Tonight, I finally get around to sharing some of the kewl science news stories that I have accumulated lately.

Like how about this for supervillain-level awesomeness : Google is reportedly going to launch 180 satellites into geostationary orbits with the express purpose of bringing Internet access to the entire world.

Leave it to the richest, coolest nerds in the world to bring WiFi to the entire globe.

And that’s not their only world-changing Internet plans. They also are looking into using upper atmosphere balloons to do the same thing, as well as solar-powered drones beaming Internet down to the lucky people below.

But it is the satellites that have me the most excited because I included that exact thing, everybody getting their (future equivalent of) Internet from a series of satellites, in the novel I wrote last November, also known as way before I had ever heard about these Google plans.

So I feel like a real futurist now, even if I am the only person who has even read the book. I suppose if I published the book tomorrow, people would think I just stole the idea from Google.

Let them think what they like. I know I came up with it like 7 months ago.

In another part of that rockin’ world of Google scientific largess, we have the latest news on their self-driving car.

They now have a design for what the actual cars will look like, and they look like this :

Now THAT is a Smart Car!

I am pretty sure that is the Catbus‘ depressed younger brother.

Resemblance to a sad grey clown aside, Google plans on making a hundred of these little cars so they can ship them to various parties for further testing.

Obviously, with something as delicate and complex as a self-driving car, you are going to want to make damned sure that you have tested the thing to exhaustion. Never before has a technology taken on the kind of responsibility for the safety of human beings as the self-driving car.

Plenty of technology would be very dangerous to us if it failed, but all of those have a person at the controls. A self-driving car takes over that role and has to, in essence, think for itself.

If they can do that, why not self-flying planes? That seems easier than cars to me. Planes don’t have to negotiate bumper to bumper traffic, at least not once they are om the air.

I am sure that will be next.

On to materials science, which of course means nanotech.

Researchers have come up with a new material that is like graphene’s big brother. Instead of being the essentially two dimensional single sheet of evenly spaced carbon atoms that make up graphene, this new substance, cadmium arsenide, is a much more stable and useful form of nanotech.

Especially promising is the potential for this new substance to be formed into electronic components with such a high level of conductivity that it is almost as though the electrons in it have no mass.

This would do a great deal to speed up computing on all levels, letting it finally reach the near-light speeds of science fiction data flow.

The name bothers me, though, because as far as I know, cadmium is a rare Earth element and arsenic is, of course, highly toxic, so it seems to me like this stuff might be pretty tricky to make in large quantities.

Of course, the ingredients don’t define the final compound. As we all learned in high school, chlorine is a deadly toxic gas and sodium is so volatile that it explodes from contact with water, but together they make NaCL, sodium chloride, otherwise known as the table salt that we all both enjoy and need in order to live.

Well enough of the other stuff. Let’s talk about brain science. Freaky, scary brain science.

First off, scientists have gotten a glimpse of exactly how sleep is needed to encode memories.

I won’t go into the details of the experiment as they are pretty nasty and involve animal experimentation, but the gist of the results is that during sleep, our brains build new synaptic connections related to the day’s experiences and codify and save new skills we have learned.

I feel a little thrill of validation about that, because I have been supporting the memory theory of sleep and dreaming for a long time based purely on my own understanding of both observed fact and my subjective sense of my own cognition.

Sleep is when our brains sort through all the memories in our medium term storage from the day’s events and chooses which ones get put into long term memory and which ones get flushed.

That is why sleep deprivation makes you stupid…. your medium term memory is full.

Lastly and definitely most creepily, we have scientists erasing and replacing specific memories.

Only in mice, of course… so far. By tracking down the specific brain activity that happens from a specific stimulus as it becomes a specific memory in mice, the scientists were able to record the electrical signals involved, erase that memory, and then put it back in again without actually being able to read the content of the signal.

It’s kind of like monitoring transmissions from an enemy army who speaks in a language you can’t translate. You have no idea what the words mean, but if you noticed that the same string of gibberish always happened right before an attack, you might be able to transmit that back to the enemy and get them to attack when and where you wanted them too.

The scientists’ involved are talking about how this could be used to erase the over-powerful, unprocessable memories that ar the root cause of PTSD. And don’t get me wrong, that would be awesome. PTSD can be crippling and so far, all efforts to treat it have met with mixed and weak results at best.

But I don’t think you have to be Philip K. Dick to see how such power could be used for evil.

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

I have been thinking about people’s moral horizons lately, and how one of the big differences between good people and bad people is how large their moral horizon is.

Let me give you an example.

Say you’re the CEO of a big sociopathic corporation. You sign off on a plan for one of your products that, because it uses a cheaper part, you know damned well will kill between 100-500 people but will save $5 per unit. You sign it because the lawyers say it will be cheaper to settle the wrongful death lawsuits than it will be to use a more expensive part.

By most people’s standards, what you just did is monstrous. Horrible. They can’t imagine how anyone could be so callous.

But look again. What did you actually do.

You went to a room with a bunch of people you know and work with all the time and you signed a piece of paper. That’s it. You signed it because people told you it was a good idea and you are a popular CEO precisely because you have a knack for agreeing with everyone. You signed it because you are pretty sure it will result in more money for you in the long run. And you signed it because like everyone else in this crazy world, you try to do what it expected for you.

You will never see the people you have just killed. They are a number, a statistic, an abstraction. You don’t even know who it will be. So these people have no faces, no names, no identities to you. They are just a range of numbers, and that can’t possibly hold as much weight in your mind as the immediate issues of doing what you are told, getting all the money you can, and doing what is expected of you.

