Don’t have anything in particular in mind for today’s words, so I guess it’s personal update time.

Let’s see. Oh, my “earaches” are under control. Quotes because they are probably more than just earaches. Whatever they are, as long as I keep my nose blown and my sinuses empty, they are not a problem. I have not had a serious attack for a while.

That doesn’t mean the problem is solved, of course. Whatever the hell that is wrong with me that caused them in the first place has not been fixed. I only have the symptoms under control. I still need repairs.

Speaking of which, I haven’t heard from a surgeon or my doctor’s office about seeing a surgeon to fix up the big holes in my abdominal wall yet. I am going to call my GP’s office tomorrow to ask about it, and to make *sure* they have my phone number right. I have all these problems (fucked up knee, hernias, earaches) and I want to get them all fixed if I can.

I am falling apart, and nothing seems to be happening about it.

I am perfectly willing to endure whatever I have to endure to get myself patched up. I am not exactly eager about it, but I am willing. I know there will be unpleasantness ahead. Things that are scary, things that are weird, things that are uncomfortable, and things that just plain hurt.

But irresponsible as I can be, especially towards myself, if I know I have a problem, I am going to want to get it fixed.

In a weird way, it is nice to have some problems that can actually be repaired. Things like diabetes and depression can’t be surgically corrected. There is no way to have your insulin resistance patched up, or have your depression removed. They are long term problems which may or may not be entirely solvable.

The abdominal hernias, at least, can be repaired. Who knows what good that might do me? I have no idea how long I have had those hernias. They might be quite old. Maybe they are the whole reason I have digestive issues in the first place.

It’s not hard to imagine that these “soft blockages” I have talked about before, where things get backed up down there and end up compacted and causing all kinds of trouble, might just be the spots where the food is going through the part of my small intestine outside my abdominal wall.

Seems like the natural place for a bottleneck, is what I am saying.

So it could be that, once I am all patched up and healed up, I am a much happier dude, with way less intestinal instability. I have kind of felt like my guts were hanging out for a long time, but I just assumed that was metaphorical.

Turns out, it is literally true, in a way.

Boy, I hope my feeling like there’s a cold wind blowing through me never becomes literal. That would be fucked up.

Anything else to report? Well, the reason I am doing all my bizness around seven hours earlier than usual is that today I will be going to the monthly BCSFA meeting, despite the omens.

Omens like the fact that the hallway in Ray’s building have recently been repainted, so there might be a fumes issue. I am all over the place with paint fumes and my reaction to them. Sometimes they don’t bother me at all, sometimes they annoy me a little, and sometimes they make me feel like I am going to pass out and/or throw up and/or die.

So we will see if I can even attend the damned thing. I would hate to be a cause for complications. For example, I would not want my inability to handle the fumes keep my roomies from doing so. So I have a backup plan.

If that ends up being the case, I will just get someone to drop me off at the Skytrain station in New West and I will Skytrain my way home. We live two blocks from Brighouse station, so it is not that big a deal for me to Skytrain it. The only complicated bit will be switching Skytrain lines. But I can figure it out.

The other ill omen is that Kathleen fell and cracked her shoulder. Poor dear! I hope she is okay.

Besides her personal suffering, there is also the issue that she is usually the person who brings most of the snacks. So I am guessing that there will be no snacks. And there is usually quite the spread.

The snacks are not necessary, of course. All you need for us nerds to have a good time is a big room with enough chairs for everybody. We will entertain ourselves with our vibrant and scintillating conversation.

But still. Kathleen’s mishap makes the whole thing feel ill fated. Silly, I know, and completely irrational. Probability does not work that way. Bad things happening does not, without a causal link, make other bad things happen.

Spilling milk on your shoes at breakfast did not make that pigeon poop on you during lunch, and it doesn’t mean that something bad will happen to you at supper either.

Despite that, we humans are a superstitious lot. No matter how hardnosed a skeptic or rugged a philosopher you might think you are, you have superstitions nevertheless.

Anything else to report? Not that I can think of at the moment. Life has been going fairly smoothly lately, especially since I got that GST cheque. Before it, I was very tense about money and worried about making it to check day this month.

But now, I am serene and calm on the subject. I will be just fine.

