Sort of an interesting twist on this whole struggle to do more with my life but play video games : Today, I did spend all afternoon napping and playing Android games on my tablet… up to a point.

But around 3:30 pm, I decided, fuck that. I will at least get up and sit in front of the computer and get caught up on Facebook until 5 pm. That way I would at least have to remain upright and conscious for an hour and a half.

Not a big deal in most people’s lives, but for me it was an important step, and it made me feel less helpless and incompetent and more cable of being the version of me that I know I can be : fully activated, focused, and ready to take on the world.

But it will take a lot of pushing. That statue that fell on me is still crushing me. It will take a long sustained effort to push it off me. I’m still suffering from the damage it’s done.

Lucky for me, I am incredibly stubborn. Once I started thinking of my depression as separate from myself, something that just happened to have happened to me as opposed to something that was fundamentally wrong about me, that gave me space needed to start thinking of it as an opponent, and baby, I play to win.

It helps that I have been watching that Hulk show. It’s really helped me to dig deep and find that deep Taurus no-compromise total-determination tough son of a bitch that has always been there but got buried deep by various factors that all seem petty and irrelevant to me now.

Now, in my mind, I can stands on the mountaintop and scream into the night, “I am not weak! I am not a loser! I am not pathetic! I am not incompetent! I AM STRONG, and fuck everything that says different! ”

I feel like I am on what I will call Nietzsche’s Ladder. Nietzsche spoke extensively about how to become greater, a person must overcome themselves over and over. Each step, one has to climb up over a previous version of themselves, like rungs on a ladder.

Except the rungs are you… the you that existed before the current you.

So as I develop my internal strength, I have a mildly Hulk like persona I am developing. (Actually, it’s The Thing. Always loved The Thing. ) This is not someone I plan to be, just someone to be more like. A tough, rough, relentless, courageous, stout hearted and level headed juggernaut (small j) who bulldozes through the obstacles in his path and dares the world to fuck with him because he knows he can take it.

Kinda wish that guy had a brother, honestly.

And that’s just one side of my current development. Another facet is the Game Changing Queen. He/She is utterly self-confident, in full possession of all my charisma presence and charm, and what’s more, also uses my outside the box way of thinking to be completely, utterly, and breathtakingly original in everything we do. Thus, we change the game wherever we go and stand out from the crowd so much that we make our own social reality by just being ourselves.

Um…. not that I should be adopting the royal “we” or anything. Sanity…. must remember sanity.

Oh, and my hero for the Game Changing Queen? Totally Iggy Pop. A champion for all us weirdoes and our right to be exactly who we are and the world will have to just fucking deal with it.

Eventually, of course, these facets will meld into a single person that is moi version 2.something, and I will somehow become a form of super awesome I can’t even imagine yet.

And it will be so much fun to find out!

Oh, one another thing about this afternoon : the part where I was lazing, napping, and video gaming?

I enjoyed it. It wasn’t just something I do when I don’t know what to do with myself, which is most of the time. I chose it, I enjoyed it, and when I got sick of it, I stopped.

Good for me! That is far better than just bumping through life in a fog, never really choosing anything much.

So really, today has been good overall. Last night’s baking was peanut butter cookies, and they turned out slightly burned and rather dry, so I will go back to putting them in for 9 minutes even and not the 9:15 that I tried last night.

Maybe 9:05 if I am feeling cocky.

But whatever, baking is an adventure and sometimes things go wrong. Tonight I will probably make my tried (and tried and tried) and true Chocolate Oat Bombs in order to get my confidence back, unless I suddenly desire cake.

Haven’t done a cake-style cake in a while. Been doing loaf style ones. And those are good….. hmm.

So overall, doing okay today. I know that there will be many, many, many more rough patched ahead, but now that my deep and abiding stubbornness has been engaged, I know I will make it through.

I feel like parts of me are getting activated that have lain dormant for a long long time. The sort of things that should have happened when I was a teenager, honestly. Surges of ego and libido and the desire to explore. There is a very exciting feeling of tip toeing into a whole new world, one bigger and brighter and fuller and more joyous than the drab little cell I have been keeping myself in because I was scared of the world and thought I had no choice.

Well I do have a choice. I can choose to step out into the world in search of my niche, or at least a new place to hide.

And if that dark villain known as my depression rises to menace me again, I have but one thing to say :

It’s Clobberin’ Time!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Been thinking about what it means to be as inner-life oriented as I am.

For one thing, I am positive it is the main caused for my legendary clueless and absentminded nature. On a deep cognitive level, my mind heavily, heavily prioritizes inner processes over outer awareness. Thus, even when interacting with reality, my mind tries to get away with the absolute minimum about of outer awareness needed, and sometimes it goes too far.

Thus, for instance, the three or four times in my life I have gotten into trouble for walking right past someone who knew me and not knowing it, or responding when they say my name. They understandably think I just snubbed them, when in reality (that pesky place) I was just too wrapped up in my well developed (overdeveloped?) inner world to notice anything except the sidewalk beneath my feet. I sincerely did not notice them.

I would never snub someone deliberately unless they really, REALLY pissed me off.

And most of those times, it was someone who only knew me through my parents, and I wouldn’t have recognized them even if I had been exercising a paranoid schizophrenic level of awareness.

But that’s a different issue.

So basically, the rule is that at any moment, no matter how it looks on the outside, my mind is much more busy with what is happening on the inside than what is happening on the outside.

And the thing is, I don’t have a choice in the matter. Maybe I did have the choice during some formative stage long passed, but I literally cannot imagine what it would be like to be me without all that inner noise. I bitch now and again about how it makes it hard to sleep or relax, but to be honest, if it wasn’t there, I would not know how to handle it. It would be eerily quiet.

