Bullies and Dominance

We will start with the bullies.

I have been analyzing bullying for the vast majority of my life, ever since I was first a victim of it in elementary school.

But for years, I couldn’t really get a grip on it because I was stuck in a total evil/total innocent binary when the truth is always somewhere in between. It was only when I started to see things in a broader and deeper way, including trying to see thing from the bully’s point of view, that I made any real progress.

Lately, I have been trying to integrate thoughts about status into my thinking. Like most liberal intellectual types and DEFINITELY like most nerds, I tend to be status blind. People are just people to me. Status signals are just one of the forms of social information that my brain interprets as static and disregards.

So I am just now getting around to putting social status and social dominance issues into the equation. Sadly, being ignorant of status does not make one immune to its powerful effects.

And here is the key for us intellectual types : intellect is power. When we follow our natural instinct to show off how smart we are, we are (largely unknowingly) challenging all the other students for social dominance. The socially intact people all get this, even though few of them could articulate it. But we social retards are accidentally throwing down the gauntlet… and then are surprised when someone picks it up.

That alone makes us socially “weird”. From the point of view of the socially normal, we constantly powerfully challenge others and lose, and to them, it’s like we are beating out head against the wall and complaining about the headaches.

And to make matters worse, we are clearly the sort of person the school system likes : the academically gifted. The teachers themselves tend to, if not like us, at least give clear signals that the system approves of us.

So we have the favour of both the authority figure (teacher) and the society in which we are operating (school), and do not struggle as hard with our studies as the average student to boot. Everything about us is a social challenge to others, and yet, being status blind and socially retarded, we are at the same time the people least capable of actually defending ourselves.

So we get socially trounced. All we can see from our literal mindset is people being mean to us for no reason. Without the ability to understand the social milieu around us, that’s the best interpretation available to us.

And I am not, of course, saying we deserve what happens to us. Nobody deserves the kind of abuse we get/have gotten from our peers. As always, I only seek to understand what is really going on.

The root problem is socialization, or possibly something that predates it. Somehow, developmentally, a choice is made to primarily focus on abstract reasoning skills and interpret the world through them, and while that leads to high academic performance, it makes us ignore or suppress the information from our social antennae. That’s too random, emotional, intuitive, and real to be reliable or even valid.

The most extreme examples of this, of course, would be the various points on the autism spectrum. These people have “chosen” (only in a developmental sense) to value the rational over the intuitive to such an extent that it severely hampers their ability to function in normal society at all. The necessary information might well be coming in, but like I said earlier, their minds tune that out as noise in order to better focus on abstract reasoning.

And the thing is, this is all done in total innocence. From the point of view of the socially ignorant person being bullied, they did absolutely nothing to provoke these social challenges that they inevitably lose. Nothing we do is intended as a challenge or a provocation or anything of the sort. We just seek the sort of approval we can get (from the teacher and the system) and are stunned by the apparent random cruelty of people.

No wonder so many of us end up as cynical misanthropes with a nearly nihilistic level of hate and mistrust for our fellow human beings. If you form your opinion of humanity on the playground, where apparently people are mean to you for no reason, you can only conclude that most people are evil.

I have always felt that, somehow, bullies are acting on a group emotion… that they are only the active component of a whole social dynamic that hates you. The constant unconscious social challenges emitted by nerds and other intellectual types provides the stimulus for that social dynamic.

But there is one more component to said dynamic : what our social programming tells us to do about weak leaders.

See, by sending out challenges but also showing ourselves to be social weak, we put ourselves in the position of the incompetent alpha, and there is no group for whom we have less sympathy than weak leaders.

The whole dynamic of social status competition is focused on producing strong leaders. Part of that is betas constantly looking for a chance to become alpha. This ensures that when the alpha becomes weak, there is a strong replacement.

This means, though, that we are programmed to be enraged by signs of weakness in leaders. This rage leaves no place for mercy. Weak leaders must be torn down.

The hardest form of empathy for us naked beach apes is empathy for our social superiors.

And there we are, stuck, without knowing it, acting out the role of the weak leader over and over again. Our intellect is a powerful social status signal, yet we don’t know how to defend and maintain our status… so the herd turns on us.

And because we are ignorant of the real mechanisms in play, it happens again and again and again.

Not sure how to fix this, but I expect early intervention has to play a part of it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Adventures in Baking : Chocolate Oaty Gut Bombs edition

I made these today : 60 Second Chocolate Oat etc.

It’s my fourth time making them because they are just plain that good. It’s a recipe with everything : tastes great, fairly nutritious, easy as heck to make, and it has a huge yield.

I mean, I got 42 oat… things out of that recipe. It’s the perfect thing for filling that cookie jar when you want to make space in your baking schedule for something non-dessert.

Yeah, I am talking about biscuits. Those garlic biscuits I love so much! And this time, I have the actual half and half the recipe calls for and don’t need to make a substitute, which is where I keep messing up.

So will this make them even better? Time will tell!

