This has not been a very productive weekend.

And I started off with such great hopes. I had three days off in a row and I planned to use that time to get caughtt up on homework and really get out ahead of life for a change.

But that ain’t gonna happen. I kept trying to get started but things kept getting in the way, and the sad truth is that because of my depression, it doesn’t take too many stumbles over hurdles before I lose my motivation entirely, and then nothing gets done at all.

And that’s the story of this weekend. I was planning to get this major project started for my Story Editing class. But after a) finding out it was due this Wednesday then b) finding out which handout it was on, I had to then c) get the script I am supposed to be analyzing, and I have not managed to do that yet. All I know is that it is supposed to be in my email from about a month ago, but I have checked both my school and my personal email, and nada.

So I can’t’get started there until I sort that whole mess out.

Then I figured I would do the reading and generating notes for my next TV Pilot 2 class. But the scripts in question will not be due till tomorrow at 1, and when I checked last night, none of them had been posted yet.

And so now I don’t know what I am doing. If I was a more healthy and driven person, I would be able to simply steamroller over this kind of obstacle and keep going till I got some things done. Things that could make me feel proud and accomplished. Thing that would drain  my excess mental energy and give me some mental space to put myself together and maybe even feel good for a while.

It’s funny how perverse depression is. Having too much energy without the ability to find a strong enough outlet for it can end up looking and feeling a lot like having none at all. That’s because when that energy builds up and can’t be released, it causes mental pain, and pain without apparent cause or hope of solution is the exact recipe for despair.

So you stop trying to express it and find ways to deal with the pain instead. It doesn’t take long before you have forgotten what the original point of the game was and all you remember is the pain that feels like it’s been there forever.

This leads to the truly paradoxical phenomenon of lapsing into a low energy output mode because things which require more energy than the very minimum make the energy want to come out, and because the system is blocked, as far as you can tell that can only cause pain. Might even awaken all those latent emotions and make them want to express themselves, and we can’t have that. So we hide, and suppress.

Running out of insulin has not helped things. My blood sugar has to be through the roof by now, and that always sucks. Not only is it terrible for my long term health, it leaves me feeling very ill and icky and gross and faintly nauseated.

And that, of course, makes me depressed.

So I am not feeling very good about myself right now. I know I will get over it, but at the moment I loathe myself for being so lazy and useless for getting so little done.

And that’s not the kind of person I want to be. I want to get my shit together and pour my energies into the world and hence buy myself some peace of mind and pride of accomplishment and productivity. I want to be able to live life instead of merely surviving it. I want to be healthy and strong.

I really thought I had a tube of insulin left. Otherwise I would have picked up more on Thursday. I mean, I walk right past my pharmacy every time I come home from school. It is no big deal at all to just go in and pick up some more.

But no, I was convinced I had one more tube, then when I went to get said tube last night, I learned of my error. And the thing is, I had already eaten a few naughty things that day. I had actually been planning on taking double the usual dose. Instead…. nothing.

So until I pick up more tomorrow after class, I have to go around feeling crappy with maple syrup for blood and sweat that makes me feel like I have been lightly glazed, like a honey dipped donut. It’s very gross and highly dispiriting.I feel icky all over.

Oh well, I will concentrate on this icky feeling the next time I feel like eating the bad things. It’s just not worth it, especially when I have not had much physical energy to charge my metabolism and make it better able to handle that kind of thing.

God damn diabetes sucks. I had no idea how good I had it when I could eat what I liked without any serious consequences. There was a time I could eat a whole box of cookies if I felt like it and the worst possible consequence was a sugar crash.

But now I am paying the price. That’s the name of the game when you are a fat person. Eventually, as you get older and your metabolism slows down, being fat comes with more and more consequences.

That’s why so many of us don’t make it to 50.

Myself, I hope I get to the point where I have the money for a gym membership and the means to get to it and back without it being a huge hassle. It might seem crazy to need a drive to the gym – why not just walk there as part of your workout – but the truth is that I would need to get there by car, at least at first, otherwise I would not have enough motivation left to actually go in and work out by the time I got there.

Hopefully, that would change once I had worked out enough to be healthier.

But until I have the $ and free time for that, I will just keep hanging on.

That’s one thing I know I am good at.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Life is a journey. You start it when you’re born and end it when you die, and for that time in between, there is neither departure nor arrival. Just another day floating down the river of time which relentlessly bears us forward towards oblivion without mercy or consideration.

And no matter how badly we want it to, it can never stop or go backwards. Time only goes in one direction, and that is forward. To cling to the past is to place oneself at the mercy of what is to come in favour of facing backwards and pretending the future isn’t happening.

But the future will happen whether we like it or not. The only use of the past is to guide us towards a better future. We need not worry about letting go of the past, for it will always be with us. It is, in fact, the foundation of the present, and we can no more escape it than a dog can run away from its tail.

Therefore there is no need to cling to it and keep it alive in our minds. Letting go of the past doesn’t mean forgetting it or killing that which was good in it.

