Diary of a Supervillain, part 2

Still no word about the fate of my friend “Toby”. I have made a few connections among the staff here (being able to help them with their children’s homework helps) and when they know something about how he is doing in his new life in the Powered ward, I will know too.

I don’t know what I am expecting to hear. From all I have gathered about the Powered ward, his fate will be identical to all the other chemical zombies there.

And to think, the people in charge here consider that the humane option. After all, the patients are easy to manage and they are, in a highly insipid and demeaning way, “happy”.

I, for one, would rather die.

Speaking of death (always a favorite topic around here), my main worry for my friend is that his slippery, clever personality will find a way to play games with people’s minds even in the Powered ward, and he will get himself in enough trouble to get transferred to that most dreaded of wards, the Uncontrollable Powered ward.

The powers that be deny it exists, but my people in the Powered ward have seen patients disappear and never come back. Shortly thereafter, their records disappear from the computer, and people who ask about them end up facing disciplinary action on one trumped up charge or another.

The message is clear. These people were never hear.

This happened to someone I worked with once, whom I will call The Minotaur. There was no question of him being in the Unpowered ward. He is indestructible, has unlimited stamina, is strong enough to throw a small building into orbit, and can dominate people with his mind.

He is also an excellent cook and plays a very cunning game of chess. We got along well enough.

And to his credit, he fooled them for a while. He acted like a drugged out zombie, even though the drugs barely had any effect on him, and blended into the flock while he planned his escape.

My people claim they were never fooled (as people do) but didn’t think it was important. They learned different.

One day, an orderly dropped a tray right into the game of chess the Minotaur was very slowly playing with a fellow inmate, and the Minotaur unthinkingly backhanded him into the nearest wall.

The orderly, I am told, will recover. His legs, however, will not.

After that, the Minotaur was subjected to all kinds of tests that proved he was not controllable, and within an hour of the incident, a doctor none of them recognized came to transfer the Minotaur to a “special facility” for “individual treatment”, and all the paperwork checked out, so they had to let him go.

And now, he only exists in people’s memories.

Rumors are rife as to what happens to people like him. There are dark tales of tortuous devices draining their victims of life force and keeping them on the very edge of death so they can be studied anyhow the scientific sadists please.

Personally, I assume they just kill them. It’s what I would do in their place.

So I worry for my friend “Toby”. A lot of people would assume that for people of my ilk, true friendship is impossible because there is no way we could ever trust one another.

I would argue that the lack of trust makes our friendships all the stronger. When you go into things knowing that both of you would kill the other in a heartbeat if it served their needs, you can build your relationship with that in mind.

I know I could never trust “Toby”. He is, after all, an alien life form genetically programmed to loathe humanity with his entire being, to the point where he looks at us as an exterminator looks at bedbugs.

And of course, knowing this, I view him similarly, and would end him in a moment if they opportunity arose.

And yet, I am also quite fond of him, and I think he feels the same about me. We respect one another. We recognize in the other qualities we value. And most importantly, we enjoy talking to one another.

Perhaps that doesn’t fit the usual mold of friendship, but it works for us. Oh, and sex and romance work similarly.

Had a visitor today. A former foe. Not sure what the policy is on using their names, so I will call him Solomon. He visits now and then, whenever he wants to relive his glory days.

At first, I enjoyed these visits as much as he did, and for the same reason. But over time I have learned to dread them, because his deterioration upsets and depresses me. He is clearly drinking again, and getting into senseless fights, and who knows what else. He just cannot adjust to civilian life.

If I had know that this would be the outcome of my stripping him of his powers, I would have…. well, I suppose I would have done it anyway. But now… I feel responsible.

That’s why, despite my dread, I could never turn him away. That’s unthinkable. Not only because I feel responsible for his condition, but the way he talks sometimes gives me the impression that our visits are the only things keeping him together.

I have no idea what would happen if I turned him away. Maybe nothing. But he and I have a long history together, and I have always admired and respected him despite his proclivity for foiling my plans. He was a strong and noble warrior fighting for the highest ideals when we clashed swords, and I never begrudged him his enmity for me. I didn’t even share it.

After all, I would feel the same if I were in his position.

And I refuse to let someone like that fall apart if there is a single thing I can do to prevent it, or at least slow it down.

My worst nightmare concerning him is that he does someone drastic and ends up in a place like this.

I have now “journaled” the requisite number of words, and thus, I conclude.

Am I antisocial?

And what would it mean if I was?

Those of you who only know me through my online persona might find the question baffling, or even amusing. Online, I am perky and funny and friendly to everyone. Me, antisocial?

But those who know the real me might at least get a glimmer of what I am talking about. In real life, I am a semi-recluse (or as I like to say, an “urban hermit”) who doesn’t exactly go out and paint the town red.

In fact, I barely paint one room light pink, and that’s only on New Year’s.

And it is easy to simply write it all off as agoraphobia and/or social anxiety and/or depression. (Complicated, but easy.) But as I ride that long dark road to recovery, I am beginning to wonder how much of that is, well…. me!

Maybe I am just not that friendly a fellow in the real world. The Internet is great for someone with the kind of social anxiety I have because it reduces the social stimulation down to pretty much its theoretical minimum. Talking in text, and through the mask of a persona that I created myself, reduces interaction intensity to the very low level that I can manage.

So I can be very friendly and silly and funny in that extremely low stimulation level environment. Mostly mental, takes place in the imagination (more or less), don’t have to be my real self and thus self-loathing is neatly dodged. It’s ideal.

And terrible, because it means I don’t have to learn to deal with reality.

