I was going to write about business models tonight, but then I realized I really had nothing new to add to what I have said before about how I think business models change the world, not technology, and so forth and so on.

So I am going to rant about anti-business liberals instead.

Now you know that I am not using anti-business liberals in the sense a whiny American pseudo-libertarian would use it to mean “anyone who dares to tell money what it can and cannot do”. You know I am not that kind of dog.

No, what I mean when I say anti-business liberals is that special kind of toxic purist who refuses to have anything to do with the dirty, grubby world of capitalism, what with all its greed and evil and…. math.

This sort of liberal is more concerned with maintaining their own moral purity as “not part of the problem” both in their own eyes and mostly importantly in the eyes of their fellow wimpy liberals than actually seeing the change they claim to want in the world come to pass. They want nothing to do with the harsh realities of life and would much prefer to spend all their time performing the same kind of “I am one of the right kind of people” rituals that everyone else does too.

Because they don’t really want change. Real change is scary and might actually affect their own lives and their own status in society. What they like is appearing to be for the sorts of changes that say to other liberals “I’m very very nice too!” and getting that feel-good niceness vibe without having to really do anything they don’t like to do or sacrifice anything or risk losing precious status by seeming less nice than the other liberals.

It’s a steal at twice the price.

Well guess what? The other side wants to change things too. Being “for change” does not make you special.  And being a nice person doesn’t help anyone by itself.

If change occurs, it won’t be because of the purists who do it. It will be the pragmatists who do. They will be the ones willing to see past the end of their own precious selves and get down to the business of change and do what it takes to make the world a better place.

And in my opinion,. if you think yourself a liberal but are unwilling to dirty your hands with capitalism, you are full of shit.

Your belief in your own liberalism is a bourgeois delusion and you are part of the goddamned problem. You’re the reason the business world can do all kinds of nefarious things and get away with it, and all they had to do to hide their crimes is to throw up a minefield of numbers that the know you are unwilling to cross. You’re why the dark forces of the world prosper because unlike you, they are realistic and pragmatic. You’re the ones who left the world in the hands of bastards rather that have to take responsibility and risk losing status by having to morally compromise and make tough decisions.

You are the good people doing nothing that lets evil succeed. 

If the world is to change, it will be changed by profit-driven capitalism. Because here’s a newsflash for you : if the first step of your big plan is “change the way everything is done in the world”, then I hate to break it to you but your plan sucks, and you need to be honest with yourself and admit that your plans are impractical for a reason : so that you never ever run the risk of actually having to implement them.

Thus, you remain uncompromised and you never ever have to deal with numbers or tough decisions or anything else that makes you feel uncomfortable or is otherwise not fun and easy with a high emotional profit ratio.

All I did was retweet something and now I feel good about myself! Let me bask in the glow of my own moral rectitude. I really AM the right kind of person!

Now I am not sayign that the only true liberal is an accountant or business major. You don’t have to master high finance or be able to read a ledger like it’s a novel to be a true liberal. You don’t even have to become more comfortable with algebra.

All I am saying is that a true liberal recognizes that if change is the goal then capitalism, and all it entails, is the method. Nothing else is going to work. Not your NGO, not your nonprofit, not your precious little jam-making collective, and especially not you sitting around sighing about capitalism.

You want to change the world? Invent and perfect a new business model. One that helps change the world and is profitable.

Because profit equals growth. That’s how it’s done. You want to put a carbon-capturing plant on the outskirts of every town? Make it profitable. Take the profits for the first one and use them to start the second one, and the profits from the first two to make two more, and so forth and so on.

Profitable businesses survive. Profitable businesses grow. Profitable businesses don’t have to go begging for cash. And the great thing is, once things really get moving, you don’t need to rely on your limited supply of hardnosed liberals any more.

All you need is people who want to make lots of money, and there’s never any shortage of those in the world.

Capitalism can be harnesses for change./ In fact, little else will do it.

So to all you ever so precious liberals out there who would refuse to end world hunger if it meant having to do something that seemed gross or mean, please, and I mean this sincerely, go fuck yourselves.