It simply means that you have stopped pretending you can stop or reverse time, and you recognize that you will have a better tomorrow if you concentrate on today.

I have a hard time with that, because I have the equal but opposite problem : I tend to focus on the future instead of the present. My mind’s eye is tragically farsighted, and I too tend to be at the mercy of events because I see only the big picture made of big ideas with implications far into the future.

I suppose there might be some kind of marginal advantage to being future oriented over being stuck in the past. It certainly allows one to avoid a lot of (but not all of) the sorts of future-wrecking decisions that present oriented people are prone to, and we can at least see and avoid the kind of potholes that the past oriented people fall into.

But it’s still a way to avoid having to be mentally present in the real world. It’s still escapism. And escapism taken to extremes is a deadly trap, where one responds to problems by mentally escaping into one’s preferred mode of distraction, thus ignoring reality and making more bad things happen in the future.

At some point, the cycle has to end. You have to Be Here Now and stay with something in the present long enough to see it through. Escapism is an addiction, and therefore a very hard habit to break. I am nowhere near shaking it yet.

But I make progress.

Of course, sometimes we cling to the past, and sometimes the past clings to us. That’s how I feel about my life right now. I want to move on very badly, but my road to the future involves a lot of returning to my past in order to deal with all the emotions I shoved to the side for all those years.

And it gets very tiring sometimes. I wish I could just cut the ties that bind me to my terrible past and move on. But the only way I have found to be free of the past is to deal with it. Otherwise, like an unpaid bill, it’s just going to keep showing up and getting worse every single time. Might as well save yourself the hassle.

It doesn’t seem to be something I can do by thinking, though. Like I have said many times before, my answers do not lie in the circle of light cast by my powers of reason. Turning said light inwards accomplishes little. I can analyze myself all day and half the night, and I will come up with all kinds of explanations for why I am how I am.

But I won’t find any actual solutions. What progress can be made that way is geologically slow, like trying to use a glacier as a pepper mill. Counterintuitively (at least for a cerebral type like me), sometimes figuring things out rationally can be the longest and least efficient path. The mind in a more mystical mode can make connections directly, while slow and awkward reason has to take the long way to the same connection every single time.

One of the things I talked about in therapy yesterday was the cold hard path of life I am on. It is the path of the philosopher, the path which permits no delusions, no matter how much they might help. A path which demands evidence for all things and denies even the slightest bit of faith. A path that demands that things make sense, or be rejected.

And it all sounds good on paper. One can even paint a picture of oneself as a rugged truth warrior living the austere live of an epistemological ascetic, a stoic of the mind, forever denying themselves the worldly illusions that other, lesser beings cling to for comfort in favour of the long an arduous path of the truth-seeker.

But me, I would rather be happy.

Unfortunately, I have no choice but to travel this long hard cold road of mine because I am incapable of consciously accepting anything on faith. There’s just no room for that in my worldview. The entire structure of my mind is based on a logically consistent and contiguous set of beliefs which is always being updated, compacted, and integrated in order to make it as efficient and functional as possible.

Even the basic assumptions that underlie the entire structure and which are not, in and of themselves, rational are integrated into the larger structure in a logical way. And there is always the possibility that even those assumptions might get minimized or reduced by a superior structure with even fewer assumptions.

And all that is very very good…. for being right.

But there’s not a damned thing it can do about being happy.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Had therapy for the first time in a month today. I really needed it. In fact, I could use three more sessions in a row just to deal with all the psychological trash and spiritual toxins that have accumulated in this tired old soul of mine lately.

I really feel like life is taking more out of me than it replaces lately. I am running a defecit of one kind or another, and I can’t feel the sunlight on my face right now.

I tell myself : There’s sunshine in my heart. It’s always there.

But I’m not there yet. Not all the way.

The sunshine goes away
and I freeze to death for another day.

And when the sun returns
My skin get warm but my frostbite burns

The empty spaces in question are the ones caused by the chemical reality of my depression. One thing all expressions of depression have in common is a sense of their being a great emptiness inside you, a screaming silence that is worse than any pain.

Because it’s not pain. It’s death. And death is terrifying.

I was trying to explain this idea to my therapist today. I am not sure I got it across. It didn’t necessarily come out in as elegant and effective form at that time. I was just bailing out my soul as fast as I could.

And while there were no big breakthrough or life transforming revelations, I am pretty sure my boat does not lie as heavy and low as it did before today.

I remember when I first started on Paxil, my first and best antidepressant, over a decade ago. At first, all it did was give me a very disconnected, numb feeling, which wasn’t very fun but was noticeably better than the maelstrom of depression that had been destroying me at the time. And that was enough to keep me taking it. Well, that, and the efficacy of the St. John’s Wort I had already been taking that got me in good enough shape to get myself a family doctor and go to him to get the Paxil.

