Today, I am going to talk about inner conflict, because I have a hell of a fight going on inside me lately.

It is the old energy versus inertia problem that I have always had and that is probably at the root of most of my problems. After all, all that anxiety and fear and craziness in my head has to gets its energy somewhere.

And for a long time now, I have figured that “somewhere” to be all the energy that my powerful mind puts out but which doesn’t go anywhere. It gets stuck at the enormous depressive clog made of ice and fear in my soul and instead of pouring out into the world in the form of action and expression, it just backs up back into my mind and produces this massive electrical charge that expresses itself as mental chaos.

For a long time, that was simply the way things were. I stayed all wrapped up in myself, trying to shut out the world and disappear into my toys, and thought that because my mind was free, I was free.

Like hell. I was more a slave in a cage than any pig-ignorant bumpkin who thinks Obama is a gay Muslim socialist fascist. It does not matter if your mind can fly as free as a bird if said bird has a sixteen ton weight tied to its tail.

And so it went for far too many years of my life. After I moved out of Angela’s place and into the apartment I live in now, it became all too easy not to have to deal with the world at all.

So I have been in somewhat of a slump for a long time. And things have only gotten worse since last November. Last year, I was doing a video and a blog entry a day, and doing fine that way.

But now, I blog, and that’s it. And that is not good. Not that I have some sort of obligation or compulsion to do more, but this blog of mine does not absorb enough of my creative energies to keep me calm. In fact, lately writing this blog entry has felt really easy for me. I guess that means I have gotten back into shape, writing wise. This little outlet of mine does me a lot of good, but it is feeling increasingly like a warm-up, not a routine.

This would naturally lead to finding something else to do with my day, and it is not like I don’t have lots of exciting and fruitful possibilities. I could start a new book, or try to pin down some of my short story ideas long enough to write the damned thing, or go back to making videos, maybe with my tablet this time (better quality), or start up a wacky fake news website like I have been planning to do forever, or yadda yadda yadda,

So I have a lot of neato things I could totally do. But I am stuck at the end of the diving board, scared to dive even though I know the water is only a few feet below.

Thus, I am feeling the conflict big time, and it is a very hard thing to resolve. I need an inner conflict resolution expert. My inner self wants to emerge and shine and release all that latent power into the world in the form of wonderful, witty, wacky, warm works of art.

But there is still this barrier within me, the little boy who can’t jump, and that terrible fear that makes me cling to stasis as the only way to keep my demons quiet hold me back.

Hell, it holds me down. I really feel like I am holding my own head under water lately. I used to feel this sort of thing as me staring at myself, unblinking, and holding myself in place that way. Frozen by the light.

But now it feels a lot more like a hand on the back of my head, pushing me down, squashing me into place, keeping me from lifting my head and looking around at the world.

This is the point in the battle for my soul when the skirmishes stop and the war begins. I wish I knew a better way. I am conflict avoidant by nature, preferring to stick with the smooth and mellow groove. I don’t dig the harshness.

And part of me keeps trying to find a diplomatic solution. Something that balances the ambition and the fear and lets them find a third way out of the conflict and into cooperation with each other.

Problem is, that inner barrier has to go. That is not negotiable. That wall inside of me, the wall that has both been keeping me in and keeping the world out, has to be destroyed. Perhaps a new, more flexible, more nuanced barrier will replace it eventually, but for now, the old wall has to come down like the walls of Jericho.

Only when I can let the world in and let myself out can I find a more healthy equilibrium. I will always be an introvert. I will always need serious alone time to recharge after social engagement. I will always seek the quiet spaces where I can do my quiet activities in peace. I will never be someone who is a social whirlwind.

But I need to move in that direction. Let some fresh air into my soul and clear out all the junk cluttering up my mind. Get rid of old thought patterns in favour of new, optimized ones. Patch myself into Fru 2.0 already.

As always, though, the real issue is patience, and faith. The patience to wait for this long damned process to work itself out, and the faith that all of this is, actually, leading somewhere.

Turns out, the war within will not be short or decisive, and will in fact be something of a quagmire.

And here I thought we’d be greeted as liberators.

See you tomorrow, folks!

First, let’s get this out of the way.

That is the song I have had playing in my head since I decided on today’s topic. You know, sometimes the jukebox in my head can be pretty damned loud. Anyone else have this problem, or is it just me?

Anyhow, since I talked about sex yesterday, I thought I would talk above love today. To me, these things are intimately linked in more ways than one. I know for some people, sex can be entirely recreational, and I totally do not judge them in any way for that. In fact, I kind of envy them.

But for me, sex is about intimacy, and intimacy requires an emotional connection, and you can’t get that by cruising.

Anyhow, as you all know by now, I am a complete and total virgin when it comes to romance. I have never had even a weekend boyfriend, let alone a genuine LTR. I have no idea what it is like to be in love, or rather, my entire concept of how romance works is derived from popular culture, and that is probably not good.