Oh, get this : I still haven’t ordered that Airbake cookie sheet I want because I fucked up when I gave the lady at Money Mart my postal code. So I have to go in again.

God as my witness, I will have unburnable cookies!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My creativity is extremely impatient.

Maybe that is because everything was cooped up inside me for so long. That created the conditions for me to become addicted, instantly addicted, to the release I get from writing my thousand words and posting them immediately to the net every day.

This blog is truly a lifeline to me. It lets me get at least some of my words out. I still have a billion words locked inside the vaults and storerooms of my soul, but with this blog, I can at least slow down their rate of accumulation.

Obviously, the vlog entries help with that too.

I am pretty happy with how my vlog is going lately. Granted, the blog entries used to have higher production values back when all I had was a crappy webcam and too much time on my hands. Being able to record it and edit it immediately made a big difference. I could cut and paste and trim and title when it was all still molten, not yet fully cooled.

That is what I mean about impatient creativity, though. Just the act of having to plug my tablet into my computer (and transfer the file over to my HD to edit it) is too long and too complicated a step for me. If I do that, the red-hot creativity of it cools and solidifies and my inspiration to go on is dead, dead, dead.

I will try not to be too gross about it, but creation to me is a lot like a process of organic elimination. Once the words (or whatever) are out of me, I don’t want to see them again. I want to move on to the next thing.

I wish I could say that there was a period after which they no longer feel like a part of me and so operating on them (known to sane people as “editing”) won’t feel painful and disgusting and just plain wrong…. but I don’t seem to operate like that. All that happens is that over time, they leave my immediate memory, but all it takes is reading them again to take me right back to when I wrote them in the first place, and boom, they are a part of me again.

And I just can’t go back like that. I just…. can’t. I don’t know why and I wish it were different, but one of the hard life lessons I am learning lately is that there will always be things about yourself that you can’t justify or explain but are nevertheless a very important part of you that is not up for debate.

Sometimes, all you can say is “that’s just how I am”, or “that’s just how it works for me”, and if people truly care about you, they will take that as true without argument or denial.

This is, presumably, intuitively obvious to people who are not all bound up in the hyper-rationality trap. People less restricted by the need to stay in the light of reason, logic, and rationality are completely fine with telling the world, either by word or deed, that they are who they are and work like they work and that is the beginning, middle, and end of it.

But somewhere on the way, I donned the straightjacket of excess reasonableness. My verbal/logic abilities fooled me into thinking I could explain everything and justify anything and that I could face the world as a self-contained rational stalwart without any of those messy inexplicable noncommunicable truths to worry about.

It is amazing what an elaborate and transparent set of delusions one can create when one makes them out of logic and reason. This is especially true when you have the mind of a psychologist like I do, because there isn’t the enormous dark area of human behaviour sitting there on your map of the universe, reminding you that there is a lot you just plain don’t get, like there is with a lot of other hyper-rationals.

I have never had a big trouble understanding why people did what they did. I was only ten years old when I realized that everything people do makes sense to them, and that was the key to unlocking most of human behaviour. You can deduce a lot about people’s motivations once you start from that premise. People are not random.

You can see, then, how someone like me might fool themselves into thinking they see all and know all, or at least, can figure most of it out, given time.

But that is so, so very wrong. Being able to see and explain things is only part of the puzzle of living. It’s great for reassuring you that being reclusive isn’t as exclusive as it seems to be. It’s great for looking at the world through a telescope from way on high and fooling yourself into thinking you are somehow a part of what is going on down there. It is great at making you feel you can handle anything, especially when you haven’t had to handle anything lately.

But there are vast realms impenetrable by logic and light within the human soul. None of us gets to be intellect only, no matter how proud Reason likes to pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist or doesn’t matter. Every one of us is a vast cosmos of self, filled with memories, emotions, opinions, and all the other stuff for which we have no names.

It is true that we must always know the difference between what goes on inside our minds and what goes on outside of them, and the mystically true should never be mistaken for the literally true.

But that does not mean we get to ignore all that we cannot explain about ourselves. You do not need to be able to justify yourself to the world. We are so much more than our reason and language can ever convey.

I don’t know, that’s just the way I am.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know your life has taken a strange turn when you find yourself wondering what it would be like to be a sociopath, and thinking that on some levels, it sounds kind of good.