My anxiety is so strong that it is very hard to me to figure out who I would be without it. I can’t see through it. It’s like this hyper dense magnetic field that distorts everything, even light, and makes my world blurry and unfocused.

Yeah, I know. My metaphors are weird.

But I am fairly sure that, if it all went away and my brain chemicals were normal and I could begin to think like a normal person, I would still not exactly be super outgoing or interested in “partying”.

Don’t get me wrong. I have been to parties and quite enjoyed myself, especially after drinking enough to keep the social anxiety at bay. I don’t have anything against parties or party attendance or people who love parties.

But to me, “partying” will always consist of finding someplace comfortable to sit and talking with people. Party animal I am not. And I am not very interested in small talk. I do it when necessary, and I grasp why it exists, but I am the sort of person who prefers to get right to the point without any unnecessary detours, so speaking of banal and inconsequential things bores me.

That is not exactly a pro-social sentiment.

See, the reason I have the terms pro-social and antisocial (that’s just how they are spelled, folks) burned deep into my mind is that I grew up in the era of pro-social kids’ cartoons.

In the late Seventies, moral crusaders managed to convince the FCC and the networks that the previous kind of cartoons taught all the wrong lessons, and cartoons and other children’s programming had to be “pro-social” as a result.

Usually, this was done by making the cartoons somewhat preachy, and led to the proliferation of “lesson” shows, where every episode had a moral lesson to teach.

Luckily, for most of it, I was too young to find that really fucking annoying. In fact, for most of that period, I found all those lessons soothing and in some cases even instructive. I came to expect them, and I can only assume that if I had come across something without an implicit moral, I would have been confused and possibly even angry.

In short, I was thoroughly indoctrinated.

In essence, these lessons boiled down to five main lessons, listed here in order of use.

1. Cooperation. It is always better to cooperate with others and do things together than to go it alone or fight with others. This is still, to me, a core lesson of what it is to be a human being. Cooperation is our strongest advantage.

2. Tolerance. This was most often formulated as “it’s okay to be different”. Another basic lesson of humanity, made more important with every increase in diversity.

3. Friendship. For some reason, they felt the need to keep telling us how awesome friendship was. I am pretty sure that you either know this firsthand or resent having it rubbed in your face.

4. Forethought. Think before you act. Don’t act purely on emotion. Use your head!

5. Safety. Don’t do dangerous things. Often connected to the previous lesson. My gosh, did I get a lot of safety lessons as a kid. I can’t entirely dismiss the idea that this made me the anxious adult I am now.

At the same time as I was having my mind marinated in universally acceptable moral lessons, the word “antisocial” became attached to the bad sort of person. Good people were pro-social. Cooperation and tolerance and so on. Bad people did bad things that hurt other people and made it hard to get along with one another.

So to me, to be antisocial is to be a bad person. But that’s a problem for someone like me. The whole vibe of the pro-social movement was not kind to introverts. And while you would think the whole “it’s okay to be different” message would be comforting to an oddball outcast like I was, but reality just didn’t match. As for forethought and safety, those came naturally to me.

I was never the kind of kid who did stupid stuff and got hurt.

As for cooperation, well, I was willing. The world was not.

And yet still, I would hate to be seen as antisocial. Part of me, I suspect, is still trying its hardest to live up to those excellent ideals instilled in me as a kid, and the fact that I don’t seem to be able to do it makes me feel like I am a bad person. An antisocial person.

Maybe I needed more episodes with the lesson “it’s okay to keep to yourself sometimes, too. ”

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Diary of a supervillain

I hate it here. I miss my lair.

Every day it’s the same bloody thing. Communal meals of banal food. Endless group therapy sessions where I am forced to listen to men and women (and a few other things) whimper about their terrible childhoods in order to please our fatuous caretakers. Individual therapy, where I am expected to bare all to some low achiever versed in psychiatric quackery. And hours of forced fun where they lock us out of our rooms and into the recreation area to “socialize”.

Supervillains socialize about as well as sharks do, and for much the same reason. Megalomania does not spring from an active social life. We keep to ourselves.

At least I’m a “UP”, or Unpowered. All my villainous superpowers disappeared when those wretched little monkeys pried me from my power armor like they were stripping a harlot. They were so eager to examine all my advanced technologies (as if they could possibly comprehend them) that they ignored my vehement warnings and a few of them perished from either clumsy handling of powerful technology or the booby traps I had installed in my power armor long, long ago.

And I regret that. I did all that I could to prevent it, but I still feel bad about these young people dying from systems I put in place so long ago that I barely remember half of them. They died at my hand, in a way, and that burdens me heavily.

Would a “raving monster” feel that way? The media calls me a sociopath, but that has never been true. I simply lack altruism. There is a world of difference between being morally inert and simply having no desire to go out of my way to help my fellow upright primates. I wish people understood that.

I understand that the theatrical nature of my chosen profession fooled millions of people into thinking I was truly a black-hearted villain of monstrous dimension.

But the truth is, I never wanted to hurt anybody. I would never have actually activated any of my doomsday devices. To be honest, most of them wouldn’t have done the job even if I had. Why build an actual doomsday device when a convincing fake does the job just as well?

It amuses me to imagine the look on Captain Trueheart’s face if he knew that the Ticktock Device he fought so hard to “disarm” was about as dangerous as a broken alarm clock.

To be honest, I miss him. Of all the superheroes I ever fought, he was the one who came closest to matching me mentally, and I respect him for that. If he was on the case, I knew I would have to work especially hard. He hides it under his “hero pure and strong” persona, but he has as twisted and devious a mind as any of my fellow inmates.

