Back home in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, around this time of year, people would accelerate the snow melting process in their front yards by waiting for a warm sunny spring day and then shoveling the snow onto the street in front of their homes, where it would melt and run down into the storm drains.

This was completely illegal. See, when you do this, it makes the pavement wet, and if the notoriously fickle Prince Edward Island weather takes a turn for the colder and dips below zero before it dries out, you have just turned the street in front of your house into a surprise skating rink by covering it in a thin layer of that evil substance, black ice.

So doing it was something of a gamble and smart house owners would make sure to do it in the early afternoon to make sure that the snow would have the longest time to melt and run down the drain and the pavement would have a good long time to dry out before it got dark.

Still, doing it was always a bit of a risk. Anyone caught doing it could end up in trouble with the city cops, not to mention any snow plow driver or city worker who happened by and giving an irresponsible citizen an earful.

But people did it any way. And I can see why, because my family did not usually do it and so we would end up being the only house on our street that still had snow in the front yard when all the rest were bare.

Picture that. It certainly made our place stick out. Looking back at it now, it all seems a little magical. Like our home was its own little magical land and had its own weather.

What brought this practice to mind was both the coming spring outside my window and the spring that is happening within my soul. I feel like my soul has be buried under ice and snow for a very long time and only now can I claim that spring is truly coming and I will burst into boisterously blooming life once more.

But first, I have a lot of snow to shovel on to that warm pavement. Emotions that have been frozen in place for decades need to be dug out and melted before they can run down the drain and be gone.

So that is what I am doing with the darker angst postings now. Just shoveling out my back yard to hasten the coming of spring.

I have been thinking a lot about closeness lately, especially after last Friday’s post. I have been thinking in particular about my family and trying to figure out how close we were.

It is hard to know, because I do not have a baseline of closeness to compare it to. It certainly seems that we all did our own thing much of the time. When I was very young, before school, we did some things as a family, especially in the summer. But as I got older and our relationship with my father got worse and worse, the family just kind of gave up on that.

We all had our own lives. In many ways, it was more like having roommates than having a family. We still got together for dinner every night, and maybe that is why I have such a strong desire to go back to that in my life today. It was the only time when we were all together as a family.

So despite being ground zero for my father’s angry tirades, it still was quality family time most of the time.

But that is not closeness, not really. It’s conviviality, perhaps, but you can get that from close friends. There is supposed to be something deeper than that with family. Something that makes blood thicker than water. Some kind of unbreakable bond of trust and love and support that transcends all the petty crap of life and last a lifetime.

Maybe that is just the hopeless idealism of a child raised by sitcom families. But I have seen how close some families are, and as a little boy left out in the cold, I could only look in from the outside at their warmth and togetherness, and wish I could go inside and experience it myself.

A lot of this coldness was my father’s fault. His anger was the primary disease on our family unit. He always wanted us to be a sitcom kind of family, but he never understood that his volatility, anger, and impatience was what made that impossible. You cannot have the true family closeness you desire when you have made everybody afraid of you.

Fear and love are simply incompatible.

So the fact that we all felt like we had to walk on eggshells around him certainly didn’t help. That is the sort of thing that makes it nearly impossible to relax enough to let your hair down and bond with people.

In theory, shared adversity brings people together, but in our case, it drove us apart.

But I don’t think it is all my father’s fault. My mother is a very sweet and kind woman, but there is also a certain chill to her as well. She is a highly intellectual person, and I don’t think it is a coincidence that all her kids turned out that way too. We are all eggheads of various species of egg.

Also, just be being as sensitive as she was, she too kept us on eggshells a bit because we didn’t want to upset her. This was nowhere near as dire a thing as trying (in vain) to keep my father happy, but I think we all kept negative things away from her for fear of hurting her.

So we could not exactly come to her to talk about bad things happening in our lives. It would only upset her. From my current point of view, I can see that while it might of upset her, she probably would have been quite happy to be a part of our lives.

At least that is how I would feel if I was her, and I am a lot like her in many many ways.

Well, that is my shovelful of snow for today, folks. Forecast calls for more tomorrow.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

Tonight, we take a break from the grinding angst to talk about brain science.

This starts with a story. Once upon a time, there was a sweet, kind, pious, very conservative woman with Parkinson’s Disease. (I know doctors don’t think this way, but I would not want a disease named after me. Then people will be cursing your name every time someone gets it!)

Her Parkinson’s was quite severe, and nothing seemed to help much until her doctor put her on a drug called Elect (citation needed) that was very good at keeping her symptoms under control.

But then one day, she was passing a casino and felt the strange urge to go in. This is a woman who was raised to think that gambling was a sin, and yet she went into the casino, put a quarter into a slot machine, and was instantly hooked.