And at the end of the day, you will still be a wealthy person with a lifestyle that tells you how special and important you are, and a very important sounding job that really impresses the boys at the club.

You can think this way precisely because your moral horizons are very close. You don’t really think about or connect with anything outside your immediate, personal life. You leave those abstruse abstractions to someone else. You are a businessman, not a social worker!

So the real crime that leads to such monstrous acts is not pure evil, but merely the act of keeping your moral horizons small. And that is an action people don’t even know they are doing. We are not, usually, aware of how our moral horizons expand and contract.

That’s how people can do damned near anything and feel no guilt, or at least, not nearly enough to keep you from doing it. That CEO probably felt a little guilt and a certain amount of pity for those faceless people who will die as a result of your signature. After all, he’s not a monster. But none of that is nearly as important as doing what is expected of him so he can keep feeling important and powerful as the CEO, and make a lot of money in the process, which makes your wife happy.

The thing that opens the door to evil, then, is not some melodramatic decision to devote yourself to coldblooded evil, but the simple act of deciding not to think about that kind of thing.

Even some of history’s greatest monsters have used this technique. A Nazi commandant orders a group of Jewish prisoners to be worked to death. But what did he really do? He signed a piece of paper and left the rest to someone else because that is all his job required of him.

Even the guards who gassed the Jews at Auschwitz could use this technique. We think we cannot imagine how these men lived with themselves afterwards. But what did they really do? They did a little plumbing then pushed a button. They didn’t have to be in the same room as their victims. Afterwards, they still got to go home to their wife and children and live a normal life. And they can just tell themselves that they didn’t make the decision to kill the Jews.

They were just following orders.

That is why the 20th century saw the birth of the idea of total personal responsibility. The Nuremberg Defense dies a little more with each passing day. We demand that people be held responsible for all the reasonably foreseeable consequences of their actions, no matter how divorced by time and space they are from the consequences.

That Nazi guard knew what he was doing would kill Jews. That CEO knew people would die as a result of his signature. That Nazi commandant was fully aware of what the consequences of that work order would be.

Therefore, we hold them rightfully responsible for those actions, no matter how they “tried not to think about that kind of thing” and were “just following orders”.

It could be argued that some people have no choice but to have narrow, close moral horizons because they are just plain not smart enough to have anything else. And that is definitely a possibility.

But I think there are far more people who deliberately do not even try because they know that looking at the real, full consequences of their actions would make them unhappy and be terribly inconvenient.

It might even lead to risking their social position and comfortable lifestyle, and why should someone do that for someone they don’t even know?

So they keep their moral horizons very close, only ever thinking about their immediate lives, and letting other people deal with the messy bits.

This is how you can have an entire organization that does awful things all the time, but every person in that organization can deny responsibility. Who decided to kill those people?

Well, everybody, really. In other words… nobody.

That’s why the real heroes are the whistle-blowers, the Edward Snowdens of the world, who are willing to throw away everything in order to do the right thing.

It’s sad how few there are.

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

Let’s talk about self-discipline.

I’ve been trying to increase mine lately. The secret, at least for me, is to imagine the person you want to be, the real actualized you, and dream of it happening. Imaging your destination. Then devote yourself to it.

And remember, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. What you want is constant pressure, not one bout of enormous effort. Change the little things first. Consider every time you reinforce a good habit to be a victory that gets you closer to your goal.

And if you slip, you slip. Feel guilty? Then get right back on that horse. This is your own game, and it is not possible to fail out of it. You can’t escape via failure. The task will still be sitting there, waiting for you, no matter how bad you screw up.

That’s the secret of why many people fail at life. They start out with good intentions, but once it starts being hard or complicated or scary, they just want to escape, and failure is the easiest way out.

It’s the equivalent of slinking off with your tail between your legs. Sure, you lost, but the important thing is that you got out of the situation as quickly and with the least amount of effort as possible.

That is how failure becomes an addiction. You know, deep down, that you can get out of things by failing at them, and so when the going gets tough, you fold like a house of cards and tell yourself trying is the first step towards failure.

And you think that, just because you keep telling yourself how much you suck after, that means you are not doing it on purpose. But notice that you are telling yourself that from a safe distance, in an emotional state that is far more tolerable and familiar than actually confronting the problem.

That is the crux of self-discipline and self-respect : deciding that this time, you will keep going no matter what. You will learn to stay instead of fleeing, and endure the tension and fear that you usually capitulate to, and find out what it is like on the other side of it.

I guarantee it won’t be nearly as bad as your fears make it out to be.

Take myself. Recently, I launched a movement called Science Is True. It’s a slogan I want to see on the chest and the bumper stickers of all people who support evidence over ideology and science over superstition. It is a thing desperately needed in a world where people don’t even believe in vaccines any more.

As of now, I have made a Facebook Page, a Tumblr, and a Cafepress store for it.

So that is the initial flurry of activity. Call that the honeymoon phase. Now the honeymoon is over, I have done the part that is easy for me (creating), and now I am at a very familiar crossroads.

This is the point where I usually give up because I genuinely have no idea what to do next. My mind is a blank. But this time, I know what is really going on. My depression is leading me to want to escape the situation rather than face up to the task of choosing what to do next, with all its scary possibilities.

