OMG, they have My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic on Canadian Netflix now!

And I am so excited about it! This is the most excited I’ve ever been (except for the one time I went GASP!), but really, I have wanted this for so long and it finally happened!

And they have all 91 (holycrap) episodes, so I kind of know what I will be watching for the next like… 33 Netflix hours.

I have wanted to watch the show for aaages, but I didn’t have the fecal concentration (in other words, I didn’t have my shit together) enough to say, download a torrent of the whole thing and stick them on a DVD-R or something.

I could have watched them on this a-here computer, but as y’all know, I don’t like watching things on my desktop. Being online makes me all twitchy like and it is hard for me to just watch something when my every urge is to flick around doing this that and the other in various tabs and windows.

So what I needed was for it to come to where I live, which is Netflix. I watch between 90 and 180 minutes of Netflix streaming content a day, always while I am eating a meal. Being busy eating provides me with the distraction and/or mental energy absorption necessary for me to be able to sit still and watch stuff.

And yes, this twitchiness does worry me a little sometimes. It seems to be a primary symptom of the way the Internet rewires our brains. Everyone I know that spend a significant amount of time online has the same problem.

The Internet makes us so impatient!

Anyhoo, back to the actual topic. MLP : FIM (or milpfim, as absolutely nobody calls it) on Netflix. The really twenty percent cooler thing is that I found My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic on Netflix on the very day that I finished watching the Bronies documentary… and I wasn’t even looking for it!

I had just reached that point where none of the stuff on my list (formerly the Instant Queue) really appealed to me, so it was time to check out the What’s Popular and the Recommended For You parts of my Netflix feed and add whatever appealed to me.

Even then, it was one of the very last things I found. If I wasn’t so bizaarely and fixatedly thorough and hence incapable of stopping until I have done the WHOLE THING, I probably would never have known.

So clearly, it is my destiny to watch all 91 (holycrap) episodes and become a brony at last!

Everything I knew about bronyship and the show it’s based on made me feel like it was something perfect for little ol me, even before I saw the documentary. I had seen the first two episodes and a few other random episodes before, and I definitely liked what I saw. The show is simply excellent. It has that combination of great characters, sense of humour, and most of all, genuine warmth that makes a show far more than the sum of its parts.

It makes it magic. To me, that’s where the magic lives. All my favorite shows, the ones that have a special place in my heart, like the Muppets, Cheers, Barney Miller, and Night Court, they all have that magic.

And that is the sort of thing that I hope to infuse into my own arts some day.

Speaking of my own arts, I will now set my first hoof into bornyhood and do something incredibly brony, and list the six mane characters in ascending order of how much I identify with them, and why.

Rarity. Nope. Apart from a shared sense of aesthetics, her and I don’t correspond at all. I would have to say she’s my least favorite. Don’t get me wrong, I love all the ponies, but she is just not my kind of person. Pony. Whatever. And is it just me, or does she have entirely the wrong kind of personality to be the spirit of Generosity? It’s like they came up with the characters first, then the idea of the virtues of friendship, and they found a suitable embodiment for five of them and she got the one left over. Plus, honestly, little girls have enough princess types who are obsessed with fashion and beauty and clothes from like, every other show in the universe. They don’t need Rarity.

Rainbow Dash. I debated having her be first because she has a personality that is practically the opposite of mine, but then I thought about it more and I do identify with her brash confidence. It’s not a side of me that comes to the fore very often (yet), but I have always identified with the characters that have a lot of gall. The ones who dare to do things others wouldn’t do because it would be too weird. That’s enough to put her ahead of Rarity for me.

Twilight Sparkle. Oh noes, she’s everybody’s favorite and she’s only third on this list! But seriously, I don’t have anything against her. I just don’t identify with her hyper-achiever personality. I do love that she is intellectual and takes things like education and learning things seriously. And I have sympathy for her highly driven nature. But I am a coaster, not a keener.

Applejack. I really like her. Specifically, I love her no-nonsense approach to life and her willingness to work hard for her family. I adore her determination to keep things grounded in reality and to look at life straight on and deal with it as it is. I identify with that. I just wish I had her fortitude.

Pinkie Pie. No surprise that the embodiment of Laughter would be high on my list. And yes, she can be annoying in her unrelenting perkiness, but I totally identity with having way too much to say and feeling all hyper and giggly and conquering fear through laughter, though I expect my laughter would be a tad more sarcastic than hers. Less “tee hee hee!”, more “Seriously? You expect me to be scared by that?”

But of course, absolutely nobody can compete with…

Fluttershy. She’s shy and sweet and loves animals and is occasionally slightly psychotic. It’s like we’re twins! I just want to cuddle up with her someplace quiet where we can hide from the world and pet bunnies.

That’s all from me for today, folks. Sorry about the brony explosion. I promise this will not become a brony blog. I just had to get this out of my system or I would burst from the happy!

I will learn the ways of the brony, and become one. This I swear!

Talk to you tomorrow, all you wonderful people!

One of the things I have realized about myself lately is that I have a powerful, powerful need to express myself.

And this informs the way I interact with the world on every level. In addition to trying to prove to the world how clever and brilliant I am and what a simply gorgeous mind I have, I also have an immense need to express what is inside of me.

Perhaps that is true of every creative type person. I don’t know. So far I have only had a chance to be me.

But I definitely have this need. It is what has fueled my lifelong pursuit of higher density in communication. There is so much inside of me that I wish to express that the usual modes of expression simply do not cut it. The workaday language of quotidian life is so very thin to someone like me that it’s like trying to play a symphony on a kazoo. My inner life is far too rich and dense for such an unimaginative instrument.