And when I say hooked, I mean she quickly spiraled into a full blown gambling addict. She estimates she blew through around $300,000 total, a quarter at a time. She stole from friends, lied to people, stole away from family events to go gamble, and did all the other things that a desperate addict does when the addiction has hollowed them out and all they care about is the next fix. The addiction becomes more important than family, morality, religion, you name it. Everything in the addict’s life is twisted to serve the addiction.

That is part of what makes addiction so devastating. It brings a kind of deadly simplicity to life. It is like being devoted to a very demanding but rewarding religion. The addiction is your god, and all you have to do to be happy is to serve it. No more life decisions, no more searching for meaning, no more wondering what to do with yourself, no more pesky complicated freedom.

Life becomes so very, very simple. I can well imagine how hard it would be to break away from that.

Anyhow, our protagonist hit rock bottom and was quite miserable. She hated herself for what she had become. She was in the same pickle as an addicted. And she kept saying that it was as though she couldn’t help herself.

Her saviour arrived in an unusual form : a new drug that, instead of suppressing the symptoms, acted like the missing dopamine from the woman’s brain.

See, Parkinson’s burns out certain dopamine secreting cells in the brain, and so one way of treating it is by giving the patient a dopamine boost via medication and thus correcting the low dopamine level that causes.

That is, incidentally, what Doctor Oliver Sacks, as played by Robin Williams, was trying to do in Awakenings.

And so what happened when our poor protagonist switched to the new drug?

Her desire to gamble evaporated. Gone like it had never been there in the first place. She went from hardcore addict at the end of her rope to stone cold sober and sane and all it took was a medication swap.

What was happening in the lady’s brain was that her brain had someone figured out that the gambler’s rush, otherwise known as the dopamine release we get from gambling, was just the thing to bring her dopamine levels back up to normal.

All that gambling was, like all addiction, just a form of self-medication. When our dopamine levels are too low, the brain switches into a kind of emergency mode and forces us to focus only on correcting it. And that was fine in the state of nature, because the only way we could get that kick would be to go do something biologically advantageous, like eat, or hunt, or have sex, or even take a bath in the river.

Our instincts matched out environment and while I am sure that system still broke down sometimes, by and large, following our instincts reliably led to both the things we needed to do to survive and propagate the species and the dopamine release needed to keep us on an even keel.

Then we had to go and invent civilization, and with that came the leisure time to focus in on maximizing the reward we got from all our favorite things. We invented cooking and made our food more rewarding. We got really good at hunting, and made that both more rewarding and more successful. We invented all kinds of new ways to have sex and make that more fun too.

And we found that certain plants could give that reward center of the brain a right good kick, and so we could get that dopamine high without having to do anything.

That, presumably, was the birth of addiction as we know it today. When the basic things become extremely rewarding, our brains naively rewires itself around this wonderful new source of reward.

Which would make sense in the wild. But not in town.

So maybe one primitive ancestor ended up addicted to eating and became the first fat person (remember, every fat person is a food addict). Another got really into the hunting and became a wild man who disappeared into the forest and never returned. A third never, ever wanted to leave the sex cave and was always “on the make” like a modern sex addict.

And others were content to just sit around chewing the lotus leaf all day. It’s a wonder our species survived.

The more I look at this issue, the more convinced I become that dopamine is not simply A reward, it is THE reward. Everything we find enjoyable is just another way to get our brains to release that sweet, sweet dopamine. From the next fix of a hardcore junkie to the simple pleasure one takes in one’s morning tea, it is all about the dopamine.

It’s an alienating but also liberating thought : every action taken by every human being who has ever lived was just one more try to get the same chemical out of our stingy brains.

That’s all from me for now, folks! Seeya tomorrow.

Well, I have been rocking the positive vibe pretty hard lately, but sadly, this is the part of the cycle where I switch polarities and talk about the negative things in order to exorcise them from my soul.

For instance… it has occurred to me recently that I do not know what it is like to be truly close to someone. Not to the degree I see in others. People talk about feeling really close to their family or their friends, feeling like the people they love will always be there for them and vice versa, and feeling a closeness that I just do not understand.

And I know that I can’t blame my isolated childhood for all of that. A lot of it was me. I dealt with my pain by erecting a huge, thick, but see-through wall around myself and locking myself away. It was a wall of analysis, intellect, and logic, and it gave me a way to deal with the world but it came at a terrible price : I was very hard to reach.

I mean, that was the whole point of the wall : to keep out the people who wanted to hurt me. It’s quite the trick to be able to pull back from life and observe it with the detachment and calm of a Vulcan sociology.

Really, it’s all quite fascinating.

But the wall had to be invisible. That way, I could fool myself into forgetting that it was there. Wall? What wall? I’m right here in front of you. I don’t see a wall. Do you?

So there I was, behind that wall, and it made me both distant and clumsy. The isolated nature of my childhood did not help, but how much of that isolation came from my inability to open my heart to people and let them in? I had a number of people try to make friends with me when I was in elementary school, but it never worked out. I used to think that meant there was something wrong with those people, but I know the truth now.