I mean, sure, they’re the definition of evil. But they seem happy.

Not really, of course. For someone like me, wondering what it is like to be a sociopath, devoid of empathy, is like a person with chronic eyestrain headaches wondering what it would be like to be blind. It might seem nice when you are just thinking about it in the abstract, but the moment you imagine it actually being true, reality sets in and you realize it would be horrible.

Still, I wonder. I wonder if being a sensitive person and being a sociopath are somehow linked, in the same way that light and shadow are linked. I wonder if there are sociopaths out there who got that way because of some intolerable empathic memory or event that was so profoundly disturbing that the only way out of that hell was to isolate and disconnect the entire empathic circuit of the brain.

This is not an unknown phenomenon. Phobias are basically wildly overgeneralized reactions to traumatic incidents. When one person who touches the hot stove might come away thinking “Wow, that hurt like hell, I better not touch a hot stove ever again!”, another, possibly more sensitive or more reactive person, might come away thinking “Stoves are evil! I hate stoves! Stoves just want to hurt people! I won’t go near a stove ever again!”.

So that is one theory of sociopathy. There needs to be many others, because one thing we know about these people is that a lot of them come from perfectly average homes with no known evidence of trauma of any out of the ordinary sort.

It is entirely possible that some people are simply born that way. If so, then we should be able to observe the difference in their minds with modern realtime brain activity imaging via fMRI. This introduces the intriguing and disturbing (so much of modern brain science is both) possibility of there being an objective way to determine if someone is, indeed, a sociopath.

On the one hand, that conceivably could be used as a legal defense. A defense attorney could argue that their client was literally incapable of stopping themselves from doing heinous things and therefore cannot be held legally accountable to them.

And of course, because we have this crazy (hah) legal system that can only think in terms of “innocent” or “guilty”, that could theoretically mean someone is put back on the street on the grounds that they are the kind of person who should not be, under any circumstances, be back on the street.

That’s why I think we need to revitalize the civil commitment process. Yes, in the past it was horribly abused to send away people who were merely inconvenient to the state or to their families, but there has to be a way to declare someone, legally speaking, too crazy to be free.

So maybe it happens due to trauma, maybe some people are simply born with a brain abnormality that makes them unable to care. The third and least likely possibility is that at some point in life, people make a choice. Maybe a conscious choice, maybe an unconscious choice, probably somewhere in between.

They choose how much they care. They make their deal with the world about what is worth caring about and what is not, what circumstances justify a sacrifice of purely selfish concerns in pursuit of moral (empathic) rewards. They draw their circle around themselves, and everything within their circle is their business, and everything else is someone else’s business, in all senses of the word.

And some people choose bigger circles and some people draw smaller circles, and sociopaths draw the smallest ones possible. Theirs is a solipsistic subjective reality in which only they are real, and everyone else is just a shadow, an irritation, or at best, a means to an end.

But have you ever wondered why merely not caring about people would drive them to violence? One answer is, of course, that it doesn’t in most cases. There is significant evidence that there may be a dozen well behaved sociopaths lurking, unknown, for every headline-grabbing low impulse control deviant who does unspeakable things to people.

But I think that, for the ones that do draw attention to themselves, there is a secret to the evil they do beyond their glib and superficial answers as to why they did their misdeeds.

They will say it was out of curiosity, or boredom, or anger, but I think that part of their mind knows something very key is missing and is trying to find a way through that icy cold steel that is their sociopathy, but the only thing it can find that comes close to what it knows it should be feeling is the bludgeoningly strong empathic signals that come from someone else being in extreme pain and fear.

So they are drawn to acts of sadism not merely for some kind of sick thrill, but because it makes them feel… better, somehow.

This, of course, does not justify the acts, it just explains them. I am sure many sociopaths would object to the idea that they hurt people just so they can feel something for once. That would make them sound like a pussy.

To wrap this entry up, I will return to where I started. I know what it would be like if I didn’t care, and it is no good. Like I have said many times before, a guy like me could be a terrible menace without moral restraint. Think Hannibal Lecter crossed with the Joker. The worst villains are always the ones who use great intellect to do harm, and mine is pretty damned big.

I don’t really want to stop caring.

I just want it to be quiet in my head for once. At least for a little while.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I used YouTube’s editor to fix the lighting on this one. How does it look?