That is also the problem, though. This scintillating inner world full of magic and wonder (and demons and poisons and murder) can be so overwhelming that trying to express it seems hopeless. It can seem that no matter what I do, no matter what medium I employ and no matter how hard I try to get all my inner richness to go through the too-narrow gate of my expressive abilities in an orderly single-file fashion, it will always be like trying to empty Luke Huron with a teaspoon.

And this inner life is so much richer and deeper than everyday experience that it can be like a wall between me and others. It looks like I am right there with them, and I desperately want to be, but I am surrounded by my enormous retinue of ideas and observations and emotions and everything else that is waiting to be expressed.

Sometimes I feel like an overstuffed orphanage that can only just barely keep up with the children’s basic needs, and never actually takes the time to get the kids adopted out, but just keeps on taking in more kids anyway. I am overfull with all the children (and grandchildren, and so on) of my extraordinary mind, and frankly, that is what makes it so hard to cope.

There is this profound pressure inside of me that ebbs and flows and sometimes makes it very hard to think. The internal noise level alone, the racket caused by all those rowdy thoughts jostling about, can be deafening, especially when something has stimulated the throng and made them agitated.

If I could plant an existential microphone in my seat of consciousness and let everyone hear what it is like inside this skull of mine, people would be amazed that I ever get anything done.

But alas, that is not possible, and I find myself dealing with a problem that is nearly impossible to explain to anyone. How do you tell people that you can’t hear them over your own internal noise? How can you get across the idea that when your inner crowd gets riled up, the sheer pressure squeezes the intelligence out of you and so you are trying to cope with the reality outside your skull while the inner world is making it nearly impossible to think.

Looking back, a lot of the worst moments of my life involved this madding crowd of mine. It is no wonder that I developed the habit, early on, to react to stress by reducing stimulation levels. The wrong kind of stimulation sets my inner entourage humming like a hive full of angry bees, and drains away my ability to cope.

Hence, self-isolation. When I think back on times when it has been bad, I am amazed at all the stuff going on in my head during uncomfortable situations. And when you are dealing with all that shit flying around inside your head, it makes it very hard to deal with the outside world at the same time.

So I isolate myself, and spend my days keeping my mind occupied in safe, controllable, low-stimulation (compared to reality) ways, like reading and video games and messing around on Facebook.

Those, I can handle. Those I can control. Those provide the kind of mental stimulation I can handle, the kind that is highly intellectual and fairly passive, and that can take place mostly inside my head (from a subjective point of view) and thus remain within my comfort zone.

Doing those things does not agitate my inner crowd. In fact, it soothes it. By keeping my mind busy, some of that excess energy is drained away and I can cope with the world in my own minimal way.

But even better than video games and the Internet for those purposes is this very blog you are reading. Here, I can pour out some of the words that accumulate inside of me just from living and reduce that inner pressure to more livable levels.

Looked at that way, self-expression becomes less of a hobby or a talent and more of a dire psychological need. I have been pondering increasing my creative output since, um, January and this gives me an excellent reason to go for it.

I mean, I know damned well that I am a healthier and happier person when I have a high creative output. Presumably this is because the crowd inside is actually going somewhere instead of just milling around causing trouble.

I have been pondering doing one of my zany challenges in order to get things going, namely to commit myself publicly to doing a five minute audio podcast every day for sixty days, for a total of 300 minutes (ish) of content, or five hours.

Doing five minutes a day would be quite a challenge, especially because I am going to do my best to make it high-quality, high-density stuff and not just me talking about whatever is on my mind that day.

I will ponder this anon. It feels like the right time to get something like that going.

Who knows… maybe I could even clear the backlog and get to a point where all I had to deal with was whatever had accumulated in my mind in the previous 24 hours.

Dare to dream, folks. I will talk to you all again tomorrow.

So, now my other knee is showing the same symptoms as the first one. I now have two malfunctioning knees. First the left, now the right. Isn’t that just dandy?

Just like when I first started have problems with the left, the right knee now feels very hot to me, especially after moving, and when I palpate the knee (aka give it a squeeze), it feels squishy and puffy, like there is fluid under the skin.

So, you know… WTF?

By this point, the left knee has… stabilized. It doesn’t heat up nearly as much as it did before, and it doesn’t hurt as much to move it as it once did.

But it’s still not healthy. I have to be careful how I put weight on it because any side-to-side twisting causes pain of a very worrying sort. And I still have that surface muscular paralysis that makes it feel like there’s a cast or a bandage wrapped around my left leg, between the top of the kneecap to around mid-calf.

If the same thing was to happen to the right leg as well, it would definitely make it hard to walk. Right now, I have a bit of a limp, but for the most part, the right leg compensates for the left.

That might be part of the problem, come to think of it. The right leg being overloaded now.

Anyhow, if both of them were stiff and unstable, at the very least I would be walking funny. At the worst, I would not be able to walk correctly without some kind of assistance, like crutches or braces.

That would suck. I might not be the most active of guys, in fact I am probably about as indolent as one can be without being in a coma. There are invalids in hospitals who get more exercise than me because they at least are made to do physio.

But I still enjoy the ability to walk. The alternatives are so much less efficient and, frankly, a lot more work. I have spent some time on crutches and they are a nightmare of a hassle to deal with. They are bulky and awkward and clumsy to use, and they put a lot of strain on your arms, and especially your underarms, which are, after all, now bearing your weight.