I was the problem. I had my rigid little inner world and I simply could not just relax and feel people. I was always just looking at them across my invisible moat, and the connection they sought with me was just not there.

I feel bad for those people now. They must have wondered what they were doing wrong, and I assume they felt like I had rejected them. And I had, without knowing it. Some of them put a fair amount of effort into trying to connect with me, but I was just not capable of picking up the receiver.

Even with the friends I did eventually get in junior high, there was always those high, high walls between me and them. I was strange and awkward and wimpy and distant. I could never really relax with them. I was on the inside looking out.

How much of the social awkwardness of nerds can be traced to simply being too intellectual to connect? And could we, knowing this, come up with some kind of bridge for us to cross so we can finally understand what we are doing?

I am not sure what it was like to be around me back then. As now, I am quite comfortable in intellectual discussions of all types. I enjoyed talking about comics, D&D, television, and so forth.

But I was too locked away in my ice fortress to see the point in a lot of the things that my friends wanted to do. I understand it all now, although it is, perforce, a cold intellectual understanding. They were just being normal teens who wanted to go where the other teenagers went, and do what their instincts told them to do : learn to integrate with society, develop a separate identity from their parents, and maybe even give sex and romance a try.

But nerds and other intellectual types interpret instincts as noise, and filter them out. Only the products of the intellect can be trusted because they can be fulled understood and verified, unlike those murky sourceless mysterious instincts and purely emotional responses.

So we build our own cages, we nerds, and stay in them for the rest of our lives. Our approach yields far too many legit awards in terms of the all the fertile potentials of abstract thought. This big brawny brain of mine had a lot of power, especially in this modern world where the products of intellect are increasingly more important that products of muscle and money.

It’s just that intellect and creativity are not enough. You need spiritual health before you can be happy, and that involves a lot of what we are most uncomfortable with, namely dealing directly with our own emotions.

We fear that dark forest of emotion and instinct more than we fear all the bullies and loud extroverts in the world combined. What we especially fear is going in there without the blazing light of intellectual analysis and the protective armor of detachment to protect them.

To step into the darkness, the true deep darkness, is the scariest thing imaginable to us, and it is quite easy for us to convince ourselves that there is nothing in there that we need and therefore there is no reason we would ever go in there.

And in time, we can fool ourselves into forgetting it is even there, leaving us thinking “something is wrong, but I can’t imagine what it might be”.

It’s easy to find. Just look into the corner of your mind that you fear the most, and see the beast that has grown fat and strong from your neglect. Feel how it’s hand on your head has kept you from turning to look at it until now. See how it has been bullying you and getting away with it because you refuse to face the problem.

And when you have taken full measure of the beast, when you truly know it as much as it knows you, grab your sword and swing for its heart, because it is YOUR beast, you own it, it is part of you, and you can kill it any time you want.

And once it is dead, you will be free, and you can finally find out who you truly are.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

I just realized that I have been testing myself again.

I still feel bad when I “waste” a whole afternoon just playing video games and listening to podcasts. It still makes me feel like I have failed somehow. Like every day is a test, and if I don’t do enough, I flunk it.

It is a hard habit to break. I am still having trouble distinguishing unhappiness from failure. It is clear to me, if I examine my emotions, that spending the afternoon with video games and podcasts is not making me happy. I clearly want to be doing something more, something better. And yet, I feel trapped.

And the thing is, I can’t even claim that I do not know what else to do with my time, because I used to be a lot more active. As recently as six months ago, I was playing music on my synthesizer, making bread with by bread machine, playing games on the Wii, and even making a brand new video every day in addition to my blogging.

So what happened? I think it began with the unwise (and suspiciously self-destructive) that I would not do any videos while I was doing my NaNoWriMo writing. You know, so that I could concentrate more fully on my writing. Yeah right.

That was the beginning of the end, to be honest. The videos have not come back and NaNoWriMo was over 4 months ago. I have no real reason not to go back to making them except that special brand of paralytic laziness that comes with depression. Depression weighs you down and tells you that nothing is ever worth the effort and so the best thing is to simply invest as little effort into life as you can manage.

And this, despite the fact that I know I am happier when I am busy. I usually feel great during NaNoWriMo, when I am writing the 1667 words a day of novel sized fiction. Fiction is the hardest thing to write, but that is a good thing because that means it absorbs the most of my internal energies, leaving nothing behind to fuel my neuroses.

Video editing is also a pretty absorbing task. I generally had to put a lot more effort into the day’s video than the day’s blog entry. Video is this whole language of its own and writing in it can be very intense. It usually took up at least two hours of my afternoons, but it gave me something to do, something with a point to it, something with an output.

And yet, I don’t feel that all my reluctance to return to making them is depressive in basis. I think that I was getting tired of making videos and felt like it was time to move on to something more.

