Too soft, and yet, too heavy.

I have been having one of my sleepy days today. I can never predict when, exactly, they will happen. I suppose it would be like trying to predict an avalanche, or when an iceberg will detach from a glacier.

What is it with me and icebergs, anyhow? And water imagery in general?

Still excited about getting the new place. A week from tomorrow, we start the move. I have researched a couple of moving companies, but their sites are long on marketing talk and lo on actual practical information.

Basically, what I want to know is whether we can afford to have people show up and move all our furniture and whatever packed boxes we have.

This is not strictly necessary. Boxes, we can probably handle ourselves. And we have a LOT of furniture to move, so odds are, we can’t afford furniture AND boxes.

But still, it would be awfully nice to have the whole move done by others. It would almost seem like magic to have the whole thing go through in one day without us having to lift a finger.

Some of the places will also do the packing for you, but there is no way we could afford that, and besides, that is where I draw the line.

I would not want strangers going through all my stuff to pack it. That would just plain feel weird.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not particularly “stuff” oriented. I don’t form deep emotional connections with the things I own. I don’t have trouble sharing.

But even I have some materialistic feelings, and not wanting people I don’t even know pawing through my stuff is one of them.

My own packing should not be TOO onerous, he says, knowing full well that every time he’s said that it has turned into a freaking nightmare.

But this time, moving my bed is someone else’s problem, and that’s half the battle right there. Having a king sized bed is cool and all, but moving the motherfucker can be a serious bitch.

Not my problem!

Honestly, though, I might as well have a queen sized, because I don’t even use the half of the bed away from my nightstand. Why would I? If I ever have a partner, it would be great because we could both sleep in it without having to touch one another. I can’t sleep while touching another person.

Why? I don’t know. Pretty sure it has something to do with some very deep trust issues and problems with intimacy.

I got lots of that going on. It doesn’t come up in my everyday life because I don’t have anyone close enough to me for it to matter. I love my friends and I would be lost without them, but hanging out with them is entirely within my life experience. I have had friends before, especially in college, and we really enjoyed one another’s company and did fun things together, but we were never heart to heart, I can tell you anything type friends.

Maybe that’s just because we are dudes. I don’t know. There is certainly a lack of shared adversity, and that seems to be what gets men to bond more deeply.

But it also has to do with the conflict within me between my desire to be all happy and friendly and nice and the fact that, deep down, I am actually a fairly guarded person. I’m just good at hiding it.

I aspire to greater openness. I hope that as I patiently erase the old tapes of brittle, angry distrust, I can replace them with more positive, happy, engaged tapes and be the bright and shiny beacon of love that I hope to be.

It’s my dream.

Speaking of dreams, this being a super sleepy day, it means I have also been going a few rounds with my hyper-real dream state. I don’t recall any of the dreams, but I can see their footprints in my mind, and gosh there’s a lot of them.

These dreamy periods always feel like I have run a mental marathon, or fought a long and brutal battle. And that makes sense, because I think that one of the functions of this period is to discharge the mental energy charge that my overstimulated brain accumulates through my everyday life.

Hence my being far more calm when I am writing my National Novel Writing Month novel. Writing almost three thousand words a day does a lot to discharge that excess mental energy, leaving me a calmer and happier person.

Hopefully, I will get a similar effect when I have a way of discharging my physical energies in the gym at our new place. One problem is going to be that I don’t have any proper gym clothes. I have exactly one intact pair of sweat pants, and they don’t fit. They would fall right off me. Not good.

So I have to decide whether it is possible, let alone desirable, to work out wearing gym pants with suspenders. That would be cute.

Oh well, I am sure I will find something. I have had sweat pants before that actually fit me. I know it’s possible.

In fact, sweat pants are many a fat man’s best friend. Their elastic nature allows them to adjust to our weight fluctuations, and while it can be a nightmare to find normal pants in your exact size, the forgiving nature of sweat pants means you just have to figure out how many X’s are on your XL.

So I will probably see if they have something for me at Value Village. Which, it just occurred to me, is also only a few blocks from the new place!

Yet another advantage to the new place. We are going to be right there at the heart of central Richmond, so we will have the Skytrain, Value Village, Richmond Center, and all kinds of other stuff like the Wing Kee, our fave Chinese restaurant.

It’s not quite like living in downtown Vancouver, but it’s as close as I want to get, at least at my current income level.