Of course, I am talking about real life romance. I have had online relationships before, none of which went well and one of which ended in a terrible way that was completely my fault and hurt a very sweet and idealistic man and for which I will forever bear a burden of guilt.

It sucks that sometimes learning important life lessons ends up hurting others. I wish it were not so.

So I suppose that if virtual romance counts, I am not entirely virginal. I have dabbled. But a string of relationships with people who turn out to already be in relationships soured me on the prospect. Plus, of course, seeing as most of the world lives nowhere near you, there is always the problem of falling in love with someone you will never meet because they live at the exact antipode of you and you are both poor.

I suppose I would be more open to the idea today, now that I am forty and ready to be more realistic, shall we say. I have always been monogamy-minded. I have always wanted a man to settle down with and put down roots with and make a life and a home for ourselves. I’m a Taurus and we want comfort and stability over almost anything else.

But as I get older and life hurts more and I feel the aging of my bones, that nice comfortable house of my dreams begins to seem more and more attractive. I would love to have a nice home with my Man of Life somewhere. I may end up needing it.

And here’s the thing : unless I have a radical change of lifestyle, I am not going to meet men in any other way. I can’t imagine going to gay clubs. I was too introverted for night clubs when I was in college. I have only gotten crustier and less tolerant of such things as I age.

Oh sure, put me in a place with loud noise, crowding, and intense social judgment. That way you can activate my dislike of loudness, my claustrophobia, and my social anxiety all at once. It’s like they are made to repel the likes of me.

Oh well, at least they aren’t also filled with smoke any more. They were when I was a college student. Talk about the perfect hell. No amount of liquor could get me to be able to tolerate that.

So it is not like I am going to meet men offline, in the real world. It would take a rom-com level of meet cute style luck for me to meet the man of my dreams in my current mode of existence. Mostly I just see my friends, which is ideal if all one cares about is keeping social anxiety in check, but not if one actually wants to have a life.

And I do want a life. A life beyond this bedroom. I want a man, and a home, and a job, and cats. I want to participate in life and be a part of it instead of just being a cipher on the sidelines, worldly wise but wet and weak.

The question, therefore, is whether or not it is better to have an online relationship with someone I will never meet than to have no relationship at all.

I think it might be, but I’m not sure.

Then there is the massive problem of compatibility. I have extremely high standards, not because I am so full of myself that I think nobody is good enough for me or that I am just too damned fussy (I’m not), it’s just that my natural requirements for a man are fairly exacting and do not necessarily allow in a lot of human males.

Take intelligence. I need someone who can keep up with me intellectually, and I am a really bright guy. That already disqualifies most of humanity.

Add that to the fact that it would be kind of convenient if he was gay or bi, and that makes it a tiny percentage of a tiny percentage of the world population of adult males.

Then you have to add in actual compatibility factors, like outlook on life, goals, dreams, values, and of course, basic personality, and you can see why it seems so daunting to me.

I sign up for dating sites, and I read profile after profile, and they all seem so impossibly boring. None of them seem remotely like what I am looking for. And it gets really depressing really fast.

So where do I find love? I have no idea. I can’t see myself going out there and meeting men, I can’t imagine having the emotional stamina to go through a million profiles to find Mister Right, and nobody ever responds to my sparklingly witty and charming profiles, so I am up a stump, love-life wise.

Maybe I should make a profile under the name Horse-Hung Billionaire and see where that gets me.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

[CONTENT WARNING : Tonight’s entry is about various aspects of my sexuality. If you do not want to read very intimate (but not too explicit) details of myself as a sexual being, I recommend following this link to a silly video I made. ]

[TRIGGER WARNING : Child sexual abuse. ]

In pop culture terms, I don’t have a sex life. Those require at least two participants. But this doesn’t bother me, mainly because I have never known anything else.

Oh, I am no virgin. I have messed around with other dudes a bunch of times, and golly it’s fun. But I have never had sex on a regular basis and the times I did, it just… doesn’t go well.

For some reason, when I get into a genuine sexual situation, I just freeze up inside and go completely passive. It’s almost pathological. It is like suddenly I am encased in a block of ice. Horny ice, but still… ice.

And it’s not that I suddenly don’t want sex (although that did happen once). I am as eager as any aroused male. But this other process sets in and I am suddenly not real fun in bed.

I am pretty sure I know why. It’s because I was molested as a kid. (Who knows, maybe that’s why I am gay, too.) And when I say kid, I mean I was three or four years old. Stuff that happens that young sinks in very, very deep.

And what did I do to cope with being molested while it was happening? I did what billions of abuse victims have done and just went into total existential denial mode. This isn’t real, this isn’t happening, I can take my mind away.

And so I unfocused my mind all the way. Imagine turning the focus on a camera lens all the way in one direction, so that all you see is the vaguest of blurs. That is what I did to escape what was happening to me.