Not that I have the slightest idea what “more” could be. Going from writing to video was an obvious step up in intensity of commitment. I remember thinking that it was time that I moved to a medium that took advantage of more of my assets, namely my charisma and charm. I have a force of personality that I have never really tapped into. I wanted to make use of that.

But what comes after video? Nothing that can be done from my little world, I would imagine. Making YouTube videos is safe because I can do it from within my tiny comfort zone. But the next level, I feel, will not be so easy.

What I need is something more. Something to add to it to rekindle my interest in it and get me excited about making videos again. I need a new, fresh spark of some kind.

I will cogitate and brood over this notion and see what comes of it. Being artistically uninspired is a lot different than simply being lazy, and I think part of my dismantling of my self-destruct machinery is realizing this, and believing it.

Those are very different things, but one is necessary for the other to happen.

So video is out for the short term, until I come up with some crazy wacky idea that sparks my interest again. Another possibility is baking. I like baking, and it is something I can do at home here that would be a great way to invest effort into my own happiness.

After all, I have a huge bag of Splenda and lots of other baking supplies. I could make desserts for myself, and thus make it a highly rewarding activity. Right now, I pay for sugar free this n’ that. I could save myself a lot of money if I just made them myself, plus I would have the satisfaction that comes with making things. So on paper at least, it seems like a no-brainer.

I have even considered turning it into one of my wacky challenges by doing “30 desserts in 30 days”. That way I would cement it as a daily activity, and historically speaking, that has been a big boost to my motivation.

After all, by publicly declaring a challenge like that, you commit yourself to following through, otherwise, at least in mt case, I would feel like I had let people down, including myself.

And I the sort of person who takes commitments and responsibility very seriously. I am very faithful to my word and I strongly believe that if you are responsible for something or someone, you have to do your absolute best, regardless of whether or not acquiring this responsibility was your idea or not.

If you really cannot stand having said responsibility, then it is your responsibility to arrange for someone else to take the burden. Until then, you are stuck with it.

This, in part, explains why I am against abortion. Think about it.

Anyhow, turns out reprogramming your entire psyche is a lot of work. Quelle surprise. I am going to be discovering new bits of bad programming to remove for quite a while, I suspect.

But there is no going back now.

There is only victory, or death.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!
\

Gee, even typing that made me feel like I was tempting fate. What the fuck do I think will happen? I am too much the materialist (in the philosophical sense) to think the universe is just waiting for the cue to come beat me to death with an irony stick.

Anyhow, I feel like pushing the old ego forward today, so that is what I am going to do. I apologize in advance for the fact that some of this will be things I have said before and hence the thing comes off as a tad ritualistic and compulsive.

But I have many years of self-loathing to counteract, and it is going to take a lot more than one dose to do it.

It seems crazy now to think of how long I have hated myself when the evidence of the opposite was so apparent. (What a neat phrase. ) Lots of people like me, both in person and online. How does that jibe with self-loathing? Do I think all these people are stupid, or somehow defective?

I guess it’s another case of impostor syndrome. I felt I was fake, a fraud, like the people who liked me would reject me with a vengeance if they only knew the “real me”.

If they could see all the ugliness and filth inside me, if they could see what a horrible, useless, pathetic, low creature I was, they would push me out into the darkness out of sheer disgust.

But now I can see that they were seeing the real me. I am really like that, a sweet friendly understanding dude with a wicked wit and a brain the size of a planet. It was the dark and disgusting me that was the illusion. Others saw the good in me when I did not, and I am very grateful to them for that.

And I won’t lie. Self-esteem is still a struggle. That paragraph about how I used to see myself was very dangerous for me to write because I could feel all those old feelings of self-loathing rising up like a ghost inside me.

And the really awful part is that in a very sick way, those feelings tempt me. There is a satisfaction in self-loathing, a feeling of perverse protection, in just giving up on yourself completely and letting the dark tide win.

But I am on the right path now, and I will not step off again. I will push back against the darkness until I drive it out of my head entirely. I am in this to win it.

So maybe it is good to bring up those feelings every now and then. All the better to defeat them.

Now where was I? Oh right, what a great guy I am.

I know we’re not supposed to acknowledge how awesome we are. I know it is considered very arrogant and selfish to talk about how great you are. But I don’t care. I am increasingly convinced is that the only way to destroy a big depression, at least for me, is to have a big ego.

Like I have said before, there is no middle ground. You can’t change the balance of the scale by sitting in the middle. You need to add weight to the opposite side.

So, I am a pretty amazing dude. There is no reason why I should not go out into the world to seek my fortune. I have nothing to be ashamed of and I have a lot to offer in my correct milieu.

Granted, I am not much good at the practical side of things. But this modern world does not require that of everyone. You can be an entirely impractical person and still contribute invaluable things to society. I have a lot to offer the world as a writer and creative type. Works of the imagination are treasured in this modern life.

