I am in a lousy fucking mood.

Dunno why. It’s not like something catastrophic or even mildly upsetting has happened. My blood sugar isn’t low, as far as I can tell, and I am getting awesome sleep these days. I should be at least doing decently.

But no, I feel like crap. I feel like I want to snap and growl at people. My head aches, my muscles ache, my joints ache. I feel painfully swollen all over. And it has put me in foul mood.

I really hate the whole world right now, because everything in it hurts me.

I am sure this is a transient thing. I will probably feel better once I have been upright and hydrating for a while. This too will pass, and all that.

But I decided to write about it anyhow because I wanted to capture it in words. And I wanted to express my cranky feelings in a way that doesn’t hurt anybody.

As you all know quite well by now, I have taken a lifelong oath never to take my negative feelings out on others. That’s what my father did to us, and I absolutely cannot do it if I have any fucking say about it.

And, possibly to a fault, I do.

Is there such a thing as too much self-control? I feel like there is. You can do yourself a lot of harm with that iron self control business. Happy people probably find the happy medium, letting their emotions rule some of the time and saving the really harsh inner suppression for important occasions when there is a lot at stake.

But me, I suppress nearly everything. And especially anger. Like I said before, I don’t know how to express anger in a healthy way. It’s still 90 percent nothing and 10 percent explosion with me. The amount of latent anger I have in me due to all the pain and loneliness that I didn’t even have the ability to acknowledge to myself at the time is staggering, and if I think about it, it becomes obvious that this anger/pain reservoir is a major source of my depression.

Depression is anger turned inwards, after all. You take it out on yourself. And then you take the anger from THAT out on yourself. And so on until you have destroyed yourself like a mad golem.

My therapist thinks I should scream into a pillow or something like that in order to express it all. And he’s probably right. That might well do me a lot of good.

But I’m scared. My rage frightens me. And it’s so much easier (not better, just easier) to keep on turning my head away from it and pretending it isn’t there. I feel like if I confront it, it will explode like an atom bomb and blast me and everyone around me to pieces. Just thinking about my anger makes me feel like going on some kind of rampage of destruction.

And those are generally a bad idea.

I need some sort of emotional bomb squad to come in and disarm my anger nuke, and then maybe take it somewhere safe for a controlled explosion in a blast chamber somewhere.

Even seen one of those? They are so cool.

But of course, no such bomb squad exists. Nobody else can come in and make it so that I don’t have to deal with it myself. It’s my anger, my pain, and my wounds. Nobody can deal with them but me.

So fuck it.

Okay, not really. I want all that shit gone and for that it’s either therapy or ayuasca(sp?).

Maybe I should go find a fight worth fighting, and work it out that way. I could be a powerful force for any given cause, what with my verbal and emotive skills and deep personal convictions. But deep down I am afraid that would never be able to get people to take me seriously enough in order to get to show what I could do.

Or that it doesn’t matter how passionate and potent you are, you still have to pay your dues and work your way up, and I am not sure I could be that patient. If that was the deal, I would have to strike out on my own.

I suppose there is nothing keeping me from doing that anyhow, and to hell with the people in charge of the official part of crusading for causes. But then I would have to choose a cause and run with it, and we all know that is not going to happen.

There’s so many things which could benefit from my putting the right memes out there. That’s what I want the most. To be able to destroy bad ideas with good ones. To free people from beliefs they know deep down are wrong but can’t find a way out of. To do the articulation for people who have something to say but don’t know how to say it.

That is, I think, my highest calling. Being a thought leader. A visionary. And I could go on and on about how I don’t know how to get started, or how to get people to take me seriously, or whatever, but we all know knowledge has little to do with it.

It’s that option paralysis thing again. My creative mind sees so many possibilities. Too many. I just can’t choose.

The best I can do is put myself in a position where life can help me choose. Try a bunch of things and go with whatever seems to work out the best. Or whatever I can get paid to do. Whatever.

Going back to school should inject some momentum into my life. And soak up my excess mental energy, at least some of it. Getting organized enough to get to classes, going to the class, doing the classwork. That should take up my time.

Oh shit. I was going to do a video roundup today. I always forget!

I will do it when I talk to you nice people tomorrow.

Ya know I am low on mental energy when I name my day’s column after the day of the week it’s on.