I have never had braces on my legs, but they do not look like fun either. And they usually come with crutches.

So needless to say (but I will anyway), I am getting pretty worried. Clearly something is attacking my knees and possibly other joints as well, and so far, medical science doesn’t know what. My GP couldn’t figure it out (typical, in my experience) and has supposedly referred me to a rheumotologist (sp?), but that was weeks ago now and I still haven’t heard anything.

So I might just have to dial myself up another GP appointment and go back to see Doctor Chao and remind him that he has not actually diagnosed my problem yet, let alone solved it.

I think it is unfair to make patients have to come back over and over again and advocate so hard for themselves just to keep the doctor’s attention long enough to get your problem actually treated. I should not feel like I need to have a lawyer or an advocate just to get treatment. The assembly-line approach to primary health care of today is great for making sure you can get an appointment within a couple of days, but it does a poor job with anything that can’t be solved in 15 minutes or less with a quick procedure or a hastily dashed off prescription.

All my life, I have had a strange relationship with doctors. I don’t know if it’s the perversity of fate or the perversity of how I express myself, but I always seem to end up with these sorts of problems that defy simply solutions and that therefore require the kind of focused attention and follow-through that you just can’t get from today’s general practitioners.

The fact that I have a history of being too timid and agreeable to properly advocate for myself only makes the problem worse. The very medical conditions (social anxiety, depression) that a GP first diagnosed in me are the precise reason why I cannot properly advocate for myself in the first place.

But life is pretty harsh for people whose medical conditions make it hard to seek treatment. I am not sure what could be done about that. Maybe some sort of medical advocate outreach program. Something where I would only have to have the gumption to call and make contact once, and then an advocate would take it from there.

Hell, for all I know, that’s already out there, just waiting for my call. How would I know?

Luckily, thanks to the ministrations of a competent medical professional in the form of my therapist Doctor Costin, I am recovering from my mental illness and I am therefore considerably less timid and self-minimizing than before. This opens the door to a more robust and assertive level of self-advocacy.

But it will always seem wrong to me to have a medical system where you have to practically shout at your GP in order to keep their attention long enough to actually be treated for things. It certainly fails to make me feel like my doctor is on my side or that he or she knows me well enough to treat me as a person and not just today’s list of symptoms.

Maybe the information age is partly to blame. There is a lot of information attached to every patient now, and it would take some kind of mnemonic genius to remember it all for dozens of patients.

But there has to be some way to make the whole thing a little more gentle and humane.

I guess doubling the number of doctors would do it. But that’s kind of hard to arrange. People either choose to become doctors or they don’t, and nothing society can do can do much to change that.

Oh well. I will hobble to the keyboard to talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

I’ve been catching up on Sherlock (the Cummerbund Bandersnatch version) via Netflix lately, and it’s got me thinking about my own life as someone who was far too smart for his own good.

I think the main reason Sherlock Holmes is the most portrayed character in the history of the English language and still has a powerful legacy more than a hundred years after the original stories were published is that, for us intellectual types, Holmes is actually an “id” character.

He behaves more or less exactly like us smarty pants types secretly wish we could. He is eccentric and driven and follows the passions of the mind with very little restraint and uses his extraordinary mind in the most exciting and thrilling way possible : the pursuit of crime.

Now, depending on your Sherlock, exactly how eccentric he is varies. Some versions he’s more or less just a slightly eccentric proper gentleman who mostly does drawing-room deductions and his Watson is a bumbling fool only good for taking down notes and fawning over Sherlock and telling Sherlock how brilliant he is.

And that version of Sherlock can be quite entertaining in a mostly intellectual way. But I don’t identify with it. I have never had the luxury of being able to keep my overclocked brain from making me one very strange dude.

The Henderson Cabbagepatch version of Sherlock Holmes is far more to my liking. He’s eccentric to the point of being a barely contained lunatic a lot of the time. He is the sort of person who shoots his wall with a pistol (indoors, no less) when he gets bored and has a lot of trouble actually identifying with people and behaving like one of them despite his extraordinarily sharp understanding of them from an intellectual POV.

I can relate to that. In that, he is more or less a more severe and exaggerated version of me. I too have a great understanding of people that doesn’t actually make it any easier for me to get along with them. I could give you enormous detail as to why people do the things they do. I have never had trouble understanding people’s motives or actions, or at least, not as an adult.

Nevertheless, I am as socially isolated as any other breed of nerd. There is a vast gulf between the sort of intellectual understanding of people that I possess and the gut-level realtime understanding that a socially gifted person has. There are skills you can only acquire via proper socialization, and if you do not get that socialization at the right time of your life, you will be at a disadvantage till the day you die.

Luckily, those social circuits get repurposed into intellectual circuits (or maybe that was the problem in the first place) and so there is at least some compensation for being socially retarded.

And the Bumbershoot Cucumber version of Sherlock Holmes seems like that kind of person as well. It is clear to me that his Sherlock is not the sort of person who could just walk into a random pub and be chatting with the regulars like he’d been there for years within five minutes. He does not seem like the kind of person who is the life of the party wherever he goes.

He does not seem like the type who knows how to mingle.

Instead, he operates within his own icy “mind palace” that gives him a robust avenue for engaging with reality entirely on his own chilly intellectual terms, and even gives him a way to function at a very high level in society without actually having to learn to be a normal person at all.