There have been times when I have tried my hardest to stay in the here and now, but the second I am distracted (far too easy a thing to do), my mind returns to its default position.

I think this is why I have never been very coordinated and hence never good at gym class. No matter how hard I tried to concentrate on what was going on, the inward tide pulled in the opposite direction and kept me from ever being sufficiently present in the world to make it work.

And of course, every time you try to interact with the real world and end up hurt and/or embarrassed, that reinforces the whole “inside the mind safe, outside the mind bad” message in your mind and you end up retreating even further into yourself.

This, you will recognize, is the exact opposite of the right way to react, and will only make the problem worse.

Thus I ended up as your typical clumsy, uncoordinated nerd. I walk through the world in a fog created by my mind to block my view of the outside world and thus remove the possibility of distracting stimuli taking precious mental CPU cycles away from all the ideas, emotions, thoughts, and processes of my inner life.

This is not without its advantages. Like I have said before, I can have many very deep trains of thought all operating at the same time, without any input from the conscious mind, who only finds out when the answer occurs to me in a wave of revelation.

Then that percentage of my brain capacity is released, and I feel a rush of release. And it feels amazingly good! Thus the process is validated and the search for the truth continues.

Inner concentration is also very good for creativity. So much of creativity requires the ability to listen to the world inside for the soft and subtle voice of inspiration, and obviously, us dreamy high interiority (love that word) types have a natural advantage in that sphere.

People of lower interiority can’t imagine how people like me live. They can’t imagine what it is that is going on in our minds that takes up so much of our mental bandwidth that it draws us out of reality. From their point of view, everything they do is conscious and deliberate and when they ask you “so what are you thinking about?” and you say “lots of things” or, worse, “everything… and nothing”, that’s a null register to them. They can’t comprehend it. To them, it sounds like you are deliberately giving them a vague nonanswer.

But it’s the truth. I have a lot going on in my mind all the time, but like an iceberg, most of it is underwater. Beneath my consciousness. So there can definitely be times when I am in one sense thinking about everything as my subconscious mind grinds away at the lifelong task of integrating everything I know into a single comprehensive world-view, but in order to aid this I have quieted my conscious mind almost completely, and thus I am in that sense thinking about nothing.

And I am lucky. I can articulate this truth. That’s because I am a highly verbal dreamer. In fact, it could be said that I interface with reality primary via words. That’s why I love intellectual conversation so much. It is exactly what I want (mental stimulation, connection to others) in a form that I can handle.

And with no tricky visual angle my poor eyes won’t be able to understand.

All this makes me return to the image of myself as leaving in a sprawling castle of ice, only getting news of the outside world via feeble signals that rarely penetrate the ice.

If it was not for things like the Internet and my friends, my worst nightmare might occur : me finally losing all touch with reality and thus totally at the mercy of my inner processes.

If only I could control that inward tide and make it do what I want, instead of being totally at its mercy. Then I would be able to clear my mind and find things in reality that are worth the trip out of the castle, and thus will give me experience where coming out lead to good and happy things.

Reality is full of wonderful things I’d enjoy, if only I set myself free.

I will talk to all you nice people against tomorrow.

Feeling low right now. Sort of sleepy, kind of tense, and suffused with a feeling of cold, hanging weight.

Didn’t end up baking last night. In fact, last night went sort of… weird. I found myself in on of my dissociative states where I feel like nothing is real and I am only barely hanging on to existence myself.

Those don’t bother me nearly as much as they used to, because I know it’s just a feeling and it will pass. But it leaves me little choice but to retreat further into myself and that is never a good thing.

So I ended up playing an Android game for two and a half hours straight. It’s not even that great a game, it’s just that when I am in that kind of mood, it is very easy for me to fixate on something small and rewarding and put my energies into it while shutting out the rest of the world.

And that is how I survived that particular mood storm. Dunno what comes next, but whatever it is, I will get through it okay.

Today me and Le Gang will be going to ABC Country Kitchen for supper. Hopefully exposure to fresh air and the caffeine from the Diet Coke I drink will help perk me up and feel more alive, because right now, I feel an inadequately animated corpse and all I really want to do is crawl back into my grave for another century or two.

Yup, I am really really sleepy. I got a normal amount of sleep, but my body wants more. And it can’t have it. When I am done with my words for today I will have to get a shower and get dressed, and by the end of that, it will probably be 3:30 pm and we will likely leave for supper at like 4:30 pm or 5 pm at the latest.

Nor enough time for a nap.

But we will see how I am doing after supper. Odds are I will have actually filled my sails with wind by then, and I will feel up to going to the BCSFA meeting afterwards.

But if not, I will come back home and get some sleep and hang out with Le Gang when they get back from the meeting. I don’t like missing the meetings because they are usually quite enjoyable, with all us fans having wide ranging intellectual discussions peppered with anecdotes and goofiness. My kind of party.

But it may come to that. Of course, my inner drill sergeant is yelling “It doesn’t matter what you feel! Do it anyway!”. And I do want to encourage that voice as much as I can because it could do me a lot of good.

However, I do have legit medical conditions and I suppose I can’t always override them. Although who knows. Maybe those are false limitations and if I just powered through them, they would crumble like sandcastles before the incoming tide.

And I haven’t done all my little health checks yet either. For one thing, due to a recent cold snap (and someone turning my room’s thermostat down without telling me, grr) I have both my windows closed. Could be that part fo why I am feeling crappy is that the air is stale in his little box of mine and I need to punch some holes in the top.

