My latest package from Amazon arrived today, and it was full of fun thiings to play with. So come with me to my bedroom with me so I can pen up my toy box so I cqan show you all my neato new toyd.

The coolest is definitely the new case for my tablet. It uses a Velcro tab that sits under the tablet when it’s in there i order to keep everything safely and securely immobilized, which is rad. It is custom made for ths exact tablet, so the holder has gaps for all the buttons and jacks.

Speaking of which, I learned today that this thing does have a headphone jack, w00t! I looked it over when I first got it and didn’t SEE anything that looked like a headphone jack to Me, but apparently they have changed a little since the days when I had a Walkman practically glued to my hip.

So yes. I had to Google my tablet to find out it had a headphone jack. Derp.

But I digress. The coolest thing about this case is that it comes with its own Bluetooth keyboard plus the pocket to keep it in.

I say pocket, but the thing actually has magnetic backing, so it actually just magnetically adheres in place, which is beyond cool.

Now being around the same size as my 7 inch tablet, we still have a big fingers versus small buttons thing going on. Don’t get me wrong, it is a lot bigger than the virtual keyboardI was using before. After all, it is the size of the entire tablet, not just two thirds of the screen.

But my fingers haven’t ten any smaller, Typing is still a tad tricky if not
Downright painstaking st times.

Still, it is wonderful to be typing on something a lot like a normal, standard keyboard and not some squished and unnatural virtual hoozitz.

It even has arrow keys. Joy!

In addition to the case, I got some thingd that don’t work. No their fsult though. It’s my faukt for being a doofus

Like the four port hub I bought It would be up and working right now, no doubt, if I had not forgotten to buy the cable to connect it to my computer Doh1

And speaking of csbles, the one thst was supposed to let me plug this tablet into normal USB ports turned out to be a six foot USB to microUSB cable instead.

Samsung devices use a proprietary plug, not anything normsl like usb. So the cable is useless. I would return it, but it only cost $3, so fuck it.

Lastly, I got a USB stick that takes SD and microSD cards, just like my tablet does, so i can finally take my whole MP3 collection on an itty bitty card that will be with me everywhere in this tablet of mine.

It doesn’t work, but only because it is in clamshell packaging and I have been too lazy to go find some sturdy scissrs.

Well, Mom is calling so I guess it’s time to put all my toys back in the toybox and call it a day.

Thanks fir coming over!

(I have been trying to come up with a way to re-imagine politics as something more than the tired and increasingly meaningless struggle between left and right for a long time now. And I think I have made some progress, and I want to share that with you tonight, as well as develop the idea myself by explaining it.

The following is the result of that search. )

Politics is far too complex for a single axis. Left wing versus right wing might have been good enough for the age of the stagecoach and the telegram, but today’s world simply cannot be represented in such a one dimensional metric. There are vast differences in outlook, in ethics, and even in basic fundamental worldview between groups of people on the same side of the dividing line and these differences are not represented by the current left-right system.

To fix this, I propose we add a Y axis to the existing X, and start talking about the up versus down axis. Some people are “up wingers” and some people are “down wingers”, and it’s about time we recognize this.

The fundamental defining factor of this new axis is progress. To be an up winger, you must believe in human progress on all levels, including (but not limited to) the scientific and technological.

You must believe that there are answers to fundamental questions and that these answers can be (but don’t necessarily have to be) derived via the rational accumulation of observed principles that comes from the pursuit of knowledge by intelligent people.

You have to believe that the human race is, as a whole, on the right track and that the future can be even brighter and better if we just keep our perspective focused and keep striving.

To be up-wing, you must be dedicated to the humanist endeavor, i. e. the betterment of all humanity, no matter what color, creed, or country. To the up winger, all of humanity is one, and all deserve a better life, a life which can be achieved by social, spiritual, and scientific progress.

Up wingers trust science, not implicitly but by default. They know that technological progress sometimes creates unintended problems but they also know that said problems can only be solved by science.

Clean living and prayer do not clean up oil spills.

If the up wing is defined by progress, it follows that the down wing is defined by regress. Down wingers have a fundamental belief that at some point, the human race took a wrong turn and the only solution is to go back to some previous point in history and start again, vowing never to return to our previous folly.

Thus, the down winger does not believe in progress. They think things have been getting worse for a considerable time and that the only way to reverse that trend is to abandon one or more forms of progress (social, political, scientific, and so on) and stop pursuing our own benefit entirely, and learn to be content with what we have.

They see the pursuit of progress to be humanity’s almighty hubris leading it to go where none should dare to tread and then suffering the consequences. Down wingers think there is a natural, correct way to live and that straying too far from it brings dire and terrible consequences.

Down wingers consider the fundamental questions of life and the nature of the universe to be either unknowable or foolish to pursue because there are some places humanity is simply not meant to go.

Down wingers inherently mistrust the urge for betterment.

Down wingers also mistrust science, and the more general pursuit of knowledge via rational means. They see that pursuit as dangerous because it so often leads away from what they consider to be the ultimate truths of life, which are emotional in nature, not rational, and thus not open to debate, discussion, or questioning.

