Or maybe vice versa.

Just got out of bed, so you know I feel like absolute shit. My head hurts, my blood oxygen level is that of David Blaine right after he came out of the glass coffin, every cell in my body aches, and I am trembling slightly.

Just another day in Casa Del Fru. Or maybe Cabesa Del Fru.

Today will be, by my standards, busy. Supper with Le Gang at 6, then straight to the BCSFA meeting, then back to the homestead for our usual Sunday videoage.

Right now, that feels like way to much. But that’s okay. I know I won’t feel like that later.

And that’s the trick, isn’t it? Remembering that how you feel now is not permanent. You have felt differently before. You will feel differently again. That’s how you overcome the tyranny of mood and get the hell over yourself.

Not only is this mood temporary and transient, but you have the power to improve it. There are actions you can take to feel better. You don’t have to passively endure it. You can fix it. Not with a single silver bullet solution that gets you all the way from utterly crappy to totally happy in one shot, but in stages, over time.

Instant gratification is great, but when it isn’t available, eventual gratification is the next best thing.

I am having trouble with this. It is my current struggle. Most people have a job to keep them going, and thus, they get lots of experiences waking up feeling crappy, boosting themselves into barely functional mode with out without the help of caffeine, then getting to work and having its structure and demands to work towards. Over and over again, they get proof that how they feel when they wake up is not how they will feel when they get going.

But I don’t get going. Not often, anyhow. Most of my days, most of the time, there is no particular reason to get out of bed and get my day going. Nothing bad happens if I just lay there feeling like crap for hours on end.

Well, nothing bad except feeling crappy. Nothing external.

So I have to become a self-starter if I want to get truly ambitious. And that is exactly the opposite of how I have been in the past. I have always lacked initiative. By default, I retreat within myself. Without something external to motivate me, the intense gravity of my inner planet sucks me down.

This rich inner life thing can be downright dangerous when it gets too strong. It takes so much energy to get even a little closer to the sun. And when that energy runs out, I crash to the ground again.

No wonder I end up spending most of my time lying down.

I know I don’t want to be like this. I want to be someone who is happy staying engaged and active most of the time. Someone who doesn’t retreat into his inner sanctum at the slightest impulse. Someone ruled by will and desire, not weakness and fear. Someone who isn’t stuck trying to interact with the world with mile long chopsticks because he’s trying to get things done without leaving his filthy fucking fortress of the mind.

Someone for whom being fully engaged with reality is the default, not the exception.

So what’s stopping me? Hard to say. I could say I am too weak, but that’s not really an answer. More accurate to say I feel too weak, but that doesn’t mean I really am too weak. It’s just an excuse for not trying.

And if you don’t try, you never find out you are not that weak after all and then you’d have to change your mind about a lot of things, wouldn’t you?

Plus, you might have to stop switching to the second person all the time. And you’d hate that.

Right now, I feel like I am some little shore creature that darts out to grab some food from the sea floor in between waves. I make progress now and then, but only between waves of misery and dysfunction.

A lot better than nothing, I suppose. But I wish low tide would come so I could get some things done.

I guess the real question is, are the up times getting longer and stronger? Am I making progress? And the answer is : definitely. I get more done in a month now than I used to get done in a year.

And I will go back to doing videos soon. We’ve almost caught up with all the videos I did in 2014, and I promised myself I would start doing videos again if we reached the end of those and I hadn’t found another “thing” besides my blog by then.

I imagine I will start off small, with simple “talkers” where I just look into the camera (from further away this time) and blab. But I hope to turn it into someplace where I can do more ambitious stuff, like this :

It’s funny, it was fun to do, it’s content-rich, and it’s not like it was back breaking labour. Took like an hour. And it uses my comedy skills, which don’t get a lot of exercise on this blog for some reason.

Too busy using it as an offshore angst dump, I guess.

I suppose I can also use the videos as a place to work on my standup comedy routines. Technically they have am audience. Not the kind you would find in a comedy club, but still. A place to put together a routine and test it out then watch the video and see what I did wrong and get it as good as I can before sharing it with the world.

That actually sounds really hard. But if I want to make a go of life, I can’t keep just making things and then shoving them out the door before the paint is even dry.

It just hurts to slow things down that much.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Today has had its ups and downs.