And with that happy note, I leave you all! I will talk to you again tomorrow.

Please play this video as many times as it takes while reading this blog entry.

God DAMN they had awesome music in the Seventies.

Yup. We are moving on up! We have secured a new place to live, and it’s the high rise that I may have mentioned before.

And I am stoked. It’s going to be almost torture to wait till the 15th to start moving in. I will be counting the days, starting now.

9. It’s nine days till the 15th.

This is the place I wanted the most because it is a building with a gym and a sauna, and I want that so very much.

Once we are moved in, I am going to work very hard to make working out part of my daily routine. I will steadfastly ignore the alarm calls of my social anxiety and hang in there till I get used to the place and I can calm down about it.

After all, if you don’t endure, you don’t adapt.

It’s good to know going into a situation that there will be anxiety issues. I am working on not letting my anxieties run my life, and so knowing going in that adjusting to the gym and random people coming in and out and whatnot will be difficult gives me an edge on mentally preparing for it so I can enter the situation ready to stand up to my anxieties and stare them down.

Sadly, my bum knee complicates things. When it comes to the lifting part of working out, there are plenty of stations that don’t require the use of the legs.

But when it comes to cardio…. I can’t think of a cardio machine that doesn’t involve using the legs in some way. Cardio machines are strongly biased towards giving you a full body workout.

So I am not sure how I am going to get the cardio necessary to get my engines up to speed for the actual lifting weights part of things.

But whatever. Maybe I will just lift free weights for cardio. I will think of something. And this knee is not going to be busted forever.

At least, I sure hope it isn’t.

Granted, a high rise apartment is sort of the exact opposite of the fully detached house idea that I went into this process with. We will still be surrounded on all sides by apartments full of people and their noises and whatnot.

I am pondering making some sort of effort to at least get to know the other people on my floor. Do a little “Hi, I’m your new neighbor!” door-knocking and maybe get people to join a Facebook group called FloorSixAtCooneyAndCook, or the like.

Watching all this stuff about modern cities and their problems has really made me aware of how alienated we are from the people around us. It’s strange to live amongst strangers. We need to start breaking down some of the walls between us (not literally) and get to know the people actually physically present in our lives.

Because no matter how awesome the Internet gets, there is still no substitute for face-time. I am not sure, but I think getting to know the people who live in the apartment next door, while quite awkward at first, could ultimately lead to a reduction of urban stress overall.

Because make no mistake, urban life stresses the human organism. We don’t notice it because it’s always there in the background and we rapidly lose touch with any other kind of living, but it is there and it takes its toll.

Like I said before, it’s strange to live among strangers. Human beings can adapt to this world where you are always surrounded by people you know nothing about, but it takes its toll on us.

It drains our social battery. It is by no means a perfect adaptation. And it completely destroys any sense of community. The human need for community doesn’t know anything about virtual friends and Internet communities. The socialization we get via those things makes a poor substitute for the rich environment of a real world sense of community.

It is hard to feel like a citizen when the first link, connection with those around you, is broken. We have taken the atomization of individualism about as far as it can go without us all getting our own planet like the Little Prince, and the price has been the deep sense of alienation that pervade the zeitgeist.

I think it is entirely possible that the sharp rise in depression over the last thirty years is almost entirely due to this individualist alienation. I am glad that the current generation of millennials seems determined to rediscover community and reverse this trend at last.

Because it sure as hell won’t be my generation of sullen and resentful Gen X types who fix it. Even the hippies would have been better suited to the task than us.

And I have to admit, on a purely personal level, the things I think are good for people are not necessarily things I would choose for myself.

With my social issues, having lots of barriers between myself and others sounds just fine to me. You can’t exactly get into the whole community thing when your psychological issues have you hiding from the world.

But who knows… maybe a dose of communal feeling would be exactly the medicine I need to heal my soul and make me feel less trapped and less afraid of the world.

The view of humanity that I keep deep inside me, the feeling that all strangers are dangers and could turn on me at any time and are silently judging me incredibly harshly and think I am a complete disgusting horror of a human being… that could really use some new, positive inputs to replace the old tapes.

And of course, I need to work on that atrocious and unfounded self-image and the issues that make me feel that way.

I have a full plate ahead of me.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

Today, I rant.

I really have to get the video and blog things better coordinated.

Feeling melancholy and introspective today, so be warned :

Here comes the angst.