Compared to that potential, all the little things of life seem pretty unimportant. I could very well make a living via writing, and then I can hire people to take care of the other stuff.

So what if I’m a hothouse flower, ill suited for life in the real world? This world has no shortage of hothouses, if you know where to look and you keep an open mind.

I am blessed with many talents. I should be very grateful for that. Viewed as a whole, my talents provide a formidable toolkit to use against a cold and uncaring world. Intelligent and sensitive with a great depth of understand and crazy good verbal skills… sounds like a writer to me.

And I need to keep reminding myself that I excel at the other side of writing. I do fine on the first side of writing too, of course, the stuff about sentence structure and paragraphs and tight writing and all of that.

But my real genius is in the less tangible stuff, like imagination. Notice how often critics praise an author’s imagination (especially in sci fi and fantasy) and how rare it is that they praise the spelling.

Also, it is very important for me and for all struggling writers to remember that it is foolish to compare your writing to the writing in one’s favorite books, because the writing in the books has benefited (really? Only one T in that word? Looks wrong. ) from the hard work of a professional editor and a whole slew and a half of other people who work for the publisher.

So sure, your prose may not seem as polished and perfect as theirs, but that’s only because you are comparing your rough stones to their cut diamonds. If you had the same people working on your book, it would look just as good.

So cut yourself some slack. The important thing about a book is that it be enjoyable to read. What a publisher wants to see is writing with that spark of life in it, and that comes from creativity, not technique.

That doesn’t mean that you can forget all about the other stuff, it just means that it does not have to be as good as the books on your bookshelf before you dare send it anywhere.

No publisher expects to have perfect prose dropped in their lap. “Wow, this is perfect! Send it directly to the printers!”

They just want something they can work with.

I think that lowers the bar to achievable levels.

That’s it for today! Seeya tomorrow folks!

At first, recovery felt like investigation. Just a basic survey, gathering clues as to where I had buried my heart, picking up bits of broken warmth and shattered ego where I could. Nothing really penetrated. My heart was buried too deep for any sunlight to reach it. Buried down deep, where it is always cold.

Then, it felt like drilling. Excavation. I had a good idea where it was, but it was buried so deep that it took months and months of steady digging just to reach the chamber where it was held, and further months to carefully remove all the layers and layers of rough cut stone and pure smooth ice that swaddled it.

At that point, I was beginning to feel things. A vague sense of warmth, a delicate feeling of connection. It was not much, but it gave me a sense of direction, a target for my drill. It is how I found my heart in the first place.

But now, I am in the heart’s chamber and the casket is exposed. I stand on the brink of opening it up and letting my heart shine into the world for the first time in decades. It will shine a warm and dazzling glow, focused through the lens of a brilliant mind, and many will be warmed and comforted by its light.

However, first, I have to fight the demon who guards the casket, and that will not be easy. The demon has grown fat and strong by having things all its way for a very long time, and it knows that this is the final battle. This is the endgame. This is a life or death struggle, and it is not going to die without a fight.

But I have a secret. I have the key to its defeat, and I will thrust that key into the demon’s cold and spiteful heart.

You see, I know its name, and when you know a demon’s true name, it cannot resist you.

Its name is Nothing. It is the void wrapped in anger. It is the freezer that has kept my heart frozen all these years. It is the malevolent force behind my self-loathing and self-destruction. It is the demon that buries icy daggers in my flesh and denies me the integration I so desire.

And right now, I am wrestling with it. It is strong, but I am stronger. I am fully committed to this fight, and I cannot lose, because with every victory, the demon loses strength, and I gain it.

So it is just a matter of time. I will crack its armor, strip it bare, then plunge my dagger into its heart and it will die forever. It might be a very long fight, but I have nothing but time.

And I will never, ever give up. I can smell victory and that gives me the strength to drive ever onward toward it. My goal is in sight and no force in the universe can keep me from achieving it. My strength of will is my courage, and my long years of isolation are my engine. I will not be denied.

And when victory is won and the demon defeated, I will open the casket, take my wounded heart lovingly in my arms, stroke it soothingly and tell it everything will be okay. For my heart is a lost and lonely child that has been wandering in the dark and the cold for a very long time, always looking for the way home but never finding it.

And when it is calm, and warm, and safe again, I will gently slip it back into my chest, and I will be a real little boy for the first time in a very long time.

Damn, I get poetical sometimes. That is the skeleton of a pretty excellent story I just wrote. It would star a lonely robot who
has been looking for its heart, but cannot find it until he meets a man who can show him the way.

And then he has to go to the planet where it is, and search for where it is buried, and drill down to find it, and then do the whole demon fighting thing. It would be wearing its metaphors on its sleeve, granted, but perhaps it’s all the Once Upon A Time I have been watching lately, but I am perfectly fine with writing something that reads like a fairy tale.