As you can see, this new axis represents a layer of opinion not included in the traditional left-right division. A passionate animal rights activist and environmentalist might be surprised to find that they are on the lower left of the graph, whereas a rationalist libertarian conservative might be equally surprised to find themselves on the upper right of that same diagram.

It all depends on whether you think we should be going forward or backward. The left has their science hating regressives who want to return to a simpler and more innocent time before everything went wrong just like the right has their share of progress oriented rationalists.

And it may well be that thus new axis allows people to see what they have in common with people they previously thought of as enemies, and maybe even realize they have more in common with some people from the opposite side of the left-right fence than a lot of the people on what they have always thought of their own side of the fence.

This could ultimately lead to a profound political regrouping that leads to people allying themselves with people with whom they genuinely have more in common than that rusty old left-ring system ever could.

That is not, of course, the end of the process. Human life is extreme complicated and it might be that two axes is not nearly enough. So be it.

Once the idea of adding other dimensions when the current number has proven inadequate has taken hold, the sphere of opinion can expand and contract as necessary to represent the full measure of human politics.

Perhaps one day, someone could develop a kind of political Myers-Briggs test which can give people a shorthand for their political opinions just as the MBTI does for personality.

“Oh, you’re a GNUD? I’m a GNYU! We would probably vote the same on some things!”

And remember, if the people adopted a more complex and nuanced view of the world, the politicians will have to follow suit if they want to get elected.

Isn’t it time we made those bastards have to think for a change?

Took an unexpected nap this afternoon, which is extremely rare for me. I almost never doze off. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing (sometimes, it would be really nice to be able to doze off), but the truth is, for as long as I can remember, nearly every time I have gone to sleep, it has been a deliberate act

One exception : when I was a little kid, I would doze off any time we were driving in the car at night. Even if everyone was talking, but especially if it was quite. Something about being in motion soothes me. Maybe the movement outside eases the movement inside me and some sort of equilibrium is maintain, like equalizing air pressures inside the cabin of a jumbo jet.

But when you get older, there’s just too many times when you can’t just take a nap when you need one, and so I learned to suppress my urge to sleep until it was the “right time”.

A lesson I learned too well, I think. Our instinct is to find a safe place to sleep. But I have a fundamentally broken sense of safety. It’s hard for me to ever truly feel safe, even when, as now, I am all alone in the apartment and there is nothing here which, rationally speaking, is a threat.

It doesn’t matter. I guess this is when I feel the most safe, but even now, there is a big part of me that is always in restless motion, like a shark endlessly swimming in the dark depths of the ocean, always vigilant, always moving, because to stop is to die.

No wonder I have a weird relationship with sleep.

So anyhow. I did doze off today. I was playing a video game and slipped right into Morpheus’ sweet embrace (Mmmm… Lawrence Fishburne hugs). Quite rare for me, but I think it’s a good sign that I was relaxed enough to do that and feel good after.

I am still pretty sleepy right now, to be honest. I really need to get out into the sunshine more often so that I can develop a normal sleep schedule. This napping throughout the day can’t be good for me.

Sure makes life go by faster, though. Yay.

Sorry about yesterday’s blog entry, by the way. I realized after I wrote it that while I had a lot of fun making it and trying to figure out how my tablet’s speech to text system worked, it was probably not nearly as fun to read, and for that, I apologize.

I’ve done a little research and found out that the default speech to text on Android devices is quite primitive by modern standards. And here I was, thinking it was a miracle of our times.

So I will likely go look for a cheap or free app that does the same thing but better, and see if I can truly type by talking. It’s something that could be extremely useful, especially if I am out and about, because it would be way easier to just dictate a quick note rather than find someplace to put the tablet down and then type on the itty bitty virtual keyboard with my big ol’ fingers.

Of course, I could just record a sound clip of me talking, but then I would have to transcribe said note at some future time, and I know damned well I would never get around to it, lazy sod that I am.

Much better for it to go directly into text. I am a text based dude, when it really comes down to it. Stringing those 26 magical letters into words and sentences and paragraphs and stuff.

I still find it amazing how just 26 symbols can turn a slice of dead tree into a medium for projecting another person’s thoughts into the theater of your mind. The written word is an amazing thing and those who write what others may read hold an extraordinary power in their hands.

That’s why I like it.

Unrelatedly, check out Microsoft’s latest bit of marketing.

Brilliant move on their part to use the current surge in nineties nostalgia as a way to spin the rather sad joke that is Internet Explorer as that great old thing from a simpler and more innocent time.

Retro nostalgia software. It’s an interesting concept. I have to admit, there’s some software from the past that I miss, like Xtree Pro.

But being a video game junkie, there are limits to the nostalgia. Sure, there are tons of great games in the massive library of every video game ever, but I would still rather be playing something modern.

The real reason I wanted to link that video, though, is that it has a strange effect on me.

It makes me incredibly uncomfortable.

Weird, huh? But I have figured out why.

It’s because it is a concentrated dose of nostalgia that comes after my own nostalgia. Nostalgia for a youth that came after my own.