All internal, of course. My life is still primarily content free. Most of my time is spent in naps and video games and fucking around on the Internet.

What can I say, it’s what I know. It’s how I survived childhood. The only difference is the Internet. All through my childhood, I mostly buried myself in comics, books, television, and video games.

Because when you bury yourself in those deeply enough, you can’t see the cruel and confusing outside world any more, and that makes you feel safe.

Every fixation is an escape.

I wonder about my passivity. I can’t help but think that it is, in part at least, a fundamental part of my basic personality. The sort of thing they used to call temperament. Some babies explore, some don’t.

I’m guessing I didn’t. Or not much.

And my point of view is that if I am happy where I am, why move? There needs to be a specific reason for me to do something, something that compels (and impels) me to do it. A need, a desire.

Other people need a reason to stop.

Of course, once I was old enough to get into books and other media, I did my exploration there. It is, in its own way, a solution to the conflict between passivity and the urge to explore. I could go all kids of places without moving at all. Stay where I am safe and if not happy than at least content (starting to hate that word) and explore the world of the mind instead.

As I have send before, intellectually I am restless and easily bored. It takes a lot to keep my enormous sprawling complicated intellect busy. So my mind is constantly searching for answers, insights, and illumination. Or if none of those are on the menu, amusement will do. Or at the very least, distraction.

If I had to summarize how I have spent most of my life, “distracted” would be an acceptable answer.

And like all addictions, it is both the problem and the solution. The things I escape via distraction would not even be there if I spent less of my time distracted and more of it paying attention to reality and plotting my course through it.

God knows I’m smart enough. It’s the other parts of the equation missing.

I would be a lot better off if I turned away from the world inside and figured out how to get along better with the real world, and yet, I feel so weak. The very inner isolation that has caused the problem has also done a brutally efficient job of keeping me away from any and all life experiences that might have stimulated growth in spirit and will.

I am brilliant, funny, sweet, charming, creative, inventive, and one heck of a nice person. And yet, I still feel like I am just a bag of skin full of nothing. None of that adds up to an actual person. I can’t explain why that is, but that’s how I feel.

Maybe I’m afraid to be a real person. Reality is such a commitment.

Perhaps the yawning hungry void inside is purely chemical. Some imbalance in my brain, maybe that excess of internal anesthetic I go on about from time to time. It floats around in my mind, suppressing emotion, blocking out the sunlight and warmth I need to nourish my soul and help my spirit grow. It leaves me cold and numb and devours everything inside me.

And yet, until I heal the wounds prompting the released of these endorphins, the void and all its terrible nothing, nothing, NOTHING will continue to plague me and I will remain in a state of slow and painful glaciation.

Oh well. At least I can feel the sun now, albeit very weakly. It gives me something to go towards.

The word “draining” has been on my mind. Not just in the sense of depression “draining” my strength, joy, energy, and damn near everything else. It’s also another sense of draining : the kind that turns a swamp into farmland.

I feel like swampland in need of draining. I feel bloated will ill humors and drenched in dirty brown poison, in need of some spiritual lancet to puncture me and apply suction to drain the wound and give me a chance to recover.

All that unexpressed energy curdling and turning within to infect and poison my soul. Perhaps it is my shell that requires puncturing, or at less my albumen.

Water imagery. Always.

Oh well, progress is not linear. Very little in the real world is, and as much as I hate to admit it, real progress can only happen in the real world, outside my well padded cell.

I wish I could just open a vein and bleed on the page until all the bad stuff was gone. Let all my poisons flow out into the world and down the drain, and hence, out to the ever-restless seas.

The sea is our mother, and she is mighty. She can take all our pain away. But only if we dare release it.

Had a minor panic attack earlier. Nothing major, just increased heart rate, respiration, a panicky feeling. No external prompt, just the usual feeling of being trapped and unable to free myself or escape, backed by low oxygen levels from sleep apnea.

Guess I should be doing something about that whole smothering in my sleep thing. Oh well. It’s not like I’m in charge.

Oh wait, I am. Fuck. I need to learn to delegate.

If only I had a strong male figure to gather me up and take me someplace where I will feel warm and special and safe and valid. Feel like I am enough. Someone who loves me, warts and all, and who never, for a single moment, makes me feel like I am a burden he’d be better off without.

But who can love the unemployable man?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow,.