I sometimes wonder how much of my current mind fog was born that day.

So I have had sex with others, but it’s never been any good, really. Not for me anyhow… I have made some dudes pretty happy and I really enjoy that, both sexually and just as a thrill, but for me, not so much.

I just freeze up, just like I did when I was molested. I can feel my mind wanting to just fog out and it takes a lot of willpower to stay in the moment. And obviously, that does not lead to being an electrifying lover. I’m barely even there.

This is a big problem. I am hoping that if I ever get into a committed relationship with a wonderful man, I will be able to open up and trust him enough to be completely relaxed with him and my sexuality can blossom that way.

I missed a lot of opportunities when I was a teenager. Opportunities I was just too clueless to recognize as someone coming on to me. I was a right idiot.

That means that I never had the chance to fumble around, experiment, learn the ropes, and all that jazz when it was age-appropriate. When I was that age, I considered myself to be impossible for anyone to even like, let alone want to bone, and therefore my sexuality was practically an abstract concept.

Certainly, my homosexuality did not matter much in the scheme of things. All it did was make the sort of pornography I wanted somewhat harder to find. I honestly thought that pornography and masturbation were all I could expect out of life.

So in a way, it was quite cruel of the universe to make it so that when I finally did get access to other horny dudes, I found I could not really function.

I have never really connected with my sexuality as a result of all this. It and I have always had an arm’s length relationship, pun belatedly intended. It’s not something I even think about much. I have never had a really strong libido, possibly because I suppressed it so much when I was younger.

Add antidepressants to the mix, and the outlook becomes even more dire. SSRIs like Paxil have the side of effect of lessening libido, and that is unfortunate but it’s not hard to deal with, because no longer wanting something doesn’t hurt.

It’s like not being hungry (something I have dealt with too). Sure, you ought to get hungry and eat on a regular basis, but not being hungry is not actually actively unpleasant.

So when I was on a very high dose of Paxil, I had no libido to speak of, and that was okay. If I thought about it, I missed the energizing warmth of sexual desire, not to mention the pleasure of satiating it, but I didn’t think about it much.

But now I am on a much lower dose, and so my libido is there. I find men on TV attractive. I get turned on by suggestive situations (and those are everywhere if you have a perverted mind lime mine.) My balls get full and sore.

The antidepressants, however, still make a contribution : they make it very difficult for me to “get off”. I have to let the pressure build for a week before it is worth my time to even try to give myself some relief. Output just plain cannot keep up with demand at all.

So I live in a perpetual state of sexual frustration. I can’t say that it bothers me a whole lot.

What bothers me is how little it bothers me. I feel a very deep sense of something that should be there. But the thing about horniness is that it naturally leads to action, and I have been suppressing all emotions that lead to action for a very long time. My commitment to stasis is hardcore down to the bone, it seems.

Still, I hope to blossom some day, with the right dude.

Maybe it’s just casual sex I can’t do.

Seeya tomorrow folks!

Well, to be precise, I know a whole bunch of Daves, but there’s only one that I call bro.

Of the whole family, my brother Dave is the one I was closest to, emotionally speaking. He was the closest to me in age, only four and a third years older than me, and while it certainly can’t be said that we always got along (what siblings do? without one of them being in a coma?) and our relationship was very bad when I a wee thing, later in life we spent a lot of time together, watching TV or playing board games or NES games together, and we got along fine.

When I was a preschooler, he tormented me. Not all the time, but occasionally. He seemed to delight in getting me really mad, knowing that there was not much I could do to hurt him, being so much smaller than him.

In fact, one of my earliest memories is of being a very wee tyke in footed pyjamas, basically a onesie, and toddling around the living room when I stepped on a needle that had been dropped on the floor. It hurt like hell, of course, and I started crying my little eyes out.

And there was my brother Dave, laughing at me.

With the distance of years, I can see that he was probably jealous of me. After all, he had been the youngest until my unexpected and unplanned arrival, and I probably stole an awful lot of my parents’ attention away from him and my sisters, at least until my mother went back to work.

And what the hell, he was only four years old when I was born. I can’t get too mad at him for behaving childishly at that age. For a while there when were were both kids, he was pretty much my nemesis, which I understand is not exactly a rare thing between younger and older brothers.

I can’t say I hated him, exactly. I was too young and too soft-natured to develop grudges like that. But I sure as hell didn’t like him much.

He did save my life, though. It was our family vacation in 1978. We went to Ontario so that my father’s side of the family could see us kids. It’s funny that we have this urge to show our kids to our relatives.

We were staying at a cottage on Lake Ontario. It was great, there was at least several passles of kids there and we did everything as a bigass mob. I was enjoying this break from civilized life, and despite my Ontario cousins’ attempts to scare the life out of me with tales of the enormous spiders that lived in the area and were just itching to bite me on the ass and eat me when I used the outhouse, I thought the place was great.

