep, and wishing I had someone to talk to, but no fear.

So it was not until my father build an extension onto our house and suddenly every kid got their own bedroom. which meant that suddenly, I was sleeping alone for the first time.

And that is when the trouble started. I remember, in fact, not being really all that keen on the idea of having a bedroom all to myself if it meant I was all alone, but I was far too young to be able to sufficiently articulate that idea, let alone bold enough to go against what everyone else in the family clearly thought was a great thing.

I think I complained about it to my brother Dave once, and that was it.

So there I was, a wee thing not yet of school age, sleeping alone at night for the first time. But nobody was asking me to sleep in the dark yet, so things were not too bad.

But then my siblings and my parents started pressuring me to learn to sleep in the dark. At the time I could not see the point of this, but what kid could? It just seemed that they were needlessly making life harder for me when the light in my room worked just fine.

The first step was to take away the other lamps in my room, leaving me only with the “night light” attached to the head of my bed.

I put “night light” in quotes because since then, I have discovered what a “night light” normally means. Usually, it is something plugged into an outlet that provides a soft, gentle, reassuring glow for the child. Something to make the darkness less than total, and yet, still not be bright enough to keep the child awake all night.

My “night light” was actually a perfectly normal 60W bulb in a plastic holder. It could easily light my entire room, and because it was literally right over my head, it hardly made any difference that the overhead light and the other lamp did not work any more.

But then came the pressure to turn that off when I wanted to go to sleep. And that was… not cool.

After I resisted that for a while, my parents decided on a compromise : I would turn out my “night light”, and they would close my door most of the way, and leave the light on in the hallway outside my room, and thus give me a sliver of light to cling to in the darkness.

And that lasted for a while. It took me a long time to get used to it, and I spent a lot of scary nights imagining that a ninja-like bogeyman, a human shaped creature completely covered, head to toe, in night-black clothing (not even eyeholes… all black) was tucked into the corner of my room opposite the head of my bed and just waiting for me to go to sleep so it could attack me.

But eventually I adjusted. Then, it was time for the last step : turning out the hall light. This was a move championed by my brother Dave, who had the bedroom next to mine and who was rather sick of the hall light keeping him awake at night.

And that seemed like a big deal at the time, but honestly, I got used to it pretty fast. It helped that my brother had been waiting till I fell asleep and then sneaking out to turn out the hall light anyhow.

Of course, as an adult, I want it to be as dark as possible in my room when I sleep, and I totally understand why my parents and siblings put me through what they did.

But why, exactly, was I afraid of the dark in the first place? What’s the big deal?

I think that, primarily, fear of the dark is fear of the unknown. When you are alone in the dark, you have effectively lost your primary sense, sight. The amount of information you have about your environment plummets to not even a quarter of what it was before.

And when you are a kid, you lack the mental defenses to distinguish between “I don’t know what is there” and “I know something awful is there!!!”

It is easy for your mind to project onto this blank blackness whatever fears and insecurities you have as a kid, and kids have plenty of those, being tiny people in a big scary world that they mostly do not understand at all.

Anytime anyone gets too nostalgic for childhood, I like to remind them of fear of the dark.

It is also possible, though, that our childhood fear of the dark is also influenced by a deep seated and quite sensible instinct for young humans to stay within the light of the fire that was keeping all those predators away at night.

Even us mighty humans are prey animals when we are young, and it would make sense to be scared of the dark when the dark could legitimately be filled with predators eager for a snack called “you”.

I think that might, even, be why we imagine horrible monsters in that darkness. Our instincts are telling us that there are predators out there, and our imaginations plus whatever we have seen that seems very scary combine to create these illusions.

And I don’t think that necessarily stops when we become adults, either. A lot of supposedly grownups seem quite willing to imagine, and believe, that the unknown things that frighten them must be incredibly dangerous, even if any reasonable examination would show them to be harmless and that their fears are wildly exaggerated or even entirely illusory.

Sure, we stop being afraid of the dark.

But some people never stop being afraid of the unknown, and they are quite capable of filling the voids in their knowledge with whatever bogeymen will justify that fear.

So I ask you, readers : were you afraid of the dark?