Resisting sleepiness has always stressed me out. I am just not used to having so much of my mental capacity drained away and I get freaked out and kinda paranoid. It would be so easy to just give in to the desire to sleep and it is so hard to stay awake that it does quite a number on my emotional state. Makes me feel very strained.

And of course, it gets ten times worse once I lose the option of falling asleep. Once I am out and about in the world, I can’t just flop into bed and snooze any more. I have to stay awake, and I end up bouncing off the barrier I have had to erect between me and sleep over and over again.

I remember going through this in my school days. I am pretty sure I have never even fallen asleep in class, but I have come damned close. I would be almost asleep then I would jerk myself awake, and feel all paranoid and conspicuous.

In a way, I wish I had just said “Fuck it” and gone to sleep those times. Other people do it and it doesn’t wreck their lives. It just turns into an amusing story of an embarrassing moment.

I doubt I would have gotten away with sleeping for long, though, as I snore. Plus I always sit up front because I want to be able to read the board/slides/video/whatever, and because I like to ask questions (sometimes specifically to keep myself awake), and because it keeps me from feeling too claustrophobic.

So falling asleep in the front row would not have gone well. Imagine seeing a student snoring in the front row of a class you were teaching. You would feel pretty insulted, even if part of you might understand that the student didn’t do it on purpose and might have a very good reason for being that sleepy.

I would totally be the kind of teacher who made a show out of waking those people up. Gently…. but with the whole class watching and hearing my shtick.

“Ding Dong! This is your The Middle Of My Class wakeup call. ”
“Hey, wake up! Today’s lesson is way too awesome to miss! Of course, I might be biased. ”
“You are dreaming that you are flunking the next quiz in this class because you fell asleep. You wake to find that IT WAS NOT A DREAM! But wait…. is there still time to change your fate? Yes. Yes there is. ”

I would definitely be the kind of teacher you either love or loathe.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Well, not fever really. But my tummy was upset earlier, and those of you who know me know that when I say “tummy” I really mean “lower digestive tract”, known at home as “the bowels”.

I suffer from IBS. For the most part, the symptoms are trivial and easily managed. But now and then, I get a flare up, and it is not exactly a fun time for all ages.

Nobody knows what causes IBS, though I expect a certain temperament plus a certain body type makes one more susceptible.

But it has a lot fo do with your nervous disposition and you diet and current emotional state and blah blah blah. Any time I have a serious emotional blow, I know my bowels will provide a highly unwelcome aftershock effect. If I have been eating the wrong things, that also can set off an attack. Such things include food that is too spicy for my (increasingly) (dammit) delicate digestion or things that are just too hard to digest, like Pho or beef jerky.

And I am increasingly convinced that it is related to the sort of low level inflammation that is making all the medical news lately as it might just be the root cause of a lot of extremely pesky medical conditions.

My anecdotal person evidence show a definite pattern of my bowels getting worse after I have had an allergy attack. And I had one last night. Sneezing, runny nose, and most tellingly, a sort of odd feeling of heat in my major muscles.

It is my theory that these attacks set off a body wide inflammatory response in me, with histamines going nuts everywhere, and ergo can cause a wide variety of effects like joint ache, dizziness, and of course, digestive difficulties.

If so, then I should really take my antihistamines all the time rather than just when I have had problems. Keeping my histamines happy might just make me a much happier person in the long run. That, and some Tylenol for inflammation.

Tonight’s festivities started after I went to the bathroom. When I got up off the porcelain throne, I felt okay, but by the time I had washed my hands and sat down in front of the computer, I knew something was a-stirring Down South.

Basically, I felt the sadly all too familiar feeling of being “backed up”. It’s a very distinctive form of nausea. Basically, somewhere along the line, my bowels/lower intestine cramps up and that causes everything from that point back up to the stomach to jam, and the body, quite correctly, makes sure I don’t add to the problem by making me nauseous.

Sadly, this all happened around 6:30 pm, and made me too nauseous to eat until 8, so I ended up eating supper way later than usual and my whole timing is thrown off.

Theoretically, I should be baking in an hour and ten minutes. But I don’t know if I will have the energy or not. Usually there is three or four hours between blogging and baking. Tonight I am lucky if I will get one. And I am still not feeling wonderful, although the ginger in the gingerbread I had earlier helped a lot.

Nothing like ginger for soothing an upset tummy. Back home, the folk remedy for nausea was flat ginger ale. You made it by taking a bottle of ginger ale, poking a tiny hole in the cap, then very carefully shaking the bottle. Thus, the carbon dioxide escapes and your ginger ale gets flattened.

Why ginger ale? For the ginger, of course. Why flat? Because bubbles are not good for upset tummies.

The good news is, of course, that I got over it. The bad news is that I now feel very tired. So it will be up to me to decide whether I bake in an hour or not.

I can’t imagine that I will feel like it. But then again, it’s not all about how I feel any more, is it? And it never should have been. So whether or not I feel like it is not nearly as important as whether I want to do it.

Those are not the same things.

And part of me definitely wants to do it. I never bake on Sundays (even God rested then) and so if I don’t bake tonight either, I will have gone two days without baking in a row and I worry that the necessary discipline that I have worked so hard to build will crumble if I go that long without reinforcing it.

And then you have to build the discipline of baking 6 days out of 7 AGAIN. And that sucks!

So I imagine I will end up baking tonight… nothing big, just biscuits, easy peasy… but I doubt it will be at 11 pm as is my custom. Probably a lot closer to 1 am, because after I finish here, I am taking a nap.