This time, I am not going to fold. There is no reason to run away. I am in no physical danger. Nothing bad is about to happen to me. And so I will stay with this little movement of mine and wait for the blankness to fade, and then (and this is the crucial part) I will continue to think about the problem.

Like I have been telling my therapist for a while, the problem is never really that I lack knowledge. The phrase “not knowing what to do next” is deceptive that way. I am perfectly capable, when my mind is clear, of thinking of all kinds of possible next steps. Posting a link on an atheist or science based forum. Look around for other people working in the same general area. Make and buy some business cards online. Those kind of things.

So it is not logic or creativity that I have lacked in the past, although it may seem that way from the outside with how I talk. But I know all kinds of things I could do.

The hard part is just picking one and staying with it, and resisting the urge to try to fail out of the task and escape.

I am done with being the kind of person who avoids everything. I am going to become the kind of person who faces things and deals with them. And it is by pursuing the dream of being that kind of person, a better version of myself, that will give me the strength and determination to bend my personality to my will and make myself my own.

Self-discipline means bending yourself to your own will. All you have to do is dig deep and find that scared little animal in you, and convince it that the real way out is to change. Then it will be fear of being trapped forever in an unsatisfying life that will drive you forward.

Only through change can your scared little animal escape the badness for good. And change is in your grasp.

It starts with little things. Have a few fewer potato chips. Make room in your lifestyle for the occasional walk. Choose one thing to do now and not later.

And above all, when you feel the urge to avoid doing something via procrastination, do that thing right then, if possible. Don’t subject yourself to worry and guilt over not doing that thing yet. Do it now, and you can just go on with yourself, no longer trapped in an avoidance loop.

And remember, you are making these little sacrifices not just for the immediate benefit, or even long term direct benefit, but because you are building the person you want to be.

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks!

I hate to be the bearer of more bad news, but there is a meme that occurs with mass shootings and I think it is one that needs to be laid to rest.

Put simply, there are no warning signs.

None. I know that when these things occur, the media likes to take a look at the killer’s personal life (very easy in this share-everything world) and try to find clues leading to an answer to the question “Why did he do it?”

And from this position of hindsight, it is easy to point at various things from a killer’s life and say “Look at that! That was a clear warning sign! Somebody should have done something. The system let this happen!”

And to a certain extend, that is true. We can talk about failures of a mental health system that ignores potentially dangerous young men (it’s always men) cring out for care and being told “Sorry, we can’t help you because you haven’t done anything. Yet. We can talk about a criminal justice system that also can’t do anything until a crime is committed. And we can talk about the societal pressures that lead to this kind of madness.

But none of those thing matter when we address the subject of “warning signs”.

Sure, the shooters tend to post violent Youtube videos saying they are going to “do something”. They usually have withdrawn from family and friends and show signs of mental illness. They even go and buy guns and ammo in large quantities.

But so do a lot of other people who never shoot anyone.

So these supposed “warning signs” are useless for stopping the next Borque. Until he went on his rampage, he was just another crazy loner on the Internet talking about “doing something”. There is no way for anyone to know which of these nutcases are actually going to do it. For every Borque there is thousands of people who look and talk exactly like him.

So unless we want to rip a giant hole in freedom by making it illegal to talk about something that sort of sounds like you might do something horrible, there is no way to stop these extremely damaged young men before they commit their crimes.

Gun control might help. Gun anarchists insist that if people like Borque didn’t have guns, they would just use knives. But it is a lot harder to kill a lot of people in a short time with a knife. People can just run away from a knife assailant and unless the assailant is very fast, there’s nothing he can do about it. It’s way easier for someone to tackle a person with a knife and wrest it away from him. And with a gun, you have to get up close and personal, which is very messy and puts the assailant within arms-length of their victim in order to hurt them and thus put themselves at physical risk.

That is a whole different ballgame from just mowing people down with an assault rifle from a safe distance.

Not that I am advocating taking guns away from law-abiding citizens. You can’t restrict the freedom of all to catch the very rare person who, in hindsight, we wish hadn’t had a gun.

I am just saying that the “knife” argument is stupid.

So gun control of some sort might help. Certainly, background checks to see if someone is crazy before we sell them a gun seems entirely reasonable. So does restricting the sales of weapons that can kill a room full of people in ten seconds.

Early intervention might be possible. We don’t have forced commitment any more (thank God) so we can’t just lock someone up for talking crazy. But mental health outreach might be able to get to this kind of person and offer them another way out.

But the hard cold truth is that there is probably absolutely nothing we can do to keep these things from ever happening again. These are isolated incidents that are, from the point of view of society and the authorities, completely unpredictable.

We accomplish nothing by hashing and rehashing “warning signs” that apply to thousand of people. I know that we want to answer that burning question of “why did he do it?”, but the real answer to that question is as simple as it is depressing.

Why did he do it? Because he’s crazy.

That’s it. That is the entire answer. There is no other cause. This isn’t the result of something preventable. We don’t need to pour through the guts of this story to find the “real answer”.

He did it because he’s crazy. End of story.

On a personal note for you wonderful people who have read this far, I grew up in Summerside, Prince Edward Island, which was just a ferry ride away from Moncton. I am also an Acadian, and Moncton is the closest thing us Acadians have to a capital city. I have visited Moncton many times, and always liked it there.

So the Borque tragedy hits very close to home for me, both literally and emotionally. The Maritimes (Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia) might not always be the most exciting of places, but it is extremely safe. My home province averages about one murder per decade. The worst crime is usually the usual drunken brawls that happen everywhere they sell booze and attract a lot of young men.