Makes me kind of jealous, to be honest, inasmuch as it is possible to be jealous of a fictional character. I still have not found my weird little niche from which I can deal with society yet. Unlike luckier souls, I was left completely adrift at an early age. Nobody ever took an interest in me, or if they did, I was just too difficult and hard to reach for them to keep it up. I never had anyone to suggest I focus my enormous mental energies on some sort of goal.

And so I just drifted through life, and I am drifting still. One would hope that by now I would have learned to make my own structure and find my own goals to focus on, but no matter how much time you spend flapping your wings, you still won’t fly.

Plus, you know, mental illness. It’s a bitch.

I’d like to think that if a real world situation that required Sherlockian detective work came up, I could be as driven as he is to find the answers. I could never have his powers of observation, of course. All my skills are cerebral, not sense-based. I barely notice really obvious details of people, let alone subtle ones.

Actually, I am pretty good with sound. I suppose I’ve had to be, growing up as I did with poor vision. So I can notice things in people’s tone of voice that others might miss. I can certainly detect insincerity with great precision.

And it bugs the hell out of me. That’s why I can’t stand it when corporations force their employees to pretend to be more social and friendly than they are. I would much rather aloof but polite service from someone being genuine than artificially perky and over-familiar service from someone who is dying on the inside.

Anyhow, basically, watching Sherlock has prompted me to think of my own role as a maladjusted intellectual.

What we need is something like kindergarten for grownups. Someplace where we can go where there is not a lot of pressure, just cool stuff to do and nice people teaching lessons and lots of gentle encouragement to socialize and mingle.

It would be a rough place to run because a lot of us have some pretty deep issues that might well come out in antisocial behaviour, at least at first. A lot of us do not play well with others either.

But with enough kindness and patience, maybe we can all have that happy childhood that it is supposedly never too late for.

You and me, Sherlock. The game’s afoot!

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

I am not a happy camper lately.

For the last three or four days, I have been experiencing a period of almost constant anxiety. I feel crazed and haunted all the time. I can’t seem to calm down for long. I feel like I am being hunted and I can’t relax at all.

Oh, I can sleep. I can even sleep fairly peacefully… no more crazy scary dreams than usual, no waking up feeling more tired than when I went to sleep, no waking uyp dizzy and disoriented either.

But once I am awake, the anxiety sets in. I feel restless and agitated all the time. I feel like I am waiting for something big and bad to happen, and I wish it would just happen already so I could deal with it and get it over with.

It’s like being in the waiting room of your dentist’s office, waiting for a procedure you know will be painful and gross and very upsetting, and the dentist is running late. So despite how part of you might be glad the bad thing hasn’t happened yet, you are mostly just mad at the dentist for making you stew in your own trepidation like this.

Ironically, when I feel agitated and anxious like this, I end up spending more time in bed. The nature of my illness leads me to deal with anxiety by reducing stimulation, and retreating into sleep is the ultimate expression of that. When you sleep, you do not have to deal with stimulation at all. You get to skip out on life completely for a while. The ultimate escape.

Well, penultimate, perhaps.

So I have been spending far more time lying in bed than usual. I spend my time sleeping, or reading, or playing games on my tablet, or just laying there with my fan pointed at my forehead, my conscious mind blanked out so my inner mind can process and integrate whatever it is that is bothering me.

Even just sitting here typing, with no music on or anything else to distract or stimulate me, I feel far too anxious, and the desire to retreat to my bed and finish this entry later is very strong. It is only my usual bullheaded determination to finish what I start that is keeping me here, typing away to you nice people, when I could be “safe:.

Naturally, all this worry has me worried. I am pretty curious about just what it is that happened lately that has led me to this state of heightened agitation. I can’t think of any one thing in particular that is the trigger. I haven’t gotten any sort of news that has me upset, and there’s no life changes coming my way as far as I know.

Mostly it is just an accumulation of things, I suspect. At some point, I started taking on agitation faster than I could dissipate it, and since them it has been building and building.

And now I feel kind of freaked out all the time.

I can think of a few contributing stressors. I slept on my right shoulder wrong recently, and so it is kind of sore. Nothing enormous or life-changing, just a stiffness and soreness that makes doing anything with that arm (like, say, use the mouse) a little more painful and uncomfortable, and that certainly adds to one’s stress level like only pain can.

Plus, my sister Catherine and her hubby Joe will be visiting me in around a month, and the evil forces of social anxiety are already hard at work making me dread the coming visit instead of anticipating it with great joy, like I want to do.

After all, I haven’t seen Catherine in decades and I have never even met her hubby Joe, and I am so happy that they will be visiting and I will get to see them.

Or at least, the sane part of me feels that way,

But the crazy part is terrified of the whole thing. Why? No good reason. That’s what makes it crazy. I could not even begin to offer any sort of rational rationale as to why I am terrified of the whole thing. I just am.

I mean, what do I think is going to happen? Rejection? Disapproval? Exposure? This is my sister, not some stranger. She knows me well enough, even after all these years, to know what to expect from me. And yet, I feel deeply ashamed.

So that is weighing on my mind, and probably contributing to this state of stress. I have been having low level anxiety attacks by the dozens. I have tried getting some exercise, and thank goodness, that does help a little bit. Takes some of that excess energy out of the equation.

But deep down, I think I am going through some sort of emotional crisis. All this emotional chaos is merely the side effect of a serious emotional renovation project, and I will be far better off once it’s all done.

In the meantime, I am going to have to put up with feeling crazy all the time. I feel like doing something nuts like throwing my computer monitor out the window or smashing my tablet over my knee or running screaming into the night.