I would love to sit down with him for a chat or maybe a game of chess now that the medications have made me less…. volatile. I am still the same man who terrorized the world, but the medications do a wonderful job of restraining my overweaning egomania enough that I can retain control of myself.

Therapy may be a farce, but there is no denying the efficacy of chemistry.

If I seem especially cranky and bitter today, it’s probably because I just lost a friend. They finally figured out that my roommate “Toby” (no more his name than I am “Anthony”) really is a green-skinned frog-person from another dimension sent here to destroy us all, and not the mild-mannered insurance broker with a costume fetish he’d conned them into thinking he was.

Once they twigged to that, they realized that they only believed his absurd cover story because of his mind powers, and that meant he had to be transferred to the “Powered” ward.

And as banal and insipid as this ward might be, I wouldn’t wish the Powered ward on anyone, let alone someone I have come to view as a friend. The residents of the Powered ward are kept drugged up to the gills (in his case, literally) to the point that they are almost catatonic. The drugs leave them in a state of placid imbecility, and the thought of my friend “Toby” being reduced to such a state effects me deeply.

His final words to me were “Farewell, pink flesh-bag. May you be the last to die. ”

Coming from him, that meant a lot to me.

At least my new roommate “Mark” seems promising. I am not allowed to reveal his true persona, but let’s just say he used to work in pyrotechnics. Rather impressive ones. He and I seem to be cut from approximately the same kind of cloth, as he too was a self-made villain and owed his powers not to fate but to the power of his mind. His approach was a tad less refined than mind, but I always admired his work. His theatricality exceeded even my own. His hostage videos always had me spellbound.

I don’t know what he thinks of me. Perhaps he has yet to deduce my true identity. It usually doesn’t take long. Our caretakers seem to think that if we never speak of our previous lives, we can all pretend to be “normal”, but we figure out who’s who pretty quickly despite all that.

Once he figures it out, I expect I will have to endure the usual period of reverence and adulation. I am somewhat of a big name in our select little social circle, and have through seniority become mentor to many a rising hopeful, and so the young villains all clamor for my imprimatur.

Then comes the disappointment as they realize that the person they think I am no longer exists. I am now as I was before I took the path of villainy : a soft-spoken scholar who fades into the woodwork by choice.

Not very exciting, given my previous high profile, but I am content.

I have now “journaled” the requisite number of words, and thus, I conclude.

Privacy, paranoia, and superstition

For the most part, privacy concerns operate as superstitions.

They have to, because the harm involved is such an ephemeral thing. They exist in a very abstract area of the mind that it is nearly impossible to apprehend rationally.

It is hard to make a solidly rational argument about something that doesn’t hurt you and probably never will.

I mean, say the government wanted to put security cameras in every room in every house everywhere. It would mean the annihilation of the very concept of privacy from the point of view of the relationship between citizens and their government.

We would be horrified at the very thought of it. Someone seeing our most private and intimate moments? Intolerable.

And yet, if the government somehow pulled it off despite the public outcry, you would soon get used to it. Sure, in theory, you have no privacy at all any more. But most people would never be otherwise effected about it at all.

The cameras would be there, but you’d forget about them soon enough. Most people don’t actually break the law in their own homes, so the police would never come busting through the door of your average family dwelling. Most people would never hear a peep from the government at all.

Why is this? Because our social privacy remains intact.

Sure, maybe some government employee somewhere sees what goes on in your bedroom (and your bathroom, ick) but you don’t know them, will never hear from them, and it will never impact your life in any way.[1]

So what, exactly, have you lost? The concept creeps pretty much anyone out, but it’s hard to argue why.

Hence, superstition. We get a profound sense of unease and possibly even terror at the thought of such an invasion of our personal domain, but the facts supporting it are nebulous at best.

The only way to make a logical argument is to start from the position that human beings, however rational or irrational it may be, have a strong instinct towards privacy.

This is easily demonstrated via cross-cultural analysis. There are two things that, regardless of all other variables, human beings simply do not do in public : mate, and defecate.

There is no culture on Earth where people routinely have sex in the street, just like there is no culture on Earth where people do not seek privacy for acts of elimination. The exact operation of these deep taboos varies from culture to culture, but just as there is no society that does not have marriage, there are no societies without these taboos.

So clearly our privacy concerns stem from something far deeper than reasoned argument or pragmatic concern. We want it because we are driven by deep instinct, the same kind of instinct that makes us want sex, status, and freedom.

We don’t physically need any of those. But any conception of human happiness that doesn’t take those into account is laughable.

And so it goes with privacy. Regardless of actual consequences, we will react very strongly to any invasion of our privacy. The development of our modern conception of privacy, where our homes are the place where we can escape the larger social structure and “be ourselves”, and where in our bedrooms and bathrooms we can even safely violate our nudity, sexuality, and toilet taboos in rooms we have all agreed are the proper place for those activities.

But these taboos are part of our social instincts. As such, they are dependent on social context. That’s why the full surveillance program I described above would fade into the background of most people’s lives. Without someone to, in essence, point and laugh at us, or react in horror and shock, our shame is not activated and therefore our privacy instinct isn’t either.

When we are speaking strictly of privacy from our government, things get a lot trickier.

Because all we have to deal with that kind of privacy concern is instinct and superstition, the people arguing against any expansion of government powers will always come across as irrational and paranoid. The argument that if you aren’t doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear, will come up and it is a powerful one.

And it’s not always wrong, either. One only has to imagine turning that thinking on the powers that be to understand that.