And whle you’re at it, get the fuck out of the way of people at the grown-up’s table.

We have a world to save.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

This must be the real battlezone for my infection. Everything else was preliminary. This is the big fight, where my body throws everything into shaking this fucking thing.

Because I’m tired.

Ever so tired. And bed is seemingly like a really wonderful place right about now. I have slept a ton already and I still want more. I just want to curl up in my nice warm bed and drift off. Bed seems so warm and friendly and inviting right now.

And that’s strange. As patient and loyal readers well know, my relationship with sleep is fraught with complications at the best of times, and as a result, sleep is something I rarely relish, let alone look forward to. It’s something I do because it needs doing, or because I literally do not know what else to do with myself. But even when I am very tired, I don’t look forward to sleep. I am craving it on an emotional level. I just do it because I know it’s needed and it will help.

So viewing the prospect of sleep with delight is quite rare for me. I am usually the sort of person (namely, a bit of a dick) that says you can’t say you enjoy sleep, because you are not awake to enjoy it. The best you can say is that you enjoy the idea of sleep, or the things leading up to and/or following from sleep, or things associated with sleep.

But saying you enjoy sleep is like saying you really enjoyed your open heart surgery. No, you didn’t,  you weren’t there!

But at the moment, I can dig it. I am pretty sure there is more than merely the wish to fast-forward life that my depression makes me crave. ^[1] I honestly don’t feel that way, at least not right now. I would rather be awake, playing my current game (Shadow Warrior 2) or hanging out online or something.

And yet, I know that after I am done blogging (warning : may not make wordcount). I will go right back to sleep until it is time to get up, show, and go to FRED.

Oh well, At least the other symptoms have tamped down a little. My lung are heavy but I am not doing a lot of coughing, and what coughing happens is usually due to my runny nose running in the wrong direction. And the runny nose is less severe than before.

But I am weak, short of breath, and feel generally unwell. I suppose I should be hoping the crap in my lungs would break up so I could cough it up and be rid of it. That way I would get the lung capacity back and not feel so tired and weak.

But I am so tired and week that coughing up phlegm seems like too much work.

I am less certain than before that I will make class tomorrow. Things have gotten a little worse, overall. Plus I will be going out into the wintry cold tonight, which might not be a wonderful idea, but fuck it.

I will take my chances. If I stayed home tonight, it would cause a bunch of problems that I am too tired to even think about. Not the least of which would be the depression that came from not being with my friends.

Still. I might have no choice. I will make the call at around 5.

Well I am all out of things to say, I guess I am done for the night.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Bleh. I am still ill, and it makes life cruddy.

It’s nothing severe, or even moderate. It’s mostly moved into my head now, although I can feel there there’s still gunk in my lungs that I will likely be dealing with for a long time.

Won’t that be fun?

Anyhow, it’s mostly just a runny nose and a general feeling of malaise right now. I am hopeful that I will be sufficiently recovered by Monday afternoon to attend class.

Luckily, if that turns out not to be the case, the class is one where I could miss one and and it would not be that big of a deal. It’s just Producing for Writers, and while it would kind of suck to miss the last film production meeting before the film gets shot next Saturday, I am not all that involved in that shit anyhow, so I doubt I would miss much.

I do need an actual plan for the food, though. I have 10 hours minimum to cover, and while that only translates to one actual meal, we will also need snacks and drinks.

I am pretty sure I can pull it all off for $60, maybe $50. Depends on how good a deal I get on the pizza. I know that I want to get at least a little wacky and creative with the snacks so that it’s a little more than just junk food and juice boxes. Not sure how much that will add the the tab. We will see.

Sure, it’s a crap job for being my only duty, and a total waste of my amazing talents, but I am determined to do the best I can. Both for my own sense of honor and professionalism and responsibility, and because I want the others in the group to go away with the impression that I am awesome and that they might have made a mistake by not including me in more of the production.

Long shot, I know, but it gives me hope. Then again, I know why they don’t want me around and it is either all my fault or the fault of my depression, depending on how you look at it.

Depression can be so ugly.