The only downside, and it’s not even really a downside, to my little oat…. thingies is that they incredibly filling. They are very tight little clusters of chocolate, peanut butter, and oats, and so two of them will fill you right up. Some people don’t like really dense desserts and I have been one of those people in the past.

But these things taste too darn good for me to hold that against them!

I did ponder experimenting with the flavouring a little. The recipe calls for a teaspoon of vanilla, and that opens the door for my little collection of extracts.

But none of them seemed right. Caramel would disappear into the chocolate flavour. Maple would make things WAY too sweet. Peppermint/mint would go great with the chocolate but clash quite violently with the peanut butter.

Just thinking about it makes me a little erfy.

But I do have one extract that might have worked : banana. Banana works with both chocolate and peanut butter. But in the end, I decided not to mess with perfection this time and just used the regular recipe.

Next time, though, who knows? I got a huge big of quick oats and lots of time!

Emotional Weather Report

I feel better today than I have lately. Got to spend more time awake, which is a plus. I feel like I hit the bottom of a negative mood cycle and now I have a chance to start building my way to the top again. Dunno whether that’s brain chemistry, sleep cycle, blood sugar, or what. But I feel like I caught up today, at least somewhat.

I still get sleepy in front of this darn computer, though. The warmth from the base heaters just feels so darn nice and cozy that it makes me want to slip between the sheets and sliiide away. I am such a sucker for coziness.

Of course, the cruel irony is that my bed, which is extremely close to me… so close I can lean out of my seat and flop directly into bed… is not all cozy and warm. It’s much colder, because apparently something in that intervening foot or so sucks the heat right out of air.

So I keep getting sleepy in front of the computer, so I lie down, but then the cold wakes me back up again. I am getting better at resisting lying down in the first place, which is the only way to break the cycle, but what I would not give to have my bed be as cozy as my seat at the computer. I would sleep so damned well.

Oh right. I know what keeps my bed from being this warm. Hot air rises. Damn it.

Anyhow, the mood thing seems to be improving. I don’t feel as dragged down and I feel more interested in the world and more capable of looking forward to things.

I’m not out of the woods yet. This is depression, after all, and that doesn’t just go away. I feel like I still have some napping to do before I am back up to speed entirely.

But as I regain energy, I regain ambition, and ambition’s other half, boredom. When I feel well enough to get really bored with my usual bullshit, that is when things get done.

Who knows, might start that next book yet. Or at least start editing the last one.

The Soul Cost Of Permafrost

Last night, my friends and I watched a great movie called Beyond The Mat . It’s a documentary about professional wrestling, and despite a very annoying narrator and some incredibly cheesy music choices, it was really good documentary work that really made you feel like you were seeing what it is really like to be behind the scenes of the world of pro wrestling.

I was especially happy that they focused in on a wrestler of whom I was a huge fan way back in The Day, Jake “The Snake” Roberts. He was amazing in his day, the only wrestler who was scarier speaking softly during a demo than any other wrestler shouting his fool head off. He had this air of quiet but unmistakable menace that I just loved back when I was a big WWF fan in my mid-teens.

And they showed him warts and all. And we are talking a lot of warts. The one that really struck me, though, was his inability to open up emotionally to his daughter. What he said was “I don’t know how to do it… I can’t do that.. melting… thing. ”

That hit me like a bullet because I have been thinking about my own problems in those exact terms. I can’t… melt. I can’t let go that last bit. I can’t… intermingle. Whether it’s with a single person or an entire organization, I can’t truly join. I can’t mix my identity with another, or let mine be subsumed. I just… can’t.

And I know that’s wrong. If I can’t let go like that, I will never know true intimacy. I will never truly connect with another.

And it’s been that way for a long, long time. Those kids who tried to befriend me when I was in elementary school hell all failed because I could not let them in. Something in me is broken and I think it might be the source of a lot of my problems.

Maybe some people can sense this broken wrongness in me, and it bothers them. I definitely feel like it is a developmental thing, like I didn’t get what I needed at a vital time in my early development and so this part of me, the part that connects with others, never developed properly. I’m like a baby bird with a broken beak.

I bet if my little connector worked, I would find some peace in this world and I would have found my way out of my intellectual deep freeze decades ago.

But I don’t know how to fix it.

I don’t know if fixing it is even possible at this point.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

Meaning of course, the space between my ears. Seven days back to blogging and already I am drawing a blank.

Mostly that is due to tiredness. I am obviously still not caught up on sleep, as I have had plenty of Z time. Yet I still feel very sleepy and want to sleep the afternoon away.

Can’t tell if that is genuinely sleepiness or just my old addiction to pressing the fast forward button on life, though.

I do find myself finding it hard to stay focused on a task lately. I feel sleepy and tired AND restless and angry at the same time. The oppressive weight of sleepiness makes me feel trapped and yet I am, in a way, addicted to it.

But the really interesting thing is that while I had a book to write, none of this shit happened. It’s like I got a month off from sleepy days and associated bullshit. I guess while I was writing my book, life was stimulating and rewarding enough to keep my mind and body active, and I didn’t have all this excess mental energy overheating that bubbling cauldron of creativity and strangeness I call my mind.