A lot of people worry that any expansion of surveillance will lead to an Orwellian nightmare society. This is a very common and strong response, but it is not actually rational. It is, instead, a veneer of reason concealing a superstitious fear.

At the core of this fear is a misunderstanding (or outright ignorance) of what it is that protects your privacy right now.

Sure, most of us get that we have rights and those rights protect us from the government on some level or other. This is true, but it is only a small part of the picture.

What truly keeps your privacy intact is the moral principle of reciprocity. We all, deep down inside, understand that we don’t peek into other people’s windows because we wouldn’t want our own peeked into. When we imagine doing wrong, we imagine it being done to us, and thus we are stopped.

In short, what really protects our privacy, and everything else we hold dear, is the moral character of our neighbors.

This not a concept readily accepted by the citizens of a modern individualist society. Individualism breeds suspicion of others by isolating citizens from connection to what their collective does (none of us had to get together to build that road, we just had to pay for it), and so the notion that it is not law or ourselves who create society but the collective moral nature of all our fellow citizens does not seem sufficient to us.

It is nevertheless true.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. This all assumes that the footage has the same restriction as any other evidence in police custody, so that you won’t see a video of yourself on the toilet on YouTube or end up being watched by your next door neighbor or anything.

I’ll be okay…I think

Feeling better today.

The sunshine helps, I think. It boosts my mood. So does moving around more. It’s hard to convince myself that motion will make me fill better despite all the times it totally has, but that’s the depression talking.

And I don’t listen to that whiny bitch any more. Never tells me anything good anyway. It can shut the fuck up permanently.

I would stick its head under water and laugh at the bubble till it died if I knew how.

Therapy was good. I told my therapist about how depressed I have been lately, and why. The stuff I covered on Wednesday. Told him how writing it out helped, too.

Once more, thank you.

He was pretty appalled when I told him about how I had to shop for my own clothes. It really is appalling when you think about it. A lot of my childhood is appalling.

I made the “mistake” of saying that I thought some people had far worse parents than I. I have met a lot of people online with whom I would not swap. Parents that beat them, screamed insanity at them, belittled them, did everything they could to make sure their kid never thought, even for a second, that they were valued or loved.

But therapists do not like that kind of quantitative comparison. They hate to hear their patients say someone else had a worse childhood than themselves. To them, it sounds like you are minimizing your own pain.

And they are not wrong.

He also made the point that in some ways, neglect is worse than outright abuse. I’ve said as much here. Abuse at least gives you a relationship and an enemy. The person beating you is the Devil. You’ll kill them or get out or both. But when you are emotionally neglected like I was, there is no clear enemy.

My parents did fine on the basic level of parenting. I never went hungry. I had a birthday party every year. I got a winter jacket and boots when I needed them. Ditto school supplies.

And of course, my parents never told me they didn’t care about me, didn’t think I was worth anything, and wished I had never been born. To this day, I am sure they would deny ever even thinking those thoughts.

And I’d believe them.

But the thing is, it doesn’t matter what you think. What matters is how you act, and from a very early age, I was given the distinct impression that I was, at best, an afterthought.

I told my therapist that all my life, I have felt cared about, but not cared for. Caring about someone in a passive kind of way requires very little effort and absolutely no commitment.

The example I used was telling a friend that you had to move this weekend, and them saying “That sucks. Good luck with that. ”

They have definitely established that they care about you enough to be sad that you are doing to have to do something which sucks. But they are also not going to exert the tiniest bit of effort to actually help.

That is how it has been for me for my entire life. Teachers, parents, eve siblings sometimes. Everyone went on record as caring, but absolutely none of them were inclined to go even slightly out of their way to help me.

Couple that with the way my parents told me, both in words and in attitude, that I was never ever allowed to ask for anything, including help, and I was one abandoned kid.

But not in any ways that show, of course. Real abuse leaves no evidence.

So all through my childhood, I was terribly alone. Nobody was there for me. I had nobody I could rely on, nobody who had my back, nobody who was willing to do a damned thing to help the weird little fat kid.

You would think I would be able to go to my teachers, but nope. Their response was always the Platonic ideal of caring about but not caring for. They were technically sympathetic to my plight, but they made it clear they were not going to do anything about it. They just wanted me to go away.

That’s why I eventually gave up trying. It was really hard for me to ask for help in the first place with how my family had raised me. Having my head messed up by getting an answer that seemed sympathetic but didn’t actually help was too much.

I mean, what a trip to lay on a kid, right? From where I sit now, it was clear that they didn’t want to help me, but when I was elementary school age, I didn’t understand that. So I would go away from those encounters feeling like I had gotten what I wanted, but also knowing that I hadn’t, really.

Eventually, my cynicism caught up.

Looking back, I am amazed that I didn’t end up being a very bitter, angry, and possibly even dangerous person. I suppose the lack of a clear enemy helped with that. I had no idea I was being neglected as a kid.

However you are raised is normal to you.

It took a lot of years of adulthood for me to be able to articulate and understand what was wrong with my childhood. All the sort of surface things a kid could understand were there. I wasn’t beaten or verbally abused. I lived a normal middle class life. I had a roof overhead and food on the table and a place to lay my head.

I would not have been able to understand, let alone articulate, what was different about my childhood. And even if I had been able to do it, I probably would have blamed myself for it, like I did with everything else.

After all, I was the weird little fat kid who was way too smart for his own good. That meant there was something wrong with me, something that meant I would never fit in or be accepted.

Of course it was all my fault.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

My questionable life

I question everything.

And Western culture says “Good! You should!”.

But you shouldn’t. You really, really shouldn’t.