I still have times when I lose touch with why I do…. anything, really. Out of nowhere, I lose the beat, and until I get it back, I am lost. Dead air. I am disconnected and scared and completely without motivation or direction.

Sometimes, it’s so bad that I don’t even know where I am or what is happening. I suddenly have to reconstruct what is going on according to the clues available to me.

This times are usually fairly brief, thank goodness. If I was like that for more than ten seconds, I am pretty sure I would go completely insane, or at least freak out wholesale.

Emotional and mental reality should not disconnect at random like bad data service.

It’s like black ice. One second you are fine. the next you are spinning out of control with no idea why. If there was a warning sign, you missed it. All you can do is hold yourself together until the connection returns.

And that is all very draining. And it kind of fucks up any sense you might have of being safe and secure. That shit can happen at any moment and so I never know when I will suddenly be in freefall, waiting for my chute to deploy.

And when I make it to the other side of the chasm, I am both relieved and traumatized. Like an out of control car just barely missed me. I am glad to be alive but HOLY SHIT. What the fuck, man?

It’s this sort of thing that makes me wonder if my problems are deeper than merely depression. Maybe I have some kind of brain damage. It would not surprise me. My sleep apnea alone could have done all kind of shit to my overworked cerebellum. Throw in some diabetes and obesity, and it’s a wonder I don’t have dementia…. yet.

Or maybe I do have it, but it hasn’t done damage to anything vital yet.

Anyhow, I have had these moments of total disconnection for my entire life, as far as I can remember anyhow. And it’s something that is extremely hard to describe to someone, especially while it was happening. I have trouble describing it now and I am 43 and verbally gifted. When I was a kid…. how would you even go about explaining it?

“Mom, sometimes I get all confused and feel like I am completely alone in the universe and I can’t think and I don’t know where I am or what I am doing or why and it really scares me and I am pretty sure that it is not normal!”.

Something like that. But whoops, she stopped listening six words in and replied with only a grunt and I am so crushed that I never share anything like that with her again.

Which was, of course, the idea. Not consciously. But intended nonetheless.

When I write it out like that, it really does sound like some form of birth defect in my brain and/or skull messes with me sometimes. I have tried explaining it to my therapist, but he was totally overwhelmed by it and was not help at all.

Apparently, he has forgotten all his medical training (he is a PSYCHIATRIST after all) except the bit that lets you write prescriptions.

Oh well, it’s not like us crazies have a lot of choice in the matter.

I suppose I should try it again. Or try it on my GP, although I don’t have much hope there either. I seem to overwhelm him, too.

Guess I am just an overwhelming kind of guy. Nobody can handle me. And I am disinclined to tone myself down in order to get along. If I can’t express myself as I please, I would just as soon stay home.

Maybe that’s a character flaw, I don’t know. But I have insisted on being myself for my entire life, come what may.

I’d need a damned good reason to change now!

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

That’s how my life feels right now.

It’s not easy to stave off depression in this state. At least I did the right thing and got dressed. I have mentioned before how sitting around nude make my depression worse. I think it’s because the lack of a boundary layer between myself and the world encourages the exact kind of loose, diffuse, unfocused, and uncontained state of mind that is the way my depression operates. In order for any chance at a good mood, I need a container to give me a shape.

Look, water imagery is back! It’s just so apt.

But still, when I am physically depressed, it tends to make me emotionally depressed as well. I guess that’s true for everyone, it’s just that the sadness is a lot less dangerous in mentally healthy people.

They might feel sorry for themselves, but they don’t feel like hurting themselves either.

Me, I never feel sorry for myself. The closest I get to that is being pissed off about getting jerked around or stepped on. When the universe is polite enough to give me an obvious enemy, I have no problem finding motivation to fight.

But when the enemy is yourself, it gets…. complicated.

Outrage is not the same as sympathy for oneself, though. I am still working on that one. I am still living in a dungeon of my own design, where I am both Inquisitor and… Inquisitee, I guess? Conditions have improved but I am still very cruel and demanding of myself.

So little pity, so little forgiveness, so little compassion. I am my own villain and I am one of the nastiest kinds : the kind that thinks they are on the side of right.