When I first heard of the tragedy, my first thought was “MONCTON? Really?”. I just couldn’t believe it was true. Like everyone else who doesn’t live in a big city, we Maritimers tend to think that is the sort of thing that happens somewhere else, down in the States where everyone is crazy anyhow.

But these things are too unpredictable to make that kind of assumption. It really can happen anywhere. Anywhere they are disaffected young men with access to firearms who choose to go down a very dark and self-destructive road of isolation and anger, there is a chance this kind of thing will happen.

The good news is that these events are exceedingly rare. They are incredibly frightening, but you are probably more likely to win the Lotto than you are to be a victim of this kind of violence.

We need to just accept that there is no way of stopping these men after they have the guns.

Our only hope is to hear their cries for help, and respond.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

I was going to talk about something else tonight. But instead, I am going to grab my shovel and dig up some of my worst skeleton, and talk about an episode of Ultimate Spider-Man

It’s an episode called The Rhino, although they should have just called it The One About Bullying.

In it, a little nerdy guy named Alex is bullied by reliable asshole Flash Thompson. Little nerdy guy steals stuff from Oscorp that turns him into The Rhino. (I don’t like the redesign. His horn is hard to see and his head is a giant triangle.)

Now, the adult in me thinks the episode was superb. It hit all the right notes about telling people when you are bullied (hard to do for boys, because it means showing weakness) and not becoming a monster from the bullying.

Seriously, there was a scene that practically shouted “Don’t shoot up your school over this!”

It had some fun bits too. When Alex becomes The Rhino, his IQ plummets, and he ends up saying things like “Me smart good!”.

Buuuut as you all know, I was severely bullied as a child. So this is not about the adult in me. It’s about the kid in me, and the kid in me had entirely different reactions to the show.

The kid in me was totally with Alex. I wanted him to get his revenge on Flash. If I was Spider-Man, even though I would have regretted it deeply afterwards, I would have just let the Rhino do whatever he wanted to Flash.

I am not saying that is the right thing to do. It isn’t. But it is what I would feel like doing so there is a little fucking accountability in this world. Flash would have died a quite horrible and messy death, and I would have had that on my conscience for my entire life, but I am not sure I could resist the urge to just let Flash reap what he’d sown.

Particularly painful was Spider-Man (my number one guy) telling Alex that he should go to the school principle or the school counselors or his friends and tell them he is being bullied.

That made a very painful and extremely rapid montage of some of the worst moments in my life to speed through my amygdala. Because it is one thing to be savaged by your classmates to the point where your only chance for safety is to hide.

It’s another thing, a much worse thing, to finally pluck up the courage to go to the authorities, only to have them not care and not do a damned thing to stop it.

I am just glad I was out of that school when I realized the even worse truth : the teachers didn’t help me because, deep down, they thought I deserved it. They didn’t like me either, and to them, my being bullies was justice. I deserved it for being a smartass little prick in class. I deserved it for being so weird.

I deserved it because I was a pathetic, wimpy little geek, and the teachers, like everyone else, had absolutely no respect for me at all.

So when I want to them, I just got brushed off. They would say thing like “they’re just jealous of you” or “the bully is just a coward” or, the ultimate rusty dagger to the heart, “You must have done SOMETHING to provoke them. ”

Yeah, I existed. What an unforgivable affront.

The teachers acted concerned when I told them, but you know, not concerned enough to get up from their desk and actually do something about it. They just wanted me to go away.

And don’t think this is just about the bully. The bully is only the active component of a much larger and darker social reality. The bully is picking on you and not someone else because they instinctively grasp that you are at the absolute bottom of the totem pole, and that therefore you are a safe target for their aggression because not only will nobody come to your defense (not even the teachers), they all deep down think you deserve it for being so weird.

The bully is only acting on what the whole school is thinking. Your schoolmates know you disrupt the social fabric wherever you go and make things harder on everyone, and so to them, this is almost like revenge on you for hurting them by being so nonconformist, weird, and (this is the worse part) pathetic.

When you are a wimpy kid, it is impossible for people to respect you. You have no status presence. Other people instinctively get that a certain kind of attitude sends a social signal that you have your social ground and will defend it.

But not so the wimpy kid. Just by being ourselves, in total innocence, we tell the other naked beach apes “I am the lowest, and you can crap on me all you want!”.

If the authorities had protected me, or even tried to protect me, that would send the signal that I had some value and was not, therefore, devoid of status.

But when people do horrible things to you and suffer no consequence from their peer group or school, it sends a very clear signal that you are worthless.

That is how an entire school bullies a child. It’s not simply that other kids stand by and watch and are just glad it’s not them. It’s that they all, on some level, think you are just getting what you deserve for being wimpy and weird.

Left to their own devices, the natural state of human social interaction is unkind to nonconformists of low status. We males become the whipping boys for the entire social structure.

It is only through law (of whatever kind) and justice that the weak are protected from the strong. I swear, if the authorities had protected me, I would probably be an Establishment conservative now.

But they didn’t. I could not have been more alone in that savage world we seem to think is perfectly okay for kids called “the playground”. My parent were no help either… they barely knew I existed.

So, that was elementary school for me.

Explains a lot, doesn’t it?

Talk to you again tomorrow, folks.

You need to have an organized mind in order to be an organized person.