Thankfully, I have you people to talk to, and that gives me a slightly less deranged outlet for my insanity. Hopefully, this whole thing will end on its own soon and I can go back to my usual lower level of total insanity.

When I am done typing this missive to you all, I will lay down again, perchance to sleep, or possibly just to state at the ceiling without really seeing it while my mind races and races and I try to get it to slow down and tell me what it wants.

What it wants, I suspect, is to start screaming and never stop, but that is not currently a primary option.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

If I wasn’t depressed… if somehow my entire mental illness evaporated overnight like morning fog burned away by the summer sun… then I would have to face the world without it.

And that prospect terrifies me on a level so deep and so primal that it makes me feel like I am going insane just to think about it, let alone do anything about it.

This is the real deep throbbing hard-edged truth of depression : you need it. It stays because you still want it around. You might think and say all kinds of things about how much being mentally ill sucks and how you would do all kinds of wonderful things if that darn depression wasn’t around, but the truth is, you couldn’t live without it.

I need mine. That deadly numbness acts as a filter for reality, one that mutes the intensity of sensation and throttles down the volume of life to something I can handle, and I can’t handle much.

For this service, depression demands a very heavy price. It has left me alone and isolated for a vast majority of my life. Even when I am not alone, the icy numbness to which I am addicted keeps me from feeling the love and respect of others, so I am still isolated where it counts.

And all so I can remain turned inward, away from reality, and hide my head in the sand. All so I can stay in my inner world and pretend the outer world does not exist to terrify and defeat me, and make me feel so small.

I might fool myself into thinking that because my mind is free, so am I. But if you have a chained and padlocked soul, like I do, the freedom of one’s mind is that of a bird on a chain who thinks it flies free because it can fly in circles.

And boy, do I know a think or two about going in the circles. It seems like that is all I do. I can never tell whether I am making any real progress because it seems like I just end up in the same places over and over again. Am I spiraling upward, or am I just wearing a groove into the circle of ground at the end of my leash?

Either way, I don’t feel like I have the power to stop. If I stopped, all the energy that I use in my mindless circling would start to build up and that would shatter my fragile strategy like a china cup under a giant’s heel.

So I wander and search, never stopping, always looking, always seeking, never finding that one thing that would make me happy. The one thing that would let me finally stop and rest. Because there is no such thing. I search because I have to, not because I actually think I will find a solution.

And so in my mind and in my dreams, I am always moving, looking, trying to get somewhere but the cross current always pulls me off course and I can never get back to where I began.

I guess that’s its job.

At least here, I can drag myself back to the beginning. So… if I wasn’t depressed….

I would be… exposed? I would have to take reality unfiltered. I would have to live in realtime and make my decisions on the fly without even the illusion of a delay. As an over-intellectual emotional refugee, I have grown extremely reliant on my rational mind for decision making, thus cutting the more gut-level, integrated, instinctual thinking out of the loop.

And cold rationality is simply not enough. We cannot live healthy lives if we are cut in half. Only with balance and integration do we have a hope of being stable and sane.

If I could truly decide to simply throw away my depression… to rip the cold cloak of clinical comfort that has kept me from growing up and being a real person for my entire adult life… would I do it? Would I have the strength to say “Fuck it. Kill that bullshit and let me deal with the consequences. ”

I don’t know. I feel like I have on just looked beyond the edge of my depression and seen what truly lies outside it, and what its true dimensions are. If it were possible (and it just might be) to just rip it all away, would I do it? Could I do it? Or would cowardice and weakness keep me forever trapped in maladaptation and depression, watching the days and years of my life pass me by as I roll, unresisting, towards an early grave?

I honestly don’t know. I have been experiencing so much emotional flux lately that it is hard for me to do much more than try to just let things sort themselves out somehow, with the occasional bit of light exercise to help bleed off some of the pressure and make some room for me to think.

I think I can let my depression go. Maybe not all at once, but in the biggest handfuls I can make. I have a deep dark rage against this cold and filthy monster that has kept me trapped for two decades and more, and it is that rage that has powered my recent recovery and led me to be willing to do whatever it takes to be free.

Even if it means cutting off my arm, metaphorically speaking.

And the more I understand what I am getting from my depression, the easier it will be to decide to give it up. I have to be willing to give up this cloak of intellect and detachment and swim naked in the pool of life for the first time, without my little submersible, before I can endure… and adapt.

If you don’t endure, you will never adapt. If you don’t stay, you won’t learn to play.

And there are worse things in life than being trapped.

That’s all for me today, folks. Tomorrow… I talk about my Dad.

I must have had ten different ideas for an entry today. So I just spun the wheel and it landed on thinking versus knowing.

Like I have said before in this space, I think there is a difference between a mind focused on having a lot of knowledge on hand and one focused on having a lot of think about.

Some people collect facts with amazing alacrity, and file those facts in very neatly organized filing cabinets in their minds, with robust cross-referencing and intelligent indexing, and are able to bring up whole rafts of related information at a moment’s notice whenever they like.

Basically, these are organized people with organized minds, and I am always amazed at their ability to bring so much knowledge to bear in any situation and to be able to search their internal database from whatever angle they want and get very thorough and accurate results time after time.

As you may have guessed, my mind is not like that at all. Oh, there is all kinds of stuff in there. Like any good intellectual, I love to learn, and I am quite intellectually omnivorous. I can feed on and enjoy all kinds of intellectual faire.