And as such, it really drives home the point that my youth is over. There is a whole generation that has grown up after my own childhood and they are now old enough to look back at a decade in which I was an adult with the misty rosy glow of nostalgia for one’s childhood.

It took that ad to make my discomfort with nineties nostalgia acute enough to force me to figure out just what was going on with it.

This is the first wave of nostalgia that does not include me. The first that looks back to an age that does not seem that long ago to me, and yet an age when I was definitely past my salad days and on to the main course.

It makes me feel old in a very deep and powerful way. Life really does just keep stumbling forward no matter what and eventually, it will leave me behind entirely.

Man that sucks.

Hi there folks! Today’s blog entry will be a little bit different. I will be attempting to do this entire blog entry via the voice to text function built in to my tablet.

In theory, this could be a much faster way to do my blog entries than typing them out. After all, while I’m an OK typist, I don’t think I type as fast as I talk. And talking sure sounds a lot better then typing with my big fat fingers on a tiny little virtual keyboard on my 7 inch tablet with its relatively small screen.

At least that’s the theory. So far it’s going okay but I don’t know how to backspace, or capitalize words. And yes , as every single science fiction thing has told us, you have to say your punctuation aloud, which kind of makes me feel like I’m either Victor Borge or Rimmer when he was dictating to the scutters.

Wow. I’m not surprised that it didn’t know Rimmer or scuttersm but it got Victor Borge flawlessly, capitalization and everything, and for that I tip my hat to this new technology.

Anyhow, I know the transition to this new technology will not be perfectly smooth. After all, there’s no technology so perfect that it doesn’t require the human being to adapt to it at least a little bit. So I’m going to have to learn the ways of this particular technology before I can totally consider it a replacement for typing.

But all in all, this works way better than any other voice to text technology that I have ever tries. They’ve been trying to make this kind of thing work for 40 or 50 years that I know about, and only now have they actually got it right. I’m speaking at a totally normal speed and a totally normal tone to this thing.and for the most part it is keeping up with me with a very low error rate.

Not a 0 error rate, but remarkably low considering that this is my first time using the technology for more than a sentence or two just when I was first messing with my tablet here and found out that it had this miraculous new feature. It really gives me that feeling that I am living in the future now, so to speak.

The inability to capitalize words is pretty annoying, I will admit. Also, for some reason, it has to be on the Internet in order for this to work. I think it needs an active internet connection because it does all this through Google Voice.

And that wouldn’t be such a big deal except that the internet access via wifi in my bedroom is still pretty spotty. It cuts in and out about 20 times an hour it seems (okay maybe not quite that much) and I’ve been looking into ways to fix this. I can get something called a repeater for about 40 bucks but that’s basically what we spent on the wifi router in the first place, so part of me kind of resists going in that direction. I mean I could just buy a new router and plug a hard one line into it.

And that’s not totally out of the question, although it will be a last resort.I was really hoping for something way lazier and cheaper than that. You know, one weird trick to make your wifi router work a whole lot better.

Because the thing is, I almost have enough internet in my bedroom. It works just well enough for me to use it but not well enough that it doesn’t do annoying things to get on my nerves 20 or 30 times a day.

It is almost like I am getting the exact amount of WiFi reception in my room to cause the maximum aggravation. any more than this and it wouldn’t bother me that much. Any less and I just wouldn’t bother using the damn thing until I got it working right.

Oh well, it is hardly a world shattering problem. Just a little bit of grating on my nerves that I could do well without. if push comes to shove and there’s no easy way to fix this problem, I will break down and show out the 40 bucks for a router or repeater or whatever is the least amount of money / work.there’s no point in being all annoyed all the time out of sheer stubbornness after all.

But I will at least ask around and find out if there’s any simpler remedy. After all, it almost works well enough.. I only need just a little bit more performance and then it will work well enough in ll parts of my bedroom that it won’t be a big deal.

After all if it only messed up say once a day, it would not be that big a deal. At least that’s how it looks from right now when it’s more like 20 times a day. I might sing a different tune in a few months when I have the wifi in my bedroom working a little better.

Expect a blog entry in the future complaining how once a day this damn thing stops working. How very easily we get used to miracles.

Well, I guess that’s about it for me tonight. This has been an interesting experiment but with the limitations of this particular text to speech engine and my general and my inexperience with dictation, I would have to say that, while I guess this would be easier than using my big fat fingers on the keyboard, it’s still no where near as convenient as just typing the damn thing on my big computer.

Regardless, I am glad I tried this little experiment. It is a very cool technology and now I know its limitations. Perhaps somewhere out there is an app that does it better than the version of text to speech that came bundled with my tablet.

I hereby declare this experiment to be a partial success I have successfully dictated by today’s blog entry via text to speech.

Now I just have to go proof read the damn thing.

Today is Saturday, and therefore, quiet.

Saturday is the day when Joe sleeps in late, and then goes to hang out and play board games with his parents, and so often I don’t see him and Julian at all on Saturdays.

So Saturday is an alone day for me, and that’s fine. One day a week to myself, with nobody else in the social section of my mind, is good for me. Lets me relax just a little more than usual.