There are times when I can look back on my past self, that sad little boy who laid down in snow bank, wanting to die, and feel sympathy for the poor little guy. He didn’t do anything wrong. He got dealt a very weird hand of cards and it’s not his fault that the system could not handle him. He did the best he could with what he had. Sometimes, I wish I could go back in time and give that poor kid a hug.

But then the overzealous superego steps in, and what I really want to do is give that kid a smack and tell him to stop being such a pussy and take control of his life and his fate. Stop drifting and decide things!

And while that is not entirely incompatible with a loving approach (not all good parenting looks like hugs and kisses and Sunday morning breakfast), it is pretty low in compassion. Something like that might have helped me snap out of it at an early age (instead, it took puberty to give me the hormones to wake the fuck up), but it might have just further convinced me that the world was against me and caused me to retreat even further into the world of my mind.

Then again – I guess it would have given me a villain to fight, at least.

And the real crime is that I am (obviously) still mad at that kid. I still blame him for what happened to him/me due to his extraordinary wimpiness and cowardice. As a big guy with an off the scale IQ, I could have ruled that school.

Not sure why I’d want to, but the option was there. All I needed to do was get the fuck over myself, grow up, and take charge.

Then again… I was only a kid. A very, very damaged kid.

I’ve never understood the pursuit of power. Is it just the ugly stepchild of ambition? Because honestly, I have a completely utilitarian view of power. What would it get me? What do I need it for? What do I plan to do with it when I get it? Is it worth the target power paints on your back? How will it make my life better? Iwould honestly prefer wealth. With wealth, you can live as you please, especially if you avoid drawing attention to yourself via some kind of conspicuous consumption.

I loathe conspicuous consumption.

If I had money, I would get myself a nice house in a nice neighborhood and buy some neat toys but for the most part, I would be like any other suburbanite. I’d buy what I thought I ought to in order to keep up with the middle of the pack, and happily become just another guy at the swap meet or clothing drive.

No drawing attention to myself, no bragging, no trying to outdo the Joneses, just the simple life of a writer who happens to take fairly expensive vacations.

It might seem odd to some that as individualistic a person as I am, someone who has insisted on being himself and nobody else for his entire life, wants nothing more than to blend in and, to a certain extend, conform.

But the thing is that, at least for me, being an individual means doing what pleases you, and seeing as I have never been forced to conform, I have no issues that makes me need to do the exact opposite in order to silence those demons.

So if I dream of quiet middle class anonymity, I am crystal clear that I am choosing that, not having it forced on me or obeying some kind of herd instinct or having my individuality squashed by The System. I am choosing to do it, and I feel free to choose it and free to change my mind if I get tired of it.

To me, freedom is autonomy – the freedom to do as I please, without any preconceived notions as to what that might be. Maybe I would end up building a big weird mansion that is my own little perverse kingdom. Maybe I would buy a comfy apartment and live downtown with the freaks, weirdos, and losers. Maybe I would do something I can’t even conceive of until the situation is upon me.

But wealth and power have exactly one purpose : to make me happier.

Anything else is bullshit.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Pullin’ out all the stops tonight because I am ill and I have no energy and so I am not inclined to filter myself or hold myself to a high standard of journaling excellence and so tonight’s entry will be even more stream of consciousness than usual.

I had an idea for tonight. I was going to write about how hard it is to be yourself. How it’s easy to say but hard to do because you have to turn off the part of your mind that deals with the opinions of others and that’s a big part of us.

I guess you just have to reach the point where you are good and mad and fed up with the bullshit and declare yourself awesome.

I am working on it.

The whole apartment is sick. Poor Julian has been coughing up for three or four days now. He chose to use one of our saucepans as the receptacle of his expectoration. I really wish he had not done that. It’s intensely gross. Don’t use something we cook in to house your diseased sputum! Find something else!

Preferably something disposable.

Joe and I, on the other hand, seem to have caught the exact same bug. Maybe it’s the same as the one Julian has, but it ain’t necessarily so. I read today that this has been a particularly harsh flu season in Canada, and I am in the proximity of a lot of people on school days, what with the traveling on the Skytrain and being cooped up with classmates and walking in the cold.