Makes me wish I had just started the next book. But somehow, I knew all along that I wouldn’t. The part of me that wants to curl up in a tight little ball with my back turned to the world and just wait for it all to go away had been waiting patiently all those weeks of writing, and when it got the chance to regain its throne, it took it.

So I find myself thinking about how to get started again. I wanted to preserve the momentum but that clearly is not going to happen. I will have to boost myself up into orbit again. But how?

I haven’t been entirely idle, thank goodness. I did the whole eBook thing. So far, despite people saying they bought it, no sales have appeared on the account. Dunno what that means. I doubt people are lying to me.

Maybe the first ten sales don’t count.

The hard copy edition should be available soon. I just had to fiddle with the back cover copy some, and that means it had to go into the review process again, and yadda yadda yadda.

Latest culinary experiment was a gingerbread coffee cake I had tried once before. It turned out fine, very tasty. Texture is a little too spongy for my tastes but that’s part for the course with coffee cakes in my experience. Not sure why… I am pretty sure they don’t intend you to dunk the cake in your coffee…. but coffee cakes are just like that.

Also getting used to a round cake pan is a bit silly because now I have to cut the thing into triangles instead of squares. That might not be the case with more normal type cakes in the future, but the one I made last night has a crumbly topping and so I could not use the “double flip” method of turning it out of the pan. So it’s still in there.

Today is Sunday, my day off from baking. Tomorrow, I think I will look for a recipe for the kind of soft spice cookies we call molasses cookies back home. Apparently my spice itch is not yet fully scratched.

One good thing about today : I completed the “family” portion of my Xmas shopping. Mom, Dave, Anne, and Catherine all have gifts wending their way. My credit card account is dry now, but whatever. Tis the season! And I had no idea what I was going to do with that money anyhow. So I am super glad it is going to Xmas love.

That still leaves me with the “friends” category : Joe, Julian, and Felicity. I was feeling tense because I didn’t have enough $ on the card to buy all seven gifts. Then I realized that I have a check on the 17th and live two blocks from a mall. Eight days is plenty of time for me to get their gifts as long as it’s in person and not online.

I’m not going to make a lot of progress on the Cracked invasion today. What the hell, even slackers need a day off. Tomorrow, I will finally figure out how to pitch a sketch to them. They have lots of information on how to pitch a listicle, and I am busily trying to get my brain to come up with topics for at least a soft listicle like “5 Stupid Things You Do Every Day” type stuff.

Maybe I will put together something about nerd delusions. That could get them a lot of hate hits.

As you may have deduced from the opening parts of this entry, mood has not been lovely. But fuck it, it’s just mood. I fully intend to develop my strength of will to the point where mood just doesn’t fucking matter. Where I do what I want to do regardless of what I feel like doing.

Call it tough self-love.

Oh, and before I forget again, I want to jot down this very strange dream I had a week or so ago.

It’s strange because it was so detailed and surreal. It took place in a room that looked a lot like a courtroom, but there was no bench or gallery, just a row of jury boxes along one wall. Probably about six of them.

The jury boxes were half full. I remember specifically thinking they are exactly half full. All the occupants were Republicans, and they were watching someone in an elaborate but old-fashioned donkey costume caper about and shake the donkey’s head in response to very sarcastic questions being asked of it.

Every response would get a big laugh from the Republicans. That’s all I remember, and its not exactly a wild trip into the realms of the imagination, but I rarely have dreams like that.

And you know what? I feel better for having let it out of my head.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today’s been crap.

Well, for the most part, it’s been sleep. You guessed it, folks… another one of my sleepy days. I slept all morning and all afternoon and when I finish this blog entry, I will likely sleep some more.

Paying off that sleep debt. Payback’s a bitch.

And the thing is, my problem isn’t insomnia… I sleep more or less normally. It’s hyposomnia… the sleep I get sucks. I am doing nothing for my sleep apnea and it shows.

I feel so overwhelmed lately. I got the whole hard copy edition of my book thing going (still not available… it’s kind of a process), I got the stress of dealing with all the various potential avenues of expression on the Cracked forums (rejoined the Writer’s Workshop there, trying to figure out how to pitch a skit), been having mood issues, and to top it all off, I haven’t done any Xmas shopping yet.

I just can’t seem to get started on that.

I was hoping to get at least some of that shit done today, but instead, I slept. Maybe on some level that was to escape the stress, I don’t know. But I do know that I feel very cold and alone and abandoned lately, and I know damned well that it isn’t due to anything being wrong in my exterior world.

But I feel like I’m in a never-ending boxing match with my inner demons and I am starting to feel very… bruised.

Luckily, the rage that is my pilot light remains. My anger against my depression and its restrictions is not and cannot be extinguished no matter how hard it rains.

It’s just the weather.

So my grim determination to keep fighting remains. Even if I lose a few rounds, I will keep fighting.