Eventually, though, the profound numbing faded away slowly and the real effect became evident : the hole in my soul finally closed. I no longer felt like the wind blew right through me and I was absolutely helpless before the storm. I still felt empty inside, but the wound was closed and I had a tiny island of stability to stand on.

Words cannot describe how huge a difference that made. Suddenly, I could think. Really think. It was like waking up when you didn’t even know you were asleep. And all the recovery I have done since then has continued that process.

It’s just that there’s so much to do
And I’m tired of sleeping

Look at me, I’m multimedia.

Of course, there’s benefits to having so much empty space inside. It lets you handle big ideas that represent bigger pieces of the puzzle than other people can see because you have the room to house and work on the idea, and the incentive to do so because big idea can fill up those empty space, at least for a while.

Not all of my emptiness is chemical, though. A too-rapid re-uptake of serotonin explains a lot and it is the lack of serotonin in the system that it is the root cause of depression (and maybe a lot of other things too).

But I think there’s another form of blankness that has a lot more to do with the places were certain things are meant to go but never got recorded because I never had anything to record. Nothing that got through, anyhow.

So there’s the space where my social development was supposed to be. That slate is still mostly blank. I have, arguably, never learned how to make friends (I just end up with them by accident) or how to get along with people outside my small group of peers or how to deal with interpersonal politics or any of that.

And my sex/romance slate is almost entirely blank too. I’ve barely even dated. I have never actually been in a relationship. I have never been in the right position to attract a mate. When I try dating websites, other people’s profiles bore me and depress me and nobody – I mean nobody, not even creepy weirdos – responds to my profile.

The fact that I refuse to present a false “normal” picture of myself might have something to do with that. The very idea nauseates me. I absolutely refuse to pretend to me someone I am not. There’s no point in it anyway. Whoever I attract is going to have to deal with the real me, the radiant wacky genius with the gigavolt IQ and Godzilla sized personality who is also a very delicate flower that longs to bloom just for you.

Oh, and has a head full of crazy that might spill out at any moment.

But also with an enormous capacity for affection, loyalty, tenderness, kindness, and just plain lovey dovey warm gooey LOVE as well.

I have so much love to give. I could be so good for the right person. But my craziness keeps me in the dark, away from people, new people especially. And the only way to find love to his meet new people. That’s it. Keeping meeting new people till you find the one you click with, and who clicks back.

It’s mindless but it works.

Dating sites help narrow the field somewhat. They can at least help normal people find other people who work for them on paper. That can create a very handy short list.

But not me. My criterion for compatibility don’t appear on the average dating profile. Profiles don’t tell me if you are fun, or interesting, or have a lively and curious intellect. They don’t tell me what you have going on between your ears, or if you can handle a powerful love like mine.

That’s why I am so happy that me and Ross reconnected.

We’re both people who, romantically speaking, are hard to shop for.

I just hope we can make it work.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I’m going to do something fairly unusual for me tonight and piggyback on other people’s content. But when I saw this article, I immediately knew I had to riff off it.

The article in question is entitled “30 Things People Don’t Realize You’re Doing Because of Your Depression” and it’s from the fairly amazing website The Mighty, which seems to be a blog for giving people dealing with various disabilities, like autism or mental illness, a very positive message of hope and empowerment and validation.

As is the case with a lot of Internet articles, it’s also “borrowed” content, because it’s just a compilation of answers to a certain Reddit question.

The Internet is so cannibalistic!

Anyhow, here are my responses to some of the answers that resonated with me :

1. “In social situations, some people don’t realize I withdraw or don’t speak much because of depression. Instead, they think I’m being rude or purposefully antisocial.” — Laura B.

I have run into this in my life. Not as much as a lot of depressives, because I don’t find myself tongue tied or afraid to speak as often as some people. I have never been shy in that way. If anything, I go a little too far in the other direction. I feel compelled to participate in conversations by my enormous need for connection… and attention, of course. I am not sure I am capable of just sitting back and letting other people do the talking. I can listen to someone, but it’s active listening, where I say little things to reassure the person that I am picking up what they are putting down.

Purely passive listening would be very difficult for me. It just wouldn’t be stimulating enough. My mind would automatically try to tune it out.

Anyhow, despite this, I have had people mistake my shyness for aloofness or a sense of superiority. I suppose that’s the only explanation that makes sense to an extrovert, or a very over-sensitive introvert who thinks everything is always about them.

But that’s bullshit, of course. I have distilled that down into a mantra that I have been using to quell my fears lately : “Nobody is watching. Nobody cares. ”

And it’s true.

“I struggle to get out of bed, sometimes for hours. Then just the thought of taking a shower is exhausting. If I manage to do that, I am ready for a nap. People don’t understand, but anxiety and depression is exhausting, much like an actual physical fight with a professional boxer.” — Juli J.

And how. It’s hard to convey the sheer power drain of depression to someone who has never experienced it. I guess the closest comparison is to the kind of exhaustion you get from having a really harsh flu.

Except that results in you fighting off the infection. Depressive exhaustion doesn’t result in anything but more exhaustion.