Speaking of the cold, man, what the fuck is with this continuing to be real winter around here? We have snow on the ground and ice on sidewalks and everything. Normally it’s iffy whether we are going to get even a single day of “real winter” in this area, and yet this year we have had around a month of it…. except for on Christmas Day, of course.

We didn’t get a white Xmas, we got a white Everything Else. And it sucks.

And of course, the people around here don’t know how to handle it. Winter has always been, at most, a temporary inconvenience some time in December around here. Something you just wait out. But now that it seems like this winter shit is here to say, people are starting to go a little crazy.

So much so that an issue that I thought I would never see again – not while I live here in the GVRD anyhow. The issue is road salt.

There’s not nearly enough of it to go around in this region.

Now for those of you who did not grow up with Maritime winters, this might not seem like that big of a deal. You might also think that this is only a problem for the governments that are supposed to keep the roads ice free.  But it is far, far more than that.

It’s the consumer market that is the issue. When I was growing up, periodically the Canadian Tire and other businesses would run out of road salt and there would be a delay before any more came in, and people got downright testy.

See, it starts when your average citizen looks over at their neighbor’s yard and sees a perfectly ice free driveway and walkway. It’s almost like they are in an entirely different season. Then he looks at the ice and snow on this own property, and he starts to feel jealous and that leads to him to feeling like a victim of injustice and if you multiply that by enough fellow citizens, that leads to angry mobs descending on anyplace even rumoured to have road salt.

That’s what consumer society does to people. We find it extremely hard to believe that what we want is not there when we want it. Instead, people rapidly become convinced that some people are “hoarding” it (a very non-capitalistic thought) or that the businesses that usually sell it are “holding back some for their friends and family” (ditto), and things can get really tense really fast. ^[1]

That’s what has happened here, in spades. The local fire departments, with the best of intentions but without any experience in this kind of situation, offered people free road salt to tide them over till the stores get more…. and then were completely overwhelmed when they were swamped with cranky, entitled people by the hundreds.

One guy showed up in a pickup truck with two enormous garbage cans in the back and expected to have those filled up. No doubt this titan of industry he had the intention of reselling the stuff.

But no, citizens got two small bags of the stuff each and that’s it. Even so, the fire stations rapidly ran out, and had to put up enormous banners telling people that they had no more road salt and they would have to do without.

I bet there were a lot of people who got really angry about that. Because suddenly, the idea of others having something that others do not bothers them.

Myself, I just want it to be over already, like everyone else. I am completely over my desire for “real winter” and would be happy with the usual clammy Vancouver winter by this point. It would be worth it just to have it be warmer.

Who knows, maybe I will be singing a different tune if the drippier form of winter returns. But I am serious about the possibility of that never happening. Global warming is changing everything and there are a lot more shifts in the future. Areas of the world maybe totally change climates. The jet stream is making radical changes of route. Forests could become deserts and vice versa. Coastal areas could become swamps and swamps could try out and become farmland. Anything might happen.

But hey…. at least it’s not my end of the boat that’s on fire, right?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

I talk about zoning out a lot. And most of the time, I play it off like it’s just part of my gentle, wacky , dreamer’s personality. Just another one of my lovable quirks.

But it’s a really serious problem, one I have talked about in this space before. In previous bloggenings, I have talks about this terrible inward tide that drags me away from reality and deeper into the world of my own mind and all the things I have built there.

It’s like I generate my own intense field of gravity that is constantly compressing the contents of my mind like a star compressing hydrogen and helium into neutronium. It’s the energy released that allows me to shine bright and hot, but at the cost of tearing things apart inside me and maybe someday leading to a total collapse of matter into a black hole from which nothing could escape.

Not even my screams.

So you see, this crushing gravity is my greatest foe. If I could point to a single force in my mind that I would call “my depression”, that would be it. It’s that force I am bowing to when I retreat into sleep. Sleep allows for dreaming, and when I am dreaming, that is the closest I can safely get to that black hole collapse. I am experiencing zero information from my environment, I am expending very little energy to maintain the state, and my mind is free to use all the mental resources available to process things.