Dunno why I feel this way. There’s no obvious reason for me to be sad. My knee is still messed up and I am somewhat stressed by the whole house hunting thing, but neither of those has gotten worse lately.

I guess it is just that time of my mood cycle. The time my body and/or my mind sets aside for actively feeling a measure of the deep and abiding sadness I carry within mr.

One possible trigger, however, is this documentary I watched about the hallucinogen ayausca, and its active ingredient, DMT, or di-methyl toluene. You might remember that I spoke about this topic once before.

Don’t worry, I won’t be ranting about transcendentalists today.

In the documentary, we follow three Canadians as they journey to Peru in order to take part in an ayuasca ritual run by a wise old Shaman who will be their guide through what will be a difficult and profound experience in both the physical and mental realms.

Seeing people go through the emotional purging of the ayuasca ritual got me thinking about my own demons, and how good it would be to be able to cut through all my resistance and confront all my demons all at once, and be done with them.

I would definitely try the ayuasca ritual if I had the opportunity. I would be scared out of my mind, but I would do it anyhow. I don’t care what kind of hell it unleashed. It would be worth it to rid myself of the emotional residue of my forty one years on Earth.

For someone who truly believes in catharsis like I do, ayuasca is the ultimate drug. A new kind of drug : a cathartic.

Imagine what something like that could do for the world.

So I guess that seeing other people deal with their deep issues and imagining myself in their place helped me bring up some of that deep sadness that I carry around with me in my sad and lonely heart.

Right now, I don’t feel good at all. I feel cranky and restless and that reliable demon self-loathing is very close to the surface and threatens to break out at any second. When I feel like this, hating everything about myself is very easy, and it takes a certain amount of will to resist it.

I can only resist it by pushing the thoughts back down when they emerge, which is no long-term solution, I admit, but it gets me through the day.

It’s times like this when I wish I had access to a gym so I could take all this raging energy and expend it via exercise.

It would be especially good if said gym had a heavy bag, the kind boxers use. I bet spending twenty minutes punching the shit out of a heavy bag is almost as cathartic as an ayuasca ritual.

Well, maybe not. But I bet it would help a lot.

Instead, I sit here trying to let it out through words. I suppose that is also a sort of exercise, but for mental as opposed to physical muscle.

And quite frankly, my body needs it a lot more than my brain.

It is times like these that also make me realize, acutely, how unsatisfying my life is. I want so much more out of life, and yet I can’t seem to find it in myself to find a path between the life I lead and the one I want.

Applying to VFS was a big deal to me. It was supposed to be my ticket out. Losing that, after convincing myself that I was a shoe-in to get it, really took the wind out of my sails. I have never handled disappointment well, and this was a doozy.

I tried not to let it take all the hope out of me. I tried to stay focused and work really hard to find some courses to take so I could reapply in the new year. I tried really hard to stay on track.

But there’s a hole in the bottom of my motivation bucket, and when I got rejected for VFS, all my motivation drained out of me and I went back to being the lump that I have been for 20 goddamned wasted years of my life.

That has a lot to do with why I am getting back into doing videos. It might not be much, but it is a way for me to give more purpose and focus to my day and make my life be something more than distracting myself between meals.

I find the prospect of living the rest of my life like that fills me with horror. I want my life to mean something. I want to be noticed. I want to be recognized for my abilities. I want the chance to apply those abilities, and in doing so, develop them further. I want to make things that make people happy and maybe even create a little magic in their lives.

And I can rail against VFS, fate, my parents, and all kinds of other things for “holding me back”, but that sort of answer has never really satisfied me.

And I know the truth : there are millions of possibilities open to me, right now, from this exact position in life, and I am just too sick to pursue them.

And that frustrates me to no end. My newborn will and ego rail against the very notion of such petty limitations. They want to roar onto the world scene like a lion, rise like the sun, and shine so bright that the whole world can see me.

But that alone will not heal the broken bones and frostburn that scar me inside. Healing is never easy and it’s never as fast as we want it to be.

So I wait, and I sigh, and I do my best to heal a little faster today than I did yesterday, and continue this process known as recovery.

The lion will have to stay in his cage… for now.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Like a lot of people, especially intellectuals, I don’t interact with reality on a real-time basis. Direct exposure to reality is anathema to me, and so I require an extensive and complex cognitive structure in which to hide.