Hi there Livejournal friends! Yes, it’s been ages and ages since you heard from me. And for that, I apologize. Here is why :

First, the WordPress plugin I used for ages just plain stopped working. I figured, well, surely any day now, they will release a patch and it will start working again.

That has happened once or twice with other plugins, so I was not worried.

Then, one day, I realized I had been waiting for a month and a half. So, probably not going to happen any time soon.

So then I went to look for a new one via the WordPress archives, only to find out, to my enormous shock, that there was no suitable replacement.

This makes the lack of a patch to the one that works even more galling. I mean, I realize that Livejournal is somewhat of a landmark neighborhood now, and not at all the hotness that it once was, but come on.

So that is why you have not heard from me in a while. I know that I could repost my blog entries manually, but I am too damned lazy amd/or absentminded.

When I finish a blog entry, I press Publish and then forget it. On to the next thing. So it would be tricky for me to develop a new habit of publishing to my blog then reposting manually.

The Tumblr reposting plugin also stopped working. So I have been only visible on my actual blog at http://michaeljohnbertrand.com for the last few months.

One annoying thing : having to do this as an OpenOffice document because I have become so incredibly dependent on WordPress’ ever so handy (nearly) continuous onscreen word count and none of the other blogging platforms that I know of do that.

Sad that I can’t write without knowing how many words I am writing. But I have done this 1000 words a day thing for so long that I can’t function in an unstructured writing environment.

Anyhow, enough administrivia. How have I been doing, I hear at least one of you ask, hopefully?

Well, like always, my life consists of blogging, video games, television, and the very slow slog up the shallow grade of the very long road that we in the mental health consumer community call “recovery”.

So yeah. Depression is still sort of my main gig. I get very frustrated at the slow progress of my life sometimes, but that is highly counterproductive in the long run so I try to keep it down to a bare minimum.

In fact, I think learning to just accept that some things cannot be made to happen but can only be allowed to happen is quite a good spiritual lesson for me. One of the things that I have learned about myself recently is that have been wasting enormous amounts of energy trying to control the small things in my life and leaving very little of myself left for actually getting where I want to go.

So, as is the karmic lesson of all us Taurus types, I have been learning the fine art of just plain letting go of control. Or rather, to put it in Buddhist terms, the illusion of control.

Once you free yourself from the shackles of the illusion of control, you can save your will and your energies for the big things that truly matter to you and let the smaller things sort themselves out.

In fact, that is something I have been saying to myself a lot lately : “These things will sort themselves out eventually”.

It is difficult for me to accept that sometimes, like the libertarians say, things really do go a lot better without intervention.

I am an interventionist by nature. I would be a classic control freak if I had more energy and was a less mellow guy. Deep down, a part of me thinks “Nothing works unless I make it work!”

But that is just not true, and you can do yourself a world of hurt by trying to micromanage yourself like that. Human beings have a lot of perfectly good automatic systems that work great if the conscious mind just leaves them the hell alone to do their jobs instead of constantly second-guessing every last little thing and demanding constant progress reports.

Talk about inefficient! You end up being more about the process than the product, and that is a bad thing when the product is YOU.

So I am slowly learning to loosen up inside, stop poking around in my own guts trying to read the future from my own entrails so much, and not take things quite so seriously.

I know, it sounds odd to hear Mister Comedy Guy himself talk about taking life too seriously, but like a lot of funny people, I am also a bag of exploding neuroses, and a lot of us develop our ability to generate comedy because we are people who REALLY need to laugh.

It’s a defense mechanism, a self-soothing mechanism, a way to gain social acceptance if you are socially awkward, it’s a way to deal with conflict, it’s a floor wax, it’s a dessert topping.

As you can see, I still ramble on as much as ever. Aren’t you glad I haven’t gotten over that yet?

Well, what can I say? My words do not, in general, come to me as fully coherent and complete thoughts with a built in outline for the essay about a particular subject very often.

And honestly, a lot of the reason I blog is to give all the words in my head a place to go and frolic and be free.

Before I became a daily blogger, there was so much going on in my head at any given moment that it was like I went around in a haze of buzzing thoughts and ideas that wanted out.

Now, with this daily release, I can get at least some of them back, and that means I sleep a whole lot better at night.

Well, with this, and the drugs.

Mostly the drugs, really.

But blogging is in there somewhere, I swear!