Still sitting on my iceberg.

But I am not too worried. This too shall pass. And when it does, I will have another little piece of myself back. And there is no profit in worrying about being depressed. I have learned to treat it like having a cold. Sure, it sucks, and sure, you are going to do whatever it takes to get better or at least alleviate the symptoms, but at the bottom of it all, you know that you are mostly just going to be waiting it out.

Of course, writing about it helps a lot, too.

Spent a lot of time asleep today. Whatever. It’s not like I had anything important to get done. Just another day in the life of the quiet kind of depressive. The kind that never attempts suicide, never ends up in the psych war, never brings people down with their bad mood.

We just wait out our lives in silence.

It’s been a long long time since I have been even vaguely suicidal. The worst I have is moments. Moments where all the frustration and anger at my condition peaks and I just want to escape being myself for a while.

Real life is such a drag, you know?

But those pass quickly. I am a judo master when it comes to slamming those thoughts down. I know that I get a little better every day and the times when I feel bad are just part of the process of healing. You can’t heal from anything, physical or mental, without a certain amount of pain. Growth itself is often painful. Trying to avoid everything that is painful is futile. Nearly everything worth getting in life involves crawling over the jagged rocks of life at least a little.

The secret is to have tough skin and sufficient drive to make going over those rocks a piece of cake.

Still working on not beating myself up over the lack of progress type things done by yours truly lately. I knew that when I finally got around to making my “things I could be doing right now” list, there was a very high chance that the machinery of my mind would turn that into the “things you SHOULD be doing right now and oh my god you haven’t done anything in ages you sre such a loser everybody hates you” blah blah, but I took the risk anyhow.

These are the sort of things I want to get over, and you don’t get over anything without dealing with it.

It is still hard to accept that sometimes I can make progress upstream and sometimes the best I can do is keep up with the stream. And some days, not even that.

It’s always water.

I did do one thing I have been meaning to do for a while today. I signed up for Patreon. It’s a site where people can sign up to sponsor an artist they like. You can either pledge a certain amount per month or a certain amount per piece of art, like every time an artist posts a new piece of part, you would pay them X bucks.

Obviously, for a fellow like me, the “per blog entry” thing would be pretty expensive. I do two a day, after all, so even a $1 per piece sponsorship plan would cost someone $60/month. Plus, to me, that seems uncomfortably open to abuse. Sure, on the one hand, it inspires artists to be prolific, but what about quality?

I suppose what keeps artists from just churning out tons of low quality crap for the cash is that a Patron can withdraw patronage at any time, and if you art sucks, that is more likely to happen.

Still, I have myself set up on the monthly plan. It just seems more honest somehow. Here’s the link, if you are interested.

Click here if you would like to sponsor me.

It doesn’t have to mean a lot of money. You can pledge as little as $1 a month if you like. It would just be nice to have a little extra encouragement, especially on the down days.

It was pretty hard for me to go through with it, signing up and everything. Even harder to tell people about it. I have spent a hell of a long time thinking I am worthless and useless and so on, so to have the temerity to even suggest someone would put one red cent in this Internet busker’s hat of mine shows significant progress for yours truly. It took a lot of what passes for guts in me to do it.

So yay me, I guess.

I still find it hard to imagine that anyone will do anything with it. What I do seems to fly under the radar of even the people who experience it themselves. People don’t know how to react to it, or how to process it, so it just sort of… passes through them. Like light through a window pane.

But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that I did it and that I am telling you about it. Just like what matters is that I submitted that story of mine to On Spec, not whether or not they accept it.

Just putting myself out there is a big step for me. One of these days, I am either going to get one of these submission tracker programs or do it myself with a spreadsheet or something, and then I will have the tool(s) I need to keep every story I have ever written that is even faintly readable out there in circulation.

My friend James Patrick Lynch is right. I really should be putting my “stuff” out there more. It’s very easy to just stay in the cozy interiority of the artist’s mind, making art just for fun, but I want to be able to support myself with my writing skills and that means taking this shit seriously, even if it’s only in bursts.

Oh, and in case my comments earlier did not make this clear, I don’t want anyone to worry about me when I write all these sad things about myself. It doesn’t mean I am in any danger of self-harm.

This is just how I work through things.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.