I know that this is hardly a bombshell of a revelation, but I was brooding on why I never seem to get my shit together and the thought suddenly occurred to me. And I think it might explain a lot.

I am, fundamentally, a creative type. This means that I don’t like a lot of rules, I assign my individuality and autonomy very high priorities, and I try to keep a rigorously open mind at all times.

But here’s the thing : open minds are great for creativity, but not so good for dealing with the mundane details of life. And open mind instinctively resists structure, and that precludes any form of organization I can think of right now.

This explains why I have always been a lot better at organizing things than I am at keeping them organized. Organizing things is fun for me. It’s the kind of mental challenge I enjoy. I like coming up with the system, implementing it, making changes to it in order to optimize it, and sorting everything into useful groupings.

But here’s the other thing : Once the system is done, I lost interest. It’s no longer mentally stimulating. It is, in fact, the very sort of structuring that I instinctively resist as a creative person because it restrict my intellectual freedom. More structure means less autonomy and I can’t have that.

Perhaps if I could make maintaining the system intellectually stimulating, I could maintain interest in it. Alternately, I could create a system that I loved so much that I would do anything to keep it running smoothly.

That is not as far-fetched as it sounds. I appreciate the beauty of an efficient system, one that keeps everything running smoothly and effectively so people can just do their work and trust that the system will take care of the rest.

As you can see, it’s human systems that intrigue me the most. Other sorts of systems can be beautiful as well, but they don’t hold my interest for long because what I care about most is improving the lives of people.

I am extremely dedicated to the humanist endevour, and to my mind, the best way to help my fellow naked beach apes is to create better, more humane, more comforting, more efficient systems for them to live and work in.

Now I am not a completely disorganized person. That kind of person probably doesn’t exist. There is some organization in my life, but it tends to be skewed heavily towards the minimum. I have my meals at roughly the same time every day, but not in a rigid sense. For example, normally I eat supper at 6, but tonight I decided I wasn’t hungry enough at six, and had it at seven instead. So when I say “roughly”, I mean “within a one hour margin”.

And I do organize things when their disorganization is getting in the way of what I want to do. But I am adaptable to a fault, and have a remarkable ability to “make do” with whatever occurs naturally.

There is also the issue of my Freudian anxieties that surface when things are too empty, too tidy, too visually simple. But that is a topic for another day.

Now if I was entirely a creative, free-spirit type, I would be messy and disorganized and I just wouldn’t care. But I am an INTJ (click to find out what that means) and we sit at the juncture of creativity and organization. And that means that part of me will always think things should be organized and cataloged and sorted out.

Part of me actually craves structure and order and organization. It is all too keenly aware of how my lack of organization makes my life more difficult than it needs to be, and it is keeping a running tally of all the things that I have done wrong or had turn out wrong because I can’t seem to get my shit together.

But that part of me is increasingly aware that I am simply not capable of generating that sort of structure myself. Like water, I need external structure in order to keep my shape. I am defined by my vessel, and so far at least, I have not been able to change the shape of that vessel myself.

This means I have come to a fork in the road : I either have to become more organized, or stop beating myself up over not being organized. The conflict between the two has become intolerable and needs to be resolved.

It will probably be a little of both. I will have to figure out what I really do care about, deep down, and that should naturally lead to a plan of organization to organize those things. Other things can fend for themselves.

Mostly, I want to be able to find things when I need them, which means putting them someplace and then remembering where they are. Obviously, it is much easier to remember where things are if a) they are always in the same place because you always remember to put them back where you found them, and b) if you put things someplace with a label on it, so even if I forget where I put it, I can figure it out from the labels.

Historically, it is the remembering where things are part that has defeated me. Things I am looking for are usually, in theory, exactly where I left them. If I only remembered the act of putting them down, the problem would disappear.

But alas, my memory just does not work like that. Once I put something down, it is forgotten.

Sigh. Once again, I have wandered far afield of my original topic.

What I meant to say was, I think I get why I have a problem with organization now. And I hope that, because I am now cognizant of this fact, I can work consciously towards a resolution.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

Tonight’s blog entry is a bit of an experiment. Instead of writing the whole thing at once, I am just going to leave this window open and type in whatever thoughts happen to pop into my head as I do my usual Internet stuff.

And as of this sentence, I have already done one hundred words. So, you know, rock on.

How come there has never been a creamy orange flavoured pop? All I get from Google is a link to a brewery website (???) and a “product not found” message. I suppose a brewery could also make soda. It works for Jones Soda… use the same machines the brewers use to fill the same type of mass produced bottle.

Anyhow, I think a creamy orange soda is a great idea. For those of you who have never had a creamsicle (or dreamsicle as they are called in some markets), it might seem counterintuitive, but trust me, the combination is phenomenal.

Call me, Jones!

When you are learning French, it is really easy to get in over your head. You can totally convince yourself that you are awesome at French because you can have such marvelous and free-flowing conversations with yourself in your head. And hey, they say that the ultimate sign of mastering a language is when you start thinking in it. So you must be Flashmaster French by now.

Wrong! See, speaking French in your head only calls on the vocabulary and grammar you already have. Actual conversation with a francophone has no such restrictions. Plus, like English speakers, francophones don’t always pronounce every letter of every word. That’s not a problem for a native listener who acquired the language naturally, their minds fill in the rest automatically. But for us second language types, it can render a sentence where you know every word into gibberish.

So basically, it is way easier to speak French than it is to understand it when you hear it.

This song is amusing. It’s about driving in Boston, but I am pretty sure all major urban centers have the same issues.