Or at least lying down with the lights out to rest my eyes. Too much staring at screens!

Started watching a show called Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H. I’ve had it on my Netflix instant queue for a while now but hadn’t gotten around to watching it yet because its Netflix user ratings were pretty low.

Well those people are morons because the show is a lot of fun. Basically, the Hulk creates his own super hero team with Red Hulk, A-bomb (a Hulked up Rick Jones), Skaar (a Hulk from another dimension), and… wait for it… SHE HULK!

And admittedly, the animation style is a little over-shaded and jumps around a lot like a Michael Bay movie, but that works quite well in the big fight scenes. And it has a fun jokey wacky sense of humour about it which is more charming than funny but makes the whole thing more fun.

I have only seen the first two episodes which form, I think, a two-part pilot for the show, so it remains to be seen how it looks and works once they are on a smaller budget. Hopefully, that will result in them ditching the out of control shading (seriously, it’s like a deranged inker got hold of the cells) and using fewer camera moves.

Further bulletins as events warrant.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Apparently, my streak of having a firm idea what I wanted to talk about via this blog has been broken. Utterly no idea tonight. So as always, I will fall back on personal reportage.

I’ve been doing too little of that lately anyhow. It’s just that other things are so much more interesting to write!

Anyhoo, let’s see. Today was a therapy day, and this session came with a twist.

The twist was named Charlie, and he was a bichon frise owned by my therapist. Turns out, my therapist’s wife is out of town and Charlie is too old and frail to be left alone. When he is alone, he works himself up into quite a state of agitation and at his advanced age, he could do himself harm like that.

So my therapist had no choice but to bring Charlie with him to work today. (Yes, there are such a thing as pet sitters and day kennels, but my therapist is also cheap. )

First he asked me if I was afraid of dogs. I laughed and said oh no, I love animals. So he snuck Charlie in. (The owners of the facility have no problem with dogs, but some of the other office renters do. I suspect some of them might come from a culture where the dog is considered am unclean and disgusting creature. And Charlie had just been groomed the day before!)

And this dog is cute. Bichon frise is an adorable breed. I mean look at this thing.

It’s like it’s made of cuteness and carpeting

“Bichon Frise 600“. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Isn’t that just the cutest? I am not normally all that impressed by small breed dogs, but this one was a charmer.

Of course, as I said before, I had no problem with Charlie being there. The only ill effect his presence had was to make it very hard for me to concentrate on therapy, especially after Charlie insisted on sitting in my therapist’s lap.

Just imagine trying to have a serious therapeutic discussion with a cute fluffy dog like that in your eyeline.

The session went well. I told him about my recent efforts at self-improvement. That I had taken a good long look at what a child I have been and decided it was about time I grew the fuck up. I am done with drifting and defocusing and not thinking about things. I am sick and tired of being a cloud of potential without direction or force.

I want to get things done.

And how I have been thinking hard about the idea of discipline being the ability to do what you want to do regardless of whether or not you feel like doing it. When described that way, it becomes more apparent that this is something you do for yourself, not something that someone else is forcing you to have out of some “character building” dogma.

Like I said before, long and ever ago, our parents are right when they say we need to build character and learn discipline. If you want to make it in the world at all, you need to build up your capacity to do things you do not feel like doing, otherwise your options in life will be limited to what you feel like doing at any moment, and that road leads nowhere good.

The problem, of course, is that even assuming they mean well (and are not just using character building as an excuse for abusing you), the character building exercises always come across as punishment. After all, they are making you do something you don’t want to do. It’s very easy as a spoiled middle class kid to see that as senseless abuse from wicked sadists.

My problem, of course, is that I was never even required to develop any discipline. School was easy for me. Even in college it wasn’t very hard. So I never had to study, let alone study all night until the words blur together.

It was all too easy. And I mean that… I wish there had been something for me to focus on where I had to strive and stretch and learn to overcome my limitations.

My home life didn’t demand much either. I had chores when I was younger but at some point those vanished. I guess my Mom decided it was easier to do it all herself, which is utter nonsense on the face of it.

Just take the time to teach me to do it, and after that, I will do it. It’s not that complicated. But because in the short term it is easier to just do it yourself, you end up doing it for life. Insanity.

So life was quite soft for me at home, too. The only job I kept was taking out the garbage, and that was ten seconds work every Tuesday. (Thus began my dislike of Tuesdays. )

So I just drifted through life. The closest I got to discipline was walking to and from school every day, no matter the weather. I really resented it (still do, really), and it was another symptom of being a self-raised child due to neglect, but I suppose I might have picked up some hardiness then.

They taught me not to complain, then contented themselves with the idea that I must be fine, because they heard no complaints.

After all, no news is good news, right?

You know, not that’s I’m bitter. Why, I am as sweet as chocolate…. before they add the sugar.

Oh, and in a roundabout way, I told him about the Inner Drill Sargent. I didn’t put it that way because I knew he would not “get it”, but I told my therapist about the encouraging and rewarding inner voice I was developing.

Oh, one last thing. I was going to mail my payment to the bus pass people, and I spent a tense half hour addressing the envelope (that’s tense for someone with penmanship like mine) and getting a stamp off Joe and realizing that the “payee” section of the money order was blank so I fretted about what to put there, and etc etc…. and then forgot to actually take it with me when we left for my therapist.

Luckily, The Joe is a benevolent force for all of humanity, and he dropped it in a mailbox for me on his way to work.

I figure my bus pass will be reactivated by the end of the month.

And then I will have one less excuse for staying in all the time.

I will talk to all you nice people again tomorrow.

But there might be cures.