Because honestly… FUCK my depression. Fuck it to death in a million pieces. I want it to die screaming and bleeding to death as it drowns. When it comes to fighting my depression, I’m a suicide bomber.

Wait, that sounds wrong.

My point is, I am fully dedicated to the fight. Any time I feel tired or bruised, I can just remember the rage and hate that I kept locked away and ignored for so long, and remember that I have a perfectly valid and deserving target for it : my depression, and all the bullshit, weakness, and lost life that comes with it.

So I ride the rage. Sure, sometimes it makes me want to smash the monitor with my keyboard, but that’s just excess heat. As long as it keeps me attacking the depression, both on a purely psychological level and in action, doing things like baking and putting my book up for sale and pushing forward in my campaign to invade and dominate the Cracked forums. (Fora?)

Of course, the ultimate goal of said invasion would be to become a staff writer for Cracked. I would kick ass writing comedy for them. I would need some help, at least at first, with the research aspect of writing their more fact oriented articles, though. I am not exactly keen on or good at research. I don’t have a clue how they come up with their fact lists. I can only assume that for some people, it’s easy, because they have reams and reams of well organized information in their heads, so they can just get an idea in their heads for an article and then think up six examples of it and there you are.

But my mind doesn’t work that way. I have loads and loads of information in my head, but it’s not organized in a way that lets me think of examples. And it’s not things like history or strange trivia either, although there’s some of both in there too.

Like I have said before, I don’t have any single large, deep bodies of knowledge. I have tons of little puddles. That’s why I do so well in general knowledge trivia, but totally flare out and crash when things get more specific.

So what I really need is a research partner. They make the list, I make it funny. I’m great at that!

As for Xmas shopping, hopefully I will get started on that tonight or tomorrow. At the moment, I feel relatively well rested. I might nap a little more, but I have some energies at my disposal at least.

Plus, I have yet to bake today, and I am all out of dessert, and tomorrow is my day off from baking, so…. gotta refill the cookie jar or whatnot tonight,

Last night’s experiment went… strangely. I made this : and instead of a cake, I ended up with a tasty flatbread.

I knew something was up when I had done all the steps to make the batter, and there was barely anything there. I looked at the batter, looked at my new round cake pan, and said “OK, there is not nearly enough substance here. ”

And I was right. Even fully cooked, it didn’t even fill a quarter of the pan. And what topological complexity it had coming out of the oven disappeared as it cooled, so it was basically just a big flat pancake.

Granted, I did experiment a little. I used caramel extract instead of lemon. But that’s a flavouring question. I am pretty sure neither would be part of the chemistry of the baking process.

Oh well, it was a very tasty pancake. The caramel tasted quite nice in there. But I have deleted the bookmark for the recipe. I prefer my cake recipes to result in cake.

Tonight, I think I will try the caramel thing again, but this time, I will use a highly reliable white cake recipe. And if I am feeling ambitious, I will even make frosting for it.

Or at least a glaze. Let’s not go crazy here.

That’s all my words for today, folks. I will talk to you nice people tomorrow!

Caramel cake with a maple glaze? Hmmmm…..

I miss not having to think about what my blog post title would be.

Anyhow, heya nice people! Today’s been a bottle of good and bad things that has been shaken in a paint can shaker for a few years, so I am in what one might call a mixed mood at the moment.

But don’t worry, the bad stuff isn’t really bad, just irritating, and the good stuff was great!

Here’s a rough itinerary of my day :

10:43 am – Joe, Julian, and I depart for my therapy appointment. Damn I love living so much closer to it now. We got there with six minutes to spare. Fab.

11 am – Therapy. I can’t say it’s been going super well lately. It hasn’t been going badly, mind you, but I can’t shake the feeling that we are not really connecting with what’s really wrong. It’s up to me (as I am the person I can control) to fix that by trying to come in with something deeper and juicier than just whatever is on my mind that day.

I mean, that’s what this blog is for.

I know that I have times when I feel very wounded lately. Stricken, even, like I got struck with a poison arrow and my body is fighting the poison and losing. I think I have reached the ragged edge of a particular inner precipice. This pushing myself into being more active is, of course, meeting a lot of inner resistance. I feel like my inner steamroller is crushing a lot of ice lately as I try to rid myself of all the gunk and junk and unexpressed spunk in my mind.

Take that how you may.

It’s like I have to let the coldness out. Decades of self-induced numbness have to be overcome and for that to happen, I have to open myself up to let the coldness out and the sunshine in. I have to melt. Spring must spring.

Wrong season for that, I know. Relax, it’s a metaphor.

And I need to somehow tame my unchecked superego. My therapist was right about that, mine is out of control, and is completely dominating my id and my ego. Basic Freudian theory says that this is clearly out of balance and unhealthy. It’s almost like I am one of his patients with an internalized super harsh German parent to deal with.

Which is rich because I had the exact opposite kind of childhood.

Oh right, my day.