Fairy tales have their power precisely because they are so very clear and obvious in their symbols and meanings. Their simplicity makes them accessible to everyone, even children, and like a lot of children’s stories, the fact that we absorb them when we are children ourselves makes them especially strong.

Childhood is, after all, magic. The world is magical to a child precisely because they understand so little of it, and one definition of magic is things that work and you don’t know why.

Hence Clarke’s Law about sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic. From the point of view of a human being of even just 150 years ago, our world is full of magic and wonder that they could not even begin to understand. They simply do not have the mental machinery to even understand the principles. We easily forget just how much you have to know to function in society because we all learn it as children, and it is so ubiquitous that it fades into the background.

But to a child, it is all magical. They can’t understand how any of it really works, and they definitely do not have the right spaces in their heads to develop a comprehensive world view, so to them, everything is magic and every adult is a wizard.

That is why fairy tales make so much sense to them. They offer a version of the world they can understand, with rules that make sense to them. No wonder so many people grow up wanting to live there.

Me, I wanted to move to Narnia.

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

Man I feel random lately.

The thing about being brutalized is that it makes you a brute. When I was savagely bullied in school, it brought out the savage in me. There is a very very angry animal inside me that is permanently in cornered rat mode. Just full on psucho rage that is willing to tear apart any motherfucker who so much as looks at me the wrong way.

I call it blackout rage. Luckily, not being a victim of fetal alcohol syndrome, that rage is buried deep deep inside me and is quite unlikely to come out in normal, civilized situations.

But it is always there. I can always feel it. It is the part of me that is paranoid, mistrustful, overemotional, and ready to snap like a dry twig if the wrong things happen. It is the part of me that drives the eternal vigilance of the eye that is trying to see all directions at the same time, the part that drives the deep primal fear of people that is the hot running engine of my social anxiety. It is the part that pushes the constant low level adrenal response that makes it so that I can never truly relax inside. How I never truly feel safe, even when alone in my room with nobody around.

There is no such thing as a lack of anxiety. There is only the option of minimizing it. That psychotic rat inside me neber truly sleeps. It is too scared and too angry and in general just too fucking freaked out to sleep.

Who knows, maybe that is what keeps my precuneus so damned busy too. A deep sense of terror and rage (otherwise known as “flight” and “fight”) drives my brain to constantly be looking for patterns, figuring things out, analyzing, judging, inferencing, and so on in order to better understand the world and thus be safer in it.

It is like a deep, deep wound that never stops hurting and the pain is such that it drives you insane.

But I have hope. The further I go in the recovery process, the closer I get to that primal wound and thus the closer I get to healing it. I am slowly dismantling all the mental machinery I have built in order to contain the pain, and eventually, I will get to the pain itself.

And all because some idiots in my elementary school savaged me for being vulnerable and weird.

I have also been thinking about the idea of judging people. Part of liberal thought is the idea that you should not judge people, and I had a whole lot of trouble with this idea when I was younger because I could not imagine how that was possible.

After all, I’m an INTJ, and that J stands for Judgment. I analyze therefore I am. I can no more refrain from judging people (and everything else) than I can sneeze with my eyes open or lick my own elbow.

The problem, as it often is, was with definitions. I thought that refraining from judgment meant, basically, not even thinking about the person or situation. That is what it would take with how my brain is rigged. I think, I analyze, I assign value, I fit new data into my existing mental structure (or change the structure when it does not fit) and I do not really have any control over that.

I guess some people can just have faith in people and therefore feel no need to subject them to the sort of mental X-ray machine that I do, but I lost the option of having blind trust in people a long, long time ago.

Instead, I figure people out. I use my powerful analytical abilities to get inside people’s heads and see what is going on in there, and based on that I can define my relationship to them.

To some, that seems like a horrifying invasion of privacy. I know my sister Anne did. That is how I learned that not everyone thinks like I do and what is obvious to me about someone’s inner workings is not obvious to others, and I definitely need to keep my analyses to myself in most situations.

There’s a big difference between knowing the Emperor has no clothes and mentioning how oddly shaped the royal wang is.

And so with the over-broad definition of judgment in mind, I did not think it was possible for me to refrain from judging people. But that is not how “judge” is being used in that context. In that context, it is more about what you do with your evaluations than the evaluations themselves.

If you then use said evaluations to cut people down and make yourself feel superior, if you use them basically to decide a person’s worth and place in the social hierarchy relative to you, then you are indeed going from judging people to being judgmental about them.

I don’t do that, as a rule. My deep perceptions of people have instead been the engine driving my pursuit of greater compassion and the humanist endevour. Once you realize just how fragile and confused and vulnerable most people are, once you have looked behind enough masks to know that it is very rare to find an actual monster there, you begin to forgive people for being merely human and not the incarnations of our ideals that we want them to be.