One day, the whole gang was swimming in the Lake, and I had been left to my own devices in the shallow part near the shore because I didn’t know how to swim.

And I was happy. This was pretty much the same thing that happened when my family went to the beach, and I loved being in the water, so I was quite content with the situation.

But I also had a tendency to get in trouble when unsupervised, as I was not born with a lot of what one might call common sense, and this day was to prove no different.

I was happily wading around, figuring I was safe because the water was only up to my five year old shoulders, when I discovered what a “dropoff” was when I dropped off it.

Seems there was a shelf to the lake floor, and over the edge of the shelf the water got a whole lot deeper. So there I was, drowning, inches from death, when my dear brother Dave saved me.

I don’t remember that part. In fact, I am very lucky in that I don’t remember drowning at all. I remember wading, I remember falling off, and I remember being back on shore with everyone looking at me all worried, but the part in between is gone.

So anyhow, that proved to me that my brother did care about me, when the chips were down.

Then, when I was in elementary school, he and I were in different worlds. He had his friends, and I had my nothing. The closest thing I had to friends was my sibling’s friends would be over to visit. Sad, really.

But later on, my brother was around a hell of a lot more. I only found out recently that this was because he had no friends either. And so we hung out a fair bit.

Looking back, I feel like there was always a wall between us, perhaps because of our age differences, perhaps because I was still a little afraid of him, perhaps because I always felt so inferior that I considered any time he spent with me to be an act of charity on his part, perhaps simply because I had my emotional wall up by then and I could not see past it.

Later on, my parents sent him and I to college together. For me, that was right on time, but for him, there had been like three years between graduating from high school and finally getting to go to college.

And I am quite ashamed now of how absurdly dependent on him I was. I mean, sure, it was my first time living on my own, but it was his too, and yet the easiest thing in the world was to just defer to him and leave him in charge.

I feel bad about that now. That could have been a great time for us both to form our own identities, but I held him back some.

Luckily, we did eventually split off. I had my college friends, the Pit Crew, and he went off to form a band called Spot The Brain Cell with some friends of his.

Then, after my parents bounced the both of us out of college because they didn’t feel like paying for it any more, we ended up joined at the hip again when we were both living with our parents, unemployed, and adrift back in Summerside.

I love my brother very much. We are very much alike, so much so that people would ask if we were twins. (And for some reason, if they didn’t think we were twins, they thought I was the older one. I have absolutely no theories as to why that is. )

He never asked to be a father figure to me, but he was the closest thing I ever had to one. It’s not something I could have helped. Ever kid needs one and if the primary one is inadequate (and mine was), the kid latches onto the next best thing, and that was my brother Dave.

I miss my bro a lot. We were two lobes of the same brain for a lot of my life.

And he misses me, too, which always comes as a surprise to me.

I guess hanging out with my wasn’t an act of charity after all.

See you tomorrow, kids!

Time to talk about my siblings, in order of age, starting with the oldest.

I didn’t really connect with my sister Anne at all when I was a kid. It seemed like we lived in different universes. I remember being a little scared of her because she could be pretty scary when she was mad, and well, she’s a redhead, so this was not exactly a rare occurrence. But I was never scared enough not to like her or anything. I liked her fine. She always seemed so full of life and confidence and energy to me when I was a kid. I admired her for that.

But to me, all that energy and vivacity made her kind of unapproachable. And to her, presumably, I was just an annoying little kid seven years younger than her who got underfoot a lot.

I just wanted to be included.

Later in life, when I was in junior high and she was in college, we finally found some common ground. Namely, we are both intellectual people who love to talk. I got into astrology and that gave us a starting point for discussion, and eventually we would talk politics, philosophy, religion, feminism, and so on.

That was mostly good, but sometimes we would end up in this dead end situation where we would start arguing about something and neither of us could stop. We were both, in our own ways, too damned stubborn for our own goods. She would just keep trying to win the argument, growing increasingly upset and angry, and clueless nerd I would not notice how overwrought she was becoming and just keep arguing.

She was growing hysterical, and I was still enjoying myself. I was such a dick.

And of course, the fact that I was remaining cool and calm and unassailable only made her even more upset, and so we would get into a pretty bad loop. She would accuse me of being stubborn and close-minded. I would ask her to prove it without just assuming that her arguments were so good that only a close-minded stubborn person could resist them. She would say I wasn’t listening to her. I would say “Yes, I am, you are saying…. ” and then repeat all her points back at her, then conclude “I just don’t agree with you. ” For bonus points, sometimes I would point that she’s not changing her mind or backing down either, so obviously there is equal proof of being stubborn for both of us.

And so forth and so on. Often my mother would become very upset to see her children fight like this, which I also barely noticed because again, I was enjoying myself. I love a good argument and I have nearly unlimited stamina for one, or so it seems. And this was the kind of mental stimulation I didn’t get in my life back then.