I am not sure what would happen if I was completely alone without even the faint sounds of the neighbors, though. That might be too alone. I grew up in a house with five other Bertrands, and so I am used to the sounds of others around me all the time.

Total dead silence might be really creepy. Or who knows, might be really soothing.

It could go either way.

Today, my introspective thoughts have been about retraction, and gaps. I think that there was a point of no return, a line I crossed, a distance I created inside myself, that made me as bizarrely and sometimes paradoxically hard to reach and connect with.

It’s like the process is not too bad if you only take it so far, but if you go past the tipping point into interior isolation then it becomes downright cancerous. I look back on my life and think about people who were trying to reach me, even though I didn’t (couldn’t) realize it then, and I wonder what it must have been like trying to connect with a sad little genius like myself.

Not easy, that’s for sure. Combine social awkwardness, startling intelligence, and my crippling shyness, and you get someone who is at best very confusing to deal with (so many mixed signals, so fast!) and at the very worst probably pretty upsetting.

I say this not to self-flagellate with guilt for past sins. I am beyond that now. I was a very damaged little kid and damaged people end up hurting others one way or another.

As always, I just want to understand. I am trying to probe the limits of the damage inside me in order to best find ways to heal it, like a surgeon using X-rays to pinpoint the damage tissue and thus make the surgery as effective as possible while being minimally invasive.

That’s how I feel right now. Like I am gingerly poking at the dead tissue to see where it hurts, which is bad, and where there is no sensation at all, which is worse.

There is a lot of dead tissue inside me. A lot of very old scars which have warped and twisted the development of healthy flesh around it. I feel this coldness inside that frightens me with its interstellar chill.

It is just plain horrifying to realize that some of you is dead, even if it is just in the psychological sense. (Dead, or so deeply anesthetized that it’s the same thing. )

Because I suffered trauma so early in childhood, I worry that my problems are brain deep. Like I have said before, you develop a lot of your brain mass between birth and the age of five, and my sexual abuse at the hands of my father definitely happened before I was five, so it is quite possible that there is something fundamentally wrong with my brain.

It’s not just a software problem. The hardware is broken too.

In a way, though, it really doesn’t matter. I have to deal with it one way or another. If it’s software, I will find some way to debug myself.

And if it’s hardware, brain plasticity insures that damage can almost always be routed around.

And what the hell, the damage might be part of what makes me so damned intelligent and creative. I know that somewhere inside me is a burning ball of pain and fire that powers all this creative mentation of mine.

Fine line between madness and genius, and so on. Or maybe they are the same thing. After all, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man’s insane.

Maybe being too smart can drive you insane. After all, we are social creatures, and a sufficiently advanced intellect might well render you unable to relate to others, and thus isolate you.

Pretty sure that happened to me, to be honest. I didn’t relate with the other kiddies at all. They were playing with trucks and Barbies and I was reading Shakespeare (admittedly, without understanding it… I understood the words but… ) and watching Newton’s Apple.

Even the other bright kids seem to exist on another planet from me. There was always other kids who got good grades and did well, and looking back, I guess I came closer to relating with them than with others.

But they were all well dressed, well groomed, neat, orderly, and keen. They would sweat bullets over every assignment and through themselves body and soul to get high grades.

I was rumpled, ruffled, sloppy, and completely immune to adult authority. I did my assignments with a contemptuous flare and most of the time seemed like I was on another planet, and yet I got the same marks as them.

So… that was never going to happen. Intelligence aside, we were not in the same universe.

Therefore I was as alone in the classroom as I was on the playground.

I look back on all that isolation and think about the quite established science that shows that social animals raised in isolation become anti-social, even hostile, and tend to view others of their species as threats.

Then I think about my own agoraphobia and social anxiety, and I wonder how one cures such an animal. The science suggests that there is, indeed, a point of no return. A point past which the animal will simply never be healthy and normal again.

But that’s animals. Surely us inteligent, sentient humans with our amazingly plastic minds can do better.

I can learn to connect. I can learn to trust. I can learn to relax.

Or can I?

This is going to hurt. But it has to be done.

Today was a therapy day. During my session, some thoughts about my mother spilled out, thoughts I didn’t even know I had in me till I said them, and I immediately knew I had hit paydirt in the strictly therapeutic sense of the word.

Thing is, I love my mother. She is the best person in the world to me. Everything about me that I like comes from her. Of all four of us kids, I feel like she and I are the most alike.

She is sweet, and kind, and gentle, and shy. She taught me to love animals and nature and books. I think part of the reason I turned out to be such a bright kid is her gentle encouragement of my intellect. When I was a kid, if I asked her a question and she didn’t know the answer, she would say “let’s find out!” and we’d look it up together in our big fat encyclopedia/dictionary.

She read Huckleberry Finn, both Alice books, and all of the Chronicles of Narnia to me when I was a wee sprog She filled the house with cats (well OK, that was mostly the cats’ idea) and taught me to never hold them against their will and never trap them (except for trips to the vet) and to care for them like the wonderful fuzzy little individuals that they were.

She was a wonderful mother to me… at least until she went back to work and left me with a babysitter.

But looking back now, I feel like there was something… missing. Something I am struggling to define. It was never that she lacked warmth, exactly. She’s a very warm person, in fact.