But you look perfectly healthy. You don’t act crazy. Depression is one of the most invisible of invisible illnesses. There is nothing you can point to that would seem like evidence of illness to the average person. No rash, no wheelchair, no oxygen tent.

So it is easy for an average person to conclude that we are simply lazy. Or too into ourselves. Or some other normalcy-level thing.

They are not malicious. They simply lack understanding.

8. “I don’t like talking on the phone. I prefer to text. Less pressure there. Also being anti-social. Not because I don’t like being around people, but because I’m pretty sure everyone can’t stand me.” — Meghan B.

Same here. I don’t like talking on the phone. Text is more my speed. Part of my depression slash social anxiety is being incredible sensitive to social stimuli. Phone calls are too realtime, too stimulating, too real. Text is safely virtualized and hence almost completely a product of imagination.

And I feel safe in my imagination.

After all, I grew up there.

13. “Answering slowly. It makes my brain run slower, and I can’t think of the answers to the questions as quickly. Especially when someone is asking what I want to do – I don’t really want anything. I isolate myself so I don’t have to be forced into a situation where I have to respond because it’s exhausting.” — Erin W.

I have been there. I’m still there, in fact, but to a far lesser extent than before. With me, it’s complicated, because in some ways I am very quick-witted and can answer questions rapidly and with confidence.

But in other ways – especially with questions like “what do you want?” – I am completely thrown off track and it takes me a while to come up with an answer.

To me, it seems like healthy people carry a list of things they want in their head at all times. Either that, or they just don’t think about their answers much.

16. “Not keeping in touch with anyone, bad personal hygiene and extremely bad reactions to seemingly trivial things.” — Jenny B.

Yes to the first two things. I am terrible at keeping in touch with people. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I have trouble imagining anyone actually wanting to hear from me. I always feel like people would respond to my reaching out by thinking “Oh god, not this loser again. I’d just managed to forget all about him. Now I have to deal with him again. I wish he would just fuck off permanently. ”

It’s a crazy thing to think. And I am crazy.

As for the bad personal hygiene, it’s a daily struggle. Something as simple as taking a shower can seem like a trip through the jungles of Borneo to me sometimes. It;s such a large increase in stimulation levels and such a departure from my tiny comfort zone of bum in seat in front of the computer. It can really loom large, and dark.

Self-care is one of the first casualties of depression. Because it’s hard to take care of yourself when you don’t care about yourself.

In fact, you hate yourself.

30. “Keeping the house dark is a comfort thing for me. People always point it out, like, ‘No wonder you’re so depressed. You need to let some light in.’ Darkness in my living space makes me feel comfortable, almost like I’m not alone. Good days, I’m all about the sunshine!” — Michelle T.

I can sympathize. A relative of mine used to sit in a dark house all alone when a glass of whiskey in his hand due to his depression. It is all about reducing your stimulus level as an unconscious attempt to control the anxiety stimulus provokes.

It’s like always being a pot that is almost boiling over. Anything that raises the temperature must be suppressed. And nothing can be let in, either.

I sometimes think that the residents of the House of Usher were depressives.

Well, those are my thoughts for the night.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow!

…come large responsibilities.

Been thinking about my size lately, and not merely in the sense of my obesity. Like I have said before, I would be a large male even if I was at my ideal weight. There’s just a heck of a lot of me, and I feel that this comes with certain benefits and complications of its own.

For example, one benefit is that I can walk the streets without the slightest fear of being the victim of violence. Smart predators do not try to add bear meat to their diet. Simply by being a big bearded male, I am passively displaying a certain level of dominance whether I feel like it or not.

That’s one of the complications too. I scare some people. They can’t see past my largeness to the gentle genial teddy bear inside. I definitely consider myself to be a gentle giant and quite happy to be one. Being big definitely gives me the physical self-assurance that comes from never having to worry that some other male with try to dominate or prey upon me, at least physically.

And if it did some to physical violence, my size gives me many natural advantages without my even having to be in shape. I have a large, strong, sturdy frame that can take a lot of punishment. I have a reach advantage over most folks. My weight, when applied properly, can add a lot of power to any punch, and of course, also lets me toss lighter people around. And there is a kind of brute power inherent in my Bubba-shaped body type.

As a result, I do not worry about getting into a fight. It’s not something I want, but I do not fear other men. I know I can handle myself. I know that, if the situation calls for it, I can be very intimidating without a lot of effort. In fact, it would have just as much to do with un-suppressing certain behaviours as it does bring other feelings to the fore.

I’d make a great bouncer.

That touches on another of the complications, namely that I can’t play by the same rules as everyone else. The exact same facial expressions and body postures that a normal person uses become something threatening or frightening or even downright grotesque on a large person. Everything I do gets amplified by my size. I am constantly on loudspeaker.

If I were to simply relax my guard and express myself without inhibition, I would be a very loud, obnoxious, bullying kind of person. And not via intent. It would flow naturally from trying to be like everyone else.