Like I said in a Facebook comment today, I have been doing my best to concentrate on all the little physical things that can lead to my feeling depressed.

This is recent. I woke up from a nap at 4:30 in the afternoon (yup, another sleepy type day, though not nearly as unpleasant) and I felt awful. I felt like I had this heavy weight pushing on me from all sides and weighing me down. I felt constantly on the verge of tears and I was confused, disoriented, and of course, very depressed.

And I thought about just collapsing and letting depression have its way with me, but then another voice, the new strong voice, said “No! We do not have to simply accept being depressed! We can fight it!”.

Or something like that. I wasn’t taking dictation at the time.

So I crawled out of bed and got myself a nice big glass of water and sat down in front of the computer and slowly hydrated myself while I did my usual online type stuff. I also made a point of doing some deep breathing exercises in case it was the aftereffects of sleep apnea that were getting me down.

In addition, I checked nose and ears for blockages, in case it was a sinus thing. I have learned from bitter experience that clogged ears means my sinuses are all filled up and the fluid had no place to go but my ears, and then even THAT clogged up. And that can lead to all kinds of nastiness. Sinus headache is only one of them.

And as a result of these actions, I managed to pull myself out of the depths. I didn’t exactly inflate myself with the light of joy, but I went from feeling horrible to being on the lower end of okay.

This is a big change for me. I have always treated my mood like the weather. Something I can adapt to or protect myself from as best I can, but not something I can change through my actions.

But today proved that it is possible for me to boost my own mood via self-care, and that is a sea change for me. It’s still not going to be easy, but at least I have some kind of chance of winning the war against the darkness. I can beat it into submission by fighting as many of the physical contributing factors as I can.

I can give myself hope.

And a big part of me doesn’t like that. To this part of my diseased mind, hope equals disappointment. It also potentially leads to action, and that part of me doesn’t ever want to do anything except the high reward activities to which it has become accustomed. It tries to veto absolutely everything that seems like work.

What a retarded, sick, useless way to look at the world. Time to kill it.

As always, anger is my pilot light. The anger I feel from all the unexpressed rage and pain of my life and the anger I feel towards my depression for everything it has taken from me makes an excellent spark to keep the flame of hope lit. Whenever I feel myself wavering and on the edge of slipping back into the old, bad ways, I can reach deep down inside myself for that primal identity rage and use it to get shit going again.

It will not be an instant or an easy transition. The enemy still occupies far more mental land than the good guys. And it has been there more than long enough to fortify its position.

But the forces of the Light have righteous fire on their side and a burning desire for victory at any cost. Like I have said many times before, there is nothing within me that I would not sacrifice if it was between me and the clean fresh air of sanity.

I have been buried within myself for far too long. I want to break free.

No, I’m not going to insert a link to the video.

The image that keeps popping into my head is of me violently pushing depression away. Like it’s a statue that fell on me, and I have to stand up and push it over in order to free myself of its crushing weight.

I mean, FUCK YOU, depression. You are not my friend and you never were. You are a base, foul, unworthy entity infecting my brain with your icy touch and dread weights and poisonous advice. It’s you who whispers “why bother?” in my ear, and you even have the gall to make me feel clever when I avoid all action. Like I have cleverly out-thought the world.

BullSHIT I have. There was no thought involved, just instinct. If you’re so damned clever, why does your life suck? You haven’t avoided work. You’ve avoided LIFE, and all the things out there that might make you happy, god dammit.

I swear, I am developing an Inner Drill Sargent. Someone of will and strength and determination, who says things to me like “Nobody asked how you FEEL about it” and “Yeah it sucks. Do it anyway!” and “You can do better than that!.

Sounds horrible, but I know that voice is on my side and sincerely wants to see me stronger, better, and above all happier because I don’t fear the world any more and I know I can tackle anything.

To me, the best part of the whole basic training experience would be the self-confidence you get from both having done it and survived, and from the way such an extreme experience would just burn away all the useless crap in your mind and leave you more whole, pure, and strong both inside and out.

Were I a younger man, I could actually imagine joining the military for purely selfish reasons.

As is, it would take me a while to build myself up to the point where I could even go to one of those “boot camps”.

Anyhow, that’s my words for today.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Yes, it is possible to do both of those at the same time, at least metaphorically.

Had a very bad sleepy day today. The kind that comes with it’s own gravity well. The kind where there is not even the illusion of choice about whether or not to sleep. Where sleep is hell and I cannot escape it.

The kind that is kind of like dying.

I’ve bitched about this kind of thing many times before. Sleep where I wake up feeling battered and bruised and like I just barely escaped drowning. Where I sweat so much I feel like day old bread soaked in day old beer. Where the periods of wakefulness are entirely propelled by hunger, and the minute I am full, I have to go back to sleep again.

These are the days when it feels like sleep is a project, a chore, and that you have no choice but to keep sleeping till you have slept enough to meet your body’s sudden demands.

But for the most part, you can’t sleep for a living. And you’re not exactly a volunteer. So it’s a tiny bit like slavery.

It sounds melodramatic, but I really do feel on these days that I am sleeping with a gun to my head. And that bastard Mister Sandman is holding the gun and saying “Sleep or else, fat man!”

It also feels like a giant has been squishing me with one huge boot as well. Not killing me, just putting enough weight down to compress me by quite a bit.

I only hope that all this torment at least burns some calories.

I don’t remember much of the dreaming. I remember that at one point, someone was asking me what my yearly income was, but in some really complicated way, with this chart with like, a week by week breakdown of income and expenditures.