12:10 pm : We arrive at the UPS store. I got a notice that there was a package waiting for me. You can’t pick up a package at UPS without photo ID, which I lack, but luckily Joe was with me and it was still cool. It doesn’t have to be your photo ID, it just has to be from someone with the same address, so, no prob. I am handed an intriguingly large Amazon package. What could be in there, I wonder?

12:25 pm : I go shopping at the IGA. Normally I am a Safeway or Save-on dude, but my mother sent me a $20 IGA gift card, so I happily pick up some stuff. Some snack crackers (CHEESE NIPS YO!), some eggs, some half-and-half to use in baking, and a fresh bottle of peppermint/mint extract for baking things that are all minty and stuff.

Have I mentioned that the combination of mint and chocolate does wild things to my brain? It’s beyond delicious.

Anyhow, I gather my items, go to the cash register, and hand the nice hunchbacked lady (not kidding) the gift card, only to have her look at it like I just handed her a picture of me blowing an alien. Oh dear, she had never seen that card before. I had no fear, because the card said IGA right on it, along with some other brands like Sobey’s. (Side note : we have both back home. )

She scans it… no dice. Not recognized. She scans it again…. nope. Tries a third time at my insistence, then tells me that the card, which says IGA right on it, doesn’t work at IGAs in BC.

Because apparently, the trans-Canada magic that makes IGAs work can’t make it over the Rockies. Works in Alberta and the rest of Canada, but not in BC. In BC, IGA is owned by totally different people.

Well what the FUCK. I am clearly growing more pissed off so she calls the head cashier over. She tells me the same thing. I keep saying “But it says IGA on it!”. She eventually gets her manager (the store manager, I assume) to come over and also say the same damned thing. At that point, I figured I am not going to get a fresh answer from anyone, so I pay for my stuff and go.

But I am still mad about it. Why? Because the gift card was a gift from my mother. So them rejecting it felt a lot like them rejecting my mother. The shock of it all and the emotional connection plus the sheer illogic of it all combined to make me a lot more forceful and insistent than I usually am.

In fact, I think I scared the poor little hunchback woman (I am large and hence frightening when mad, especially to itty bitty people like her) and I feel bad about that. It wasn’t her fault that the system made no goddamned sense.

Oh, and the kicker? Turns out that, according to the manager anyhow, the gift card will work… at Safeway. Where I normally shop. Mother fucker.

On the plus side, when I came home and opened my gift (which I had been instructed to do by the sender), it turned out to be a whole big set of every baking pan I asked for this year! w00t! 🙂

So now I got 2 eight inch round baking pans, a one-dozen muffin tin, a roasting pan, a loaf pan… and two more I don’t recall.

I also had a frustrating time involving locked doors, stairways, and a parking garage, but whatever.

That’s all my words for today. I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

Yes, that’s books, plural. I hooked up with Amazon’s CreateSpace website (next time I will start there, because it’s amazing) and soonishly I should have a print edition of my book available.

I assume it’s a sort of print on demand deal. I have no idea what kind of $$ I will make per sale, but at the moment, I don’t care. I am just thrilled as hell that I will have an actual, physical, pigment on paper book to my name.

Obviously, at some point soon, I will buy one for myself, and display it prominently.

The cover is meh. Don’t get me wrong, I am thrilled that I, you know, have one. Part of my worried of today revolved around how I was going to generate a cover for my eBook, giving my general lack of relevant skills. Skills aside, I had no idea what one actually puts on the cover of a book about death by teleport.

I’m fairly certain there’s nothing in public domain art that would cover that kind of thing.

But it turns out CreateSpace has a cover generation tool, so I picked a minimalist template, filled in my back cover text (going on an ACTUAL back cover!) and will just have to live with it.

I like how it looks, but it lacks pizzazz.

So soon, I should have both an eBook and real book version of my novel available. This thrills me to no end. Plus, I am very happy and proud of myself for completing the process, because I had many moments where I felt overwhelmed with sudden options and
really wanted to just close the tab and go take a nap. But I didn’t close the tab. I just did my other usual stuff and let the emotional reaction subside so I could look at things more reasonably, as they really are, instead of the giant monsters my fears amplify them into.

And so I made it through. I’m happy about that. I really look forward to lying in bed and reading my own book, on paper and everything. I think that will be extremely fulfilling.

Other than that, today has been rather blah. One of my tired days. It happens, I get through it. Spent all morning and the lion’s share of the afternoon in bed, asleep. The fact that I have no caffeine in my bloodstream by now might have something to do with that. Finished my last liter of Diet Coke last night, now I am drinking root beer.

I suppose that, if a day sans caffeination makes you sleep the sleep of the dead, that might just be an indication that you should cut back so you get more normal sleep.

It’s especially bad when I have Diet Coke with my late night snack. I know, let’s drink a liter of caffeinated beverage and then take our sleeping pills and make them fight it out.

When I have my poop in a group, I make sure to get enough pop of both perky and non-perky varieties that I can have my cola with supper and be energetic in the evening, which is usually when I am most active anyhow, and then have something tasty but caffeine free for my midnight snack.

