That’s how I feel right now. Part of me is fighting really hard to be positive, but meeting stiff resistance from the paralytic ennui and despair of depression, and the result is a constant balancing act between depression and mania.

So how’s YOUR head doing? Because it’s all fucked up in here.

Hopefully, now that I have eaten, I will be able to settle down and attain some kind of stable mood. Doesn’t seem likely right at the moment, but it is possible.

But the odds are that I will do what I always end up doing : plowing ahead by sheer determination, ignoring the chaos inside my cranium, and get through my day one step at a time.

Fuck the wind. Fuck the rain. Fuck the cold. Fuck the thunder AND the lightning. I will continue to put one foot in front of the other no matter what.

And all the time, the world happens around me, and I don’t feel a thing.

Just like in this video.

That’s the cost of being Numb.

First time I saw that video, I connected with it (and the song, of course). That’s pretty much exactly what depression is like. You keep going, and life happens around you, but nothing really gets through. And you sit there, numb yet hurting, feeling completely alone, no matter what the actual truth of your life is. The whole world seems to be made of DON’T. Everything is poisonous and boobytrapped and wrong. There is no safety, only an endless list of things not to do.

Eventually, you just stop trying anything. What’s the point? Nothing is good. Nothing is worth the cost. Your only hope is to do as little as possible and shut the world out as much as you possibly can.

That’s when you learn that despair can be a blessed relief.

Sometimes I look out at the world with reptilian eyes, wondering with perfect detachment what all those warm blooded mammals are doing in their hot and urgent lives, and it all seems so strange to me. What must that be like, to be alive inside? How can it possibly be worth all the trouble and the stress? It’s so much better to be safe in my isolation, observing and analyzing and finding patterns, knowing that no matter how close I get to that hot and stimulating world, I will be safe inside my sheath of ice. I might even laugh at all those silly people out there, living their crazed lives of contrasts and collisions, and all the while the lizard inside me moves like the ultimate anthropologist through the herd, unmolested.

Then comes the contempt and loathing. Fuck all you goddamned people. You all can just go to hell. None of you were ever truly there for me. So fuck you all, individually and as a group. You won’t let me in, I won’t let you in to hurt me, then. You can rot, die, and roast eternally for all I care.

Time to give all the coldness inside me back to the world, with a vengeance. Maybe then I will be able to find room for some wholesome healing in my heart.

It shock me how much loathing and contempt I have inside me. It doesn’t fit my self-image at all. But that is what isolation does to a person. You end up all frostbitten, ice-scraped, filthy meat soaking in ten Spring’s worth of runoff inside. Nothing can get in, so nothing can get out, and all your pain, loneliness, and heartache just keeps building up until you feel like you are going to drown in it.

And buried deep inside is a voice just screaming and screaming where nobody, not even you, can hear.

And you sometimes wonder if you should just let yourself fall apart. End the slow death march to a pointless and worthless grave, withdraw from reality entirely, and let the world do what it will with you.

Catatonics have very few worries, and nobody expects anything of them. Bliss.

Either that, or do something extremely and vividly crazy to force the world to pay attention to you for once. Walk naked into a police station and take a shit on the floor while maintaining eye contact. Throw bowling balls off an overpass into rush hour traffic and then pretend all the chaos and mayhem that ensues has nothing to do with you.

Those poor people! Someone should do something to protect them from people like me. What a shame.

Or even take some hostages and when the cops show up, make absurd, demeaning, and downright disturbing demands of the authorities. I’ll let them go if you get ten men to ejaculate simultaneously on live TV.

You have to admit, the ratings on that would be through the ROOF.

So the reptile becomes the maniac. Guess we weren’t that safe after all. Turns out that rather than a peaceful and bemused observer, you are that most dangerous of beasts, the intelligent lunatic. Detachment and peace? Bullshit. That only leads to lunacy and derangement as you try to blame and punish the world for the isolation you, yourself have imposed yourself.

The world does not owe you people willing to crawl through the minefield of your defenses to deliver some warmth to you despite how hard you fight it. It’s a crazy thing to expect of anyone and an even more insane yardstick by which to measure the world.

At some point, it’s going to have to be you that opens the door. People can knock, but only you can let them in, and if you don’t, eventually they will give up and go away.

And you can’t fault them for that.

Once you realize that it is the terror of letting things in that is the real source of your pain, you can throw away all the anger and pain and concentrate on overcoming yourself.