There’s times I wish I could one of those jolly fat guys. Like a non-scary John Goodman character. Jolly, friendly, sociable, gregarious, able to make friends easily and get along with anybody from the get-go. A social genius, really. The kind of guy you would want as a salesman, product rep, lobbyist, or even politician.

But that’s not for me, not yet at least. I have too much introversion and negativity for that. And a deep non-negotiable need to be honest. To say it like I see it.

But I digress.

My point is that I have to deliberately compensate for my larger than life impression on people in order to avoid being that loud, obnoxious bully. In a sense, I have to be twice as calm and gentle in order to get along as I would have to were I of average size.

And there are a lot of little, subtle things about being large that can easily slip by if you are not as sensitive as I am. Little micro-reactions that never add up to much.

Now being sensitive/wimpy and large presents its own set of challenges. People are less forgiving of weakness in large men. We are, in the public mind, supposed to be as impressive and strong as the visual impression we make. Were I a thin, willowy man with a womanly face, I would face a lot of problems… but people would not expect me to be more manly than I am.

Basically, I do not send out the sorts of signals that bring out the nurturing side in people. Not physically, anyhow.. When you see people like me in films and TV, we are quite frequently the bad guy, or at least, someone tough and scary.

And if the character is actually wimpy, the story is often savagely disapproving, and takes great pleasure in seeing us hurt and humiliated.

Why? Because we have failed as men. We are not living up to what society thinks we should be. The fact that we didn’t ask to be big doesn’t enter into it.

There’s also some strange stuff hanging around the zeitgeist because, when we are fat, we cause a mild amount of gender confusion because we give off a few of the female body signals, like roundness, big hips, and a general softness of appearance.

Personally, I don’t mind that at all. I consider it an open question whether I would be better off as a fat woman. I’d do it for the right man. Not the operation… I like my bits. But I would dress and live as a woman for the right guy.

One that could make me feel like a lady.

There is also some even weirder shit floating about because we big fat dudes resemble infants in some ways.

But I don’t want to think about that.

All in all, I am not really complaining about being big. It has its pluses and minuses. It bothers me that I have to restrain my self-expression in some ways, but in other ways, I really enjoy being a big dude.

I like the physical confidence it brings. I like being built like a truck. I like having big hands and big feet. I like being able to use my weight to substitute for strength sometimes.

And most of all, I love being a gentle giant.

It really is the best of both worlds.

I will talk to you nice people tomorrow.

I’ve been watching the quite fascinating Netflix show The OA recently, and it’s got me thinking about the line between the rational and the mystic.

Because there is a certain bank of emotions and imagery that I intuitively and completely understand without reason and rationality even getting a look in. Because of that. it is a difficult thing to describe or define in the rational realm of human language.

And it hurts me a little to admit that, as for long as I can remember I have found other people saying that kind of thing to be very annoying and thought to myself that they simply weren’t trying hard enough.

More fool me, then.

It is only a fool who thinks that all that resides within them can be bound and explained away by the powerful but limited toolset that it rationality. It’s like a hammer thinking that all the world is merely a nail to be pounded. It’s profoundly ignorant.

The only word I have, at the moment at least, for this bank of imagery is “mystical”. It contains deep imagery about doorways, the immaterial, connections between souls, darkness and light, getting lost and finding oneself, walls, barriers, containers, being trapped and how it can free you and being free in a way that traps you, the yearning of one soul to touch another, wells, water, fountains, the sea, rivers, and other such water images, innocence and purity on a spiritual level, and so much more than I am not thinking of at the moment.

Astrologically, this is all Pisces imagery, and I have Mars in Pisces, so it makes sense that I connect with this kind of thinking.

Another Netflix series, Sense8, also taps into the same part of the human zeitgeist. That show is about eight people from all over the world who discover they have this psychic connection between one another, and how they fumble towards accepting it and being able to use it to draw on one another’s strengths in times of need.

That’s very Pisces. The whole idea of souls finding one another in the dark without the distractions of the material world and, by connecting, becoming far more than the sum of their parts is a very deep Pisces notion.

It can be very confusing. Many times in my own life I have found myself pulled in two different directions at once. One direction is the here and now physicality of the world and the other direction is the way I perceive others that bypasses that physicality and has more to do with the inner self than anything external.

On a deep level, I see people as souls. The fact that said souls have bodies with faces and identities and literal structure is secondary. Superficial. If I like someone, it is because they look good to this inner vision of mine. I perceive their inner beauty. To me, they are beautiful people no matter what their outer packaging looks like.

The confusion mostly comes from having to deal with both inner and outer vision at the same time. Without a certain kind of self-discipline, I would always default to the inner vision and ignore the outer packaging.

But the world does not work that way.

None of this, by the way, conflicts with my deep and fundamental philosophical materialism. I don’t consider this inner vision of mine to be some kind of door into a superior reality, nor do I consider it to be the work of any kind of spiritual intermediary.