One might say, therefore, that sleep is my natural state – the low energy point where I come to rest when all energy output ceases and I succumb to gravity, and fall… asleep.

Everything else is an effort. It feels like all my energy goes into fighting that gravity. And that is why I prefer quiet, low-stimulus, safe, calm environments. The less I have to deal with in my outer life, the more energy I can spare to fight the gravity well and get further away from my total annihilation.

Or at least, that’s how it seems. Maybe if I truly let go, let my ship crash into the star, all I would lose is who I think I am and from that would emerge who I really am. Who knows?

But I am far too scared to do that. So instead, I dream hard and I dream a lot. I don’t remember a lot of it, but what I do remember is extremely intense and I suspect that it is this hyperdreaming that is the true root of my sleep issues.

I mean, there is only so much that any mind can process in one night, and I am so cerebral that I barely process any emotions at all during the waking hours, so the backlog for dreaming must be ten miles long.

This is the cause of my tendency to zone out at the slightest provocation and why I have to stimulate my mind all day long just to stay awake. It’s a Sisyphean task because it’s precisely this mental stimulation that forces me to stay cerebral and not process those emotions that then lay there, unprocessed, generating gravity.

Maybe that makes unprocessed emotion my dark matter. I will think about it.

Therapy, in this increasingly elaborate and nerdy metaphor, could be seen as an activity designed to stimulate a waking dreaming state where a section of emotions can be processed consciously. This involves actually feeling the emotions, which makes it somewhat unpopular, but when it works, the pull of gravity decreases and the individual needs to expend less energy in order to stay with the world, and therefore has more energy left to live their lives.

And there I go, getting hyper cerebral as I attempt to talk about my deepest emotions. I guess that’s just how I deal with things.

And of course, the drugs help. In my case, the Paxil provides the necessary emotional distance for me to be able to deal consciously and rationally with my issues instead of being at the mercy of the shearing forces of my internal gravitic flux. In doing it, it gives me an island of much needed.stability. The Wellbutrin just gives me more energy to use against that harsh gravity well. I am actually considering asking my psychiatrist to increase my dosage to see if it helps.

And for the most part, I keep up. Most of the time, I can at least bring the minimum amount of focus necessary to deal with my life to bear on the situation. There are very scary moments when I feel like I am going to lose contact entirely. Moments when I scramble to even make sense of the world and the words that are coming at me. Moments when it really feels like I am going insane.

As opposed to merely being insane, like right now.

But I usually can drag myself back into the real world, even if it feels like I aged a year in the process. If there’s a drug out there that specializes in keeping me in the here and now, I would dearly love to be on it. This constant tug of war between situational awareness and inner processing takes a lot out of me and I would love to be able to just relax without feeling like I am going to die inside.

Harsh, but accurate. Mental annihilation is the same as death on the spiritual level anyhow. Except it leaves you alive to suffer.

Again, this might all be illusion. It might be that the fight is completely unnecessary and that I would be a lot better off if I let go, let the worst happen, and deal with the aftermath. Let all these forces in my mind loose so they can sort it out for themselves.

Or maybe I just need to open up my heart and learn to live a little, without feeling the need to question, examine, and analyze everything.

That would sure as fuck speed things up.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

We’ve all been there. You take the wrong turn and end up at a dead end or in a cul-de-sac. You know you screwed up, but part of you doesn’t want to believe it because, subjectively speaking, there’s more than a mere navigational error happening here.

It’s a reality error. The world was working a certain way – namely, streets being laid out in a more or less gridlike fashion – then suddenly it wasn’t. And your mind is not ready to deal with that right away. You’re momentarily stunned, as if suddenly walking stopped working.

And everyone knows what to do in that situation. Get turned around, go back to where you came, and make a different turn. Write whatever time you lost off as the price of a life lesson and get on with things.