Because that kind of questioning destroys faith and annihilates the possibility of feeling safe. If you question everything, absolutely everything, then there is no solid ground to stand on, no safe haven in the storm of life, no quiet place to lay your head and go to sleep.

It makes you afraid to truly believe anything at all. Even things you should believe in. You end up associating solid belief with being trapped or exposed (or both) and so the mind keeps moving, moving, moving and you can never truly rest.

People require faith. Why? Because their knowledge is finite. Faith covers the gaps. It doesn’t have to be faith in any deity, entity, or spirituality, but it has to be something.

That whole Socratic “know that you know nothing” thing can kill you if you take it too far. The human mind cannot withstand a true understanding of how little it knows versus all it does not without some kind of counterbalancing force.

Faith also drives motivation. Motivation hinges on belief that action leads to happiness, and there is only so rational such a belief can be. There has to be a solid core of belief that remains immune to the degradation of the intellect in order to keep things moving forward. Lack of such a core renders the individual wretchedly inert.

And what is the use of questions that keep you from “error” if they also leave you helpless and depressed? It’s easy to avoid life’s potholes if you aren’t moving.

The unexamined life might not be worth living, but to me, it’s 50/50 whether or not it’s happier.

Maybe it is worth it to make more stupid mistakes if it closes the gaping screaming gibbering hole in your soul. Maybe you need faith of some kind in order to make it over life’s potholes instead of getting stuck in them.

Maybe reason can give you directions, but only faith, at least in oneself, can give you horsepower.

That’s the trick, though, isn’t it? Faith in oneself. The questioning mind denies the possibility of faith and therefore requires proof before it believes in something.

But what proof can there be in a faithless person who finds themselves in the dank dark cage of depression? The illness itself makes it hard to be good enough to oneself to encourage any kind of belief in oneself. In general, it makes you treat yourself quite badly in many ways, and is therefore anathema to the sort of self-trust that leads to faith in oneself.

I mean, who could trust a person who treats you so badly?

Others find their faith externally. Faith in God, Allah, Yahweh, the Buddha, Ganesha, and so on fills all those nasty gaps in one’s spirit and allows a feeling of wholeness that will never be found in the land of universal questioning.

Even those who have abandoned the faith of their youth retain it within them. They simply disconnected it from the dogma that was needlessly attached to it by a religious organization with its own agenda.

The source is gone, but the shape of their faith, which is the shape of their gaps, remains, holding everything together.

And for them, questioning is liberating. For them, it is safe, because deep down they know that the important part of their faith remains and their questions can only free them of stifling dogma.

They don’t even have to keep believing in God.

And when you think of it, ruthless atheism requires faith as well. Specifically, faith that you can rip out all your false beliefs without mercy or consideration and just get by on whatever’s left.

That’s like thinking you can rip out all the parts of your car that you don’t like and get to work with whatever’s left.

In fact, Western nontheistic thought has an enormous blind spot when it comes to spiritual/emotional health. The underlying assumption is that if the soul doesn’t exist, neither does the spirit and therefore one can simply ignore the consequences of a headlong and heedless pursuit of the truth.

You know, because we are all rugged intellectuals who are too macho to admit some questions can hurt us.

And that is how I have lived my life. I have taken great pride in my ability to go right to the heart of the truth no matter what. In many ways, I see things more clearly than most people. I have developed and honed those perceptions over a lifetime, and in that way, my mind grows stronger constantly.

I learn. I think. I grow. I improve.

But what use is all that if there is no faith to propel me? The best engine in the world is useless without fuel. And the nourishment the soul needs cannot be found in the cold and barren world of questioning and smothered emotions.

So a lot of intellectual compatriots of mine are stuck in the same kind of dead end that I am. They only trust that which can be verified by reason, and to be frank, that is just plain not enough.

It’s like trying to live without eating. No matter what your philosophical objections to food are, you will starve without it. Even if you had a very experience with food and have every reason to mistrust it. Even if you now hate the food of your youth because it was forced down your throat and turned out to be not nearly as nutritious as you were told.

Even if all that uis true, you still have to go find food you like, or you will die.

Well a lot of us are dying inside from lack of spiritual food, and what’s more, a lot of those people refuse to even accept the idea that food might help, or even that food is a real thing that people actually need.

In many ways, faithlessness is as massively ignorant as any religious doctrine.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Darkness and fire

I am really depressed right now.

No mytery as to why… I have had some unique stressors lately. If my ATC was low last week at this time, it’s buried the needle at E today.

The main stressor lately is wardrobe, or rather, lack thereof. First, I ripped the crotch out of one of my three pairs of pants when I tugged too hard trying to disentangle it from the agitator of our washing machine.

Then, first the cuff, then the left inside seam of one of my two remaining pairs of pants gave out.

So I am sitting here in my one remaining pair of parts. One. That’s it. One pair of pants is all that stands between me and being sartorially housebound.

This makes me feel very insecure.

And no lie, it’s a legit emergency.Anyone would be stressed out in my position. But for me, it goes much deeper. It taps into some deep issues stemming from the particular kind of childhood I had.

Specifically, neglectful. When I was only eight years old, I was put in charge of buying my own clothes. My parents would hand me the money from the monthly Child Assistance Credit check (known coloquially as the “baby bonus”) and tell me to go buy clothes for myself.

Who the hell does that to an eight year old?

Oh right, parents who wish you had never been born and are doing the best to simulate that experience.

This made me responsible not only for buying the clothes, but making sure they last.nbsp; When you know that if your pants rip, you won’t be able to buy more until next month, it makes you very self-conscious about your clothing’s durability.