Only then can you join the rest of the world in the sunshine and the rain.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Guess what I had for dinner and what I watched while I was eating it?

Decided it was KFC’s turn tonight. And there is definitely something changing about me, because I ordered a four piece Big Box meal and I didn’t even slow down till the last piece.

And not that long ago, even a single piece of fried chicken made me feel like I had guzzled used bacon grease. Now, apparently, I am insatiable.

It could be a vitamin B12 thing, I suppose. It’s my body’s way of saying EATING MORE MEAT DAMMIT. Give me animal products! Meat! Dairy! Eggs! Anything! I need B12 you fat fool!

Yes, my body fat-shames me. Oh well. Ours has never been a happy relationship.

And now, triptophan^[1] battles it out with caffeine in my bloodstream, making me feel alert and sleepy at the same time. I might end up having to do this blog entry in halves if the triptophan (plus the lovely heat coming from the wall heater) wins the day.

I hate doing that, though. I want my blog entries to be a single…. thing. A single rambling, meandering, incoherent thing, but still…. a thing.

Going back to something I have stopped working on, even if the thing is far from finished, is physically painful to me. I clearly have some weird shit going on in my brain concerning what exactly it is I am doing when I write.

I can’t escape the awful truth. I have danced around it for years now, never quite coming out and saying it, but the brutal truth is that, on a deep psychological level, writing for me is…

…an act of elimination. (I’m so sorry. )

The Freudian signposts are all there. When I write, I am pushing out what is inside of me. Often, that is the stuff I won’t went to be in my mind any more. And after I stop, I never want to see it again.

The very idea of going back grosses me out. Unspeakably so. So when I am done, I move on as fast as I can and never ever look back.

Well that’s not entirely true. If it was, I would not have been able to collect all 40 of my short stories together without puking. So presumably, after a certain time, a form of mental detachment occurs, and I can stands to see a story or whatnot again.

In fact, I am often quite pleased with what I have written. But it takes a long time.

Hmmm. Something shady is going on. I ordered my new computer last night, and everything seemed to be in order. Then at 3 PM today, I get an email from someone named Jenny Huang saying that my credit card had been declined, and would I like to resubmit my credit card information to her, over email.

Or if not, she could always call me!

I don’t fucking think so. Nobody honest ever asks you for your credit card info over email, and the phone is hardly any more secure. Like I would be able to tell if the person on the other end of the line really worked for NCIX or not!

I have contacted NCIX about it. But I am growing very suspicious. This seems very much like a scam. Like someone has inserted themselves into the NCIX online ordering process somewhere in order to steal credit card information and resell it at profit.

Well fuck THAT. I can buy a computer from a lot of places. It doesn’t have to be NCIX. If they are compromised like this, I don’t dare trust them.

I am sure lots of local businesses would love to sell me a computer. I like NCIX… it strikes me as a by geeks for geeks kind of place, and those are the people I trust to sell me a decent computer because if they don’t, their geeky customers will figure it out and come back with highly technically correct complaints.

What’s worse, it would make them seem like they didn’t know how to put a computer together properly, and that would mean they were inferior geeks, and that is just plain unacceptable.

I know how techie type geeks think. They would rather die than have their skills at something as “simple” as PC assembly be questioned.

But now I wonder. I really hope their security hasn’t been compromised so badly that it makes it impossible to order from them. I would rather they got my business…. but there’s a trust issue now.

Not much else happening in my life. Thinking of getting my monitor (I have to get a new monitor too because VGA is barely even supported any more) from Monitor King, another local business.

I would love to say I shop locally when I can purely out of some noble desire to keep my money out of the clutches of sociopathic megacorps, but the truth is, I just want to be able to meet the person who is selling me something and connect with them on a (slightly) personal level so that I know who is getting my money, and they know who they would, potentially, be ripping off.

That way, neither of us is just some numbers on a screen. I truly believe that makes both sides of the transaction more honest. There are a lot of immoral acts that most people would never do if it meant hurting someone right in front of them, but might just consider if all they had to do was use their computer like they normally do, typing in things and clicking on things, in a way that makes money go to them.

I think that’s the main reason why the 1 percent can make morally reprehensible decisions so easily. These people are not, as individuals, sociopaths. I am sure they pet puppies, treat their children like gold, and truly believe something should be done to help the homeless.

But actions unconscionable on a personal level become quite acceptable when you know you will never, ever, ever see the consequences of your actions.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.