Definitely the smart way to do things. But like I have been saying, the smart, sensible, intelligent option can, despite all logic, sometimes still be wrong for you. There is a vast array of personality factors that must be part of any rational equation that hopes to yield concrete results, and thinking that you are free, or must be free, to take the smart choice every single time is actually a highly irrational belief that smothers your humanity in order to meet some imagined ideal.

You can’t just ignore the damage that trying to be a way that goes against the grain of your nature does to you. Some perfectly reasonable seeming choices may just plain not work out for you. The part of you that you sacrificed in order to make the choice dictated by your rational mind and your overwhelming drive to be smart might just be a part of you that you cannot get back.

It certainly helps explain why we intellectual types tend to be neurotic or even insane. This constant damage to the structure of self leaves a person very vulnerable to collapse of self and the resulting emotional instability.

I have definitely been guilty of this. I have talked before about how I seek the truth no matter what. Well part of that “what” is the damage I take to the structure of my self when going straight for the truth regardless of personal considerations.

And I doubt that is the sort of thing that one can change, wholesale, about oneself. This might be middle age talking, but I am fairly certain it is too late for any large changes in my basic nature. I will always be a lively intellectual who goes straight for the heart of things by instinct. I want to truly understand what is going on, and that’s not about to change.

But perhaps I can be more forgiving towards myself. Perhaps I can give myself more permission to be irrational. To do silly things that are clearly not the smart thing to do from the point of view of a narrow kind of rationalism, but which are, in fact, entirely worth doing because they make me happy and don’t really cost me very much, in the broad scheme of things.

I have made a big deal about total submission to the facts before. But maybe that is just too much to ask of yourself. Maybe, in order to be psychologically healthy, you need some degree of protection from the truth forcing sudden change on you.

One cannot consciously choose delusion. But perhaps one can ease back just a tiny bit on the search for truth in order to give one’s self and one’s soul some breathing space.

All my life, I have felt helpless against powers I could not control.

Maybe one of those powers was me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Adventures in Baking : Fire Edition

I done burned my biscuits!

Well, actually, they were peanut butter cookies, but that doesn’t sound as funny.

I had them 90 percent cooked. In fact, they were basically done. But I thought, “Eh, I will turn off the oven and just leave them in there to coast to a finish while I play this video game. ”

Now that’s retarded on the face of it. Thinking I can some how keep track of time while playing a video game is akin to thinking you can still juggle while drowning. Both common sense and historical precedent were against me.

Unsurprisingly, twenty minutes later, I take the cookies out of the oven to find them very, very browned. Not totally burned except on the bottoms a bit, but still bone dry, burned tasting, and generally inedible.

Oh well, at least I still have some banana cake left over from last night.

Oh right, I haven’t told you about the banana cake yet (and I know you’ve been just dying to ask!). Last night I ended up doing my baking at, like, 11 pm, and I was feeling tired and lazy, so I figured, I’ll just do a simple white cake.

But just to jazz it up, I was going to replace half the artificial vanilla extract with artificial orange extract. Orange, you say? Not banana? I’m getting to that.

Could not find the orange extract. I was positive we had it, but it just ain’t there. It may never have existed. When you are as clueless as I am, you have to keep that in mind as a possibility.

But I found the banana, and thought, what the heck. And it turned out pretty good. The banana flavour is a little subtle, but it is distinctly present. Next time, maybe I will make it three quarters banana. Should be even better!

I have a confession

Time for one of my little confessions.

I haven’t had any insulin since last Friday night.

I know, I know, that’s awful of me. I ran out after Friday night’s dose, and told myself “Well, I will just go to the pharmacist (who is ONE BLOCK away) tomorrow and pick up more. ”

Well here it is Wednesday and I still haven’t done it. It’s just really hard to get my ass out the door now. I guess it’s because I haven’t done it in a while. I just sort of… stopped having my little excursions into the outdoors while I was working on the book, and I guess all that progress sort of… slipped away.

Of course, the change in the weather doesn’t help.

But really, this is the sort of thing that makes me feel like I can’t actually make progress. If I prop one thing up, something else falls down. If I grow in one direction, I shrink in another. If I gain discipline in one area, I lose it in another.

All I can do is hope that I am trading up each time. That when I shift my resources around, while there are both gains and losses, the losses outweigh the gains and the total net worth goes up.

Otherwise, I seriously wonder what the fucking point is.

Worst part is, I probably won’t get my insulin until Friday, when it will be easier because I can just get Joe to drop me off there… again, ONE BLOCK from my home… and like, maximize my laziness and cowardice.

This shit has seriously got to stop. I want to grow the hell up already. I am so tired of being a wimpy scared mama’s boy. I want to grow a pair so I can stand up to my problems and stare them down, or solve them, instead of just turning tail and running away at the slightest sign of pain, fear, doubt, or confusion.

Life cannot and will not accept your submission to it and stop fucking with you.

So the onnly option left is to fight.