But part of you doesn’t want to do that. It wants to keep going forward, as if everything was normal and the dead end had merely been an illusion. Turning around and going back feels very unnatural and wrong to this stubbornly anti-reality part of our minds and, if it had its way, that Dead End sign would be denied, the whole thing would be patched over with stubborn pride and a certain brutal sort of imagination, and you would never ever ever have reason to doubt your perceptions and intentions, and most of all, you would never ever ever ever EVER have to admit you were wrong.

Don’t worry. I am not about to talk about politics.

Instead, I want to talk about my own wrong turnings and how my stubborn insistence on never, ever going backwards has left me in a rather nasty cul-de-sac of my own.

It centers around a certain fundamental weakness in how I think. I call it the Lily-pad Problem. My mind makes and follows logical connections between things very, very rapidly, like a frog leaping from lily-pad to lily-pad in rapid succession. It allows me to reach complex conclusions very rapidly and intuitively – when it works.

But you can’t connect things so rapidly without taking risks. Sometimes, you end up on the wrong lily-pad. And there you are, with no likely seeming lily-pads around, totally lost and with no idea where to hop next.

But only if going backwards is out of the question.  

And granted, sometimes everything has happened so fast that you honestly do not remember your route. In your eagerness to reach your conclusion, you didn’t make note of your route, and now backtracking is no longer a possibility.

Hence all my dreams where I get progressively more lost.

But the route is always there in my mind, if I just slow down and think back instead of panicking because I am lost and don’t know where I am any more.  It’s hard to slow down and calm down because that same burst of energy that propelled me to my mysterious destination can easily convert into the exact kind of panic and disorientation that leaves me feeling stranded, abandoned, and alone.

And it is that burst of cascading, flowering, overflowing creative energy that leads to genius, or at least, my subvariant of it. It’s that sort of thing that powers creative leaps and high level deductions and such.

As my dude and halfways-hero Nietzsche said, “one must have chaos in one’s heart in order to give birth to a dancing star. ”

Right on, brother.

Wisdom, in this scheme, is measure by how often I end up on the right lily-pad. When I do, I am wise, smart, insightful, and so on.

When I do not, I am the muddle-headed confused person who can barely take care of himself that everyone that knows me knows and loves, or at least tolerates with varying degrees of affection based on how much of a fuckup I have been lately.

I try so hard.

Anyhow, the point I was tacking towards in my thought boat is that in order to go forward in my recovery, I may have to be willing to regress. Not to the point where I become a toddler again in my own mind – nobody wants that. But there has to be a way to psychologically time travel and fix some of the damage done to me.

These victories would be, obviously, largely symbolic. Actually traveling into the past is, as far as modern physics can tell, completely impossible.

This controlled regression of which I speak is very tricky to pull off. It involves mentally returning to some of the worst moments of your life and then hanging in there, resisting the urge to give up and escape, for long enough to finish feeling all those emotions you have suppressed for so long.

In fact, suppression of these terrible emotions might well be one of the foundations of your adult personality. So this is no small change we are talking about. Standard “sensibility” would tell you that you are crazy to try it, the risks are too big, and you should just give it up as remind yourself to never do it again.

The test, then, is to go on anyways, because you are goddamned sick of your life as it is and the person you have become and there is no change without risk. The human mind has a phenomenal capacity to pull itself together, and even if one house of cards falls because you have removed a load bearing card, it will not take long for your mind to rebuild itself into a stronger, saner, happier version of yourself.

Please do not terminate power while updates are installing.

That’s the real nitty gritty of personal growth : going beyond what you know and perceive into the green-gray light of the complete unknown, where there are no signposts and no horizons and nothing to rely on but youself.

Trust me, somehow, you will manage. There is even a good chance that, after all is said and done, you will be left wondering what all the fuss was about.

Maybe smart frogs forget about the lily-pad they were heading towards and instead look to make the best of the one where they ended up.

Or maybe they just learn to backtrack.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Hey look, he’s blogging again!

Well, Ross just left on his epic journey back to his home in Silly Con Valley, and I already miss him. For a week and change, I didn’t have to sleep alone, and I had someone in my life to care about who cared about me.

I am not convinced we are entirely compatible yet. I am certainly a lot more comfortable expressing emotions than he is. I wanto to tell him how much I love him and give him all my overflowing affection, but he does not seem comfortable with that kind of thing.