I had one of those sudden revelations about myself recently :

I have never been controlled.

And by that, I have never been threatened or forced into obedience. Not by my parents or my teachers or my bosses or anyone else.

All my life, I have chosen to cooperate most of the time, and felt entirely free to withhold that cooperation if I felt I was being wronged.

So I never had to accept discipline in the most direct and basic sense. I don’t think I have ever done something purely out of fear of punishment. I have never felt like my life was not in my own hands.

And it occurs to me that most people are not that autonomous.

I am not exactly sure how I ended up so independent. The easy answer would be that my parents’ neglect of me kind of forced me to be that way, but that would be glib and facile and does not ring true to me.

I think I was fiercely independent from birth, or shortly thereafter. I have a strange blend of easygoing agreeability and absolute refusal to surrender one inch of my autonomy that makes me a complicated guy.

And you know what? Sometimes being complicated kinda sucks.

I have been probing my memories of what I was like before I ever went to school and got bullies lately in an effort to remember that I was a happy, charming, precocious little darling at one point.

And it occurs to me, as I look back at that time, that even then, I was remarkably autonomous for a child. My parents would take me to some event and I would get bored when nobody was paying attention to me and just wander off on my own to explore my surroundings.

And of course, then my poor parents had to search for me (I must have worried them so much! Sorry, Mom!), and usually they would find me talking to the scariest looking adult around, who was usually utterly bemused and bewildered (and charmed) by this little red-headed kid who talked like an adult.

Even then, though, my parents never used forced on me. I was never spanked or anything. I was not even verbally reprimanded that often. Partly that is because my parents had a distinctly laissez-faire attitude when it came to childrearing philosophies. And part of that is because I am not rebellious by nature, and generally genuinely wanted to do the right thing and make my parents or caretaker happy.

And speaking of caretakers, that time before I even went to school was ruled by my babysitter Betty, a tough but kind lady from the other side of the tracks, and she could handle me.

She was not any more physical with me than my parents were, but she was tough as nails and not inclined to put up with any crap from some smartass kid. So partly because I loved her, partly because I am by nature agreeable until I’m not, and a great deal because she had the force of personality to put me in my place, I was quite happy with her.

And I think that observation yields a great deal of insight to my character and nature, because I realize now that this set the bar pretty high for future people who would have to deal with me, like teachers.

My favorite teacher in elementary school was Mrs. Rogers, who most kids thought was a grumpy old battleaxe. She was definitely an old-school type teacher (so to speak) who predated the more touchy-feely buddy-buddy style of teaching that was all the rage during the 70s.

So she believed in discipline via strength of personality. She was not warm or pleasant and she was definitely not interested in being your friend.

And I adored her. I think it was because her strength of personality made me feel secure. She, like Betty, did not put up with any crap, and when you are a kid, you need someone who can stand up to you and be the authority figure in order to calm down and feel safe.

Very few of my teachers had that ability. Couple that with the fact that I was so bright that the school work was never difficult for me, so much so that I never even had to study, and you have a picture of someone who grew up with a very low amount of governance.

Whoopee, right? After all, authority sucks! Our freedom-loving culture teaches us that freedom is inherently good and hence more freedom is always better. Must have been a great childhood, right?

But no. I think we learn to govern ourselves by internalizing the governing we have received. I think that part of the reason I grew up so insecure and timid is precisely because I was that impossible, unreachable child that very few people could handle.

And so I almost never had that feeling of security that comes from knowing you are not alone in the world and that someone is looking after you and making sure you are OK and do not hurt yourself.

So I ended up having to govern myself, and a child, even a terribly bright one, is not very sophisticated when it comes to nuance or fine distinctions, and so I grew up feeling like the world was a dangerous place filled with booby-traps and that the only way to be safe was to have as little to do with it as possible. With nobody there to teach me how to deal with the world, what else could I do?

And sure, the bullying was a big part of that. I have no doubt of that.

But as I look back at my past from this new perspective, I am increasingly convinced that it was also because most adults simply did not know how to handle me.

And I was not impossible. A few teachers managed it just fine, as did Betty.

But it took a rare kind of person. Most of the time, there was nobody in my life who could handle me, and I did not feel secure.

And I think that this has a lot to do with why I am so insecure now.