As in all things, it is merely a way for the human mind to understand the inputs it gets from the perceptions it cannot integrate with everyday consciousness. This can be because of a lack of the right ideas and concepts to bridge the gap between the conscious and unconscious levels of these perceptions, or it can be the work of things operating on a deep level that is simply too “big” to fit in the conscious mind.

So to me, there is no conflict between the rational scientist and the mystic poet in me. My fundamentally rational worldview is not perturbed by mystic perception. It is merely one of the manifold filters that can be used to better understand one’s life, and life in general.

Nevertheless, I believe that there has been substantial conflict between the rational and the intuitive on a deeper and less intellectualized level. It’s that split perception effect that is to blame. Had I not embraced hardcore rationality as my salvation at an early age, I might have had the flexibility needed to balance my two level of perception and thus integrate them into a single, cohesive consciousness.

Instead, I embraced the great power and deep roots of rationality, and treated that other level of perception as noise, filtering it out much of the time as I raggedly but determinedly clung to the seeming solidity a sensible and rational outlook – one in which all the parts of a perception could be taken out and inspected for logical consistency, and hence be believed to be rational, and thus… safe.

The problem is that, no matter how sturdy one makes one’s fortress of rationality, it still lies on one small island in the vast ocean of human reality, and choosing to ignore what goes on outside your fortress by no means renders you unaffected by it.

No matter what, you will remain an irrational, flawed, emotional, subjective, solitary being… a naked beach ape in a hopelessly complex jungle who only sees a small part of the big picture but has no choice but to proceed as if you understood the whole.

Rationality is a very powerful tool. Its application has changed the world in far too many ways to count, let alone innumerate. And it is tempting to pretend that, with so powerful a tool in one’s possession, there can be no problem that you cannot solve.

But rationality is helpless before the irrationalities of life.

To solve those, you have to be willing to feel your way around. Close your eyes, follow your emotions, and stop imposing your notion of order on the results.

It’s the only way to find out how you really are.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

…more than half of the time!

I was not in class today. I was not in class Friday. Both times,I blamed a stomach bug. But the truth is, it was depression.

I don’t know why that is so hard for me to admit. I guess it makes me feel so vulnerable and pathetic. Like I am saying to the world,  “I would do these important things, if only I wasn’t so sad”.

Well aren’t I a precious fucking rainbow.

And I mean, I know that I have a disease called depression and that being too sad to do things is a very big part of that. It is, in fact, a crude and incomplete but nonetheless valid way to describe the disease.

But that’s the thing about mental illness : it’s insane. And being insane, it does not follow any logical set of rules or any consistent pattern. On no level does it “make sense”. If insanity is defined as believing things which are not true, and/or not believing things which are blatantly true, then a depressive is insane the same way as a full blown psychotic.

It’s just a matter of degree. A psychotic sees and hears things which are not real. A depressive merely feels and believes things which are not true.

So I. in a sense, have no choice but to hate myself for not going to class even though I know intellectually that I had a pretty good reason.

I had a flare-up of my disease.

It’s not hard to see why. Last night, I confirmed that my cell phone is completely dead due to my having left it in my pocket when I did a load of laundry. There had been some hope that the “leaving it in a container full of rice for 48 hours” method would work. Presumably, the idea is that the rice slowly draws out the moisture.

But no, it is dead. If I try to start it up, the screen flashes purple for a second, then it dies. Maybe I should have left it in the rice longer, I don’t know.

I just know that I killed my cell phone with my rampant incompetence and idiocy, and I hate myself for that.

Plus, of course, the world is sliding under rack and ruin under Trump. I truly feel like this is the end of America, at least as a first class country. And seeing as Canada is basically America’s conjoined twin,. they are going to take us down with them.

This is the first time in my life when I have felt truly insecure. It really feels like nothing in the future is certain and everything could truly fall apart. Not even my disability check. Because if (when) Trump craters the American economy, Canada will suffer, and a provincial government reeling from a massive drop in tax revenue might decide that duds like myself are no longer worth supporting.

“Why pay people to do nothing?” will be the battle cry, fueled by the insecurities of the middle class who feel like their own position is falling and want someone to blame.

And you can’t blame the rich. They’re powerful, they can fight back. Blame it on the people who can’t fight back. Who cares if it’s true if it feels good to do?

So I really have no idea whether I will even survive in the future. I have gone from optimistic about my future writing comedy to wondering if the civilization I have grown up in will even still be there in a year.

Always remember : Trump was not elected by the Republicans. They were the same gang of idiots that are always in the way of history. Trump was elected by left wing people who did not bother to vote because they were so sure there was no way Trump could win.

Nobody thought Trump could win. Not even the people who voted for him. It was a protest vote, just like Brexit. Their faith that there was no way he could win divorced them from thoughts of the consequences of their vote. They could entertain the idea that Trump will fix everything precisely because they thought he would lose.