And yet there is a distance to that warmth, a subtle separation, and above all, a powerfully intellectual core to it. There is light and delight and affection in it, but not a deep emotional connection in the full sense of the word. There is just something missing.

And as I type about it, I keep thinking about how we were never that close a family. Not the way other families are close. In our family, it was always just assumed that we would show up for meals but otherwise we would just do our own thing, whatever that may be.

We did the occasional thing as a family, but the older I got, the less often we did anything like that.

The meals tapered off too.

OF course, that all seemed normal at the time. All families are normal from the inside.

But I never felt like my parents were there for me. I was an ignored and neglected kid, and a big part of that was having nobody to protect me and guide me. I was looked after with the detachment of a pet who has outlived its cuteness.

Sure, they made sure I had water and food and a bed. And of course, I wagged my tail like crazy every time they paid attention to me. So I must be fine, right?

I even told them I was fine, because I knew that was what they wanted to hear. They didn’t want to hear about the terror and boredom at school and how at times I wanted to die just so I wouldn’t have to go back.

I was supposed to just tell them everything was fine so they could go back to taking me for granted and I would fade into the woodwork again.

And my mother was as much a part of that as my father. I spent my whole life in a polarized home, where Mom was Good and Dad was Bad, and so it’s far more natural for me to blame my father for everything.

It is much harder for me to acknowledge my mother’s shortcomings, but she bears responsibility too. She could have saved me from my loneliness and despair, but by the time I started school (sans kindergarten), she was teaching again and I was just… still around.

My siblings were there before me and already excelled at dividing my parents’ attention between them, leaving nothing behind for little old me. My parents were already older than most young parents when I, the Accidental Child, showed up, and they already had three kids who had worn them out. I wasn’t part of anyone’s plans and frankly, they didn’t know what to do with me.

Three kids plus a career is enough for anyone, right?

Me and my Dad were never close. I was always too scared of him for that. So I can’t really say that he neglected me. If anyone neglected me, it was here.

There, I’ve said it. My mother neglected me. My mother. Mary Elizabeth Bertrand, neglected me.

Even just typing that feels like a profound betrayal, even though she’ll never read it. When you grow up in a household with a Good Parent and a Bad Parent, a Princess and an Ogre, you have to put all your faith in the Good Parent. You believe in them with all your heart because they are all you have, and children will believe in absolutely any parent rather than believe in their own abandonment.

The truth is, though, that she could have done a lot better.

I grew up feeling very small and alone and unimportant. I felt like I had to apologize just for existing and that everyone would have been happier if I went away and wasn’t their problem any more.

Then they could go back to how everything was before I rudely showed up, unannounced and uninvited, and screwed up everything just be being alive.

It was bad enough that I was there at all. I certainly could not expect any warmth or attention. That would just remind them I was there, and I wasn’t supposed to be there.

And there was one competent adult in my life who could have saved me, but she was too wrapped up in her job and the other three kids to even notice me.

My mother left me out in the cold.

I am getting really tired of this crap.

You know my lifestyle. Play video games and blog. That’s about it. There’s some eating and pooping in there as well, but for the most part, it’s video games and this here blog.

That is just not doing it for me any more. I wanted things to be so much better by now. Instead, getting a tablet has just made it so I hang out in bed all day instead of in front of this computer.

And that’s the opposite of progress, when you think about it. At least in front of this computer, I am upright and alert, and I can chat online with all my furry friends.

On the tablet, chat is possible, but very annoying. It’s hard to type and the apps do not have the features I require, plus there is always a battle between the virtual keyboard and the rest of the chat.

You know. the things people are actually saying.

So I spend all day lounging around in bed playing Android games and wasting my life away. I want to break free of this terrible pattern, but I feel like no matter which way I turn, I only get more and more tangled up in this web of quiet spiritual desolation.

I try to view my life as a life of leisure, where I have the luxury of doing nothing but please myself for most of the day, but that doesn’t work when you life is unrewarding like mine is. It feels a lot less like luxury and a lot more like neglect, and the only person in a position to neglect me is… me. Of course.

I need to break my patterns, and yet I don’t feel strong enough. I feel weak and fragile and raw all over, and to even find the energy to push against the grain seems damned near impossible.

That is the sort of thing that happens to other people, not me. Other people reach crisis points, go through psychological hell, maybe make some bad decisions, but from that chaos comes the energy for transformation, and they emerge from the process stronger and better suited for life.

But me, I am like some kind of primitive pre-Cambrian life form that just barely avoids extinction by being just barely adapted to their environment.

But they have been doing that for hundreds of millions of years. They are adapted well enough to avoid evolutionary pressure to evolve or perish, but not well enough to thrive. Merely survive.

So here I sit, a barnacle on the ship of life, going nowhere, doing nothing but passively absorb nutrients and get a little bigger over the years.

I wanted so much more. But the bus pass thing, that knocked the momentum out of me.

The latest update on that is that it looks like I will have no choice but to do it by mail, which involves buying a money order in the right nameand getting it sent to the right place and all other kinds of extra life competence type things that just seem beyond me at the moment.