Unpacking the past is hard work.

I am feeling sort of unwell today.

I keep cycling between sleepiness and painful wakefulness. I can’t seem to catch up with whatever it is my body and my brain want me to do. When I lay down, I lose the desire for sleep. When I stay up, I become very sleepy. It is really quite maddening.

More Wellbutrin adjusting, I suspect.

I had an anxiety attack last night. I was watching an episode of Mythbusters where they are testing a myth from a viral video that shows a guy surviving a fall from a three story building because he is wrapped in four inches of bubble wrap.

The video is obviously fake, because that is seriously not possible. Not only was it obviously a dummy shot when the daredevil was supposedly plummeting to the ground, but basic high school physics will tell you that falling three stories is like getting hit by a dump truck going the speed limit.

I think we tend to think of falling as a linear thing, where falling three times as far is only three times as bad. But gravity means acceleration and acceleration means a square function because the speed is always increasing. So three times as far is actually nine times as bad.

And I have to say, just as an aside, whoever made that viral video is an irresponsible douchebag. Sure, any intelligent person should be able to figure out that it must be fake, but people are not always intelligent, especially young people, and someone might just get the idea into their heads to emulate your oh so amusing video (after all, it must work, I saw it on YouTube), and end up seriously hurt or even dead. And that is way too high a price for YouTube hits.

Anyhow, Jamie and Adam did some small scale tests that pretty much totally confirmed what physics says, which is that four inches of bubble wrap does jack shit to improve your odds of survival.

It changed the deceleration force from 300 Gs to 260 Gs. Sure, that is a reduction of a little under fifteen percent, but either way, you are a bag of very dead goo.

But they wanted to see what it would take to actually make that kind of thing survivable, so after some highly scientific fiddling around, they decided to wrap Adam in layers of coils of bubble wrap, kind of like bed spring coils, and drop him from fifteen feet.

And they had a camera in with Adam to show us what this was like from the inside, and as the layers of bubble wrap were applied he looked at the camera and said “Good thing I don’t get claustrophobic!”.

That started my own claustrophobia kettle boiling, and then he started complaining how much all that bubble wrap weighed and how much it was pressing on him, and I guess I was over-empathizing because before I knew it, it was panic attack city.

I was seriously freaking out. I had to just mute the show and close my eyes and slow myself down so I could get a grip on myself. I really felt like I couldn’t breathe and the air was being squeezed out of me and I was about to suffocate.

So that was…. bad. I am guessing that I need to be a little more careful about anxiety triggers now that I am on less Paxil and plenty of Wellbutrin. I don’t feel like having to be even more careful in life, but I have to protect my precious emotional state.

Hell, I am feeling anxious just writing about this and remembering it all. I never truly appreciated how protected from my anxieties I have been all these years.

I guess I has forgotten what it was like for me in the bad old days when I was a ball of anxiety, neuroses , and irrational fears. I would really hate to end up there again, to be honest.

That would be the opposite of making me more functional. I hate to say it, but I think I would prefer being an unmotivated lump of lard that never gets anywhere in life if the alternative is to go back to being scared all the damn time.

But I am not anywhere near giving up on Wellbutrin just yet. I knew going into this that higher anxiety levels were one of the risks of going on Wellbutrin and that I might just have to deal with that on the way to becoming more well.

And I know that my anxiety levels are rising partly because my energy levels are rising and all that energy has to go somewhere. I need to learn to take that energy and use it and thus dissipate it via useful activity, instead of leaving it inside me like a stored charge just looking to arc out as a rush of panic or anxiety.

So my journey, as always, is all about translating potential into actual. For my own sanity, I am going to need to learn a new way of living, with more activity in it, rather than simply becoming a more frightened and unhappy lump of lard.

I have lived the life of an energy miser for so long that it is going to be incredibly hard to change that deep set habit.

I keep trying to tell myself, “I will be happier if I go find something to do!”, but I am having a very hard time making myself believe it. The opposite attitude runs so deep with me that it will take an effort equivalent to digging the Chunnel in order to drill through it.

But I will persist. This resistance is now my enemy, and I will continue to combat it until I defeat it.

After all, if the alternative is to be freaked out all the time, what choice do I have?

Now if you will excuse me, I am going to go lie down and think about all this.