And now, they are losing faith in him as they realize that Trump is the same idiot he has always been and they are the ones who voted him in. It’s just dawning on them now that they are directly responsible for everything Trump does now, and it is only going to get worse from here on in.

That’s why I am so certain that he will lose nearly all of his populist base in the next six months. The one thing the right wing anti-reality bubble can’t filter out is what their guy actually says and does. That has to make it in otherwise how could they worship him?

And what Trump says and does will be more than enough to make them lose faith. Sure, his gang of idiots will try to spin everything, but that has its limits and he had already exceeded them by the end of the election.

And now he has actual power.

Makes me wish the Americans had our system of government. If a Prime Minister ever did even one percent of the crazy shit Trump does, and thus became a massive liability to his or her own party, they would simply join the opposition in a vote of no confidence and boom, he or she would be booted out of power and that would be it.

We did it with Diefenbaker, after all.

So basically, between killing my own cell phone in an act of profound stupidity, having my computer get infected with malicious adware, and Trump,. my psychological defenses simply could not handle the strain, and so I have been very depressed.

But I am getting over it. I am moving to a point where I can regain my detachment and view Trump’s reign as the non stop schadenfreude festival it is, and enjoy watching millions of people suddenly realize that when you vote for someone, that means you actually think they should run the country.

That might have made sense, say, last October, but everything he has done after winning has made his supporters regret having voted for him.

And I take comfort in that.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

You know, I think I might just make that the name of this blog. “My Life, and Other Tragedies, a blog by Michael Bertrand”. Has a nice ring to it.

Anyhow. Fate continues to fuck me over. Spent a lot of energy yesterday fighting that goddamned adware infecting my browser.

Oh, but that was not nearly hell enough, so the Demon of Stupid infected me once more and in an attempt to deal with the adware, I uninstalled Chrome, my web browser, without thinking ahead far enough to think, “Um, how am I going to re-install Chrome  without a working web browser?”.

Cue maximum duh.

So I spent a lot of time trying various measures. It IS possible, and there’s a number of ways of doing it. My first plan was to download the Chrome installer to my laptop and then email it to myself.

But no, Gmail will not let you email executables. Makes sense if the idea is to keep Grandma from running that free kitten screensaver some nice random person sent her, but frustrating to me,.

Then I tried to upload it to my DropBox, only to find that my DropBox was full. It told me I had 7.9 gigs of stuff and that my limit (after the free trial that I got with my computer expired) was 4 gigs. It told me that I now had to get a paid plan or I would not be able to upload anything more.

Luckily, I knew that was bullshit, and eventually I figured out how to access my DropBox without paying. The idea was that I would just go in there and delete enough stuff to be under my limit then upload the Chrome installer so I could download it on my PC.

But try as I might, I could not find whatever was taking up all that room. There was a few large-ish video files but together they added up to less than a gig. And all the other directories were empty or nearly empty. There certainly wasn’t another 7 gig anywhere.

So honestly, the whole thing started to seem like one big scam to me. They tell you that you are over and make it seem like you have to sign up for a paid plan now, counting on you to just assume they are right and pay.

But it’s a big ol lie. No matter how little you have, they will tell you it is full and keep you from uploading anything more. The real deal is : pay us or you can’t use the service, period. They are just pretending it is still free.

This was confirmed when I tried to download the files in the one directory that had some files of significant size in it, figuring I would download them to the laptop then delete them from my DropBox. Well whaddaya know, that didn’t work either! I just ended up with a blank html file instead.

So screw you, DropBox, you shady sons of bitches. You have competitors. Next time I will go to them,

And then I tried getting the latest Firefox via, of all things, FTP. Yup, FTP is still around and Firefox, being the only truly independent browser, still maintains an FTP site where people can download the latest version of Firefox.

Except no, FTP could not connect. Dunno if that was because of the malware or the site not existing any more or what, but that didn’t work either.

Oh, and before you ask, I couldn’t use Microsoft Edge or Microsoft Explorer because they don’t work on my computer because of stupid Win 10 reasons.

Then I decided to play my ace in the hole and consult my furry friends. They suggested many things, but they were all things I had tried to do and failed. By this point, I was riding the ragged edge of despair.

Luckily, I suddenly remembered that I actually did have another browser installed : one called Tor, which I downloaded and installed out of curiosity after reading an article about how it was this super secure and/or private browser that left no traces behind and therefore was used by like, drug dealers and such.

Turned out not to be all that exciting, so I forgot all about it until, thank goodness, it came to my rescue and let me download Chrome.

So yay…. back to zero! What a victory.

I still had that goddamned adware malware thing to deal with. So once more I consulted the fuzzies. Someone pointed me towards a rather extraordinary program called TRON.BAT which is a Windows batch file that runs a simply staggering number of programs that “clean up” your computer on every possible level, including some of the strongest anti-virus and anti-malware programs available.

So, after finally getting to play Mass Effect 2 (I beat the first one) for a while, I set the thing to run and went to bed. The instructions said that it would take between 3 and ten hours to run, and that seemed like an overnight job to me.