Eventually, though, I figured out that one of us had to be willing to just stop that shit before it started, and I was the only one I had control of, so it had to be me. I would just bow out and change the subject. Sometimes that seemed unfair to her, like I was denying her some kind of victory, but eventually we both figured out what was good for us.

After all, this was just casual, non-binding conversation between two people who loved each other. And in those situations, “being right” is far, far less important than the relationship between you.

And besides, actual conversational victory is extremely rare, despite what our crazy dominance hormones tell us. So the chances are, all the argument can do at that point is damage your relationship with the person, and hurt them as well.

So in a way, she taught me to get the hell over myself.

My sister Catherine and I were never all that close either, although she periodically took it upon myself to be my teacher. Looking back, it’s quite touching and adorable the way she would assume the role of the kindly, encouraging teacher when she tried to teach me one of the crafts she learned in the craft-crazed Seventies (another way the Seventies are back), or get me to read her school assigned reading with her, or teach me a song.

Like I said, this was fairly sporadic, and like a lot of things from the Seventies, it ended in the Eighties. But I still greatly appreciate her taking time with me like that, and thanks to her, if I really concentrate, I can still recite “Jabberwocky” by Lewis Carroll and “Stopping By The Woods On A Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost, just like she taught me.

Fun fact : many years after the afternoon where she taught me those poems, I got an assignment to memorize two poems (possibly the same assignment she got, from the exact same teahcher!).

Guess which two poems I chose? That’s right, the two I already had memorized.

That was a freebie.

Later on, when she was in high school, it was I, the little brother, who began to worry about her. She was always an overachiever, although of course I didn’t know the term at the time, and like a lot of folks of that ilk, she put incredibly amounts of pressure on herself and was absolutely terrified of failure.

So she would have these emotional breakdowns when it all got to be too much for her poor nervous system, and have crying jags and freakouts and other problems that made me genuinely worried for her.

And that only got worse when she went to college. I would try in my own way to help by encouraging her to relax and calm down, but keeners and coasters just don’t speak the same emotional language at all. So I was not much help to her.

You just cannot accomplish anything by telling someone who is freaking out to calm down. It is completely futile, and might even make the situation worse. I have enough experience of anxiety myself to know this and know it well.

I think the best that you can hope for is to be there for them when the anxiety wave crashes and they need someone to hold their hand and tell them everything will be okay.

That’s all from me for today, folks. Tomorrow : DAVE.

Nothing in particular in mind tonight. Guess I might as well keep on bitching about my family.

I never really bonded with my Dad much. There was the issue of his temper, which was rarely directed at me (Anne and Dave took the brunt of that abuse) but which nevertheless made me afraid of him and his volatility,

And like I said, you can love someone, or fear them, but not both. Love requires trust and fear is pretty much the opposite of trust. If you fear something, it means you see it as a threat. That’s incompatible with trust.

But there was also the fact that we were just very different people. He tried to get me into the things he was into, but they were mostly the exact sort of hands-on things, like carpentry or fixing things around the house, that I just can’t do. All my talents are on the cerebral track and I am very clumsy with my hands.

And he correctly sensed that while I was always willing to give it a shot if he asked, I really just wanted to get away from him as soon as possible.

Because he scared me. That fear makes every moment in the angry parent’s presence painful because it is fraught with tension. One of our strongest instincts is to flee from that which scares us. It’s a basic survival instinct. And so the angry parent can’t really bond with the kids, no matter how friendly they are, because the kid knows that could change at any second.

Still, despite all he did to me (molestation, taking me out of college, making the whole house a minefield when he was around with his temper), part of me wishes I could go back and try harder to see things from his point of view. I understand how frustrated he must have been by his inability to really connect with his kids, whom he does genuinely love like any father would. The problem was of his own devising, but I understand how painful it must have been to repeatedly try to reach out to us only to have our fear of him and/or his temper push us away.

And of all of us kids, I think I would have been the one most capable of bridging the gap, because I have a unique talent for understanding people, even the unpleasant ones, and I am quite capable of having compassion for the beast.

After all, my father had a nightmarishly bad childhood because of his father, who was Satan, and I am sure that is what fueled the anger, the frustration, and his inability to stand up for himself at work.

I mean, his sister Mary Jane reacted to their depraved and deprived childhood by retreating to a house in the boonies which was so strictly religious and antiseptic that the only things their kids were allowed to watch on TV was tapes of Leave It To Beaver and Father Knows Best.

I swear I am not making that up.

My mother, on the other hand…. it is very hard for me to talk about her. Children of polarized households with an angry parent and a nice but submissive parent invariably end up idolizing the nice parent. My mother is writ deep into the bedrock of my mind, and even thinking about her objectively makes me feel like I am trespassing on sacred ground.

But she played her part in my unhappy childhood as well. She was emotionally absent a lot of the time. Part of that was the terrible injustice of her working full time as a teacher and also being responsible for all the housework. Words cannot express how angry that makes me now.