And I didn’t know how to shop for clothes. I felt acutely out of place even trying. I never knew what to get when. At that age, I just didn’t have the mental hardware to put all the pieces together.nbsp;nbsp; An inventory of my clothes, how badly worn they seemed, what season it was and what it would be for the next month. It is the sort of thing that adult me would find easy and possibly even fun. But at that age, and given that every time I went clothes shopping I had a massive panic attack, plus the fact that I was a fat kid and normal clothes didn’t fit me, it was a nightmare.

That is why when a piece of clothing breaks, I get this massive burst of terror and shame. I feel like I am a kid who is in big trouble, and that isnbsp; very bad feeling. In short… It freaks me out.

And down goes my mood.

Then today, I got good news and bad news.nbsp; The good news is that I have been accepted into Kwantlen. Like there was any doubt.

The bad news is that I have to come up with $250 by July 2 for the desposit.

It is like the universe said “Well, we destroyed his clothes. What other things freak him out and destroy his mood? Oh, that’s right, MONEY and BEING HURRIED. Time for the Kwantlen letter!”

And the thing is, I knew this was coming. I was definitely told that I would need $250 for the deposit. But that information disappeared from my consciousness like all those medical appointments I keep forgetting.

And I am not truly worried about where I will get the $$$. I have a lot of options.

But the insecurity remains. I feel exposed and fragile. Just a scared little animal looking for a way out ofnbsp; the trap.

Darkness and fire. Depression and anxiety. Too little and too much.

And the Sense 8 episode where lack of Hernando drives Lito to attempt suicide didn’t help either. [1] That is probably what got my emotions to this heightned state in the first place.

But I don’t miss the numbness which might have protected me. I want to live life instead of staying out of its way and that means the numbing fog has to go. Once I reach the other side of the mood valley I am in, I will be rid of another load of emotional baggage.

And I will have gotten another piece of myself back. I am stronger than I used to be precisely to the degree that I have unburdened myself.

Catharsis is never easy (unless, I suppose, the only thing you have been suppressing is happiness[2]) but it’s always worth it.

More on this when I get home.

(—)

769 words this time. A little less than last time. But I have a lot on my mind.

I feel better for all that catharsis up there. Walking home in the cool night air with my mp3’s going on in my headphone helped too. I had a real bad emotional pressure buildup there, and writing about it really helped me release it in a safe and healthy way that makes me feel better and doesn’t involve the police.

And for that, I am so very grateful. The fact that you brave few read my soul graffiti every day fills me with humility and gratitude. Like I have said many times before, none of this could happen without you. If I had zero readers, then I wouldn’t write at all.

What would the point be? I can express myself to myself without having to write anything down. If I was ever to start the old school kind of diary, where you don’t immediately post it to the Internet for all to see, but keep it locked away somewhere, I would have to convince myself that eventually it would go someplace where people would read it, or I just would not be motivated enough to write it.

I would just ask myself, “Who the fuck cares what I think?”

And the answer, dear readers, is that you do.

And I am eternally grateful for that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. See last night’s video for details.
  2. Like Scrooge at the end of A Christmas Carol

Neither super nor villain

Sorry, no Interview with a Supervillain today. I am not happy with how the first part turned out, so I am going to give myself some time to regroup and rethink.

Basically, I feel like I got bogged down in backstory yesterday. I had not planned on going into such depth when explaining his early days, but the more I wrote, the more of it there was to write.

I guess I need to have a better sense of how long X amount of story will be and plan accordingly. I wanted to explain his origin and to get there, I felt I needed a backstory. But I didn’t expect his street gang leader days to take up the entire first part.

Ah well, to write is to learn. Perhaps I will take a crack at summarizing part 1 at the beginning of part 2, and if I can do that well enough, part 1 will become entirely unnecessary. Then SNIP.

Here in the world of nonfiction, things are going okay, I suppose. Still trying to figure out how to keep myself moving. The lesson of last Thursday, when I expended an enormous amount of creative energy and felt great, is still lingering in my mind. There must be a way to maintain that kind of energy output in a meaningful way. It would go a long way to reducing my stress level. You can’t hoard energy and all that.

A lot of depression’s sheer agony might well be the result of trapped energy. On a purely chemical level, it can’t be good to eat a lot of calories without spending most of them.

It’s increasingly clear to me that depression’s sense of lack of motivation/energy/willpower is an illusion, like so many others that depression creates in order to maintain itself.

When you think about it, feeling like you have no energy because of depression makes no sense. Depression is an illness of the mind. Bodily energy is contained in the body. There is no way that depression can actually destroy bodily energy. We depressives would, in one way, be better off if it could.

Instead, depression acts like friction. It resists movement. It blocks the path between intention and action. The energy is there. The desire is there. But depression gets in the way.

It does this, at least in part, by making you numb. Imagine trying to get up and walk around too soon after coming out of general anesthetic. Your body would feel very heavy and you would not achieve your goal.

That’s what depression is like. Only it doesn’t wear off.

So your bodily energy is trapped behind a barrier of psychic self-anesthetic. It’s there, and is trying hard to get expressed, but the depression is blocking it.

And the depressive person is caught in between. The pressure build up against the dam and there is no release. Hence, the ability of depression to make you feel like you are being squeezed between two heavy stones, or like you are ready to explode.

The conflict expresses itself in different ways.

The only solution is release, and that requires deprogramming yourself. You have to defy your depression and all its lies and do things your depression doesn’t want you to do. And you have to do this knowing that, at least at first, your depression will dig in its heels and scream and cry and do everything it can to stop you.