I was an impossible child
Nobody could reach me

– ABBA, “What’s The Name Of The Game?”

That line really sticks with me, because I really was.

I was an impossible child. Between being incredibly bright and incredibly stubborn, plus having absolutely no inherent respect for authority whatsoever and ergo no fear of adults at all, I was incredibly hard to reach, emotionally and intellectually.

My mind was just too fast and too strong for adults to handle. All the usual ways of getting kids to toe the line just did not work on me. I could not be intimidated, browbeaten, cajoled, jollied, or intellectually overpowered at all.

It was just lucky for everyone involved that I am a basically agreeable and helpful person who only breaks the rules when he has a damned good reason.

Otherwise, I would likely have ended up in jail before I was 20.

And I know I have talked about this before on this blog, but I feel like I have not truly processed this revelation about myself yet.

I was just plain hard to deal with. I totally understand now why a lot of my teachers kept me at arm’s length and always seemed sort of tired and frustrated with me.

I used to be angry at them for that. Couldn’t they see how badly I needed them? They were my only friends in school. I just could not connect with my fellow students. We just lived on different planets. The gap between us was so enormous that there was just no chance of real connection.

And, well, they hated me. I was just a big bag of weird to them. Pretty much everything about me upset them in one way or another. My strangeness, my contempt for our school work (oh, how I wish I had thought to hide that..), the way I clung to the teachers, the bizarre disconnection between my low social status in the schoolyard (none lower!) and the apparent approval of the school system…

I can see now how they got the impression that I thought I was better than them. Sure, I never said I was better than them, nor did I believe that I was. But I acted like I thought I was something special and the normal rules do not apply to me, and actions speak a lot more loudly than words or attitudes ever did.

In fact, to be honest, I guess I did, in fact, think I was better than them and that the usual rules did not apply to me, in a sense. In the back of my mind, I thought anybody could do what I did, defy the teachers and get away with it, argue with them in class, and so on.

I guess I just thought I was especially clever and cool for being able to figure out that I could do it. And in that sense, I was kind of showing off when I did it, even though I would not have thought of it that way at the time.

And this wasn’t a constant thing, I was no Bart Simpson. But it happened often enough to color the opinions of my classmates.

And my teachers, to be honest. I have a smartass streak a mile wide (classic youngest child) and I am sure at least some of the time I seemed quite smug and self-satisfied when in the classroom setting.

It is bad enough to have some way too smart for his own good kid correct you or defy you in class, in front of all the other students.

But it’s even worse if the little shit is laughing at you with his eyes and seems downright amused at the idea that your word means something to him.

Now I say all this not to beat myself down (after all, I was just a kid, doing the best I could) but to flesh out my idea of my past with details that do not fit the victim narrative that I have been carrying around for a long time.

Life is rarely as simple as black and white, and so there is rarely a case where a purely innocent person is victimized by purely malevolent forces.

That is not to say that I think that my bullying was justified. Not at all. It is the sort of thing that should never happen to any child, ever. The system failed me, and in doing so, they became passively complicit in my abuse.

It is, however, still very useful to understand what really went down back then in as great a detail as possible in order to make sense of it all.

I am always seeking a fuller understanding of things. It is, in many ways, my lifelong quest. I have always sought knowledge, but not for it’s own sake. I seek knowledge as the key to understanding.

That said, there is no knowledge that is not power. All knowledge helps one understand the world better, although some more than others, of course.

But us philosophical types tend to view knowledge as input for our contemplations, and that sets us apart from the scholars who collect knowledge for it’s own sake.

So I would like to think that this rehashing of my childhood is more than just wallowing in the past and taking shelter in my own victim narrative.

I think it helps me to better understand myself when I plumb my own past for insight as to just what sort of a person I am, and most importantly, what exactly was I like before I became a depressed adult?

I want to get to know the person that I could have been, and maybe, if I am really lucky, he and I will merge and I will get to be him, or at least, a version of him.

I can never erase the terrible things that have happened to me in the past.

But it may be possible to transcend them.

And I am in dire need of transcendence.

Bleh. That’s how today has been, more or less : very bleh.

Having one of those days where I feel bored and restless and irritable. A day where I feel like staying in bed not because I am tired or depressed but simply because I do not feel like going back to my stupid pointless life in which nothing appeals to me.