So I get up this morning, reboot the computer like the instructions said, then opening my browser… and the adware was still there. Fail!

However, it seems to be gone for now. Fingers crossed. Perhaps there was just a little left over that my computer had not yet eliminated, I dunno.

Even when it was still there after TRON.BAT, all I had to do was click close on the tabs it opened in order to get rid of them. So that’s not that big a deal. Very annoying, but a lot better than having it disable the browser entirely and attempt to do the same thing with my entire computer. I choose to count that as progress.

So the last three days have kind of sucked. At least I got to finish the first draft of the second version of my TV pilot script, and upload it to Moodle. So that is done.

I have other assignments that I should work on, but meh. I will give them a good try tomorrow morning and evening.

Today, I will freaking relax.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

To make the universe hate me?

Today has been rough. I finally get over enough of my psychological garbage to actually start work on my pilot, and I run smack dab into one of those problems that only seems to happen to me.

I had it all planned. I would follow my outline, cutting and pasting in the good stuff from the first version, and that would end up with me having a superb version.

But of course it’s not that easy. Turns out that when you paste any kind of text into Story Touch, the screenwriting software I use, it comes out in an unformatted block that (and this is the insane part) it will not let me put into the right format.

That’s not a problem with action description. It’s usually formatted that way. But not with dialogue. And I wrote some really good dialogue in my first draft.

So now I have to choose between the following lovely options :

1. Rewrite all the dialogue – which would suck
2. Cut and paste the dialogue into Story Touch then re-type it into the dialogue, then delete it after
3. Look for yet another screenwriting program that lets me paste text into dialogue
4. Try to convert my original into a format Story Touch understands and then save it as a new version
5. Give up, stick my head in a bucket, and live a frugal life of self-flagellation, self-denial, prayer, and bucket maintenance

After trying to find a workaround for a while, I hit a total psychological roadblock. Logically, I know it is resolvable, but my brain gears are frozen and it takes time to thaw them out again and get back to work.

And just as I am wrapping my head around that and getting ready to get back to work, my computer catches some malware and now I have to deal with that.

I have had it before. It’s one where first it just spams your browser with irritating popups, then takes over your browser with a tab that wants you to add a browser extension and makes you incapable of doing anything with your browser except that while a lady with a British accent says “Press Add to continue” over and over and over again.

So it’s pretty evil.

After wrestling with it for a while, I remembered what I did the last time I had this problem and started disabling programs in my start up for Win 10 until the evil British lady was no longer haunting me.

But this was on top of all the software stress, and so, just like last night, fate dealt me this one-two punch seemingly designed to cripple me psychologically.

Maybe this is life’s way of toughening me up. I don’t know. I just know that the last two days have sucked and I am fucking sick and tired of it.

All I wanted to do was write my thing. But then the things happened to keep me from writing my thing. And I was all ready to write my thing and then the things happened to stop it and that really hurt.

I have to go to some place very deep and vulnerable when I write. That’s why I can’t handle interruptions. Having that tender connection that lets the words flow out suddenly broken is extremely painful to me on an emotional level.

And then there’s that fucking British lady droning on, making me feel guilty and stupid for having got infected with malware again and grating on my nerves.

I know i will come up with a solution for my software issue with Story Touch. Maybe I will just make peace with retyping the dialogue. Maybe I will say “fuck it” and do the whole thing in text and worry about the formatting afterwards. Maybe I will go look at other screenwriting programs and see if I can find one that is a little more reasonable.

But I have to admit, that bucket is looking pretty good to me right now.

I doubt I will get any work on that done tonight, though. It’s already 9 pm. After I am finished blogging, I will likely lay down for a bit. By the time I get back up, it will be too late to get back into the zone. Especially when I have a big gumption gap to leap before I can even get down to writing the fucking thing.

Oh well, nobody ever said being a writer was easy. But it still beats working for a living.

That’s a joke, folks.

I will survive. ^[1] I will get over, under, or around all this bullshit and today’s traumas will turn into tomorrow’s memories and then into nothing but anecdotes of misfortune.

And we all know how funny those can be, especially when written by me.

Again, that’s what I have to keep reminding myself. I write very funny stuff. It makes people laugh. That is a very valuable skill. I have something to offer society. Something of genuine economic and human value. I will find someone to pay me for it.

So all I have to do is keep going. Deal with the bullshit and move on. Do what it takes to cope – only a fool tries to go on regardless how how sick he is – and then move on. Before I know it, this will all be behind me and I will have a good start on a new life.

Which will be a vast improvement over having no life whatsoever.

I would be in much worse shape if I didn’t have a fairly bankable talent to give to the world. I spend a lot of years thinking I had absolutely nothing of worth to offer anyone and that I was doomed to be nothing but a massive liability to one and all until the day I die.

But now, I know there is at least one thing I am good at : writing comedy.

I wonder what else I can do?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.