The problem, when you really boil it down, is that there is no mechanism (nor could there be, realistically) to stop people from developing and moving into land because the traffic system can’t support them.

And if you have growth without rational limitations like that, you get overcrowding. And once it is that bad, there’s not a damned thing you can do about it. You can’t force people to move somewhere else. You can’t build any more capacity because all the land around the existing highways is occupied. And you can build all the mass transit you want. People with money still will not use it, at least here in car-crazy North America.

And good luck trying to convince people to give up the nine to five work schedule. That is the whole reason there is ap roblem in the first place. You have long stretches of highway that are empty from 9 to 5 because they were built specifically to handle the huge traffic spikes that naturally occurs when everyone is driving to and from work at the same time.

In an ideal world, it would be possible to give the urban planning authorities the rights and the power to refuse to grant development licences for places that already have the maximum population that the system can handle.

But try getting that through Parliament. You will have people Godwin-ing all over you in no time.

People hate being told they can’t do what they want to do, no matter how much sense it makes.

Hmmm. So far, the biggest issue with this little experiment of mine is that I am used to writing as a sort of marathon effort, or maybe a mid-distance race. I just keep going until it is done. I have always done far better with concentrated, uninterrupted periods of effort than with anything more intermittent.

That’s part of why I test so well. An exam is exactly the kind of long hard run at which I excel.

But this experiment of mine is supposed to be intermittent. I just type in whatever is on my mind when it strikes me. Otherwise, business as usual. And I am finding that REALLY hard.

I;m built for drag racing, not stop and go traffic!

Also, of course, because I have this drive to cross that finish line ASAP, I have caught myself trying to think of something more to say, and that defeats the whole purpose of the experiment.

The idea was to collect some of my random thoughts, the sort of thing that happens in my head all the time. Hopefully, that will lead to a less noisy head. Or at the very least, a collection of pithy aphorisms and trenchant observations.

Guess that s going to be hard than I thought.

I have tried out my new sex toy, whom I now call Purple Pete. Without lube, it has not gone any better than you would expect, but I ordered me some Astroglide (voted Lube That Sounds Most Like A Transformer every year) so that problem will end.

My online friends recommended other lubes to me, like Probe (how sci fi!) and Liquid Silk (ooh my my). But weirdly, Amazon.ca only carries insanely huge Costco sized bottles of the both of them that cost $50, and I don’t have that kind of money.

Besides, buying that much lube is a heck of a commitment. I want to make sure my relationship with Pete is on solid ground before I dive in like that.

Pete has a problem that is already straining out relationship, though. The plain truth is that he stinks. He gives off this powerful plasticky rubbery smell that I find quite nauseating.

Granted, when in use, Stinky Pete and I are not exactly face to face. But the smell when he is not in use kind of makes it hard not to associate him with nausea.

Right now, I have relegated him to a far corner of the bed.

We will see what develops when I have lube.

He might just be worth it.

Well, I guess that went okay. I will likely try it again some time. I still felt the need to power through it and that might not be negotiable. Maybe I would be better off putting my momentary thoughts in a text file.

See you tomorrow, folks!

I think I have identified one of the major roots of my problems.

Basically, I am not psychologically stable.

Big news, huh? Kind of comes with the whole “mentally ill” thing. But this is something different and I have to admit to being a little freaked out about it.

I realized recently that all my life, I have had these times when I become… confused. It’s like there is a flood in my brain and it washes away all my coherence and focus. At these times, the world becomes quite terrifying because I can’t concentrate and everything becomes sort of a wash of sensations and staying in contact with reality takes all of my will because the blood inside my head is threatening to wipe me out completely.

It’s been happening all my life. I can remember it happening when I was just a preschooler. Something shifts in my head and suddenly I can’t think, I don’t understand what is going on, and I feel like I am going to faint. It’s like a very nasty head rush, like when you stand up too fast.

It started so early in my life that I guess I just accepted it as a natural part of my life. But now that I have become conscious of it, I am wondering if I have a serious fucking problem.

I mean, that shit is just not normal.

My intuition is that it has something to do with my malformed sinuses. I think something is going on in there that puts pressure on my brain and when that pressure is relieved or just shifted, the blood rushes into the new space and I get all spaced out and dizzy and fucked up.

I am guessing that, as a child, I just didn’t have the words to express this problem to anyone. And my parents discouraged me from asking for anything anyhow, even for a trip to the doctor. I can easily imagine that if I had brought it up, they would have reacted as though I had just interrupted all their plans because their plans never included me.

No wonder I grew up to be the kid who never asks for anything, never complains, and always says yes to whatever my parents wanted, even to the point of trying to do my own clothes shopping when I was only 8 years old.

But that’s a topic for another day.

This tendency to get brain flooded informs my social anxiety and insularity to a very high degree. It is hard to be socially confident and relaxed when, at any moment, you could suddenly lose nearly all of your marbles and even just continuing to hear what people are saying and respond sensibly is a herculean task.

But you know one thing that keeps it from happening? Staying still. If I just sit or just lay down, that kind of thing almost never happens. But the more I move about, the more likely it is to occur, and the experience is terrifying in a way I can’t even begin to convey, so I have, subconsciously , been conditioned by this problem to equate lack of movement with safety.

I’m seeing my GP on Friday, and I am going to bring this up. I won’t mention the whole “since early childhood” angle, as that will lead to unnecessary complications. I will just make like it just started recently.