And even in my dream, I was thinking “I’m unemployed and on disability. It’s really not that complicated. Get ready to put down the exact same numbers over and over again. ”

I suppose that this dude in my dream was some sort of fresh-faced financial advisor who thought poor people just needed to plan and budget better.

Well guess what, Guy Who Lives Entirely In My Fevered Mind : it ain’t that simple. Or rather, it;s far simpler than anything you were ever trained for and there is not a lot of flexibility.

And if he dared to ask what a poor person is doing going out to eat once a week, I would just stare at him then say “I do it because I enjoy it and I need all the happiness I can get out of life to keep me from walking into traffic. ”

Things can get pretty dramatic and raw in my dreams.

What else…. there was something involving people counting out loud. But not the regular way. They were counting up according to some sort of rule (like only prime numbers, but not that) that I could not figure out.

Oh, and there was a nightmare where my foot was literally freezing because I stepped into an icy river.

I think that’s at. As usual, there is something oddly cathartic about telling people about your dreams, even if for the most part nobody actually cares and they certainly can’t truly understand something with such a high degree of interiority.

Then again, the writer’s lot in life is to try to express what has not yet been expressed. Things people think are impossible to express. Our job is to prove them wrong, and thus open a path for everyone to express what they had been unable to express before. And make them feel whole by doing so.

Gah, even with almost a liter of Diet Coke in me, I feel the urge to crawl back into bed. Words first, though.

I have tried before to keep from getting depressed about these nap attacks from hell. And at times, I have even succeeded a bit. But for the most part, that is impossible, because these things strike without warning and have me in their grasp before I have any chance to set up a psychological defense. The parts of my brain that deal with things like that ain’t there at the time.

And even when it is over, it leaves behind a feeling of being gross and tired and worn out and shabby and fragile and nervous and that is all going to lead to Depression Town for a guy like me.

But it is not a really deep depression, so whatever. It’s just a transient feeling and I am not too worried about it. Usually, once I actually totally catch up on sleep, I feel a lot better, and this confused interregnum fades into the past.

So yeah, I will probably lay down and sleep a little more, but like in Quantum Leap, I am always hoping that the next nap will be the last. Oh boy.

The words, they are not easy to make tonight. My brain is still fuzzy and unfocused and so it is very, very easy to drift into the haze and very, very hard to stay focused on the task at hand and get it done.

I still feel like I am on a ship at sea that is almost but not quite big enough for the people inside it to be immune to the waves. Things are shifting around in deep and subtle ways on my head. And I don’t like it.

So it is off to box another round with that Sandman bastard. I don’t have a choice whether to fight him or not, but sooner or later, I know I will win and he will be forced to retreat back into letting me sleep normally again for a while.

Hopefully, the next time I am writing to you nice people, I will be firmly ashore and able to give you the usual level of incoherence which you have come to know and love.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’ve seen a lot of murders over the last couple of weeks.

Not in real life, of course. I live in Canada. But via Netflix, I watched 40 episodes of a show called Forensic Files, and you know what? That’s too damned many.

Not that I saw this coming. When I came across it in the Netflix listings, I was happy because I had seen the show on A&E back in the day, and I loved it. I love true crime shows.

Or at least, I used to.

Turns out, there is a hug difference between watching a murder a week and watching 40 over the space of two weeks or so. I would watch three or four episodes along with my meals most days, and after a while, that shit starts to build up in you and becomes pretty damned depressing.

I feel like I have felt a tiny drop out of the vast ocean of depression that cops must feel when they have to deal with the real world of murder every day in the course of their work. Real world murder is nothing like a murder mystery, an action film, or even a cop show.

Real murder is petty, and mean, and ugly, and downright stupid. Real people commit murder out of jealousy and greed and sometimes just plain fumbling idiocy.

There were some of the “savage animal” type of murders. Some mentally deranged dude abducts and kills random women in savage ways. But these people are no Hannibal Lecter. They’re not even Hannibal from the A-team. They are not villains by the standards of modern Western storytelling. Animals, yes. Monsters even. But not villains.

Villains command a kind of respect. These people…. ugh.

And most of the murders were even less noble. Someone wants to leave his wife but doesn’t want to lose money in the divorce, so he very clumsily kills her. Some redneck wants to keep pursuing his monster truck building hobby, so he finds someone of his approximate weight height and build, lures the victim to his home, knocks him out, then drops a truck on him. Then sets the whole place on fire so nobody could identify the body, all so via his wife he would get $5 million in insurance money.

Note to future criminals : fire does not destroy everything.

And then there was this one woman who got killed just because some crazy chick got the idea in her head that the victim was coming between her and her EX girlfriend. For that, she got knocked over the head and cut up with a chainsaw.

Another note : chainsaws are a terrible disposal method. Bone and tissue end up embedded in every surface around you. The police will find a million times more than the tiny amount of the DNA they need to fry your ass.

The last ten or so episodes I watched were a chore, something to get through rather than enjoy.

(Yeah, I know, the sane thing to do would have been to stop watching once I stop enjoying it, but I am the sort of person who feels compelled to finish that which he starts, no matter what. I have been known to read an entire 200 page book that I stopped enjoying on page 30. )

Anyhow, after all that petty dirty ugliness, I have had to reassure myself about murder being very rare and that these people in no way represent humanity. Instead, they are a tiny aberration in it.

Which brings me back to a question that has haunted and fascinated me for decades : what is the difference between the minds of the people who actually go through with it and the normal human mind who might think it, but would never do it.

I feel like there must be some kind of fundamental difference and it cannot be entirely circumstantial. People of all walks of life, status in society, degree of education, geographical location, age, sex, race, religion and golf handicap commit murder and for the same two reasons : sex and money.