The Grand Food Conspiracy

There’s a lot of talk floating about the Internet lately about the evil food industry and all the wily tricks they use to get you addicted to their product. This generally conjures images of evil corporate fatcats sitting around cackling about how they will get everyone addicted to Ding Dongs then laugh as they all die of OBESITY! Just like we planned! Mua ha ha!

But here’s the thing. It’s not necessarily like that at all. Their motives could be totally pure and still produce the same result. Let me use an example.

Say you are am honest, hardworking person with their own small bakery business. You sell a small line of prepackaged baked goods packaged in an old-timey style made with simple, wholesome, easy to pronounce ingredients. You don’t make a lot of money but you make a lot of people happy and that’s just fine by you.

One day, after talking with a few of your customers, you decide that people would love to drink old-fashioned lemonade along with their old-fashioned baked treats. So you decide to branch out into beverages.

All you want is to make the best tasting darn lemonade around. So, sensibly enough, you make up a bunch of different batches of lemonade, all a little different, and give them to people to taste test, and choose the one people like best and say they would most like to try again.

You also look into a little of the science of beverages so you can make your lemonade as satisfying as possible.

You put out your lemonade and it’s a smash hit. People are buying it by the gallon. Everyone says they love and some people say they can’t imagine going a day without it.

Then some angry activists come alone and accuse you of deliberately aiming to get people hooked on your product so they would buy it again and again.

And you say “No, I just wanted to make it taste really good. ”

And the thing is… both sides are partially right. Things that taste good are inherently addictive because they give people pleasure. Nobody has to have any evil on their minds in order to create an addictive product.

They just have to honestly want to make people happy via food.

Puts a kind of a different spin on things, doesn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I submitted last year’s book, The Scrambled Man, to Amazon today.

I followed their guidelines for making it Kindle friendly, although I didn’t do the “active table of contents” thing ’cause it was too damned complicated, like I said yesterday. And I gave it a cover page, albeit a minimal one. I am pondering doing a new one that’s an image with some vaguely appropriate image from public domain clipart. Just so it looks like something.

And I wrote a description for it. A nice, punchy, gets to the point back-cover type description. I assume that, like the back of a traditional ink on paper book, this will largely be what sells the book, and so I did my best to make it engaging.

I will probably go back and see if I can tune it further eventually. It is, after all, a rough draft.

Plus I had to submit my American tax information, which seems like a step I could skip, right? But no, I had to fill out a (very brief) form declaring that I am definitely not American. A certificate of foreignness, I suppose. So to the American government, I am a certified non-American now.

Isn’t bureaucracy fun?

The book’s called The Scrambled Man. It’s about a future society where teleportation has become commonplace. Every city has at least one teleportation center. They’re sort of like airports, but the journey is WAY faster and cheaper.

The teleportation industry has been running smoothly for at least a decade when one day, during a routine teleportation, something unexpected materializes : the randomized remains of a man. All the cells are there but they have been scrambled, as though someone took a person apart cell by cell then put him back together at random.

The world is shocked by this grisly turn of events, and it is up to Adam Eden, the world’s first genetically perfect man, and his team of investigators to find out what happened.

I think it’s quite good, but I might be biased.

It will sell for $3. I chose that price because I thought it was the right balance between being understandably affordable, seeing as I am a nobody in the writing biz, while not making the book seem cheap and hence worthless.

I will get around $2.08 per sale. Pretty small beans, but hey. It will be available to pretty much every human being on earth with an Internet connection. So in that sense, it’s a hell of a good distribution deal.

Of course, that alone won’t make anyone buy it. I will leave it up there and see if it generates any sales at all, but I am willing to consider doing some kind of “get it free” limited time promotion. I’d like to get paid something for my writing, but for now, the most important thing is to get people actually reading my stuff.

A friend of mine suggested I should get a second reader first. You know, someone to read the thing and give me their critique before I go off making it available for all to see.

That is absolutely the smart, sensible thing to do. But I am learning that what is smart and sensible is not necessarily what will be the most effective. Every artist serves their muse, and mine is impatient and unstable. So I have to get things done when I have the will and the energy and the courage to do them. If I had waited to find a second reader then waited for that reader to read it then waited for them to get around to giving me their critique then waited even longer for me to work up the courage to actually read their critique… by the time all that was done, I would have lost both the interest and the will to do it.

And who the heck would be willing to read a whole 50K book for me? And then write a critique? Who would do that kind of thing for free? I would feel like I was heavily imposing upon someone just be asking them. So no, that was never an option.

Perhaps I will eventually dig up the courage to at least post a request for second readers on here. But I would do so without almost no faith that it would produce any result at all… not even a polite rejection.

That’s just how it seems to go with me. Shouting down the well. Sometimes I wonder if I am ever really here.

Anyhow, the Amazon process has my book now and will release it soonishly. I don’t know what the delay is, exactly, but I am pretty sure it must involve some human being actually laying eyes upon the thing to make sure it isn’t strings of random letters or Nazi hate speech or someone just typing PENIS over and over again.

Other than that, I am not sure why it takes like 12 hours to 48 hours to go from submitted to available. Well whatevs. It will get there when it gets there.