And I can remember it too, in the right situation. That’s why school was so easy for me. I am test-bright, which means (according to my theory) that I get a lot of information out of the question itself, thus making it easier to fill in the space remaining and remember the answer.

But I need that information from the question. Otherwise. I am stuck dealing with the raw contents of my mind, and that is where things break down, because my mind, like my life, is not organized like a reference library.

In fact, it is tempting to say it isn’t organized at all, but there are some things which it can do very swiftly and with great accuracy and deadly efficiency, so clearly my mind is more than a scattered heap of unrelated pages.

It’s just that I have never had knowing things as my highest priority. My highest priority is always understanding.

Now you might say, “Aren’t those the same thing?”. And it’s true that to understand something is to know something about it, and vice versa. But that doesn’t make them the same thing, merely intimately interrelated.

Knowledge is about facts. Known truths, established inferences, the pleasure of knowing.

Understanding, on the other hand, is about the relationships between those known things. The greatest pleasure for a theorist, philosopher, or other understanding-based thinkers is to deduce or inference something new from existing knowns.

It is the pleasure of revelation. It’s that wonderful feeling you get when you discover a previously unknown pattern or make a novel and valid connection and suddenly the chaos resolves into a simpler and more orderly form.

That’s as close as I can get as to why someone like me pursues understanding so passionately. The long term benefits are enormous, but the short term reward, the thing that keeps you gathering information and distilling it down, is that extraordinary jolt of electric mental pleasure I get when I figure something out.

They say that we INTJ types have a model of the universe in our minds that we are constantly updating and optimizing. If so, then the pleasure of revelation represents the moment when that model becomes smaller and more compact and efficient.

And that’s fucking awesome.

Because my mind works this way, seeking understanding, the things I learn never end up in neatly organized files in my mind. Most of what I learn is boiled away in the distillation process, and the rest is fitted into that model of the world in a formthat might well be radically different from what I began with.

It’s like I am making an enormous sculpture out of whatever junk I happen to find lying around. Odds are, that entire microwave oven won’t make it into the final piece… but the handle might.

So compared to others, I am no walking encyclopedia. I know a lot of things, but whether or not I can bring it up whole and complete is a total crapshoot. The odds get better the closer you get to one of my many pet topics, like politics or science, but for the most part, I extract what insights I can from my knowledge and discard the rest as irrelevant.

Luckily, just as knowledge can be used to produce insight, insight can be used to recreate knowledge. I am almost certain that a lot of the times when I do remember things, it is because somewhere in my mind there is just enough of the information in question for me to inference the rest.

In computer terms. my mind is very good at compression, though it is far from lossless.

I also have the ability (another INTJ tool) to sound like I know exactly what I am talking about. We can do that because of that highly integrated and optimized model of the world we carry around. It lets us be very sure of what we know and what we do not know, and that then lets us speak with a firmness and certainty that really impresses people.

It is one of the ways we end up in leadership roles without ever really wanting or seeking them. One of the most natural forms of leadership for human beings is to be the person who sounds like they really know what they are talking about.

Thank goodness I usually do. There were some incidents when I was in my late teens where my mouth got ahead of my brain and I ended up talking utter nonsense plucked straight from my anus, but I learned the necessary amount of caution from those humilating moments when someone looked at me and said “What the fuck are you saying?” and, well…

I had no idea.

So in conclusion (I bet the knowing types are better at staying on topic) I am a thinker, a theorist, a dreamer, and a philosopher before anything else.

That’s all I was really trying to say.

See you again tomorrow, you wonderful people!

Some days, I know exactly what I will write about. I have a clear idea of the subject matter and the points I want to cover, or I at least have a firm idea for a good jumping-off point for something I want to explore, and writing the day’s entry is relatively easy from that point on.

But not today. Today, my mind is a dusty tornado full of random bits of Kansas, and I have no plan at all.

Oh well, clarity (like purity) is overrated anyhow. I would rather face the true mess of things than fool myself with artificial order created as a safety blanket against chaos.

That’s what makes me a philosopher, I guess. I am capable of highly ordered and analytical thinking with a very high density and resolution and laser precision.

But I don’t let it fool me into thinking I can conquer the chaos of life and create order for order’s sake. I pilot my little kayak of sanity around the oceans of possibility and when in doubt, I make do with less, not more.

The true philosopher, like the true warrior, is without form.

Speaking of purity, the idea has been on my mind a lot lately. And by that I do not merely mean that I have been thinking about it, but that it keeps spontaneously popping into my mind as a prominent theme. The usual wellspring of my creative mind, the place where all my insights and creations come from, has been producing ideas about purity at an increasing rate.

I think this is a sign that I am at the stage of recovery where, having become both aware of my own impurity and the possibility of their being something else, the concept of purity has now become a direction and a yearning instead of the meaningless and inaccessible abstraction it was before.

Total purity may not be possible, but greater purity always is.

And what do I mean by purity? I don’t know. It’s a spiritual feeling, not a well fleshed out philosophical concept to be now. It is the bare nub where an idea way some day grow. It is a need I was afraid to acknowledge and buried under mental abstractions and pretentious derision until recently.

For reference, see my thoughts on innocence. They are almost the same thing.

I was afraid to face this need in me, this striving for purity, because for a long time I thought that was simply impossible for me. Purity and innocence were something that happened to other people. I felt like I was poisoned, polluted, and paralyzed from the very start. The innocent world of others seemed like another dimension to me, one that I could see but never touch without destroying it with my chaotic and radioactive bitter truths.