So, bleh. Part of me wants to run screaming into the night, or jump out a window, or smash my monitor into a million pieces. I feel like I could jump out of my own skin.

In other words, I feel somewhat agitated.

I think this is the sort of thing I will have to endure as the process of adjusting to the Wellbutrin and resulting higher noradrenaline levels continues. My energy levels are climbing slowly, and eventually this will lead to my being more motivated and active and engaged with life.

But those mechanisms are mighty rusty, and so the energy has to build up to the point where it can overcome the resistance inside me before things begin to run smoothly.

And that means a period where the energy is straining against the resistance, and that, I think, comes out as this feeling of restless, frustrated emotion.

The accelerator is pressed down, but the brakes are still on. It is going to be a while before I learn to let up on the brake and let myself GO.

And even then, there will still be the emergency brake to contend with.

Basically, I am really, really good at stopping. It is the going that I find difficult. I have held myself back, held myself down, for so very long, without even realizing I was doing it.

And for what reason? Fear of flying off into the sky and never coming back? What the odds of that? Surely that is a poor reason for clinging to the ground so hard your fingers grow roots.

How often is our most extreme and irrational behaviour caused by an extreme and irrational fear of the the opposite extreme? Healthy behaviour is balanced.

You can spend so much time backing away from the edge of madness that you fall off the edge on the opposite side. And end up lost anyhow.

The truth, as always, is somewhere in the middle of the two extremes. It is at the center of the bell curve, not amongst the anomalous outliers.

That is a hard thing to wrap your head around when, like me, you have been an outlier your entire life, and have learned to take some comfort from being far out on the fringe of the herd, where the going might be lonely, but there is also nobody around to hurt you.

When that has been your life for a long time, it is very hard to talk yourself into truly coming in from the cold. You might look in through the windows of the good and healthy world and envy the people living their warm and wholesome lives, but you know that deep down, there is no place in that world for someone like you, with your… strangeness.

Or at least, that is how you have always felt. If you were in there with the whole and happy people, you would feel incredibly out of place, a rat amongst mice, a weed amongst the roses, a devil lost and confused at the convention for angels.

And maybe that is why the fringes attract you. They might be lonely and cold, but you feel comfortable there, like you belong.

Were you on the inside with the good and the strong, you would feel vulnerable, exposed. Any second, they will figure out how strange and unsettling you are and they will attack you and push you out.

Better to stay out where you belong than be cast out again. At least if you stay out, you get used to the cold and the dark, and the few people you meet are more like you.

But oh, how your heart aches to be able to live in the light, where it’s warm.

I suppose that the smart thing to do is to take whatever you can find out at the edges and try to make some kind of shelter of your own out of it.

You might never be able to have what the whole and pure have, but you might well be able to make something better for yourself. Something where you are out of the wind, anyhow, and able to share a little warmth with a few other lonely souls.

And at least out here, you can feel… normal. Calm. Safe.

You know that those inside the circle can never truly understand you. It is not that they are unwilling to try, mind you.

It is just that what is missing in you is something that has never been missing in them, and so they cannot conceive of it not being there. The strength and security of the stronghold of their souls has never been violated, and so they can’t even imagine it happening.

And so despite their best efforts, they cannot truly understand. At best, they can picture their own sadness and imagine it ten times as large.

But yours is a difference in kind, not just scale. Compared to them, you are the mere skeleton of a person, and the wind blows right through your bony chest.

There is a world of difference between being naked in the cold, and lacking even flesh to keep you warm.

So the best that you can hope for is to linger now and then at the edge of their circle, and soak up what little warmth and light makes it out that far, and for a little while at least, feel a little more alive.

But then it is back to the darkness and the depths of your bare and frozen existence, and the cold comfort of the company of your fellow spooks and skeletons.

You can never truly go inside.

The book I am reading right now is Gilgamesh the King by Robert Silverberg.

It is a ripping good book. It is the classic story of Gilgamesh, told from Gilgamesh’s point of view, and so not only is it an intimate look into one of mythology’s greatest heroes (in my opinion), but because this is Silverberg we are talking about here, it is also filled with well researched details about life way back in the city-states which arose between rivers we call the Tigris and the Euphrates.