Call this my fortress. Its thick walls and complex structure give me a feeling of safety and calmness. For better and for definitely worse, I can’t be reached there. Nothing can get to me there.

Nothing can hurt me there.

And I have lived in this fortress since I was a small child. I think it began when my father sexually abused me. Like a lot of victims of abuse, I took my mind away. I told myself I wasn’t there, this wasn’t happening, I was somewhere far away.

That vital disconnection from the reality of what was happening to me become the foundation of my fortress. I wasn’t here in unfiltered reality, I was deep in my fortress where I was safe. I displaced myself from reality in order to hide from its truths, and built this fortress, this thick and sturdy armor, so that I could not be hurt again.

This, of course, does not work. Sure, it removes you from the immediacy of your surroundings, but it does so at the cost of making you very awkward in your thick and heavy armor.

And it cuts you off from the world. That is its function. In keeping you from getting hurt, it also keeps you from getting help. It cuts you off from nearly all sources of emotional sustenance and leaves your soul to starve.

It is too extreme a solution – a cure that is worse than the disease.

What got me onto this line of thinking is that I recently realized just how many people tried to be my friends when I was suffering from extreme isolation and bullying as an elementary school student.

It wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence, but there was at least half a dozen kids who made a real effort to get to know me, but it just didn’t take. They couldn’t reach me. I was too far gone.

So I would be friendly and polite, but in a distant way, and they would sense that I was not easily accessible, take that as rejection (which it was, in a way) and stop trying. I was just too weird a kid.

The fact that I couldn’t relate to them didn’t help. In a particular way, I grew up far too young and too fast, and I honestly could not relate to people my age. The things they liked to do seemed pointless to me. I only liked to read, watch TV, and play video games. The traditional sort of toys bored me. Not stimulating enough.

But even if that hadn’t been the case, the fortress would have interfered. Indeed, it might be the main reason I couldn’t relate. I had built my fortress out of books and TV and video games, and bound them all together with the icy cold perfection of my overweaning intellect.

Somehow, before even hitting Grade 1, I had become an intellectual. And who the hell is an intellectual in grade school?

Besides me, obviously.

This is what happens when you build your mental fortress when you are far too young to do a proper job of it. Most people have some sort of protection from the world, but it is more sophisticated and efficient. It lets most things in instead of blocking most things out.

Recovery, then, feels to me like I am demolishing my fortress brick by brick so I can replace it with a more robust and sophisticated way of dealing with the world.

Because the thing is, there is not a lot you can do with a fortress except hide in it. It keeps the rest of the world away, so even if you are lonely there in the tiny safe room in the middle of your fortress, your efforts to end that loneliness will forever be thwarted by your own inaccessibility.

You can’t go blaming the world for not reaching you when you have made yourself so hard to reach. You have to be willing to meet people at least halfway. You can’t get mad at people for not being willing or able to brave your fortress’ intricate maze of dangers and illusions just for a chance to maybe reach you.

Sure, you can say “Well if they really loved me, they would do it”, but be reasonable. That is a hell of a tight screening process.

It makes me wonder just how much of my life’s loneliness has been, in a sense, self-imposed. How many people were there outside my fortress, trying to get in, but having no idea how to do it?

I shudder to think. And all the time, I am as lonely as a cloud. Two world desperate to combine but separated by a fortress thick with ice and snow.

But slowly, I melt.

And as always, I feel I am becoming more and more of a real person. Of course, to the world, I am as real as anyone else.

But from inside, I feel fake and wooden and hollow. My abject lack of adult life experience combined with the effects of my depression makes me feel like I don’t really exist. Like I am only one or at best two dimensions of a real person, caught in one of the longest frozen childhoods in existence.

It’s tragic, really. But I try not to think about that too much. I am trying to be the kind of person who always looks forward into the future, and for whom each new day is an opportunity to decide who you really are.

We do not need to be defined forever by our existing contexts. We can become the people we wish to be, a better version of ourselves, if we make the right choices.

You just have to ask yourself, what sort of person do I want to be?

And then make the choices that person would make.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Extremely local. I’m going to talk about my colon.

Okay, not really. But tonight will be of the personal update variety.

First, today’s video.

I decided to let YouTube do what it wanted to do to fix the video. Tell me if you liked it better the previous way.

Like I said in the video, I had a busy day yesterday and had no time to make a video for you poor people, and I apologize.