Hopefully, I will eventually get my shit together enough to do all that. And then I get to wait a month before getting the goddamned thing. That is the turnaround time on mail order processing.

And I am ashamed to admit it, but knowing that the reward will take that long to arrive makes it harder to get myself motivated to do it.

Regardless, the whole thing has been one big frustrating disappointment, and those have always been the two things that hurt me the worst.

Frustration has been my bane ever since I was a too-stubborn kid who was far too good at not learning things he didn’t feel like learning. I could defy my teachers at will, which our society considers great, all other things being equal. But it actually sucks. It means I never learned a lot of things I might have been perfectly capable of learning, like arts and crafts, or swimming, if I had simply stuck with them and not gotten all frustrated and defiant about it.

Plus, I think that if I had accepted discipline better, or had the right kind of people around to handle a willful kid who is way too stubborn and smart for his own good, then I might not have grown up feeling so alone.

I have wondered where people get this feeling that there is some force out there looking after them. That somehow, it’s not all up to them. That there is something else.

I think discipline is a big part of that. It gives you the feeling that there is someone out there who will stop you from hurting yourself by making bad decisions. This helps you grow up feeling secure.

But for me, there was nobody there. If I made bad decisions, I suffered alone.

As for disappointment, that is even worse. If I get my hopes up about something, it had better happen, otherwise I will be utterly crushed. Disappointment is the one kind of emotion against which I have absolutely no defense. It always damned near kills me, and it always kills my precious motivation.

I think that if I were a healthier person, I would be the sort who did things via waves of inspiration that carry him towards a distant goal.

But the seas of my soul are too shallow and frozen for that. There is only a stale and sluggish tide.

At least I didn’t sleep quite so much today. A lot, but not as much as yesterday. I have been kind of depressed all day, but at least I didn’t sleep through all of it.

Instead, I played video games. Whee. I am really going somewhere in life.

Oh well. Perhaps this is just one of my periods of having the blues, and all I can do is hang around and mope.

Is it too late to become a moody, sarcastic teenager?

Because I think I’m finally ready.

Had another majorly sleepy day today, although thankfully, the whole sweaty suffocating thing was quite minimal.

So apart from the feeling like my life is slipping through my fingers as I sleep my limited number of heartbeats away, it was not all that unpleasant.

These sleepy days seem to come in swarms. Not sure why. Perhaps it’s just that once the dyke of insomnia (or rather, hyposomnia) is burst, it takes a long time for all the pent up need for hardcore REM time to drain away.

But knowing how these things work, I know that I will sleep a lot for an indeterminate amount of time and then one day, out of nowhere, I will be…. done, more or less.

I will take a nap and wake up feeling actually relaxed and rested for a change. These are very precious moments due to their scarcity and I cherish them.

I have been thinking a lot lately about how many of the paragraphs of this blog start with “I have been thinking a lot lately about…”.

What can I say? I’m a thinker by nature. I do a lot of thinking.

Seriously though, I have been thinking about how tense my mind is a lot of the time. Mind, and body. I am thoroughly used to having this sort of painful, forced nature to my consciousness, like I am eternally a student struggling to stay awake during a boring but important class.

Hence, I think that at some point in my childhood, I solved my battle with insomnia by learning to basically force myself to be awake and alert for school (thus taking a vital amount of pressure to sleep off myself at night) and I have been doing that ever since.

So I go through periods where I am, psychologically speaking, going around with my eyes propped open with toothpicks, and when that eventually catches up with me, I slump into hypersomnia and end up losing days of my life to catching up on my sleep debt.

If this theory hold true, then what I really need to do is to just let go and relax inside this torqued up noggin of mine, sleep all I need to sleep without judgement or restraint, and when I am caught up, truly caught up (as opposed to just being back to being able to force myself awake and build up sleep debt again), resolve to never tighten that particular valve again, no matter what.

Hopefully, after that, I would be able to develop some sort of normal sleep/wake pattern, or at the very least figure out what weird sort of pattern actually works for me.

It would be so nice to find out what it feels like to be truly rested and relaxed for more than a few hours. Sleep has been a difficult issue for me ever since I was a wee one terrified of the dark. I can’t remember a time when I could just sleep eight hours and wake feeling rested.

Instead, I get varying degrees of sleep that leaves me feeling drained and abused. Then I get tired of the sleepiness and force myself to stay awake for a while.

But I am not truly rested, so the sleepiness returns, and the whole thing continues.

Another sleep related thing I have noticed is that the worst time for me is the period between putting the book down and/or shutting off my tablet and when I actually go to sleep.

No matter how I try to taper off the stimulation involved, I always end up having a kind of anxiety attack because of that dropoff between doing something and doing nothing. My heart rate is up, my mental stimulation level is high, and then I drive off the cliff by stopping and trying to relax.

Obviously, eventually I relax and get to sleep, but those periods of dropoff are very hard on me. I think that is the real reason I want a really strong sleeping pill : so that it is no longer up to my clearly untrustworthy conscious mind to get from wakefulness to sleep.