Anyhoo. Just finished watching the Penguins Of Madagascar movie. For the uninitiated, the Madagascar series of animated movies have a team of four penguins who are quite funny and popular in them, and they got their own movie.

Kind of like the Minions from the Despicable Me series.

Quick review : Recommended! It’s not hilarious or amazingly moving, but I enjoyed it. The characters are engaging and fun. The humour is quick and at times even witty. Animation is, to my eyes, superb. Not bad for a kids’ movie.

John Malkovitch voices the villain, a penguin-hating octopus named Dave. Nice to see him doing voice work. It allows him to be funny and wacky and fun without his high inherent creepiness factor making it all weird.

So yeah. Good flick.

But tonight, I force myself to go back to talking about myself. It’s been a nice little vacation from myself, this time of reviewing movies I just finishes, and I will do it more in the future.

But self-therapy takes precedent. Even though part of me is screaming for me to take the easy way out.

Yell all you want. I got stuff to work on.

Something odd happened late Wednesday night/early Thursday morning. My week had been (for me) nicely busy, and then Thursday was going to be a day with no particular “thing” to do, and that should have been a good thing.

But I was pondering the day to come before bed on Wednesday night, and I had the thought “I am not looking forward to figuring out what to do with myself tomorrow.”, and with that thought, it was like something that I had been holding back without knowing it broke loose and flooded into my mind like an avalanche.

It was this heavy, lugubrious feeling, and at first I couldn’t identify it. But when I was dealing with it the next day, I soon recognized the feeling.

It was the feeling of time being something to endure rather than something to enjoy or even to use. Without realizing it, I had been suppressing that feeling and finding at least some meaning in my days for a long time, but it had been building in the back of my mind for a long long time, so that by the time Thursday night rolled around, all it took was a thought to let it loose.

Can’t say I am too happy with it coming back. Especially because it brought its favorite tool with it : sleepiness. The urge to fast forward life via sleep (because what’s the point of staying awake? For what?) is back, and I really, really didn’t miss it.

The best thing I can say is that its return has made me keenly aware of it and able to react against it, and that’s the first crucial step in overcoming it permanently.

Now I could just be overdramatizing things. I have had these sleepy patches before without it being a catastrophe. Maybe this is just one of them, and I have been sleeping a lot because I need to sleep a lot in order to catch up on my REM sleep.

Kind of hoped the CPAP would take care of that, actually. But as I learned at my Coastal Sleep appointment yesterday, my CPAP use has practically eliminated my sleep apnea. With the adjustments to the setting, my sleep lady Marielle and I hope to eliminate it completely so that I will be actually sleeping like a normal person for possibly the first time in my life.

So I dunno. Maybe this is my last REM backlog burn-through. But I somehow doubt it. As I have been using the CPAP, I have felt like there was something missing from my sleep, something I wasn’t getting. This feeling of deficit, in turn, would make me want to sleep without the CPAP on.

Hence my not quite sufficient compliance rate. In order for the BC government to buy me this CPAP device, my compliance rate, which is defined as how much I use it for four hours or more in a row, has to be at least 80 percent, and right now it is only 71 percent. So I will try to use it more from now on.

But the question remains : what the heck am I missing? I think it must be REM sleep. So either I have a sleep issue entirely unrelated to my sleep apnea, which would really suck, or the CPAP machine is somehow messing with my REM sleep.

I am pretty sure it must be the former, because I have had this cycle of low REM leading to “sleepy days” for a long time. I thought it was related to my sleep apnea, but maybe not. Maybe there is some primal psychological tension in my mind, some excess of left-brained control over the right, that makes it hard for me to let dreams happen, even in sleep.

It’s sad how plausible that is to me. At least I know I am too left-brained for my own good.

As often happens during these sleepy times, I find myself getting really mad at the sleepiness. I don’t want to slumber through life, I want to live through it. But sleep is so tempting an escape.

Probably my best course is to stop fighting it and just sleep as much as my body wants me to sleep until I am done. The idea that sleeping a lot represents a form of moral backsliding is probably bad for me. It’s just another example of how depression sets up these situations in the mind where the task is defined so rigidly and with such absurdly high standards that failure is guaranteed, thus protecting the depression’s hold on you by convincing you that trying is futile.

My sentences are just crazy complicated tonight.

Anyhoo, I will do what I can about not being so judgmental about myself, and instead letting things work themselves out.

Hopefully, going to Kwantlen 4 days a week will help work some of this shit out.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.