And this was the normal thing back in the Seventies. Women were just happy they were finally allowed to have jobs. They certainly weren’t about to rock the boat by suggesting their husbands pick up the fucking slack.

So my mother was tired a lot of the time. I think she was also depressed, though I doubt she would agree. But I remember her basically going through life in this zombie-like state, like the burdens of life were so heavy that all she could manage was to sleepwalk through it.

And that sounds like a kind of depression to me. Life was a very hard slog for my mother when I was a kid and she was working full time and looking after four kids and an idle at home husband at the same time. And I think it really took its toll on her.

How I wish I could go back and not just volunteer to help with the housework (which I did many times, only to be rebuffed because she didn’t want to invest the effort in teaching me to do things), but insist on doing the housework and make my siblings and my father take up more of the load as well.

We were a family of six, and many hands make light work. It would have been a small price to pay to get the mother I had when I was a tiny tot back. The sweet, attentive, kind woman who delighted in teaching me new things.

The woman who sat me down beside her and we would sing songs from her guitar books while she strummed her guitar. The woman who showed me how our back yard garden worked. The woman who read me Huckleberry Finn, both Alice books, and all of the Chronicles of Narnia books, and did all the voices as well.

She gave me all that is good within me, and I will always treasure her for that. She taught me compassion and kindness and curiosity and gave me a thirst for knowledge and understanding that has never left me.

I think if I had been raised by that version of her, whether or not she had gone back to work, I would have been a much stronger and more confident person.

Maybe a bit of a Mama’s-boy, but there are worse fates.

Well, that’s all from me for today, folks. Thanks so much for reading this.

Seeya tomorrow, faithful readers!

Today was a Friday, and thus, a therapy day.

The session was not particularly productive, although my therapist did remind me that it is high time we got back to dealing with my anger and my family and my anger at my family.

It is the most difficult, and most productive, subject for me to deal with. I have successfully kept him distracted for nearly a year (I am a genius at smoke and mirrors and misdirection) but he is right, that is the really deep rich fertile pain and I should be trying to deal with it.

It hurts just to admit how angry I am at my family for how I was treated growing up. I was a fragile kid, and they crushed me with their indifference and their casual neglect and their lack of interest in me.

My family role was to disappear. Once my mother went back to work and my siblings were all in school, I went from being the wunderkind to being an irritation, like a once prized pet that has lost its novelty value and is now ignored, neglected, and even resented by the people who once loved it.

And the thing is, there is no one person to blame. It was the family culture as a whole. Everybody treated me like that. It was okay if we were just sitting around talking. I was allowed to speak. But there was no question of including me in things. I was useless, after all, and should be glad for anything I got.

So I was an isolated child despite being part of a household of six. Even if I was present, I was not truly included. I was an outsider in my own family, always feeling like I was on the verge of being left behind and had to tun to keep up, and try not to be noticed, because to be noticed was to remind them I was still there and they hated that.

And I made myself easy to ignore, that is the thing. Early on, I mastered giving them the appropriately reassuring responses when they happened to think to ask how I was. I knew the score. I knew they just wanted me to say everything was fine so they could go back to forgetting I exist. I knew that any other response, like for instance telling them about the nightmare that was the schoolyard for me. was out of the question.

If I had told them about my problems, they would have just blinked as though awakening from a dream, the dream where I did not exist, and looked confused and irritated about it to boot. Then they would have done whatever got them out of the conversation the fastest, and gone back to their happy fantasy land where I did not exist and did not matter again.

And I know that if I confronted them about it now, they would claim they do not remember doing that to me. And of course that is true. What is the point of ignoring me if they were going to remember they ignored me? The idea was to forget that I was even there. That means not paying any attention to me, and if you don’t pay attention to something, you don’t remember it.

You can’t have video of something if you never point your camera at it, after all.

And that was just not fair. It wasn’t right. I was a fragile, sensitive kid and I internalized this neglect completely. I still have a lot of trouble imagining that I matter. To the world, to others, to myself. Despite all evidence to the contrary, a part of me still feels like I am completely worthless, unworthy, illegitimate, and inconsequential.

It is very upsetting to realize that one cannot help but believe, or at least feel, something that one knows to be absiolutely untrue. Lots of people like and value me. I have loads of talent and wit to offer the world. I know damned well that I can be extremely likable and personable.

But somehow, that does not truly penetrate all the frost and filth caked around my heart. Not yet. I am doing my best to burn bright and hot so I can melt all that nasty dirty ice off of my poor broken heart, but it takes time.

And it is hard to be patient about one’s release from emotional jail. Part of me wants so badly to run free and wild that it drives me crazy, and that part of me is very impatient with this slow thawing process.