There is a lot of crazy shit going down in my head, to be honest. It was writing my piece on my conversation issues that made me realize it.

I have a seriously haunted head.

(Great song, by the way. Don’t let the mellow beginning part fool you, it seriously thrashes later on. )

There are all these complex emotional reactions going off like fireworks in my head practically all the time. The smallest interactions (with, say, a cashier) comes with a simply staggering amount of psychological baggage. It’s no wonder that I am clumsy and awkward (in more than one sense) and have trouble dealing with reality when there is so going inside my head that it drowns reality out.

Having become conscious of this, it frankly staggers and terrifies me. I really am crazy. Spending all that time alone and isolated and feeding my brain has caused my inner world to grow out of control like an abandoned flower garden. My defense mechanisms have gone beyond merely maladaptive and have become positively cancerous.

I have a lot of things I have to get out of my head before I can have the kind of calm and clarity and above all, quiet in my head that I so deeply crave. I am tired of life being so hard and so complicated for me simply because it’s a Chinese New Year parade in my head all the time.

No wonder recovery has come to mean “feeling more solid and calm” to me. I am trying my best to evict all these unwanted guests in my capacious noggin and reach a place where I can just be me, by myself, in peace and quietude.

I have squatters in my brain, man.

And all this craziness in the cranium has a lot to do with my fear of getting close to people, too. For a long time, I have known that I was afraid to get too close to people because I thought that my issues and the bleakness of my inner landscape would destroy them.

But now I know that I am afraid for myself as well. I have lived my entire life trying to keep this raucous menagerie calm, and that is no way to live. It is high time I kicked them all out.

But it’s not that easy. Every ghost contains its own measure of unprocessed emotion, and one cannot merely wish that away. The human mind can’t delete things.

It can only move them around, and when you push and unpleasant and complicated emotion out of your consciousness, it doesn’t go away. It just goes to the end of the line of other emotions trying to get expressed too.

The only way to deal with things is to deal with them.

Talk to you tomorrow, folks!

I have figured out one of the ways in which I am far too hard on myself.

Yesterday, I went to Safeway to pick up a few things. When I got to the checkout, the following conversation happened.

Cashier : How are you doing today?

Me : I’m doing okay.

Cashier : Your total is X.

Me (referencing the fact that I was paying entirely in coins) : You can tell it’s the end of the month when you are paying with the stuff from your piggy bank.

Cashier : Yup. Here’s your change.

Perfectly normal conversation, right?

But not inside my head. After that brief exchange, I felt like I had failed. I felt embarrassed and like I had done something wrong, and that the cashier now thought I was a total loser.

And even after getting home, realizing this, and essentially internally yelling “That was a perfectly normal conversation with someone you don’t even know! You didn’t fail anything!” at myself, I still feel the same way.

And if that is how a minor conversation with a cashier goes, no wonder I am so fucking shy. With the emotional stakes so high, how could I not be?

And what, exactly, did I fail to do? Make the clearly overworked and tired cashier laugh? Convince him that I was brilliant and hilarious and fun to be around? What exactly was I looking for? What response would have made me happy?

I have been thinking about it a lot since the incident in question, and I have some potential answers.

I think it all boils down to connection. I am emotionally naive enough to look to connect with people whenever I talk to them. And I am so desperate to connect that I look for that connection in all the wrong places.

I don’t have a mode where I just don’t care if I connect. The desperation precludes that. This turns every conversation, no matter how casual, into a kind of life or death situation with the stakes, and the odds, so high that failure is virtually guaranteed. I am desperate to see my light reflected off others because that is the only way I can feel the warmth that I generate for others.

And when it doesn’t happen, I feel a crushing sense of failure, as though I have been rejected yet again.

And all this from what to a more mentally well person would be a perfectly normal conversation of zero emotional impact. The implications of this are positively staggering. My sadness and desperation have led me to be so crazed for connection that a lot of weird and negative shit happens in my head from every single normal interaction.

Obviously, this is part of what makes me try so hard to be funny and interesting and entertaining, but standards that high, while providing the motivation to strive for improvement on a radically deep level, fail more than they succeed because I so rarely get the kind of reinforcement that I need and so I end up not with achievement and success but with misery and despair.

Even when I am at my most socially comfortable, which is when I am hanging out with my friends, the ghost of this misery is there, judging every attempted joke, every conversational assay, every moment of attention by a set of standards nearly impossible to meet and dragging my mood down with it at every turn.

This is obviously not a healthy way to relate to people, but it’s all I know. I guess being the youngest of four and fairly ignored and neglected as a child made me internalize the idea that the only way to get and sustain attention was to be funny and/or interesting, and that if I didn’t maintain someone’s interest in me, it was because I had failed.

It was all my fault. I wasn’t interesting enough or pleasant enough to be worth anyone’s attention. It is a classic case of someone assuming responsibility for something because that makes them feel like they have some control over it.

Which is fine…. if the thing is actually their fault and within their control. But when it is something that they cannot control, it becomes a fast train to insanity.

All my life, I now realize, I was trying to become something that people wanted. I have lived with the burden of trying to become attention-worthy for my entire life. I used what natural tools I had, charm and wit and personality, but my desperation and social awkwardness came through anyhow and alienated me from people.

I am like that sad kid who tries to learn magic tricks so he can meet people. It seems like a solution, but in reality, the problem is one of fundamentally being too emotionally closed off and too socially inept to really relate to and connect with others, and that cannot be overcome by tricks or wit.