I also apologize for today’s video. I’m not stoned, just kind of sleepy, and hence today’s talk is a tad more rambling than usual.

Oh well. Learn, and move on.

What kept me so busy yesterday was keeping the always radiant Felicity company on her birthday bracket observed close bracket.

Technically, her birthday was last Thursday, but honestly, celebrating your birthday on your actual birthday is a freak occurrence in these modern busy times, even though you would think that, if it is always preferable to celebrate on the weekend, the odds would be two or three out of seven.

Anyhow, she was going to have to leave her home in the morning because the exterminators were coming, and so she wanted company as she puttered about delivering BCSFAzines and running other errands, and I was happy to oblige.

We went to a place which has achieved near-legendary status, the last remaining Muffin Break in the world^[1], which is the only place in the world that makes these particular peanut butter squares that Felicity has raved about.

And with good reason. I tried a little crumb of one while we were waiting for her order to be filled, and it was heaven. Like everything that is wonderful about a Reese cup, but with the decadent intensity of a Nanaimo bar.

Damn I miss being able to eat stuff like that.

This lone Muffin Break is in a neat funky little strip mall called Jericho Square. It has a yoga center called Yes Feet and and a cheese shop called Cheese Here.

Clearly, these are my kind of people.

Said Muffin Break also has the biggest goddamned cookies I have ever seen. They’re the size of a catcher’s mitt. I was so impressed that I was tempted to get one myself, but I figured that, odds were, I was going to be eating birthday cake later, so I figured I had better save all my naughtiness points for that.

As it turned out, there was no suitable cake available (it’s so hard to find a white cake with white frosting!), but that turned out to be a boon for me because I had stupidly gotten a dessert after our birthday meal at one of our two usual haunts, ABC Country Kitchen.

The other one, of course, is Denny’s.

But I am getting ahead of myself. After the Muffin Break and a quick stop at White Dwarf Books to drop off BCSFAzines, Felicity and I headed back to our beloved Richmond. We stopped to look for a cake at IGA (no dice, the only one available was only one day from retirement) and puttered about Richmond a little.

We even stopped at RAPS, the Richmond Animal Protection Society, also known as the local animal shelter, to pet kitties. I hearted that so much. I love cats and I miss having them around to pet and fuss over.

Eventually, we decided to go hang out at Denny’s for a while and drink pop and soak up the air conditioning. Did I mention how hot it was yesterday?

Cause it was really freaking hot.

We like it at Denny’s. The food is good, the prices are reasonable, and the people there know us and like us, and vice versa.

I take some pride in that. We are quiet, respectful, patient, understanding customers who tip well, and hence, servers like us.

I mean, I consider how we behave to be the way everyone should behave as a minimum, but apparently, compared to a lot of their customers, it makes us saints.

After that, we went back to Chez Nous to wait for Joe to get off work. I offloaded some video from my tablet to my main, still Internet-less computer, took a shower, and chilled with Felicity.

Then Joe got home, and it was off to ABC. As usual, I had no gift, because I totally forgot about Felicity’s birthday until last Wednesday, then I compounded that by ordering from Amazon.com and not Amazon.ca, thus ensuring maximum delivery time and fees.

Derp! All that means that Felicity’s gift will not arrive until 4-9 days from now. She is cool with that, but I still feel like a putz.

Joe got her two AAA grade gifts. One is a DVD of the Thirteen Ghosts of Scooby Doo, which is arguably the most Eighties of all Scooby Doo series and hence Felicity’s all time favorite.

And hey, it has Vincent Van Price in it, and he makes everything better.

The other one, though, was a whole book all about fonts. Felicity is the biggest font fan I know, so this gift was, pun intended, letter perfect for her.

My gift is just something she asked for. How dull.

After ABC, we of course retired to the apartment to watch more of the delightful gift baskets of video goodness Felicity brings us every time we get together.

All and all, it was a delightful day.

Other news : we have a line on a new apartment. It’s in a high rise near Cooney and Cook, so it’s only two blocks from the Richmond Brighouse Skytrain station, and the building has a gym AND a sauna! Score!

Joe went to check it out yesterday, and he said it was a pretty sweet place. He filled out an application, and we will know if we get the place via a phone call to Joe’s cell next Tuesday.

I hope we get it. It sounds like this place rocks.