And when it gets there, I will, of course, make a link to it available to, frankly, everyone I can. I no longer imagine that the people I know will spread the word about things, as most people just…. don’t do that, myself included. Must be an extrovert thing. So I will also look at other ways to get the word out about it.

No idea what those might be. Maybe a table at the next Vancoufur or something. Or release a thousand balloons with the URL on them, as well as the title.

I think The Scrambled Man is a good title, don’t you? Short but intriguing.

So yeah. Took a big step towards putting my words out where people who don’t even know me can see them. I still want a traditional publishing deal some day, but for now I am happy to go the eBook route.

It might not make me rich, but at least I don’t have to convince someone to invest in me.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

No, not this guy :

I meant, this thing I do here. A thousand words of something or other. My… making words…. thing.

Blog just doesn’t seem like the right word, ya know?

Anyhow, I am back. So this is what it’s like to write something others will actually read. (People do read this thing, right?). I had almost forgotten. I was so engrossed in the process of writing a book that to come back to the blogosphere feels like returning to your home town after a long absence. Everything seems… weirdly familiar.

You get so used to the unfamiliar… things without decades of memories to make them seem solid and real… that coming back to the place you left feels too damned real. Like you stepped out of black and white into full on technicolor. It hurts the eyes.

Okay, so I am not really talking about blogging any more. What can I say, the mind wanders, and I follow.

Writing the book was great. Having such a focus for externalizing my energies was very good for me. I wasn’t always happy, but I was definitely more satisfied with life. And now… I honestly don’t know what to do with myself.

Going back to a life of just blogging and making one-take videos… a life which I found at least adequate a month ago… seems like a terrible step backwards to me now. Like a pale and pointless pursuit of meaningless things compared to the sense of satisfaction and purpose I had when I was writing my novel. It’s just not enough any more. I need more. I can’t go back to sleep now… not when I have fought so hard to wake up.

As a result, I am seriously considering just starting my next book. I already know the premise. I could start tomorrow. I will have to do some basic research, and we all know I dislike that. But I know what it will be about and, well, let’s just say the premise dictates the plot. So in a sense, it is already plotted out.

So I might just dive right back in. Be a book-writing machine, like Asimov was. Just write and write and write. The idea seems slightly crazy , but it has a lot of appeal to me. It’s something I have been pondering for a long time.

And without the regimentation of the usual NaNoWriMo 1667 words a day, I would be free to just keep on writing until I was out of words for the day. That’s more or less what happened with my latest book. I couldn’t do that and blog because writing the novel pretty much used up all my words for the day.

But endurance grows with repetition. Who knows how prolific I could be if I simply gave myself over to writing? I write. That’s what I do. It’s my job, hobby, vocation, career, and therapy. I feel like I could write myself out of any mess if I just keep going for long enough.

Of course, at some point you have to proofread and polish the damned thing. Still not keen on that. I already feel like the novel I just finished is lurking on my HD, waiting for me to clean it up and make it presentable, and I.. don’t wanna.

I’ll find some way to make that work somehow.

The other alternative is to find another equally absorbing and demanding creative outlet. Videos come to mind. I didn’t always do the “just me talking” kinds of videos. I used to do ones that were actually somewhat ambitious.

Stuff like this :

Or this one :

You know, I am one funny motherfucker. That German one cracks me the hell up. I need to watch/read my own stuff more often. It will help me remember that I am awesome.

Anyhow, so high production value videos are a possibility. I know that I have plenty of room to grow in that direction. Top quality content need not be expensive, elaborate, or extremely technical. It just has to be well written and competently executed. Not everything can be Epic Rap Battles Of History.

Perhaps a wise move would be to go through all my videos with an eye to figuring out what works and what does not. Take some notes, figure out what I should focus on.

Figuring out what I should focus on… story of my life, really. Too much talent with too little get up and go.

One hurdle to… uh, hurdle on the video front is that editing video can be extremely frustrating due to programs crashing and things slowing down to a crawl if there is too many cuts and so forth and so on.

Maybe I should try to be an online comedian. But I have never felt like writing standup material, or being that kind of performer. I’m a comedy writing, not a comedian. I would enjoy building rapport with the audience, but still. Standup hasn’t really called to me since the 80’s. I’ve moved on.

I could finally get around to writing a comedy novel. That’s what I tried to do with my second NaNoWriMo novel, the fantasy one, but things got pretty serious pretty fast. That really bothers me. Why couldn’t I keep things light and funny? The first chaper of the book is hilarious, charming, and appealing. Very Pratchett-like. Why couldn’t I stay in that vein?

So in a sense, I am a little gun-shy about the whole “funny novel” thing. It’s a little scary to think that I am not capable of sustaining a single mood over the space of a novel. Am I that unstable?

Anyhow, it is wonderful to be back talking to all of you nice people. Writing the novel was great, but a part of me really missed this direct mode of communication where I can just type out my thoughts and set them free.

It is an honor, a privilege, and a joy to be talking to all you nice people again.

And I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!