So we had a lot of really good intellectual conversation, but not a lot of emotional connection. That could turn out to be a problem.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed the visit. And wow was he generous with the gifts. Because of him, I have a new synthesizer(that’s one fancy new toy) , new headphones (yay a ,  and $100 sitting on my Steam account,. waiting for me to finish Darksiders 2 (I’m close), whereupon I will consult some gaming friends of mine and see what’s awesome and current and stuff.

Imagine that. Playing a game that people are also playing right now. I am a-tizzy with excitement at the prospect.

But mostly, Ross and I hung out and talked. We talked here in bed, we talked at various restaurants around Richmond, we talked hanging out with La Gang (Julian, Joe, and Felicity) at dinner, and we talked in his car going to these places.

It was all very high quality intellectual conversation, on which I thrive. But what is haunting me is that I didn’t get a chance to express all the things I wanted to express to him. Instead, it all stayed very intellectual.

My side of that is that I am shy and sensitive and I could tell that Real Talk made him very nervous and uncomfortable, so I went with my worser instincts and let everything be how he wanted it instead of asserting my own need to be heard and understand on my own terms. And for me, those terms are very deeply emotional.

I wanted to tell him how I loved him, how I have always loved him, that nothing would please me more than being his life mate, and that I would dote on him if he would spoil me. I had a speech worked out and everything.

But I couldn’t spit it out. These last few days, when his departure was looming, I tried to get some of it out, with mixed results. I at least got out how much I loved him, and got his assurance that he cared for me as well.

So that offered some relief from my mounting anxiety.

I suppose that with some, that is the problem with love on vacation. People who are on vacation from their hectic day-to-day lives do not want to think about big subjects like love and relationships and the future. They just want to relax, have fun, catch up on rest, and in general just chill the fuck out.

But I am going to need significant emotional inputs and outlets in any relationship in order to keep myself from going completely crazy as my neuroses eat my brain like termites in an antique furniture store.

That’s a good thing to know about myself. I am going to need someone who can take my big messy wet emotions without getting spooked or waterlogged, and said person will also need to be able to give me the kind of love and assurance and stability that I need.

It’s ironic…. I used to think that intellectual compatibility would be the precious commodity I would have to kiss a thousand frogs to find. But now that I have had a little more experience, I am starting to think that the emotional stuff is far, far more important.

Talk is cheap. Love is rare.

Not that I am giving up on Ross, of course. I am just examining my own needs.

Predictably, I feel like I made huge, glaring, unforgivable mistakes the whole time he was visiting. For one thing, the sex thing really didn’t happen, and I should have been more prepared for that.

But when everything was theoretical, it was way too easy to pretend that I didn’t have huge problems in that area and that weird shit can crop up in my mind when I try to do the sex thing with other people, as well as the problems caused by my antidepressants.

The worst problem I have is that when someone is stimulating me, I have a strong tendency to just kind of space out and go extremely passive. This probably would not be a problem if I got more sex in my life, but it’s kind of a big deal when someone is trying to please you and you space out like you are tripping balls.

Not making a balls joke. Moving on.

That’s a big part of why, in the past, my most “successful” sexual encounters have been the ones in which I concentrated entirely on pleasing my partner. I enjoy that – taking someone to the Happy Horny Place is a lot of fun and very gratifying – but I can’t say that I exactly get off on it. It’s just easier.

It occurs to me that those people who want to be treated like a sex doll might not be merely kinky. They might have problems like mine.

And it’s not like I feel like I don’t deserve pleasure. Trust me, if I start earning well, I will be buying myself a lot of pleasure. I want all the sexual gratification money can buy, and it won’t matter if I space out because I will have hired capable professionals to do the job.

And they will be, of course, forewarned.

But I still feel like I failed Ross. That I disappointed him. That he was looking for more. That might just be my neurotic and damaged psyche singing its usual song, but it might not be.

I wanted to give him so much more.

Instead, I just took the path of least resistance. AGAIN.

When will I finally learn how to paddle upstream?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.