But I can’t just make it happen. This is not a riddle or a puzzle where once I know the answer, the door just magically opens. This is real emotional work, the processing and reprocessing of emotion, and that takes time, effort, energy, and above all, a lot of goddamned patience.

All I can do is convalesce. Like physical healing, when you are mentally ill, sometimes all you can do is do the things that make you feel healthier and wait for the mind to heal itself, without meddling from your manic monkey mind screwing things up.

And that is so hard for me. I am used to attacking problems with this big ole brain of mind and either just plain crushing them with its strength or prying it open via analysis, or if those don’t work, picking the lock with my cleverness.

Just plain leaving it alone is very hard. It is like not scratching an itch, or picking a scab. You know that it is what is needed in order to speed your healing, but it is so tempting to say screw that and choose instant relief instead.

I keep trying to zero out back to “all I have to do is be myself and try to make myself happy” but my deep intellectual restlessness makes that a tough sell.

With patience, I hope I will eventually redirect that restlessness into something productive, or at least interesting.

Wish me luck, folks. See you tomorrow!

No thoughts or ideas burning to be expressed tonight, so I guess I will just diarize at you nice people instead.

I learned something from a Cracked list recently that is just so damned beautiful that I have to share it.

During the Maidan revolution that led to the current problems in the Ukraine, the protesters did a hell of a lot more than just “occupy” some spaces. They basically went to war with their own government, They build an ice fortress made of compacted snow and defended it against all the government could throw at it.

It helps that some of the protesters were ex-military, including some that were ex-Spetsnaz, which is Russian for “Green Beret”, more or less. These are some tough motherfuckers.

Among the many brilliant non-violent tactics they invented, like having a whole bunch of people with cars form a kind of non-violent armored infantry unit called the Automaidan to keep supply lines running, was a move so absolutely poetically (and practically) perfect that it still shimmers in my mind every time I think of it.

When the jackbooted thugs of the previous regime came to try to kick them out and arrest them, they confronted with the usual things like Molotov cocktails (okay, so it was not entirely non-violent) and catapults full of rocks (they truly got medieval on their asses), they also used…. mirrors.

It’s simple. When the government thugs come, hold up a mirror to them and let them see themselves as individuals instead of being just one part of a faceless mob. Let them see what they have become. It is one thing to be one indistinguishable cog in uniforms designed to make them frightening anonymous, and another thing to see you, the individual you, staring back at you from the mirror and seeing what you have become.

I have no idea what effect this actually had, but it doesn’t really matter. It was such a genius move in terms of tearing away the veil of anonymity and making people see what they truly look like to others when they put on the scary uniform and start cracking the skulls of everyday citizens just like themselves.

And they kept it up, too, even adding “take your helmets off so we can see your face” to their demands at one point.

It is just so beautiful that it makes me want to fall to my knees and weep in front of it. It is so brilliant that I wish I had thought of it. It is so poetically perfect that I can’t believe it actually happened.

I think this should be a standard part of the revolution handbook from now on. Want to defend yourself from the stormtroopers of oppression without direct violence? Just snatch their face-concealing helmets or masks off, and see how willing they are to commit brutal acts when everybody can see who they really are.

It is the moral pressure of shame, and I am a big believer in shame. Shame is one of the forces we use to remain moral. In times of temptation, the thought of the humiliation and shame you would feel if anyone found out what you had done is a very good aid to remaining true to your ideals.

In fact, honestly, I think it is all keeping some people in line.

So by taking their helmets off, you are applying shame to them. It’s made even better by the fact that everyone can snap pictures of said faces with their cell phones and tablets these days. Then boom, that face is subject to shame from the entire fucking Internet, which will be able to provide real names, addresses, and so on for said faces in no time at all.

So face what you do, you goddamned thugs. See what you have become. Know that you will be considered personally responsible for all you do. And we do not care if you were “just following orders”.

That’s what is known (to me) as the Nuremberg Defense, and it works a little less every day.

Another cool thing I learned recently, this time from a podcast : Way down south in southern South America, there is a mosquito factory that produces over 20 million mosquitoes a day.

Sounds like something an 80’s cartoon villain would do, doesn’t it? “Ah yes, put the mosquito factory right next to the bad smell generator and the broccoli flavored liver boutique…. ”

But these are not ordinary mosquitoes. For one thing, they are all male. For another thing, they have been given a very specific genetic modification : any babies they sire will die almost right away.

So the idea is that you release these killer daddy skeeters in a mosquito-rich area, they follow their biological imperative and get it on with as many lady mosquitoes as they can, and all the babies those mamas have die.

This throws a spanner into the works of their entire reproductive cycle, and the upshot is that in a very short period of time, you have cut down the mosquito population by as much as 96 percent.

And as someone who grew up in a place with mosquitoes so big they rape ducks, I think that is bloody marvelous. I have absolutely no sympathy for mosquitoes as a species and I would be quite happy to see them all go.

But that is neither wise or possible. All we really want to is to get rid of them in places where humans live. They will do just fine out in the wild, biting other mammals.