So there must be something about the people themselves that makes them the ones who do it. I can’t help but think there is some fundamental brain hardware that, when broken, causes people to truly believe that their emotions justify murder. That they have the fundamental right to act on said emotions of jealousy and greed, or maybe, they are somehow helpless to stop themselves.

I wonder if they talk themselves into it over time. They start with just thinking about it, and that makes them feel better. Then, they start planning it, all the while telling themselves they will never actually do it, they are just planning it because it helps relieve the stress.

And then one day, they realize that they have the whole thing planned out, and they can’t get satisfaction from planning it any more, and the only way to get that sweet relief is to actually do it. Kill the bastard.

And I imagine they romanticize what will happen afterwards, too. Just do this one thing, and everything will be great. This person is the only thing between you and happiness. When they are dead, life will be perfect.

But one thing that struck me is that a lot of the “problems” these people “solved” through murder were something that could have been solved by non-homicidal means. Pay for the damned divorce, if the alternative is MURDER, for fuck’s sake.

And it makes me feel like these people were, somehow, programmed to kill from birth. Or if not to kill, then with a much higher potential to resort to murder than the average person.

And it has to be something about a weakness in the parts of the brain that restrain action. Some tiny little defect that lurks in the minds of some people, waiting for that moment when the emotional potentials will let it slip through.

Anyhow, one thing that bothered me on the show is that every single victim was female except when it was a mass shooting. And even then, they paid no attention to the male victims other than to give their names.

That is like, double sexist. Sexist because it totally feeds into the “women as helpless victims” narrative that does so much harm in the world. And sexist because it ignores male murder completely, like the lives of men don’t count.

Plus, every episode ends with people praising forensics. Like :

“Oh, if it hadn’t been for the forensics, they would have never found my daughter’s killer. ”
“We cops would have been helpless without the leads we got from forensics. ”
“The key to my prosecution of the killer was good, solid forensic evidence. ”
“All hail Forensics, revealer of the the Truth, against whom no sin can stand!”

Don’t get me wrong, I love forensics. It’s science versus evil. It doesn’t get much better than that. But I don’t need to be told how great it is every single episode.

Oh well. It’s all done now, and I watched this movie and it made me feel all better. Nothing like some pure uncut Frank Miller to make the world seem better to a twisted dude like myself.

And Felicity, check out who did the voice of the Batman.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

So, tonight, I had two errands : buy a money order at Money Mart, and get my prescriptions filled. Simple, right?

Well, I am telling you about it, so you know the answer to that question is “heck no”.

When I got to Money Mart, I was third in line. Ahead of me was a fresh faced young Asian man, and ahead of him was a small pack of Spanish speaking people.

That doesn’t sound like a lot. But it turned out that the Spanish speaking people, via the clear patriarch, were making a major bank’s overnight business in transactions.

So I get there at 6:30 pm or so, and it’s a provincial holiday here in BC today, so Money Mart closes at 7 instead of their usual 9. Ergo and therefore, there’s only half an hour left in which to get my money order.

But there’s only two people ahead of me! Yay! Um…. nay.

While waiting, I noticed there are stages to the psychology of waiting a long time in line.

Stage 1 : When you get there, you say to yourself “This won’t take long. ”
Stage 2 : You slip into Waiting In Line Mode, where your brain unfocuses into a sort of neutral nothingness, just leaving enough consciousness active to notice when the person in front of you moves ahead so you can move ahead too.
Stage 3 : Your supply of WILM is running out, and you are beginning to get annoyed. But you are fighting it, telling yourself to just be patient, the time will come, and so on.
Stage 4 : Fuck that, the walls are down, the battle is lost, and you are just plain pissed off now. Anything that the person serving the line (cashier, bank teller, etc) that seems even a tiny slower than needed makes you flare up with inner rage. The rest of the time, you seethe.

Now luckily, I am not one to take out my anger on others and I knew that the one gal working at Money Mart tonight was having a worse night than I was, so I didn’t bitch at her or anything. That would have been totally uncool.

However, I was prepared to let her have it if I got to the front of the line and she said “I’m sorry, it’s after 7 pm and we’re closed.” Then I would have let her have it and to hell if it was right or not.

That did not come to pass, though. She did what any good retail worker does, and locked the door to the business when closing time came, but continued to serve the customers still waiting.

So I bought my money order for $45 (which cost $51) and I can now pay for my bus pass via mail. So yay for that.

When I finally left, it was 7:10 PM. And as a testament to how tense I had become, when I left I had this enormous sensation of relief. Free at last, lord almighty, free at last.

Of course, after the relief comes the cooldown, where I feel fragile and twitchy because, presumably, my body is bouncing back from an adrenal response and not balanced yet.

So then we went to Shopper’s Drug Mart, because my for-now usual pharmacist closes at 6 pm on a weekday. I handed over my prescriptions and helped out with the translation from Doctor Scribble to human language, and the pharmacist said it would be 25 minutes or so.

I looked at Joe and Julian, and said “How about McDonald’s?” I hadn’t had supper yet and at least half my fragile state was directly attributable to low blood sugar.

They were amenable, so we went to McD’s and I got to eat my Big Mac and enjoy stimulating intellectual conversation and even get a little caffeine into my blood, and all three of those combined to calm me way down.

I don’t feel like I am flying level just yet, but at least there’s no turbulence.

After our tasty and affordable repast, we went back to Shopper’s, I picked up my psych meds (yay for being less crazy via chemistry) and we came home.

And then…. I began to blog!