Always, I have stood outside, wanting to be inside where it is warm and loving, but afraid of destroying it with my toxic self by my very presence.

This is not uncommon with victims of childhood sexual abuse. When we say it robs children of their innocence, we are saying far more than we know. I have felt disgusting all my life. There is no such thing as a clean turd.

So it’s a good thing that I am now feeling that some sort of purity might be possible for me. The waters of my soul need not be a morass of vile and hateful fluids. It can be purified. It can be clean.

One idea that keeps popping into my head is the idea of a spiritually perfect being. I have known since I was a teenager that one of the driving forces of my personality was a desire for spiritual growth, and that my spiritual ambitions had no limit.

But never before has the concept of the spiritually and morally perfect being been as strong and compelling as it is now. I keep coming back to the idea of a being that has no nagging personal motives or conflicting drives any more, but is spiritually whole and clean and unfettered by complications, and thus can embrace the universe of emotions and relationships without fear and without risk.

That is the state I desire, though of course, not being an angel (as good a name for such a being as any), I can never truly shed my humanity and transcend the messy material realities of existence into a state of perfection.

But I can try. Some goals you pursue while knowing you can never truly get there, because what you have found is not a destination but a direction, an axis along which you wish to travel.

It also makes me feel good to realize that I am growing more comfortable with the non-rational side of myself. The grand process of integration that is my recovery demanded that I abandon my palace of ice, at least some of the time, and I feel I have done that. I have tapped into the wellspring of spirit and feel more alive and real and valid as a result.

The process is ongoing, of course. This vast a renovation does not take place overnight. And in order to get there, I have to walk through that valley of death and get to the other side. I have to keep walking down this long dim cold corridor not just because I want to reach the end but because the acting of walking itself is better than the stagnant stasis that came before.

The first step towards purifying water is to get it flowing. Still waters might run deep, but they also run dirty. I have been deep and still for a very long time, which is great for philosophy but lousy for anything else.

And at some point, just like Zarathrusta, you have to come down from the mountaintop and live your life. Join the madding crowd and learn what it is to be human.

I am still making my way there. I am still only, at best, halfway down my mountain.

But I will get to the ground eventually.

That’s all the free form prosetry I have for today, folks. See you tomorrow.

Check out the future of batteries : the metal-air battery.

It could drive your electric vehicle 1800 km (or around 1200 miles for you Americans) on a single charge, and all with a battery that only weighs 100 kg (220 pounds, or the weight of one slightly overweight man).

It does this by one of those acts of genius that seems obvious in hindsight : it gets its oxygen from the air instead of lugging it around in the anode of the battery.

I had no idea until now that batteries carried their own oxygen supply inside. All I know about batteries is that when you have two different kinds of metal in the same acid, the difference between the conductivity in the two metals creates a current.

Or something like that. It’s been a long time since Grade 9 science.

So I am not sure where the oxygen comes in. But the company responsible for this breakthrough, Phinergy, assures us that this is true and that their solution fixes that problem.

I have heard about this kind of thing before, but never in so effective a form and, and this is very important, never in a form that relies on something as cheap and plentiful as aluminum.

The Earth’s crust is loaded with aluminum, until rarer stuff like lithium, and aluminum is cheap, easy to work with, and marvelously recyclable to boot.

With that kind of range, the biggest hurdle for electric vehicles is cleared. A car with the Phinergy system would have two batteries, a small lithium-ion one with a 50 km range (more than enough for urban driving) and the larger aluminum-air battery for longer trips.

To be honest, people’s objection to short operating ranges for electric cars is mostly irrational. Unless you have a very long commute, 50 km is enough whether there’s a bigger battery for longer trips there or not. Most people could commute, run errands, and be back home with range to spare, and just plug their car in overnight.

But if a much longer range than they need is what it takes to get enough people to buy electric cars that it is worth it to invest in the infrastructure to support them, I am all for it.

Imagine a future where your car drives itself and you never have to worry about running out of power because it automatically parks itself on a charging pad when not in use.

Sounds pretty awesome to me.

Moving on, it turns out that Thomas Kinkade was a drunk.

For those of you unfamiliar with the late mister Kinkade, here’s the precis : he painted super happy, warm, life-affirming paintings filled with glowy sunshine and bucolic imagery like cottages and lakes and flowers.

Stuff like this :

And as we wind on down the road/ our shadow’s taller than our soul…

And because his paintings were happy and harmless and easy for anyone to like, the artistic establishment hated him. And not only that, he had the gall to make paintings that the Wrong Kind Of People, namely evangelical Christians, liked, and made a heck of a lot of money doing it. So the artistic establishment hated him with the fiery passion of a thousand suns.

To me, that is entirely wrongheaded. I like his work. There is nothing wrong with making art purely to make people feel good. Art does not have to challenge and perplex.

It can just set out to be pretty and nice to look at. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Do we forget all the revered artists who painted nothing but sunflowers and starry nights?

As for him being a drinker and a tail-chaser, I suppose that would be a shock to people in the self-sealed evangelical Christian movement, but to people like myself who are more versed in the lives of artists and writers, it is not a surprise at all. We artists are a high strung and intense bunch, often with profound personal demons hounding us, and it is no wonder that so many of us end up lost to one form of addiction or another.

Being an artist isn’t easy, and I am not just talking about how hard it is to make the actual art. Just having the necessary combination of sensitivity and imagination can be quite the burden, and some of us turn to substance abuse in order to dull our sensitivity and quiet our demons for a while.