It takes real emotional growth on a level with which we neurotic icebound intellectual types are not at all comfortable. It means being able to truly let down your defenses and deal with people in realtime, without the protective barrier of a detached point of view always getting in the way.

It takes calming down inside enough to be human again, and that is not easily achieved. It requires a very deep form of healing before one can trust the world and trust themselves enough to come out of one’s shell and open up again.

It is far easier to keep stumbling along, getting hurt by our own defenses and blaming it on other things, and just making is through the day in a way that works, but makes you feel like you are drowning inside yourself.

I have a lot of memories of isolation and loneliness and sadness to deal with inside me. The disease, while diminished, is still active and still preventing me from curing it.

But every day, I get a little stronger, and the more ghosts I can confront, the sooner I will be free.

But only when I am ready to be free.

There’s nobody to push this little bird out of the nest and make it fly.

Nobody but me, of course.

See you tomorrow, folks!

First, a cotton candy machine update.

Today, I got my meaty paws on some sugar free hard candy, and let me tell you, it wasn’t easy. Shoppers Drug Mart really let me down by having absolutely nothing for me. Not one single form of sugar free hard candy remains at our local Shoppers. I used to be able to get both sugarless Werther’s and sugarless Campinos there, as well as sugar free scotch mints (I miss them so), and now they have nothing.

I am very disappointed in them. I bet if it was GLUTEN free candy, they’d be all over that shit.

So I had to go to Safeway, and despite having, in general, way less varieties of hard candy than Shopper’s, they did have the sugar free version of the original Werther’s Originals, and that’s what I got.

Luckily, I am going to Costco tomorrow, and I will likely be able to find something there. At the very least, I think they will have one of those throw-pillow sized bags of sugar free Jolly Ranchers.

Werther’s in hand, I was able to try out my new toy that makes food, and it worked perfectly. Did exactly what it was supposed to do. And Werther’s flavoured cotton candy is pretty good. I am normally not that into Werther’s, I find them a little boring, but as cotton candy? Faboo.

One last little note : in French, cotton candy is Barbe A Papa, which literally translates into Father’s Beard, although if you are the super Catholic kind of French, it translates as God’s Beard.

So I have now heard it called Father’s Beard, God’s Beard, Candy Floss (total stripper name) , Fairy Floss (the British are adorable), and Cotton Candy. I am sure there must be more out there.

None of them are what you would call dignified and they all have issues (especially the beardy ones), but I figure cotton candy is more or less the best of the lot.

Oh, and one more thing : my body is very confused right now, because I just ate a whole bunch of extremely sugary tasting cotton candy and so my taste buds are telling my body “holy shit, brace for sugar!”, but of course, it’s not coming.

This often happens when I eat sugar free stuff. My body will sort things out soon.

Now, to boredom. I have been really thinking about how much of my life has been complicated by my low boredom threshold.

I get bored easily. I need a lot of mental stimulation to be happy. Specifically, what I need is variety. I have a seemingly limitless capacity to mentally encompass a lot of varieties of an item, and I grow restless and irritated with what, for a less easily bored person, would be a perfectly adequate number of options.

That’s why I have almost 4000 mp3’s, and I still crave more. That is four thousand songs, hundreds of hours of content, and yet there are still times when I don’t feel like listening to literally any of it and I get bored and frustrated.

It’s also why I have hundreds of books. My goal, since I was a child, was to have enough of all my favorite media so that I would never face having nothing to read (or whatever) because by the time I reach the end of the collection, the beginning of it seems new again.

It’s a noble (if somewhat passive) goal, but it has proven very hard to achieve. This big old brain of my just plain retains too much of what I experience for things to “freshen” fast enough. It takes a lot of time before I can go back to something and enjoy it. Until then, it will almost gross to me.

And that’s a minor thing compared to my low boredom threshold leading to my trouble focusing. It’s very hard for me to focus on just one thing. I am always multitasking. Right now I am writing for my blog, but I am also chatting with my furry friends online. If I didn’t have that other thing going, I would find it very hard to concentrate on blogging.

That accounts for a lot of how I feel about my mp3 collection. Not only is music inherently awesome and a big part of consciousness, but I can play some mp3’s and give my brain the level of distraction needed in order for me to focus.

Clearly, boredom can be defined simply as a lack of occupation for your mental faculties, and the more mental you are (hah), the more faculties you have and the harder it is to keep them busy.

That’s why I become highly devoted to anything which can keep my brain occupied. For example, games like Hearthstone. The complexities and strategies of the Collectible Card Game type games are more than enough to keep my capacious and rapacious brain busy.

In fact, during a really good match, it even mutes the nearly constant buzzing of my busy mind-hive that is always searching, thinking, processing, and digesting things.

Now I know that I have likely derived a lot of benefit from this restless and hungry mind of mine. The restlessness powers the rest of it and it is what keeps me searching for answers and insights while maintaining a very high intellectual standard.

So in a sense, it is both a function of and a cause of why I am so smart, and not just CPU smart but deep insight smart.

But when I think about the constant complex and chaotic symphony playing inside me, and how noisy the inside of my skull has always been, and how tiring it can be to have a mind like a shark, always moving, never resting…

All I can think about is how nice it would be to be able to press mute now and then and just relax.

But no. Not even in sleep does my mind rest. Even my dreams have me searching, wandering, unable to stop looking for what I know I will never find.

Talk to you tomorrow, nice people!