Well, that’s all from me for today. I will talk to you nice people tomorrow!

So I have been watching this thing about superheroes. It’s a three part documentary series about superheroes, comics, and their role in American cultural history.

I have learned many neato things from it. For example, comics did massive business during World War II. It was estimated that pretty much all the boys and ninety percent of the girls read some kind of comic.

That kind of cultural saturation boggles the mind in today’s cultural landscape. We have grown quite used to a world where having even a ten percent cultural penetration is considered revolutionary.

Sure, they were not all reading the same comics. In fact, there were more titles in print during the World War II era than at any other time since. When a market is that huge, the product always expands to fill it, especially when the established players can’t keep up with demand and that creates opportunities for the little guy. Back then, there were seven major comic companies and tons of little ones with tiny markets and shoestring operations.

That seems like a golden era to me because there were so many opportunities for the bright young creative types to make a name for themselves or at least to find someone who would give them a chance.

Today, we all have access to the means of production and distribution, at least, but getting people’s attention has never been harder.

One little niggle : I have always thought of Liev Schreiber as a fairly intelligent guy, but at as host and narrator of this documentary series, he doesn’t come across that way. Perhaps the problem is that he’s trying to sound smart and that almost never ever works.

Or maybe it’s the writing. I had a major grammar/logic twerk when, in the opening bit, he said that comics “were available everywhere on comic racks and drugstores.”

No, they were available ON comic racks and IN drugstores. They weren’t ON the drugstores. That make make them rather hard to find. What moron wrote this stuff?

Oh well, the great thing about documentaries is that, as long as the people they are interviewing are intelligent and articulate, the rest doesn’t have to be.

Another thing that interested me, as it always does when I watch something about the birth of the comic book and the superhero genre, is the early relationship between the comic strip and the comic book.

The earliest comic books were just reprints of the dominant media form at the time, the comic strip. That is the whole reason we call them comics, even though so few of them even try to be funny.

But what interests me is to try to imagine a time where the funny pages and the comic book existed in the same cultural space. All my life, they have been very different worlds, with the few remaining adventure strips existing as bizarrely anachronistic reminders of a bygone era.

The reason this interests me is that I am a fan of both forms. I love comic books AND comic strips, and so to imagine them merging intrigues me.

Another interesting thing : Superman, the super dude who launched the entire superhero genre, was created by two boys who had grown up picked on and bullied by the other kids during the Great Depression.

So Superman, in that oh so expensive issue of Action Comics, did not fight supervillains, he fought the injustices of the time. He exonerates a woman about to be executed for a crime she did not commit by bringing the judge a signed confession from the real crook, then he busts a senator for colluding with a defense contractor for personal profit.

So you heard it here first, folks. Superman started off as a socialist!

It really makes me appreciate Supes all the more to imagine him righting the human scale wrongs of his time. It seems like a form of heroism that might seem a little nearsighted compared to big scale villains and cosmic struggles, but I think it would make for a far more relatable and meaningful kind of heroism.

One of the things I really liked about the Joss Whedon show Angel in its first season is that it had that very kind of street level heroism. Angel worked out of a phone booth and took on things like abusive boyfriends or corrupt politicians.

I think the world needs that kind of hero. A hero who is not too big and important to take on the real problems that people have in their daily lives. Someone you can imagine showing up to help you with your crazy boss, your venomous ex, or your teenager who is just plain out of control.

This street level Superman is clearly the product of two boys who had suffered a lot of personal injustice in their lives (wow, even back in the Depression, nerds got shit on) and who wanted to create the ultimate avenger (small a) of all the wrongs of the world.

That makes me feel more connected with the character. I was bullied a lot as a kid too, and I can well imagine my dreaming up someone to stick up for me and keep me safe and make sure the bullies never got away with hurting anyone ever again.

Of course, being a child of the Eighties, I probably would have come up with someone a lot like Mister T.

Different times, different heroes.

In fact, part of me wants to do that now. To just show up during lunch and recess at a local elementary school and police the schoolyard.

Of course, you can’t beat up a little kid no matter how much the little shit might deserve it, so I would do the next best thing and document the abuse via video, then take the proof to the school and demand they take action.

I’m not sure what my hero name would be. The Anti-Bully? Camera Man? That Fat Guy Who Hangs Around In Playgrounds And Creeps Us Out?