One factor that must be added to the equation of my stressed out frustration at Money Mart is that I am a very fat man and when very fat men stand for an extended period of time, our feet swell up and start to hurt like a big bad bitch. So all the time I was waiting, I was in an ever intensifying amount of pain.

If I had been able to sit down, like if they had a take a number and wait for it to be called system, everything would have been fine. I am by nature a fairly patient person… when I am comfortable. If I had been able to sit, the worst that would have happened is that I would have gotten a little nervous when closing time was approaching.

But as it was, I had foot pain stoking the fires of stress and so, for me, it was kind of torture.

So now, here I am, safe at home, telling you nice people about my evening and thus taking the information of my emotions and experiences and transmitting it to you.

That’s why, as Spider Robinson says, “Shared pain is lessened. Shared joy is multiplied. ”

What else… well I was going to write some more “mother and the machine” stuff tonight, but I don’t have the energy to go soul spelunking right now.

In summary, I have decided that I will always be a calculating person. Someone who sees the world as a chess game and is always looking for the right move.

That sounds awful, and it is true that modern society is not kind to calculating people. Just that fact that calculating is a pejorative is a clear indication of that.

The hero is never “calculating”.

But my goals and desires are caring and compassionate. I am no cold blooded sociopath. I want what is best for everyone, and those are the sort of moves I try to make.

It’s like I’m your robot grandmother a la “I Sing The Body Electric”, the short story by Ray Bradbury.

No wonder I have always loved that story. It’s me!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I have been in pursuit of an answer as to what makes me (and people like me) different from your average person since I was a little boy hiding from my bullying classmates in elementary school.

And recently, I feel like I have a solid lead on one of the main factors : we refuse to accept the communal reality.

I will explain. Prototypicallly, human beings have a shared sense of what is real. We gather information on our own, true, but then we share that information with others of our tribe, and that information is added to the group reality.

A simple example : You are driving home from work one day when you notice that a local restaurant that has been in business since before you were born has now gone out of business. Your immediate instinct is to tell everyone about it when you get home. You do so, and now everyone you live with amends their map of reality to reflect this new information.

Were it not for this impulse to share (and receive) information, there would be no particular impulse to tell anyone what you had seen, and you would have kept your version of reality to yourself.

But you didn’t. You knew there would be people who wanted to know back home, and so you told them, and it felt good.

This is how our enmeshed reality works. And even us big brained intellectuals can accept that kind of shared reality. When it is an abstract piece of information, we share the communal reality like everyone else.

But only on the surface. Below the surface, it’s a different story. Because one of the most stark and distinct differences between the intellectual outlook and the more average outlook is that intellectuals accept new information consciously, and with a fair bit of rigorous pre-testing of said information for soundness and consistency.

Average people do not do this, or at least, do not do it to the levels we do. To them, reality is a shared and social phenomenon. The topmost priority is not the truth. The truth is very important and no-one knowingly believes a lie (that’s simply not possible) but it is not the most important thing.

The most important thing to the average person is to develop an understanding of reality that keeps them in accord with the rest of their peer group.

It is not that these people are incapable of truly independent thought. In fact, in every person’s life, there will be times when it is impossible to avoid.

They just don’t see the point in wandering away from the herd and abandoning its soothing protection when, to their mind, the only possible result is to end up lost, confused, and alone.

There is nothing out there for them, or so they think.

And this may well be a function of intelligence. It might be that the kind of rugged intellectualism practiced by the high IQ set is simply not an option for people of average mental capacity. They lack the mental strength and cognitive bandwidth to keep and maintain their own independent version of reality. They need the communal reality to do at least some of the thinking for them. That way, they can concentrate on their own lives and the highly important social information from it.

That leads us to the main problem : the ruggedly independent mindset seems to be at odds with social information and hence the raw data needed for social interaction. By refusing to simply accept the communal reality and demanding such virtues as logical consistency and congruence with other known facts, the intellectual automatically excludes the less certain and verifiable information coming to them via their empathy and social antenna.

Tragically, these signals are then treated as noise, and excluded from consciousness. The intellectual comes to rely on only the information derived from reason, logic, and facts, and to ignore empathy, instinct, and even simple emotion, for they are seen as unreliable and unverifiable.

Average people believe the people they trust. Intellectual types figure it out for themselves. This opens up one universe of information and insight while closing the door on another.

So is there a route back from this decision, or indeed, a way to “have it all” by encompassing both? I am not sure. One would like to think there was, but from my observations, the intellectual way, once chosen and maintained, is irreversible.

That does not mean the situation cannot be improved, however. But the patient in this case must be willing and able to accept that the information from their emotions and instincts is valid and true in its own way, and therefore all efforts to accept and understand it are worth the effort as they will only enrich their understanding of the world.

Any adherence to the misguided idea that one can only rely on the fruits of the intellectual process will block the process. Billions of us Earthlings use the information from our emotions to navigate through the human world every day, and a lot of them are doing a much better job of it than us supposedly smarter types, so we must concede that they know something we don’t.

Open up your mind to the world of social information. Be willing, for a time, to accept some things without questioning them and see what happens. Try to find that part of the mind that takes in social information and do your best to hook it up to your main cognitive center. Feel your way through things.

And don’t be quite so fanatical in your guarding your citadel or knowledge from all irrational influences. There might be vitally important information in all that messy emotional stuff, and no intellectual worth their salt ignores information simply because it makes them uncomfortable.

That lonely vigil at the gates of the mind might help you develop a sense of objective reality, but it also keeps you isolated from the rest of humanity, and unhappy.

And what’s more important than happiness?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.