We must also remember that for us in North America, mosquitoes are a persistent nuisance, but for a lot of the rest of the world, they are downright deadly. Whether it’s dengue fever in South America or malaria in Africa, mosquitoes kill millions every year.

If we could simply eliminate them from human occupied areas, we could save lives and prevent tons of human suffering, not to mention the suffering of the local fauna.

So screw you, mosquitoes! Go bite a bear in the forest and leave us alone.

That’s it from me for today, folks. Talk to you tomorrow!

I have always been an honest person. In fact, I would say that I have always been compulsively honest. If you surprise me, honesty comes out. Part of my deep drive to discover the truth is the kind of truthfulness to which many aspire.

But I would be lying if I said I was honesty out of pure saintly idealism. The truth is, I just do not like lying. I despise the sensation of it. I hate that moment when reality splits in two between the real world and the world in which your lie is true, and you now are stuck keeping track of both of them essentially until the day you die, or fess up.

Lies are messy and complicated and make cognitive demands and I have always just preferred to skip the whole thing by telling the truth however I see it.

And don’t get me wrong. Honestly is definitely a virtue. Being an honest, genuine, forthright person can lead people to trust you and rely on you for an objective point of view. Coupled with a genuine desire to help people, honesty can be a powerful tool for good. And certainly, everyone wants to think of themselves as honest. It is one of the core virtues of Western society.

But all virtues become poisonous when taken to the extreme. In the case of honesty, too much of it becomes bluntness, and being blunt is downright antisocial.

If you are blunt and insensitive, you will lose people’s trust because they cannot trust you not to suddenly say something hurtful or rude. The fact that you are doing so completely honestly and innocently actually makes it worse, because the person can’t get mad at you for it the way they could if it was openly malicious.

When I was a younger and less sophisticated man, I would have claimed higher moral authority and said something about how the people who don’t want to hear the truth are the ones who need it the most.

I know. What an asshole. I was totally a neckbeard back then.

But over the years I have learned that claiming that you have the right to say whatever the hell pops into your head in the name of Truth with a capital T runs quite contrary to any thought you might have about being a kind, gentle person.

Basically, you can be honest, or kind, but not both, not when taken to extremes. And after a certain amount of contemplation, I decided being kind was a lot more important to me.

I am too sensitive to knowingly choose a path that will hurt people. I genuinely want to help people. Occasionally that has come in the form of the short sharp shock of reality therapy, but most of the time, that means thinking about what I say and, more importantly, how I say it to keep it from being hurtful.

But that is not at odds with basic honesty. You can only say things which are true without saying the things that will hurt people. It is a matter of careful choice and it is a tightrope I have walked for a very long time, a compromise between my desire to be kind and my compulsion to be honest.

That is how I have lived for the bulk of my adult life. But recently it has struck me that this is not enough.

I will give you an example. Last Xmas, an online friend of mine was kind enough to buy me some books. Among those books was American Gods by Neil Gaiman.

I didn’t care for it. (I know, heresy.) I found it ponderous, slow-moving, emotionally flat, without any characters that I really liked (or hated), and overall I felt like it was one of those books that just goes on for a while then stops, without any sense of having gone anywhere or done anything.

So I didn’t like it. Later, she asked me what I thought of the book, and I told her the exact truth, that I didn’t like it at all, and she was clearly hurt by my blunt opinion.

And the thing is, I knew that she had bought me three books that she personally loved, totally as an act of affection, and that therefore her opinion of the book was highly positive.

But I just blurted out the truth anyhow, cluelessly, and it was only later that the stark truth of the matter become clear to me : I had hurt someone of whom I am very fond for no damned good reason.

It would have cost me nothing to say that I liked it, or at the very least been a lot more gentle in my explaining my opinion to her. She was clearly making herself vulnerable to me and I just thoughtlessly stomped all over her.

I went into what my dear friend Felicity calls “classroom mode”, which is kind of the default mode for all nerds. In it, you treat any and all questions as if they were questions from a teacher and you will be graded on the accuracy and thoroughness of your answer. So you blurt out the whole entire truth.

But life is not the classroom. There is nobody to hear your ever so clever answer and then give you a pat on the head for being
so gosh darn smart.

Yhere’s just people, regular people, equals, and they can be deeply hurt by a blunt and thoughtless remark from a person they know and like. People will not want to trust you or get close to you if you think you might hurt them at any moment.

So there is a limit to how much honesty is a virtue. There are times when honesty is a great strength and other times when it is not just a great weakness but morally wrong.

And that is a lesson I need to learn down to my very bone if I am going to continue to think of myself as a kind and gentle person who never hurts anyone unintentionally.

And I do.

Now if you like what I have said tonight, then I meant every single word of it.

But if you didn’t like it and it upset you, relax, it was all just a joke.

Seeya tomorrow, folks!