Myself, I have avoided life, and therefore I have avoided the sorts of stresses that turn us high strung artistic types to addiction. I am keenly aware of how easy it would be for me to fall into addiction, and so I am extremely paranoid about opening the door to it even the tiniest bit.

As a result, I have fewer bad habits than a lot of fat dudes my age. My main addiction is food, and even that is not so bad compared to others in my demographic because I am by no means averse to fresh fruit and vegetables and I have never eaten a lot of greasy foods.

If only I could kick this carb addiction, I would practically be a health nut.

Anyhow, I have realized recently that I really am kind of high strung. I don’t think of myself that way, but it’s true. I think of myself as all mellow and laid back, and that’s true to a large extent.

But when I look back over my life and the sheer amount of tension and stress I have felt in fairly normal circumstances,that does not paint the picture of a mellow dude.

So in some ways I am mellow and in other ways I am a tightly wound rubber band ready to snap. I think it is important for me to realize and accept this instead of pretending part of my personality just doesn’t exist.

Well, that’s it for my ramblings for today, folks. I will talk to you again tomorrow.

In the meantime, think happy thoughts.

We’re back in the personal mode for tonight. Good news and bad news tonight.

The bad news (I always start with the bad news) is that today has been a pretty rough day for me, health wise.

It started with lunch. I was happily eating lunch when suddenly it felt like the bottom fell out of my stomach and left a morass of aches and acid in its wake. Just like that, I went from feeling normal to feeling ill.

And that was bad. But I have had Irritable Bowel Syndrome for twenty years now, and so I am somewhat prepared to handle these little upsets. They don’t get me down. I just go to the bathroom and get rid of whatever I can get rid of, then relax in bed with the fan pointed at my forehead and do my best to drain my sinuses and make sure my ears are not clogged.

Seems weird, but those two things, sinuses and bowels, are intimately connected with me. Somehow.

Anyhow, I did all that and my tummy felt better eventually, and so I did the sensible thing and went to sleep. I figured that what I was dealing with was a run of the mill IBS attack and resolved to make sure I didn’t eat too fast in the future.

But when I woke up from my nap, my body was loaded with aches and pains. The only part of me that didn’t hurt was, ironically, my head. Everything else ached, especially my joints, but also in the major muscles of my arms and legs, in the pit of my stomach, and in the back of my neck.

This was way worse. I was feeling pretty lousy. That kind of pain really makes life miserable. That is bad enough for a healthy person but for someone like me with depression, it was a constantly struggle not to let the pain push my mood into a really dark and bad place and just weather it.

Luckily, I remembered that I had a huge bottle of acetaminophen, and took a fat dose of it (2000 mg, or 2 grams), then eventually also remembered that I still had that Volteran joint pain remedy gel stuff too, so I applied it to the worst places for pain, and it seemed to help somewhat.

The really weird and worrying thing is that after a little while, I realized that the pain was far more severe on my right side. I have no idea what that means. But it was exactly like I was in one of those ads where they treat half of the body with Brand X and half with Awesome Brand.

The aches and pains are still there even now, but thank goodness, they are far less intense.

I have two theories (of course I have theories) as to WTF is going on. One is that I have contracted something flu-ish and the aches and pains are just the first symptoms to arrive on the scene. It’s the wrong time of year for the flu and I have had summer head colds before and they never came with muscle and joint pain before, but it is still possible.

My main theory, however, is that the heavy amount of pollen in the air today (from the landlord FINALLY cutting the grass after letting it grow to about two feet high) triggered a very severe allergic response in me, which in term set off a body-wide inflammatory response which I felt as aches and pains in my muscles and joints.

If so, the good news is, that can be fixed with time and antihistamines, as well as more anti-inflammatory acetaminophen.

And speaking of good news, I finally got my order of sugar free candy today. It had been held up because they were out of one of the things I ordered, and I needed to give them permission to substitute something else.

So candy in hand, despite my pain, I tried out a few of them in the cotton candy machine. I tried out starlight eppermint, lemon, and orange.

Starlight peppermint is apparently just Russel Stover’s fancy pants way of referring to those round peppermints with a sort of pinwheel of red on a white background. It was pretty good as cotton candy, although getting, as it were, two entire peppermints at once via the cotton candy, the result was rather curiously strong.

The lemon was quite nice. Again, a little on the strong side, but still a wonderful little bit of lemon fluff.

But my fave was the orange. I have always liked orange flavoured things like candy or Popsicles and the cotton candy form of that artificial orange flavour was wonderful. Like a whole orange Slurpee all at once.

I still have a bunch of other flavours to try, including four Jolly Rancher flavours. There’s apple, grape, cherry… and WATERMELON. I love watermelon very very much, in both artificial and natural form, and watermelon is hands down my all time favorite flavour of Jolly Rancher, so I am stoked.

I will save that one for last for sure!

I did get somewhat depressed about the whole thing, probably from the pain. I found myself wondering why the heck I had paid fifty bucks for such a ridiculous toy that will just end up joining the breadmaker and the slow cooker that I never use any more and are just collecting dust now.

But that’s a “me” thing. I have trouble accepting the transient and I am always looking for things that last. Even if all I get is a month’s fun out of the cotton candy machine, that’s still a month more fun than I would have had without it, right?

And if I am willing to admit that I will never use them again, I could easily sell the slow cooker and the breadmaker and recoup some of my losses.

Whether I keep them or sell them or give them away, though, the last thing I should be doing is letting inanimate objects make me feel guilty because I lost interest in them.

I mean, how fucked up is that?

See you tomorrow, folks.