Still working on that one. Luckily, I am a naturally extremely stubborn person, so I have a deep well of bloody-minded resolve to call on in times like this.

Fuck you, depression. I am a rock, and you are nothing but noise and shadows. I don’t have to play your game.

So every day and in every way, I grind away at that stupid fucking dam. Progress is not linear in any reasonable timeframe. But the trend bends towards victory.

I often find myself thinking about opening up. There is so much pain and suffering in the world due to people keeping things bottled up inside themselves and then ended up trapped in a negative cycle by becoming addicted to the one thing that lets the pressure out for them.

Rage is the most obvious of the deadly releases. I know that one from my father. The pressure builds with no sane method od release, then comes out in a torrent of anger and accusation and martyrdom.

I used to have that problem myself. I would seem fine on the outside for a while then some tiny thing would set me off and suddenly I was a tower of anger, recrimination, feelings of abandonment, and lots and lots of tears.

Luckily for me, and the world I suppose, I realized what was happening and shut that shit down.

But perhaps I paid too high a price. It’s not like I learned to express my anger in a more helpful and constructive way. I just stopped expressing it entirely.

That is probably not good. At all.

Perhaps my life would have been better with the occasional meltdowns. It would have put a bit of a strain on those around me ever now and then, but at least it would have been an outlet.

Maybe the occasional flood is good for the land. I don’t know.

Then again, that’s probably how my father probably got started. Granted, his father was a sociopathic demon from hell’s worst neighborhood, so presumably his level of unexpressed rage makes mine seem like mild annoyance, but still.

Taking it out on your family is just plain wrong. Verbal abuse is still abuse. Adult don’t get to have temper tantrums.

And what strikes me most is the massive blind spot abusers have to build in order to justify their actions. They’re like an addict in that sense, I suppose. The addiction rules all, and anything which challenges it will be fought tooth and nail.

Because if the addict could see their addiction as others do, they might stop getting their fix.

And that absolutely cannot be allowed to happen.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Interview with a Supervillain, part 1

The following is a full transcript of Sterling Roche’s interviews with Anton Gardener, know to the world as the supervillain “Repton”. It took place in Visiting Room Eight at Highgate Hypermaximum Prison in Greem Oaks, Maryland. The interviews took place between May 17 and May 24, 2015.

Roche : Before we get down to business, I have a personal question to ask you, if I may.

Repton : You may.

Roche : Why did you pick me as the one person to interview you, after all these years of silence?

Repton : Because I admire your work, Mister Roche. The fact you have not risen to the top of your field yet is, no pun intended, downright criminal. I am particularly fond of your work with so-called “street gangs”. Those articles proved to me, beyond a shadow of doubt, that you are a man who can look directly into the heart of evil and remain objective.

Roche : I am flattered and honored by your praise. I am curious as to why you said “so-called ‘street gangs'”. What do you call them? And do you have a history with them?

Repton : I called them “self-organizing youth organizations”, and I have an extensive history with them. In fact, it was one of those organizations that began me on a life of crime, as it were.

Roche : Please explain.

Repton : Until I encountered my first gang at age 14, I was a happy little clean-cut private school drone like so many others. Got good grades, did what I was told, stayed away from anything that seemed socially embarrassing. I thought the best thing in life was to be respectable, and pursued that goal with diligence and focus.

Roche : I take it that changed?

Repton : Indeed it did. Once puberty took hold in me, I became restless, discontent, and sarcastic. Suddenly, the world I was brought up seemed incredibly drab and crushingly dull. And increasingly hard to endure. By the time I encountered my first gang, I was officially a “problematic” and “difficult” child in most people’s eyes. No one was more surprised by this than me.

Roche : Is that when the Bay Street Vipers recruited you?

Repton : It was the other way around. I wanted desperately to join them. I had encountered them on one of my frequent long walks, and to my young mind, they represented everything that was missing from my life. I absolutely had to join them. And they wanted nothing to do with me.

Roche : Why was that?

Repton : Let’s say that my entreaties to them were less than sophisticated. To them, I was some effete spoiled brat who wanted to do the equivalent of running away to the circus, and far more trouble than I was worth. They were probably right.

Roche : What changed that?

Repton : My first crime. I knew it would take something very impressive to gain their respect. I reasoned that anyone could steal candy from the candy store. I would steal it from the trucks it arrived on.

Roche : That seems quite bold of you.

Repton : Thank you, it was. So I hung around the back entrance of Lollipop’s, the Cadillac of candy stores in our neighborhood, and watched the trucks come and go till I found a pattern I could exploit.

Roche : And that was?

Repton : There was one delivery driver who always spent a long time chatting up one of the girls who worked behind the counter at Lollipop’s, leaving his truck entirely unguarded. It was quite simple for me to slip into the truck and boost an enormous crate of candy that was almost as big as me.

Roche : And that worked?

Repton : Like the proverbial charm. Once I showed up to school with a simply absurd amount of all kinds of chocolate and candy, word got around, and the next day I was told that the leader of the Bay Street Vipers, someone everyone called King, wanted to meet me ASAP.

Roche : And it was smooth sailing from there?

Repton : Mostly. I walked into his “office”, looked him straight in the eye, and said “Want to know how I did it?”. It turned out he did. Very much so. Negotiations for my entry into his gang went smoothly from there.

Roche : According to my research, you took King’s job soon after that.

Repton : Well yes, but not by design. I was just happy to be included. But it turns out that if you are the person with the best ideas and the most effective plans, people naturally start following you. I always made sure to show him deference and respect, but it was obvious who the de facto leader was, and it wasn’t long before it was made official.