Instead, a nice strong drug takes the choice out of my hands and thus saves me a lot of anxiety. The drug would just bulldoze through all the interfering neuroses and mental blocks and boom, I would get good sleep.

That is the fantasy, anyhow. My current sleeping pill helps smooth the way from waking to sleeping, but in my heart of hearts, I want something that hits me like a frozen sandbag and keeps me asleep until I am freaking DONE.

I am not sure what makes this kind of sleepy day harder : the sleep apnea, or the intense dreaming.

I have been forgetting my dreams more or less on purpose lately. When I wake up, I just want to clear my memory banks and get on with things. Remembering your dreams just clutters things up.

And it’s not like my dreams are all that horrible. Then tend not to have a single emotional tone, good or bad, anyhow. They are just… intense. Realer than real, sometime. They always take the form of something fairly mundane like walking through a mall or investigating a neighborhood, and they never include anyone I know, except in brief cameos, and that bothers me.

Other people have dreams involving those with whom they have relationships. The fact that I do not suggests that maybe all that isolation has led me to be someone who does not value interpersonal relationships very highly.

Things grow strange int he dark, after all. I do feel like I am excessively transpersonal. You need a balance of the personal and transpersonal in your life or things go out of whack.

You cannot live on the cold circuit of high ideals and intellectual values all the time. You are still human, and need the comfort of others of your species in order to feel safe and happy.

And I don’t know how to really let people in.

That’s all for me me today, folks.

Talk to you tomorrow!

Sorry to sound melodramatic. That’s just the song I have stuck in my head right now.

You remember it? It’s this one.

Trigger warning : child physical abuse.

It’s things like that which make me realize that as bad as my childhood was, it could have been a lot worse.

At least I didn’t suffer physical abuse from a parent. I already regret the brutalization of the soul, the sapping of the civilized sense of safety and the resultant seeds of savagery, that I carry around from the schoolyard bullying I got as a child.

There will always be a part of me that is vicious and angry and scared and determined to destroy anyone who so much as raises a hand against me again, no matter the cost.

And I really wish it wasn’t there. It is certainly nothing to be proud of. I am a civilized person with civilized values. I value restraint, cooperation, order, progress, and the higher morality of true humanism.

But in the middle of it all is a very dangerous animal, crazed with rage and trembling with fear, capable of lashing out at any moment if it feels threatened or hurt.

That’s one reason I have avoided getting really close to people (besides most of them being, you know, outside). I am deadly afraid that if someone gets too close, they will come in contact with that animal and very bad things would happen.

It will sound absurd to those who know me, but I am convinced that this dark passenger of mine could turn me into a physical abuser under certain conditions.

The explosive rage kind, where afterwards I am incredibly apologetic and swear it will never happen again.

But it will, because I still don’t know how else to deal with my rage and so it just builds up till… POW. There goes a jillion kilowatt dam. And I’m not in control of myself until I run dry.

After all, it’s in the blood. That’s what my father did. He would take out his anger and frustrations on his family at the dinner table.

Granted, he wasn’t physically abusive like poor little Paul Hyde’s dad, and I am very grateful for that. Who knows what kind of savage thug I would have become if that had been the case.

But the pattern of abuse is the same. Unable to express emotions the normal way, they build up until it all comes out at once in a big ketchup bottle burst.

And coming from me, sweet mellow affectionate me, it would come as a particular surprise. One moment I am my usual laid back silly self, then I am yelling and crying and accusing and attacking.

It has happened before in my life. Nobody got hurt but a lot of people were shocked and upset. From their point of view, I am freaking out about some tiny thing.

They can’t possibly know the kind of emotional pressure that has been building up inside me.

And even if they did, who knows which pebble will start the avalanche? Certainly not me.

Certainly right now, as I am processing and integrating decades of emotional pain and suppressed rage and frozen bitter tears, I am in no state for a relationship.

I am a big bag of radioactive broken glass right around now, and nobody, absolutely nobody, could get close to me without getting cut to pieces, no matter what I’d prefer.

I feel so angry and vicious lately. Not all the time, but enough so that it worries me. I know that I will have to go through this in order to become a psychologically whole person, but that doesn’t make it any easier to endure.

The times I want to just smash everything are getting closer together. Yesterday I had a “I hate my life” moment, and when I start thinking that, I know things are getting bad.

Speaking of anger, here’s something that got me good and ranty today.

It seems that ur-retailer Amazon is going to start sending you things it thinks you might want.

That’s right, stuff will show up at your door that you never ordered and you will have to either buy it or go to the trouble of sending it back.

Presumably, they hope that once you are holding it in your hands, and it becomes easier to just do nothing and have the thing charged to your credit card than to send it back, you will end up buying all kinds of things you never would have ordered and profit will rain down on them like manna from heaven.

But they have gravely miscalculated. People loathe negative option billing. They might get a few extra sales but at the cost of generating enormous ill will. To send something just in case the person might want to buy it is presumptuous, obnoxious, and blatantly manipulative.

I predict that negative reaction to the very idea of this will be so monolithic and vehement that the idea will get dropped before it ever sees the light of say again.

In fact, Amazon might have deliberately leaked this story in order to gauge public reaction to the idea.