I love that kind of historical fiction, the sort that really puts you right there in the action of a bygone era and makes you feel like you have traveled back in time to the fabled city of Uruk.

It is not Silverberg’s usual science fiction, and it is not quite straight historical fiction either, although all of the “magic” that happens in the story could be explained away as simply Gilgamesh’s interpretation of events based on his beliefs.

I have always found Gilgamesh to be a compelling character who perfectly embodies his era by being a great hero not simply in terms of martial prowess but a powerful force for civilization. The Uruk city-state that he ruled is a place where yearly floods have been transformed by an elaborate system of sluices, canals, reservoirs, and such from a scourge that destroyed everything in its path to a much needed source of year round fresh water. Buildings are made of baked bricks, there are many specialty professions, and they have a rather wonderfully enlightened attitude about sex.

They are so enlightened, in fact, that they have holy prostitutes, a phrase which is a total oxymoron according to Judeo-Christian erotophobic standards. But to them, sex is sacred, not profane or obscene, and so the temple prostitutes, who make themselves available to any and all men, are considered to be holy priestesses doing the work of their goddess.

Doesn’t that sound a lot more sane than our current fucked up shame and terror system cooked up by old men who condemned what they could no longer enjoy, like a person declaring food evil the minute they are full?

But alas, there is a limit to Uruk’s (and, I fear, Silverberg’s) sexual enlightenment, and it really cuts me to the quick, so I thought I would discuss it here tonight.

It all boils down to a single passage :

But it has been whispered that we were lovers as men and women are. I would not have you believe that. That was not the case at all. I know that there are certain men in whom the gods have mixed manhood and womanhood so that they have no need or liking for women, but I am not one of them, nor was Enkidu. For me, the union of man and woman is the great holy thing, which it is not possible for a man to experience with another man : they say that they do experience it, those men, but I think they deceive themselves. It is not the true union.

Maybe not, Gilgamesh, but it’s awfully nice.

Now is it just me, or does it seem like Silverberg went out of his way to slag us poor homos? He could have just said nothing about the subject either way and just let the reader assume whatever they preferred to assume, and offended nobody.

But no, he had to butt in and say, basically, “Despite what dozens of other scholars of this era, who make it clear that bisexuality was the norm back then, I am going to say that my big manly hero Gilgamesh and his extremely close male friend Enkidu were the only close male friends back then who were definitely no pair of pansy queers, that’s for sure!”

Now admittedly, Silverberg wrote this in 1984, but if Heinlein managed to go from misguided (in Stranger in a Strange Land (1961) , he repeats that canard about homosexuals being ‘confused’) to enlightened (in I Will Fear No Evil (1970), a gay couple are quite accepted and very positive characters) in the space of nine years, you have no fucking excuse for still being in the dark ages fourteen years later.

I tried to ask him about this when he was a guest of honor at Vcon a while ago, but he was quite old and confused and frail and querulous, and I could not get the point across to him. That was too bad, because I really wanted to confront him about this slight.

Oh well, even if he had grasped my question, odds are he would not have remembered something he had written almost thirty years ago.

But it still pisses me off. I had a lot of respect for Silverberg until the first time I read that passage (this is my third reading of the book), and so I can’t help but take it somewhat personally.

Plus, I tend to see science fiction as a very enlightened and socially progressive place, and so to get blindsided like that in a science fiction novel was particularly harsh. I really did not see it coming. Science fiction is usually a safe place for us fags.

So that is why I am writing this for you, dear readers. It is something that has been bothering me ever since I first read that passage, and I felt that tonight, it was time to pluck that burr from my side.

And just for the record, Mister Silverberg, I am not confused. I know exactly what I want. I want men. And you can interpret that however I like. I suspect your type would assume that I have unresolved Daddy issues or some such bullshit.

But no matter why I am gay, I am gay, and not confused or sick or crazy or any of that 19th century moralistic Psychopathia Sexualis Kraft-Ebing bullshit.

I am a perfectly well adjusted adult male homo.

Well, OK, I am crazy as fuck, but that has nothing to do with being gay.

And I say Gilgamesh and Enkidu were lovers, dammit!

I suppose you think Alexander the Great and Hephaestion were just “real good friends”?