Roche : And how did you feel about that?

Repton : Dizzy. Excited. Terrified. Wildly inadequate. Incredibly proud. And, most importantly to this narrative, I felt a feeling of true power. And I liked it. A lot.

Roche : What did you do with this new-found power?

Repton : At first, not much. But eventually, I grew into the role, and before too long, I was ruling Bay Street with an iron fist. All three blocks of it. To say we terrorized the citizens would be a vast overstatement. But we enriched ourselves and pissed off a lot of adults, and that made us very happy.

Roche : That doesn’t sound particularly evil to me.

Repton : The local shopkeepers would have vehemently disagreed. But yes, the worst we did was steal from shopkeepers that sold things kids and teens liked, then sell them at vastly lower prices. We never beat anyone up, we didn’t have anything we were trying to prove, and we made sure to spread our wealth around. We were far from the toughest gang around. But we were definitely the most popular. We thought of ourselves as a gang of merry bandits, like in Robin Hood.

Roche : So what turned you from a merry bandit into Repton?

Repton : That, my friend, is a long story. And judging by that guard’s glare, we are out of time.

End Transcript Part One

Something whatever etc.

Feeling decently good lately. Not as fun as indecently good, but it’s a lot less work.

Got some things done that had been hanging over my head for way too long. Like, for instance, cleaning the massive accumulation of 2L pop bottles that was taking over all our counter space.

All mine, of course. You have to rinse them out, or the recycling place won’t take them. Or at the very least, they will get really cranky with you. I can’t imagine it’s a fun job, so I can see why they would be cranky people.

And it would be much simpler if I just rinsed the damned things out the moment they are empty. But so far, I have not been able to instill this new habit into myself. So they build up.

Must have been at least fifty of the darn things. I drink around 7 of the things a week, so it builds up quick.

Yeah, I know, I have a habit. But it’s a harmless one. And God knows, you have to have a little satisfaction in life.

And it’s not like its a particularly heinous job. Add a little warm water, swish it around, dump it out, you’re done. I put some tunes on, took my snazzy Bluetooth external speaker with my to the kitchen, and got to work.

Twenty minutes later and I was done, and I could cross that off my list of things to do. That felt good. In fact, it felt extra good, because I really didn’t feel like doing it.

It took a real act of will to overcome my own laziness and get started. It would have been so much easier to do what I wanted to do at that time, which was to go take a nap.

But I had gone to the trouble of doing my blogging in the afternoon so there would be no chance of a “lack of time” excuse. And whether or not I feel like doing something has almost no relation to whether or not I will enjoy doing it.

Things are almost never as bad as my pouty, spoiled inner child would have me believe. Once you stop fighting yourself, you find most of the badness goes away. Stop kicking and screaming and get on with it, you will be a lot happier.

My sleep life has been more disturbed lately. No specific dreams remembered for me to transcribe (you’re welcome). But I have the very distinct feeling that things have been more stormy than usual in this haunted head of mine.

I am evicting ghosts as fast as I can. But it takes time.

Right now, I am pretty sleepy. This makes no sense, as I have had tons of sleep. But my body wants more, or at least, things it does. This is not the first times this has happened, but it’s probably the first time it’s happened in a while.

Maybe I have more dreaming to do. My dreams, they want me.

And sometimes, that really scares me. I don’t know if anyone else fears their dream world like I do. Probably they don’t even think about their dream life much. Sometimes they remember a dream and think “Well, that was weird!”. Maybe they tell a friend about it, maybe not. But it’s not something that has a huge effect on their life.

But when I get into this mental space, it feels like my dreams want to swallow me alive and never let go. Like they are exterting a terrible gravity over me. And it would be so easy to let go of my perch and let it take me back to the center.

But I have things to do.

After I am done blogging, I will still have a video to make. And then there;s supper, then this month’s BCSFA party. Then hanging out with Le Gang.

Really wish I had soem diet cola right about now. I could use some artificial energy.

Geez, I’m too mentally drained to even think of deep angsty stuff to overanalyze. I want more sleep, fucker. I’m not done yet.

Oh well. When I am done tippity tappity typing up this here blog entry, I will lay down for a bit. Hopefully I won’t fall asleep and sleep so long that I don’t have time to do a video before leaving for the evening’s adventures.

Then again, if that happens, I could just take video of tonight’s meeting and make that tonight’s video after some editing. You know, as a last ditch plan.

Hmmm. Last ditch. I bet that one comes from World War I. It would be the last moment when you can “ditch”, which back then meant getting out of your plane alive via parachuting.

On the other hand, it could have something to do with actual ditches. That’s the problem with this kind of “folk etymology”. It’s not hard to come up with a plausible sounding theory that people will readily accept and believe, even though it’s based on nothing but an intelligent guess.

Instead of, you know, facts and evidence and research and all that unsexy, unfun stuff.

Listened to a podcast about storytelling from an evolutionary point of view. What is the Darwinian advantage of storytelling? Why do we love stories so much?

Nonfiction is easy. It shares information. The tribe that shared knowledge this way has a huge advantage over ones that kept everything to themselves.

But that is less storytelling and more like education. What of fiction?

Here’s the problem with that question : fiction is a recent invention. For most of human history, there was no such thing as fiction because people had a far more flexible idea of reality.

If someone arrives in your village and tells tales of strange people and heroic deeds in some far off land, you have no reason to think they are lying, and if it’s a good story, you have an incentive to believe it.

And believing it does you no harm and makes the world seem like a more exciting sense, so why not believe?

And thus it is with all media.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.