If so, I am sure the results will he very clear.

As for myself, like I said on Facebook, I consider anything sent to me to be mine. All the legal steps for giving someone a gift have been followed, and that is steel plated law from the days of the Napoleonic Code.

Compared to that, some silly sub-paragraph in some enormous and opaque user agreement that most people don’t even read and that definitely does not conform to the “reasonable expectation” test doesn’t stand a chance.

You sent it to me without my even asking. I consider it mine now, just like bulk mailings are mine.

And I encourage everyone else who ends up victim to this bullshit to take the same attitude.

See how long they keep up this nonsense when the legal precedent has been set that if you send it, they own it.

That’s all for today, folks. See you tomorrow.

Regular readers of this column (both of you) are aware of a certain peculiarity of my life : because of my weird relationship with sleep, every now and then I have a “sleepy day” where I sleep all days and the dreams are so intense that it really fries my poor overworked noodle.

Well today was one of those days, and brother, it’s a lulu.

I have already slept for around eleven hours this calendar day and I am still pretty damned sleepy. The moment I finish this column, I am going right back to bed. Who knows, maybe I will sleep all the way into tomorrow.

These sleepy periods suck. largely because the waking periods are so unpleasant. I wake up soaked in sweat and completely incoherent. As in, “it takes me some time to remember who I am” kind of incoherent. It always feels like I have just dragged myself ashore from nearly drowning in a turgid and turbulent sea.

And that would not be so bad if I didn’t have things I have to do, chief among them writing this column and that funny little human ritual called eating.

And acts of elimination, of course.

So I have to rise from my grave and stumble around the apartment like a sleepwalking zombie and perform the suddenly extremely complex seeming tasks of eating and using the bathroom and watching something on Netflix. It is very stressful, and so I start feeling angry and resentful to go with being merely incoherent.

Yhis, obviously, does not actually help.

I shudder to think of what it would be like to be my husband when I get into this state. I feel lucky that I almost always have the apartment to myself when this occurs, thus sparing me the intolerable complexity of actually interacting with people.

Thus, my crankiness never goes anywhere. It passes through me like a cloud passes through the night sky. But if someone else was around and tried to interact with me, and didn’t realize I was in a bad mental state, I might well end up getting pretty angry with them because I just want to get back to sleep.

Something to consider should the impossible happen and I actually find myself in a relationship.

The state of really needing to go to sleep is one of those rare instances where all my mellow equanimity leaves me and I am just a raw and surly animal. Normally, I am not a cranky fellow. But wjem I really need sleep and something (usually someONE) is getting in my way, I will do almost anything to get rid of them.

I remember one night in particular. My brother and I had just been in a workshop style play and we were at the cast party. My friend Clark Wasnidge had also been part of it and he was there.

There was vodka. There was mixers. It was college. I got pretty damned drunk.

My buddy Clark, on the other hand, got way WAY WAY drunk. Way past sloppy falling-down drunk and into “end game” drunk where your conscious mind is just plain not in attendance. There was much vomiting (in the theater’s bathroom, thank ye gods) and screaming and incoherent speech.

He was as fucked up as you can be without dying of alcohol poisoning, is what I am saying.

And who was it that had to be there with Clark in the bathroom to keep him from dying via inhaled ejecta? None other than my poor brother David. I was too drunk to do it. And Clark did not have any other friends around.

The best I could manage was to sit outside the door of the bathroom and warn people going in that something really drunk and disgusting was happening in there. And that was fine while I was still drunk.

But eventually, the booze started to wear off, and the thing about that is that while I do not pass out from drinking, there is always a point when I start getting really sleepy and the “find a place to sleep now” mode in my mental hardware gets activated.

So it’s kind of like passing out, but with a grace period.

Back to the Bathroom of Clark’s Doom. At a certain point, I realize some very bad things.

1. I am sobering up and need to get to sleep SOON.
2. The party has ended while we were looking after Clark, meaning I missed most of it. (Grr.)
3. The party being over means the entire cast is gone and we are alone in the theater.
4. This was the fall semester play and ergo it is the middle of December, and back home on PEI, that means were two months into winter.
5. Add in the fact that it’s been dark out for hours by this point, and you realize it is very cold out.
6. The entire cast being gone means there is no longer anyone to give us a ride home.

And that all leads to the really bad one,

7. We now have to walk around twenty five blocks up Queen Street to get home.
7b. With a stumbling and incoherent (and presumably very empty) Clark in tow.

This put me into grumpy mode pretty damned fast, and to my eternal shame, I am pretty sure I complained to my brother Dave about it the entire way home.

My brother who was busy keeping Clark from passing out in a snowbank or pissing on anyone’s shrubbery.

That was definitely one of the worst nights of my life. I feel very guilty about making my brother’s life even more difficult by bitching at him the whole walk home while he was being a saint looking after Clark.

It does make for a fairly decent anecdote, though, so there’s that. Great for when everyone is telling stories about their drunken misadventures.

Well kids, time for me to go back to bed. I feel a lot better now than I did earlier, but I still need some more rack time in order to actually catch up.

Seeya tomorrow, folks.