And it is this understanding of naked humanity that unites us all. No matter the culture, race, religion, skin tone. or political allegiance, we are all just naked beach apes stumbling blindly in the dark, dealing with all the consequences of being the only animal that knows it’s going to die.

To understand is to forgive. I understand why my bullies did what they did, and how it made sense from their point of view. That does not mean I approve or think I deserved it, but I know too much to see things as starkly black and white.

Well those are my thoughts for today. Seeya tomorrow folks!

No real idea what to write about tonight, so this blog is going to be freestyle.

I believe I have officially had too much caffeine now. I have had a lot of Diet Coke in the last two days and it is catching up to me. I had some with yesterday’s lunch, yesterday’s dinner, today’s lunch, and today’s dinner, and now I feel all twitchy and trembling and I believe I have started to very gently and subtly vibrate.

So no caff for me for at least 24 hours. My slacked metabolism just can’t take it. Prudence dictates a cooling off period before I end up with heart palpitations or something.

Still wrestling my demons, and kicking their asses. Today I had a fruitful revelation. Turns out that with the rock of hating myself for “doing nothing” removed, I could finally see what was slithering around underneath : I am just plain bored.

That is the real issue with my restless afternoons. Playing video games and listening to podcasts is great for a while, but the truth is, it is just not enough, and I can see that clearly now.

I also can see that I have been, in a sense, holding my own head down for a long time. So deep was my emotional conviction that life held nothing for me that I put very severe blinkers on myself so that I would not look out of my cage and be tormented by visions of things I could never have.

It was like some kind of perverse and inverted form of Buddhism, where I decided it was easier to just cut off all desires rather than to actually have to pursue them. It seems downright inhuman (and inhumane) now. Everybody has desires. Having a desire one cannot immediately fulfill is not the worst thing in the world. Not when the alternative is the kind of soul-deadening, self-destroying ligation of all my heart’s desires.

That is how deep the anti-action bias has sunk its roots into my living soul. Even now, just talking (typing) about this subject, I can hear a little voice inside me saying “But if I want things, that will mean I’ll have to DO things. ”

First of all, not necessarily. You could just enjoy wanting it and dreaming about it. That’s a lot healthier than smothering the desire in its cradle.

But secondly and more importantly, so you end up doing things. So what? The anti-action bias, that malfunction of one’s hide response, says that only when we are hidden and immobile are we safe, and therefore all action means danger. It is the drive that makes the deer freeze in the headlights of a car.

And we all know how well that works out for the deer.

I just have to repeat to myself the heretical thought that I want to do things. I want to be more active. I want to move and act and do and seek and explore and do all the other things that my stunned deer response has denied me.

Now the anti-action bias in me is really screaming. I have been chipping away at its defenses for a long time, getting halfway closer, then halfway again, and so on in a Xeno’s Paradox way.

And all the time, it has remained fairly quiet, because no matter how thin the wall protecting it got, I never actually quite got around to actually, you know, doing active things. Its empire was secure. All the therapy in the world would do is make me realize a bunch of things I should be doing, and when that word is in the equation, the depression always wins.

Should equals pressure equals anxiety equals aversion attachment equals victory for the bad guys.

But unlike in Xeno’s paradox or one of those equations where X approached a number but can never reach it, in this case when I get close enough, I can leap the gap. Like a synapse firing when enough charge accumulates, I can complete the circuit and free myself from this cycle.

Of course, I have to keep reminding myself to take things slow. My natural proclivities always makes me want to rush into things on a big wave of enthusiasm and reach for the stars, and that is a wonderful thing and something I am learning to really value in myself, but lasting progress comes a little at a time.

One day, I will harness those waves of enthusiasm and run a whole empire on its hydroelectric power. But for now, I have to pour my energies into making slow, steady progress in opening myself up inside and letting all the bad air out so clean, fresh air can replace it.

I will emerge from the wreckage of the old machine in my own due time. Trying to rush it would just set off that whole pressure chain again. For now, I am content to simply let the process happen, and I will do my best to not go crazy and want to do everything right now at the same time.

That kind of thing is what has kept me in. I will not go down that road any more.

Spending an afternoon “doing nothing” is fine. It’s not nothing, I am doing many things. There is no such thing as ‘doing nothing’ unless you are in a very deep coma. Even in sleep, we dream.

But if the real issue is being unhappy (and it is), the question becomes what to do to be less bored. Like I have said before, I need more stations. There’s the bed, and the big computer, and that’s it.

Even getting back into playing games on the Wii would be an improvement, because at least I would be out of bed, out of my bedroom, and doing something a little more active than just lounging around.

So it doesn’t have to be me charging out into the world and never looking back. That is just not going to happen. It will be a slow and easy, no-pressure, natural expansion of my comfort zone.

One must walk before they can run, and crawl before they can walk.