Oh well. That’s it from me for today, folks. Felicity, I am so sorry I made you wait for me.

I will talk to you nice folks again tomorrow.

Today was therapy day, which for the summer also means Adventures In Public Transit day for lil ol’ me.

Here’s the video evidence :

Not that anything all that bad (or all that good, for that matter) happened to me along the way. The worst thing mass transit ever does to me is be dull. I had my tablet with me though, and that works as a partial cure for bus boringness.

And when that didn’t work, I would just stare out the window at the passing scenery. All those houses full of people, each of whom have their own unique story and point of view, trying muddle through life and find the door that leads to happiness.

Or at least fun.

I have been thinking a lot about fun lately. One might think that someone who plays videos games as much as I do (hours and hours daily) would have all the fun he could stand, and you would be partly right.

I have a lot of fun playing video games. Otherwise, honestly, what’s the point? But it is a cold and lonely and above all stationary kind of fun.

It’s well suited to a depressed, isolated, shy person, but for the version of me that I am striving towards, it is just not enough. Life is too short to spend endless days merely diverting oneself. Video games may entertain but they do not enrich, educate, or enlighten.

In fact, it has occurred to me lately that I might be some sort of addict. Not a full blown addict who neglects everything else in order to play WoW 24/7 and who becomes a threat to himself and others.

No, I am a milder kind of addict, in that I have no problem tearing myself away from the games when there is something better to do.

It’s just that I worry that the time and energy I put into the games could be better spent actually going and looking for something better to do instead of always waiting for that something to come to you.

There’s a guy outside calling to his dog Phoebe, but I swear it sounds like he is just wandering around saying “BEEP BEEP” with various intonations.

Anyhow, I fear that video games are a crutch to me, and if I want to get better, I have to throw away the crutches and learn to walk on my own. It is so easy to just dip in to the endless world of video games at my fingertips via the Internet that it becomes seductive.

And like any addiction, it takes more from you than it can ever give back.

I am tired of just letting the days go by.

I want my life to mean something. I want to use the products and the power of my imagination and my talents to be my passport to the world outside this apartment. I want my brilliance to be recognized and rewarded by those in authority.

Or at least get something I have written published or produced.

And I am making progress in my quest to escape my own gravity well. I might not be ready to start blasting my work all over God’s creation in the hopes that someone, somewhere, will take an interest in it, but I am getting there.

My self-confidence improves daily. I feel like I am constantly reinvesting in myself. Or maybe it is more like compound interest. Every day, the balance increases, and that means tomorrow’s gains will be slightly bigger.

Hopefully, some marvelously quadratic function will take over at some point and my confidence will rise like a rocket into the clear blue sky.

But um, not to the point where I completely lose my mind and enter a state of demented mania where I think I am the saviour of mankind or something.

That is something I sincerely worry about, although said worry is probably baseless. It’s probably just my depression using its usual scare tactics to convince me that if I am not careful, I will go completely insane, with delusions of grandeur, and end up on a rooftop somewhere shouting, like a low rent Lawnmower Man, that I AM GOD HERE.

It really does feel that way sometimes, though. I fear that deep within my soul is a vast reservoir of untapped elitism just itching to get out. All my efforts at egalitarianism, all my deep desire to understand people as people, outside what society says about them, all the fruits of the conscious decision I made as a scared, bullied kid to reject elitism as a dark and dead end path, have not managed to erase the spectre of elitism from my soul.

It’s just suppressed its expression, and we all know that what is suppressed has more power over us than anything of which we are conscious because the suppressed emotions can operate in the blind spot we specifically created for it so that we could pretend it isn’t there.

So I confess : there is a part of me that wants to scream at people that they are all a bunch of fucking idiots and they should let someone with a functional frontal cortex run things before they fuck everything up for good.

You know, someone like me.

I think that one part of the sometimes heavy price we pay for our superior intellects. Sure, you see more than the average person, but that doesn’t do any good if nobody listens to you or believes you.

And it is particularly painful to know better and yet be unable to do anything about it. No wonder so many of my ilk retreat into cynicism and misanthropy.

If you can convince yourself that the sheep deserve whatever they get for being so stupid, maybe it won’t hurt so much to see them walk into the same walls over and over and over again.

But I have rejected cynicism, misanthropy, and elitism. I choose the humanist road, and while it is never easy, it is always the right path.

I will talk to you nice folks again tomorrow.