But I’m in this for the long haul, so… no rush. I will get there when I get there, and the there I get to might well look nothing like the one I set out to find.

And that’s fine.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!

Don’r worry, that’s not a double negative. I haven’t taken leave of my senses or my grammar.

However, in order to explain why that is and why this is such an important statement to make in my life right now, I am goinh to have to go back to the beginning, which in this case is therapy.

I know, here I am talking about therapy on a Friday. Quelle shocke. But today’s session was special. The doc helped to a really profound revelation, and I just have to memorialize it here in order to help it really sink in.

It started out with me making a remark that I need to forgive myself if I end up doing nothing all afternoon.

My therapist pointed out that even calling it “doing nothing” was attaching a negative label to it.

And at first I didn’t get it. it didn’t click.

Here’s me : *poit poit* Well, technically, I guess….

But after a few more times around the mulberry bush (did I mention my therapist is a weasel?), the penny dropped and I got it. I really got it. And the it I got was a really great it. In fact, I think it is one of the best its I gotten this decade.

Because I’m an it-getting. No really, I am!

Alright, enough soft shoe shuffle. What I realized is that he was absolutely right. To say I did nothing is factually inaccurate. I didn’t do nothing, I did a bunch of things. I played video games. I listened to podcasts. I read. I fed my mind. And most importantly, I thought about stuff, and that is one of the most important things I do.

In the grand computer of life, I am a processor. A thinker. And I am not ashamed to say that I have gotten really, really good at it over the years. This constant processing of input is the source of my creativity, my insights, my ideas, and my depth of mind and personality.

Just by being alive and awake, I am doing something. I am processing. I am thinking. I am distilling understanding from the bumper crop of information that this age provides. That’s a long way from nothing.

The outdated diseased part of my mind says “Well yes, but you did nothing productive. ”

Well who the fuck says I have to be productive? Why isn’t it okay for me to just be me? Who is the overlord demanding I produce like a factory hen? Society? Well then fuck society.

Fuck society, fuck pressure, fuck self-judgment, fuck the whole goddamned system. (Imagine that in a Jack Nicholson voice. )

Fuck everything that stands between me and the true glory that I deserve. It all has to go. I am ripping out piping, knocking down walls, and dumping dumpsters full of detritus down the drain. I don’t give a shit about having something to replace it with. Whatever function it performed, it did badly anyhow.

And I am confident that, if the function it performed is important, I will grow a new, clean, optimized system in its place, and everything will be better off in the long run.

There is truth to the idea that you have to destroy the old to make way for the new. I have always resisted that idea, as I am by nature a conservative person and that idea always seemed just like an excuse for barbarity and chaos to me.

But it is absolutely true. Sometimes, you have to throw out everything and start over. Even the oldest forest can benefit from the occasional forest fire. And I am so ready to destroy all the bad machinery in my head. I am through with slow reform and I am ready for rapid reset.

The machine is broken beyond repair. All you can do now is dispose of it and start from scratch again. Take what we have learned from the flaws of the old machine, and build a shiny new machine without them.

Or maybe that is just my crazy creative brain talking. I have been reading this interesting article about the kind of mental malfunction that leads both to creativity and insanity.

Turns out there is this structure in the brain (yay brain science!) called the precuneus.

The precuneus is the area of the brain that shows the highest levels of activation during times of rest and has been linked to self-consciousness and memory retrieval. It is an indicator of how much one ruminates or ponders oneself and one’s experiences.

In normal people, this brain bit is only active when they are completely at rest. But for us crazy creative types, that fucker is on all the goddamned time.

Holy shit, the constant blaring radio of my thoughts has a name, and that name is precuneus. I have lived with it for it so long that it took the article to remind me that it is there.

And a lot of us brainy types have wished we could turn our brain off for just five fucking minutes sometimes. Especially when trying to sleep. It is not hard to imagine how this unending cycle of contemplative thought could result in a very tired and depleted brain, which in turn would lead to depression.

It would also fit neatly into my idea that people seek out ways to press the reset button on their brains. Whether you are a Tibetan monk trying to achieve nirvana or drinking a fifth of Jack while listening to Nirvana, you are seeking the annihilation of consciousness that comes from, for example, ECT.

Press reset on the brain, and that prenuceus shuts the hell up for a while, and your head is no longer a massive echo chamber for its constant emanations.

To be honest, I would really like to know what that is like. But I am pretty sure there is no such thing as elective ECT. You can’t just pop into your friendly neighborhood ECT booth and get your brain rebooted on a coffee break.

More’s the pity.

Well that’s it from me for today, my faithful readers. I don’t know what I will do next. Maybe I will flop down and play with my tablet. Maybe I will go watch some TV. Maybe I will hit my head against the wall exactly 187 times.

But whatever I do, I know one thing :

It won’t be nothing.

See you tomorrow, folks!